The first elimination games for this year's Euro took place yesterday. Not surprisingly, Germany eliminated Denmark, 2-0.
There was one surprise yesterday, however. Switzerland knocked off the defending champions, Italy, 2-0. The Italians have suffered through some surprising struggles in recent years. Italy had failed to qualify for two consecutive World Cups, in 2018 and again in 2022, despite having won the Euro tournament four years ago. Now, bowing out this early in the tournament, despite being the defending European champions, feels like yet another sign that the struggles on the Italian side might not quite be over yet.
Later today, elimination round games continue at this Euro. Favored England takes on Slovakia. Then in the late game, Spain takes on one of the true Cinderella stories of this tournament, Georgia.
Should be interesting.
This was a book which I started reading years ago. And for reasons which I don't really want to get into here, it took me years to get this book back and finally be able to read it.
So, how was it?
Well, I enjoyed it. In fact, there were parts of this book which I actually enjoyed immensely.
The title of the book itself is the way to pronounce Haiti, the country which Gay is originally from. She speaks of the experiences of her fellow Haitians both on the island nation, as well as the experiences of those Haitians who have made it here in the United States. Everywhere, you see poverty and hunger and suffering. You feel the anger of a young Haitian immigrant who is largely unimpressed and resentful of everything about his new country, only to find out that his classmates have been mocking him, giving him even more reason (and justification) for his resentment.
Everywhere, you see hopelessness and despair and an understandable desire to escape, no matter what the cost. People suffering from poverty inside of Haiti, people suffering from poverty once they finally get to the land of milk and honey, only to find that they themselves are unable to obtain any share of all that wealth they see all around them, then lying about how they have made it to their family back home, and lying about how they are in the process of bringing the family here, as well. There is the longing to escape Haiti, which seems to be viewed by many of the characters as a cursed country. A country of paradoxes, with modern workplaces, where employees then return to their impoverished shacks and hopeless lives after business hours are over.
Yet, mentioning all that is a bit deceptive, because it is much more than that. Despite the clear and obvious ugliness which the author capably describes, the misery and hopelessness, there is also a beauty within these pages. There is the beauty of love, of sexual intimacy, of hope. There is an experience that is very human, and very real, despite this being fiction.
In short, I very much enjoyed this book. It is not always a pleasant read, admittedly. After all, a book about so much human suffering cannot always be pleasant.
Still, it is a book that wakes you up to the reality of a country which we too often overlook, or ignore altogether. A people who have reason to be proud, as the first independent black nation, and also the first nation to permanently abolish slavery. Yet paradoxically, it is a country which remains enslaved in a very real sense by the inescapable poverty that is everywhere on the island. You also get to see just how Americans can come across there, how the United States at once seems like the land where dreams can come true, yet also how American tourists come across as loud and entitled and crass and, frankly, obnoxious.
This is an important book. It is also a short one. You can probably read this in one sitting, if you are so inclined. I didn't, but it is not a book that takes long to read. But it is a book which you should read, if nothing else just to understand the reality that not everyone is privileged and blessed as we are. This book helps to put just how good we have it into perspective. And it makes you, the reader, aware that the poverty of a place like Haiti, a country that just cannot seem to ever get a break, is not just some faraway news story that you glimpse every now and then on the evening news after a coup attempt or serious gang warfare or a massive earthquake. It should not merely be dismissed as some "shithole nation" as one former American president so charmingly put it. Haiti is real. Haitians are real, and so is their plight, their experience, and their humanity. And this book allows us to see them in a very different light.
Highly recommended.
Let me just admit one thing right off the bat: I did not watch the presidential debate live. I just couldn't. bring myself to do it.
Here's the thing: when I was younger, elections were a welcome time. My assumption - clearly mistaken - was that elections were good for the country. They informed the public, increased awareness on the most pertinent issues of the day.
Also, back then I could not understand how so many people could roll their eyes and express sheer disgust at politics during the election season, and particularly the presidential election season. After all, I figured, it only came once every four years.
Fast-forward quite a few decades. Now, I am one of those people who rolls their eyes for every election cycle. Personally, I was sick of this election a couple of years ago, when it became clear that it basically would be a rematch of thee 2020 election.
Most of us are tired of the platitudes. Who isn't tired of hearing how this election is going to be the most important election of our lifetimes? Didn't we hear the same thing during the last presidential elections? And didn't we hear that same sentiment in the 2016 elections, as well? Come to think of it, I seem to remember hearing that back in 2008, as well. And the same sense of urgency was shared in 2004, and even in 2000.
It seems that for some people, every election is life or death. Every election is the most important election of our lifetime.
The problems with that, obviously, is that it does not stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. It just isn't mathematically possible that every election is the most important election of our lifetimes. Before long, that message begins to fall on deaf ears. It's like the boy who cried wolf.
So let's get specific now. We have two establishment candidates. Joe Biden is a career politician, and epitomizes the elite Washington insider. Like with the Clintons, it is virtually impossible to imagine what Joe Biden would be doing, or who he would even be, if he was not a prominent Washington politician. And while Donald Trump might have been somewhat of an outsider to politics when he won the 2016 election, that surely is no longer the case. Not after having been in the White House for four years. Not after this being the third time that he is the Republican nominee for the White House, something that this country has not seen since the days of FDR. So they are both very established politicians. They are both all too familiar to the American public.
If I am being truthful, I feel that this is the worst presidential election that I have ever seen. I felt that the 2016 election was, as Lee Child suggested, an insult to the collective intelligence of the American people. Then 2020 was hardly better than that.
Yet this election, when we have a choice, yet again, between two tired old men with tired old ideas and tired old approaches to their politics, feels worse.
What? How can I possibly say that?
Well, I say that because Trump is, frankly, a pig. He and his supporters want everyone desperately to believe that he is still a political outsider. But in 2020, he was the incumbent. And this time around, he is the former president, and again, the Republican nominee for a record third time. He has not introduced any new ideas. Just the same old viewpoints that he championed in the prior two presidential elections. If you are a supporter, then you think that he stands for you, champions your values. And if you do not like him at all, you still feel that he represents everything that is wrong with the country. Nothing has changed, in that regard. In fact, you can boil it down to this being the third straight presidential election in which Donald Trump is front and center, and where the election is basically decided not so much on the issues, as on how the country feels, collectively, about Donald Trump.
How tiresome. How unimaginative as a nation. To think that these two old men are allegedly the two best options for a country of about 330 million people feels like the real insult to our collective intelligence.
So yes, this election is all about Donald Trump. Just like 2016. And just like 2020. As a country, we cannot seem to move past this pathetic, needy, lying man.
Knowing this, what then do the Democrats do? They rely on the slickest, most establishment candidates that they can find to beat the least conventional president of our times, if not all times The reason that Trump may seem like an outsider is because he does not act like a typical establishment politician. That, in fact, is his act, to make it seem like he is telling his own opinion, which some people apparently feel is refreshing.
How could mainstream Democrats not see that Hillary Clinton could prove to be a liability in the 2016 election? How did they actually believe that preventing her from facing competition for the nomination would not make her appear stronger, but would actually weaken her? You need to be challenged in order to sharpen the tools you need to run a strong race. If she showed cowardice towards those ends, and exhibited a false sense of entitlement in her obvious expectations to take over the White House, then why would we be surprised when people were far less thrilled with her than mainstream Democrats were?
Then in 2020, for the second straight election, it felt like Bernie Sanders was robbed. He had even more momentum in 2020 and seemed destined to win the Democratic nomination, until some obvious backroom deals resulted in many major Democratic candidates dropping out just before Super Tuesday, effectively making Biden the frontrunner. There was anger against Trump, and personally, I feel that this was why Biden won the presidency. It was not so much excitement for Biden, as it was disgust and fatigue with the Trump presidency.
Already, Biden's age was considered a source of concern in 2020. How did they not foresee how it could be a far more detrimental issue come 20204? Did they really believe that Trump would simply go away? Perhaps that he would be locked up, and let's throw away the keys? I pretty much knew that Trump would run again, and it seemed obvious to me. No need to spend millions of dollars in research, or anything, either. The man's ego would not allow him to concede the 2020 race. He kept going with his ridiculous rallies, and kept reiterating the same talking points as always. Did you really think that maybe someone else would get the nomination? DeSantis, perhaps?
Give me a break.
So now, Biden seems to have confirmed that the concerns that he is too old and really not fit to be in the Oval Office for the next four years appear to have been legitimate. In recent videos, he looks frozen and confused, not altogether with it.
And in the debate?
Well, I didn't watch it, as stated earlier. But yesterday morning, I turned on the news, just to see what they had to say. And the very first thing that I saw was about how some concerned Democrats were now asking Biden to bow out of the race.
Uh-oh.
Could it have actually been that bad?
Apparently, yes. In fact, it was worse, because suddenly, all of the exaggerated conspiracy theories y Trump supporters about how Biden was senile and incompetent were suddenly looking not so nonsensical. This was the worst nightmare for the Democrats in this particular presidential race come true.
Given the fairly obvious threat to American democracy posed by King Con Don and his Cult 45 following, the fact that he still holds a narrow lead even after his criminal convictions is disturbing enough. But this performance by Joe Biden, which confirm that he seems far more vulnerable than anyone on the Biden team or among Democrats wanted to believe is worse still. This election was described as a last defense for American democracy. And now, it appears that the Democratic candidate really is too frail for such a fight.
In a strange way, Biden feels like they are symbolic of a weakened American democracy and a wavering last line of defense against dictatorship in a similar way to Hindenburg being the last line of defense against the dictatorship that came to be once he was out of the way. I am not trying to compare Trump to Hitler, or the United States now to Germany in the 1930's. But certainly, I feel we could have learned lessons from history a little better than we have.
As I have mentioned before, I had a very bad feeling about this 2024 election for a long, long time. I suspected that Trump was far from done even after he lost the 2020 election - and yes, he lost that election, and soundly. It feels like everything is playing into his hands, even more than in 2016. The timing of the trials are playing into Trump's hands, making it indeed look like a political witch hunt. His convictions seem to reinforce for some that he is being targeted and persecuted and, as he suggests, being treated badly. And now this. A weak and vulnerable President Biden, seemingly confirming just how incompetent and unfit for the presidency he is.
Where do the Democrats go from here?
Should they really get someone else, with just four months to go before the November election? Do they stick with Biden, who increasingly seems like a liability?
Never before, at least in recent history, has one of the major parties been in such a state of crisis about who should be the official nominee this close to the actual election. Oh, sure, there was some discussion about Donald Trump being replaced in 2016, because some Republicans felt that he was a liability, and they just could not take him or his candidacy seriously. But this time around, it seems like everyone is looking at Biden as too much of a liability. As possibly actively self-destructive and self-defeating as a presidential candidate, despite being the incumbent.
So in the third or fourth, or possibly fifth consecutive most important election of our lifetimes, it seems that Biden and the Democrats are looking more vulnerable than ever. Indeed, it feels like this time, democracy itself might hang in the balance. Although this, too, feels inevitable. If democracy wasn't handed a devastating blow in 2020, it would probably happen in 2024. And it feels as if somehow, we escape that fate this time around, then we will have to deal with it in 2028. Or 2032. Frankly, the Republicans of the Trump, and presumably post-Trump, era are not the Republicans of even a few decades ago. Those Republicans sometimes were accused, and with some justification, of having authoritarian leanings. But now we have someone who is not shying away from clearly claiming he will assume dictatorial powers on day one. It feels like just a matter of time now.
Is this really the way that American democracy as we know it comes to an end?
Both Asterix and Tintin are very popular - even iconic - French language cartoons who have been famous for many decades now. Technically, I lived in France up until I was about four or five, give or take. But the first time that I remember going back to France, in the summer of 1982, I came to enjoy both of those comic series, as well as Lucky Luke.
Admittedly, Tintin was my favorite. Than Lucky Luke, and then Asterix. Since that summer, seeing those comics always made me feel nostalgic. They also made me feel a bit more connected to the French, or Francophone, culture that I had largely lost in the years between when we moved out of France, to when I went back, hardly knowing a word of French at the time. Slowly but surely, I got re-acclimated with French culture, and came to appreciate it.
These cartoons, or comic books, really helped along in that process. These were not comic books in the small, magazine style of North American comic books, but actual books, which held a more respectable place on the shelves of French bookstores than they ever did back then in the United States, although comic books (again, actual books) seem to have made serious inroads now in Anglo North America, as well. I specify the English speaking part of North America because, like in France, comic books like Tintin, Lucky Luke, and Asterix also had a respectable place in book stores in French Canada, as well. Part of the pleasure of visiting French Canada for me, particularly Québec was (and still is, presumably) seeing those comics available there.
In any case, the cartoon (with the link below) felt like something that I might share here. It is an image where Asterix and Tintin are mixed. At least, Asterix himself is wearing the clothes of Tintin, while his sidekick Obelix is wearing the outfit of Captain Haddock (Capitaine Haddock in French).
Enjoy.
Rick Paisa 17 June, 2021 ·
For those who also love Tin Tin!!!
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10160897858861978
Decided to not only get rid of the beard, but also see how I look without even a goatee. Guess the gray is growing more dominant on my chin, so I wanted to see if I might look a bit younger by shaving it off.
This picture reveals what I look like presently, minus the goatee.
Judging by the picture, this guy does not look too pleased with his new look. Also, he looks dangerous, like he is about to snap. I'd hate to meet him in a dark alley. You can just see the insanity lurking just underneath the surface. And not too deep underneath the surface, either.
Turn that frown upside down, buddy!
Anyway, let me know if you think that this is a good look for this guy, or if it makes him look like a psycho.
Also, where the hell are my ears? They are conspicuous by their absence. Hell, there's not even any hair for them to hide behind.
Yeesh!
There are live reports right now as I write this from Al Jazeera of violent protests in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. The protests were originally over taxes, but the situation quickly escalated.
There were reports that the police had responded with live ammo against protestors, and that some of the protestors had been killed.
However, the protestors overwhelmed the police, ultimately.
A section of Kenya's Parliament Building caught fire.
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