Chilly and overcast this morning. It was cool enough this morning that I checked the thermostat. It was still at 69 so I didn't turn on the furnace. I checked again just now and the temperature had dipped to 68. I made sure the automatic setting was at 68 and turned on the furnace. It will only come on when the temperature goes below the setting. We have noticed that our electric bills have been a bit higher this year but the summer was very warm for a long time. We haven't had any trouble paying our utility bills but we try to keep tabs on them.
Doomberg has an interesting and long teaser this morning. A teaser because I can only read the first half and I would love to read the rest which is behind a pay wall. I simply can't afford the $30 a month subscription or the $300/year either. I have been fascinated by the dance between energy companies and climate activists. At one point the activists can pressure a company (either directly or through the "passive" investors like Black Rock) and get a so-called climate friendly board. But once the spotlight is off they backtrack. In the case Doomberg describes the back tracking came in response the dislocations that came with international events like the Ukraine-Russia war and now the amped up Hamas-Israel confrontation. But I have wondered about something that wasn't mentioned in the open part of the article--the tension between climate activism and consumers. And the fact that climate activists are also consumers that need gas, electricity and other necessities of modern life. When the price of those go up, for whatever reason, the howls rise.
We are watching soccer this morning and then we'll shift to DVDs. I scanned the news this morning and didn't see much new. The aid trucks are finally moving into Gaza. Everything else repeats what we saw last night.
I haven't seen many real discussions of the Biden Administration's proposed "aid" package. The proposal, as it stands last time I saw/heard it, wants a whopping $100+billion. One of the interviewers asked outright if we could afford that given all of the needs we have at home. Biden came back vigorously insisting that "of course" we can--we are the most powerful nation that has ever been. Only a couple of other commentators mentioned that part of the interview. Almost no one really drilled into the notion that somehow we can, as the old saying goes, have unlimited guns and unlimited butter. We tried that in the 1960s when the Johnson Administration declared "war" on poverty and massively increased our involvement in Vietnam. One critic carped that Johnson "declared war on poverty but funded a skirmish." But the Vietnam quicksand sucked up increasing amounts of tax dollars and the deficits ramped up. We really couldn't fund both at the same time and paid with massive inflation in the 1970s. We already have a high level of inflation at the consumer level though the economists insist it isn't all that bad. Most of them, of course, don't do their own shopping and they would rather believe the massaged statistics developed to make the politicians feel good. If it comes to a choice between guns and butter, butter is going to lose. Bill Astore calls the package "trigger treats."
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We had heavy rain early last night and high winds. I don't know what things are like right now because it is still dark. The sky is becoming a bit lighter but dawn is still about half an hour away. We had another domestic almost catastrophe. Mom mentioned that the downstairs toilet was a bit slow so I checked for a sewer backup and found everything dry. About two hours later the landlord's handyman was checking the connection to the main sewer. He asked if we had seen any water in the utility closet. I hadn't but checked again and there was water on the floor. Thankfully, it hadn't gotten any further. They got the line cleared fairly quickly.
Contemplating the Hamas-Israeli conflict I remember a scene in the DUNE miniseries (released 2000). Jessica tells Paul that she has seen the future he is unleashing and is terrified. He claims he can't stop it. Jessica protests that the violence will hurt the "innocent." He tells her, implacably, that there are no innocents any more. There no innocents in any war and the current conflicts in our world prove that. The screams of the bereaved and the injured are THE SAME on both sides but neither side wants to give more than lip service to the innocence of the "civilians" on the other side. There are neither innocents nor civilians in any of the conflicts. I doubt that there ever have been in any conflict. We follow the Chivington dictum: kill and scalp them all...nits make lice. I'll let you look up the reference. JanInSanFran at Can It Happen Here? makes a similar argument.
Scientific American has an interesting article on the spread of a parasite caused skin disease normally associated with tropical areas--in the U.S. Over the last few years we have seen several tropical diseases spreading in the U.S. An especially interesting tidbit in the article: the parasite has been found in samples from 18 years ago. And an "American" strain of the parasite has appeared.
I am not sympathetic to the notion of blasphemy. It really should be applied within a particular religious tradition and non-lethal penalties should only be applied to members of that tradition. However, I saw an image this morning that, if I were a practicing Christian, I would find blasphemous. It showed The Former Guy in court with a spectral Jesus seated beside him. He is NOT Christ's deputy on earth. In his actions and words he is the antithesis of Christ.
We just went out on an unscheduled errand. The cabinet under the sink has finally dried out enough to lay down a liner of newspaper. We don't subscribe so we decided to pick one up and get the few items on our grocery list at the same time. We were surprised that the grocery store didn't have any red cabbage. The stocker told us they hadn't had any for a while and didn't know when more would come in. I thought I would substitute a green cabbage but they only had about a dozen and they were huge. Even a small one would do us for four or five meals. So we didn't get any cabbage. We wanted a bottle of red wine primarily for cooking but a nip every now and then would also be good. But we got there at 11am and the cashier said that she couldn't sell it before 12. I did look up the laws in Indiana and everything I saw set no time limits for Sunday sales. We didn't argue. There are enough bitches out there. But we didn't get the wine either. And we wanted a newspaper. My god!! Those rags were pathetic. Even the Chicago paper was a ghost of its former self. We barely got enough newsprint for a shelf liner. There was no news worthy of the name. Even the Sunday funnies were skimpy. We did get the newspaper but aren't happy it cost 2 bucks. I wonder if we should have got a roll of regular shelf liners which would have been too good for the use.
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