Bicycle delivery

Bonus: What do the countries here have in common? They put the "again" in MAGA.

Top: Just before the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, a man makes a bicycle delivery. Posters, paintings, and statues of Saddam Hussein were common and varied—ranging from fearsome to fatherly, from thuggish to this one, where he looks like a Miami bon vivant.

Below: A man rides along the Mekong River to deliver handmade brooms in Vientiane, Laos. When I was there, one of the pleasures of the country was how little plastic there was. Many items we only see in plastic—pails, trash cans, containers, bags—were locally hand-made by skilled craftspeople. Wonder if that is still the case.

I picked these two photos without at first realizing that their link went beyond the bikes. Sooo, here it is, your …

BONUS RANT: Both photos were shot on location for unironic episodes of the Make America Great Again fantasy series.

Great, like when the US dropped more munitions on tiny Laos in a secret war (well, secret from Americans, but surely not from tens of thousands of Laotian casualties). Washington—in its relentless, tragic, and unfathomably stupid Vietnam war, waged in the name of the lethally specious Domino Theory—dropped an estimated 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos, making it, per capita, the most bombed nation in history.

Great, like when the US led two invasions of Iraq—the 1991 Gulf War and the sequel, the 2003 invasion and occupation. These aggressions, in violation of the US Constitution and international law, left a tragic legacy of literal and political poison. Casualties may have topped a million people when the toll from indirect causes (disease, infrastructure collapse, etc.) is included.