-- New information has galvanized the FBI into digging up the earth in search of the remains of former Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa's links to organized crime were widely assumed when he disappeared in 1975 after a lunch with another Teamsters leader and a Mafia member.
The one piece of information I cannot extract from today's news story about all this is what usefulness there might be to uncovering the remains. Hoffa was born on Valentines Day in 1913. If, by some chance, he were alive today, he would be 100 years old. Odds favor his being dead. So the question that rises in my mind is, how much more definitive does anyone need to be? What new information, outside the solving of some gossipy, delicious mental mystery, could there possibly be in a bunch of bones?
What, precisely, would anyone know if they knew it? What makes knowing a good enough reason to break out the backhoes? On what sentence is this application of time, money and manpower attempting to put a period?
-- In Afghanistan, the government has taken over security duties implemented by NATO since the 2001 outster of the Taliban, a faction devoted to fundamentalist Islamic rigidities that might scare the balls off lesser men. Billions and billions of U.S. dollars have been poured into the effort to 'stabilize' Afghanistan. Young men and women, American and otherwise, have died. And now, as predicted, we can watch the civil wars recommence.
-- In Brazil, widening protests about a public-transport fare price hike lend a poignancy to the economic implosion of 2008 ... the one Wall Street and probably your neighbor helped to arrange. A seven-cent price hike brings out hundreds of thousands: What does that tell you about straitened circumstances?
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