Happy Birthday Mrs.Satan

An advocate of Free Love, womens rights, workers rights, free thinker, first published the Communist Manifesto in here weekly newspaper, spiritualist, and successful Wall Street wheeler dealer. Oh yes and she was the first woman to run for President of the U.S. Her opponents called her Mrs. Satan.


I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps

This Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast warns against the allure of the Free Love movement advocated by Victoria Woodhull.


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Free Trade and Africa

Funny thing synchronicity. No sooner had I finished this mornings rant here about Aid and Free Trade than I should find this article in the latest issue of Monthly Review, the Independent Socialist monthly from the U.S. It too refers to Easterly and the neo-liberal arguments for trade not aid and its distortions of the market in Africa. It is available on line.

REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa
Michael Watts

William Easterly, former high-ranking World Bank apparatchik, in his new lacerating demolition of structural adjustment—“a quarter century of economic failure and political chaos”—boldly states that the entire unaccountable enterprise of planned reform is “absurd” (http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/). It was Africa after all that was the testing ground for the Hayekian counter-revolution that swept through development economics in the 1970s. It began with the publication of Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (known as the “Berg Report”), the first in a series of World Bank reports that focus on the development problems of sub-Saharan Africa. This was the first systematic attempt to take the Chicago Boys experience in post-Allende Chile and impose it on an entire continent. The ideas of Elliot Berg and his fellow travelers marked the triumph of a long march by the likes of Peter Bauer, H. G. Johnson, and Deepak Lal (ably supported by the monetarist think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Mont Pelerin Society, and the astonishing rise to power from the early presence of Leo Strauss and Fredrich Hayek of the “Chicago School”) through the development institutions like the World Bank. Long before shock therapy in Eastern Europe or even the debt-driven “adjustments” in Latin America, it was sub-Saharan Africa that was the playground for neoliberalism’s assault. According to the United Nations, twenty-six of thirty-two sub-Saharan states had a “liberal” economic regime by 1998. Almost all had experienced some sort of structural adjustment program in the wake of the Berg report.

The neoliberal tsunami broke with a dreadful ferocity on African cities, and the African slum world in particular. Reform—the privatization of public utilities creating massive corporate profits and a decline in service provision, the slashing of urban services, the immiseration of many sectors of the public workforce, the collapse of manufactures and real wages, and often the disappearance of the middle class—was remorselessly anti-urban in its effects, as Mike Davis documents in Planet of Slums (Verso, 2005). As a consequence, African cities confronted the horrifying realities of an economic contraction of 2–5 percent per year combined with sustained population growth of up to 10 percent per annum (Zimbabwe’s urban labor market grew by 300,000 per year in the 1990s while urban employment grew by just 3 percent of that figure).

The neoliberal tsunami broke with a dreadful ferocity on African cities, and the African slum world in particular. Reform—the privatization of public utilities creating massive corporate profits and a decline in service provision, the slashing of urban services, the immiseration of many sectors of the public workforce, the collapse of manufactures and real wages, and often the disappearance of the middle class—was remorselessly anti-urban in its effects, as Mike Davis documents in Planet of Slums (Verso, 2005). As a consequence, African cities confronted the horrifying realities of an economic contraction of 2–5 percent per year combined with sustained population growth of up to 10 percent per annum (Zimbabwe’s urban labor market grew by 300,000 per year in the 1990s while urban employment grew by just 3 percent of that figure).

What is especially striking is that the fear that Africa was largely marginal to the circuits of capitalist accumulation and global resource flows during the 1980s and might be marginalized further, in some respects, proved to be a massive understatement. It is almost shocking to think that in the 1970s, Africa accounted for 25 percent of FDI to the third world. By 2000 it had crashed to 3.8 percent (Africa’s share of world FDI is currently less than 1 percent).

It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and unaccountable) failure. The solution is not to plan at all. Rather than planners—in his view the IMF/IBRD stenographers are really Stalinists in neoliberal garb—and the likes of Bono and Tony Blair, we need to find a raft of “searchers” like microcredit guru Mohammed Yunus. On the other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance failure.

The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables) in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African development.

See:

Africa

Neo-Liberalism

Aid

Oil



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Free Trade Not Aid

My fellow blog combatants from the right will be surprized that I agree with them.

Aid is not the anwer; economic freedom is says Damination, which by the way is one of the better Blogging Tories. Thoughtful and insightful articles can actually be found here, even though I disagree with them. As I will here.

It is a review of Wayne Easterly's book which the neo-liberal CATO Journal has also reviewed.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
by William Easterly
Reviewed by Prakash Loungani
Cato Journal
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Policy Analysis
Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

In 1982, Peter Bauer coauthored an article with the title “Foreign Aid
Isn’t.” This title could serve as an apt summary of William Easterly’s new
book. In “Development Aid: End It or Mend It” (International Center for Economic Growth, Occasional Papers No. 43, 1993), Bauer railed against calling it aid because “it promotes an unquestioning attitude. It disarms criticism, obscures realities, and prejudges results. Who could be against aid to the less fortunate? The term has enabled aid supporters to claim a monopoly of compassion and to dismiss critics as lacking in understanding and sympathy”
Bauer then went on to note the more substantive criticism that “the term also clearly implies that the policy must benefit the population of the recipient countries, which is not the case.” Easterly agrees: “ The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades,” he
writes, adding that he feels like “a Scrooge” for pointing out that all this “well-meaning compassion” has brought about little improvement in the lot of the world’s poor.

We can look at Canada's foreign aid as an example it has been aimed at prop up Canadian trade with the developing world. The money goes to governments who then purchase goods and services from Canadian businesses. It is another corporate subsidy. For instance our much lauded aid to Afghanistan is perfect example of this.

Afghan mission cost: $3.5B or far more

Documents tabled in the House on Monday also listed the top 20 highest-value contracts issued in connection with the Afghanistan deployment. The single largest line item was a $200-million contract for logistic support at the Canadian base in Kabul, awarded to a joint venture of Quebec engineering firm SNC Lavalin and California-based Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE).

The government has also spent $92.4 million for Nyala armoured patrol vehicles made by General Dynamics Land Systems, and $37.9 million on howitzer artillery pieces from BAE Systems in the U.S. and Britain.

Two foreign companies, based in United Arab Emirates and Monaco, were paid more than $10 million to provide accommodations and food for Canadian troops in Kandahar.

And it is by far the largest aid package that Canada is giving to any developing country. It is in short war profiteering as much as it is Aid for development. See my; Foreign Aid Or War Profiteering

No country in the world receives more foreign aid from Canada than Afghanistan. Ottawa is committing $100 million a year until 2011. Earlier this year, the United States turned over responsibility for a large part of Afghanistan to NATO, which includes Canada. Under American leadership, Senlis said $82 billion US was spent on military operations in Afghanistan, compared with $7 billion US on development since 2002. Development a slow road in unstable Afghanistan

NGO's themselves are the new form of business which fail to actually use business practices because they are in the compassion business. Whether directly state funded or charities their record is one of too little too late, and a complete failure to follow good business practices. Which is why so much international aid fails to reach those that need it. One merely needs to reflect on recent crisises such as the Indonesian Tsunami or the earthquake in Pakistan to see the failure of international AID. And its corruption. In the latter case funds to Pakistan for aid were diverted to Muslim terrorists.

The failure of this mode of business can be seen in Afghanistan.

A fact-packed report issued in June 2005 by Action Aid, a widely respected NGO headquartered in Johannesburg, makes sense of the workings of that world. The report studied development aid given by all countries globally and discovered that only a small part of it - maybe 40% - is real. The rest is "phantom" aid; that is, the money never actually shows up in recipient countries at all.

Some of it doesn't even exist except as an accounting item, as when countries count debt relief or the construction costs for a fancy new embassy in the aid column. A lot of it never leaves home. Paychecks for American "experts" under contract to USAID, for example, go directly from the agency to their US banks without ever passing through the to-be-reconstructed country. Much aid money, the report concludes, is thrown away on "overpriced and ineffective technical assistance", such as those very hot-shot American experts. And a big chunk of it is carefully "tied" to the donor nation, which means that the recipient is obliged to use the donated money to buy products from the donor country, even when - especially when - the same goods are available cheaper at home.

The US easily outstrips other nations at most of these scams, making it second only to France as the world's biggest purveyor of phantom aid. Fully 47% of US development aid is lavished on overpriced technical assistance. By comparison, only 4% of Sweden's aid budget and only 2% of Luxembourg's and Ireland's goes to such assistance. As for tying aid to the purchase of donor-made products, Sweden and Norway don't do it all; neither do Ireland and the United Kingdom. But 70% of US aid is contingent upon the recipient spending it on American stuff, especially US-made armaments. Considering all these practices, Action Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of US aid is phantom aid.

In 2001, Andrew Natsios, then head of USAID, cited foreign aid as "a key foreign-policy instrument" designed to help other countries "become better markets for US exports". To guarantee that mission, the State Department recently took over the formerly semi-autonomous aid agency. And since the aim of American aid is to make the world safe for American business, USAID now cuts in business from the start. It sends out requests for proposals to a short list of the usual suspects and awards contracts to those bidders currently in favor. (Election-time kickbacks influence the list of favorites.) Why it's not working in Afghanistan

As I wrote here Marx also agreed that trade was essential to the development of capitalism within the rotting structure of old fuedalist nations like India. But that was not all that was required. Any more than trade and aid and reconstruction will create a capitalist economy in Afhganistan.

These small stereotype forms of social organism (the village community .ed) have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia. Karl Marx

Industrial production was also required in fact Marx criticized the monopoly of British Imperialism and its failure to create a competitive mode of production, because it was not in the interests of the monopoly capitalists of his day, in this case the Dutch East India Company. Anymore than it is in the interests of the international monopolies today. Who use the state and its trade agreements to further their own profit and power. American corporations like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill for example, who are the new Ductch East Indian Companies of today. Who live off subsidies at home and preferntial trade deals abroad.

That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. Marx

The inherent logic of free trade and the idea of creating productive capitalism in Africa and other non industrialized developing countries is counter intuitive to those who would maintain their monopolies. In other words large Transnational corporations and banks are not interested in development perse, because it would lead to competition against their own interests.

Nearly all of Easterly’s conclusions serve to highlight the prescience of Bauer’s work.
While the book’s main targets appear to be Jeffrey Sachs, the United
Nations, and bilateral aid agencies, international financial institutions
(IFIs) such as the World Bank and the IMF that make loans to lowincome
countries also come in for strong criticism. Though these loans
are made conditional on countries carrying out agreed reforms, Easterly
questions how effective this “intrusive and complex conditionality” turns
out to be in practice. One reason why conditions are ineffective is that
“each loan is an attempt to engineer paradise rather than do piecemeal
reforms”
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good


An example of how Transnational corporations distort the market can be found in China's newly developing Fordist economy. Privatization of state enterprizes is a local phenomena while the state capitalist controled industries are becoming Private-Public Partnerships (P3's) with global multinational corporations.

Huang, Y. (2003) Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform
Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. finds that overseas Chinese capital has been an important means though which the non-state enterprises have overcome the distortions in China’s capital markets.
By contrast, the direct investment by foreign multinationals has gone mainly to SOEs.
Much of this capital has been misappropriated. The multinationals retain ownership of
nearly all technology. They also provide the marketing outlet for most of the industrial
exports from the non-SOEs, which have become processing centers of multinational firms.
For an enthralling account of how multinational investments to modernize state enterprises
have failed, see Crissold, T. (2004) Mr. China. London: Constable and Robinson.
The Economist (2004) “ Growth Spreads Inland.” November 18: 13.
(2005) “Special Report: China’s Champions.” January 8: 59–61.
Deepak Lal
A Proposal to Privatize Chinese Enterprises and End Financial Repression
Cato Journal
Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

Over and over again we see that the only alternative to Aid is not trade, free or fair because trade and aid are two faces of the same coin.

he U.S. approach to globalization has been ad hoc, relying on the bilateral influence of the U.S. Treasury and private financial firms, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's. European policymakers, in contrast, have sought to create new rules for the international system and empower international organizations, such as the EU, OECD, and IMF, to enforce them. French policymakers invented the doctrine of "managed globalization" as an alternative to U.S.-centric ad hoc globalization. A handful of French policymakers—all of them socialists, paradoxically—first liberalized France and then, upon taking leadership roles in international organizations, sought to organize and manage the process of globalization with new jurisdictions and rules.The vast majority of capital flows not from rich to poor countries, but rather among the rich countries of the EU and OECD. With a few exceptions, China, India, and Brazil among them, most developing countries have little access to financial globalization. How Europe Wrote the Rules of Global Finance


What is necassary for the development of capitalism is industrialization in particular Fordism. The creation of mass industrial production in the cities. This can be supplemented by localized craft and agricultural production. But in reality these can never replace the need to create jobs in the cities. Capitalization of industry is not on the agenda for the WTO, IMF or any other form of bilateral or multilateral trade agreements. And it certainly is not the focus of international aid.

The reality is that State Capitalism was never implemented successfully in the vast majority of the Third World despite the nationalist struggles against colonialism for the last four decades. Like Zimbabwe these regimes are pure and simple autarky. Despite their left wing rhetoric. Only where State Capitalism existed in countries like Viet Nam, China, Iran. etc. have the preconditions been met for the development of an industrialized economy. As I have said before it is because State Capitalism in all its forms (the Soviet model, the fascist model, the Roosevelt model and the Keyensian model) is the historic development of capitalism in the late 20th Century. It is required for the centralization of capital in the nation state.

As Marx said; That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power.

See:

Africa

Aid

Afghanistan

Marx

Capitalism

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Remember Katrina and Rita?

Call this the silver lining story.....Katrina, Rita Actually Helped Wetlands, Study Says Well of course they did, they flooded the flood plains.

In findings that could cause a stir among environmentalists, the LSU researchers ultimately conclude that hurricanes play an important role in maintaining the health of wetlands.

Engineers have tried to increase sediment deposits by diverting the flow of the Mississippi River through coastal wetlands. But the LSU researchers say the two hurricanes last summer brought in 227 times more sediment than the river diversions bring in a year.

"The diversions we have now introduce a trivial amount of sediment compared to hurricanes," Turner said.

Nature can always undo mans work, which is why as humans we realized early on that we were not the dominant force in the universe. In nature we have Bakunins dictum of creative destruction.

Hence the creation of religion and philosophy. Both founded on the need for human sacrifice, literally and figuratively, reflective of the power of nature to take our lives and thus its need for propitiation.

In the case of both religion and philosophy there is the creation of diety, a mask for nature. In religion diety is God. In philosophy diety is the State. God and State coexist in harmony as the authoritairan reflection of order in chaos. And God and the State must be propitiated imitating the destructive elements in nature.

Mammon, a diety of rapacious consumption and a prefigurative icon of capitalism , and his counterpart Moloch are served by human sacrifice. As illustrated by Flaubert in his novel about ancient Carthage; Salambo.

The modern day Moloch of the American Empire sacrificed its weak and poor, in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. And the failed reconstruction was not done for human need but for greed and profit in the name of Mammon. But what nature destroys she rebirths and recreates. Which capitalism cannot do despite its attempt to imitate nature through creative/destruction.

Howl

 What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
     their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
     nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
     tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
     stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
     weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
     loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
     judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
     crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
     sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
     Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
     ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
     blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
     are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
     bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
     tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
     Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
     streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
     tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
     smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
     whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
     whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
     whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
     Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
     Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
     Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
     I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
     who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
     Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
     Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
     skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
     industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
     houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
     ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
     Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
     us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
     gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
     boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
     gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
     spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
     Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
     the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
     wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
     They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
     carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
     street! 

See:

Katrina



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Prehistoric Climate Change

Dinosaurs' climate shifted too

Brassell says that findings of a changeable climate during the Cretaceous, a time period dominated by dinosaurs and noted for the spread of flowering plants, could influence the current climate change debate. "One of the key challenges for us is trying to predict climate change," Brassell said. "If there are big, inherent fluctuations in the system, as paleoclimate studies are showing, it could make determining Earth's climatic future even harder than it is. We're learning our climate, throughout time, has been a wild beast."

Before they became the Tar Sands......dinosaurs adapted as far as they could and then they were wiped out.

“What it shows is that the Canadian version of extinction of the ichthyosaur has more diversity that anyone thought. Even in their declining years there were a lot more species that we thought.”

Which is analogous to capitalism attempting to adapt to the climate change/global warming it is creating now. Now some naysayers will say this shows Climate Change/Global Warming is natural. That's true. But what nature takes thousands of years to do we have done in the last two centuries of rapacious capitalist industrialization.

Finally, the environmental manifestation of contradiction is clear, not only through the way capitalists treat common resources, again necessitating state intervention, but even through the despoilment of privately held resources in the quest for profit. In short, capitalism must commodify nature itself as an input into the production process. In order for this to happen, nature must be appropriated as dead and available for human benefit. This is an idea supported by mechanistic cosmology. It gained prominence, at least among the emerging bourgeoisie of northern Europe, during the sixteenth century and at the expense of the now dysfunctional organic cosmology that considered nature to be alive and capable of retribution if misused. Encyclopedia of World Environmental History

In particular the development of Fordism and its resulting energy source Oil in the Twentieth century had more impact than the earlier modes of capitalist industrialization using coal as its energy source.

The victory of the Entente in the World War was in the last analysis a victory of the superior war technology of America. For the first time oil triumphed over coal for the heating of the submarines and ships, of the aircraft, motors, tanks, etc., was accomplished with oil and by a technology which had undergone especially high development in America and opposite which the German technology was backward. After the ending of the World War, the most pressing imperative for America, if it did not want to lose again the hegemony won over world economic domains, was to bring the oil production of the world into its hands in order to thus monopolise the guarantees of its ascendancy.
From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution by Otto Ruhle 1924

This American mode of production is now the model for capitalist development around the globe and is the very source of globalization which is the source of Global Warming and Climate Change. The air pollution over Asia, the yellow cloud, is the result of mass Fordist industrialization and automobile exhaust.

As the historian J.R. McNeill writes in his book (a must read): Something New Under the Sun An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

Environmental change on earth is as old as the planet itself, about 4 billion years. Our genus, Homo, has altered earthly environments throughout our career, about 4 million years. But there has never been anything like the twentieth century.

The worldwide energy harvest increased about fivefold in the nineteenth century under the impact of steam and coal, but then by another sixteenfold in the twentieth century with oil, and (after 1950) natural gas, and, less importantly, nuclear power. No other century—no millennium—in human history can compare with the twentieth for its growth in energy use. We have probably deployed more energy since 1900 than in all of human history before 1900. My very rough calculation suggests that the world in the twentieth century used 10 times as much energy as in the thousand years before 1900 A.D. In the 100 centuries between the dawn of agriculture and 1900, people used only about two-thirds as much energy as in the twentieth century.


That is not to say there is no solution to our current crisis there is, It's potential is reflected in the current research into, despite its attempts to create a sustainable capitalism, Industrial Ecology. The real solution is its application through libertarian Social Ecology.


See:

Environment

Global Warming

Climate Change

Dinosaurs

Kyoto

Oil


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Happy Equinox

Triple Sunrise courtesy NASA

Its Spring Down Under and Fall here in the North....

See:
Fall Delayed

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