These are certainly extraordinary times and that may be an understatement.
You can look at the situation on the Korean peninsula and maybe shake your head that it has come to this point. But you can also find an article from the American “progressive” news web site, “The North Korean economy is actually growing despite sanctions”.
The Korea correspondent for The New York Times—Choe Sang-hun—chimes in with “The economy in North Korea is showing surprising signs of life”. Both pieces acknowledge that the authors have no idea about the actual economic output. But (from Choe) “there are now enough cars on its [capital Pyongyang] once-empty streets for some residents to make a living washing them”. He does not indicate whether these “car washers” will ever be allowed to own one.
Apple Corp. just reported earnings and has cash holdings of $256.8 billion, more than the total economic output of New Zealand. But it is really not “cash” if us ignorant folks thought Apple keeps it in their “savings or current” account. It is really “in long-term marketable securities”, which is considered “cash”, but not “real” cash.
We celebrated Labor Day in the Philippines. Everywhere else that the day is observed, it is “May Day”. The “holiday” was started as the “International Worker’s Day” in the US by the Communist and Socialist parties “to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat and for universal peace”. And the demonstrations turned to rioting with the destruction and burning of public and private property in France and Portland, Oregon. “Universal peace” must have many meanings.
It is not just the events that are interesting. Something else is going on.
Alexander van der Bellen, Austrian president, says, “It is every woman’s right to always dress how she wants.” But then he says, “There will come a day where we must ask all women to wear a headscarf [the hijab]— all- out of solidarity to those who do it for religious reasons.” Am I the only one that thinks those ideas do not make any sense together?
Look at the global press, the media and social media and the intensity of emotion on so-called issues is somewhat unprecedented and a little frightening. Brexit, Duterte, Donald J. Trump, Marine Le Pen in France and a host of other people and “causes” have taken discussion far beyond anything we would have normally considered rational.
US scientist want-to-be and television host Bill Nye says he is openly favorable to the idea of jailing “global warming” skeptics at The Hague as “war criminals”. I thought we got past that thinking after an Italian guy named Galileo was threatened with torture when he disagreed with “98 percent of all scientists” and wrote that the sun did not go around the Earth.
A visiting professor from Ireland —a woman and a genuine degreed scientist by the way—at a US university was called a “Goddamn idiot” for suggesting that washing machines were more liberating for women than the birth-control pill. Apparently, her critics send their clothes to a laundry—maybe operated by Chinese people—to have more time to enjoy the liberating benefits of their birth-control pills.
There are going to be a whole lot of people totally burned out when the real Zombie apocalypse comes.
Having written repeatedly about the coming together of several economic and political cycles, the intensity of the rhetoric and the behavior behind it is going to increase going into 2018. The problem is that “interesting” can turn into “dangerous” without warning.
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