Status update: Once again, all COVID symptoms sweated out fast, leaving me feeling perky and impatient with quarantine. I did want to check for a cheque in the mail, so accepted a lift into town and back in a truck; it was warm enough. I went into the post office when the office, proper, was closed. No new mail of any kind had come in. I came back to the screen-porch-as-office.
Poems
The child I knew who used to look like this grew up before digital cameras, and had a completely different face, hair, complexion...but this is what my immediate family used to call "pouting." Or sometimes, since it clearly goes beyond a simple lip protrusion, "poutatating."
It may be genetic, but it's instinctive. None of "The Poutatator's" parents or siblings did it. They showed anger in other ways.
More musings on karma in the broad US sense of the word:
What can the rest of the world learn from Ireland?
Stupidity, the Choice
Congresschick Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has a large mouth full of extra-large teeth. That is her worst feature. Otherwise, she looks far too young to be in Congress, arguably too young to be in Washington without a parent, but youth is cute. Her hair and eyes are pretty. Her very best look might be a drapey black face veil. She'd do well to lose the lipstick; not since Kim Kardashian was a girl have we seen a girl who so desperately needed to avoid calling attention to her mouth.
And it seems that not only can AOC not resist the temptation to highlight her worst feature, that ugly mouth...she also can't keep her foot out of it.
"Moral equivalence" between Hamas and...the Birmingham church bombing? The Wounded Knee massacre? The Yom Kippur War?\Most victims of mass murders have at least been able to see danger and fight, or flee, or at least say their prayers; at Soweto and Waco and Sandy Hook the murderers looked at the faces they are going to see directing them to Hell on the Judgment Day. At My Lai or at the World Trade Center, even, the murdered weren't celebrating a religious holiday.
Dang. I started this comment with the intention of linking to a moment of stunning stupidity that ended someone else's career, but the only thing that comes to mind is Earl Butz and I think linking to his infamous remark might violate this web site's contract.
War
This web site takes no sides...between nations. Between human decency and crimes against humanity, only. We are not anti-Palestine; we think Palestinians and sincere Muslims should join the civilized world in condemning Hamas. So, just in case any Palestinians are able to use the Internet...
This is an old war song. The young fellows in the video were going out to maim and kill people. Some of them were also going to be maimed or killed. Some of them have lived with disabilities for fifty years. They sang a cheerful song to suppress their natural feelings about this.
But they faced their enemy like men. They did not creep up behind families, who are praying or singing in a religious celebration, and murder the babies. They made absolutely sure their enemies knew what they were doing, and why. If they did not earn the honor due to those who make peace, at least they earned the respect due to those who fight with some courage, as having some reason to believe that God might be with them.
What Hamas did is as far below this traditional warfare as warfare is below negotiation, morally. Israel's declaration of war was certainly understandable but it shows more respect than Hamas deserves. They could still deal with the Hamas trash as the nastier-than-common criminals they are, as the US did with bin Laden, or with homegrown terrorists like Ted Kaczynski or Timothy McVeigh.
This is not what I want to see The Nephews doing but it is the way to wage war without making the whole world despise you. Palestinians' grievances have piled up for fifty years because, fifty years ago, some cowards similar to Hamas committed murders similar to Hamas's, and so now everyone whose memory goes back fifty yeas has a tendency to think "treacherous, cowardly, hypocritical murderers" when we think of Palestinians. We might have hoped that it had taught present-time Palestinians something about how human beings behave.
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