back from st lou

Coming back from St Louis, as I was pushing my bag through the x-ray machine the TSA guy noticed the Cub hat that I had attached to my bag (The Cubs had just beat the Cards twice in the last two days) and suggested that the trash bag nearby would be a good place for my hat.  It was all in good humor and the two of us laughed.  I guess that was the closest I came to getting shot in the gateway city,  

My friends there don't even live in St Louis, they live in the leafy suburban paradise of Webster Groves.  Unlike Chicago, which ate up its suburbs as it grew, St Louis remained aloof, it's not even part of St Louis county.  Perhaps that's the reason, the gateway arch notwithstanding, that Chicago became the conduit between the eastern and western parts of the country.  Well that and the railroads. St Louis, sitting on the banks of the wide Missouri, thought that railroads were a flash in the pan.

I looked up Old Dog's link, and did a brief scan but it appears to me that what it is saying is that spending all that money on weapons is economic lunacy in the face of other pressing needs, but hell when the choice is between upgrading the welfare of the citizens or buying shiny new weapons we know how that comes out.  It is certainly the path that the USA continues to follow.

It may be that two regional powers are going to be in conflict even if they have the same religion or politics, but the Shia/Sunni thing is huge.  This Yemen thing was originally a local civil war, but has somehow become a proxy war between Iran and the Saudis,  I don't know how deeply the Iranians are in this but the Saudis certainly enjoy blasting it with their shiny new weapons.

And now I hear over the radio that the Saudis have come down on Qatar.  I don't know why and the radio isn't giving many clues.  I wonder if its worth buying a copy of Old Dog's favorite magazine, The Economist, to see what's going on there.  But a single issue is kind of expensive compared to taking a subscription and getting it for a buck an issue, but then you get hit with them once a week and you can never keep up, and you can't throw them out, I don't know.

I expect I could just read something on the Economist's site but I am afraid that if I go there I will see something else I want to read and there goes the whole day.

The Shias were the guys who thought the next caliph should be a relative of Mohammed, and the Sunnis didn't.  The Sunnis killed the relative of Mohammed and the thing was on.  I don't know why Beagles thinks that is not enough to start a conflagration.  Certainly many Christians were laid low by what exactly was the relationship between Jesus and Jehovah.

Well I've got Saturday and Sunday's Sun-Times to catch up on now that I am safely back from the gateway city.