In the following very short video American writer John Green shows a little of what life is like for young people in the Zaatri refugee camp on an arid plain in northern Jordan near the Syrian border.
The camp was established 2012 July 28 (barely over 4 years ago as I write this) to shelter refugees from the civil war in Syria. It was supposed to be temporary, but because the war shows no sign of ending, Zaatri is developing into a permanent city with its own government and a population of around 80,000, most of them children and adolescents. The Wikipedia article on the camp (link) has a photo that shows the immense scale of the place.
There are reasons besides simple decency to help educate young people like the ones John Green interviews in the video. Adolescents in camps like this can lose hope and become vulnerable to the influence of everything from criminal gangs and drug dealers to political and religious extremists and terrorist organizations.
For whatever they’re worth, my other posts on the refugee crisis can be found at this link.
I’ve become a fan of East India Comedy, a group of Indian comics with an active YouTube channel. Even when I don’t get a lot of the jokes (which is most of the time), I still find their material entertaining.
This video, however, isn’t merely of mainly funny, it’s a tribute to good people, people who do things that deserve credit and admiration, such as Bijendra Singh, a retired soldier now employed as a security guard, who spends his nights teaching homeless children. Or Udai Bhai, who drives a taxi but asks people to pay what they are able and think is fair. (The Sanskrit phrase mentioned, Atithi Devo Bhava, is an admonition to treat people with hospitality. It means, “The guest is equivalent to God.”)
Not all are heroes in the classic sense, but Bipin Ganatra is. When he was a teenager his brother died in a fire and in the forty years since then he has been risking his life to fight fires and save people from them, though he is not a professional firefighter. He says he does it because he has nothing to lose.
This one is a couple of weeks old but still quite funny (and in passing informative): Stephen Colbert travels to Jon Stewart’s off-the-grid cabin and among other things reveals that the GOP nominee for president is not Jeb Bush.
(The second Stephen Colbert in the bit, the one with the Captain America shield, is his alter ego, the parody conservative commentator Colbert used to play on The Colbert Report.)
Minute Physics points out that despite the Sun’s immense gravity, it’s remarkably hard to throw something off of Earth so that it hits the Sun. In fact, it’s actually easier, at least in terms of energy, to send a payload elsewhere in the universe than to make it fall into our own Sun.
In brief, if you throw something at the Sun and miss, it will either go into an orbit around the Sun or it will be deflected by the Sun’s gravity but keep going beyond the Solar System. To hit the Sun you have to throw it just right. That’s hard to do, because anything you launch from the Earth starts out moving with Earth’s speed around the Sun, pretty much at right angles to the direction it needs to go to hit the Sun, so you have to somehow cancel that speed and cancel it pretty much exactly. There are ways of doing that, but it requires a lot of rocket fuel or some clever orbital tricks of the sort mentioned in the video.
A brief July 26 Time magazine article by Olivia B. Waxman (link) addresses the historical context of Esperanto, and it’s noteworthy for being relatively accurate. For example, she points out that while Esperanto was initially an “invented” language, it quite soon started evolving naturally in use. I’ve heard so much nonsense about Esperanto I was delighted to see something fact-based for a change.
There’s a commercial on television recently that claims raising chickens without antibiotics is just a scam to charge more money. After all, it says, federal rules don’t permit selling chickens with any antibiotic residue.
Of course, that’s not the problem. Antibiotics are used in farming primarily as a way of stimulating rapid growth, and this overuse promotes the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Routine use of antibiotics for that purpose should never have been allowed to start with, and until it’s prohibited we can at least try to avoid buying from operations that still use this irresponsible practice.
Lately I find I often feel like grabbing certain segment of the populace by the scruff of the neck and politely inquiring, “What the hell is wrong with you people??”
Bernie Sanders fans and people in general have valid reasons for disliking Hillary Clinton. True, some attacks on her are wildly false (see Snopes for plenty of examples), such as the assertion that she or someone in the Obama administration issued a “stand down” order to stop U.S. forces from rescuing Americans in Benghazi. That particular rumor was debunked by a whole series of Congressional investigations, most of them conducted by Republicans.
But a lot of other attacks on her are valid. She’s shown some pretty bad judgment, the prime example being her use of a private email server for official business then having her own staff as opposed to a neutral party expunge personal emails. True, until John Kerry no U.S. secretary of state restricted official communications to government email accounts, and the evidence is that no secrets of any importance were divulged. But when I was doing work for a large enterprise I was careful to use their secure email system for work purposes and keep it separate from my personal email, and she should have been smart enough to do the same. But there’s no evidence what she did compromised any actual secrets, and despite calls to “lock her up,” no one has ever been criminally prosecuted for doing what she did.
She’s also a tireless self-promoter. She’s delivered ridiculously expensive speeches to some pretty sleazy Wall Street organizations and refused to reveal what she said. She’s been caught in a number of self-serving lies, and by various accounts she’s a pretty unpleasant person to work for. She’s lied about a lot of things (a common habit of politicians, but that’s no excuse).
So I understand why a lot of people, including Bernie supporters, would dislike her. I can even understand why some people find her voice annoying, though it’s hard for me to see that as a major consideration in selecting a president. (Some people apparently disliked Abraham Lincoln’s voice.)
But for God’s sake, people, everything wrong with Hillary is also wrong with Donald Trump, only vastly worse. He has a history of stiffing contractors and using bankruptcy to get out of paying his debts. No U.S. bank will do business with him. He didn’t just lend his name to “Trump University” — an outright scam designed to peddle yugely overpriced get-rich-with-real-estate courses to people in and approaching retirement in need of more income — he actively helped design the marketing materials, though not the courses that were supposedly based on his business secrets. He pays lip service to the Constitution but advocates a long list of things that plainly violate it. He praises some of the world’s worst dictators for their supposed “leadership.” He casually talks about breaking treaties (including the highly important North Atlantic Treaty) and advocates the spread of nuclear weapons, even to governments with links to terrorism. As people across the entire political spectrum have pointed out, he lies not just on occasion but constantly. In fact, his campaign is largely based on a string of lies about today’s United States, lies about everything from taxation to immigration to the strength of our military.
A few years ago a friend of mine told me that the problem with voting for the lesser of two evils is that you still end up with evil. I told him he was right, but unfortunately in the real world not voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t change that, it just makes it a bit more likely that you’ll end up with the greater evil.
If you don’t think Donald Trump is by far a greater evil than Hillary Clinton you’re not really paying attention.
(Updated 2016 July 31 to fix some typos, add a few points, and the like.)
Apologies to anyone reading this blog for my recent inactivity. I’ve been dealing with a serious illness in my family, but I should be able to begin posting stuff again soon.
A group of prisoners in a Texas jail saw their guard collapse. When yelling for help produced no response, they manage to break out of the cell and proceeded to bang on doors and shout until other deputies finally arrived and gave the fallen guard emergency aid. The guard’s heart had stopped, but he survived.
When interviewed by a local television station, a couple of the prisoners admitted they had some fear that the other guards would come in with guns drawn and misunderstand the situation as an assault. The unconscious guard had a gun and keys but none of the inmates attempted to take them.
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