Virunga, Congo

Oil companies are circling Virunga National Park in the Congo, home to several endangered wildlife species such as mountain gorillas.  The oil company thugs stoop to bribery and murder.  The Government is silent saying they must support anything that will lift their people out of poverty.  One could be more impressed if they were putting a large part of their royalties into a trust fund for all its citizens, such as Alaska did.  
 The Congo has been home to natural resource exploitation by the Belgians for generations and where are the jobs it was supposed to create?  Any natural resource eventually runs out and the people who get rich are government officials and foreign companies.
Source: NYT 16 Nov 2014

Obama Popularity

Why has Obama's popularity plummeted?  He has accomplished a great deal that is not getting talked about.  He is the victim of the press and his opponents (some racist) that keep chanting "Obama Care" is bad.  This seems to stop further thinking about actual consequences.  It reminds of Gov. George Romney whose campaign for the presidency coincided with the Vietnam War.  He went on a fact-finding mission and came back and said he had been "brain washed" by the generals.  Well, we can't have a president who can be brain washed and the press repeated this trope over and over again and Romney's quest for the presidency was over.  The press and many people did not want to know more. 
Culture is a strange animal that is hard to understand.  Words can enter the language, and no matter how misleading, they have a life of their own, albeit pushed along by opinion makers.  Why is not "Affordable Care" is easy to say as "Obama Care?"  But, then the opponents would have to admit that they simply don't want to give aid to the poor--they don't deserve it.

For Shame America

For Shame America.  More than 57,000 young migrants have been apprehended, coming without parents, mostly from Central America since October.  At great expense, we have thousands of immigration control officers and elaborate fences.  I try to imagine the desperation of parents to send their children north hoping to escape killing and rape by drug gangs.  Do we need extensive interviews to determine if these children are eligible for entry? We are ruining our neighbors.

      The whole thing is our fault.  If we treated our addicts, the demand and profits of the drug trade would dry up. 

Spy who came in from the cold

John LeCarre comparing today's undercover operations with those when he wrote his famous spy novel:
"Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic  illegal war in Iraq , or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semiautomatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as-a risk-free method of assassinating one's perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the Third World, and great banks are there to serve the public."
      We have not learned a thing!  LeCarre asks, "How far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?

Immigration Policy

Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, receiving an honorary degree from MSU, set my mind to work on immigration policy. He argued that all illegal immigrants living in the U.S. should be given the right to stay. "But, wouldn't that reward people for breaking the law?" Velasquez points out that we pardon law breakers all the time. He gave examples of Pres Nixon and the Watergate operatives. So why not Mexicans?
He argues further that if we believe in open markets for goods, why not for people. I don't have a good answer, so I am going with him, at least up to a certain number per year, so as not to overload facilities. I recall that Switzerland accepts a certain number of foreign immigrants per year and requires every local government to provide for a certain number. This spreads immigrants around rather than having them all in a few places putting a great strain on social services, and facilitating integration, etc.