Let’s start with the Total Solar Eclipse. It was a spectacle if you weren’t hiding in a bunker and got to watch the longest eclipse North America has seen since Kodak invented roll-films in 1988.
With no cell-phone coverage, secluded from the busyness of life, lounging in the quiet comfort of nature - it was blissful.
For 4mins and 15 secs, I looked up into the mid-afternoon darkness as the sun, moon, and earth aligned. It was magical. Now that the show’s over, let’s get back to the darkness we can’t see, unless of course you look through the lens of The Marinade.
Big tech is trying to swallow us whole. Apple has been in rough waters lately. First the anti-trust politicians, the EU and now India - all trying to pry open Apple’s self-gratifying policies. All they want is Apple to comply to the rules of a fair market capitalist society.
If they succeed, then any app developer could potentially push code to the iOS App Store, an open market like the Android Play Store. Yay to the abundance of apps from loosely-vetted coders. Nay to having to install Norton anti-virus to clean up all the trojans that would self-download its way into my world of iOS.
Not all who sneak-in without permission get to stay. I am talking about the Chinese illegal migrants who entered the US southern border at Jacumba Springs, California. Remember? You don’t? I don’t blame you. It’s not hot news anymore. At the time, just for a few days, the main stream media couldn’t care less about Gaza or Ukraine or anything but that. After everyone said their piece, and the political puppet shows ended at the border, we moved on.
Well, I wrote about it if you want to catch up.
Some of those Chinese illegal migrants who crossed the San Juan border got deported back after waiting for months in a U.S. detention facility. Some of them who got accepted found work, then decided to return willingly.
Returning back to China1 after fleeing is no laughing matter. They all get charged a fine on entering China, their passports are taken away, are slapped a 3-year travel ban, their foreign social media accounts and contacts are deleted, and their WeChat communication is continuously monitored.
No matter what our politics, this issue is not as blue or red as the American media wants us to think. The legal and illegal doors remain open for migrants fleeing from their world into ours. People are being displaced. Many are in limbo.
The U.S. border crisis is certainly a pressing issue for our Presidential candidates to debate over the coming months. It will most certainly be also the issue that may never get resolved.
Flip flopping talking points were center stage last week.
Let’s talk about Biden’s flip-flopping first.