Again this will have to be somewhat short as another set of visitors have arrived from Danmark, (Honestly, we are not running a hostel for itenerant Danes.  It just seems that way at times.) and while they are not staying with us, thank the Gods, it is time consuming. We love seeing old friends but we do love our privacy also.  And this is a girl SWMBO grew up with and her husband who have come all the way to Spain to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary with us so we can't just sort of ignore them now can we?  So please bear with me just a week longer.  Then all this will be over, I freverently hope at least, until Christmas.  Just think, a whole month on our own!  I wonder how we will survive.

But to get you started on the right foot, Grumpy style, I would like you to go here and read this. And once you have I'd like you to contemplate just what it is that is happening and perhaps you will discover one of the myriad reasons the United States is hated in most of the world.  For it isn't just because of Bush and the war in Iraq.  No, it is basically due to your total disregard for the hopes, aspirations and rights of anyone else on this planet if they should happen to come into conflict with the visceral and oft times vulgarly ostentatious expectations of the American people.  YOU alone have the right to use all the resources on this planet for your exclusive pleasure.  That other people, millions of other people, might be forced to leave their homes to go live in a city slum and perhaps even starve to death means nothing to you.  You don't see 'em so they don't exist is your motto.  Every Californian with respect for himself must have a swimming pool and if that means 20 or 30 Mexican families have their livelihoods and lives destroyed that's just tough shit baby.  For share equally is not a concept in the American mindset.  "I've got mine Jack, how you doin." is more like it.

Just think of it, millions upon millions of people on this earth are starving and you lot are growing FOOD to be made into fuel for your gas guzzling tin monsters.  That you have in your greed forced millions of Mexican people off their ancestrial lands so that you can water your fucking huge lawns.  Growing fucking grass instead of food as they would do if they had the use of that land and water and then, on top of it all, forcing this NAFTA shit down their throats which means that corn grown in the American midwest with huge government subsidies that is not turned into fuel invades their markets which means they cannot compete in the market place and have to go bankrupt.  With all the heartbreak, hunger and misery that comes with it.  This is the American version of a "Free market economy!"

Well here you have an example of that "Free Market economy" working at it's best.  It was called the dust bowl and took place during the 1930's in the West, Central States of the United States.

And here you have a couple of songs Woody Guthrie wrote about the results of this disaster.  And do keep in mind that he lived through this as he was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Texas at the time all this was happening.

Do Re Mi=Dough=Cash money.  Both common terms in the '30s.

And this is the area I'm talking about.

And what caused this unbelievable devastation?  Basically there were two causes.  The advent of the motor powered tractor and the untamed greed of the people who owned and operated the huge agri businesses of their day.  And how did these to seemingly disparate things work in conjunction to cause a disaster of these dimensions?  Quite simple in reality.  For with unlimited greed the agri conglomerates took to mechanized farming with a vengeance.  And there were vast untapped lands just waiting for the plow to the West of Oklahoma and Kansas.  The only trouble with this being that the lands here had a very thin layer of topsoil due to the lack of WATER.  (There you have that magic word again.)  And all you needed to do was to break the surface of the soil with a plow, which would then release any surface water held captive below the sods and then to this, add a period of drouth and wait for the wind.  The results were in fact, very predictable.  But no one was doing any predicting in the face of the all powerful "Free Marketeers" of that era just as they are not today.  And thus the disaster.

Just as no one been able to convince the "Free Marketeers" in the California real estate business that stripping all the vegetation off the hills in order to build houses was not a very good idea either.  And once again, nature has shown them the evil of their ways by burning some 1000 of these houses and all the vegetation surrounding them just this past week .  And the next thing will be heavy rains with resultant landslides and more houses destroyed.  And what will the "Free Marketeers" do?  What else but call out the bulldozers and strip even more vegetation off and then build even more houses that will then become fuel for the insatiable flames that are the inevitable result of this greed and short sightedness.  Just as the original answer to the dust bowl was the plowing of more marginal land.  With the same inevitable result.