Assange, Refugee Family, Remembering 9/11, Fires, Prediction, Abortion “Rights,” Racial and Age Discrimination, Robots

 

I am no great fan of Julian Assange, whom I regard as a self-promoter and publicity hound who damaged our country by revealing too much in the name of freedom of information, though many folks considering themselves progressive do support him. Too much information released into the public sphere in the internet age can have unintended and harmful consequences. Furthermore, I have some sympathy for Assange’s Swedish rape accuser, who has worked quietly on behalf of Cuban dissidents. Assange apparently wore out his welcome at the Ecuadorian embassy. So, you won’t see me out carrying a sign on behalf of Julian Assange or supporting him on-line.

It’s gratifying that my local Washington, DC, Amnesty Int’l group, 211, is helping a local Afghan refugee family adapt to their new life in our area. The father has passed the driver’s test, but now needs a car. I once gave a car I had to a Vietnamese refugee family. So maybe someone out there has a car to donate.

Most people have a soft spot for children, but, as observed before, children do grow up and may become sterling citizens of their nation and the world, but a few have become Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Lizzie Borden, also Donald Trump.

On 9/11, I happened to be at Peace Corps headquarters in Tegucigalpa in a common area, sitting on a couch with fellow volunteers, watching the morning news on TV, something not available to us in our villages. Like many Americans, we were at first puzzled at seeing a plane crashing into one of the twin towers on live TV, then stunned at seeing another plane come crashing in. Soon, our Peace Corps director, over an intercom, ordered us to remain in the capital until further notice, as reported in my Honduras book (top right). If I’d been in my village at the time, it might have taken time for the news to reach me. When I returned later to Washington, DC, on a visit, I was shocked to see the Pentagon, symbol of American military strength, partially demolished.

After earning a BA and an MA from UC, Berkeley, I lived with my late ex-husband in Sacramento, so am familiar with California fires. A friend’s house in the Oakland hills was totally incinerated in a wide-ranging fire. But western fires this year and last are of an unprecedented range, frequency, and duration and the same has happened in Australia. Meanwhile, storms and hurricanes have become more deadly. Arresting climate change has become an emergency and jettisoning fossil fuels is part of that effort.

Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency, bolstered with taped conversations, just confirms what many of us already knew. We knew Donald Trump was a serial liar, so we paid no attention to his assurances about the virus. But many of his followers who attended his rallies, often without masks, as he himself has modeled and urged, have gotten sick and some, like the hapless Herman Cain, who attended Trump’s Oklahoma rally, have lost their lives. So did Woodward have an obligation to reveal Trump’s prevarications earlier?  

Michael Cohen, former Trump “fixer,” is predicting that if The Donald loses in Nov. he will resign and have Pence pardon him. Actually, that might not be such a bad outcome, giving some satisfaction to both sides. At least, Trump would be gone from public office, though doubtless continuing to aggravate from the sidelines.

As pandemic spreads, the Cuban government moves to silence independent journalists

    September 11, 2020,

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pandemic-spreads-cuban-government-moves-110000528.html

"Havana Syndrome" symptoms identified in Canadian tourist who visited Cuba

https://news.yahoo.com/havana-syndrome-symptoms-identified-in-canadian-tourist-to-cuba-204030206.html

It is well and good to plan ahead and to pursue rational strategies, but we all know that even the best-laid plans can go astray. And we also know, as per chaos theory, that the flap of a butterfly’s wing can trigger a tsunami across the sea. We owe our own personal existence to the chance meeting of a given sperm and ovum. And Donald Trump owes his election victory not to his “very stable genius,” but to quirks in the Electoral College system established by the Founding Fathers centuries ago.

We also now know that the slaughter of a hapless wild animal, perhaps a pangolin, in the Hunan, China, “wet market,” most likely led to the pandemic that has engulfed the entire globe, killed almost 200,000 Americans, and sickened millions more, including my own daughter, and still the virus surge continues. Last time, I inadvertently omitted an email from my daughter living in Honolulu, whose husband is also ill. She finds phone conversations exhausting. “Today will be 1 week & neither of us is feeling any better. These body aches are crippling. It’s been exhausting honestly. We got an oxygen finger reader and our breathing is still good, but I’m weak, dizzy, no sense of taste and no energy. It’s actually pretty awful.”

Here we are together in Hawaii, some years ago, in happier times.

Mr. Trump hs urged voting twice, both by mail and in person, and some folks are now in trouble for actually following his advice. While Donald Trump seems to be unable to speak the truth, two public servants associated with his administration do seem trustworthy, Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Chair, and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the Centers for Disease Control. Though they parse their words carefully to avoid directly contradicting Trump in public, they do tell it like it is and bravo for that. (Now Woodward’s book incudes some less-than-flattering behind the scene’s remarks by Fauci about Mr. Trump.)

Kamala Harris is said to be militantly “pro-abortion rights.” Though advocates stress “rights,” those exercising those rights are actually obtaining abortions, not opting the right to continue their pregnancies, so the net effect is “pro-abortion,” a term avoided by advocates. So far, Harris has not touched on that contentious issue during her campaigning, but it’s likely to be brought up in her debate with Mike Pence.  Readers of this blog are already aware that I’m a militant anti-Trumper, though uneasy about abortion, especially after the first trimester. Whatever he may say publicly, I doubt that Joe Biden is strongly in favor of abortion or “abortion rights.” Other Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mother of four, probably also have personal misgivings. But this is not the time for Democrats to bring up such a potentially divisive subject. Still, if Biden wins and Harris later expresses her own presidential ambitions, the question will arise again. And she has no children herself.  Unlike gay marriage, which involves consenting adults and has become fairly widely accepted, abortion still remains controversial, even these many years after Roe.    

That a professor at George Washington University here in DC could pass herself off as African American when she had no such heritage is not so surprising. Hers is not the only case. This can happen in this country because being African American or “black” seems based on the “one-drop” rule of the old South. Someone can be “passing” and considered secretly “black” if there is any African heritage in the family tree. That seems to eclipse all their “white” heritage, an absurd idea showing how arbitrary racial categories are. “Race” is culturally defined and variable. In Africa, Barack Obama might not be considered “black.” Can Elizabeth Warren rightfully claim Native American heritage? In my own family, where various so-called ethnicities do come together, we don’t recognize any of them.

Yet, is unfair stereotyping to suspect that most of the many auto breakins in my Capitol Hill neighborhood, a gentrified area abutting a low income one, are committed, not by senior women like myself, but by young black males? A little old white lady might slip cyanide into her abusive husband’s tea, but is not likely to break into a car. Stereotyping can be unfair, but we use it all the time.

Regarding my Capitol Hill neighborhood, I've noticed many changes in more than half a century. Property values and taxes have risen considerably, driving out the mostly African American residents who once prevailed. The last black family around the corner sold out about 2 years ago. My kids attended Brent, the local public school, when they wree a distinct minority. Now Brent is a school favored by white parents.

While on the subject of diversity, let’s promote more age diversity, specifically by including more folks of a certain age in employment, not focusing on their chronological age, provided they want to work and can do the job (fulfilling criteria applied to potential employees of any age)? I am speaking here personally after the pandemic risk has waned. I do consider myself a victim of age discrimination after a complaint made by a single therapist to whom I had been assigned last year at my on-call Spanish interpretation job, where I’d worked successfully for 16 years. While paired with this particular therapist as an interpreter, she became concerned about my safety at a private home whose (legally required) railing for steep exit stars had been broken off. (Another case of chaos theory in action.) She made up a bogus story about “confidential” client complaints, ending all my work for that agency. Another therapist with whom I had been working there successfully at the same time inquired about my absence and was never given an answer. But I did not pursue the matter immediately because I was an independent contractor with uncertain rights and also was preparing for my annual Honduras mission. After that, the pandemic hit. The pandemic has halted all or most in-home therapy, including that performed by the therapist who had cut my career short, poetic justice, but hardly the justice I’d have preferred. I can always switch to on-line translation or telephonic interpretation now during the pandemic, especially to avoid risky public transportation, though in-person interpretation on-site is more satisfying and interesting. I do hope to return to it someday, but not at the agency where a single complaint by a single therapist concerned about a missing stair rail--not about my interpretation skills—derailed my career there. Translation and interpretation were a part-time career I’d first undertaken in my 60’s after returning from Peace Corps, allowing me flexibility to spend time with my late mother and to return annually to Honduras, my former Peace Corps country, to volunteer with medical brigades.

I’ve rarely met another interpreter born into an English-speaking family. Most US-based interpreters of any language, in my experience, are native speakers of that language, with English as their second language, with varying levels of fluency in English. That includes Spanish interpreters as well. I’ve been told that I have no gringo accent in Spanish, so interpretation agencies should be glad to have me on board, a rare American native fluent in both languages.  

More people are now interacting, not so much directly with other humans, but on-line. Going further are robot companions for older people living alone in Japan or those in nursing home here in the US, where, apparently, interacting with robots has shown beneficial effects. There are also life-size sex dolls for lonely single men. All this may save money and avoid messy human aggravations, but surely something is being lost.