Friday, May 22, 2015

the blur of painful news: mid May 2015

This is one of those weeks where it feels like the accumulation of events has been like balloons inflating, but under the skin. It is painful, as they inflate but even when they pop, as we know they must, it will be still more painful. And then all will have to heal. But meanwhile, the skin puffs up in another new place and then slowly inflates.

In Iraq the forces there lost the city of Ramadi to the insurgent Daesh. A few days later reports came in that they had seized ancient Palmyra in Syria. A city today of 150,000 and half of its inhabitants have fled.
This is a refugee camp in neighboring Jordan.

There has been much discussion this week about the Iraq war ousting Saddam Hussein. A pair of articles in the Atlantic offer modern takes on this and an interview with President Obama on what he sees for the Middle East.

For three years some 120,000 Rohingya of Myanmar have tried to flee persecution in their country. But their neighbors largely do not want them. This week slowly Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, even Gambia have said they will accept small numbers but there may be 6-8000 of these souls, lost at sea. Nearly half are children 12 and under.
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 On Monday people tried to make sense of the shootout the day before in Waco, TX between rival biker gangs where nine were killed and eighteen hospitalized. Over 170 were arrested and put in jail awaiting the investigation. The police spokesman said, "I don't think people were defending themselves today. I think they were involved in criminal activity and didn't care who they shot."

On Tueday people in Seattle struck and protested over education spending.
There was a major oil spill Wednesday in Santa Barbara, CA of over 100,000 gallons of oil that now stretches over nine miles.
There was the train derailment in Philadelphia last week.
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David Letterman ended his 33 year career as a funny man on television.
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B.B. King, King of the Blues died this week. He was known the world over for playing his kind of american music for over sixty years. I saw him once in Kansas City over twenty years ago. Here's a fantastic set with him and James Brown from thirty years ago.
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In 1971 some activists stole into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They took all the files and slowly began sending them to newspaper publishers across the country to expose what the government was doing in secret, including unlawful surveillance. Here's the movie about it.
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