This has been an extraordinarily eventful week, particularly in Eric Hoffer terms; in that one should always be aware of leading indicators.
This Blogger’s Mexican-American, Hispanic, Latino, Latinx friends tell me that the most eventful event this past week was two out of three of the leading Democratic candidates for President, Senator Amy Klubuchar of Minnesota, and Billionaire Tom Steyer (think ARTIE ZIFF from THE SIMPSONS), could not, in their quest to lead the world, name the President of America’s largest trading partner, a nation which guards America’s Southern border, a nation of 110 million people just across the Rio Grande.
“Democratic presidential hopefuls Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer were stumped when asked during a televised interview in Nevada to name the Mexican president. Klobuchar, Steyer and fellow 2020 candidate Pete Buttigieg were asked during one-on-one interviews with the Spanish-language station Telemundo on Thursday night if they knew the name of the president whose country borders the U.S. It is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December 2018.
Klobuchar, a three-term senator from Minnesota, responded, “No.”
Steyer, a billionaire businessman, replied, “I forgot.”
Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was the only one of the three who knew the answer. “Lopez Obrador, I hope,” he said with a smile.
The interviews occurred after a candidate forum hosted by the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights organization. …ASSOCIATED PRESS.”
This Blogger’s Mexican friends, in Mexico( its President is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO) , tell him that the biggest event was Mexican women demonstrating against femicide. 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was murdered by her boyfriend; after brutally killing her, he slipped back to his Aztec priest's roots and skinned her.
This Blogger’s British friends told him it was Boris Johnson concentrating unparalleled power in his hands by firing the incumbent Chancellor of the Exchequer.
His German friends told him that it was Chancellor Angela Merkel losing her heir apparent, with the result that Merkel’s sworn enemy is in a position to assume power after she retires. He intends to exile Merkel to a cold spot in the Black Forest.
His BERNIE BRO friends told him it was Mayor Bloomberg spending $350 million so far, to buy amnesia from blacks and women; to buy amnesia from the billionaire Bloomberg’s racism and misogyny.
Mayor Bloomberg is a misogynist; how do we know that?
He said that women who walked by construction sites deserved to be harassed; and that if women wanted to be known for their brains they should go to libraries and not Bloomingdales( a very fancy Manhattan department store).
This Blogger intends to take particular delight in the upcoming Democratic debates, when two racists, Bloomberg and Mayor Pete vie to represent the most diverse political party in history, for the American Presidency.
Advocates for illegal aliens, who discuss immigration with this Blogger, thought the most eventful event this past week was President Trump preparing to send in commandos to root out illegal aliens in sanctuary cities (think French paras in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS).
“According to the NEW YORK TIMES, agents from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) will spread across the country to cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, and Newark, N.J. to work alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to arrest people allegedly in the country illegally.As the Times reported:With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.
The unit’s work often takes place in the most rugged and swelteringly hot areas of the border. It can involve breaking into stash houses maintained by smuggling operations that are known to be filled with drugs and weapons.”
MSNBC, CNN, THE WASHINGTON POST and THE NEW YORK TIMES thought that the most eventful event this past week, was President Trump riding rough shod over the Rule of Law. This Blogger found that opinion comic relief. When will the Liberal Elite ever understand that they gave President Trump license to ride roughshod over the Rule of Law when they condoned and empowered the illegality of 12 million illegal aliens. There can be no Rule of Law when 12 million people flaunt the Rule of Law.
The above is an impressive compendium.
However, none of those events were the most eventful, or seminal from last week.
That event occurred in Egypt.
"Egypt’s population has surpassed 100 million, with statistics showing that a baby is born every 17.9 seconds according to the state statistics body.
The North African country has witnessed a rapid population growth in the past three decades, having risen from 57 million in 1990.In about two years, Egypt’s population grew by nearly four million.
Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said last week that overpopulation was the single biggest challenge facing the country.
The population growth rate has caused concerns among authorities who have recently responded by encouraging people to have smaller families.
Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a cabinet meeting last week that “population growth is the single largest challenge facing the state … and affects national security.”
As with most Arab countries, Egypt has a youthful population with just over 60 percent under the age of 30. …..Africacgtn,com”
By happenstance, this Blogger was in Cairo, on vacation, during the first Gulf War.
In 2012, this Blogger published the following about his time in Egypt, 1991.
“This Blogger loves the Egyptian people; they are kind, good natured, and gracious. Made worshipers of fellow humans by incestuous Pharaohs; conquered by Hittites, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, British, among others; they have survived into graciousness. With their history, graciousness should not be there, but it is, just like the Nile.
Cairo has an infrastructure built for maybe 3 to 4 million people; it must have been fabulous to live there in the late forties and early 1950s, just like Hollywood and Mexico City must have been in those golden years. Cairo had glamour then.
But alas, it is now like the now Mexico City, a great old lady, now too old for her burden.
Today, Cairo’s metro area has a population of about 20.8 million people; Cairo is the 16th most populous metro area in the world.
It is also the most populous metropolitan area in Africa, a lot of people for an infrastructure built to sustain 3 million souls.
One night, this Blogger and his girl, Judy, were assigned a Coptic Christian bodyguard, Hani; he could and did join us for a drink of whiskey. We sat around chatting, watching a wedding reception at the Sheraton Hotel. Hani was hilarious;he had just finished guarding a party of Mormons, and they had decided to convert him, so they had sent him NINE boxes of religious material from Bountiful, Utah. He asked me some questions about Mormons, which I could not answer, so we decided to go visit his uncle in Heliopolis, a cool Cairo neighborhood.
The Uncle was a most gracious man, and he asked Judy and this Blogger to stay to watch some Egyptian films made in Cairo in the late 1940s,when it seems Egypt had a thriving film industry. He had a gigantic collection of old Egyptian films, complete with a makeshift screening room, featuring an antique, no ancient 35mm projector. It was so Egyptian Sunset Blvd. Hani was assigned to change the reels at the appropriate times. Our host spoke wonderfully aristocratic English, from his youth in the Days of Empire.
The film was filmed in and around Cairo;out of nowhere, the gracious host starts crying like a baby, a real breakdown.
He began to mutter: " Oh Cairo, my Cairo, you were so beautiful then. you should have seen it then.”
Hani tried to console his inconsolable Uncle, amid the flickering black and white images mocking the living from the screen. All that was missing was Erich Von Stroheim, with monocle and maybe a fez.
How can one summon up nostalgia for the good old times of fifty years ago, in a country that has been there for 5,000 years? Our host was lamenting fifty years past, in a country which has a past history of 5,000 years.
This Blogger made a point of visiting the Cairo Citadel, the site of the Massacre of the Mamelukes, by the original Muhammad Ali, the Albanian thug, mercenary, warlord, Mafioso, and eventual Sultan of Egypt.
Under the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, young Christian Crimean, Georgian and Circassian boys were kidnapped from their homeland and made into slaves, the Mamelukes( from the Arab word meaning “owned.”). They were forcibly converted to Islam and trained in the martial arts.
This is what you should know about Egypt, the misplaced permanence of it. Go stand on the banks of the Nile, the Mother of Rivers; then turn around and face West, toward Libya, and just start walking. It is some of the most green,and lush and vibrant land you will ever see. It is so green, it is like Astroturf. You walk for maybe ten miles, a nice hike,through toppled temples, past wrecked Gods, but still green, a green carpet.
Then it ends, ENDS. In its place, directly in front of you, where there was lush green, is a mean, brown desert. It just begins, no gap, no ditch, no gulch, no epic divide, just lush green suddenly stopping and a hard brown desert beginning. It is as if God had laid a thousand mile strip of astroturf on the Mojave; it is a remarkable sight. The green does not even peter out, it just ends. No one should weep for something which happened, on film, when you can walk ten miles and see a green and brown miracle.
There is nothing like the Nile, for the simple reason, IT SHOULD NOT BE THERE. It is the anomaly which humbles you... THE MAXEY CHRONICLES.’
”CAIRO — Somewhere in Egypt, around lunchtime Tuesday, the country reached a major milestone: its 100 millionth citizen was born.
The birth of that citizen — whom officials identified as a girl named Yasmine Rabie, in a village in Minya governorate — was noted in Cairo by a giant counter outside the country’s national statistics agency that has been ticking upward for years.
Hitting 100,000,000 marked human plenty, certainly, but also an uneasy moment in a country gripped by worries that its exploding population will exacerbate poverty and unemployment, and contribute to the scarcity of basic resources like land and water.
Egypt’s cabinet said last week that it was on “high alert” to fight population growth, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has described as a threat to national security on par with terrorism. If unchecked, the population could reach 128 million by 2030, officials say.
Mr. el-Sisi tried to push back the tide with a public health campaign called “Two Is Enough” to persuade parents to have fewer children. Like many such efforts, it failed.
Fertility rates have risen since 2008, to 3.5 children per woman, according to the United Nations, and the population is growing 1.8 percent annually — a rate that, in Egypt’s crowded cities and towns, adds one million citizens every six months.
“The kids are coming thick and fast,” said David Sims, a lecturer at the American University in Cairo and author of “Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control.” “What the hell are they going to do?”
Egypt’s population crisis is amplified by its unforgiving geography: 95 percent of the population lives on about 4 percent of the land, a green belt roughly half the size of Ireland that follows the Nile as it snakes through the desert then fans out into the lush Nile Delta.
The construction of a huge new dam on the Nile in Ethiopia, due to start filling this summer, has focused the public’s fears about the existing strains on the river, largely from population growth.
Fertility rates are highest in rural areas, where a large family is considered a blessing.
But their impact is felt most keenly in greater Cairo, where a sprawling megalopolis of about 20 million inhabitants is spilling into the surrounding desert and farmland.
Seen from roof height, the city looms as a vista of flat concrete roofs dotted with millions of satellite dishes. Even at the pyramids of Giza, houses, hotels and golf courses push in from three sides, leaving tourists with just one direction for photographs with a sand-filled backdrop.
Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of former President Hosni Mubarak, spearheaded a push during her husband’s rule to reduce fertility rates. It was partly successful: During the 1990s and 2000s, rates fell to 3.0 from 5.2, according to government figures.
But the rate rose again around the time of the Arab Spring in 2011…Under Mr. el-Sisi, the government has dispatched thousands of family planning advocates into rural areas and offered cheap contraceptives — as little as 6 cents for a packet of three condoms in a government store and 12 cents for an intrauterine device.
The country’s leading Islamic authority, Al Azhar, has endorsed the government plans and stressed that family planning is not forbidden by God.
….“Overpopulation is eating everything,” said Dr. Amr A. Nadim, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Ain Ain Shams University. ….
Other large developing countries with soaring populations have managed to get the problem under control. Vietnam, where the population grew to 97 million in 2018 from 60 million in 1986, has reduced the rate of increase to 1 percent. Bangladesh, which has a population of more than 160 million, has done the same.
In Egypt, though, the rate of growth is nearly twice as high, at 1.79 percent in 2018-19. More than 700,000 young Egyptians enter the job market every year, said Aleksandar Bodiroza, representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Egypt. “That’s a daunting task for any government,” he said.
Housing them is equally challenging. Mr. el-Sisi has made much of the array of high-profile megaprojects his government is building, like a new summer capital on the north coast and a new administrative capital outside Cairo. But few Egyptians can afford to live in the fancy new developments.
Rather, most people are cramming into the informal settlements that are continually sprouting on the edge of Cairo and other cities, where villages are being transformed into dormitory towns and farmland is being swallowed by uncontrolled development……NEW YORK TIMES.”
This Blogger was in Egypt when its population was 60 million; Egypt’s President at the time, Hosni Mubarak was clever, shrewd and far sighted. He knew the greatest threat to Egypt was overpopulation.
Mubarak stopped the population explosion in its tracks.
However, Mubarak was not cuddly enough for Liberals like President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Ambassador Anne Patterson. During the Arab Spring, they scuppered President Mubarak, for people who did not give a damn about population control, the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Sunnis of the Muslim Brotherhood wanted more Sunnis, and here we are with 100 million Egyptians.
It is physically impossible for the 100 million Egyptians to stay in Egypt; the Nile will not provide enough water to sustain them; especially now that Ethiopia is planning a massive Hoover like Dam, damming the Blue Nile.
By happenstance, this Blogger was in Luxor when the Gulf War began; Judy was evacuated by the German counsel. This Blogger was assigned a Nubian Guardian and a phalanx of tourist police to keep him alive( https://themaxeychronicles.blogspot.com/2019/04/up-nile-greatest-question-ever-asked.html). On his cruise up the Nile, he shared meals with many Egyptian army officers and futurists.
Their contingency plans for an over populated Egypt, with a depleted Nile, were stark. Egypt would go West, and absorb Libya and its oil.
And they would reassert their suzerainty over Sudan, driving into Ethiopia, and securing the headwaters of the Blue Nile, by force.
Egypt has a good army; Israel can attest to that.
The most eventful event last week, hands down, was in Egypt.
This Blogger in Egypt
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