Yesterday, the Second Circuit — by a vote of 7-4 – agreed with the government and dismissed Arar’s case in its entirety. It held that even if the government violated Arar’s Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him. Why? Because “providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns” (p. 39). In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context — even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured — and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.
Mr. Medvedev made the comments on his video blog, on the occasion of a holiday devoted to the memory of victims of repression. He warned that revisionist historians risked glossing over the darker passages of the Soviet past, citing a poll that showed that 90 percent of young people could not name victims of the purges.
“Even now we can hear voices saying that these numerous deaths were justified by some supreme goals of the state,” Mr. Medvedev said. “Nothing can be valued above human life, and there is no excuse for repressions.”
Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) — CIT Group Inc.’s decision to seek court protection probably will keep money flowing to bondholders and 1 million customers of the 101-year-old commercial lender. Shareholders and taxpayers won’t be as fortunate.
CIT’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy may give bondholders new notes at 70 cents on the dollar plus new common stock, and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Peek said clients will be able to get funds. Common stock owners could be mostly wiped out, and the U.S. Treasury Department said it won’t recoup much, if any, of the $2.33 billion of taxpayer money that went into CIT, the largest firm to go bankrupt after getting a federal bailout.
“It doesn’t look too good for the government preferred or any preferred holders,” Brian Charles, a debt analyst at New York-based brokerage RW Pressprich & Co., said yesterday. “It’s unlikely common shareholders realize any value.”
On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.
But what’s even crazier is that the bet paid.
At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.
The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…
Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn’t help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “I would hope that you’re looking at this,” Dodd said. “This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors.”
Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. “I’ve seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000,” says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. “But they did nothing to stop this.”
The SEC’s halfhearted oversight didn’t go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers
In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
[...]
To piece together Goldman’s role in the subprime meltdown, McClatchy reviewed hundreds of documents, SEC filings, copies of secret investment circulars, lawsuits and interviewed numerous people familiar with the firm’s activities.
McClatchy’s inquiry found that Goldman Sachs:
Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they’d misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants’ incomes to justify making hefty loans.
Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.
Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.
Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.
The firm benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse, and when he organized a massive rescue of tottering global insurer American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman chief Blankfein. With the Federal Reserve Board’s blessing, AIG later used $12.9 billion in taxpayers’ dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman.
Toy said she concluded that the reviews were mostly “for appearances,” because the Wall Street firms planned to repackage “bogus” loans swiftly and sell them as bonds, passing any future liabilities to the buyers. The investment banks and mortgage lenders each seemed to be playing “hot potato,” trying to pass the risks “before they got burned,” she said.
“There was nobody involved in this who didn’t know what was going on, no matter what they say,” she said. “We all knew.”
[...]
John Talbott, a former Goldman investment banker and the author of a new book, “The 88 Biggest Lies on Wall Street,” said “it wasn’t a mistake” when illegal immigrants got home mortgages.
The lenders, he said, “just wanted somebody, anybody to sign a note” so they could sell it to Wall Street, where ratings agencies that were paid hefty fees by the investment banks bestowed triple-A grades or their equivalent on most subprime bonds.
“It’s not just unethical,” Talbott said of the chain of profiting subprime players extending from real estate appraisers to Wall Street. “It’s totally criminal.”
On the light side, we would rather believe an email from our sister-in-law that tells us that a mixture of honey and cinnamon will cure our arthritis, and so we will down the concoction, Just In Case, even though a quick Google search shows that there has been no such study at Copenhagen University or anywhere else, for that matter.
We want to believe that getting our kids fingerprinted at the local mall will somehow protect them from abduction, when the fact of the matter is that unless fingerprinting is required of all children at birth and is required for entry into school or treatment by a doctor or hospital, those fingerprints provide little more than dental records in the event that the unspeakable happens. The truth is is that the most common missing child scenarios involve either a runaway or an abduction by a family member. In this case, fingerprinting might serve some purpose, but only if it is required across the country. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon, do you?
We embrace the power of “postive thinking” which lays all the blame for our failure to find financial success or a cure for our illness at our own feet rather than looking for a solution to the inequities of our system, be they financial or medical.
As is always the case in tragic and entirely avoidable episodes such as Vietnam, Afghanistan — and, I emphasize, Iraq, and very possibly Iran next — it is “[n]ot ignorance, but refusal to credit the evidence…” that leads to disaster. The evidence is always available to those who will look, but policy which has already been chosen will override that evidence as required for States to achieve their aims.
We’ve passed all kinds of laws criminalizing drug use, sure that these will lessen our drug uses rates, yet drug use appears to be holding steady across all age groups.
Table 1. Trends in the percentage of persons reporting any illicit drug use: 1979 to 2001
Age of respondent and recency of drug use
1979
1985
1988
1990
1993
1996
1998
D
A
T
AB
R
E
A
K
1999
2000
2001
12–17
Ever
31.8%
27.4%
22.8%
20.9%
16.4%
22.1%
21.3%
27.6%
26.9%
28.4%
Past Year
24.3
20.7
14.9
14.1
11.9
16.7
16.4
19.8
18.6
20.8
Past 30 days
16.3
13.2
8.1
7.1
5.7
9.0
9.9
9.8
9.7
10.8
18–25
Ever
69.0%
62.9%
58.1%
54.9%
50.2%
48.0%
48.1%
52.6%
51.2%
55.6%
Past year
45.5
37.4
29.1
26.1
24.2
26.8
27.4
29.1
27.9
31.9
Past 30 days
38.0
25.3
17.9
15.0
13.6
15.6
16.1
16.4
15.9
18.8
26–34
Ever
49.0%
59.5%
61.2%
59.8%
58.2%
53.1%
50.6%
53.2%
50.9%
53.3%
Past year
23.0
26.2
19.1
18.4
14.6
14.6
12.7
13.5
13.4
16.1
Past 30 days
20.8
23.1
14.7
10.9
9.5
8.4
7.0
6.8
7.8
8.8
35 and older
Ever
11.8%
18.1%
20.0%
22.5%
26.1%
29.0%
31.8%
35.7%
35.5%
38.4%
Past year
3.9
5.5
5.1
5.2
5.5
5.3
5.5
5.9
5.5
6.3
Past 30 days
2.8
3.9
2.3
3.1
3.0
2.9
3.3
3.4
3.3
3.5
All (ages 12 and other)
Ever
31.3%
34.4%
34.0%
34.2%
34.2%
34.8%
35.8%
39.7%
38.9%
41.7%
Past year
17.5
16.3
12.4
11.7
10.3
10.8
10.6
11.5
11.0
12.6
Past 30 days
14.1
12.1
7.7
6.7
5.9
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.3
7.1
Note: Any illicit drug use includes use of marijuana, cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants, heroin, or nonmedical use of sedatives, tranquilizers, stimulants, or analgesics. Prior to 1979, data were not totaled for overall drug use and instead were published by specific drug type only.Data Break: Changes made to the design and execution of NHSDA in 1999 make the 1999, 2000, and 2001 data incomparable to previous years. However, the 1999, 2000, and 2001 data are comparable to each other.Source: National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
Instead of treating drug abuse (not recreational use) as the public health issue that it is, all drug use is criminalized, often at a higher degree than any other criminal offense. Our prisons are bursting with drug offenders. We don’t let convicted drug users live in government housing. We deny them financial aid for college, though convicted murderers are not subject to the same. We pass draconian laws that makes it legal for an employer to make us pee in a cup as a condition of hire or continuing employ, whether there is any evidence of drug use at all. And yet, how’s that war on drugs going?
As a convicted sex offender, Sowell was required to report regularly to the sheriff’s office, which said he had complied.
And yet, in the four years since he has been paroled, he allegedly murdered six, and raped or assaulted an unknown number of other women. Exactly how effective are these “sex offender” registries? On the one hand, do they continue to punish someone who has “served their time” and will never offend again, while at the same time giving the rest us a false sense of security? Is this the equivalent of turning over your shampoo and taking off your shoes at the airport? (more…)
Aside from the usual newsfeeds and promotional emails from Macy’s, Coldwater Creek, Target, Borders, and Pettags.com, my inbox is full of back and forth emails between the committee members for next weekend’s 11th Northern Nevada Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. It’s definitely crunch time, and the emails are flying fast and furious, but I can breathe a little today as I am caught up on all the paper entries we’ve received.
For those of you in the area who wish to participate, online registration is open until midnight on Monday, and In Person registration begins on Thursday, October 1st at the Macy’s Furniture Store at 6011 S. Virginia. Hours: Th/Fri: 12:00-7:00 pm, Sat: 10:00 am – 3:00 pm. You can also register on Race Day at the quad at UNR, from 7:00-9:00 am. Not in the area but still want to help? Here’s a link to my donation page, if you can find a couple of extra dollars.
Gardeners in northern Nevada have learned to work with a very short growing season, and more often than not, false starts on spring. So every year we wait with bated breath after our fruit trees blossom to see whether our blooms will be wiped out by a killing frost, or if it will stay warm enough for our trees to produce fruit. This year was one of those years and northern Nevadans are chock full of all kinds of backyard fruit. Maven mentions in her Friday Fish Wrap that she’s got a ton of wonderful nectarines but that her tomatoes don’t seem to want to ripen.
Nectarines are my all-time favorite summer fruit and I was so excited when our tree started growing bunches of them. I kept my eye on them, waiting for them to grow and ripen, my mouth watering in anticipation, but I soon noticed that they did not appear be growing very well. For weeks they just seemed to stay small and hard, but were starting to turn a ripened color. Something was wrong! So I mentioned it to Sweetie and after checking it out, it turns out that the fruit trees were not getting watered by our drip, and though he fixed it and the trees began to get their fair share of H2O, it was too little too late and our nectarines never really got much bigger and though they did ripen were never really edible.
Our Granny Smith apples, on the other hand…bumper crop. I’ve finally turned into one of those people that has to take take a bag of home grown produce to work in order to get rid share with her less blessed co-workers. Fortunately, it’s a big company and there were enough hungry souls. And I need to do it again. Seriously.
It's tiny!
The heart monitor. I’m seven days in to my 21 day monitoring. It’s not so bad. I’ve got to keep the cell phone in the charger as much as I can, replace the batteries in the monitor every couple of days and replace the electrode patches daily, but all-in-all, it’s not too bothersome. Coolness: the monitor itself has a little button on the back that fits the electrode patch, so that I can add a fifth one and just attach it to my chest. For work days, this is marvelous because a loose shirt hides the monitor and wires. Nice not to have a lanyard hanging around my neck. Here’s what the company’s press release says about the model I’m wearing.
With up to 21-days of real-time ECG monitoring and the provision of ST deviation analysis, the ACT III provides more sensitive and specific data for initial or early detection of arrhythmia in patients that have limited or atypical symptoms.
This cell phone automatically sends the heart data back to data central, and though I can send a manual incident when I'm noticing symptoms, I don't have to.
The device has 6 hours of memory in the sensor and a flash memory of up to 21 days of data on the ACT Cell phone monitor. This ensures that no valuable data is lost if a patient is disconnected from the cellular phone.
That “limited or atypical” would be me. My symptoms are so weird, they nearly defy explanation. The 24-hour Holter monitor picked up a few weirdnesses, but not enough for my cardiologist to really get the full picture. I do have an arrhythmia – sometimes my heart beats fast, sometimes skip beats, but my doctor isn’t sure if the misfire is coming from the bottom of my heart or the top. One is okay, the other, not so much. My resting heart rate is already slow (about 45 bpm) and I’m not an elite athlete. When I went for my echocardiogram, the tech told me I went as low as 35 bpm. I’m thinking that’s not so good.
In the real world shit keeps happening.
Bill Sparkman (AP Photo/The Times-Tribune) - Photo: Bill Sparkman with 7th grade student, Jessie Roberts during a lesson about sound waves in 2008.
I read about the census worker who got lynched in Kentucky and I have no words. Surely, Michelle Bachmann (crazy Congresswoman from Minnesota) has blood on her hands. I mean, yeah, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are paid to be ignorant, but she’s a fucking congresswoman fer cryin’ out loud.
Here’s a plan. Let’s let all those rightwing reactionaries NOT fill out their census forms. Do they have any idea of the impact that will have on their allocation of federal funds for roads, schools, health and emergency services, not to mention representation in D.C. as well as their state legislature? They want to be anonymous? Let ‘em. Jeebus on a triscuit, their ignorance is stunning.
Furthermore, where the hell were all these people while the government has been secretly listening to our phone conversations, monitoring our library use, internet, email? IN SECRET – no warrants, no letters, no nothing. But these idjits are stoking fear about a process that is (A) mandated by the U.S. Constitution, (B) has been going on since the country was founded, and (C) is probably one of the most transparent things our goverment does.
Mission Statement of the U.S. Census Bureau:
The Census Bureau serves as the leading source of quality data about the nation’s people and economy. We honor privacy, protect confidentiality, share our expertise globally, and conduct our work openly. We are guided on this mission by our strong and capable workforce, our readiness to innovate, and our abiding commitment to our customers.
And Michelle Bachmann’s query as to why the questionnaire doesn’t ask if the person filling it out is a citizen or not is ridiculous. Either she has no clue what a census is, or she is being disingenous. Me thinks the former. Every time that woman opens her mouth I wonder about her I.Q. The census is a count of how many bodies live in a particular area and the demographics about those bodies. All those bodies use public roads, schools, emergency services, etc. Furthermore, there are many, many people who are in this country legally, but are not citizens. My son-in-law is one of them. But to hear Beck and Bachmann speak, he’s a dangerous “illegal.” Fuck Them. He loves his wife (my beautiful girl), is a hard worker, has a real job and actually makes a contribution to society. Which is more than I can say for Bachmann and Beck. (/rant)
And finally, for something completely different, my favorite scene from my favorite movie. If you haven’t seen this little gem, rent it. Today.
The break in the case began Tuesday when a police officer at University of California, Berkeley, became suspicious.
Authorities said the officer spotted Garrido with two children on campus, where Garrido apparently had gone to distribute religious-themed literature, a frequent hobby of his.
Upon questioning, she discovered Garrido was a parolee and contacted his parole agent in Concord. That agent summoned Garrido to his office on Wednesday, where he arrived in the company of his wife, two girls and a woman identified as “Allissa.”
After some questioning, the agent became concerned.
“The parole agent had never seen these individuals, Allissa and the two young children, during his visits to the house and thought that the females in Garrido’s company were suspicious and contacted the Concord Police Department,” Kollar said.
When police arrived, the women were separated from Garrido. He eventually confessed to having kidnapped Dugard, police said, and in separate questioning “Allissa” confirmed that she was, in fact, the girl kidnapped from Meyers in 1991.
Why did he bring them with him, if he didn’t want to get caught? I’m sure there is much more to this story, but man, this is bizarre.
One has to wonder. With all the spying our various law enforcement agencies are wasting on us never-been-arrested-or-even-suspected-of-anything people, how the hell does this happen?
Garrido’s luck held in July of last year, when a multiagency task force in Contra Costa County searched his home as part of a sexual offender compliance check, officials said. He had a string of offenses dating back to 1971 and was a registered sex offender on parole in California.
Authorities found only evidence that Garrido, 58, his wife, Nancy, 55, and his mother were living in the home on Walnut Avenue, said Sgt. Diane Aguinaga of the Antioch police.
The team looked in the back, but saw only a screened-in porch and a back fence, she said.
Behind that fence, authorities now believe, was a hidden backyard with sheds and outbuildings. There, Garrido was housing Dugard and two daughters she allegedly had by him, officials said.
Phillip Craig Garrido had several contacts with the law in recent years, but until this week he kept authorities from finding the backyard compound near Antioch where he allegedly held Jaycee Lee Dugard captive.
Maybe they should’ve tried Google Maps, especially after neighbors had complained about the tents and sheds in his backyard.
It’s been a crazy few days. Busy-ness with driving down to SoCal to visit my father, family drama, work, meetings, and I’m just fried. So much happening in the world and I’ve barely caught up. Some news has slipped in though.
Health Care Reform™ appears to be DOA and the only ones who will benefit are the usual suspects.
Bill Clintonwent into Korea and got the journalists out, but it appears that he’s still basically the red-headed step child on both the right and the left.
A psycho went into a gym with a gun and took the lives of three women. And the media yawns, except to drool over the psycho’s sex life. The objects of his hatred are barely mentioned unless it’s to mention how those objects, or objects like them, rejected the poor guy.
I didn’t hear about the Pennsylvania misogyny massacre until late last night, when I was too tired to write about it. I figured I’d post on it today, by which time I expected there would be more articles about the story on the Google News front page and perhaps some political commentary on Memeorandum.
But there’s nothing. Nothing.
It’s no longer on Google’s front page; in fact, there’s nothing about it even on Google’s U.S. News page. And on Memeorandum? Zilch.
I know Memeorandum aggregates political news, but we’ve just finished watching the political media spend two weeks on the Gates arrest. Apparently racial profiling is political, but hate crimes against women are just how things are. Birds sing, the grass grows, misogynist freakazoids gun down women in public: welcome to life on planet Earth.
[...]
So:
White men beating up a black guy while calling him racist names: hate crime.
White man murdering three random women because of his burning hatred of females: not a hate crime.
The obvious reason for this disparity is that America takes racism seriously (or at least pretends to), but considers sexism either a myth or a joke or both. But there’s a deeper reason at work: people understand racism as the result of historical processes and social conditioning, which it is. Sexism, on the other hand, along with its gun-toting twin, misogyny, is vaguely thought to be something natural and universal. But that’s bullshit: decades of research have shown that patriarchy is not universal, and that attitudes towards women are profoundly linked to how much power women have in a given society.
Oh heck, give the press a break. They are probably still finishing up their articles about the Beer Summit.
In Sodini’s case he left a web page, since taken down by the authorities, that clearly outlined his grievances, his targets, and even the place and method of attack. Sodoni hated women—all women—for a life time of perceived slights and rejections.
What, pray tell, is the difference between misogyny, hatred for liberals, anti-Semitism, anti-abortion fanaticism, homophobia, racism, or any of the other group based hatreds and their attendant ideologies that motivate carnage in America?
While I agree with Patrick when he calls this a hate crime, he misses the point with his attempt to lay misogyny solely at the feet of right wing bloviators. As Violet and others have shown, misogyny is everywhere.
Senate Democrats are scrambling to defeat a Republican-backed provision that would allow gun owners to carry their weapons across state lines, overriding the stricter laws of many jurisdictions and giving preference to states with looser standards.
It’s not the gun owners with Concealed Carry permits that we have to worry about. And I say this as one who has had a gun waved in her face and held to her ribs and can still remember the terror I felt 31 years ago.
But here’s where the hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
On the one hand, we’ve got liberal Democrats like Charles Schumer, invoking “states rights” claiming that each state has a right to determine who should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon. Conceal Carry laws vary greatly by state, with a patchwork of state-to-state reciprocity agreements. This amendment would serve to end that patchwork and end the confusion for law-abiding gun owners – the ones not engaged in stick-ups and drive bys – to travel from state to state with their secured weapon.
On the other hand, the very same Republicans and conservative Democrats who are sure to vote for this law had no problem voting for the Defense of Marriage Act that allowed any state to not recognize the legal marriage of a gay couple. These are the same Republicans and conservative Democrats who have no problem with each state crafting its own abortion laws and who voted for the “partial birth abortion” ban, declaring themselves the arbiters of private medical decisions when it came to a woman’s reproductive health and the sanctity of the doctor/patient privilege.
Privacy is privacy, and I’ll keep my nose out of your gun cabinet if you keep yours out from between my legs. Deal?
Sauce for the goose and all. We are either all citizens of the UNITED STATES of America, or we are just a hodge-podge of individual fiefdoms wherein civil rights can be denied merely by crossing the state line.
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That about sums everything up: War Crimes are heinous and intolerable acts that all decent people reject; “anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated”; and War Criminals must not be allowed in any positions of authority . . . . except when the War Crimes in question are committed by Americans, in which case all investigations and accountability must be blocked and those who defended and even approved them are perfectly welcomed in our highest positions of authority (including, ironically, overseeing our war in Afghanistan). See also, quite relatedly: this post from earlier today on how we continue to shield from any accountability the clear and serious crimes committed by Bush officials in how they spied on Americans. Let’s just repeat the sermon from the anonymous Obama official in demanding an investigation into crimes by this Afghan warlord: “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.“ It doesn’t appear that they know what the word “anyone” means.
Former Democratic Party activist. I'm a liberal with a capital L, but I'm no longer buying what the Democratic Party is selling. I live on 5 acres of sand and sagebrush in northern Nevada with the Love Of My Life, three cats and three dogs.
Nectarines are my all-time favorite summer fruit and I was so excited when our tree started growing bunches of them. I kept my eye on them, waiting for them to grow and ripen, my mouth watering in anticipation, but I soon noticed that they did not appear be growing very well. For weeks they just seemed to stay small and hard, but were starting to turn a ripened color. Something was wrong! So I mentioned it to Sweetie and after checking it out, it turns out that the fruit trees were not getting watered by our drip, and though he fixed it and the trees began to get their fair share of H2O, it was too little too late and our nectarines never
really got much bigger and though they did ripen were never really edible. 
