95 Never Felt Better

The last couple of days have been wonderful. The temperature here has been in the mid to high 90's. It may not sound that great, but I never realized how refreshing and cool 95 was until I had to suffer through 10 days straight of temperatures above 100 degrees. I don't know if many people have been paying that much attention, but it has been hell this summer in the South. Here is a US Drought Monitor.

I went to the Congaree National Swamp on Saturday and on the way there I passed through a very rural area dotted with farms, except these farms were skeletons. I passed field after field of dead and dried up corn fields. It almost looked as if someone set them all on fire. It was bad. I also read a story the other day about dairy farmers in South Carolina that were just having trouble keeping their cows alive. At the time, they were losing several cows a day. Not to mention that they were no longer getting much, if any, milk out of them. The same things are happening in Alabama and other SE states. Along with this, Texas has been drenched with rain all summer. I wonder if that is also having detrimental effects on farmers and agriculture in general.

I thought about all of this when I ran across this post at Blognonymous. The graphic he has up on rising food prices is alarming. How much worse is it going to get when we really start feeling the effects of a disastrous summer growing season?

On a similar topic, my garden is barely hanging on. I guess 10 days straight of record breaking heat will do that. My okra and a few tomato plants are doing pretty well, but everything else in my garden is basically gone. My container garden is doing pretty well also. I can move them into the shade when it gets too hot. We had our first rain in a month Friday. I hope it won't be another month before we get some more.

Tomorrow is supposed to be over 100 again. Hopefully, this will be a one day thing. I am just now getting used to not sweating all day in my own house.

It begins...

Administration will designate group as ‘global terrorist’

The designation of the Revolutionary Guard will be made under Executive Order 13224, which President Bush signed two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to obstruct terrorist funding. It authorizes the United States to identify individuals, businesses, charities and extremist groups engaged in terrorist activities. The Revolutionary Guard would be the first national military branch included on the list, U.S. officials said -- a highly unusual move because it is part of a government, rather than a typical non-state terrorist organization.

There are people in the administration that will not be happy with anything short of an all out war with Iran (Cheney, etc). This is the first huge step to escalation. This is the first major policy that sets up the rationale for war. We are on our way folks. Get ready, because it's coming.

Also from the article:
"The administration's move comes amid growing support in Congress for the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act..."

What fucking idiots. This is playing out just like Iraq. 'Oh, we didn't think that the President would use this to make a case for war, yada, yada, yada...' Of course not, you idiots. Of course not. And if I believed that, I would be as stupid as they pretend to be. Of course these people know what they are doing.

We are alone. Our Congress has proven that they are not there to represent the people or protect the constitution. They have proven over and over that they are just enablers to illegal war, the destruction of our constitution, and the systematic dismantling of our country in general. Our courts are a joke, our attorney general is criminal at best. And what do they do? They give this criminal enterprise known as the Bush administration more power to spy and now an excuse for another preemptive illegal war. And what do we do about it??? Not a damn thing.

Something rotten...

According to the latest White House Jobs and Economic Growth report:

"The President's Pro-Growth Policies Are Helping Keep Our Economy Strong, Flexible, And Dynamic."

So dynamic, in fact, that it is apparently very easy for the economy to shit itself while no one was paying attention. So flexible that the economy of 2007 can contort itself into a near exact replica of the economy from 1927. It appears to me that the Fed and Treasury Secretary were so concerned with staying on message and promoting the President's Strong Economy propaganda that they missed or chose to ignore the impending sub-prime mortgage fallout, which dropped the bottom out of several types of bonds and securities, and in turn hit the highly volatile hedge funds very hard.

These are large markets that don't just jump around because someone issued a terror alert or a celebrity got busted for coke. These are the markets that (unfortunately) run your lives. The economy has long ceased to be a string of quarterly reports or an aggregation of earnings tables or a stock ticker at the bottom of CNN. This is a nearly sentient organism out of anyone's control. This is not something that breaks one day for no reason, and it's not something you can fix in a couple of hours. If I had any liquidity at all, I'd be buying all the Euros or gold I could get a hold of. But I don't because I live in Bush's strong economy where the average household savings is negative. It really doesn't matter much though, because we'll all be dead sooner rather than later.




Well, fuck. That won't imbed right, so here you go. Please watch the video at this link.


Oh, yeah, one more thing.

VOTE KUCINICH 2008!!!

The Dark Side

Sweltering

To Fade

Here's the beginnings of a response to Fade's latest post.





You appear frustrated because of your commitment to Truth, Justice, and the American Way. I suspect the root of your frustration may lie in your conviction that Truth and Justice are somehow an American Way, as opposed to just a Good Way. Once you realize that the American government has rarely been true or just, you can set your sights on fighting for Truth and Justice, where ever you see their precepts violated. Instead you place the focus of your love on your country, and become frustrated when it does not live up to your ideals of how it should behave. Just know that Truth and Justice are not unique to America, they were not new ideas with the birth of America, but they are, perhaps, more important than America as a country. Countries come and go, but a Good and Decent Human's commitment to Truth and Justice will be a struggle that will need to be fought for generations after the American empire crumbles into the dustbin of history. Then, there will be a mention of the once proud American empire in the history books, but the real and important story that historians will be praised for digging out of that dustbin will be that, even in the end, even in the darkest final days of the empire, there were still humans willing to work for the high ideals of Truth and Justice. Be THAT footnote in history. That, my friend, is something worth fighting for.

T.I.P.