Get ready for the cicada explosion

My daughter graduated from college in 2004 and we went to her open-air graduation ceremony in New Jersey in late May of that year. It was a memorable event, not just because of the occasion but because it also coincided with the 17-year cycle for the emergence of cicadas in the eastern part of the US. This year will see the next emergence.

Billions of cicadas that have spent 17 years underground are set to emerge across large areas of the eastern US, bringing swarming numbers and loud mating calls to major towns and cities.

The periodic cicadas – bugs with strikingly red eyes, black bodies and orange wings – burrow underground as nymphs and suck fluids from the roots of plants as they grow, eventually bursting into the open as adults in mass synchronized events.

The last such event for 15 states including New York, Ohio, Illinois and Georgia occurred in 2004. The cicadas emerge in a 17-year cycle, meaning they will appear this year once temperatures are warm enough, expected to be mid-May.
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These tough guys turn out to be such snowflakes

One of the features of the insurrection of January 6th was the tough talk of the people invaded the Capitol building with weapons in what seemed, at least on the part of some, to be an effort to take congresspeople hostage. But as soon as they were arrested, they started to whine about how they have been so misunderstood and that they were not armed insurrectionists who planned to take over the government and prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president but were merely ordinary people only doing only what the president wanted them to do.
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Making chess more exciting

Chess is a game whose rules were determined centuries ago and are thought to be unchangeable. Chess aficionados would be offended at the idea that it is not exciting and that some changes might benefit it. Without getting into that particular argument, there is no question that because it is so rigidly structured, players nowadays, aided by computers, have studied and memorized most of the openings and defenses and their variations so that there is little surprise, at least in the early stages. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one reason I gave up chess was the realization that to really improve, I would have to drop all my other activities and devote myself to studying and memorizing a huge number of openings and defenses. This was just not worth it to me.
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Blame-shifting for the emergence of the coronavirus

There is a team of international scientists under the auspices of the UN currently in China to study the origins of the coronavirus, particularly how it made the jump from animals to humans. The first major outbreak occurred in Wuhan which instituted a massive lockdown that managed to suppress the spread so that the city is bustling with activity again, with traffic jams, busy restaurants and markets, and people now move around freely and do all the normal things, though there are still a few restrictions such as you have to wear masks all the time outdoors and groups of people must not exceed a dozen.
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Trump waived anti-lobbying rules on his way out

Trump campaigned in 2016 on being the only person who could ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington by getting rid of the influence peddling that is endemic there. One of his first acts was to impose a five-year ban on former aides lobbying. That was a good move for which he deserved credit. But it seems like he now thinks that the swamp is not such a bad place bad after all. On his way out the door, one of his very last acts was to rescind that rule.

Maybe it is because all the people who worked for him are finding it so hard to get jobs now and it was embarrassing for him to have close aides find themselves not being able to get lucrative work.

Ghastly inequality in the Gulf states

The Gulf states market themselves as glitzy tourist places filled with luxury high rise hotels and shopping malls and recreational areas. But they are also some of the most oppressive places for workers, where migrant workers are brought in and treated almost like slaves, working under extremely harsh conditions and poorly paid, thus resulting in some of the world’s greatest income inequality between the small number of people who are citizens and the huge number of desperately poor imported workers who cannot become citizens nor permanent residents and can be harshly punished if they make the slightest protest.

Bernard Freamon describes the incredibly oppressive conditions of the migrant workers in those countries.

The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states ­– Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait ­– grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region.
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Ending the Churchill idolatry

There is this weird phenomenon in America of excessive admiration of Winston Churchill. We see this with the reaction to the bust of him that Biden has moved out of the Oval Office, that threatened to create another kerfuffle like when Barack Obama moved it.

It had once been a transatlantic art scandal — or at least various actors of questionable intent would have you believe it was.

Overheated, confusing and laden in the end with blatant racism, the case of the White House bust of Winston Churchill still persists.

President Joe Biden has removed it from the Oval Office after four years standing sentry under his predecessor, who thought he looked something like the wartime prime minister.

An Oval Office redesign brought in new busts instead: Latino civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt.

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