Here are topics I have selected for this past week: new back yard visitor; July 4th trivia; Brexit; El Paso county, CO; immigration and globalization;  how are you financially?; last chance; college racial diversity; reading, non-fiction, Secondhand Times, the end of the USSR; the worst possible candidates?; Elie Wiesel;

The Hawk. Our newest back yard visitor, as yet unnamed, is a red tail hawk. No doubt there will be a mom and dad. The nest building is underway. I am assisting by breaking up some of the larger twigs on the back deck to a more manageable, appropriate size for her/his endeavor. We would love to have resident backyard mouse-catchers make a home in our tree.
     Does one talk to your backyard hawks? Henry and Harriet? Howard came to mind, but he is our human neighbor to the west and we do not want there to be any confusion.

July 4, 1826: ICYMI (in case you missed it), it was exactly 50 years after our nation's 1st July 4th that both former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. Adams's famous last words were, "Jefferson survives." Actually TJ had died 5 hours earlier -- but Adams can be forgiven as that was long before the telegraph, telephone, radio, cable TV, and internet.

July 4, 1916: Alan Seeger, American poet, romantic, and member of the French Foreign Legion, died among his French comrades in the Battle of the Somme,  where more than one million died, were wounded, or just lost. In those bye-gone days, it was not illegal for an American to fight in the army of a friendly foreign nation. His most beloved poem, "I have a Rendezvous with Death," was a premonition of what was to come.

Brexit fallout. The Guardian reports on the scarred campaign and some of the more tawdry, racist fallout from Brexit. For example, [in] Huntingdon, Polish-origin schoolkids get cards calling them “vermin”, who must “leave the EU”. They come with a Polish translation, thoughtfully enough." The author continues, telling "how, while trying to sleep on a hot night, he hears a man bellowing outside his open window: 'We’ve got our country back and next I’ll blow that fucking mosque up.' ” The article goes on to relate other equally troubling examples.

The view from the editor of the left-leaning Nation: "How Brexit could avert a new Cold War."

Thomas Friedman, NYTimes columnist, in "If you break it, you own it."  A major European power, a longtime defender of liberal democracy, pluralism and free markets, falls under the sway of a few cynical politicians who see a chance to exploit public fears of immigration to advance their careers. They create a stark binary choice on an incredibly complex issue, of which few people understand the full scope — stay in or quit the E.U.....Attention Donald Trump voters: this is what happens to a country that falls for hucksters who think that life can just imitate Twitter — that there are simple answers to hard questions — and that small men can rearrange big complex systems by just erecting a wall and everything will be peachy. He wonders if someone is not "the dog who's caught the car?"

Charles Krauthammer, in the Washington Post noted, "Unity is not easy. What began in 1951 as a six-member European Coal and Steel Community was grounded in a larger conception of a united Europe born from the ashes of World War II. Seven decades into the postwar era, Britain wants out and the E.U. is facing an existential crisis."

"Where are we now?" Link to multiple responses from (mostly British) readers of the London Review of Books.

El Paso county, CO. This past Tuesday there was more anti-establishment news for the GOP. In solidly Republican El Paso county, the GOP primary voters gave the nod (37%, in a five man race) to Daryl Glenn, a county commissioner who campaigned using an all volunteer staff and not all that much money. Most of Glenn's money came from conservative sources outside the county and state. Glenn called himself  “an unapologetic Christian, constitutional conservative."
     Thus, CO's US senate race will pit Michael Bennett (first term incumbent, white, male, Democrat and establishment candidate) against Glenn (the African American, Republican outsider). A major decision now confronts Glenn: what to do about Donald Trump? In this anti-establishment atmosphere, be afraid Senator Bennett!
     It is a long time until November 8th. Colorado is a target state, so moi has checked his mute button, set his landline and cell phone to weed out as many unwanted incoming calls as possible, and taped a "no solicitors" note above the door bell. There will be more than enough candidate information to peruse on the web.
     To rephrase the old saw, "Hell hath no fury like an establishment scorned."

Immigration and globalization. These two terms are much talked about. The important question: how are they interrelated and what impact do both have on people around the world? Retired ABC foreign correspondent, Gregg Dobbs, pondered these questions in his recent Denver Post column, "Nationalism in the U.K."
     Most Denverites will avow that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, but are just as unsure about the consequences of such globalization. Decisions, governmental and/or economic, now have worldwide impact. At the beginning of the industrial age, changes might result from an innovation (e.g. the Bessemer steel process, the telegraph, the Model T, radio) but the impact was not immediately felt around the globe. However, the world has, indeed, sped up!
     The Chinese government just announced the "retirement" of the man responsible for developing a system that too long ago was thought impossible: censoring the internet. In 2000, then President Clinton said, "[Censoring the internet] is sort of like nailing jello to the wall." But LuWei did it, with frightening effect for free speech around the world.

Your income health. Two recent studies, one from the Pew Research Center, the other from IRS data, published by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth think tank, Asian males and the top 1% are doing just fine. Others groups? Not so much.

Your demise? Most likely you will not die overseas at the hands in an ISIS or like-minded melee. Rather, it will be close to home, most likely in an auto accident; in 2015, auto accident deaths were up 7.7% from 2014. Good news: lower gas prices; bad news: more accidents. "...spikes in deaths of bicyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists, up 13, 10 and 9 percent, respectively....young drivers up 10 percent....rollovers in passenger cars up 5 percent.... large trucks up 4 percent."
     “[Unfortunately,] 94 percent of crashes can be tied back to a human choice or error,” Beware the distracted driver.

Final decisions. The last week in June always heralds the Supreme Court's most awaited and often most contentious decisions. This year was no exception. Abortion, voting rights, corruption, racial preferences, et. al.  The Defense Department even "threw in its two-cents worth" by announcing an end to recruitment/retention problems for transgender members or recruits.
     George Will thought political corruption to be the most important. He agreed with Chief Justice Roberts that, however unseemly and objectionable, "tawdry" and "distasteful" were not "criminal." As Will Rogers said, "Feel free to disagree, that's democracy for you."
     In his normal Friday PBS appearance, liberal columnist Mark Shields said that while the nation had "moved on" on other social issues (LGBT, same-sex marriage, etc.), abortion remained a sharply dividing issue for most Americans. Hence, disagreement over the TX-based abortion decision.

College racial diversity. Professor and author, George Zimmerman, noted that hiring high priced "diversity officers" may not be the key. Research indicates that a program of inter-racial roommate assignment may be more effective.

Reading, non-fiction. Secondhand Times: the Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich. "Moscow is the capital of some other nation, not the country beyond the ring road....Don’t believe Moscow." p.40 Not unlike our nation's capital and the beltway.

"They feel that they’ve been lied to...? (p. 40) “USSR. That was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I’m living on foreign soil. I was born Soviet…" (p. 41)

"The death of the USSR was the death of the military nation. "We were a military nation, 70 or so percent of the economy was, in one way or another, tied to the military. Our best minds worked for it… physicists, mathematicians….And our ideology was also militarized. But Gorbachev was profoundly civilian." (p. 122)

"The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel, but we don’t need a Sakharov in charge here, we need a Tsar." (p. 124)

The USSR had fallen, rotted from inside. Tellingly, China, North Korea, and Cuba had not fallen. (p.125)

Seeming incongruities: The funeral of USSR's then most famous, beloved dissident, Andrei Sakharov, drew crowds estimated to be 70,000+. The sole representative of Soviet officialdom was the nation's highest ranking Field Marshall, Akhromeyev, in full uniform, silently paying solemn respects to his life-long adversary.
     Later, at Marshall Akhromeyev funeral, there was no military salute, his obituary was printed in Time magazine, not Pravda written by retired Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff, the Marshall's long time advisory. Again, proper respects duly paid.
     "I’m a construction worker… Before August 1991, we lived in one country, and afterward, we lived in another. Before that August, my country was called the USSR...[R]eady to die for freedom, not capitalism." (p. 133)

Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Times: The Last of the Soviets. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Nov 8th, disaster day? If the candidates turn out to be Donald and Hillary, what past presidential slate would you rate as "worser?" A year when you might well decide, as Bob Dole (former senator and Republican presidential candidate), has said "to sleep in that day." Feel free to comment with your least favorite date.

Elie Wiesel, survivor and voice of the Holocaust, "the memory keeper for victims of Nazi persecution, and a Nobel laureate who used his moral authority to force attention on atrocities around the world, died July 2 at his home in New York. He was 87....Few survivors spoke openly about the war. Those who did often felt ignored. Decades before a Holocaust museum stood in downtown Washington and moviegoers watched Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” Mr. Wiesel helped force the public to confront the Holocaust." President Obama walked through Buchenwald with Wiesel, who told him: " ‘Memory has become a sacred duty of all people of goodwill.’ ”  Thank you, Elie, and RIP.

Thank you for reading. I hope you had an enjoyable 4th.