Space race & meteor showers
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/unusual-meteorite-more-valuable-...

WAP: "Brands arent radical"

Russell Brand points out the same old same old

https://youtu.be/EdP9H60N2l8

And his point might be 9 years ago dance floors were screamIng Azealia Banks' "I guess your cunt getting eaten", thoroughly humored and relaxed with herself, so why the over-the-top Cardi B/Stallion nonsense when you have much harder hitting  212?

https://youtu.be/i3Jv9fNPjgk

Or Courtney in 1999 entertaining 50,000 Aussies with "Celebrity Skin" (1:01) - playing an instrument, not just a dress

https://youtu.be/iS4uJJCNcDM

Where's Dersh?

Indian Matchmaking in US -

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5f36cdbdc5b65bbd8c8ceffc

I'm struck by the perversity of a quaint notion about Indians, yet a fixed attitude towards White southerners. Indians explicitly favor those with lighter skin, discriminate against those not of their caste/tribe and class, occasionally pull off massive murderous pogroms against Muslims, are exceedingly homophobic, etc. 

But I don't know that Indians are *that* unique around the world, just that we often put the unknown exote a few levels up on our home altar, the familiar daemons a few rungs down.

Paris is amazing, no? But the French killed a million Muslims on their way out of Algeria 60 years ago (the Algeria wanted independence), left us with their Indochina *plantations* around the same time (the Vietnamese, Cambodian, et al wanted independence), gave us "Devil's Island" as a model of brutal incarceration. But their wines are delish! (to be fair to our "noble savage" image, the Cambodians brutally murdered and enslaved a million in the Killing Fields, killed and raped 6 million in the Congo just 20 years ago - so a bit of "both sides do it". 

Australia seems so pleasant because around the time we we're fixing up our Constitution and doing that Trail of Tears thing, the Aussies created a cordon to slowly walk across the Tasmanian island to kill off all the natives. Rinse and repeat elaewhere. But Brisbane's got awesome surfing and the Great Barrier Reef (just watch out for sharks). Love the accent, Crocodile Dundee and Olivia Newton-John and all.

In short, we're pretty emphatic on bringing up the 160-year-old Civil War as if the effrontery of the Southerners in leaving that sacred Union they'd committed to was this unforgivable act - Treason! - yet Brits starving millions of Irish at the time or disappearing Irish Catholics in the 70's just adds a bit of character to Big Ben on our tourist walkabout. Slave descendents from *other people's atrocities* in the Caribbean and Yucatan and Brazil are all nicely exotic to go with our fruity rum drink and "Que habla, dudes?" quest for polyglotism, and brushing aside the mass graves and work camps on our way to the cabana. Only a history stickler will ruin a vacation trip to futuristic efficient Tokyo with a reminder about Bataan or Manchuria already 75 years gone.

Just a reminder of the shithead behavior that permeates the world (though has some prominent examples of good promising ethics) and the unreasonableness in judging just based on proximity to us, the Familiarity Trap. Yeah, racism exists hugely around our country (not just in the South by any means, though Mississippi attitudes are easy to categorize), but this Lincoln/Civil War thing seems a peculiar rock in the craw, something that people take so personally. (Note there's a pig vs chicken breakfast thing - chicken involved, pig is committed - if you're Vietnamese the Vietnam War means something a bit different than for Americans, so real southern descendents of both colors may have more personal feelings than transplants or remote commentators).

The South in the 70s to 90s seemed much more hopeful than the South today - and even today is a far sight better than Reconstruction or the mass poverty of the Depression. But there's this sense that it's always been like this, incorrigible, baked in, not something that gets built up by tropes and rumors and fear mongering, especially in the more efficient internet age where lies travel the world in nanoseconds.

A while back I met a black-skinned Indian woman in Birmingham, asked her how she liked it. She seemed fine, had a nice job in a modern medical institute, people treated her well (Birmingham's of course majority black), a few decades in and she feels at home. Doubt she would have done too well with the Matchmaking back in India, or the opportunities  & treatment for her if not in one of perhaps 5 Indian cities. For her it was a step up and pleasant. (nd 50 years earlier, not so much). YMMV.

Also, as a nation of immigrants, how many newcomers are related to the Hun Sens of Cambodia or the generals in Guatemala or Karadzic in Croatia or the Idi Amin's of Uganda? Or their many likely (hopefully) non-barbarous countrymates (many who fled from the same). How do we even judge the fast moving cultures these days, when so much has happened the last 50 years, much less 6-7 generations ago. (My daughter asked me if "the Shah was bad" - that of course brings of a complex response for a Mideast culture in transition and a dangerous place, not an easy "yes" or "no". What did he do well, what badly, what evilly, same as his successor even, as well as our involvement, what Ben were the alternatives that *werent* taken?). Who are all these people within these streams of humanity moving around? What kind of conclusions from the many are even valid, and what would it take to alter those impressions - a new view, a new ingredient, some new breakthrough - where's our progressive hope, view to the future?

WaterGate II