A Blog for the People... + one.
ping-ponging from one military confrontation to the next. An alleged attack on Druze Israelis necessitates an attack on Lebanon, where Hezbollah is sheltering, all the while Israeli leaders talk about wrapping up operations in Gaza, although the hostages have not been rescued or returned nor Hamas eliminated.
The truth is: Israel would most benefit from peaceful boundary-making, as well as its neighbors.
Anyone reading newspaper headlines over the past 50 years understands the Middle East problem will not be resolved via weapons on a battlefield. The end will come just as the creation of the State of Israel began: on paper, negotiated...
Wiser minds need prevail. The US military hardware pipeline to the region must end. Washington's current crew is complicit in all the human death and environmental destruction. We cannot keep turning away while the world waits for leadership to emerge...
Geopolitically, the US is lucky. Israel not so much. The survival techniques "over there" -- huddle under an Iron Dome and proactively protect yourself from attack by going on the offense ever so often, with your sons and daughters as permanent military conscripts -- are not shared in a diverse welcoming democracy like the United States, with a Constitution that protects civilian rights.
Israel should emulate the United States. We in turn should stop arming up Israel for endless wars. Stop Investing in Abusurdities. That is a losing fight... It has weakened the United States and our people. Our shared American values need to prevail now.
Israel Returns Fire After Deadly Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field
The overnight strikes, a response to a rocket attack from Lebanon that killed 12 people in an Israeli-controlled town, stopped short of a major escalation.
Slow news summer, sure, but you'd think there would be more behind-the-scenes coverage of this historic visit by Israel's leader while... America flounders helplessly in the water, with no one at the rudder today guiding our motions as we are acted upon by "forces of nature" out of our control.
Meanswhile, the IDF slaughtered scores of Palestinian people in the past days by bombing facilities like United Nations facilities where they have been sheltering...
The IDF is not eager to get into the tunnels they have uncovered to pursue Hamas terrorists or Israeli- or American-Israeli hostages, even as America finances the ineffective bombing from above.
Until America stops funding the Israeli military -- and the "humanitarian" absurdities like the Great Pier build/rebuild efforts -- there will be no strategic progress except death of civilians, hostage deaths in captivity, and more encroachment and seizure of Palestinian land under the watchful eyes of the current US leadership.
I wonder what dancing orders Mr. Netanyahu will issue to our alleged Congressional leaders here at home in DC today? What will he chew up and spit into the media mouths to feed their current "war" coverage? (Can it really be a war if only one side is armed, and the other really is showing little interest in defeating terrorists who criminalized a music fest and invaded homes in October? Get get the bad guys, IDF conscripts? Leave those kids alone? "All in all you're just another brick in the wall" like the great Floyd song goes...)
Dare the collective American press today take a moment from slobbering over his ring to ask Netanyahu about the most recent land grabs, and if those high death scores of well... scores of lives have overriden the desire to see those Israeli civilians still held in captivity be freed? Does taking more Palestinian land and killing Palestinian civilians in such unwonten war methods (the IDF is writing their own rules as they merrily roll along...) justify the loss of Israeli life? Have people been appeased, had enough of the spilling of innocent blood to avenge their "side" of humanity?
Are the Jewish (and Jewish American) hostages being sacrificed by Israel and America now for Israel's greater good, to expand that country's borders by any means necessary? Martyrs not for the faith so much, but for The Promised Land?
Will any members of the US press point out that... well Netanyahu's military instincts are lousy, his tactics are not working... will any members of the US press ask today about the fate of the hostages, including those American-Israeli citizens left behind as the IDF obliterates parts of Palestine and seizes land, but still has not defeated Hamas, nor delivered live or dead hostage families to their people who remain waiting in hope for the coming of that day.
Hm.
Do we really think it's wise for America to abdicate leadership in the world for the coming 3 or 4 months? Until mid January?
Is Benjamin Netanyahu really running the world right now on America's billions? Hm... Let's talk voting issues: foreign-policy goals and border controls? Don't wait for the media to lead the "discussion". They're all covering the horse races of late.
People dancing people singing; a man is selling ice cream... Dancing in the dark.
Make it a great day out there even/especially if you're having to wing some of the lyrics... ;-)
Listening to you, I get the music...
or, America's Political Conventions March Ever Onward
 |
| Martin Mull, Christopher Makepeace, Ruth Gordon in My Bodyguard. |
For Martin Mull, try My Bodyguard, again if you have not yet seen this off-film, you are in for a treat! Another personal favorite memory (and it holds up! like... Breaking Away, if you still like that one.)
Note: this is not the Whitney Houston rest her soul film, but one with Chris Makepeace in the theaters in summer 1980: (some scenes shot at Chicago's Lake View High School...not a John Hughes film)
"A lot will be said about political violence in the coming weeks but I’m going to be clear. Advocating for a woman’s right to abortion, for voter enfranchisement, for a free Palestine, for an end to racism and xenophobia, for trans rights, for queer liberation, none of that is violent. Protesting what you believe is wrong is not political violence. Don’t let anyone muddy something that is crystal clear... "
That's a hell of a stress inducer.
I hope the former president is resting and his family is getting good medical care and advice for the days ahead. It's a marathon not a sprint.
Security needs to be revamped now. We need to begin talking less about the players and more about the plays. More about policy and less about people.
Less Drama more Change.
The good kind of change we've been promised previously in a diverse and inclusive society that often still feels out of grasp, though we are growing as a people and remain true to the causes that saw us all through thus far.
Summer 2024 continues apace!
Donald Trump is the natural heir to Ronald Reagan. A showman who scripts his own lines and acts. The good news is, there's no reason to replace Joe Biden on the ticket now without having him abdicate his current role. Donald Trump will be our new president because neither media hatred nor faulty lawsuits nor assassin's bullets will take him down. Focus on the issues... work like hell together, and Fight! Fight! Fight!
This summer needs to pass quickly and quietly... God save our candidates.
--------
Who would want to kill Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Who did this today? Answers please... Faster. Even on the weekends now. What in the world is going on? Somebody shot at his head? He fell? Bleeding from the ear....
---------
Added: I don't think he has to come to Milwaukee now. This is a good reason to stay away from the convention -- Trump should stay safe in Mar-a-Lago and take it easy, with family, if possible, to heal from whatever the hell happened today...
The Republican convention does not require his presence in the digital age... Reason to Work-From-Home here.
Israel said it targeted Hamas’ shadowy military commander in a massive strike Saturday in the crowded southern Gaza Strip that killed at least 71 people, according to local health officials.
No way would Bret Stephens' scenario play out: people linking arms to prevent deportations, inspiring "rogue" local authorities. The things some people scare up in their heads! Fantasies like this should be kept private, not published as mainstream news commentary. It's just fear-mongering, here at home.
Imagine the following scenario:
Trump is in the White House and decides to make good on his signature promise of mass deportation of migrants. Federal agents are deployed to towns and cities to do the job, but many of them flatly refuse to participate in what feels to them like a modern-day re-enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. They are joined by Democratic mayors and hundreds of thousands of Americans who are willing to form human chains around homes and neighborhoods to keep the agents out. But Trump doesn’t back down, and governors in red states call out the National Guard to break through the protests. Many are hurt, some are killed, and riots ensue.
That’s the incendiary America we are likely to get again in a second Trump term, whether the match is lit by deportations, another incident of police brutality or something else. The right-wing fantasy of somehow shutting down the left won’t be met quietly.
I'm pretty sure local people will protect local people if it comes to righting the ship, Mr. Stephens. There's still a lot of natural good-willed persons working hard to deliver as promised. It's easier to see at the ground level.
Feeling all the bumpers
Always playing clean
He plays by intuitionThe digit counters fallThat deaf, dumb and blind kidSure plays a mean pinball...President Biden’s remarks were in response to a Democratic lawmaker who told him on a Zoom call that he should withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign.
After another long holiday weekend that saw scores of people killed or wounded by gunfire — many of them children — city leaders gathered at Chicago Police headquarters Monday morning to once again decry the city’s entrenched violence and call for accountability for those who carried out the shootings.
You love to see the ladies find their voices, even if belatedly.
PAMELA PAUL
I heard the men saying something, "The captain's tell, they pay you well..."
And they say they need sailing men to show the way and leave today.
Was it you that said, "How long? How long? How long to the point of no return?"
I know what I know.
I've seen what I've said.
We came and we go...
It's the thing that I keep in the back of my head.
I won't put my hands up in surrender.
There will no white flag above my door...
-------
Name that tune. Independence Day 2024.
is that it will finally wean people off the legacy mainstream media.
People have known for years what the press just learned in last week's debate: Joe Biden is scripted, and his weaknesses hidden by DC insiders, including the press.
I read a few weeks back, someone making the point that -- to "beat" Trump -- the press needed to act the way they did back during World War II, hiding the fact that Franklin Rooseelt could not walk and needed physical assistance to the degree he did. Honestly...
Their hatred for Donald Trump (too many New York reporters he had "pasts" with and had personally insulted apparently for decades before being elected president; they had baggage immense...) led them to lie to themselves, and us, about Joe Biden's condition too.
The young people (those raised after Jon Stewart's parady news show on Comedy Central) never replied on a TV news hour, or a daily read. The new "digital subscribers" are in it for their Wordle and other assorted daily puzzles, their recipes (nttawwt) and their graphics features, or celebrities exposés,
As the American people continue to cleanse DC of the "old guard", I predict our idea that mainstream news tells us what we need to know going on in the world today and informs us as citizens will pass away too. That news model is dead, we've just been in denial for a long time about it.
America for the Loss...
Talk about No Man... or No Person Left Behind: A Boeing related space project that you might have heard news of in social media has finally made the mainstream media news, albeit a small item in the online digest. The press can no longer ignore this story either: America has two human "trapped" in space. Is this your worst nightmare? Being trapped in a situation not your making?
Can you imagine having to risk getting back into a defective transporter if you want to return home? It's like having a junk car and being miles away from your loved ones. Do you risk it? Or stay put? Can you stay away... forever? Where does your hope lie? I bet these two, and their families, are praying hard right now...
It's a shame this story is not front-page national news. But like with Evan Gershkovich or homeless and hungry Gazans hanging on today, non-happy news stories -- and the people involved -- tend to drop from the headlines these days, as journOlists conspire to breathlessly report the latest polls, the latest gossip, the latest "Get Trump!" stories.
It would be and will be BAD news if a disaster like the Challenger occurs to the partially Boeing-built spacecraft upon re-entry and even two human lives are lost. But human life is cheap today, and nobody can think ahead or take pride in their work for its own sake...
Give it a few weeks time. Soon this will be the biggest story in the nation, and where there's money to be made, the new digital media will have all journOlists on the roster opining on this one, just like they have now belatedly discovered Joe Biden, the American president, is showing signs of not-so-early-onset dementia after his son died of a brain tumor (genetic?) and the president himself had at least two brain surgeries in his medical past.
God Bless America, and I am not saying that tritely. Intelligent Americans are hurting these days, because we cannot just disappear into our technology or our cares for "our own" family people and ignore what the digital revolution is doing in absolutely cheapening human life -- all life, truth be told -- today. Pray if you can, and urge your church leaders to include prayers for the two trapped space explorers, and the people still surviving in Gaza in your collective prayer services. These stories are not going away, and the legacy media, some say, are nearly braindead today too.
NASA has sent hundreds of people into space since 1961. Doing that is hard, but for an agency like NASA, it is supposed to be as routine as one can expect.
That makes the Starliner saga of the last several weeks all the more troubling. On June 5, Boeing sent two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to the International Space Station aboard its new Starliner spacecraft. It was the first time the vehicle had ever ferried humans into space — after years of developmental delays caused by design and testing problems. This mission was supposed to be a moment of redemption for the company’s space program as well as its larger reputation.
But Boeing can’t catch a break. Helium leaks were detected soon after Starliner made it to orbit. Upon approach to the space station, five of its thrusters started to behave aberrantly. While the crew made it to the space station safely, a planned eight-day stay has stretched to 26 days and counting. NASA and Boeing say they are still trying to discern what caused the thruster issues — and, more important, ensure Starliner can safely bring back the astronauts.
That is, of course, the prudent move. The Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters could have been prevented by more thorough checks. But it’s one that leaves Williams and Wilmore stuck in space.
Now, NASA and Boeing object to that kind of characterization; they have emphasized that in an emergency, the astronauts can take the spacecraft home. But if the pair can’t come home yet, because of circumstances outside their control, and there’s no timetable for when they could return, that seems to fit the very definition of being stuck.
This isn’t how NASA’s new era of human spaceflight was billed when Starliner was first announced. NASA wanted to elevate the private sector: For its new partners, it picked a newcomer, SpaceX, and a seemingly dependable veteran, Boeing. But the veteran is the reason Williams and Wilmore are having to adapt to new routines hundreds of miles above their homes on Earth.
For the sake of the country,
they need to refuse to imprison Trump
or limit his travels or make his "serve time."
The Dems can still use the "paying the porn star" conviction/facts as campaign fodder, which is what they really were after anyway. No need to limit the people's choice: it really should be an honest "re-do" of the 2020 election now, without the emergency pandemic voting irregularities imposed...
Let's hope the judicial branch/Judge Merchan is more reasonable than punitive. We don't need another "Jan6" protest or a civil war in this country. (Israel clearly needs one though -- more protests/a "cold" civil war, in helping them decide their national leader... Dissent and civil unrest can be good, and serve a country well. America just needs an honest election in November though, with the people/voter's voices respected and listened to...)
--------
Update: Good move here!
"Manhattan Prosecutors Agree to Delay Trump’s Sentencing/Donald J. Trump’s lawyers want to argue that a Supreme Court decision giving presidents immunity for official acts..."
Like, does that work? Do we have the technology yet? People working on it?? ;-)
Let me know when Alexa gets that feature and I will subscribe. (No, there's too much here for a Roomba to be bouncing off of... not the same thing.)
Mathematicians and hobbyists have had a half-century of fun exploring the 43 billion billion permutations of Erno Rubik’s creation.
--------
Now that'll make you feel older, those of us now in our 50s who were Reagan-era kids coming up in the glory days of the 1980s... summer Olympics 1984, anyone?? "Glory days, glory days, glory days..."
Yep, life was better then because we were living life, not interacting with technology but with each other. Remember those summers? I sure do! The people and events mostly. The games and movies and good times. Sure we were younger, but life was so much richer for all. Less exclusive and less deadly because we were not locked into the growing caste system we see in America now...
Go live a free life this week, if you can. That's my advice. Take it or don't, but don't let those being paid for to stir up Drama! shut you down. Be Free once again, like the youth we once were. Remember our dead, but live life today in honoring their memory.
* You know I really write this stuff to and for me, not you, right readers? You're welcome to my thoughts, of course, but I write for myself. See the side bar.
Sure the passive pundits and podcasters -- white-boy media mostly -- are salivating at the latest drama they've cooked up to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket (as if these age problems just developed overnight and oh-how-could-anyone-have-seen-these-issues with Brandon or the family coming and addressed them earlier by applying timely pressure???) but... it's not healthy for the country.
Much too late to change horses mid-stream, especially with all these foreign wars we are funding that are slowly trapping our own nation into the consequences of the carnage that will soon enough draw us in too "to fight" (as if).
But looking ahead is not for the DRAMA! mongers, so professional potheads like Bill Maher and those pretty faces -- fellas too! -- pontificating on the Sunday talk shows are still pretending they have more power than the people across our shared land.
Not in my democracy, friends.
I can guarantee you there's no sneaking in late-hour "leaders" like young Jewish-American first-time Gov. Josh Shapiro, the female-bodied alleged MAGA victim from Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, or a smiling Gavin Newsome none of which will be much of a draw in the Midwestern and swing states that really matter. They'll be as warmly embraced by working American voters sick of the cooked-up drama! in DC as a Benyamin Netanyahu foreign leader addressing OUR representatives in Congress = not welcome at all.
Either the current president steps aside and democracy is restored as his natural successor the vice-president assumes the top of the ticket, and the highest office, in a dignified transfer of power, or you hold the reins steady and support the leader who has been in power -- like it or not -- since a few days after Jan. 6 (a day that will go down in infamy! /not. That Drama! quickly petered out, though the passive media simply couldn't let it go, initiating arrests and court actions still needing to be cleaned up even...) 2021.
This is no time to blow up the ship to try and save the people on the upper decks who have belatedly realized their vessel too is taking on water and their intentional ignorance will cost them for failing to address real issues much sooner in time while they were content to sacrifice up those in the lower berths issuing real warnings... (Exclusive journOlist cabals refuse to address what their mostly white-boy members are being paid not to cover, afterall. Real people care about real-life policies, not DRAMA! That view will never penetrate those places, however... content to watch the transfer of billions needed at home to places like Israel to kill off children to clear land for expansion. Cover that, white boys? Get your asses to Gaza and report from the killing fields?)
Still, the media has their "work" to sell, so keep your heads down in the coming weeks -- and pray for Chicago -- that all this DRAMA!tic effort at stirring up trouble goes for naught. We've got enough work to do pressuring our alleged allies to stop killing children and to admit that the Ukranian army, no matter how many billions of weapons are pumped into Zelensky's "fighting" forces will not be taking Russia anytime soon... Common sense > media legacy power any day of the week. Good luck everyone out there this week; just ignore headlines like these: don't take the (click) bait!
An open convention wouldn’t be a disaster for the Democrats. It might even help them win.
A song to start your independent week, redolent of the times when America wasn't paying our allies to kill kids and supplying weapons to push more bodies into the meat grinder in Ukraine and Russia all to open up a country for our own global business interests...
Oh common ground
Is common ground a word or just a sound?
Oh, oh, common ground
Remember those civil rights workers buried in the ground...
We'll be a great nation again one day, once we shake the parasites currently feeding off taxpayers and treating themselves as global royalties in need of daily servants to live our lives... They simply do not see the value of freedom and shifting for themselves and their own, always on the make with a hand out to take, some people are...
Not real Americans though who can and do shift for themselves.
"Nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can write that can't be run..."
