1. Hungarian TV “told not to broadcast images of refugee children”2. Norwegian bank apologizes for issuing anti-Semitic credit card3. Spanish broadcaster removes “Jewish Satanism” show from its website4. Swiss Foreign Ministry says sorry for cartoon of birds defecating on Netanyahu5. Luxembourg’s biggest supermarket chain stops selling Israeli products6. Chinese conglomerate ignores BDS protests, buys majority stake in Ahava7. Two injured as Jewish football team attacked in Berlin8. Man arrested for attack on Paris synagogue9. Visitors complain about “cool down” showers at Auschwitz10. Prince Albert of Monaco apologizes for his country’s deportation of Jews11. Jewish cafe re-opens in Shanghai12. Labour’s Corbyn criticized for supporting Palestinians who bombed Jewish charity13. Iran bars Daniel Barenboim from concert over Israeli citizenship14. ISIS-affiliated terrorists fire rocket at Israel but hit Gaza
Good morning and welcome to another Winning With Women Wednesday. Last week we interviewed, Charles (Chuck) Brooks who currently serves as the Vice President for Government Relations & Marketing for Sutherland Global Services. Chuck leads Federal, State & Local Government relations activities. He is also an Advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Technology Partner network and serves on the boards of several prominent public and private companies and organizations. Chuck has extensive service in Senior Executive Management, Marketing, Government Relations, and Business Development and worked in those capacities for three large public corporations.
After four years of devastating civil war with more than 240,000 dead — some from government use of chemical weapons and some from government- induced starvation — Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has admitted he has a manpower problem. In fact, he has a bigger problem than that.
Assad’s Russian and Iranian sponsors know that his grip on Syria is far from secure. The Islamic State group has expanded its territory in the north, and fighting in the suburbs of Damascus could trigger a collapse of the regime if one major breakthrough occurs. Thus the Syrian government has turned to brutalbombings of civilians and other measures to try to stave off what is looking more and more inevitable.
The situation could deteriorate further, and Assad may use even more desperate methods if he can find them.
Stratfor’s George Friedman published an interesting article on September 1, “ Pondering Hitler’s Legacy,” to mark the 76th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. The first outcome of Hitler’s war, he says, was that it destroyed Europe’s hegemony over much of the world and its influence over the rest:
Within 15 years of the end of the war, Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands lost their empires . . . By the end of the war they had lost the will, the energy and the wealth to maintain their power. After half-hearted and doomed attempts to resist, these countries willingly participated in the dismantling of what they had once thought of as their birthright . . . After the war, Europe faced the task of rebuilding buildings. The ambition to rule had been exhausted.
This assertion is disputable. The dusk of European hegemony started in the aftermath of the First World War. The wealth was largely gone by 1918. A financially crippled Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931. France was even more severely damaged: the ravages of war on her soil exceeded 100 percent of her 1913 GDP; the national debt rose from 66% of GDP in 1913 to 170% in 1919. High inflation caused the franc to lose half its value against the British pound.
After mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks, fleas, flies and other tiny disease-carrying insects that seem to exist solely to cause human misery and pain and which are otherwise expendable, the cicada is the next most useless creature in the animal kingdom. Ants and worms aerate the soil. Bees distribute pollen.
The cicada, however, does nothing. It doesn’t even transmit a disease. It’s also so ugly it resembles an alien life form. I’m surprised that no independent film producer has shot and released “The Attack of the Flesh-Eating Cicadas From Planet Xylophone.” It’s noisy. The mating call of the American cicada, as anyone who has ever heard one (or a forest full of cicadas) can testify, is a shrill, high-pitched, compressed clicking similar to the sound of a car’s gears being stripped. Or a DVD player spinning its wheels. Or a badly designed alarm clock. It can outshout the mating call of a tree frog.
I’d rather listen to a forest full of crickets. That can be deafening, too, but at least I know the crickets are not coming after me.
Basically, the cicada provides an “ecological” service to everyone and everything by just dying. It is basically a parasite. It doesn’t even feed on other parasites. Like the equally useless bagworm, It sucks on tree fluids, becomes an adult, reproduces, and dies. It is only good for being mulched in soil after it dies, or being consumed by ants and other insects, and by squirrels, birds, and other animals when they’re desperate.
All the websites on the cicada say that it is a nutrient-rich delicacy. There are actually cicada recipes. No, thank you. I have a hard time picturing people chowing down on chocolate-covered ants and snails.
One can’t say about the cultural cicadas that make a lot of noise on Netflix that they’re “nutrient-rich.” These movies and TV series are not nutrient-rich – at least not for one’s souls – and are otherwise useless as esthetic and/or moral experiences. They are not produced for “uplift.” They do not provide what novelist Ayn Rand called “emotional fuel” for one to pursue one’s values. They are a hybrid cicada, and can burrow into one’s mind and soul to lay eggs. They are produced, consciously or unconsciously, to inculcate an enervating epistemological and metaphysical drone that life is pointless, that happiness is random and arbitrary, and that existence is just one long sentence of spiritually eviscerating numbness with no chance of relief or commutation.
