Tired but infuriated I watched the House Havoc to its end. Then just as my brain sensed a wee bit of insight a client sent me the Times’ article castigating tourists who drive too close to cheetah.
Alas that sliver of insight from the Speaker’s brawl wasn’t, in fact, drown in the rage provoked with the Times’ story. Good insight like a piece of petrified wood gleams even brighter in the white water of rage:
Half-truths, cherry-picked truths, like the bits and pieces of glass on the kitchen floor can’t possibly tell you what’s just shattered or how it fell in the first place or what to do to prevent it happening, again. Rather, the shattered glass is a sensational, reportable event, just like too many cars lining up to watch too few cheetah.
But where did all those cars come from? Who’s in them? Who’s driving them, washing them, fixing them, financing them? The Times doesn’t care about that, but that’s the crux of the story.
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No doubt that Paul Rusesabagina, fictionalized as the hero of “Hotel Rwanda,” supports the revolutionary group that successfully blew up tiny bits of Rwanda over the last five years. But was his tricked kidnapping by a wicked priest for a show trial in Kigali the right way to keep Rwandans from massacring each other?
Africa is breaking as covid cases surge.
For my African friends. Well… all my friends, and especially for those who live near Galena, Illinois.
It will probably be three to four years before the effects of the virus stop impacting travelers to distant lands. Efficacy of the vaccines, mayhem in airline schedules, widely differing and radical airport rules for transfers and most importantly, the hugely damaged vendor communities are all just now being recognized as the travelers’ principle hurdles.
America, your weak, lilly-white specious religious and facetious democracy with its high faluting quasi morality is in complete meltdown. 
I was in Nairobi walking the streets with three hundred dollars of cold cash squished deeply into my cargo pants pocket. It was 1994. I knew Nairobi well but the street I was now walking, not so well.
Westerners decry plastic islands floating in the oceans and embrace with horror the fact that the weight of disposed plastics on earth will be greater than the weight of all its fish by 2050.
I saw my first gorilla in 1977. It was an eastern lowland gorilla in Kahuzi-Biega national park in The Congo, a species of gorilla (graueri) that’s still going extinct. I watched several Italians throw tomatoes at them. There were no guides then. You just climbed into mountain jungles and threw things at fur. It was an improvement over shooting.
Populism is not some lonesome social condition. Populism controls democracy, and populism brings down and sets up autocratic regimes. It’s not conservative or progressive, capitalist or communist. It’s not necessarily based on truth. It’s knee-jerk support for – or against – individuals wielding power. Why? How is it harnessed?