September 5

Supposed to be sunny today and a little bit cooler with rain moving in tonight and through tomorrow. I hope so. The fewer days I have to water plants the better. After that we should get much cooler weather.

Yesterday was very short on real news over the holiday weekend--including yesterday. There was so little on TV we indulged in a Charlie Chan marathon followed by a whole bunch of our favorite SciFi oldies. Thank goodness for our DVD collection.

So far I haven't seen anything much on the news but we'll see what I find.

With schools reopening the ADHD drug shortages are again on the news this morning.  A quick Google search reveals a lot of stories on various drugs in short supply and it seems to me the shortages are pervasive and increasing. According to EuroNews the shortages are also pervasive in Europe as well with very long delays in getting new supplies. The basic problem is both the U.S. and Europe has shifted from making drugs (and a whole lot more) on their own territory to importing them from other countries, especially India and China. Perhaps that economic model should be reconsidered.

I found an interesting piece on Medium today: Is Democracy Committing Suicide? For quite a while now a major refrain on our various news/talk shows has been "our democracy is in danger!" Democracy is an idea; it can't really die or commit suicide. People can abandon it or be forced to abandon it. That has happened before. And what we call "democracy" can change. When I taught Western Civ classes at least one student would ask how ancient Athens could be called a democracy when a lot of the population couldn't vote. The franchise was limited to adult men of the "citizen class" which meant their parents (both parents) had been citizens. Women, like children, were under guardianship (females for their lives, male children until they came of adult age). The United States became a "democratic republic" when the Constitution took effect and the fact that the franchise was limited to white men who had "productive" property worth a given amount. It remained a democratic republic when the franchise was broadened to include all white males in the 1830s, and when women were included in the 1930s, and when African Americans right to vote was secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  We also remained a democratic republic when post Civil War violence and the imposition of poll taxes and literacy tests excluded most Freedmen. We are still a democratic republic as gerrymandering and other measures are whittling away at the electorate, especially among racial minorities. After a long time of broadening the pool of citizens who can exercise the vote we seem to be in a period of contraction when certain people want to exclude those of us they can't count on to vote the way they want us to. We have come to define "democracy" as "one person one vote" but that hasn't always been the operative definition. We are in the process of redefining it yet again.