Israeli Apartheid, Genocide, Cease-Fire, and Other Myths
It’s been more than three months since Hamas’s massive terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Almost immediately after the news broke of the attack, anti-Semites the world over took to the streets to celebrate and, in many places, continue to do so. Oh, they aren’t anti-Semitic, they’ll tell you, they’re simply against the country of Israel. Yet the victims of the October 7 atrocities weren’t members of Israel’s government or military*. They were infants, teenagers, parents, old people, and the disabled. Victims were raped, tortured, burned alive, beheaded, and taken hostage. Even in other countries, individuals and groups were and continue to be harassed, accosted, threatened, and assaulted, not because they are Israeli (they aren’t) but because they are Jewish. So yeah, the perpetrators are anti-Semitic.
I’m glad we cleared that up.
The thing you have to understand about anti-Semites is that they’ll always find a reason to hate on Jews. Always. The Egyptians enslaved Jews because they had become so numerous in their land of self-imposed exile that the Pharaohs, who imagined an army rising up to threaten their power, used force to keep them powerless. After the an Arab man named Mohammed created Islam on the Arabian peninsula in the early 7th century, Islamic armies of conquerors invaded large swaths of the Roman Empire, including the general region of Palestine, killing Jews (and Christians and others) for the made-up crime of refusing to convert to the new religion. The Nazis imagined unspecified damage caused by the “racially impure” Jews. Today, Arabs/Moslems, leftists, and other terrorist apologists go out of their way to project their own malfeasance and bad intentions onto Jews as personified by the nation of Israel. Why they so hate the Jews is another topic, which I will explore in a future post.
For now, let’s look at today’s de rigueur manufactured excuses: apartheid and genocide, and the related demand for an Israeli ceasefire.
Read more…I’m Back, Bitches
Hi, everybody!
I know. I’ve been away for a while. A ridiculously long while.
I briefly tried posting over on Substack, but I just didn’t like it as much as here. In other words, I missed this, my humble WordPress blog.
I did post two articles over at Substack, and I have republished them here, just within the last hour. If you aren’t reading this on the main page, here are the links:
I have a few more posts in the pipeline, some things I’ve been ruminating about for some time. Stay tuned.
Plastic Recycling? Not Me
Originally published on Substack on April 15, 2023
I was a bit of a hippie back in the day. I knew I was a feminist when they were called women’s libbers. I went through a mercifully brief vegetarian phase. And I became a bit of an environmentalist. I had a “Think Globally, Act Locally” sticker on my car, packed my son’s sandwiches in biodegradable cellulose bags, and used environmentally-friendly cleaning products even though they cost a fortune and weren’t available in most supermarkets.
When recycling became available in my town in, I think, the ‘90s, I jumped in with both feet. I loved the idea of my trash being transformed into something useful rather than just going to the dump. And I quickly realized that most of the non-paper material in my recycle bin was plastic.
There was so much plastic and paper in my waste stream that there were some weeks I didn’t even put out a bag of trash because I’m cheap and couldn’t see throwing out a tall kitchen trash bag that was less than half full.
For years, I recycled plastic. Correction: I didn’t actually recycle it. I put it in the bin, believing it would be recycled by someone else, thus averting ecological calamities like this:
It turns out I was wrong. All those apocalyptic warnings about plastic refuse clogging up our oceans, rivers, and lakes if we didn’t recycle it were b.s. And I found out from what I considered to be an unlikely source: a Greenpeace report.
Most plastic simply cannot be recycled, a new Greenpeace USA report concludes. Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, released today, finds that U.S. households generated an estimated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, only 2.4 million tons of which was recycled.
The report also finds that no type of plastic packaging in the U.S. meets the definition of recyclable used by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy (EMF NPE) Initiative. Plastic recycling was estimated to have declined to about 5–6% in 2021, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.
My bins and barrels full of plastic wasn’t being recycled at all; it was being sent to a country that has virtually no reason not to just dump it into the ocean. There were islands of plastic floating around not because we weren’t putting it into our recycle bins but because we were.
[Enter mini rant here] And therein lies the problem with many environmental mandates so popular in North America and Europe. It’s all smoke-and-mirrors. People presume that recycling is good for the environment because if it weren’t, our cities and states wouldn’t be pushing it. But the politicians who push it know nothing about what happens next. Worse, many environmental activists don’t tell them because a few hundred cubic miles of plastic floating around the world’s vast oceans is a small price to pay for getting bigger mandates passed: mandates for electric vehicles and bans on fossil fuels and so many other ideas that might be great in theory but simply aren’t ready for prime time in practice. But I digress. [End rant]
So, having had my consciousness raised by Greenpeace, I no longer recycle plastic. The contents of my bin now consist of cardboard, junk mail, old magazines, newspaper, and the occasional steel can or glass jar. The plastic all goes in the trash, which where I live gets incinerated and the ash sent to the landfill. I was briefly concerned about the pollution caused by burning the plastic, but then I learned that trash incineration technology has advanced to the point where the emissions contain virtually no trace of the plastic that was burned. The incineration process might even be able to generate energy.
What I’d really like to see, though, is less plastic. Instead of plastic milk jugs, could we go back to wax cardboard cartons which are still a thing for some milk? I’d even go for the crazy milk bags they use in eastern Canada, which are still plastic but a lot less of it. Things like soft drinks used to come in glass bottles, but I wouldn’t advocate a return to those because they weigh more and take up more space, both of which would dramatically increase shipping cost. Besides, anyone of a certain age remembers at least one time when a glass bottle of Pepsi fell out of the grocery bag and smashed into bits on the driveway. What a mess. But I digress. Again.
The point is that we all need to educate ourselves about the consequences of our actions, even (especially) actions pushed on us by possibly well-meaning but often ignorant politicians and bureaucrats. Sometimes, the solution to a problem is worse than the original problem. Let’s not let our enthusiasm for “progress” take us backward.
In Defense of the Bomb
The following commentary is not intended to be an argument about the morality of using nuclear weapons. I’m a Catholic, and I am well aware that almost every pope since World War II (except John Paul I, who hardly had time to do anything) has said, in one way or another, that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral. This post is merely an explanation of why I believe they are the most effective weapons ever invented.
Originally published on Substack on May 9, 2023
Would you think I was crazy if I told you that the atomic bomb was the best weapon ever developed?
The great (or, at times, not so great) thing about the interwebs is that you can start with one search goal and, with one thing leading to another, end up with something entirely unrelated but interesting. So it was when I went down the online rabbit hole yesterday and saw a trailer for Oppenheimer, an upcoming feature film about about the United States’ development of the atomic bomb.
Which that got me thinking that the atomic bomb really is the best weapon ever developed.
By way of background, it’s important to remember that World War II was really two wars. The Axis powers of Germany and Italy in the Eurocentric theater and Japan in the Pacific theater were allied only in the sense that they shared common foes. (The same could be said, of course, for the Allied Powers: the alliance of the Anglosphere and China with the Soviet Union was purely to defeat Nazi Germany, as we learned the instant the European war ended and Stalin replaced Hitler as Eurasia’s totalitarian aggressor.)
When the super-secret Manhattan Project was launched, it was an effort to beat Germany, not Japan, to be the first to build an atomic weapon. We knew Hitler’s scientists were working on a nuclear fission bomb; we even managed to poach some of them to our side. That the Nazis were defeated before either side won that race turned out to be rotten luck for the Japanese, who would instead be the ones to experience history’s most destructive weapon—twice—just three months after the European war ended.
The year 1945 brought the very real prospect that an invasion of the Japanese home islands was the only conventional way to finally defeat Japan. America’s two brand-new “atom bombs” presented a way to end the war with much less carnage that an invasion would cause. As horrible as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, they took fewer lives than would have been lost in a ground war in a country whose population viewed their emperor as almost a deity and were willing to fight to the death for him. Every Japanese citizen would essentially become a soldier defending his nation against invaders. Conservative estimates were that a million people—military and civilian, Japanese and American—would die in protracted combat.
So when President Truman compared the potential loss of life from the two alternatives, he chose to authorize the use of an atomic bomb. We now know that the emperor, following the advice of his high-level military commanders, refused to surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, triggering the use of our second bomb on the city of Nagasaki. If he had known we didn’t have a third bomb, he might not have surrendered then, either.
Competing opinions of the morality of dropping those bombs persist to this day. Nuclear weaponry can kill in ways incendiary bombs can’t: astronomically high heat, radiation sickness, dehydration. The destruction wrought by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan stunned the Japanese people, their leaders, and the world–so much so that, though many countries now have nuclear weapons 30-35 times more powerful than those we used against Japan, they have never been used.
The purpose of a nuclear arsenal is largely deterrent. Nations want to prevent being nuked by other, possibly rogue, countries or those with megalomaniacal leaders who wouldn’t mind incineration their enemies.
It’s called mutually-assured destruction, and it works. It’s why, when Valdimir Putin was rumbling about invading Ukraine during the administration of Donald Trump, Trump reportedly told Putin that if he did that, “We’re hitting Moscow.” Trump was crazy enough to make that threat believable, so Putin waited to invade Ukraine until someone considerable weaker than Trump was president.
Sure, everyone is terrified of the prospect of nuclear war, and some think the very existence of a nuclear attack is an existential threat to humanity. But that’s exactly why they’re such effective deterrents: because every country knows that if they launch a nuclear attack, they’ll get it right back.
The nuclear weapons are the only weapons in the history of warfare that have been used only once*. And that’s precisely what makes them the best weapons ever developed.
*Yes, I’m aware we dropped two bombs. I think it’s reasonable to consider them two events in the same action.
Mansplaining, Defined
gerund : any comment from a man to any woman who is looking for something to be offended about
Just a Little Reminder to the Rest of the World
Today is the American holiday of Memorial Day. It’s the equivalent of the day observed on November 11 in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and some mainland European nations to commemorate their military service members who died in war. The date reflects the armistice ending the first World War. So why does the United States honor their war dead every year almost six months earlier?
For one thing, Memorial Day predates World War I by several decades. It is believed to have been first observed on May 30, 1868, three years after the end of the American Civil War, at the direction of Gen. John Logan, Grand Army of the Republic (the organization of Union veterans of the Civil War). It was originally called Decoration Day because women would use the occasion to decorate the graves of dead Civil War soldiers, a common practice going back centuries. While other Civil War remembrances took place in both north and south before the first Decoration Day, May 30, 1868 marks the first organized observance of what would by 1890 become a holiday in every northern state.
By the time a 1967 act of Congress officially named the holiday “Memorial Day,” the observance had come to include the military dead of the two World Wars and the Korean War. In 1971, the official observance of the holiday was changed to the last Monday in May in order to create a long holiday weekend. (The law also moved observance of Washington’s birthday, Labor Day, and Columbus Day to Mondays; Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday would join the Monday holidays in 1986.)
Not that the United States failed to commemorate the end of World War I. On the contrary, November 11 was celebrated as Armistice Day unofficially from 1919 and became a legal Federal holiday in 1938. Following the second World War, the end of which was also noteworthy, Congress renamed the holiday Veterans Day in 1954 and left the memorializing of war dead to the end of May.
All of which is a long way of saying that we celebrate Memorial Day instead of Remembrance Day because Memorial Day was established first. And that’s how it came to be that we Americans remember our military countrymen and countrywomen who died in war on the last Monday in May and honor all our mitary veterans on November 11.
The Plague!!!
[05/18/2020: Minor text edits for clarity and image edits for size. -DM]
It took a global pandemic to get me back here, so first things first:
I’m coronavirus-free, as is every member of the Den family. That’s the good news.
On the downside, I feel like a hostage, and an increasingly broke one at that. All but one of my assorted self-employment ventures have been shut down, and IT SUCKS.
Now that I have that out of the way, allow me to share a couple of memes I made in the early days of the lockdown.
Yeah, it feel like this.
Unfortunately, still true two months later.
On the TP front, I’ve been able to buy it three times: twice from the supermarket (4-roll packs, one per customer) and once at BJ’s Wholesale Club (24-roll pack, one per customer). So we’re actually doing OK. Ditto with tissues and paper towels. I’ve even managed to get my hands on some bleach (store brand, two per customer).
What I can’t seem to find anywhere is rice pilaf, specifically Near East. When did I miss the run on rice pilaf? And don’t get me started on some of the prices, including $4.49 for a pound of store brand butter.
Speaking of prices, one thing that has gone down is gasoline, simply because of the law of supply and demand. Many people are either out of work or working from home, so no gas-guzzling commute. Those who have to drive to their “essential” jobs aren’t going anywhere else. And hallelujah to that, because the last four times I filled up, I paid US$2.09⁹, $1.87⁹, and $1.81⁹ (twice). For my readers north of the border and east of the pond, that’s a price range per liter of US$0.48-$0.55 or, using today’s currency exchange rates, CA$0.68-0.78, €0.44-0.51, or £0.40-0.46. Which I’m pretty sure is less than you’re paying. God bless America.
On the CoVID-19 death front, I feel like the United States should break down their numbers between New York City and everywhere else. But since that isn’t how they’re doing it and I have math fatigue from those gasoline conversions, I’ll go with the national death rate of roughly 271 deaths per 1,000,000 people. Not great by any means (f*ck you, NYC!) but a lot better than France (431), the United Kingdom (511), Italy (528), and Spain (589, ¡madre de Dios!).
I have a LOT to say about who is dying, but that will have to wait for another post. I have to run to the grocery store and buy a lobster for supper ($5.99 for a one-pounder at Price Chopper) and maybe find some rice pilaf.
Oh, who am I kidding? They’re won’t be any rice pilaf.
Email and Alternate Universes
Just dropping in to share a ridiculous exchange I had recently via email. But first, the back story.
I might or might not have mentioned at some point in the past that I get other people’s email on a semi-regular basis. That’s because, as an early adopter of Gmail, I managed to get the address “dmother at gmail dot com” (except with my real first initial and last name) before anybody else could. Since then, every other person with the same first initial and last name has had to add a middle initial or numbers to sign up for Gmail. Then they forget, and they give people their email address as “dmother at gmail dot com” (except with my real first initial and last name). I’ve gotten communications from the schoolteachers of other people’s kids, meeting minutes from other people’s condo associations, and appointment reminders from other people’s doctors. I get account confirmations from StitchFix, I regularly receive earning and leave statement notifications for some unknown military service member. I even once got some guy’s Atlanta Falcons e-tickets the day before the game.
Never before had I gotten into an argument with someone about an email I received in error. That changed on October 1, when I received a FedEx shipment notification about a package for J—–y B—–e of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from a H—–r M—-r at a company called College Chefs. Since I am not now nor have I ever been J—–y B—–e, and I’ve never been to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I decided to notify H—–r M—-r of her error.
From: d—–r@gmail.com
To: h—–r@collegechefs.comYou had this sent to the wrong person.
This is the exchange that ensued over the next two days:
From: h—–r@collegechefs.com
To: d—–r@gmail.comWhat do you mean?
From: d—–r@gmail.com
To: h—–r@collegechefs.comYou set up my email address to receive delivery updates for a FedEx shipment. I don’t know who you are, so whomever you wanted to receive FedEx updates must have given you the wrong email address.
From: h—–r@collegechefs.com
To: d—–r@gmail.comNope… this is not a mistake… I get a lot of emails and texts and phone calls asking me if I have sent out chef coats… These are J—–y B—–e’s chef coats’, he’s the new chef in Alabama. Moving forward there will be a note in the email that says they are chef coats.
Also, FedEx has a new policy about delivery where sometimes they hold the package at a FedEx location so I want to make sure that the person getting the package the REC and me all know where it is 🙂
Granted you are not one of the people that usually ask me if I sent out chef coats but I’m just gonna send it to everyone to be on the safe side 🙂
She was partially correct: I’m not one of the people that ever asks her if she sent out chef coats. Because what the hell is a chef’s coat?
From: d—–r@gmail.com
To: h—–r@collegechefs.comI don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about chef’s coats, I’m not a chef, and I live in Massachusetts. Whoever was getting this shipment, I assure you it isn’t me.
That messaged seems to have convinced H—–r M—-r, and I haven’t heard from her since.
Now ordinarily, when I notify someone that they have the wrong email address, they say either, “Thanks,” or “Sorry!” Because those are normal responses. I mean, I could just delete the email and forget about it, but I try to be helpful, even if the people who give the wrong email address don’t deserve my help with their stupid error. The Falcons ticket guy, whom I was able to call because the email with his e-tickets listed his name and phone number, was exceedingly grateful that I offered to forward the tickets to his real email address. So I have to wonder, when H—–r was told that I didn’t know who she was, who the package recipient was, or what a chef’s coat was, whatever possessed her to argue with me?
Whatever. It’s over, and I don’t expect to hear from H—–r M—-r at College Chefs again. Now if I can only figure out how to notify the U.S. Department of Defense that I don’t need to keep getting some unknown service member’s earnings and leave statements.
English vs. Leftish
If you’re fortunate enough (and smart enough) to be multi-lingual, you know how useful it is to be able to understand and even converse with people who don’t speak your native tongue. In this age of political insanity, it is especially useful to know a language spoken by those on the left end of the political spectrum. I call that language, which uses actual English words but gives them entirely different meanings, Leftish.
Leftish has its roots in the propaganda long used by people of all political persuasions. But it did not begin to form as a separate language until the 1960s, when leftists began losing their minds. That was the decade when they said that Barry Goldwater would start World War III and U.S. soldiers killed Vietnamese babies. The language developed further in the 1980s with dire warnings that Ronald Reagan, if (re-)elected President, would start World War III (yes, they were already running out of ideas and yes, some still thing he almost did). Fast forward to the 2000s, when the next generation of the loony left declared that George W. Bush was Hitler. Most recently, they insist that Donald Trump is Hitler and everyone who doesn’t #resist him is a racist and a fascist and a Nazi. But enough about the history of Leftish.
For your edification, you will find herewith a sampling of actual entries from the very first edition of The Den Mother’s New Collegiate English-Leftist Dictionary (with a hat tip to Merriam-Webster for English definitions).
| Word | English | Leftish |
|---|---|---|
| choice | noun : a range of things that can be chosen | noun : abortion |
| democracy | noun : government by the people; especially rule of the majority | noun : government by leftists, regardless of who constitutes the majority |
| fascist | noun : one advocating strong autocratic or dictatorial control | noun : anyone a leftist doesn’t like : synonym of Nazi |
| hate | transitive verb : to feel extreme enmity toward : to regard with active hostility | intransitive verb : to disagree with a leftist |
| immigrant | noun : a person who comes to a country to live there | noun : a person who comes to a country illegally to live there |
| journalism | noun : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media | noun : the process of deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on leftists* |
| justice | noun : the process or result of using laws to fairly judge and punish crimes and criminals | noun : the process or result of doing whatever leftists want |
| morality | noun : beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior | noun : something you can’t legislate, unless it involves beliefs leftists agree with |
| Nazi | noun : an evil person who wants to use power to control and harm other people especally because of their race, religion, etc. | noun : anyone a leftist doesn’t like : synonym of fascist |
| qualified | adjective : having the necessary skill, experience, or knowledge to do a particular job | adjective : being a leftist |
| racism | noun : racial prejudice or discrimination | noun : any belief, thought, or action leftists don’t like |
| resistance | noun : an underground organization of a conquered or nearly conquered country engaging in sabotage and secret operations against occupation forces and collaborators | noun : this |
| trans | prefix : on or to the other side of : across : beyond | adjective : wanting to be something that one is not |
| woke | verb, past tense and past participle of wake | adjective : fluent in Leftish |
That’s all I have time for now, but perhaps in a future post I will give further glimpses into the uniquely ridiculous language that I call Leftish. In the meantime, don’t forget: you can’t spell “deranged lunatic” without DNC.
Battling the Evil Foe
I do a fair amount of reading and posting on social media, mostly Twitter and Facebook, with an occasional post to Instagram or Snapchat just to pretend I’m hip. One thing I’ve noticed on Twitter is that there are a lot of leftists who have gone, shall we say, batshit crazy since Donald Trump was elected President.
Examples of said lunacy could (and will soon) fill another post. My point here is that most of them, while nuts, probably aren’t actually evil, with notable exceptions including the ironically self-titled “antifa” fascists who promote violence against Trump voters, the Bernie Sanders volunteer who attempted to assassinate Republican legislators at a baseball practice, and the actual member of Congress who encouraged her minions to stalk members of Trump’s cabinet and “create a crowd […] push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Because nothing says “Democrat” quite like excluding, by force, huge swaths of the nation’s population from public life.
Almost without exception, these more extreme leftists post their incitements to vandalism, assault, and homicide on Twitter with impunity, while mainstream consesrvative users get suspended for insulting someone. In response, some right-of-center folks migrated over to a social media site called Gab which was started in mid-2016 as a censorship-free alternative to Twitter. The trouble is that the promise of a totally open platform also attracted the far-right’s version of far-left eliminationists: neo-Nazi’s, white supremacists, and others who, for unfathomable reasons, consider themselves superiod to blacks, Jews, and others they imagine to be “lesser races.”
I can’t explain why, but over this last week I decided to get myself on Gab and confront the haters. I included in my profile that I wanted to challenge anti-semites. After less than a day, I was so rapidly and viciously attacked with the vilest racist sludge that my instinctive response was, “These people are possessed.” And I don’t mean that figuratively. Here’s a sampling of some of the tamer posts that came my way:
Jack Parsons @JackParsons
It’s okay, just remember that the (((Holocaust))) is a hoax.James Herzog @TheRealJamesHerzog
The holocaust never happened but I wish it did.jerry huxley @lestermacgurdy
“I was tired of the far-right anti-semitism I saw on a daily basis.”
Me too. it’s not as bad as the fucking niggers and kikes though.
One individual, in response to a post in which I quoted scripture regarding Jesus’s command to love one’s neighbor, claimed that this verse at the end of the parable of the ten gold coins (Luke 19:11-27)…
“Now as for those enemies of mine who did not want me as their king, bring them here and slay them before me.”
…proves that Jesus wanted the Jews gassed during the Holocaust.
The only other time in my life I felt so strongly like I was in the presence of true evil was back in the early 1990s when a Planned Parenthood abortionist, picketing a campaign event I was attending for a pro-life Congressional candidate, screamed in my face that “the best thing that could happpen” to me was to be raped and get pregnant.
Now, I’m an active Catholic who believes that the devil is real and at work through people here on earth. But I’ve never been one to confront troublemakers with shouts of, “The power of Christ compels you!” I’ve never even said an audible “Amen” in the middle of an especially inspiring homily. That’s why even I was surprised by my response to the attacks: I wrote that, in the name of Jesus, I rebuked Satan and prayed the love of Jesus to enter the hearts of the posters. Literally, that’s the kind of language I used. I went all exorcist on their bigotted asses. And as anyone who ever saw The Exorcist might expect, my invocation of Jesus’s name only riled them up more.
It might sound strange, and it’s certainly out of character for me, but I really do feel like I’m being asked by God to pray for deliverance for these people and to continue confronting them with scripture. Which is bound to be more effective than trying to reason with people who reject evidence and logic by simply claiming they are part of a worldwide campaign of misinformation by “the Jews.”
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