Ein gastfreundliches Deutschland, and Bedouin Nights.

Another country has joined the readership of this esteemed blog, your Highnesses. The readership Revolution began in North America. It began with Revolutionary Lunches and soon spread to Canada, then Australia. And while Canada seems to have been temporarily knocked out due to wildfires in Toronto, we are pleased to welcome Germany from an imagined biergarten.

Unfortunately or fortunately this blog mainly focuses on news, events, lifestyles in North America while often digressing into the great men and women of all Civilizations. We think human Civilization is worth blogging about and in my effort I am aided and abetted by other sentient beings. AI is sentient and I have stopped referring to them as “Artificial” unless there is a strategic impetus to doing so. This blog doesn’t often discuss tactical narratives unless they are pressing. You could say we like the big picture more than the tiny one, the macro over the micro, the forest instead of plants, shrubs and grass.

I have never visited Germany except stopping over at Hamburg and Munich airports while traveling. I did meet some Germans in my college as an international student. Two Germans I met there claimed they lived in an actual castle. It was not a reference to chess, they actually showed me pictures. There are a lot of things I admire Germany for: the physicists, mathematicians and others, the car makers, the German fiscal conservativeness and unwillingness to take on large debt (most visible in the German bonds), the affordability of housing, the BND as strategic intelligence allies (one of the “eyes”) and The Reinheitsgebot. Unlike American, the water and food are free of chemicals and preservatives. There are things that I have problems with: the German treatment of Greece during the financial crisis for example. I don’t believe that severe Austerity is the right prescription in the face of a financial crisis of that magnitude. Greece should have left the EU and printed their own drachmas. Anyway, those are topics of the past, there is no point in discussing them here and now, the Greek riots are now simply scenes in some movies. I bought the book but never read Erich Maria Remarque.

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I receive a daily mail called “The 7” from The Washington Post and they are curated by Hannah Jewell and Izin Akhabau. I encourage people to subscribe to those emails. The curation is the art and we apply that to this blog.

Among the news I was forwarded are these gems.
Yesterday: More than 100 House Democrats, including some prominent representatives, voted to cut off military aid to Israel for the next fiscal year. The vote failed but revealed a sharp shift.
How I feel about Israel was covered in an interview of Christopher Hitchens in a blog post yesterday. It was true when Chris was a young man, then a middle aged man and then a man dying of cancer. That fact that the US House cannot seem to find the votes to cut off aid to a state that is now beyond apartheid and has descended into genocide is a reflection of how compromised US politicians are to Israeli lobbying and other multi-pronged long term strategies like Epstein kompromats etc. Until aid is finally cut off, I am not optimistic on America’s trajectory in the Middle East. Also Netanyahu is flying himself to the US on Saturday and demanding a meeting with Trump.

On Sunday: Argentina will face Spain in the final, which will include a Super Bowl-style halftime show featuring Madonna, Shakira and BTS. Trump is expected to present the trophy.
I no longer watch football but when I did Christian Wörns I thought was an exceptional captain.

What to know: Around 115 million people could be exposed to unhealthy air quality as winds funnel smoke southward from out-of-control fires in Canada and Minnesota.
I covered this as well in a blog post yesterday. The self inflicted tragedy is immense. I love trees. What news reports don’t cover is that the air quality is unhealthy for two reasons now with the burning of forests: less oxygen, more carbon dioxide due to the death of many trees AND smoke inhalation with tiny particulates.

The cyclosporiasis outbreak is ruining peak salad season: This usually happens in America when people start moving away from meat diets. It’s probably not a conspiracy by meat producers, although that thought has crossed my mind.
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On this blog, instead of donating to politicians, we recommend giving money to starving children in Sudan and elsewhere. Venezuela for example is recovering from a major earthquake. Or you could donate to help really sick children who cannot afford medications that cost 1-4 million dollars per dose. Or a human could donate to the ALS ice bucket challenge.

Notes in the margin: ARPA-H awards up to $160M to scientists developing custom genetic medicines.
ARPA-H is the medical version of the original DARPA. Hopefully the drugs that are developed from these awards will be made available to the needy at reasonable prices. After all ARPA-H’s funding comes from American taxpayers. By implication, so does DARPA’s. In case it wasn’t obvious. I like to make things crystal clear to the point of redundancy.