good vs evil

I liked to think that the demonstrations of the sixties put an end to the Vietnam war, but anymore I am not so sure.  In the end it may have just been the long loss of bodies and treasure without achieving any goal.  And looking back it is hard to see where the demonstrators changed any hearts of minds.  Our behavior once we started tossing bottles and rocks was the sort of thing that pisses people off rather than persuades them.  Burning the flag, what was with that?  I guess I would still defend burning the flag as a first amendment right, but what is the purpose of doing so?

Well arrogance.  We were right and the war hawks were wrong, and being in the right gave us license to do things that offended those who were in the wrong.  Like I've said before I thought we were good people and the people we were opposing were bad people, so it was a battle between good and evil.  

But since then I have realized that our enemies also thought that they were doing the right thing,  I think they were wrong of course, but then they probably thought I was wrong.

Anyway if the cause is police brutality then I think the current protester's cause is just, and there were some polls earlier that showed public opinion had moved towards their cause, so that is all good.  

But then there was the violence.  I will have to say that there has been almost no personal violence, just property damage.  But that damage has been very extensive, and is certainly not right.  There is a story going around that the good protesters are the ones who come around early in the day and protest peacefully, but with the fall of night out come the bad protesters who do the damage.  But I think some of these guys are the same people, and you don't see the peaceful protesters doing much to clamp down on the violent protesters.

Part of this may be due to the structure of the Black Lives Matter organization, but I'll get to that later.


My balcony faces straight east so the only sun I get is morning sun.  Peppers, especially hot ones grow well.  I get tomatoes but not a lot of them, and not very large.  This can be overcome by putting in a lot of plants and this year I was going balls to the wall by paying a few bucks more for more advanced seedlings and buying a jug of Miracle Grow.  Everything was going fine until last week when they finally got around to painting my balcony ceiling.  They put tarp over the plants but that didn't do them any good and there was something toxic in the paint that set my tomatoes way back.  The leaves along the main stems are shriveled but they are growing at the tips, which is the way of tomatoes and I may yet get a few.  My sunflowers had just crested the railings and the tarp bent their heads which were about to flower.  Three of them popped back but the fourth had an actual break of the skin at the bend.  I thought this is crazy and will never work but I made a little splint at the spot with string and a piece of dowel rod, and by gum it worked.  I feel pretty good about that.


I am not disputing the numbers of those links, which is the same news I see every day in the papers and radio and on tv.  I dispute that they do anything to back up Beagle's assertion that lockdown does no good.  In almost every case states that were locking down were doing better than states that weren't locking down.  When states that had been doing well by locking down, California is the most obvious example, started opening up in what we now know was too early they got hit bad.  That lockdown deters the pandemic is plain and obvious.