High time to
post this so now before anything more happens, as this is getting way too
long!
Axios, Kyle Rittenhouse found not guilty on all counts [The right is having a field day with this verdict with Rittenhouse already being elevated to hero status. The judge had leaned heavily in his direction, but the prosecution cannot ask for a mistrial since the jury has acquitted him. Surely, as in the case of OJ, the families of those killed and injured should seek civil damages.]
Why
some Ethiopian voters in Virginia swung for Youngkin — and how it may spell
trouble for Democrats elsewhere
Many
Ethiopian Americans heeded calls to vote for the GOP amid a coordinated effort
to express disapproval with how President Biden has handled growing conflict in
the East African nation.
BBC News, Cuba
cracks down on dissent ahead of protest march
Here are some other noteworthy headlines:
AP, Trump ally Bannon taken into custody on contempt charges
TIME, Honduras
Shows How Fake News Is Changing Latin American Elections Business
Insider, Biden bans Nicaragua's president, first lady from entering the
US over brutal crackdown CBS
News, Portugal, the little country that could … get vaccinated [98% in a total population of 10 million] Barrons, Trumps
Selling Prized Washington, D.C., Hotel for $375 Million [The hotel occupies a magnificent venerable building, but ever
since Mr. Trump has been out of office, it seems to have remained eerily empty.
While he was in the presidency, visitors trying to curry favor with him stayed in
its pricey rooms.] Before the Houston
Astroworld tragedy,
an operations plan for the festival included protocols for
"multiple casualty incidents," showing that such risks were anticipated.
Music festivals are deliberately engineered to fire up the crowd, so the excitement
can always get out of hand. Now, monitoring of such events must include triggers
of when to stop everything if necessary. Much of what
happens at a music festival is unexpected or fails to go according to plan. That’s
true in many circumstances. Did I ever expected my son Andrew and Cuban foster
son Alex to die so young? Absolutely not. I was devastated—I still am. With my
parents, yes, I was sad to lose them, but had anticipated that they would die before
me, just as their own parents had died before them. That seems to be the
natural order. Speaking of
natural order, President Biden just had his 79th birthday,
so he has lived slightly beyond the current average life expectancy for
American males. US life expectancy took a small unprecedented downturn in 2020
and that trend may have continued in 2021, though the year is not quite over
yet. Both Covid and drug overdoses accounted for the decline, with black males
showing the sharpest average drop.
Have you ever witnessed or experienced a lightning strike, a tornado, or a sudden shift in lava flow from a volcanic eruption, as I have? If I could have foreseen any of these events, I certainly would have stayed safely away. The only one that left me with lasting damage was the lightning strike, landing just next to my right ear, which didn’t kill me, but its thunderclap permanently affected my hearing. As for the other 2 surprise events mentioned, I was able to move out of the way in the nick of time.
Were the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2016 election victory of Donald Trump, and the worldwide rise of Covid predicted or predictable? No, they came as complete surprises, like so much in life. Even our own personal existence is due to the random encounter of an ovum and sperm. If our mother had simply turned over in bed, a different sperm might have resulted in producing someone else. It’s a miracle that you and I are even here today. There are devastating accidents as well as miracles, both unexpected.
Finding a silvery lobster in his trap was a big surprise for a Maine fisherman, so rare that he donated her to a science aquarium so visitors can admire her.
Methuselah was a biblical figure reputed to have lived almost 1000 years. While the pandemic has been a setback, great strides individually and collectively have been made in extending human life expectancy. Some individuals have even undergone experimental treatments in the effort to live longer, such as gene editing and blood injection from a young donor. But reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, despite being a strict germaphobe, still died at age 70.
Promoting human survival without end, however, seems like a fool’s errand. Nothing in the universe has lasted forever nor can we expect that anything that now exists will continue indefinitely. Has the universe always existed and will it go on ad infinitum or eventually dissolve into nothingness? Are time and space human constructs or have they always existed, independent of human cognition? Are there any other universes beyond our own? No one really knows because we are all limited by our human capacities. In any case, individual human beings, as well as the entire human species, can be expected to come to an eventual end. Even if a person could be engineered and carefully protected to keep on going after earthly death, nothing ever stands still and accidents eventually happen even under the most careful circumstances. The best we can do is to live as comfortably and meaningfully as possible for as long as possible during our finite lives.
So, while we may express shock and seek to assign blame when, say, a cinematographer is killed by a prop gun fired on a movie set, accidents do happen everywhere all the time. Efforts can and will always made to reduce them, but they will never be eliminated altogether. Without them, much human progress would not have been made either. In fact, many useful inventions grew out of accidents, including electricity, x-rays, rubber, penicillin, and insulin.
Quantum physics and chaos theory posit that unpredictable, unexpected events will always occur. So expecting that everything related to a person’s individual survival could possibly be anticipated and controlled ad infinitum into the future is wishful thinking. Probabilities are the best we can do and probabilities cannot guarantee a given individual’s eternal existence, quite to the contrary, most certainly not. Accidents will always happen. Will our universe even exist forever?
In the here and now, in the wake of the pandemic, ordinary people, especially after seeing friends and family members dying unexpectedly of Covid, are becoming more aware that their own lives are not endless. They are rethinking their commitment to work, quitting long-term, well-paying jobs in search of new endeavors, looking for something more meaningful to fill the time remaining. And some, as I’m finding in my Amnesty International volunteer work, are also leaving volunteer positions that may no longer be fulfilling.
After losing my older son and Cuban foster son so young, I came to appreciate my kids and grandkids more than ever. They know I would do anything for them. I connect with them often, even though some live far away, even in distant time zones. Thank goodness for phone and internet. My son in W. Va. and I talk by phone daily.
Still, the quixotic quest by some folks, especially futurists, for eternal life for themselves or for humankind in general will continue. Human life individually and collectively can be and has been extended, just not forever. Can anything last forever? Will something always exist? Forever is a really long time.
For now, the culture wars continue, my individual freedom to carry a gun and to walk out in public without a mask or without a Covid vaccination versus your freedom not to be shot or to contract Covid. Folks carrying firearms in both the Arbery and Rittenhouse cases actually shot and killed unarmed others, but have claimed self-defense, and are now being hailed and supported by rightwing advocates based not on the facts, but on ideology. Yet, firing what turned out to be a loaded prop gun by actor Alec Baldwin is being adjudged a culpable offense. Did young Rittenhouse, who traveled across state lines, had dabbled with hate groups (though that evidence was not permitted at trial), and shot 3 unarmed men, 2 fatally, actually fear for his life, as he said? Is this now a license to armed vigilantes to shoot to kill? The families of the victims (yes, I would call them that) are speaking out about the loved ones they’ve lost. They could still seek civil damages, though Rittenhouse’s rightwing defenders might help him out there. Both Rittenhouse and Arbery show how dangerous it is to allow so many folks to have ready access to firearms. (The individual “right to bear arms” certainly needs to be revisited.)
I’ve served on juries myself and know that if you or anyone else disagrees with the majority, there is strong pressure to go along. Though we may never know, the long delay before the Rittenhouse verdict may have been due to the majority who favored acquittal pressing hard on those holding out for charges.
And public schools have become a new battleground around “critical race theory,” which either is a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy or simply a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people. Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement, setting them against each other and arousing white parents against teachers. (Critical race theory actually is an academic concept more than 40 years old that posits that race is a social construct and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also embedded in legal systems and policies.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to be positioning himself now as the 2024 anti-vax presidential candidate.
Washington
Post, DeSantis brings back Florida lawmakers to crack down on
pandemic mandates
The Epoch Times, Florida Legislature Approves Bills Limiting COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates
Business Insider, Florida becomes first state to impose fines on businesses and hospitals that require the COVID-19 vaccine
Not only have schools and the pandemic become ideological battlegrounds, but so has migration. How many immigrants and refugees can be accommodated in the USA and Western Europe? Certainly more than right now, but there is a limit. To fully open our borders would create an unsustainable situation. Central American nations have de facto open borders but see little need to expel migrants, many just passing through.
Anti-immigrant walls are going up in Europe,
similar to the US-Mexico border wall. A wall may seem like a rather crude physical
barrier, but without such walls and without deportation, immigrants would keep
on coming and they still are. Migrants are fueled by problems in their home
countries and by often unrealistic expectations of life in a new country. Newcomers
to the US and Europe may enjoy more economic opportunity and their labor may be
welcome up to a point. However, developed countries cannot afford to allow
freely open borders lest they become overwhelmed with a continuous stream of
newcomers. How many is too many? Existing citizens who want to maintain the
current way of life, language, and ethnic composition of a country will resist
immigration. Push-pull factors are playing out all over the world.
[The following item was forwarded to me by a very rightwing anti-immigrant guy actually born in another country and once a refugee himself. He seems to have decided, “Now that I’ve made it here myself, let’s pull up the drawbridge.”]'I Will Send Them To Delaware': DeSantis Proposes Sending Undocumented Migrants To Biden Home State - YouTube
I once appeared as a witness at an immigration hearing on behalf of a woman and her son originally from Swaziland, reputed to Africa’s last monarchy; they became US citizens. Now the king has officially renamed their birth country eSwatini.
Ours is certainly not a consensus society, though some isolated societies fitting that description still exist in remote areas or in small island nations. However, having extremes of opinion and beliefs in a population, different languages and diverse cultural practices, as we have here in the US, has upsides as well as downsides. Having other factions and groups to compare or pit ourselves against may sharpen our own beliefs and sense of belonging and give meaning to life (on all sides), also enriching imaginations and opening us all up to new ways of thinking and behaving.
The fact that the Nov. 15 pre-announced “freedom
march” in Cuba did not actually take place was not evidence that no
one in Cuba actually seeks change, according a message received from a
dissident living there who prefers to remain anonymous. To the contrary, the
extreme measures the government undertook to suppress dissent, including police
cordons to keep people from leaving their homes, is evidence, he attests, of how
widespread antigovernment feeling actually is. And, it’s not
surprising that the Cuban government would accuse the US of fomenting unrest on
the island.
California Congresswomen Maxine Waters is 83 and has been in Congress forever. Years ago, when she was planning to visit Cuba to meet with Fidel, I wanted to give her the names of Cuban political prisoners, including at that time, Antúnez, then an Amnesty Int'l long-term Prisoner of Conscience. But she brushed me aside, saying something like, "I don't want to hear about any political prisoners." Then she went to Cuba and was shown shaking hands with Fidel. So, if I were living in her district, I would not vote for her. And I was grateful to the late Congressman John Lewis for being the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus willing to meet with Antúnez when he visited here.
And
while on the subject of gender minorities, more people are now identifying as “gender
neutral” or “gender queer,” though sex with minors is still unacceptable,
whatever the orientation. “Transgender” is a tricky term, since self-identified
incarcerated transgender “women” with penises have reportedly raped female inmates
and not so long ago, a naked individual with a penis scandalized a women’s sports
dressing room. Likewise, a transgender “man” (with breasts surgically removed) has
reportedly given birth.
LA Times, Polls:
Most Americans support the right to abortion, but many are also OK with 15-week
limit [That’s what I would have predicted, referring to the
limit in the Mississippi law now before the Supreme Court, decried by abortion
advocates. Unprotected sex
between a human male and a female of childbearing age always carries the risk
of pregnancy, but that may be forgotten or brushed aside in the heat of the moment.
Or does the woman simply tell herself she can always get an abortion if she
becomes pregnant?]
AP, Japan's
former princess leaves for US with commoner husband [She gave up her title to marry her husband and has traveled
with him to NYC, where he has a job with a law firm.]
The Guardian, ‘Terrifying
for American democracy’: is Trump planning for a 2024 coup?
NBC News, Officer was on leave for missing vaccine deadline. Then he tested positive and died.
Miami
Herald, Time is running out for foreigners to enter the free visa
lottery to win a U.S. green card
[Actually, time has already run out. So, try again next year. The 2021 deadline was November 9. As mentioned before, I once had 3 visa lottery winners from different countries living together in my house.]
Reuters, China says it will hold supporters of Taiwan's
independence criminally responsible for life
[Xi is moving full speed ahead against Taiwan, putting the US in a difficult position. Xi is celebrating 100 years of Communist Party rule in China and trying to cement his legacy with a 3rd term at the top.]
Dare I predict that boxing and, to a lesser extent, wrestling, both requiring inflicting purposeful physical harm on an opponent, will fade away? There may some diehard fans who still enjoy seeing guys beating each other up, but how much are they willing to pay for the privilege? There are probably enough videos of former matches available to entertain them. Boxing is a deliberately harmful sport. When working for an occupational therapy magazine, I once interviewed Muhammed Ali when he could no longer speak, depending on his wife to speak for him.
During the special challenges of the pandemic and just of life in general, we may find ourselves yearning for a tranquil time free of disputes, both macro and micro. I once met a young couple who wore matching t-shirts saying something like No more children until war is abolished. A world without war, a peaceful world, is a noble aspirational vision. Indeed, war has been getting less lethal, characterized now more by drone strikes than by Hiroshimas. But a world free of politically sanctioned violence is not likely to emerge in our lifetime, if ever. I suspect that couple went on anyway to have children themselves.
A honeymooning couple may feel they’ve finally achieved personal nirvana. Hopes for a frictionless future may also surge when setting foot into a new home or landing that dream job. But living in constant peace and smooth sailing forevermore without confronting any new challenges would soon become boring. We need to be engaged in purposeful activity, as I’ve said before. So if Trump is no longer messing up our lives, let’s be glad that Biden is not perfect either.
“Impossible” and “Beyond Meat” nuggets and burgers are just a couple of non-meat brands gaining popularity, declared to taste good and provide dietary protein. I'd like to try them. Fast food outlets are starting to offer their equivalents.
Does anyone know how to block spam phone calls that are pre-recorded and spewed out on multiple phone numbers all at once? If the calling number is unfamiliar to the phone owner, it’s best never to answer, as if it’s a legitimate call, a message can be left. Sometimes, I’ve picked up such a call inadvertently, then shouted into the phone, “Stop calling, damn it!” But, of course, that’s no deterrent, as the same recorded calls bombard phone lines automatically day-after-day, trying to get a rise out of some poor schmuck.
A shoutout now to a talented friend and neighbor who enjoys creating unique, gorgeous, and tasty baked goods (which I’ve sampled), but eats very few herself, instead arranging to drop them off at a local non-food enterprise where hungry workers gladly welcome them. It’s a win-win solution. I fully understand her creative urges whether or not she personally benefits.
My former blog honduraspeacecorps.blogspot.com was halted by the blog gods back in September 2019 without any warning, explanation, or recourse. So I started over with the current honduraspeacecorps2.blogspot.com, which makes reference to its predecessor, but alas, the predecessor cannot refer to this successor. My books are still imprinted with the old address. So why do I continue to blog? Perhaps for the same reasons that my friend hones her cooking skills, because we both enjoy doing it.
Whew! This meandering note has
gotten way too long, so time now to post it without further delay!
GERENCIA: Gestión del Talento Directivo
PSICOACHING: Automaestría
Aplicación Práctica
Diseño Construcción y Remodelación de Casas
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