Sundays are Unsettling

The fat NYTimes arrives Sunday at my door. I love it! I'm addicted to it. But I get very unsettled by it. This week it was very disturbing: A favorite columnist, Nicholas Kirstof, has an item about Myanmar where Aung San Sun Kyi has just become president in a democratic election -- with a good bit of support, public and, I think, possibly covert -- from Barack Obama.  Thus we have two Nobel Peace Prize winners helping a country shrug off a terrible period of repression. But, Kristoff says, in the north of the country 10,000 Rohengia (possibly misspelled) citizens of the country are in concentration camps where they have been for a long time and neither Kyi or Obama seem interested in freeing them. They are all Muslims -- in a predominantly Buddhist country. Their interment predates the whole ISIS business; they are simply persona no grata in their own country. I don't need to refer to other situations we have seen like this.

There's another corporation-too-big-to-care story in the magazine about DuPont knowing for at least 20 years that a chemical used for the Teflon coating (and other things) is highly toxic, yet they dump sludge into rural creeks, let the stuff leach into water tables that are used by thousands.They know it causes all kinds of cancers in people and animals (and they've known it and done nothing about it).  It seems almost by chance that a pricipled lawyer finally took them on.  And it's not over yet.

A bit closer to home,there's an article about women over 50 being almost ignorned, or otherwise condescended to by the entire fashion industry. And asking when do we say "furgedaboutit" and do whatever we want with our appearance, our weight, our clothes, our lives?  Well it seems that paragon of dieting, Oprha Winfrey, whose dress size has changed dramatically for the last 25 years, has recently made a one minute advertisement for Weight Watchers. And, yes, once again, she will publicly diet and weigh herself and prove how effecitve the program is.  I'm convinced she will -- after all she recently bought a 10% share of their stock and almost immediately realized a $70 million dollar profit -- as if one of American's richest business women needs that extra money. Meanwhile it is well known that people DO lose weight on the WW program, they get to their goal, go off the program and 95% of them gain it back -- then they go on the program again because, hey, it did work! 

Believe me there was much else --starving refugees, a movie star with an exclusive interview with El Chapo. the Mexican  drug load, while he was still officially on the run from an escape, North Korea's young premier doing a bully move with is bombs and so on and on.  And countries all over the world digging up their minerals and fossil fuels for China's consumption, but China is pulling back (high time!) and leaving the others with no where to sell their goods

Maybe it was an extra serious downer yesterday because heavy gray rain poured down the entire day. But I don't think so. After all its January and it was not even freezing rain when it could have been snow.  People have suggested I should stop reading the paper but that's not an option. I live in this cockeyed world and I am curious about what's going on in other parts of it. I can mostly ignore the verbal sparring of the crazy Republican candidates, only one of them can become the candidate. None of them have the qualifications to run a used car dealership let alone this country. But I don't need to think about that until later in the year.

And there's always the Sunday crossword puzzle to take my mind off the news. For me it's an anti-anxiolytic.