But first, one bit of detritus from the national scene ~
The Trump administration wants to delay a Democratic effort that would require the Secret Service to disclose its spending on the protection of the current occupant of the White House and his family during their travels.
The Government Accountability Office estimated that travel by the former reality-TV performer cost taxpayers $13.6 million in one month of 2017. At that rate, travel costs in eight months would exceed the total — $96 million — for Barack Obama’s eight years. That projects to $1.3 billion for eight years of golfing.
“Kennedy knew it was going to be important. He rested that afternoon. Nixon made a speech to the Carpenters Union that day in Chicago — thought this was just another campaign appearance that night — was ill. Arrived at the studio, banged his knee when he got out of the car, was in pain, looked green, sallow, needed a shave.” – Don Hewitt
With a little over a month to go until election day, polling showed Republican Vice-president Richard Nixon with a slim lead over his rival, Democratic Senator John Kennedy, in the race to choose the successor to two-term President Dwight Eisenhower. On September 26, 1960 both candidates met at a CBS television studio in Chicago. For the first time ever, the presidential debate would be televised. Seventy-million viewers tuned in that evening.
Those who listened to the debate on the radio perceived Nixon as victorious. Television viewers saw Kennedy as the clear winner.
The current occupant of the White House has made danger from our southern border a relentless theme of his pandering to die-hard supporters. In truth, however, the murders, extortion, and kidnappings by Mexican crime cartels continue unabated.
Cartels use violence to compete for control of flow of the product. In the first nine months of 2019, the state Michoacan suffered 1,145 murders, on a pace to exceed the 1,338 killings in 2018. Small towns have formed vigilante groups to provide the protection that law enforcement can’t or won’t. Farmers are arming to protect themselves and their crops. Drivers transporting the produce are regularly hijacked and robbed. All this carnage is the result of crime cartels fighting to dominate the lucrative business of satisfying the insatiable appetite in the U.S.
By now, the astute reader has probably surmised this is about avocados. Spanish conquistadors came to the so-called new world in the sixteenth century with a mission of conquest and plunder. They found a fruit they had never before seen. The indigenous inhabitants knew it by the Aztec name for testicle. The word sounded like “avocado” to the Spanish ear. By the late nineteenth century, avocados had made their way to the U.S. Most people were unfamiliar with the fruit until the 1980s when producers launched a massive marketing campaign promoting avocados as a healthy food.
Avocados are so in demand and prices rising so high that organized crime wants in. Supplying the fruit is as profitable as the illegal drug business and also provides the the infrastructure to launder cash from extra-legal activities.
Wineries and growers in California are hedging their risk from a changing climate by purchasing vineyard land in Oregon and Washington. The Northwest states, relative newcomers to the wine business, initially were known for Pinot Noir and Riesling, varieties that struggled in cooler environments but did spectacularly well some vintages. The quality of Northwest wines, though, varied from year to year because of inconsistent weather. Wines produced in the prime regions of northern California, differentiated themselves according to micro-climates, with weather patterns predictably reliable each year.
As the planet warms, vintners see northern California wine grapes becoming more like their cousins in the dry, hot Central Valley: abundant yields producing wines lacking nuance, usually blended into inexpensive bulk-produced wines. Northwest climate is becoming what California was, growing premium wine grapes that are now thriving further north.
Military service had “probably given these men more exalted ideas of their station in life than really exists, and having these ideas they will be guilty of many acts of self-assertion, arrogance, and insolence . . . this is the right time to show them what will and what will not be permitted, and thus save them much trouble in the future.”
– newspaper editorial
The only good thing that occurred in 1919 was the birth of my mother. Otherwise, in the aftermath of the Great War, the United States was in the midst of the influenza pandemic that killed 675,000 people — more than fifty-million world-wide. Gamblers paid the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series and ever after be known as the Black Sox. 1919 was also the Red Summer of race riots, three dozen, mostly in cities, but the most deadly in rural Elaine, Arkansas, where more than two-hundred African-Americans and five white men were killed.
“We’ve had a lot of Spanish-speaking workers. I say, ‘Thank Heaven for them.’ We’d be a lot further from recovering if it weren’t for them.”
As we’ve been told, Mexico and Central America are sending “not their best” across the border into the U.S. We are being overwhelmed by drug gangsters and rapists, according to the current occupant of the White House. Well, maybe not overwhelmed, exactly.
A new recovery-and-reconstruction work force has developed to keep pace with the more frequent and more severe weather events. (Nothing to do with climate change!) Like migrant agricultural workers following the crops, this emerging workforce is also mobile, following disasters: New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Houston after Harvey; North Carolina after Florence; Florida after Irma and Michael. Much of the cleanup and rebuilding is the work of laborers and craftspeople who entered the country illegally.
