October 14

 Well, Saturday morning and we have rain. Supposed to have more tomorrow. We simply did nothing yesterday. I had supper cooked on Friday when I did up baked chicken breasts with veggies. We took over the leftovers yesterday.

The constant harping of the news media on the civilian suffering both in Israel and Gaza. Hamas has started releasing pictures of their own people suffering from both the Israeli bombardment and the cut off of fuel, food and water. Another odd stray thought came into my mind. I don't know how many remember the TV series MASH. The episode that comes to mind is the one where a writer who is a friend of Hawkeye's is brought into the surgery gravely wounded and dies on the operating table. Henry tells a grieving Hawkeye that he was given two rules in the course designed to turn civilian doctors into officers. Rule #1 was that "In war, young men die." Rule #2 was that "Doctors can't change rule #1." The more accurate reading would be if Rule #1 said "In war, PEOPLE die. Young or old, male or female, it doesn't matter. They DIE." And if Rule #2 said "The only ones who can change that dynamic are those who start the wars." And let's not play the equivalence blame game. Hamas started this round of fighting.

Another stray thought was the conclusion of the Computer at the end of the movie War Games: Strange Game. The only winning move is not to play.

Another stray memory and one most people might not remember. The original Star Trek presented an episode in their third and last season titled "May This Be Your Last Battlefield." The crew of the Enterprise encounter a pair of aliens. Each has white skin on half of their bodies and black skin on the other half but they are mirror images of each other so that pattern is exactly opposite. One claims persecution and demands sanctuary while the other claims he is an officer pursuing a political criminal whom he demands be turned over to him. In the end they do get to the planet their "guests" came from only to find there are no sentient life forms and the cities are rubble. The two survivors of the dead civilization immediately blame each other and their people, attack each other taking their combat back to the surface. At the time the episode was aired critics thought it a very heavy handed comment on the state of race relations in the U.S. Today it would do very well for so many of our current situations including Ukraine and Israel/Gaza.

Now to something more trivial--Since the shutdowns of the pandemic we noticed that one of the sections that had become scantier was the DVD sections. Target, Meijer and other such stores have seriously eliminated much of what they carried. Just this morning Best Buy announced that they will no longer carry DVDs because streaming service have cut into the market. We tried Netflix and canceled the service because, as I think I have written before, it carried movies we simply didn't want to see. We had months where they had nothing of interest. Why pay for what doesn't serve your needs? One of the anchors asked what you will do if your internet goes down or something interferes with your service? We can go to our collection just like I can read my books because I keep them on my iPad.

This was posted on Crooks & Liars and has me shaking my head. I have heard about splitting hairs but these guys are splitting the very finely. Somehow they want the court to believe the Presidential oath to "protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution" doesn't mean to "support" it and the 14th Amendment shouldn't be applied to The Former Guy.

Talk about dirty tricks, another Crooks & Liars story reports that a group, that may not have a legal existence, has been hit with a "cease and desist" order after papering a Virginia neighborhood with flyers threatening residents with loss of Social Security, Medicare, Child subsidies and custody and more if they haven't voted in recent elections. Here is the original story on the local News 7 site.