… I think. My crystal ball is out for re-calibration so I cannot be absolutely certain, but I’ve been expecting a crisis or bundle of intersecting catastrophes for some time now. There have been murmurings for the last year regarding the probability of Ebola spreading out of Africa. And now it has happened a person sick with it has exposed lord only knows how many other people on his way back to Dallas from a visit to Africa. Which is horrific enough, but just getting started. Meanwhile, an enterovirus which attacks the respiratory tract and in some instances has an effect very like that of polio has been here for some months, sickening children especially those who have respiratory difficulties.
Just Unbelievable
Sunset Empire
Between my English and Scots-Irish-English grandparents, a deep and abiding love of English literature and history, a fair number of English friends, and two long-ago summers sojourns in Britain doing the youth hostel and Brit-Rail Pass, I’ve always looked on the place as my metaphorical second country. I know it about as well as any American could and not actually be in residence there, and I’ve always kept in touch through English magazines, newspapers and yes, in recent years through websites. Yes, and I score sufficiently high on any number of those quizzes testing American knowledge of British slang to say, with perfect truth, that I speak fluent Brit. (Although I can’t place British regional accents … something to do with acquiring most of this knowledge from the printed page rather than the spoken word.)
So ever since I happily discovered The Internet, and began following more news than was available in the local newspaper and mainstream print publications, I’d been reading English news sites starting with, I think, The Times of London and The Spectator before they put the good stuff behind a pay-wall, and moving on to the Telegraph. I had a print subscription to the Guardian Weekly, for years and occasionally checked out their website before the burden of wading through waist to neck-deep oceans of political-correctitude got to be too much of a chore. Now my guilty tabloid pleasure is to scan the Daily Mail; I know, in the eyes of the grand and the good, this is about one step above the Star or the National Enquirer. But the Mail and the Enquirer have of late begun to commit regular acts of non-partisan journalism especially when it comes to the American political scene, in contrast to the supposedly more respectable publications.
Schrecklichkeit
It’s a German word it means “frightfulness“ and it was used, if memory serves and a brief internet search conforms as a sort of shorthand for the reprisals exacted by the German Army against civilians during both wars. If not an actual German military field policy in WWI, it had certainly become one by WWII; brutally persecute, torture and execute civilians, and make certain that such horrors became well-known through extensive documentation within the theater of operations, and outside of it. To encourage the others, as the saying goes, but on a grand scale to make war on a civilian population, once all effective military have departed the area in hopes of cowing everyone who sees and hears of what brutality has been meted out on the helpless, and especially the helpless.
Was it an explicit policy of the German armies to apply the principle of schrecklichkeit by that name or another in the field in those wars?
IBD: “Child Alien Crisis Obama’s Fault, But GOP Won’t Pounce”
The more than 90,000 children who crossed the Mexican border into the U.S. and were apprehended this year, and the more than 140,000 expected next year, could and should turn the immigration issue into a GOP weapon against Democrats.
Instead of sending them back home to their parents, Attorney General Eric Holder made it a priority to hire taxpayer-funded lawyers for them. Why don’t we hear Cantor, Ryan and other GOP leaders shout that Democrats are exploiting children to further their political agenda?
The main thing the Republicans have going for them is that the Democrats are worse.
Harbingers
I’ve been surfing my usual internet hangouts over the last week or so in between working on various editing, formatting and sales projects for the Tiny Publishing Bidness so although I did surf, and read and observe reports on a number of different and rather disturbing events I didn’t have time to write anything about them until after I had finished the biggest of the current projects on my plate.
The biggest of them was the new-old range war of the Bundy ranch. I suppose that technically speaking, the Fed Gov had some small shreds of technical justification in demanding grazing fees … but the longer one looked at the whole of L’affaire Bundy, the worse it looked … which is doubtless why the Fed Gov backed down. A tactical retreat, of course; The optics of a shoot-out between the minions of the Fed Gov and the various Bundy supporters would not have been good, for Harry Reid and his clan and friends most of all, although they may eventually act seeing that they have a position which will be at risk by tolerating defiance.