Boiling Frogs.

[A]

Eastern/Southern European readers know it's summer: the temperature there is going above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit, for American readers).

"Wine growers in Italy have started gathering the grape harvest weeks earlier than usual due to the extreme heat.

Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, wrote in La Stampa newspaper that the grape harvest had never started before August 15 in living memory.

" 'The health of the grapes is severely tested by this weather,' Mr Petrini wrote, adding that growers ran the risk of finding the fruit 'cooked by the sun and the burning heat'."

That's the bad news. Capitalism over there is really hot, in a bad way.

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Now, the good news.

(source)

Visitors to Sydney may be surprised to discover that here we are supposed to be in mid winter: last July broke all records and last Sunday (July 30) the daytime temperature reached 26 degrees Celsius (78.8 Fahrenheit), breaking the previous record for July of 25.9 Celsius (78.62 Fahrenheit).

Sounds rather nice, doesn't it?

Sure it does, except that that's 11 degrees Celsius/19.8 Fahrenheit above the winter average (15 Celsius, 59 Fahrenheit) and the same average temperature for January (in the very middle of our summer).

On second thoughts, that may not sound so good.

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Somehow I'm reminded of the parable of the frog in the pot. Little by little, capitalism is boiling us to death.

Image Credits:
[A] "Frog and saucepan". Date 2 May 2010. Author: James Lee. File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. My usage of the file does not in any way suggests that the author endorses me or the usage I make of the file. Source: Wikimedia.