Trying now to post more often with shorter postings, as quirks keep popping up in the posts, which never come out as intended. Interference with my original design distracts from what I’m trying to say. Let’s see if I can become less wordy, though too late now to change to a venue that might be more user friendly.
My May 11 request, sent via the internet, for a hearing by the People’s Council on my threatened gas cutoff stemming from a billing disagreement had received no response. So today I called the council and a live person answered! Will keep you posted.
Madison Cawthorn, who was way out of his depth in Congress, won’t be coming back. He was too much even for North Carolinians, and is now finding his taunts against Liz Cheney being used against him: “hey hey, goodbye.”
The Buffalo shooter is rarely named to deny him that notoriety. Of course, he live-streamed his rampage, ever mindful of publicity. He had apparently shown disturbing behavior before, though perhaps that’s true of other young men his age, so a sustained intervention may not be undertaken. It’s always a judgement call. There are probably just too many troubling cases to try to tackle them all and, even so, there may be no good way to predict and stop most future violence. How does a legal system assess intent and what can actually be done about it before the fact? We can’t lock up all young men who might have fantasies of committing violence.
Reducing firearms access for everyone, not just volatile young men, would go along way toward reducing gun fatalities in the US, bringing them more in line with the relatively few happening in other developed countries. Gun manufacturing and gun sales have been rising steadily here since 2000. We already have an established gun culture and too many firearms already in circulation, so it’s hard to know just where to begin. And does the “right to bear arms” really include assault rifles for civilians? Gun buybacks should certainly continue, as fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths. But the vision of a heroic armed bystander saving the day is largely a myth, rarely being fortuitously on the scene when a massacre breaks out. Sometimes an armed homeowner kills an intruder during an apparent home break-in, though such a shooting can also end up targeting a family member who shows up unexpectedly.
Guys like the Buffalo shooter are often super-secretive about their plans and resistant to any interventions before the fact. Did this shooter’s parents ever anticipate a problem? Or did they try to overlook it? Or maybe they just didn’t know what to do or were afraid of their son themselves. It’s really scary for parents to raise their little boy and suddenly have him turn into a monster. How does that happen? What can parents do to foresee or prevent something like that? Since their son had shown concerning behavior a year before that led to an intervention, maybe they thought that had been sufficient and that any threat had been averted. He apparently had been quietly lying low ever since, carefully hiding signs of preparations for his vengeful plot from his parents.
NBC News, Fox
News’ Tucker Carlson under fresh scrutiny after Buffalo mass shooting Carlson, outspoken purveyor of “white replacement theory,” has
not mentioned it for a few days now except to say it’s an idea coming from the “left.”
LA Times, Letters to the Editor: There are 400 million guns in America. What did we expect? More guns here now than people.
Reuters, Prosecutor won't rule
out death penalty for California church shooter
While Americans were distracted by the Buffalo massacre, another shooting occurred in Laguna Woods, California, where the suspect was subdued after killing one person and wounding 5 others. The shooter and his victims all shared Chinese ethnicity. The shooter, a US citizen, had grown up in Taiwan, a nation against which he held a bitter grudge, while most of his victims also apparently had Taiwanese connections. Again, as with the Buffalo shooting, someone with a grudge can easily acquire firearms.
The Hill, Manchin pushes for his
gun reform bill in wake of Buffalo mass shooting
W. Va. Senator Joe Manchin has again brought up the
bipartisan legislation that he and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) had first proposed about
a decade ago,
just months
after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, mandating background
checks for all commercial gun sales. How many mass shootings have occurred
since?
In North Korea, Kim is blaming government
officials for Covid’s spread, so they may face discipline or worse. Heads may
roll and, in North Korea, that’s not just a figure of speech. Meanwhile, Kim is
distracting the outside world with weapons and missile displays.
Wall St. Journal, COVID
cases are surging in
the Northeast, the Midwest, Florida, and California.
Covid is also back in the US or just never went away,
so no time to take off the masks. Some people are tired of taking precautions, saying,
to heck with it, if I die, then I die.
Vicki
White may have enjoyed a few days of intense excitement and extreme exhilaration,
but then took her own life when she realized that the party was over.
Wash. Post, A rural county in Iowa that supported Trump turns
to Latinos to grow
This mostly White,
mostly Republican, stronghold has been weighing how to stop its steep
population decline.
As the residents of rural
towns grows older and passes away, either more births or more immigrants are
needed to maintain current population levels. The same is happening in
small-town West Va. where my son now lives.
Now, over a million Covid deaths in just the last 2+ years, the US has achieved a dubious world record, more than the total number of deaths from the 1918 flu as well as all deaths from AIDS, and Covid is still not over yet.
Say not so, but the trucker convoy has announced plans to return to DC, to clog up the beltway again. I forget what the truckers are protesting, the price of gas, vaccination, the wearing of facemasks in public? They really don’t like President Biden, that’s clear.
Wash. Post, Hawaiian
communities seek answers to ‘infestation of feral chickens’
Some 6 years ago, when I was visiting my son and his
family outside Honolulu, those darn wild chickens, namely the roosters, kept me
awake all night with their incessant crowing, sending long relays back and
forth. Local folks just tuned them out. Those birds were among many that
apparently had escaped from domestic chicken coops. Since it never gets cold there
and abundant foliage provides places for the birds to nest and procreate, they’ve
kept on proliferating. High time to cook up a tasty chicken soup! But only if
you can catch one.
Vladimir Putin has been rumored to be seriously ill and also getting discouraged, as his plans in Ukraine are not going well, though he has now successfully launched new laser weapons to take out drones. He probably expected an easier victory. Putin has apparently withdrawn his objections to Finland’s and Sweden’s plans to join NATO, reportedly telling them to just go ahead, though also warning them of dire consequences. Who is the real Putin and is he actually intending to do anything about their NATO membership? And, is Mr. Putin, in fact, ill after all? Or is that just his opponents’ wishful thinking or a sly rumor that he himself has floated? If he is genuinely ill, he may lash out even more recklessly, feeling he has nothing left to lose. At the moment, neither side is “winning” the Ukraine war, or as Putin prefers to call it, “A special military operation.” He may now be aiming to achieve more limited, face-saving, objectives.
|
The documentary team at Vox Media just released a short video of a "deep dive" into Amnesty’s work to meticulously collect and verify evidence of cluster bombs being used in Ukraine. It has been watched over 1 million times already. Amnesty’s
Moscow office is now CLOSED. |
North Korea was able to keep Covid out through strict isolation from the outer world, but now the virus has breached its borders. Authorities there are confronting Covid without vaccines or medications, with 27 reported deaths so far and probably many more going unreported. More accurate estimates put the total at one million or more cases there. Lockdowns have been ordered, but rather belatedly. Must North Koreans simply wait and hope they won’t become infected? South Korea has offered assistance, but the north has not responded so far.
Shanghai’s massive lockdown continues, though the virus seems to have been finally controlled there.
Wash. Post, Biden to lift Trump-era restrictions on Cuba
NBC News, A Cuban migrant crossed the Rio
Grande with one leg. 'I'm going to take the risk.'
Now safely in Florida, Julio Martínez, described his multi-country
journey starting out in Cuba last month that got him reunited with family in
Miami after 21 days of perilous travel. Martínez, age 63, who has only one leg,
started out by flying to Managua, as Nicaragua allows Cubans to enter there without
a visa. Cubans arriving via Managua are bankrolled by US-based
relatives, as well by the sale of belongings in Cuba, so they would have nothing
to return to if deported. Cuba is not accepting deportation flights from the US
now anyway.
Around 35,000 Cubans were apprehended in April
at the U.S. Mexico border. We Amnesty International volunteers are seeing more
requests for support of Cuban asylum petitions, but the backlog of asylum requests
means it will be quite a while before petitioners get their day in court. I actually
know Cubans who have fled recently and crossed via Mexico.
I placed flowers on Alex's unmarked grave after his death.
My son Andrew’s gravestone is still in my backyard
in Washington, DC.
Marc
Frank in Havana
Russia’s
war in Ukraine has created fresh problems for its Caribbean ally Cuba, already
shaken by street protests and facing severe financial stress amid tighter US
sanctions and a pandemic-induced collapse in tourism.
Cubans have contended with chronic shortages of food,
medicine and other basic goods for more than two years, owing to the country’s
heavy dependency on imports and lack of dollars to pay. Now, there are fuel
shortages, more blackouts and less public transport as the island’s communist
government battles to secure costly petrol and diesel supplies...The Ukraine
war has been diplomatically awkward for Cuba, with its government blaming the
conflict on the US and Nato while also calling for the respect of international
borders.
Paul Hare, former UK ambassador to Havana, said Cuba, like other Russia-
aligned countries, had been embarrassed by the invasion, noting how the
island’s government had wanted to deepen relations with the EU. “That perhaps
explains why Cuba didn’t vote against the UN General Assembly on March 2
condemning the Russian invasion but abstained,” he added. Hare, now a senior
lecturer at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, said the war
had forced Cuba to pick the wrong side in what the EU considered a strategic
threat. Relations with Brussels were already strained because of the draconian
prison sentences imposed on hundreds of participants in last year’s
anti-government protests. “Cuba will be seen as complicit in Putin’s
attempt to redraw the map of Europe and upend the world order,” he said.
The
following about a little known aspect of Cuban history comes from the Cuban
Studies Institute.
Prostitution
Under the Spanish colonial administration, prostitution was widespread
and regulated. In 1885 there were two hundred registered brothels in Havana.
The majority were located in the waterfront and industrial areas of the old
city and employed mostly Canary Islanders, Black, mulattos, and poor white
women. By 1900 the number had increased by one half. Prostitutes were numerous
on such streets as Virtudes and Prado. Some eastern European prostitutes came
with the early 1900s immigration wave. In the 1950s special districts and
brothels existed catering to different socioeconomic levels. Thus, one brothel
catering to tourists had English-speaking, fair haired, and blue-eyed
young Cuban girls. From the mid-1950s American gangsters influenced
not only the brothels, but also the hotels and casinos, from Havana to
Varadero. In 1958 Havana had 270 registered brothels and an estimated 11,500
women working as prostitutes. It was a boast of the Revolution of 1959 that it
had ended both the industry and the socioeconomic conditions that provided its
labor force. Under the economic conditions of the “Special Period” of the
1990s, however the government began to condone prostitution to enhance tourism,
and smartly dressed jineteras were highly visible in all tourist
hotels. In 1996, thanks in large part to the Cuban male’s machista
reluctance to use condoms, some 40,000 Cubans were suffering from syphilis
or gonorrhea, and many others from AIDS.
The anti-abortion side has a new slogan: “Life is a human right.” Though I might be described as liberal on most political issues, nonetheless as both an adoptive and a birth mother, as well having been an interpreter for families of preemie infants, I find myself less than enthusiastic about “abortion rights,” especially after the first 3 months of fetal life, as said before. I may have also been influenced by growing up Catholic, though after my husband divorced me, I became less observant. And while babies born prematurely may confront ongoing health challenges, at least they will have a life, and early care for them has kept improving. Their birth and survival have also revealed a fetus/infant’s reality at a given developmental stage, helping prevent abortions contemplated at that time, namely at about 21-24 weeks of gestation, when abortions might then be considered killings, though killing in self-defense is usually allowable. And the line is likely to get even earlier. But if the mother’s life or health or a serious fetal defect requires terminating a pregnancy at that stage, it should be done humanely with proper pain control, not simply by piercing the fetal skull, as may have been the practice previously. Much has been happening in reproduction, including egg and sperm donation and surrogacy, complicating the determination of parental “rights,” making the Roe decision outdated. More nuance is required now.
At Harvard,
warring groups appeared on both sides of the abortion debate.
¡En Cuba se Tortura! [From CADAL]
mitología martiana
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