Global

U.S. presidential election campaigns have been known to focus on the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Efforts to explain the behavior of the U.S. government ought to put a little more focus on a different slogan, found in the headline above.

“Could China’s economy collapse?” was the title of an October 15 article published by QUARTZ magazine. The article makes an ominous case of a Chinese economic crash and its impact on China’s and global economies. 

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Ancient Silk Road travelers cursed China's
largest desert as "Takla Makan," an ominous Persian-Turkic expression
which translates as "enter and you may never return."

Undeterred by its sandstorms and merciless terrain in the oblong basin
north of Tibet's glacier-packed peaks, China has announced completion
of the final section of a Taklamakan Desert railway loop line, the
world's first to encircle a desert.

Elsewhere, China is constructing maglev train systems, capable of
hurtling passengers and freight hundreds of miles per hour, including
an underwater route near Shanghai to reach tiny offshore islands.

These latest railways increase China's military, industrial,
agricultural and political prowess, amid escalating rivalry with the
U.S. over each nation's capabilities.

The Taklamakan Desert railway loop also allows Beijing greater access
to rebellious Kashgar, a distant southwestern city near vulnerable
borders with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Kashgar and elsewhere in Xinjiang province comprise a large population

A Rotarian has just made me aware that Rotary quietly adopted a policy in June of not investing in weapons companies. This is worth celebrating and encouraging all other organizations to do likewise. Here is the policy, excerpted from a document pasted below:

“The Rotary Foundation . . . will typically avoid investment in . . . companies that derive significant revenue from producing, distributing, or marketing . . . military weapons systems, cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines, and nuclear explosives.”

Now, I’ll admit that declaring what you will “typically” not do is weak compared to declaring what you will never do, but it does create leverage to make sure that in fact the “typical” behavior is at least mostly what is done.

And it is certainly odd that after “military weapons systems” three particular types of military weapons systems are added, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to read that as excluding other types of military weapons systems. They seem to all be covered.

Below is appendix B from the minutes of a Rotary International board meeting in June 2021. I’ve bolded a bit of it:

*****

When Joe Biden was declared the winner in the US elections last November, expectations in Ramallah were high. A Biden Administration, compared to the brazenly pro-Israel Trump Administration, would surely be much fairer to Palestinians, was the conventional wisdom at the time. 

Several million dollars’ worth of fiction exploded the other day, leaving cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — age 42, a wife, a mom — dead, and plunging Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot her, into a state of unimaginable hell.

This happened on Oct. 21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the set of the movie Rust. Despite the enormity of coverage the incident has gotten, I remain bewitched with incredulity over one unanswered question. Baldwin, the star of the movie, a Western, and one of its producers, was practicing his gun draw, using a prop gun he’d been given — except the gun wasn’t a prop. It was real. And it was loaded.

My question, of course, is: Why?

On October 26 I saw Tom Stoppard interviewed on PBS’ Amanpour & Company and the British playwright stated that “theater is a storytelling art form.” While I hold the bard who wrote 1966’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in high esteem (see my review of A Noise Within’s 2016 production of Arcadia: “Arcadia”: Tom Stoppard’s complex Byronic drama to the manor born – People's World (peoplesworld.org)), there are some intrepid souls in the realm of the stage who’d beg to differ with Stoppard’s definition/description of theater.

Wishful thinking aside, the threat of nuclear war has not receded. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moving the “Doomsday Clock”ever closer to cataclysmic midnight; the symbolic hands are now merely 100 seconds from midnight, in contrast to six minutes a decade ago.

When the news circulated that Morocco's leading political group, the Development and Justice Party (PJD), has been trounced in the latest elections, held in September, official media mouthpieces in Egypt celebrated the news as if the PJD's defeat was, in itself, a blow to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement. Regionally, political commentators who dedicated much of their time to discredit various Islamic political parties - often on behalf of one Arab government or another - found in the news another supposed proof that political Islam is a failure in both theory and practice.