Hedges

of all kinds

My first thought about hedges involves my actual privet variety in front of my house. I was concerned that the weight of the recent snow had caused them damage, but everyone assured me that they would survive. And indeed they are looking good this morning, awaiting the return of their leaves as Spring progresses.

So then my thoughts turned to why the word hedge is used in betting parlance, which led me to remember an awful fact I read in the news that people were betting on whether we would bomb Iran. I had to use Google to search and found out that Polymarket is an entity that takes bets on anything basically. The stuff I don’t know about would fill the universe these days. But somehow this sounds shady to me. Some people made a shit ton of money on this prediction, and it seems as rigged as the rest of our government these days. And of course the idea of the war being used to divert from the Epstein files is terrifying. Dr. Strangelove, indeed.

And I am going to end with something else I knew nothing about until I read it in Bill Bryson’s wonderful book At Home. Did you know that America once suffered from a locust swarm that greatly disturbed agriculture in the West? On page 297, the author describes this scourge which occurred in 1873 and for three more years following that. The locusts were eventually wiped out because of the westward migration of people who disturbed their breeding ground (get this book for a wealth of fascinating information). But I was taken with the author’s words on page 299 “There has never been a darker or more helpless moment in the whole of American history” which applied to the locust infestation but is surely apt today.

One other thought before I retire to my chair to read the Sunday paper, and that is about women’s rights. The other book I recently finished about the first female flight surgeon in the United States Air Force (see my previous post) gave me more worry that we are regressing. I am the same age as that woman and when she entered the service she had a husband. But she could not get base housing because only people with dependents could do so (you know, as in a man and his wife). By the time she retired 20 years later such anomalies had been corrected mainly because of the women’s movement in which I participated. We took to the streets in the 60’s and 70’s to point out the many inequities in existence, and we were gratified by the steps towards equality that have since been made. Do not put anyone back in the kitchen, the closet, or the plantation!

RESIST ALWAYS

TTFN