Pickles

We planted two cucumber vines, and boy, do we have cucumbers. Every night, Paul comes up with a new pickle recipe and I do a different cucumber salad.

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R.I.P.

A good friend of ours just died of brain radionecrosis, which is, as it sounds, the death of some part of the brain after radiation treatments. His treatments started many years ago, when he was still a teenager. He leaves his parents, his brother, his wife, and his very young child. We'll pay a shiva call on Sunday.

Sometimes I wonder whether in 200 years, people will look back on the way we treated cancer--poisoning and burning it out--and be amazed at our stupidity. It will look like trepanning or bloodletting or any number of pointless, painful treatments used by our forefathers and mothers.

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Endangering the Endangered

Before he leaves office, GW feels compelled to pull the temple down around him. Now comes his plan to gut the Endangered Species Act by removing any oversight from scientists and placing it in the hands of the would-be endangerers. My familial endangered-species expert doesn't think it'll fly, but comments that their evil knows no bounds. Their reason seems to be that too many reviewers are using global warming as an excuse to protect animals -gasp-.

"It is important to use our time and resources to protect the most vulnerable species. It is not possible to draw a link between greenhouse gas emissions and distant observations of impacts on species."

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Hail to Thee

Sadie decided to go out in it and came running back all squinchy from being pelted. Paul got the camera and recorded it.

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Historical Quote of the Day

"I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen."

-- John Edwards, quoted by the Raleigh News & Observer in 1999, on Bill Clinton (with thanks to CB for sending it on)

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Stupidity

Inertia wasn't enough. Now Krugman, truth-teller that he is, lets us know how stupid we are.

[K]now-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

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Inertia

I'm thinking a lot about the inertia of certain institutions that requires them after a certain tipping point to invest most of their energies into prolonging their own existences. (This was brought back up by the recent BOCES report, BOCES being a big offender in this regard.) I'm seeing a lot of evidence of this in the budget discussions happening at the county and city levels. Yet these institutions must do it convincingly, because no one wants to cut anything. I wonder whether certain small governmental bodies might fit into this group--village boards, for example. (I know that will rile Simon up.)

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