Hot peppers anyone? They can clear out your throat
and sinuses. The pepper plant grown from seeds planted by my former Bhutan
visitors is now bearing fruit that’s turning fiery. I don’t care for hot
peppers myself and my family and associates who have dared to try them have
found them really a bit too hot, all excerpt my visitor from Bhutan, who has
snapped them up. Sometimes I check the weather in Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital,
and it’s always cold and rainy there, colder and rainier (and snowier) than even
here in Washington, DC, so folks there may need to eat hot peppers to keep them
warm inside.
On
Nov. 15, as all DC residents know, we woke up to snow, not a lot, but very
early in the season, the earliest Nov. snowfall in 30 years. [photo]
Yes,
46 years ago in Nov., I gave birth to my daughter
Stephanie at George Washington University Hospital here in DC. She is a
woman of many talents, but has chosen to work in science, where she excels, as in
everything. Am I perhaps biased? I consider all my kids and grandkids very
special, as most of us do.
It’s
safe to say that most Americans are getting weary of mass shootings and of NRA arguments touting the sacredness
of the Second Amendment. As a Canadian
couple commented after a previous mass shooting, “We’re from Canada, so we don’t have this sort of
thing there.” How terrible that a young man who was spared in Las Vegas was
killed a few months later in Thousand Oaks. His anguished mother said she
doesn’t want any more “thoughts and prayers,” she just wants gun control! After
a mass shooting in Australia, tough
gun-control measures were enacted there that almost halted such shootings in their
tracks.
I’d
ask those who contend that the best defense against gun violence is having even more guns around to take a look at
Honduras. There city grocery stores, Western Union outlets, banks, cell phone
sellers, and even some ice cream parlors have armed guards. The result is an
enormous gun death rate, though, so far, no copycat mass shootings. More guns statistically
result in more gun injuries and deaths. Doesn’t the right to life and to the
pursuit of happiness, also enshrined in the Constitution, trump the right to
bear arms? Why not try a new approach, one that reduces the number of and
access to guns, since a “more-guns” strategy obviously is not working? This is
no longer the wild west! I’ve even advocated giving time-limited financial
incentives to gun manufacturers to reduce their production and switch to making
plowshares or whatever, much like what has been given to farmers to grow fewer
excess crops.
One
of the rightwing websites supporting Trump that has gotten into my feed is now
offering a chance to win a state-of-the-art
pistol complete with earmuffs and ammunition. Apparently, avid gun-owners
(whose numbers mercifully are shrinking), don’t feel safe without their handgun
at their bedside or strapped to their side; it’s part of their persona. Those
folks will just have to die out.
Why
are guns and people such a dangerous
combination? Because people tend to be impulsive, irrational, excitable, and
error-prone. In the hands of children, many guns become lethal toys. Motor
vehicles are dangerous too, so there are restrictions on driving. And while
driverless cars may not be foolproof (nothing is), they are probably safer than
cars with human drivers. People are inherently accident-prone. Probably more
than half of humans now on earth are the products of surprise or accidental pregnancies.
Trump
embarrassed himself and us all with his missteps and misstatements recently in Europe, missing a main event on his
official itinerary because of rain, while other world leaders still attended. He
probably just didn’t feel like appearing there after making statements that displayed
his woeful ignorance of history and geography. A high school student could have
done better. When Trump doesn’t know something, he should just keep his mouth
shut. Rain seems to present a persistent problem for him, as when walking in
the rain with Melania, he forgets to put the umbrella over her head and when he
enters a plane, since he doesn’t know how to close an umbrella, he just leaves
it open outside.
If
Trump actually told the truth, we wouldn’t believe it. Are we really to believe
that he, as the president who fired Sessions right after the midterms, didn’t know
about Whitaker’s views on the Mueller investigation when he skipped over
Rosenstein, the next-in-line, to appoint the newly hired Whitaker whose antagonistic
views on Mueller were common knowledge? What an ill-informed chief executive,
if that were the case. And his self-evaluation is way off if he thinks he’s wildly
popular and an A+ president, attributing his low marks to “fake news.”
Unfortunately,
the guy is seriously mentally and emotionally challenged, so sad for him, his
family, and his associates, and sadder yet for our whole country and the wider world.
He is setting a bad example for other despots and encouraging actual fake news
on the internet which multiplies and disperses his misstatements. Worse yet, he
is not only uninformed and cognitively challenged, but also very meanspirited
and deliberately cruel and never says he’s sorry or wrong. He is gratuitously
nasty. We are almost becoming numb to his mistakes, misstatements, and insults.
And when Trump reads from a teleprompter, he undermines a fairly
straightforward presentation with a silly ad lib. He never apologizes or backtracks,
doubling down instead. He should retire ASAP to the golf course and take out his
frustrations on a little round golf ball. Pundits say it’s hard for a nation to
recover after being led by demagogue and charlatan, so the longer Trump remains
in in office, the worse it gets.
Sarah Sanders has defended Trump’s efforts to strip
Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials saying there has to be “decorum” in the White House. How about
the commander-in-chief setting the example?
Trump
is lucky that the good economy, started under Obama, is still keeping him
afloat as president. If, indeed, he has done nothing wrong, he should be glad
an inquiry will prove that and not be acting so guilty and defensive. When
Trump wrongly accused Obama of having been born in Kenya (for which he has
never apologized), Obama finally came up with his official Hawaii birth
certificate. If the accusations against Trump are wrong, let him come up with
evidence to prove his case instead of belittling and name-calling his accusers.
The
man has certainly been in a funk and
a very bad mood ever since the mid-terms, not only missing a commemoration
ceremony he went to France precisely to attend, but also an Asian-Pacific
economic summit, sending Pence (with his own ambitions) instead. On Veterans’
Day, he failed to go to Arlington Cemetery, as is customary. Trump is probably
rightly worried now that Mueller will get him and that he may be losing
supporters even in the Republican Senate as his hard-core base shrinks. If the Republican Party finally sees its way
clear to jettison its knee-jerk support of Trump for its own survival, then he
will be left without allies. Some Republican office-holders already realize he
is dragging down their party. Mostly, he has been governing by winging it and
letting staff clean up his messes. We’ve lost a lot of respect not only for the
president himself, but for the office.
In Brownsville, Texas, Catholic Bishop Daniel Flores says church
property should not be used for a border
wall - that it “would limit freedom of the church to exercise her mission
in the Rio Grande Valley.” He is worried they won’t be able to stop federal officials
who have now filed in court to obtain rights to survey the property for
eventual border wall construction.
I
feel like a broken record advocating that the Catholic Church, in which I was raised, baptized, and married,
allow married and women priests. (See pp.181-2 of my book Triumph & Hope.) Now, George Shultz, former Secretary of Labor,
says the same in an article appearing in the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-not-allow-priests-to-marry-or-women-to-be-ordained/2018/11/13/025fe2d0-e69c-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html?utm_term=.ede102858b9e
Pope Francis, who started out with much support
from the faithful, has had his image tarnished by the revelation of longstanding
priestly child sex abuse and coverup. And the church worldwide has suffered a
serious crisis; it is not just an American problem.
In
Brazil, President-elect Jair Bostoner
will require Cuban doctors working there to receive their pay directly, instead
having it go to the Cuban government, and also have then be allowed to bring
their families with them, so the Cuban government has decided to pull them out.
The Cuban government’s doctors-for-hire program, a big
source of foreign income, has long been a bone of contention. As per my
books, I have often worked with Cuban doctors and other health professionals in
Honduras, some of whom have stayed on there, leaving their families in Cuba
behind. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/14/cuba-doctors-brazil-withdraw-jair-bolsonaro
On Dec. 7, the OAS has scheduled a
conference at its DC headquarters on Human
Rights in Cuba.
I
well remember Paradise, California,
a lovely special town, not far from Sacramento where I lived many years ago. My
late ex-husband and I bought a piece of land on a stream outside of Paradise and
camped out there several times. My ex got that property in our divorce. So sorry
it has all gone up in smoke.
Happy Thanksgiving, Feliz Día de Acción de Gracias
