September 24

 Good morning all. I don't know how much I will get done today. Yesterday and Friday pretty much wiped me out. Everyone knows that when you clean up one place you find others that should be cleaned up. You can ignore the whole mess but once you start reducing the mess what remains is glaringly obvious and harder to ignore.

I found this Vox article that has me shaking my head. I checked out Ballotpedia which as a page listing the upcoming Supreme Court Docket. Note the self-serving assurances by those who want the Court to invalidate the Consumer Protection Finance Bureau that other agencies whose funding is secured by similar means (like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) won't be affected. Note also the argument that CPFB is a "law enforcement agency" because it brings legal cases and levies fines for those who violate the law. Really?? In that case there isn't a government agency that is not funded by similar means. Let's ask another question: do you really want the House of Representatives (even if we have a more responsible House) making decisions on highly technical matters on a case by case basis and individually funding every government expenditure? Just think about the chaos Tuberville has created in his egotistical attempt to enforce his narrow moral vision on the Defense Department.

A comment on The Weather Channel this morning claims that we have reached a new record: 23 billion dollar+ weather disasters this year.

Another border crisis and note the recent increase in tensions is over water.

This article on Medium didn't contain any surprises I hadn't heard before. However, there are a couple of acknowledgements I don't often hear from climate activists. 1) Most of us have zero real influence in the hall of power where what "we" do (or don't do) is decided. 2) There is a difference between what we can't change and things we can change. We can't change the rules of physics that govern the play of greenhouse gasses in the environment. 3) There are actions "we" could do and things we could do but won't. I put we in quotation marks because all too often we find there isn't really a solid majority willing to act.