June 21, 22

I don't think the rain predicted for last night appeared so I will see later what plants need water. Supposed to be another hot day.

Well, I have checked the plants and watered the tower and small pots. The rest look good. Got a nice surprise--several of those old sunflower seeds have sprouted. They were just a bit slow doing so. I filled the bird feeder and, after using the remaining water in the bird bath to water the tower, filled it with fresh.

 I culled about half of the pattern books in my file cabinet. As I mentioned I am keeping the patterns I would like to do at some near time in the future. At some time soon I have to organize the keepers. For now the crochet, embroidery and quilting patterns are all mixed up together. Things get done in stages as I have the energy to do it.

22********************************************************************

I was right that the rain didn't come last night either. I got all my plants watered and found that the cosmos seeds I planted a short while ago have sprouted. With those plants and the sunflowers I noticed emerging yesterday all my spaces for summer plants are filled. I may not have any spaces for mums unless I go for small transplants for some 12 inch pots I can bring out. Decision for later.

Surprised that NBC is showing the last day of the Royal Ascot races. Interesting to watch and a wonderful respite from the so-called news. Another channel has the European soccer championships.

However, though I am really turned off by our political news over here, articles on international politics sometime do pique my interest such as this one by Simplicius. A major point made in the article is that the world has changed and the U.S. doesn't have quite the same preeminent position it once had. The bi-polar world of the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. If we ever really had a unipolar moment it didn't last long as we have already moved into an international situation in which regional powers play a more active role. The U.S. hasn't at all adjusted its foreign policy to take that into account. I thought from the time George W. swaggered across the international scene like a John Wayne wanna be that it was long past time that we put the cowboy attitude behind us. I was hoping that would be the case after Obama won the presidency but physics isn't the only system that shows the effects of inertia. Our politics and economics also shows the same phenomenon.

June 19, 20

 Happy Juneteenth. Stray thought on the coverage: so often the stories end with the comment that it was the day slaves in south Texas were informed that they were free some two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Why the tone of amazement? Did they (or their writers) ever read the document? It applied to ONLY those states still in rebellion against the Union. As though the authorities in those states would publicize it. It didn't apply to states where slavery was legal but which were not in rebellion, like Kentucky.

Interesting that the failure of the 911 system in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the northeast hasn't caused more ripples in the news. I looked for reports on the cause but haven't found any yet. From what I have found the local authorities found work-arounds to allow people to get help in spite of the outage. As some "on the street" interviewees noted we simply expect these systems to work. But it feels (I don't have any "data") like so much we take for granted aren't that reliable nowadays.

20**********************************************************************

Welcome to the Summer Solstice and astronomical summer. The heat is hanging on and is predicted to continue for the next week. I went out early to water the plants hoping it would be cooler. The word "cooler" is a a comparative term: cooler than what? The thermometer already reads more that 80°F. We should get into the 90° + range.

Aurelian has some interesting observations about elections in our western world including: Part of modern democratic systems is the organisation of regular elections. In the depoliticised politics that we have enjoyed for the last generation, politics in many western countries has degenerated into nothing much but elections, generating a massive industry of consultants, psephologists, analysts, stylists and hairdressers.

The way we live now it seems the election season never ends. Not since Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower. From what I have seen in the bloggers I follow we, here, aren't the only ones utterly exhausted by the endless chattering.

June 18

 Damn but the heat yesterday was brutal. We had a number of errands and  were wilting by the time we got back. We hadn't planned to go out today but the lease renewal arrived. We decided to take care of that and pay rent today. We did our grocery shopping as well. Thanks to a pulse of rain the temperature stayed moderate while we were out. The weather forecasts predict temperatures at or above 90 for the rest of the week. Unless something unexpected appears we will be staying home.

Tom Englehardt linked to this story in the introduction to the John Berger guest post this morning. The morning news yesterday showed a segment of Trump's speech to the rally. He mentioned that his security people told him that the heat was dangerous and his audience was in danger. He asked "what about me?!!" and went on, in a moment in truth-telling, said "I don't care about you. I just want your votes." What a selfish, self-centered piece of crap. The temperature hit around 111F.

I went out on the patio very early--as soon as I could see clearly--and watered the plants. I didn't do it yesterday because everything looked good and the soil was moist to my touch. I didn't want to trust that we would get enough rain to do any good. The last two pulses of rain barely moistened the plants and patio.

June 17

 Half past June already and another Monday. We have errands planned. I checked the plants and they all looked good for water. Beautiful sight this morning as my Asiatic lilies are blooming. I am definitely going to have to thin the stand in the fall. I hope the day lily will perform as well.

Stray thought: the Surgeon General wants some kind of a warning (similar to the kind on tobacco products) on social media sites. I am becoming more and more skeptical of such nanny measures. They say that the warnings on tobacco worked and use of those products dropped fantastically. However, I also remember the repeated hikes in the taxes on tobacco over the same years. A smoking habit will set you back considerable cash. But does the government have to be an ever-present nanny? I also noticed that efforts to mandate some measures during COVID fizzled badly. People didn't like being told they had to wear a mask many found uncomfortable or even dangerous for some of them. And they didn't like the lockdowns from which many still haven't recovered financially.

If China didn't have bad weather luck it wouldn't have much luck at all. Of course, some parts of our own country is in much the same position.

It seemed like every spring we had some unwelcome visitors: proselytizing Christians. For the last five years or so we haven't seen any and haven't missed them. That streak came to an end over the weekend. When I was younger I would politely listen to the spiel and give a vague response. Not now. These two I sent on their way with a firm "I don't discuss religion. And, no, I don't want to talk about it." Then I shut the door. We have gotten in the habit of keeping the screen door locked after one long-ago "missionary" tried to actually open the door and come in spite of our rejection. I wonder why they are back after such a long a hiatus.

Depressing thoughts: discussion this morning on the news/commentary show outlined both the Israel/Hamas and the Ukraine conflicts turning into long running lower intensity fights. They can join a long list of similar conflicts around the world--Myanmar, Sudan, Yemen, etc.

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.

June 14

 We did get rain--sorta. It wasn't much and didn't do much for my plants. I was out a little earlier to check things out and watered all the plants. I also clipped a couple back. I don't see any sprouts of sunflowers or cosmos where I planted the seeds. I considered making one more trip to Home Depot but decided that I will wait until our favorite dairy brings in the fall mums. Those have done well for us before and it will bring in some fall color just as the summer bloomers are about finished.

I also made a start on sorting my collection of needlework magazines and patterns. I plan to cull a lot of them. Some years ago a meme made its way around the needleworkers' blogs: SABLE, i.e., Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy. Well it applies to magazines and patterns as well. So I am looking at all of them and deciding which I will keep because 1) it has interesting techniques I am likely to want, 2) has patterns not included in my library, or 3) patterns I am likely to actually do.

Yesterday I mentioned Aurelian's post (and linked to it) and commented on part of it. The part I didn't comment on involved his contention that we have no heroes any more and haven't had any since our last lunar landing. As a result, he wrote, we have no transcending vision of where we should go or what we should do. I can agree to an extent. After Kennedy pledged that we would land men on the moon before the end of the 1960s we did have a vision most of our population could agree with. Before that we had a vision for a world recovered from two world wars and a decade of depression. Note I said WORLD not just the U.S. Before that we had the second of those world wars to win with our allies. We didn't simply do that on our own. And the great projects of the 19th century were settling the continent (I won't mention who we ran over to do it) and the resolution of the issue of slavery which bedeviled our Founding Generation. Who the heroes of these phases of our history were not obvious during the events and depended on whose vision won the contest. As they say: history is written by the winners.

Something else rattled around in my memory and it took me a bit to track it down. At sometime during my academic incarnations I read or heard the quote: pity the people who have no heroes. No, pity the people who need heroes. It was a slightly mistranslation from Berthold Brecht's THE LIFE OF GALILEO. He wrote "unhappy" not pity. Right now many of us are searching for heroes but not really satisfied with any of the options. But we aren't asking why we feel the need of heroes. Or what even defines a hero.

We also seem to be a people who delights in tearing down "heroes." I don't know often I have heard the Founding Fathers dismissed because many of the were "enslavers." It doesn't seem to matter that they rebelled against England and established a separate political entity, that they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that they set a pattern that the country has pretty much followed since. Somehow the fact of "slave holder" washes out everything else.

June 13

 Sunny but we might have rain a bit later. The Weather Channel reported that thunderstorms are approaching Chicago which is about 50+ miles to the west of us.

Aurelian posted a long piece on his substak which I am keeping on my e-mail for re-reading. He takes his argument in a direction I didn't expect but parallels some of what I have felt for sometime--I just didn't express it in the same terms. I know that most of the new movies aren't at all appealing. When one seems interesting we wait and buy it as a DVD or BluRay. TV is extremely boring. The news/commentary channels are interminably repetitive and talk the very few stories covered to tatters. I don't buy as many books (either physical or electronic) as I once did. I read the description and feel I have read the themes too often before. Why bother? I need to mull over his contention about the disappearance of heroes.