Allan J. "Alonzo" Wind's Blog, page 3

Juneteenth

JUNETEENTH

I don’t know about you, but it really lifted our spirits to catch the events of this past week, the way the Congress seemingly out of the blue finally passed the designation of Juneteenth as a legal Federal holiday, honoring the emancipation of the enslaved people in the United States.

The Senate passed it unanimously, which is rather remarkable, but in fact it was because they were able to avoid having an actual vote in person as no one “objected.” Sen. Ron ‘Q-Anon’ Johnson from Wisconsin had been objecting but I guess his staff was able to convince him to stop standing in the way of it, although that didn’t stop snarky comments from the Insurrectionist when he was back in Wisconsin. Oh, how I hope he will be defeated next year, if he runs again.

Anyway, it was amazing to see how in DC and all over the country people of all colors reacted positively and enthusiastically, after Joe Biden – bless him! – had such a moving signing ceremony with Opal Lee on Thursday.

We went to Shepherdstown WV and Harpers Ferry on Sunday, and it was so powerfully felt there too. It turned out to be West Virginia Day on June 20.  Powerful reminders of the Civil War and the anti-slavery abolitionists.  WV Day commemorates the splitting off of the western part of Virginia in the midst of the Civil War to resist the secessionists and the Confederacy. Harpers Ferry was of course the site of the failed “prelude to the Civil War,” the raid to provoke a slave rebellion in the southern states in 1859. It was doomed to failure then, but it did set us as a people on a track to facing and fighting the need to overthrow the slavery culture of the southern States.

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Let’s Relocate the UN to Jerusalem

 

Agent Orange of the late Administration gained fame and renown, particularly among right wingers and many Israelis, by moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was on some level a symbolic gesture, and a highly effective one for that demographic. It’s unclear whether it will had any spillover effects elsewhere. 

But it seems to me that Joe Biden has an opportunity to one up that gesture with a different one to send another symbolic as well as substantive message to the Middle East and the world.

It’s time for the UN Secretariat, the Security Council and the General Assembly to say goodbye to New York. They’ve had it good since the Truman Administration. They’ve had an easy way to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, have a hugely decorative talk shop, accomplish at that level relatively little and basically take advantage of the prestige and glory of New York as opposed to truly seeking settlements to so many of the world’s problems.

So, why not move the whole kit and kaboodle to Jerusalem, the CIty of Peace? I would love to see how long the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the West Bank and Jerusalem would prolong itself with hundreds and thousands of diplomats in the thick of it, looking carefully at what in the end can only be addressed by making Jerusalem a “world capital,” under international administration, in addition to being the capitals of the State of Israel AND an Independent Palestinian state. Seriously, let’s see Joe Biden twist arms of the Secretary General or apply some tough love to the UN overall, and force a timeline for relocation of the UN headquarters, suitably subsidized of course, to what is the most holy city for perhaps a third or so of humanity. No other city can really claim that.

I think this is a move, as I have said, of huge symbolic and substantive potential.  In an age where the US is at best in a multipolar contest, with China and the EU, where best to resituate the “last best hope” for Mankind and reconciliation?  The crossroads of Eurasia and Africa…. the heart of one of the longest standing modern conflicts. It seems to me that a truly useful UN can best be served by overturning the assumptions of the post WW II consensus, as well as the Pax Americana, and rebuild a new UN Center in Jerusalem, perhaps the eastern Arab suburbs, and use that as a tool for coaxing much more proactive diplomatic and financial support from China, the EU and the rest of the world. Not to mention inspiring some out of the box solutions for the dreadful conditions of the apartheid-like treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Security concerns? Sure – but Israel can help with that whether they like it or not, and it becomes a magnet for a collective peacemaking and peacebuilding effort, as well as shifting the center of gravity to where it really should be in this 21st century and New World Order.

 

 

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Free Audiobook for Review?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, that would tell me you are intrigued by ANDEAN ADVENTURES, and perhaps have read the book in either the English or Spanish editions.  If so, are you interested in checking out the new audiobook version on Audible? If you live or purchase in the USA or UK markets, I have a reduced number of coupons available for free downloads of the audiobook.  I’d welcome and be grateful for reviews of it. If you are interested in this free audiobook, please write me at ajwind@enableennoble.net and let me know, and confirm that if you receive the coupon you will download it within seven days. Hope to hear from a select few soon!

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Developing and Releasing the Audiobook!

I am so happy to share that Audible on Amazon released the audiobook version of my book ANDEAN ADVENTURES. It can be found by the way at https://tinyurl.com/AudioAlonzo.

Developing it required a real learning process! The book itself, which is about 280 pp, adds up to about 10 hours of narration, more or less. But that’s the least of it. I had decided to do the narration myself, and purchased a decent dynamic microphone and some other equipment to facilitate the recording along with the appropriate software to use on my laptop computer. I found it very difficult to record more than hour or so at a time, so things stretched out from there. But the editing of what proved to be about 9 files was very time consuming.  It probably required a total of 5 or 6 hours editing for each recorded hour if not more.  Quality control itself also demanded going back and listening to chapter files to catch any errors or issues that might have cropped in from either the text or the recording.

I finished the editing and quality control on the audio files by the middle of March – to be honest about 4-5 weeks longer than I had originally expected. I included an excerpt from the introduction in my March newsletter.  Then I uploaded everything to the Audible site for their review and approval.  That went live about 4 weeks later, on April 25. 

I’ve sent out some promo codes for individuals interested in listening to the book and posting a review. If you are in either the Amazon USA or Amazon UK markets, and are also interested and motivated, do please let me know.  There has been some organic sales already and I certainly welcome and encourage folks who would like to purchase it through the link above.  That will get you to Audible for it. It is available on Amazon as well as the iTunes store.

Tell me what you think!

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New Podcast to Hear – Because Everyone Has a Story Episode #24

I am happy to share the work of a lovely creator, Daniela Stockfleth-Menis, who has a podcast out of Vancouver, called BEHAS: Because Everyone Has a Story. Daniela has a website below for the podcast that includes all 24 episodes released, mostly in English with three in Spanish. She makes it a point of reaching out to people she finds interesting and uses the podcast as a way for the listener to get to know the person as well. I was honored to be invited onto her show, and she has just released as her 24th episode and final one of the second season the one with me. I hope you will use the link below to listen in! I talk about the drivers I found in my life, and how I came to work overseas in support of international development and humanitarian efforts. It’s an opportunity to lay out how ANDEAN ADVENTURES came together as a project, and now published as an ebook, paperback and audiobook.

Episode to share link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1133927/episodes/8388712 Website: https://www.becauseeveryonehasastory.ca/

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Fake IDs

How many of you looked for a fake ID in your late teens to be able to drink or go into a bar? Or go into a movie house with an R rated or NC-17 movie (“X rated” when I was a kid)? When I was in college the drinking age was briefly dropped to 18, and then went up to 21 in most states.

So when you consider that almost rite of passage when you are on the cusp of adulthood, how crazy is it to now learn of fake vaccine IDs becoming available on EBay and other websites! And of the social forces that are driving some to look for fake vaccine IDs, instead of going to get protected with the COVID 19 vaccine. Not to mention the political posturing in Texas, Florida and other Republican strongholds condemning, attacking or prohibiting “COVID vaccine passports” from being used. It’s not even limited to there – I just read that Republican Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has ruled out vaccine passports!

Excuse me! Do any of these yahoos understand that for decades anyone travelling to a country with yellow fever or other infectious diseases has been required to show a WHO “yellow card” as proof of vaccination? It has long been a basic of any international travel, a given to be kept carefully together with your national passport.  What is with these people who think COVID 19 shouldn’t also demand at a minimum comparable proof of vaccination? Where do people conclude and comment publicly that they have a constitutional right to travel, or even to frequent stores and other public events, without proof of vaccination?

It is hard to grasp how vaccine hesitancy and vaccine resistance has morphed into the dimensions that it has in certain elements of the population. It is gratifying to see that as of today, all adults 16+ are now eligible for the vaccine in the USA. Even Canada is apparently having difficulties with that, as well as much of Europe.

It used to be understood and taken as a given that there are overarching public health requirements for things like vaccines that are a public good and must be mandatory for anyone in contact with others. Children were required to demonstrate their shots before school enrollment.  In my mind, the public was poorly served when politicians over the past 15-20 years began to allow for “religious” or other “philosophical” exemptions giving credence to the anti-vax movement, which had assembled and spread on the basis of lies and scientific ignorance.  The result of those sort of weak and flaccid actions were the measles outbreaks we began to see over the last ten years, as immunization rates fell among certain populations. Measles is a deadly serious infectious disease, and yet politicians gave a pass to anti-science thinking of some.

Now with COVID 19 it is far worse, as the coronavirus mutates so fast, and there is a direct link between vaccine hesitancy and rejection and the opportunistic spread of new virus variants, some potentially more dangerous and virulent than others.

I know the Biden-Harris Administration has set aside some large sums for a new public information campaign about the vaccine, in part now timed with the increased eligibility.  I think it is long overdue. I saw one commercial this morning with C&W singer Brad Paisley. Far far more work on messaging is required. We need people of influence from conservative media, church leaders, sports and entertainment stars out there nonstop pushing the need for both the vaccine and the documentation of it for peoples’ protection.  They say you actually need to hear an advertisement for seven times before it begins to penetrate. Let’s hope this campaign is ramped up and both rejects the selflish idiocy of fake Coronavirus vaccine cards and makes undeniable the desire to have vaccination and its proof.

 

 

 

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Don’t Defund or Abolish the Police. Abolish the F&*$#& Guns

It seems to me that this debate has been going back and forth since the summer of 2020 and the murder of George P. Floyd. If not longer. There’s an argument to be made that the calls to Defund the Police contributed to Democratic losses in Congress and in State Government races. Others, such as Rep. James Clyburn, insist it didn’t. Perhaps, but it certainly didn’t help mobilize a lot of key critical voters for Democrats to vote up and down the ballot, even if turnout was so much higher for the Presidential race of 2020, which successfully dumped Agent Orange back to his lair at Mar a Lago.  I think the whole argument is unproductive. We need peace officers. We need police in key security roles. What we don’t need are the guns.

Your line police officer and indeed so many local and municipal police departments have bulked up to absurd and unjustifiable degrees over the last 15 years or more, becoming paramilitarized units. Huge expenditures on massive equipment outlays and transfers from the US military were justified based on national security grounds because of an overweening fear of Islamic terrorism. This has typical of the refrain about the generals, always fighting the last war, in this case the terror of a sequel to 9/11. But right wing domestic extremism and terrorism far exceeds that of an international threat. And crime, with the exception of the pandemic year of 2020, has steadily declined since the mid 1990s.

Look to England and some other developed democracies. Where do guns at the street level for police fit in? They rarely do. Now should situations escalate, there may be a need to always retain a rapid response force which is adequately armed.  But your every cop on the beat or circulating in patrol cars have NO REAL NEED FOR GUNS.

This is not a Second Amendment issue, before you choose to intercede. There is no constitutional obligation to have easily accessible firearms with the cops out on the streets. If truly a fear of getting outmatched from some potential area of conflict or escalation, why not keep the guns always LOCKED IN THE TRUNKS?  They would be there if truly needed. But we need to REIMAGINE POLICING. And effective policing DOES NOT require guns, not at all, particularly for initial or primary responses for people. This should be true in terms of interventions with all people: people of color as well as people who are not.  Imagine how many ugly and horrific interventions against citizens could be avoided by completely scaling back the level of escalation in citizen interactions from the start.

Abolish the F&*$#& Guns and let’s reimagine how police can and should deal with situations.

 

 

 

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Wishcycle Bins and Wishcycling

The other day we saw a significant segment on John Oliver’s @LastWeekTonight that discussed the pernicious and pervasive presence of plastics in our environment. While I had read a bit about the wide ranging pollution from microplastics all over the world, even in the remotest reaches of the Arctic and Antarctic, the @johnoliver segment was still so depressing.  He talked a bit about the huge failures and deception surrounding recycling efforts and plastics, which have only gotten worse since China stopped global importations of waste plastic from the USA and other countries a few years ago. It was clear that there really has not been a market for reusable plastics at all despite the television commercials that would have us believe otherwise. Even the partial exception of plastic water and soda bottles is a very limited one, with sourced virgin plastic use still vastly greater than the use of recycled plastic.  It was particularly sobering when Oliver interviewed a recycle center manager who referred to the reality that far too many Americans “wishcycle” rather than “recycle.”  Crazy things are put into recycle bins, such as broken umbrellas and other materials that will never be recycled.

Moreover, there really is no public policy communications or outreach effort at clarifying this for the public.  We see that here in Fairfax County Virginia.  Little or nothing is done to detract from the American fascination with “wishcycling” and wishcycle expectations.  Little is done to make the recycling of even glass from jars more easily managed, as those are actually not supposed to be accepted in the household bins we put out but are supposed to be deposited – if at all – in a few select glass bins at scattered and inconvenient locations.

It seems like this whole issue is just another example of a failure of policy where there are real economic incentives or disincentives put in place by government, and no effort to gin up wider public support and understanding for what is doable and what is not doable in terms of local government recycling efforts. Meanwhile the fact is that plastics continue to grow in volume and pollution. Those that make it into the ocean break down to horrible micro plastics that completely contaminate the food chain. John Oliver said there are government projections that in a few short years the total weight of waste plastic in the oceans will exceed the total weight of marine life in the oceans, which should make you pause and consider in horror what that means.

We need people speaking truth about topics like this, and we need to radically transform the incentives that drive our industries if we are to ever get a handle on what this means for the earth our children will inherit.

 

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Why Do We Use the Terms “Molest”, “Molester” and “Molestation”?

The recent revelations about what Dylan Farrow went through at the disgusting hands of Woody Allen have raised for me a more general question about language: why do we use such sanitized words to describe such obscene acts? Perhaps it has to do with legal terminology, and the likely phenomenon that criminal acts are described in such a way. For example assault and battery. We all know what the word assault means in common usage. But how many of us unless we’ve been victimized know what assault and battery mean in legal terms. In the law there is always the tendency to define carefully distinctions between different degrees of severity and culpability within an act.  Thus the wrangling in murder cases such as Derek Chauvin and what he did to George Floyd, and the hierarchy of charges of Murder in the first degree, Manslaughter in all the several degrees below that.

But more specifically I am annoyed and offended by the common use of the terms “Molest”, “Molester” and “Molestation” to describe horrendous violations against children. As I understand it, a common synonym for molest is “to bother,” or perhaps “to annoy”. How can we use these as words to describe the horrendous acts that must characterize “pedophilia,” another sanitized Latin word? To accuse Woody Allen of having committed child molestation surely must diminish and soften, in an entirely unjustifiable way, the alleged crimes.

Words have power. But words can also be robbed of power. I think we have to be mindful of that in our vocabulary and usage.

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Bill Maher was Foolish Last Friday about Allen v Farrow – It’s True We Were All Duped.

I watched Bill Maher Friday night, and was a bit surprised and alarmed by the reaction he offered about the new HBO documentary about Woody Allen and his alleged sexual predation within the Farrow family. I had been familiar of course with the reports of the accusations of child sexual abuse decades ago, along with the twin overlays of the scandal over his affair and eventual marriage with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon Yi Previn, and the claims of abuse against the small child Dylan Farrow. I confess that I, like many millions of Americans, took the reports about Allen and sharply discounted them given the press’ paradigm of Mia as a former partner scorned.  I chose not to believe the accusations.  When Ronan Farrow came out with his own denunciations of Woody Allen a few years ago, I discounted those again, in part because I did not trust the messenger. So I continued to blithely albeit with a slight pause watch new Woody Allen movies without qualms.

When Maher discounted the HBO documentary as only being part of the story, and heavily inflected to Mia Farrow’s side, it stirred a concern and curiosity. Could this be true? Maher argued Friday that the story should be called Mia’s Story and not Allen v Farrow as it did not offer a pretense of adding Woody’s side of the story and defense into the narrative. While I had initially hesitated when the documentary came out, my wife and I resolved to watch the first episode later that Friday night. And it proved to be so disturbing and devastating that we binge watched the remaining three episodes Saturday night, all the way well past our usual bedtime.

I can see that we were all duped by Woody Allen. Bill Maher is dreadfully wrong. The documentary not only gave his the chance to offer his side of the story, as well as other Farrow family witnesses, but it offered viewers the chance to hear Woody’s own words during contemporaneous tapings of phone calls with Mia Farrow, as well as substantial excepts from his 2020 Audio book. The producers developed the show after conducting a three year review of all the police evidence in Connecticut and New York State, a full 360 view of what so many witnesses saw of Allen’s behavior and actions and very damning narratives  not only from Mia but from poor Dylan, now almost 30 years older, married and with a daughter, but with a firm and unrelenting determination to use her voice and show what she in fact experienced and went through then and as a result.

The documentary is overwhelming and very very convincing about Allen’s predatory actions. And there are interviews with so many reporters and film critics who contextualize them within a pattern of superficial and constant depravity present in so many of Woody Allen’s movies.

We can not watch another Allen movie, at least while he lives. Perhaps never. And our hearts are broken over what poor Dylan and the rest of the Farrow family went through. We are left stunned and mystified by the sudden reversal of support and solidarity from Moses Farrow, one of the 11 adopted Farrow children and who now as an adult, with a child and ex wife, recently recanted his own constant reinforcement of Dylan’s testimony with an out of the blue claim that he now believes Woody Allen and denounced Mia. No other child has broken from the story nor demonstrated any inconsistency to their narrative except for Soon Yi Previn – Allen, still married to Woody, and Moses Farrow.

I watched this documentary wanting to remain at least a little skeptical of the accusations, but I can not sustain a doubt when none exists. And I am hugely disappointed of Bill Maher, who deliberately or not minimized the significance and resonance of the story of Dylan Farrow and Mia Farrow, and the huge collection of truth included in this devastating documentary.

Watch it yourself and tell me what you believe.

Allen v Farrow

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