June 15

 Sunny today, they say, and temps should hit the high 90s. I just finished watering the plants in the gardens which needing it. My plants are doing very well. Next week we expect the temps to go into the 90s for most days. I will have to get out early to keep the plants watered. And we will have to go out as early as possible to beat the heat for any errands.

We didn't even bother to put on any news--it is all the same. It is beyond boring going into irritating. Even BBC hasn't got much new. Or much informative. I put out a stack of our DVDs to cover the day. Thank goodness for our collection because the stations have nothing of interest or they require us to subscribe to a more expensive package--not worth it. We are talking, again, about cutting cable out all together and keeping only the internet.

Some years ago, in one of the classes I took on the history of science, I read THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas Kuhn. I have re-read it several times over the years. His premise was that scientific work is driven by paradigms (models) which guide scientists and change only slowly under the weight of accumulated anomalies. Reading a collection of Andrew Bacevich's essays (ON SHEDDING AN OBSOLETE PAST) it occurred to me that our politics, economics, and diplomacy/military thought are also driven by paradigms which we don't even realize or examine. For the last almost the dominant paradigm was that which emerged from WWII: resistance to Communist expansion where ever we saw it, creating multi-national military alliances (NATO) to achieve that aim and spending more that the next ten high spending nations together on our own military, and building similar alliances economically (World Bank, International Monetary Fund) and politically (U.N.). Over the last four decades those structures have shown cracks which are spreading no matter how our leaders try to cover them.

I just finished another book: Andy Borowitz's PROFILES IN IGNORANCE. He focuses primarily on Presidents from Reagan on. I noticed one comment on the Goodreads page which faults the author for a partisan focus on Republicans. Not a bad criticism, except Borowitz does take on Democrats for "normalizing" ignorance. All of them (Clinton, Obama and Biden) were all intelligent men who saw their route to power in pandering to an electorate entertained by ignorance. In a globalized world can we really afford to have leaders who are so clueless as Trump. His ignorance and total lack of curiosity can't be dismissed as mere gaffs.