The good news? I think just maybe Elizabeth Warren will make it. And if she is as good as I think she is, that might just make a real difference.

I read a short piece suggesting that Israel is considering a unified government. This is something they have done before while I lived there. Inflation had gone out of control and reached a level at its peak of %1800. That is a very big percent. It meant that if you got paid in the morning if you didn’t invest your money in something — dollars or yen or marks — it would be worthless before morning break. It was ugly and it was frankly, terrifying.

Lady Cardinal

One Goldfinch

Looking down Dove

Goldfinch in the rain

Our favorite 4-legged furry bird

Since neither party wanted the responsibility to fix the mess, they formed a single government. They changed the official money in use from the lira to the shekel. Dropped three zeros off all the money. They put caps on the prices of things, specifically basic foodstuffs —  milk, eggs, bread, flour, cooking oil. No price rises were allowed on anything including hardgoods, cars, appliances. No raises for workers, either.

It was the kind of thing that neither party would do alone — but together, they had the country running pretty soothly and less than a year later, the moved back into two parties and hating each other, which is what two major parties did. But the point is, they knew when the country was in trouble and did what needed to be done. Hatred notwithstanding. This is something I can’t even imagine happening in this nation.

We’ll destroy ourselves before we put the needs of the country first and our party commitment second. It’s something to think about.

Right now, talking — evening vaguely pondering — the results of a middle-eastern war is madness.

If you drop nukes in the middle east, they will quite literally set the world on fire. Even when I lived in Israel there was a quiet truce between enemy nations that no one would blow up the oil fields. Underneath the Arab states is an ocean of oil. NOTE: Israel has NO oil at all. Someone once spilled a can of oil while fixing his car and it made headlines, but the fire might burn forever and never go out. It makes our western fires look like backyard barbecues. I doubt even tiny little Israel would survive, even though they have no oil.

I suppose that’s one way of solving the middle east crisis. Not a good way, but there wouldn’t be much left to fight over after that.

As for the poisons they are spraying here — we’ve had (now) 9 cases of EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis) from mosquito bites. One death. Everyone else recovered. The poison they have used will poison every insect the birds eat and turn every  acorn lethal. We are going to have backyards full of dead birds.  It’s horrifying.

We’ve lost 29% of our entire bird population since 1970 from miscellaneous pollution. But this?

Literally, we are spreading a trail of death over New England, Michigan, and Minnesota. It will get worse. We don’t even need the apocalypse. We are going to do ourselves in. Even when we are trying to do the right thing, we don’t seem to understand what “the right thing” actually is.