Other “limited airstrikes with no boots on the ground”:
– Pearl Harbor
– 9/11
Well, this time it’ll be different. For one thing, we’ll be the attacker. For another, the Syrians can’t hit back. So no problem, right?
You know how when the government attempts to regulate or control wildlife (as with those desert tortoises who are about to lose their sanctuary in Nevada) the answer is always euthanization? Or how when there’s economic depression and high unemployment, the answer is always austerity? Or how when there’s an intractable problem with a foreign country (one we can easily whip, that is), the answer is always war?
I can’t help thinking there are less obvious but better answers. Let people adopt the desert tortoises and keep them in their back yards. Print money and give it to the people, not the banks that stole it from them in the first place. Let the Arab League tackle its own disintegrating member states and work out its own tribal animosities.
I read a report the other day that said the chaos in Syria is at least partially the result of climate change. The country has been experiencing devastating drought since 2001. Farmers drilled deeper wells but eventually tapped out the aquifer and abandoned their lands. Two to three million rural Syrians, reduced to extreme poverty and starvation, fled to the cities in search of basic survival. Once there they had to compete with Palestinian and Iraqi refugees who had earlier sought shelter in Syria, setting the stage for everything that’s happened since.
I don’t even want to think about what things may come to in this country if we tap out the water table in the Southwestern USA, where we are currently experiencing a similar extended drought. That border wall the teabaggers keep calling for? They’ll build it, all right, but it’ll run along the northern borders of Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and it’ll be used to keep thirsty Americans out of the parts of the country that still have water.
Now that I’ve thoroughly depressed myself (and you as well, I hope), on to happier news.
I, for one, welcome the return of cooler weather to southern Arizona. Any day now. C’mon, already! Speaking of hot weather, it sure is great to have a swimming pool. Speaking of swimming pools, it sure is expensive to own one!
When Ed and I stopped for lunch at the Hogan Family Restaurant in Tuba City Sunday, the soup of the day was New Mexico green chile stew. Today I’m fixing up a pot at home, using my alter ego Crouton deMenthe’s recipe. I’d rather use fresh chiles than canned ones, but you know when the craving hits you gotta have it now. They’re just starting to harvest this season’s pepper crop in New Mexico, so the Hatch chile roaster will be back in front of our local Safeway again soon and I can make up another pot of stew with fresh chiles.
I finished reading a backlog of library books and am now back to reading ebooks, where I’ve built up a much larger backlog. I generally read ebooks on a Nook; Donna uses a Kindle. But since I have a Kindle app on our iPad I can read Kindle books too, and have ordered a few. The only problem with reading on an iPad is that it’s big and heavy enough you need to hold it with both hands, and if you’re going to use both hands the thing that’s in ’em might as well be a real book. So naturally the first thing I did after turning in the finished library books was to put two more on hold.
I occasionally get friend requests from hot chicks on Facebook. They’re fake, of course, probably put up by (male) Russian scammers, and I always block them. Today, though, I got one from a hot chick who apparently likes motorcycles. At least most of her photos show her standing next to a motorcycle. Several motorcycles, actually, a different one in each photo. It took me about two seconds to recognize her as the work of yet another scammer, but this one a rarer breed: a scammer willing to put in the effort required to create tailored come-ons. I post motorcycle-related status updates to Facebook all the time. This scammer must have been on the lookout for Facebook guys who like motorcycles, and had a fake biker chick page all prepared. So is this a new thing, tailored Facebook friend request scams?
I post a lot of book reviews too. Wonder how long it’ll be before I get a friend request from a hot chick with glasses? Yo, scammers, I already know hot chicks who wear glasses … they’re in my book club, they’re real … and one of them is a biker too!
That can of green chiles is calling. Time to get cookin’.