Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXXV. Griner and Russian Law, Senseless Destruction, No. 10 Cat to get new Roommate, Russia threats on Alaska, Where's the followup?

Don't be stupid out there

Russia is not the United States.

Brittney Griner is accused of bringing CBD oil into Russia, supposedly in vape pens.

Did she do it?  I don't know.

But what I do know is that Russia isn't the US, where a celebrated athlete would likely get a slap on the hands for a drug violation, and where this isn't one.

Americans seem to believe for some reason that if they fall afoul of the law in a foreign nation, the US should rescue them.  The US has no obligation to do that.

And like it or not, other nations have much stricter laws on a host of things than the US does.  The US in contrast has lots and lots of laws, which isn't necessarily a good thing either.  In part, that leaves Americans with a sort of combined quite contempt and ignorance for the law. We don't know what all the laws are, so we don't tend to worry about them overly much.  And people can do some pretty bad stuff and not get punished all that much.

In contrast, there can be real penalties for things in foreign countries.  In one Southeast Asian country, for example, people get beat with canes for spitting gum on the street.  When I went to South Korea with the National Guard in the 1980s I recall us all being warned that you could be jailed for possessing a Playboy magazine, which didn't bother me as I wasn't going to be running around the Korean Peninsula with one, but that's a much different approach to pornography that the US has.

You get the point.

On Griner, my present understanding is that she plays basketball in Russia as women basketball players make less than male ones in the U.S.  So she goes there on the off season, where apparently they are then running their leagues.  I get that, and that's not just, but that's not a reason to be careless, if she was.  Her minority status, her numerous tattoos, her homosexual status, and her American citizenship all made her a target in a nation where all of those are either very unusual or not at all tolerated.  On top of that, there's a war going on.

There's not much the US can do to spring her.  The Russians will let her go when holding her no longer serves a purpose.

Senseless Destruction.

Somebody blew up the Georgia Guidestones.

For those who are not familiar with them, there's a really good episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World about them, identifying the builder and why he did it.  For a really brief synopsis, based on memory, a physician who lived in another state built them out of concern that things were going down the tubes and giving his own personal guidance and thoughts on how to avoid going down the tubes in the future.

Frankly, they were very 1970ish.

Why would somebody blow them up?

Apparently, some people believed they were evil, which is silly.  

Regarding guidestones, with all the crap going on in the US right now, the builders thoughts probably wouldn't be altered if he were around right now.

Boris Johnson falls.

Americans tend to be so self focused on their own politics, which are distressingly weird right now, that they miss the politics of other nations.  On top of it, the American press is phenomenally bad on reporting political events in other nations.  Added to that, the press of the subject nations tends to be no better, so you are only left with the suggestion that he did something horrible, with nobody ever telling you what it was.  An article in the Guardian, for example, calls him the worst leader the Tories every had, but won't say why.

Canadian changes of power, by the way, are completely that way.  It's like the entire topic of the election is a big secret.

Anyhow, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resigned.  He will briefly remain Prime Minister until his replacement is chosen.

Usually this happens following an election with the party in control loses.  This, however, was due to an internal revolt in the Conservative Party.

Apparently a lot of this has to do with "Partygate", a scandal in which parties were held at No. 10 Downing Street (as if they were going to be able to keep that secret) which violated COVID restrictions in the UK.

I guess it says something in favor of the British that this would bring a Prime Minister down, whereas in the United States a sitting President would attempt to illegally retain power and nothing happen to him.

Russia threatens Alaska.

One of the Russian strategies to deal with its pathetic performance in Ukraine is to threaten everyone else.  Now it is threatening the United States, stating it might fight us to take Alaska back.

Seriously?

Usually, bullies have to win to be credible.

And now. . . ?

I'm not going to bother to name names, but there is a politician in Congress who came on Twitter nearly daily to blame Biden for rising gasoline prices.

Now gas prices have fallen for eight days straight.  So is he going on and giving credit?

Yeah. . . right.