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JustPlainBill's avatar

Is it me, or are virtually all white visitors to these exotic locales heavily inked? It's hard to find one in your photos that isn't! I can’t understand the compelling desire of so many Westerners to emulate The Illustrated Man. Down at the local Salvation Army Food Pantry, business is booming nowadays, and many of its patrons are there more because of bad luck than through any great fault of their own. But when we drop off an occasional sack of groceries, I can't help noticing that so many of the younger ones have heavy ink, and wonder how much of their scarce resources are expended on it.

I follow Gonzalo Lira’s videos, and saw his recent one about the power going out. I too have imagined what prolonged power outages must be like. As a retired veteran of the power generation industry, I know better than many where it comes from, and how much and what parts of my modern life depend on it. At least I am not as dependent on it as the denizens of the modern high-rises.

I have at least brushed up against what this must be like. Back in the early 1990’s I worked at a nuclear facility in southern Maryland, a heavily-wooded, largely rural area. One February there was a big ice storm that coated all the trees and power lines with a thick layer of ice. Soon those tree limbs started snapping off, cutting the single string of power lines supplying the area in hundreds of places, making it impossible to repair quickly. The homes of many I worked with were without power for several WEEKS, something I had never imagined. Everyone ran out and bought whatever they could find in the way of portable generators, and soon the local supply was overwhelmed. Then, a month or so later, everything was finally put back together, and incredibly, the papers over the next few weeks had dozens of ads placed by people who wanted to sell their generators. I guess they hadn’t learned anything about preparedness.

I hope Graham continues to hang in there. "On the ground" reports like his are the best look we can get at what is going on, but even those are not "all-seeing eyes"--they only tell you what is happening right around them. With Zelensky shutting down the independent media, people in Ukraine like Graham struggle almost as much as we do to get the true story about anything that they can't observe personally.

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Outsider's avatar

Excellent missive, Linh

One correction though. It was Sean Penn who recently gave his Oscar to Zelensky. If Scientologist Tom Cruise did also, that make two suckers who did. Ben Stiller has been seen kissing the feet of that little Napoleon on several excursions to Kiev. Zelensky is rumored to be pumped up with steroids to tighten his green muscle shirts, which some find sexy, and is also fond of a certain white powder. Still, his performance has been Oscar worthy, especially the time that he tried (unsuccessfully) to start World War Three. No doubt he'll keep trying as long as he remains in power.

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