May 25

 We have a couple of errands today. I got a trellis set up yesterday and changed the position of a shepherd's hook that wasn't working out. Also moved the indigo to a new container and planted some pole beans. And in a nice surprise a bumblebee flew past. Bees of any kind have been rather scarce for the last few years. The birds have been active and I am filling the feeder more frequently. A beautiful cardinal shows up and pecks as the seed on the cement the other, smaller birds have scattered. I don't sweep up the hulls as often as I used to to give them all a chance at the seed.

Denise Donaldson writes that "Normalization is a dirty word." I agree. Too many actions, trends, events, etc., have become "normalized." They shouldn't be. We shouldn't come to expect mass shootings. We shouldn't come to expect anti-anyone violence--be they Jews, blacks, women, trans, Muslims, Asians, or anyone else. I have added "normalization" to "collateral damage" and "thoughts and prayers" on my list of words/phrases I absolutely hate.

Jan in SanFran posted an interesting piece. I have seen several stories like this one. And I have seen others which are similar but subtly different. The story in the link involved individuals: ex-patriot Russians and Ukrainians. The Ukrainians refused to participate in their panel if the Russians spoke at their different panel. The Russians didn't support Putin, his war, or his army's brutality. It didn't matter they were Russians. It was no better than Putin's insistence that there has never been and is not now any such thing as Ukraine or Ukrainians. Attempts to erase people won't work. On another hand, what do you do about appearances which burnish the Russian state--like international sports events. A few individual athletes may openly express their disagreement, like the Iranian women who expressed their political opposition, and suffered retribution as a result. The Olympic organizers have tried to solve that problem by allowing the teams to participate but not under the flag of the country. Boycotts, like sanctions, are a very blunt weapon and causes a lot of, how I hate the word, collateral damage.

Jan in SanFran makes a comparison with the sanctions against South Africa's apartheid regime which finally led to the end of that government. However, throughout history, every weapon ever wielded works only until countermeasures are devised. Sanctions worked against South Africa but have been far less effective against Iran or Russia. The difference? South Africas brutal white supremacist regime which victimized the majority black population united much of the global South with the western nations. Sanctions work only when countries agree to go along. Much of the developing world see the sanctions against Russia and Iran as the West's cultural war against non-Western societies. They have a lot of incentive to evade the sanctions.

Our politicians have "negotiated" for three days this week and come up dry on a "compromise" that would avoid a debt ceiling crisis. I put those words in quotes because there is little resemblance between the definitions of the words and the way things have been working out. I am far more in sympathy with the Democrat position: the Republicans should do what they did under The Former Guy three times enabling him to add more to the debt than all presidents before him. What really irritates me is that we will probably trade the debt ceiling stand-off for a budget negotiation which will threaten a government shutdown later this same year.