TX and Trump. This article, from, of all places, the Irish Times. I have blogged before about the problematic placement of President Trump's wall along the long, undulating, meandering Rio Grande River on the Mexican - south TX border. It appears that President Trump is about to find out that, if nothing else, Texans tend to be independent and unpredictable. If Ms. Mullally's election statistics are correct, those living in the counties along the border do not, as they say, have much truck with The Donald's proposed wall.
"A few good men." Not all that long ago this was the bold recruiting slogan for the USMC. Now the Corps and other service branches find themselves involved in a sex scandal that can only badly hurt their efforts to recruit women.
Mt. Etna. Last week tourists hiking Etna's slopes were bombarded with rock and ice hurled up as the volcano erupted with a burst of highly pressurized steam. Of late, Etna has laid claim to being the world's longest continuously erupting volcano. The pictures are grainy, the lens well splattered, but the lights of the nearby down-slope town are clearly visible.
North Korea. Secretary of State Tillerson visited Japan, South Korea, and China, proclaiming that twenty years of talking have produced no results viz a viz North Korea's nuclear program and it is time to move on. But, move on to what? In response, North Korea says that self-defense demands that it continue building its nuclear capability. This situation is the first true military crisis that Japan has faced since the end of WW II. A US-led military response might well place the close-by South Korean capital under Hopefully someone in the Trump administration understands the long history of Korean -- Japanese -- Chinese animosity. Ya' sure.
China and Andrew Jackson. Could columnist Fareed Zakaria be right? That for all his bluster and posing, President Trump does not see that China would love to become the de facto world leader? That for all of his "make America great again" bluster, he is really signalling our retreat on the world stage? If so he is also ceding our power to deal with North Korea and its nuclear arsenal.
Zakaria also takes note that coincident with our withdrawal, China has increased its engagement in Africa and Asia.
An Asian head of government recently told me that at every regional
conference, “Washington sends a couple of diplomats, whereas Beijing
sends dozens. The Chinese are there at every committee meeting, and you
are not.” The result, he said, is that Beijing is increasingly setting
the Asian agenda.
Seemingly just as the President Trump appeared to champion President Jackson, the populist "hero" of New Orleans, he signals our withdrawal to the edge of the world stage. Confusing messages and times.
Reading and leadership. By his own admissions we know that President Trump is not a thorough reader. Here are the relevant thoughts of Trump's Secretary of Defense, General James Matthis.
….The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s
experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a
better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of
incompetence are so final for young men. (emphasis added)
The president might do well to remember that the vulnerable young men (and women) to whom the General refers are on the front lines, not safely seated in a secure office doing some "great,, beautiful deal."
American commissars. Lenin and Stalin must be smiling. It has been reported that the Trump administration has put its very own "eyes and ears," i.e. loyalty monitors, into every important federal cabinet and agency. At Defense, Secretary( General) Mattis' well-read staff, have taken to calling their "watcher," the Commissar. Reportedly, the head of the EPA has shut his watcher out for being too persistent, an unwanted interrupter.
Beware any staffer who wants to speak an inconvenient truth to his boss. A serious threat to whose definition of "democracy"?
Native Americans take a back seat, again! Regarding the hotly contested Standing Rock pipeline, Gundars Rudzitis (professor emeritus, Geography, University of Idaho) notes,
When the citizens of Bismarck objected to putting the [Standing Rock] pipeline 10 miles from their city, fearing the possible contamination of their water supply, the route was simply moved to within one half-mile of the Standing Rock Reservation....A full EIS is required under the National Environmental Policy Act whenever the government undertakes a “major federal action. Yet the new Donald Trump administration wasted no time in canceling the required environmental impact statement and giving the easement that is required by law in order to finish the pipeline.
What followed was, of course, seen on nationwide TV: the forced, less than peaceful end to a year-long standoff, which Professor Rudzitis likened to Selma, March 17, 1965.
The Irish in America and Martin McGuiness. The death of Martin McGuinness was announced this week, a death well noted and hotly debated. Martin never denied being a party to more than few IRA-inspired bombing and shootings in Northern Ireland. Nor could it be ignored that his was a pivotal role in arranging the Easter Peace and the quiet that followed. Some forgave, some did not. Some diehard IRA members who lament the Peace live on.
In the US there are reportedly 33,000,000 Seans and Mollys, Americans of Irish ancestry -- seven times the population of the Old Sod. Here, too, McGuinness had both his sympathizers and detractors.
Last and sadly, heaven gained another Rock and Roll legend with passing of Chuck Berry. Indeed, "Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news" that the first inductee to America's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has arrived!
Thank you for reading. Enjoy the first full week of spring.
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