Economist Digest
Posted: February 5, 2022 Filed under: news Leave a commentMr DeSantis is using Florida as a peninsular podium to advertise his policies. In his proposed $100bn budget, he is pushing a special police force to oversee state elections, which he calls “an election integrity unit”, and wants to make it easier to penalise companies that “facilitate illegal immigration” to Florida. He envisages bonuses for police officers who move to Florida, and wants to create a state militia of volunteers that could work with the National Guard in emergencies.
A report from the Mojave:
Since the 1980s the population [of desert tortoises] has declined by about 90%. Michael Vamstad, a wildlife ecologist at the park, describes what is happening as “thirty to three”: where once researchers would count 30 or more tortoises per square kilometre, now they count three.
A tortoise can store a quart of water for about a year.
And: a failed coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau.
People linked to the trade have tried to [overthrow the gov’t] several times in the past in order to control or protect a cocaine route linking South America to Europe.
Joe Biden on Meet The Press
Posted: March 1, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, news Leave a comment
Instead of their opinions and guesses, I wish political commentators would offer simple facts, observations, like: Joe Biden doesn’t complete about 23*% of the sentences his starts.
A typical example of a Biden not completed sentence is like half a statistic or something followed by “I mean look” and a jump to a new thought.
Starting a new sentence whenever you’re lost is probably a great tactic if you find you get confused, lose the thread, or make frequent meanderings into language territory you can’t always get out of.
I’m aware Joe Biden has struggled with a stutter, and respect his struggle with it, you can see that in this Meet The Press appearance, that may partially explain this fact but doesn’t make it not a fact.
As for Mike Pence’s on Meet The Press, the less said the better. Rare cheers for Chuck Todd for pinning him down on naming names of what specific Democrats are “politicizing” the crisis. Pence came up with “the New York Times” (referencing I believe Gail Collins’ column).
One thought I’ve had about politics is there’s a wide gap in how important people think politics is or should be. I get a sense that, say, young Bernie voters tend to think “this is life or death! Politics means people’s lives!” while among a Trump-type voter you often get a sense of “whatever, it’s a stupid puppet show.”
After the 2008 election, when I looked back on how much time I’d spent like refreshing blogs and stuff, I resolved not to get too sucked into like following the events and commentary, but it’s a great temptation.
*actually counted and tried to make a fair estimate, what is wrong with me.
Barbarian Days
Posted: April 25, 2019 Filed under: news, Tahiti, the world around us, travel, world Leave a comment
sometimes reading “the news” I am reminded of this part from Barbarian Days:
In the cemeteries in Tonga, late in the day, there always seemed to be old women tending the graves of their parents – combing the coral-sand mounds into proper coffin-top shape, sweeping away leaves, hand-washing faded wreaths of plastic flowers, rearranging the haunting patterns of tropical peppercorns, orange and green on bleached white sand.
A shiver of secondhand sorrow ran through me. And an ache of something else. It wasn’t exactly homesickness. It felt like I had sailed off the edge of the known world. That was actually fine with me. The world was mapped in so many different ways. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal – and, at that time, the big newsweeklies. Every place on earth was part of somebody’s beat. Bryan understood that map before I did, having gone to Yale. But when I’d found an old copy of Newsweek on Captain Brett Hilder’s bridge, and tried to read a George Will column, I’d burst out laughing. His Beltway airs and provincialism were impenetrable. The truth was, we were wandering now through a world that would never be a part of any correspondent’s beat (let alone George Will’s purview). It was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight.
As the Jamaican cab driver said, the news is a Babylon thing.
Babylon
Posted: March 23, 2017 Filed under: news Leave a comment
forgetting who it was who told me the story of his Jamaican cab driver advising him that “the news is a Babylon thing.”
Above we see The Burney Relief. Allegedly Old-Babylonian. Do you believe it?
Petraeus
Posted: November 10, 2012 Filed under: America, heroes, news Leave a comment
What a great, tragic name. I guessed it was Greek but in fact his father was “Sixtus Petraeus, a sea captain from Franeker, Netherlands.”
Two stories, first from Wikipedia:
Upon promotion to lieutenant colonel, Petraeus moved … to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he commanded the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)’s 3rd Battalion 187th Infantry Regiment, known as the “Iron Rakkasans”, from 1991–1993. During this period, he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career; in 1991 he was accidentally shot in the chest with an M-16assault rifle during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center,Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. SenatorBill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push-ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.
The other one I heard Rick Atkinson tell on NPR: Apparently Petraeus got into a joking interaction with a private on a dock in Kuwait City in 1991. Petraeus challenged the soldier to a push-up contrast. The private tapped out at 27. Petraeus did 20 more, and then told the private he could write that off on his tax returns, because it was an education.
Helytimes 