Perhaps everybody does it, we Maltese not least.

We look for and prefer easy ways out by which to meet arising challenges and get over them. Where the way out we choose happens to be too hard for our tastes, we’ll see how to change it to one less onerous by our standards. Actually one could interpet this country’s economic development from such a perspective...

So, over the years we stopped emphasizing industrial development and channeled many of the efforts that used to go on its promotion towards services. In tourism, a formula was found by which foreign workers engaged for lower pay, would take over the employment of Maltese workers who found their jobs in this sector as too burdensome. Meanwhile, the easy ways out of employment with the government or in real estate trading and speculation found many many takers.

Perhaps the only time that from start to finish, an easy way out was not taken was when between 1971 and 1979, the British military base in Malta was definitively dismantled.

As of now, I doubt whether easy ways out still exist that we could seek to follow in the future.

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HEAT

Given the heat waves which as it seems, will become a continuous factor affecting our way of life, one is tempted to ask whether the systems by which fire warnings get triggered automatically are still suited to the conditions prevailing now. Are they set to give their alarm notice sufficiently in time at public buildings and offices, stores where inflammable materials are held, corn and fodder silos, ports, factories, hotels...?

When reading many of the reports that reach us from elsewhere, about fires that burst out with sudden explosive force, one is left with the suspicion that prior warnings about what was going to happen were lacking.

It might be a good idea to inspect and modernise all the gear in place that is meant to monitor the potential occurence of fire and as necessary, to install new systems in other areas which might have become sensitive to the issue. 

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RETRIBUTION

There likely is going to arise a temptation within the US Biden administration to somehow compensate for the debacle that in the eyes of the world, it has experienced with the Taliban takeover in Kabul. That scenario could take the shape of some American military operation somewhere meant to signal that the US is still the major Superpower.

Were that to be done, it would be a bigger mistake than the ways by which the American presence in Afghanistan has been run, designed as it was to bring about a fundamental change in how that country is governed.

I always believed that the initial US intervention in Afghanistan post 2001 was justified as retribution for the atrocious Al Qaida attack on central New York and to ensure there would be no repeat. After that though, the subsequent interventions turned into a series of tactical and strategic mistakes, which indeed repeated similar mistakes that well before the US came on stage in Afghanistan, had already been committed during previous British and Soviet invasions of that country.