Dog days

        The expression the dog days comes from the fact Sirius, more commonly known as the dog star rises with the sun from July 3 to August 11.  This period coincides with the maximum warmth we get in many areas of the Northern Hemisphere.  It also is the most productive period in the garden.   Everything from lettuce to zucchini is making maximum growth now.  Unfortunately for growers, many people stop cooking during this time and sales of vegetables tend to plummet.  Vacations, heat and humidity are good excuses used by growers to explain lagging sales and abundant supplies.  It happens every year and yet we are always surprised by the phenomenon.

50 years ago

    Some days it seems like yesterday, others it feels like a geological age.  50 years ago I had just graduated from high school and was taking a few tentative steps toward independence during a summer which featured two of the most talked about events in our history; Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's landing on the moon and its counter culture equivalent, Woodstock.
    Unfortunately for me, I was keeping my head down and working all summer at a local nursery for money for college tuition while assiduously courting a certain local lady who would eventually become the Divine Mrs. M. .  The moon landing registered with me, but only peripherally.   I grew up during the space race and followed Alan Shepherd and John Glenn's exploits in the early 60s.   By the time of Apollo 11, many of us took the achievement for granted, assuming mission control would make sure the astronauts would make it there and back again.  No big deal.  The detail that made me proud was the Lunar Excursion Module or LEM which actually landed on the moon was built by a local company, Grumman Aerospace.
     My relationship to Woodstock was even more tenuous.  I heard about the massive traffic jams in the tiny community in upstate NY where the festival was held, but having never been north of NYC, the Catskills were Terra Incognita to me.  I was about as likely to guest on Apollo 11 as attend 3 days of Peace and Love.  As a clean cut teen who spent 8 years in Catholic school, I was suspicious and a little put off by marijuana puffing hippies and psychedelic rock bands.
     50 years on, I wish I had paid a little more attention to the historic trends rocking America, but in the small town world I grew up in, it took more self awareness than I possessed to do that.   All I can say is I was there at the time.

Racism and education

    Racism was the theme many columnists and pundits are exploring in the wake of Cheetolini's attacks on 4 women of color in Congress.   All of them approach the topic differently depending on their own racial identity and experience.  However, all of them start from the presumption that education can mitigate racism to a certain extent.
    Paul Krugman in the NYT takes the GOP to task for tolerating tRump's racism with virtually no pushback from prominent republicans.  He posits this is the endgame of the party's continuing efforts to make itself the party of white identity and supremacy.   Starting in the Nixon era the GOP realized that with the passage of Civil Rights bills by the democrats, racists, especially in the south suddenly without a party.  The republicans filled the gap and gradually expanded their share of the white vote while democrats became the defacto party of minorities and unionists.  Under the latest iteration of the GOP republicans have gone all in on the race issue.
     Jamelle Bouie in the same paper has a different take, reflecting his own heritage.   He sees tRump's call out of  AOC, Ilan Omar, Rashida Talib and Ayana Pressley as the naked racism it is.  He worries the GOP will become even more heavy handed as its numbers continue to shrink and the US becomes a truly multi-racial democracy.
     Finally, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones can hardly believe republicans have staked their existence on drumming up racial division.   He, Krugman and Bouie all assume most of the white working class  is racist and in thrall to republicans while college educated whites are more tolerant.  I hope in this case they are all wrong, but unfortunately, my own experience with many people in the North Country tends to verify their thesis.   Drum comes to the conclusion that people of good will must come together and crush the party of racism and expunge a dark moment in our history.

The Fire next time

     It looks as though New Orleans dodged the water bullet over the weekend.  By missing the largest part of Tropical storm Barry's precipitation, the beleaguered levee system was able to keep the city dry for the most part.  However, we are at the very beginning of the hurricane season and NOLA can't continue to count on missing storms as a strategy.
     Meanwhile, in India, a city of over 8 million people is about to run out of water.  The implications of that are terrifying.   There is no way even fleets of water tankers can alleviate that problem.  With most of the sub continent dependent on the increasingly problematic monsoon season to recharge aquifers and reservoirs and haphazard development destroying the land's carrying capacity, people on that side of the world are encountering another side to the climate crisis.
     We need to mobilize now to deal with both of the above problems.

Good News/Bad News

      Sometimes, politics is a lot like farming.  No matter how much good weather and timely rainfall you get, a 2 minute thunderstorm can undo weeks of crop growth.  Similarly, an issue which triumphs several times can be brought down by an untimely judicial opinion.
      My garden received a timely 3/4 inch of rain last night which will keep things growing through the weekend.  Meanwhile, in the Canadian growing region where I do a lot of summertime business, a heavy rain and hail event pretty much destroyed at least one growers harvestable lettuce.
    To carry on the analogy, despite the success of Obamacare in reducing the number of uninsured people in the US and majority support for it in the public at large, a couple of republican judges will presumably rule in favor of a ridiculous argument against the law.  It will likely appear in the Supreme Court again where John Roberts will hold the law's fate in his hands alone.  Such are the vagaries of weather and politics.

Hello, Ms. American Pie

    With  apologies to Don Maclean, I rearranged the first line of his iconic song with its reference to levees (why did he drive to it and why was it dry?).   Louisiana and the American Midwest are about to find out what will happen if the levees get too wet.  The Mississippi has been flooding Louisiana and the areas around New Orleans since the spring.  Should proto hurricane Barry dump up to 30 inches of rain on the state, there is a pretty good chance the levees protecting NOLA will breach and cause a Katrina like flood, possibly even worse.
      More troubling for the country as a whole is the very real possibility the Mississippi could change course and join the Atchafalaya river on a different path to the Gulf of Mexico.  If this happens, the damage to trade, both domestically and internationally, would be incalculable.   Much of the industrial and agrarian trade from the US to the world flows down the mighty Mississippi and closing it to navigation for years would probably cause an immediate global panic.   I have scant confidence the tRump administration could deal with such a situation.
      Meanwhile, on a more personal level, a childhood idol of mine, Jim Bouton died yesterday.   Bouton was revered and reviled for his tell all book on major league baseball.  Ball Four detailed the tawdry side of the game, revealing many players as huge man children whose sole talent was playing the American pastime better than 99% of their fellows.   Descriptions of  marital infidelity, casual drug consumption and petty vendettas put off many players and sportswriters, but the very people who criticized the book ensured its success.   As an 11 year old besotted with the Yankees at the end of one dynasty, Bouton, who won 20 games in 1963 was one of my heroes.  RIP Jim.

What really matters

    I was going to write about the citizenship question on the census and the continuing assault on Obamacare and what these two issues say about our democracy.   Then, I checked the weather.
     Although the local forecast seems like a pretty tame summer prediction; hot and humid with a chance of thunderstorms tomorrow, there was an add on story which caught my eye.  It seems we have broken the record for most rainfall in the US during a 12 month period with a nationwide average over 37 inches. The kicker is the previous record was set last month and chances are we will break the record again this month.
   A warming world is one in which we can expect huge precipitation events due to warming oceans evaporating into the atmosphere.   The huge load of moisture will then be steered over land where it will fall as rain.  This is the same process we have always observed, but now on steroids due to human induced climate change.   Although attempts to game our electoral system by republicans are despicable, if we don't do something to mitigate our free form science experiment with climate, in the long run their shenanigans won't matter.