It is time for me to take a break from writing in order to recharge my writing batteries so I will not be blogging for the next week to ten days and instead doing other things. I am hoping to spend much of that time completely absent from the internet to see what it feels like! Given the rapid speed of information flow in these days, being away for even 10 days may make me feel like Rip Van Winkle when I return.
See you all when I come back!
I couldn’t watch last night’s debate because CNBC allowed online access only to those who were cable TV subscribers. I did follow some live blogs that covered it and it seemed to be pretty chaotic, light on substance, and heavy on attacks on the media. What everyone seemed to be agreed upon is that the debate moderators were terrible.
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I found this clip from back in 2009 where the late comedian talked to Tavis Smiley about how the country really works. He points out that by limiting the number of actual choices that people have about the major things that affect their lives, they can be more easily controlled. And they are aided in this by the collusion of the media, the politicians, and the legal system.
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Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is reporting that another one of their hospitals has been bombed. This time it is in Yemen where Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition of states that is seeking to restore the government that was toppled by rebels. This follows the bombing of an MSF hospital in Afghanistan by the US and the bombing of a Syrian hospital by the Russians.
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I like to insert quotes in my writings because it spices things up. But I have learned from bitter experience that one needs to check carefully the sourcing of a quote because some of them, especially well-known ones, are fake in that the alleged authors never actually said them, though in blog posts that are rushed I sometimes forget to practice the required due diligence.
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Assaf Gavron, a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces, has written an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled Confessions of an Israeli traitor arguing that the harsh occupation by Israel of the West Bank and its brutal treatment of people there and in Gaza is destroying Israel. He said that things have changed a lot since the days when the IDF soldiers responded with merely tear gas and rubber bullets to angry teenage stone throwers. The use of violence against protestors is much harsher and more lethal now.
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I’m sure that many of us have taken part, usually as children, in a ‘backwards race’ where everyone is required to run backwards. You may at some point have wondered what it would look like if you filmed such a race and then ran the film of the race in reverse. Well, wonder no more because here it is.
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This is a Disney nature documentary in which Tina Fey narrates the story of a troop of macaque monkeys, focusing on just two of them, Maya and her infant Kip. It appears that macaque troops have a strict social hierarchy in which the people at the top get first crack at all the good food and shelter while those at the very bottom, like Maya, have to make do with what is left over. Not much different from many human societies, really.
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It looks like we are getting really close to the global eradication of polio. The last countries where it had not been eliminated were Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan but Nigeria has had no new cases of polio for the last year so the African continent seems to be now clear. The remaining cases are in a region of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border but even there only 51 cases have been reported this year and health officials are cautiously optimistic that they can get that area clear too. But until we are sure it is completely eradicated, people all over the world will have to continue to be vaccinated against it.
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We have seen that there seems to be no depth of extremism to which the Republican party cannot and will not sink. The other question is how vacuous the Republican presidential primary debates can get and that too seems to have no limits. With the next Republican debate coming up tomorrow, no doubt knives are being sharpened in all the campaign headquarters.
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