A gobbler’s life is
typically spared on Thanksgiving Day amid much White House fanfare, although turkey
meat is still on that holiday’s official dinner menu. President Abraham Lincoln
is said have started the tradition of sparing a turkey’s life at Thanksgiving.
I just came back from a
week with my son in W Va., away from all the news, feeling quite refreshed on
my return. Daily, whenever we were out driving, we passed by a mysterious stone castle
with a green and orange cloth dragon on the parapet flapping its wings in the breeze.
Below, I am seen standing
outside in Berkeley Springs.
We visited an almost empty state park.
I spent time sitting
next to the fire at the lodge while son Jon worked at the CoolFont resort desk
nearby.
Left, eating Thanksgiving dinner
I’ve gotten 3 postal letters
at my home address, one every month, from a subsidiary of my bank, addressed to
my older daughter who once lived with me, but not recently. She moved years ago
to another state. The letter laments my untimely death and expresses condolences
to my daughter. My son in W Va. also got such a letter, although I
did call to report that I’m still among the living after receiving the first
letter. Folks, let’s not rush things. My death will come soon enough, but not
quite yet. (This is the same bank that did not protect me from the account
fraud.)
Former President Jimmy
Carter’s wife Rosalynn has now died at age 96. The Carters, married for
77 years, were partners in everything they did. I have known them both
throughout my adult life, though I haven’t seen either one for some years now.
Jimmy Carter, age 99 and in hospice care, has unexpectedly outlived his wife.
He wrote a short blurb for my first book and I saw him again in Nicaragua in
1990. It’s been longer than that since I’ve spoken with Rosalynn.
Here were the couple on
Jimmy Carter’s 90th birthday.About Rosalynn’s death, a
neighbor sent me this comment: The organization where I served as CEO had a
Speaker’s Series in the Concert Hall of the Kennedy Center for 13 seasons - 4
evenings a year. Mrs. Carter appeared twice, once with President Carter and the other time
with two other First Ladies - Barbara Bush and Betty Ford. Rosalynn Carter was
thoughtful, soft spoken, caring and brilliant on both evenings. She will
be remembered as an extraordinary and lovely person.
Another neighbor said: I just read about her in the Washington Post
and wondered if we appreciated her as much as we should have when they were in
office. Her life was inspiring on many levels.
Before leaving for
Thanksgiving with my son in W Va., I'd told a friend that “a good deal of the
money taken from my account has been returned, but the whole ordeal has
taken quite an emotional toll. Still, I’ve lived through much worse,
including my late ex-husband's departure after 24 years of
marriage and the deaths in successive years of my older son and Cuban
foster son. So the bank fraud, while upsetting, is not so much in comparison.”
DC artist Michelle Turner has displayed a recent
local house sketch
Speaking to a crowd of
supporters in Iowa, former president Trump said: “Every sane person,
without what they call Trump derangement syndrome—do you know what that is?
It’s a great honor, I had a disease named after me: Trump derangement
syndrome.”
Meanwhile, legal action continues against participants in
the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. While some Americans living out
in the hinterlands continue to believe that no such an attack ever occurred,
those of us living in the immediate area can bear personal witness to its
veracity. No, I did not personally see or hear Mr. Trump urging on his
followers over on the west side, but on our east side, I got as close to the
Capitol building as I dared and witnessed an unruly mob shouting and shoving as
they climbed up stairs and over barricades. So don’t tell me now that it never
happened.
Yahoo
News, What we know about Shifa
Hospital 2 days after Israel raided it Neither warring party in Gaza has seemed quite ready to stop fighting altogether,
so civilians caught in between have been injured and have died in record
numbers. Here in the US, a majority of citizens and voters ages 18-34 now side
with the Palestinians. On October 9, Columbia University Jewish Voice for Peace
issued a joint statement with Students for Justice in Palestine: https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654384
which included the following: “Columbia Students for Justice
in Palestine stands in full
solidarity with Palestinian resistance against
over 75 years of Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid.
Thousands of children have been killed in the enclave
since the Israeli assault began, officials in Gaza say. Eight babies died in a
recent hospital evacuation. Collective punishment is being meted out to all of Gaza’s
residents.
BBC News, Biden facing growing internal dissent over Israel's
Gaza campaign
AP, Biden says 'revitalized Palestinian Authority' should eventually
govern Gaza and the West Bank
President Biden has reiterated his pledge to work toward achieving
a “2-state solution.” Israel’s efforts under Netanyahu to completely wipe out
Hamas will not only fail, but actually increase the likelihood of the
establishment of a Palestinian state on Israel’s border.
However, since Israeli leaders seemed to have been ignoring
him, Biden made his intentions clear in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
Yahoo News, 'He does not deserve this': University of Ottawa
criticized after medical resident suspended for pro-Palestine posts A petition aiming to reinstate Dr. Yipeng Ge and
launch an inquiry into the school's faculty of medicine has received more than
28,000 signatures.
A longtime friend and I
have reconnected through an emotional email exchange about the war in Gaza. I started
out by saying: Certainly, Hamas started it, but Palestinians have been
grieving ever since 1948. Palestinian civilians, including newborn babies, have
been caught in the middle. I am not fond of Netanyahu, but am concerned about
friends living in Israel. I've also known Palestinian refugees here and know
they have suffered. A Jewish friend my age, a holocaust survivor, belongs
to Jewish Voice for Peace and certainly has no love for Netanyahu. Israeli
opposition leader Yair Lapid also says that Netanyahu
must go.
I feel
for both sides in this conflict, but do agree with Blinken that the fighting
must stop now. No doubt, the US will end up footing the bill both for Israel
and for the rehabilitation of Gaza and even of the West Bank. So I am in favor
of an immediate cease fire before any more damage to people and property is
done and before neighboring countries turn even more angrily and
dangerously against Israel. I don't know what can be
done about Hamas or what the US can do there.
He
replied: Israel: I have never liked Netanyahu. His far-right
ideology has been bad for Israel, the region and friends like the
US. Palestinians: I have good Palestinian friends here in the US and
others with whom I worked at the UN. Lovely people. Intelligent, hard-working
people. When I worked in the region evaluating World Food Programs emergency
readiness I evaluated food warehouses, food stock piles, security, staff -
local and international. I was in virtually every Palestinian refugee
camp in the region. Terrible experience but also an eye opener. I talked
to hundreds of people who have spent their entire lives in those terrible camps
with no hope of it ever changing. What I found incomprehensible was that Arab
nations make no effort to integrate the Palestinians into their communities.
They funnel resources to Hamas, the PLO, the Houthi’s with one
goal. Not to help the Palestinians but to try to destroy Israel. Many
Palestinians in Gaza, on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, resist the radical
leaders like Hamas. But many also enable them. Not just the Palestinians in the
region but those all over the world. The killing has to stop. But it won’t
change anything without radical changes in Palestinian leadership. Even
if BB is out of power in Israel, it will take a very strong and different
leader in Israel’s leadership as well. Maybe more importantly, it will also
take a lot of dramatic changes in the leadership of the Arab countries.
Even Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon can no longer be counted on for partnerships in
the region. Hezbollah controls Lebanon. The King of Jordan has none of his
father’s strengths. Iran and Syria are very bad apples. The young princes
in Saudi Arabia certainly don’t give much hope. I first went to Beirut in
1968 as a guest of a Christian family whose daughter was my friend in the US.
It was like visiting Paris. Look at it today. I don’t know what the
answer is but I think getting rid of Hamas is essential for starters. Even that
needs to be followed by some sort of strong leadership in the Palestinian
community in Israel. That leadership can’t come from Israel either. And
it can’t be forced upon them by the US. My niece, a devout Catholic, spent
a couple of years on a kibbutz right out of college. She is a nurse. We both
agree that there needs to be radical change in the leadership on both the
Palestinian side and the Israeli side. That is about as far as we get
before crying in desperation. I pray a lot!
Amnesty International has
sent out an urgent appeal, saying “Gaza is becoming a ‘graveyard for children.’...More than 2 million
Palestinians — half of them children — are
trapped, with nowhere safe to hide from Israeli military bombardments, and have
little access to food, clean water and medical supplies...The unfolding humanitarian
catastrophe makes the need for an immediate ceasefire more and more urgent with
every hour.” Recipients of the appeal are urged to contact their congressional
representatives to press for an immediate ceasefire. But congress’s only leverage
over Israel is via the purse strings and no one wants to use that. So
admonitions and warnings from US policymakers have simply been dismissed as
annoying noise by BB and other Israeli leaders who are going full speed ahead
confident that they can rely on the almighty dollar.
During
my absence in W Va., blissfully away from the news, I’ve come back to see that
the 2 sides are observing a ceasefire, which benefits civilians on both sides. No
one is being killed. Let them extend the ceasefire until it becomes a habit.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve
visited Argentina, so I’ve lost track of my friends living there. However, I
think Argentines were simply sick of rampant inflation. Most voters may have
thought that being tied to the US dollar would be a remedy for that, so it was
time to make that radical change.
Yahoo/Life, The gender gap in life expectancy is widening — in
women's favor. In 2021, American women
lived, on average, almost 6 years longer than men, with a life expectancy of
79.1 years compared to 73.2 years for men. A worldwide gender gap exists due to
lifestyle factors and the protective effects of estrogen for women who begin
life with 2 X chromosomes, while men have only one, XY. I’ve also mentioned
before on these pages than females are born with longer telomeres, which are involved in cell division. So, ladies, if you are fortunate enough to still have a man by
your side, please protect that guy!
It's
been very frustrating to try to post anything in a readable format on this blog. The odd quirks that spontaneously pop up must be corrected "blind," by
trial and error. And the blog gods always resist correction. It would be super easy
to just create a final formatted document and simply paste it in, but that
never happens. Since posting is free, we bloggers really can’t complain too
loudly. So I ask my readers’ kind indulgence regarding the inevitable quirks.
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