More odds and ends...

On this month's reading list, "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy" is a must for anyone who would like a succinct statement of how democracy works--or doesn't work that well--in the aftermath of laws permitting more democracy but inhibiting real freedom.  Sounds strange, but it explains beautifully why so many of us think Congress is the biggest collection of rogues, con men, and idiots to come down the tubes--and that holds on my side of the border as well, although for different reasons.



Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the husband is on the mend, mother on the mend, dog and horse in the hands of vets, and I am waiting for everyone to get shipshape so that I can take my turn being hospitalized or sick!

My park companion, TootSweet, has an eye infection that may actually be an allergy; although I don't know how it is possible for something two blocks away to cause an allergy in my dog when whatever it is doesn't affect him in his own back yard, there is always that possibility.  At the moment the vets are trying a change in antibiotic, although they are beginning to suspect the allergy.  The next step is either a biopsy of eyelid tissue, or a few days away from the park to see if that helps.  Obviously, the Toots will not go to the park for a while if the change in antibiotic doesn't do the trick.

Gitano, on the other hand, has developed a kind of blister over his backbone, almost over the haunches, which seems to be a sequelae of his former owner's use of a big, heavy, stiff saddle that was poorly fitted to the horse.  It reminds me of the Animal Planet series on animal intelligence: every kind of animal has unplumbed depths of perception and smarts that we are just beginning to understand, but I notice that people aren't included on the show.  If only my horse's former owner could be one of the test subjects!  With luck, he might rank up there with the invertebrates. 

People are incredibly cruel to animals, and I am sure that Nature is going to wreak some kind of horrendous vengeance.  Maybe that will happen when we overfish the seas into emptiness, or eliminate the habitats of so many species, or when the rain forests no longer exist and our sources of medicines have dried up along with them.  It seems odd to me that so many people who believe in a benign deity don't take the trouble to care for the Earth.  The short term goal always seems to predominate, as if we were never going to have to pay the piper--you know, a kind of ecological subprime loan.