Category: General

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads around the world!

My Amazon order of LEGO building plates landed on the porch on Saturday morning: nice.

I see there is a new LEGO Jurassic Park Velociraptor Chase set out, just in time for the 25th anniversary of the original Jurassic Park movie.  Hmm. I am tempted.

 

The little lantern flowers on my flowering maple* (genus Abutilon) in my back yard, have started to appear.  If it stays happy, it should produce flowers throughout summer.     *The leaves look like small maple leaves, but it is not a true maple at all.

Confession: I did not set my alarm to 5 am Seattle time to catch the TV coverage of the royal wedding.  No matter – it was replayed later, with no detail too minute to mention.

Oprah feared her original dress would photograph ‘too white’, so British designer Stella McCartney and her team worked through the night to make a new one. The wedding cake had elderflower cordial in. Meghan Markle’s wedding band was made of Welsh gold, donated by the Queen.  The prince and his bride had modern vows with no ‘honor and obey’ in.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

Nuclear war? Trade war? Maybe just a trade war.

The State Dept stated just this morning that talks between the US and North Korea were ‘a long way off’. This evening, a delegation of South Korean envoys announced on the White House driveway that President Trump and Kim Jong-un will meet before the end of May.  This will be the first time ever that a US President meet with North Korea since the Korean War Armistice of 1953. (Oh, and never mind that annual US-South Korea military exercises are to take place in April – and that U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy Joseph Yun resigned just two weeks ago).

Why did the South Koreans announce the talks (and not the White House)?
Can Kim Jong-un be trusted?
What is even on the table?

Update Fri 3/9: By Friday night Press Secretary Sanders had walked back Trump’s commitment to meet with Kim Jong-un. (‘No meeting without concrete steps and action’). And then her walk-back was walked back by the White House – sort of.

Well, that was February. 2018 is moving along!
I say: it’s going to be a fascinating year.

Will son-in-law Jared Kushner still be in the White House by December? No. His security clearance has finally been revoked, and there is a fresh scandal in the news of him mixing business and White House access.
Will Trump still be in the White House? Maybe, as a lame-duck President. Oh – he announced his 2020 campaign manager this week. What a joke.
Will new Fed chairman Powell have raised interest rates 3 times, or 4? I say 3, maybe only 2. Nobody knows yet if inflation is going to pick up significantly, or why wages are so slow to increase with almost full employment.
Will we finally have new gun control laws on the books, now that Walmart, Amazon and Dick’s Sporting Goods no longer sell the AR-15 assault weapon? Who knows. Trump staged a classic con-man ‘listening and discuss’ session at the White House today, reminiscent of his immigration discussion session (that was just for show). He offered that people that are deemed threats, should have their guns taken away immediately, and then afterwards have their due process in the court if they wanted them back. I cannot imagine the uproar from Republicans if Obama mentioned such a thing.

And there it goes, the year that was 2017.

Happy New Year, everyone.

It’s Veterans Day in the United States, and we honor our veterans that had served in the armed forces, some 20 million of them.

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the end of World War I, also called the ‘Great War’, and the ‘War to End all Wars’ (if only that could become true).  Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

New York City suffered a terrorist attack by an Uzbek national (in the USA since 2010) on Tuesday that left 8 people dead and 11 injured.

Vox.xom reports this attack is one of several recent ones by Uzbeks: in Istanbul, St Petersburg, Stockholm and now New York City.

So left me look again where Uzbekistan is, I thought.  Well, it’s one of the ‘Stans, about the size of California, pop. 29 million, native language Uzbek. It is doubly landlocked (two border crossings needed to get an ocean). The only other such country is tiny Lichtenstein. Economic prospects for young people are generally bleak, and President Shavkat Mirziyoyev sure has a lot of work to do to make life better for its citizens.  He did send a letter of condolence to President Trump today with a promise to assist in any way he can with the investigation into the attack.

Amazon is looking for a North American city for a second headquarters (HQ2), and Thursday was the last day for submissions.  The company will reportedly spend $5 billion and bring 50,000 jobs to the winning city. Critics say it’s a race to the bottom (determine who will give up the most tax & other incentives), and that cities should be careful what they wish for (an Amazon HQ2 could bring increases in real estate prices, traffic problems).

Forbes magazine lists the top contenders as: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Pittsburgh and Toronto.  We will have to be patient. The decision will only be made sometime in 2018!

A gunman sprayed 22,000 country music concert goers with bullets from machine gun fire from his Las Vegas hotel room on Sunday night at 10.08 pm, for almost  10 minutes.

The sheriff from Clark County in Las Vegas just had a news conference (Monday morning), said the ‘body count’ was up to 58, maybe 59, then corrected himself and said ‘number of deceased’.  Well, it’s a massacre, and the body count as of now is 58, with 515 wounded.   The gunman  was a 64 yr old white male, US citizen – they usually are white males & US citizens, the gunmen in these frequent events in the United States. He used bullets designed to do maximum damage. He then committed suicide.  The President called it an ‘act of pure evil’ and offered his condolences.  The gunman’s brother could not point to anything that triggered him. Congress is not expected to anything, at all.

 

I thought I would check back on Christchurch, New Zealand, since it’s been some six years since the city had been hit with a series of severe earthquakes that killed 185 people. Wikipedia says that following the earthquakes, over 1,500 buildings in the city had been demolished or partly demolished by September 2013.  In the years that followed, the city has been experiencing rapid growth, with the central city rebuild, which is outlined in the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, starting to ramp up.  I see that residents in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch feel a little left behind in all the recovery efforts, though .. and that ‘distress or anxiety associated with ongoing aftershocks, being in a damaged environment and surrounded by construction, additional financial burdens and loss of recreational and cultural facilities were the top four stresses for people in the city’.

All right .. I know there are on-going wars and catastrophes in the world, but it was still a day filled with unsettling news.  I woke up at 7 am to President Trump’s bombastic speech at the United Nations. A little restraint, Mr President? Why (again) call Kim Jung-un ‘Rocket Man’?

 

Then reports of the 7.1 earthquake near Mexico City came in, with buildings that collapsed and 150 reported dead so far.

Hurricane Maria has been in the news the last few days, striking Dominica (pop. 73,543) today and projected to make landfall in Puerto Rico (pop. 3.4 million) with Category 4 winds on Wednesday morning.

Finally, back in the category of man-made disasters, there is another effort underway from the Republicans in the United States Congress to shove the country’s healthcare system off a cliff (the Graham-Cassidy Bill).

_________

Update Wed 9/20: The death toll in Mexico City rose to 245 on Wednesday.  No casualties reported so far from Puerto Rico, but the entire island is without power.

I have started to watch a 10-episode Vietnam War documentary, currently airing on the public television channel PBS, here in the United States.

Long ago in South Africa on Friday nights, I would watch a TV series about the war, called Tour of Duty, but dubbed into Afrikaans as Sending Vietnam (Mission Vietnam). Best I can recall, this was in 1993 & 1994.  At the end of each episode, ‘Paint It, Black’ would play – a song by the Rolling Stones that describes extreme grief and loss.  No doubt: it pointed to the post-traumatic stress that soldiers and civilians alike, had suffered (still suffer?) from the war.

From ‘Paint It, Black’ (The Rolling Stones, 1966) :
‘No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you
If I look hard enough into the setting sun
My love will laugh with me before the morning comes ..’

The latest massive internet security breach here in the United States involves a credit ratings agency called Equifax.

1. On July 29,  Equifax discovered that 143 million records of personal data (credit card numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth and first name, last name) were stolen.
2. Equifax waited six weeks to publish this information. (By the way, it seems that their Apache web server software was to blame.  A patch had been issued in March for a vulnerability, but the patch was not applied).
3. The emergency-information website that they then had set up, looks like the site that a scammer would use to get one’s social security information.  Oh boy.
4. The stolen information could be used MANY YEARS from now by criminals to get credit cards, tax refunds, commit Medicare fraud – who even knows what else.
5. Three Equifax executives sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million just a few days after the company discovered the breach.

Some observers say this could finally bring to an end the ubiquitous use of social security numbers as a personal identification number in the United States. (It was never intended to be used for that; only for citizens to record and obtain their social security benefits).   I already try to keep a sharp eye on my credit card transactions, but feel I now have to figure out if I need to put a credit freeze on my accounts at the three credit ratings agencies.  A credit freeze is the nuclear option for protection, but also blocks anyone to access one’s credit history.  So for new credit, or a new job, or signing an apartment lease or a buying a new car with financing, one would have to lift the freeze, which takes time and money.  But surely that is far less of a convenience than getting one’s identity stolen?

It’s hard to believe that it has been 16 years since the terrible events of Sept 11, 2001. A lot happened in the 16 years, of course.  There was the invasion into Iraq in 2003, justified with questionable intelligence by the Republican administration. Bin Laden would finally be tracked down and killed in May 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  And who would have thought that the war in Afghanistan would drag on to this day? September 2014 was supposed to mark the end of combat operations there, but the Afghan army just could not wipe out a resurgent Taliban.

Check out these pictures from last year’s Tribute in Light memorial in Lower Manhatten. The lights were switched on for tonight, as well.

Tropical storm Harvey moved on from Houston, finally – to dump rain on the city of Beaumont, and on to the states of Louisiana and Tennessee.  (Rescuers in Houston still tried to reach homes block by block place today, fearing that people have been left behind in homes). An estimated 100,000 homes have been flooded. For people that can get to their homes, the immense clean-up effort has started.  Lots of incredible pictures, of Texas’s Flood of a Century – no, Flood of a Thousand Years, say some – have been posted by the Weather Channel, here.

The storm still made a lot of trouble in the city of Beaumont to the east today, knocking out its water supply system, with no repairs possible before the waters recede, and basically flooding the entire city (pop. 118,000).

Once a semblance of normality has returned to Texas, and especially the city of Houston, some very hard questions will have to be answered.  How to pay for all the repairs and reconstruction? Should new zoning laws be passed? What can be done infrastructure-wise?

‘We now have a president who can’t get the head of Campbell Soup to the White House*’, says Gail Collins in an editorial in the New York Times.  (Gail also pointed out that at his train wreck of a press conference on Tuesday, Trump asked the stunned reporters “Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?  I own actually one of the largest wineries in the United States. It’s in Charlottesville.”).

*Business leaders disbanded two CEO councils created by the White House on Wednesday, in a move to protest Donald Trump’s failure to adequately condemn the violence in Charlottesville.