America as a Developing Country
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! And some happy memories…
On a trip through Ireland back in 1979, a couple of college friends and I chanced upon a small convenience store run by a cheerful woman.
“Where ya from?” she asked.
“America.”
“Ah, America. A nation of mongrels!”
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Eighty-three years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded America, “Let us not be afraid to help each other—let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.”
In contrast, thirty-five years ago Ronald Reagan declared, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
[Continue Reading]While Joe’s predecessor suffers in comparison with even some autocrats.
While the quality of governance varies greatly across the globe, it’s normal for national leaders to care, or at least pretend to care, about putting in place policies that benefit their people. Even some authoritarian regimes advance their citizens’ well-being in some ways – though that does not excuse their rapaciousness, repression or human rights abuses.
In that autocratic vein, Vietnam, China, Uganda and Rwanda come to mind, given their achievements in economic growth, public health and other fields. Thus, though mainly motivated by self-interest, even certain otherwise execrable leaders try to do some good.
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If you work overseas a lot, particularly among poorly educated populations, you sometimes learn of questionable and even dangerously uninformed beliefs in some countries. One memorable one, at the height of the AIDS crisis, involved the notion that men shouldn’t wear condoms because shamans could then retrieve their sperm and do all sorts of nefarious things with it.
Not that we’re immune to such stuff. Take QAnon, the metastasizing, hydra-headed, born-in-the-USA conspiracy theory initiated in October 2017 by “Q Clearance Patriot,” an anonymous and subsequently prolific internet message board poster. Q has ridiculously claimed to be a highly placed government official privy to classified information.
[Continue Reading]Along with lots of caveats.
In a week when America’s Covid fatalities topped 500,000 – an official figure that might actually understate the real toll and that in any event represents more than all of our overseas wars’ combat deaths combined – it seems incongruous but useful to summarize some good vaccination news.
So here goes.
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