Missive #126

Read Will Rogers column 88 years ago: September 15, 1935

Ten years ago, the twentieth century and the Bronze Age were tossed together by a mysterious Event. In the decade since, the Republic of Nantucket has worked hard to create a new future for itself, using the technological know-how retained from modern times to explore and improve conditions for the inhabitants of the past. This is the third book in the trilogy. I liked all of them and will see if the authors other books are as good. Some of these peoples have become allies. Some have turned instead to the renegade Coast Guard officer William Walker. And for ten years, the two sides have tested each other, feinting and parrying, to decide who will be the ones to lead this brave new world into the future. The final battle lines have now been drawn. And only one side can emerge the victor.” — Book promo @ goodreads.com

[T]he United States approach to leading the world order is to lead by being the aggressor — to threaten, to hurt other countries; [that is,] not by providing mutual gains [or] by helping them [develop], but by saying, “If you don’t do what we want, we will overthrow you. We’ll have a coup d’état. We’ll do to you what we did with Pinochet in Chile. We’ll do to you what we did with Boris Yeltsin in Russia. We’ll interfere.”… The United States [is] essentially trying to use its threats [and] its sanctions, and it believes that it can hurt another country. Behind it all, of course, is the military threat, as you were saying, in Ukraine. But it turns out there isn’t really any military threat by the United states. Not only [have the U.S] and NATO run out of normal military arms, but America really can’t mount a land war anymore.… [The Global South] couldn’t do this back in the 1970s … because at that point, Indonesia and the Caribbean and Latin America didn’t have the critical mass to go it alone. Now, they [do] have the critical mass to go it alone, thanks to Russia, China, Iran, India. They are able to go it alone. There is only one part of the world that is not able to go it alone, and that’s the United States and Western Europe. They de-industrialized. In their class war against labor, looking for lower-priced labor abroad, they have cut their own industrial labor force, but they’ve also shifted the center of manufacturing, technology, agriculture — everything has shifted to Eurasia and the Southern hemisphere. The United States turns out to have left itself alone. — Introducing the Geopolitical Economy Hour by Michael Hudson

More problems. This time it was on Tuesday when I tried to edit a future posting that I had in Draft. Got an error every time I tried to open one and do an edit. This was when using Brave or Vivaldi browsers; Chrome worked just fine. Contacted my host provider and Astra and they both said it was not them that I should clear cache, switch to another theme, deactivate all my plugins, reactivate the plugins one at a time to see which one might be the problem or reinstall Brave and/or Vivaldi.

I found a work around. If I tried to edit and got the error I could do a ‘hard refresh’ on that page and it would then open. On Wednesday when I went to my WordPress admin page I had a plugin that needed to be updated. I did that and no longer had the edit page problem. So that plugin was the problem and I was probably not the only one that was having the problem.

Light showers on and off on Tuesday then harder showers through the night and Wednesday morning. A lot of mud so didn’t do any walks on Wednesday. I did go to town and picked up a yogurt order at Jake’s that took over two weeks to finally arrive. There was also a package waiting for me at the Post Office. This was an order that was shipped UPS but was ‘handed off’ to the USPS although I had provided the physical address where UPS has made deliveries in the past. Getting online orders when living in an RV continues to be an adventure.