Blue Tuesday

The situation in Yemen kind of snuck up on me so I'll have to add it to the growing list of global hot spots, any of which can lead to global conflict.  Don't we have enough problems already?  I'll let you guys discuss it further as I don't know enough to add to the conversation.

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And speaking of not knowing enough, I'm beginning to think that the media is not serving the American public very well.  A lot has been said lately about certain celebrity outbursts but little has been said about the actual number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria, and much of that island is still without electricity nearly a year after the fact.  And folks are jabbering about Super Bowl winners not going to the White House; it's like news stories are being tailored to give folks something to talk about and nothing more.  I suspect that there is more than one kind of collusion going on; the voices of righteous indignation are being drowned out by more White House lies and I don't understand why there isn't a stronger and more vocal political opposition to the Clown-in-Chief.  An Imperial Presidency is being established and Congress is letting him get away with it; they, too, are feckless.

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There is an economist, Canadian I think, by the name of Umair Haque who has been writing some interesting essays about America and we are in deep shit.  He describes America as being the world's first poor rich country and I think it's worth a read despite the bleak outlook.  Other essays don't paint a prettier picture but maybe we should be facing the harsh truths that we've been avoiding.  I don't buy everything he says but his reasoning seems sound and I don't detect any agenda or axe to grind.  Like many of us, he is disappointed in the way things are turning out and I'd be interested in reading what you guys have to say.  Perhaps there is a way out of this mess.

yemen

Couldn't find Castro's revenge on the first page of google so I gave up on that.  Seems way more likely that we brought AIDS to Cuba than vice versa. 

So Beagles is okay with us getting involved in Yemen as long as we are on the side of the good guys. but how to determine who the good guys are?  Under our current policy the good guys are whoever can throw Trump the best party, and not let any sarcasm creep into their extravagant praise, and have good business opportunities for Donald, Jared, and Ivanka.  But Beagles is an idealist and I suspect he wants to go with the guys who are yearning to breathe free as opposed to those who want to kill puppies, and I think that could roughly be determined by who is most willing to favor America. 

I'm purposely avoiding wiki, so I may make some mistakes here.  (Sharpen your red pencil Scourge) Yemen is on the southwestern corner of that rectangular peninsula that is mostly Saudi Arabia.  In ancient times I believe it was a prosperous trading community.  I think The Queen of Sheba came from there.  Back in our time my earliest memory of the place is there was a South Yemen and a North Yemen, and one of them (the North I think) was communist.  Odd place to plant the red flag, but what I read was that the despot threw anybody in jail who said anything bad about him, but the commies, being revolutionaries, knew enough to keep their big yaps shut, so they were the only ones not in jail when the revolution came.  I don't think the commies stayed long, I think it was one of those cold war things where African nations switched sides every few years depending on who was offering them the best swag.

So anyway, Yemen was this dusty, poor country run by a despot when along came the Arab spring.  The despot was toppled, some other guy took his place, and people didn't like him that much either and the despot fled to the Saudis who tried to return him to power, but it wasn't like there were two sides, there were a lot of factions.  And then in rode the Houthis.

The Who?  That's what everybody asked.  I guess if you were keeping abreast of goings on in Yemen you would know, but who was doing that?  Well, some tv reporter was asking some newsman on the ground, who are these guys?  The newsman replied, well, their slogan is Death to Israel and Death to America.  Oh, the reporter replied, that doesn't sound good.  Well actually, the newsman replied, that's what everybody here says/

The Houthis are Shias, and they are getting some aid from Iran, though nobody knows how much.  The Saudis are sure it is a lot and so they are using their shiny American weapons to pound the shit out of everybody there under the proud American slogan, inscribed proudly on our t shirts, kill them all, let God sort them out.  

The Saudis have tons of the latest American arms, and Yemen is right there, right across the border, so why the fuck can't they do it?  Because the Saudis never leave the air-conditioning.  They import people from elsewhere to do actual work, used to be the Palestinians, but they didn't trust them and now it is mostly people from southeast Asia.  One would suppose the Saudis could arm these people and send them over, but they dare not do that because they treat these people like shit, and armed, they would probably come after the Saudis/

Who, by the way, are the good guys because Donald can never forget that magic night he did the sword dance with the pretty kings under the Saudi moon.


Okay I had to look up.  The Queen of Sheba probably never existed, but Yemen is one place that legends say she came from

Pity the Poor Cubans

Poor people are the only ones who can afford to live under Communism because they have nothing to lose.  When Castro first assumed power, the first thing he did was start executing everybody who opposed him, which would be the more well off people who had something to lose.  Many of them escaped to America where, last I heard, their descendants were doing relatively well.  Americans generally welcomed these immigrants because they felt sorry for them.  This kind of backfired on us when Castro allowed a bunch of mental patients and common criminals to come here, which might be how AIDS first got into the country.  I seem to remember that AIDS used to be called "Castro's Revenge" for awhile, but you don't hear about that anymore.  I used to think that the best way to oppose Communism was to cut off all their trade and foreign aid, like we used to do to Red China, but I'm not so sure about that anymore.  Red China has become more capitalist over the years, but 70 years of economic isolation doesn't seem to have changed Cuba much.

That Elian thing got all blown out of proportion by politics.  If his father had been an American, there would have been nothing to argue about.  It seemed so tragic to turn an innocent child over to the evil ones, but they obviously took good care of him, probably in an effort to make their regime look good.  The poor kid was used as a propaganda pawn by both sides, but he seems to have come out of it okay, as okay as anyone can be living in Communist Cuba.

I wish I could be assured that, before getting involved in Yemen, our government will make an effort to determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys over there but, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, "Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."

a new global adventure

Elian's parents were divorced which doesn't necessarily mean estranged.  Estranged to me means not speaking to each other and bad mouthing each other to friends.  The father was indeed a commie, he believed in his country.  The kid is doing quite well.  A lot of people in Cuba love their country, and not that we Americans care, because it's about poor people, who we know is just another word for lazy, Cuba has an infant mortality rate substantially better than the USA, literacy, just slightly.

That is the photo, Elian in some closet, some robocop opening the door, crazy Miami Cubans reeling about like indignant desert birds.  The relatives made all kinds of threats so the feds went in in force, the Powell doctrine I believe.

I got the impression more that we lost a lot of genetic diversity than that we came close to extinction.  Us, great apes with opposable thumbs, and huge brains enabling us to natter on and on, going extinct?  I don't think so.  The article in Nature was, well pretty scientific, and pretty long too, I guess I will have to take the Post's word that its article is based on that.  I think if I had had the actual magazine, I could have gotten the gist of the article better because flipping through pages is easier than scrolling through screens.

Last night I was watching Ken Burns' Vietnam series, a little bored because I've seen it before so I was browsing through The Hill and came across an article about how the US is mulling direct military assistance to take key Yemini port  Yikes.  This could never happen could it?  Then I remember how the neocons were slavering to get our boys in Iraq and I kept assuring a nervous Nellie friend of mine that that would never happen because it was patently so stupid and everybody knew that didn't they?  Didn't they?

And I remember how happy Trump was doing the sword dance with his Saudi buddies, and how the republicans control the house and the senate, and none of them running for office, except Kasich, dare to say that even one hair on his orange head is out of place.

Sunday short takes

That Elian Gonzales situation was a very big deal as I recall.  There was a big police raid to grab the kid (unless I'm getting my stories mixed up) with one photo still in my mind: a burly cop in full SWAT drag with an M16 confronting a terrified six year old boy, the most heavy handed resolution of a child custody case I've ever seen.

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Current events have gotten way too screwy for me lately so I try to find items of curious interest as a distraction, and here's a good one.  About 7,000 years ago humanity was nearly driven to the point of extinction because of tribal warfare, causing a genetic bottleneck.  The NY Post (a tabloid!) did an article on it but there is a link to an article in Nature that goes into deep detail, deeper than I can easily understand.  At least it's something different to chew on.

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There has been some talk about how our society and culture is degrading and reverting to a more crude and vulgar time and I suppose it's true.  Bare-knuckle boxing is back on the scene.

Lost Kids

Sometimes I check the news app on my computer before I shut it down, just to see what's been going on.  They feature news and opinion articles from several sources, and I don't remember which sources, but I read several articles the other day about those 1500 "lost" kids.  The consensus was that their parents had brought them into the country illegally and the authorities had to do something with the kids because they couldn't send them to jail with their parents.  The kids were fostered out to relatives and other allegedly reliable people of Mexican extraction.  These guardians were supposed to bring the kids back on a given date for a hearing, and they didn't show up.  The government people attempted to reach them by telephone, but most of them didn't answer their phones or respond to voice mail messages.  Certain people of the Democratic persuasion accused the government of negligently losing those kids, and there might be some truth to that.  Perhaps more care should have been taken in assigning the guardians, as it is now believed that many of them were illegal immigrants themselves.  To be fair, we should note that so many kids have been entering the country illegally the last few years, both with and without parents, that they have overwhelmed the system.

Since a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, I looked up the story of that Cuban kid.  I didn't know his name, but I searched Wiki for the name you provided. Here's what I found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elián_González

The boy may not have been estranged from his father, but his father and mother were estranged from each other, which is what I meant.  I assumed that the mother had custody but, apparently, she took him out of Cuba without consulting with the father, which may have been illegal under Cuban law.  Of course Cuban law is Communist law, which makes it invalid in my book.  The father must have been a Commie himself because he refused an offer of asylum in the US, where there must be more Cubans than there are in Cuba anymore.  It appears that, once the kid was back in Cuba, he was brainwashed into becoming a Commie himself.  Well, at least they didn't just kill him.

so is your mother

The missing kids was a big uproar that I had heard nothing about until I read Beagles' post,  I didn't read anything about the people they placed them with not answering telephones.  You would think the gov would have ways of finding people who didn't answer their telephones.  I suspect that the gov basically doesn't give a shit, since what they are chiefly interested in these days is separating the kids from the parents who are applying for asylum, to scare people from coming here to apply for asylum.

Elian, that's the name of the kid.  The father was not estranged, and the question was who has more claim on the kid, relatives who he has never met, or his father.


Then there is Roseanne, some muttering among the Republicans about how it was not right calling Valerie Jarret the daughter of apes, even some White House characters have said the same, but not their orange poobah.  Then Samantha Bee calls Ivanka a cunt, which was also not right, and so Orangey complains about that, but not a word about Roseanne.  This is the so is your mother defense, wherein instead of condemning bad actions on your part you try to deflect attention to bad actions on the other guys part.

I don't like this argument, like the slippery slope argument it is flawed.  What should be done is you should address your own bad actions first, and then address the bad actions of the other side,  The thing is that if Samantha Bee is wrong (and I believe most liberals are acknowledging that.  Some unfortunately are pointing to bad actions by the Trumpists, and they, like the Trumpists, are also behaving badly), than so is Roseanne, so why not admit that she was also wrong.

Also it's a bit of apples and oranges, the cases are not the same.  Roseanne has a long history of doing this shit, Samantha Bee does not.  And in this particular case, these are not government actions (to fire or not to fire), but actions by ABC and I think Samantha Bee's show's parent company is CBS, and one decided to go this way, and the other another way.


Correction.  I just came across a Mona Charon column on the subject and it wasn't asylum that the parents were being held for, it was for crossing the border.