Hi readers. She snuck out of the nursing home they put her in after they snagged her car and sold her house. When a movie begins with that there’s nothing much can be done to spoil the ending. I’d put it up beside Harry and Tonto, generally.
Redwood Highway, 2013PG-131hr 30m, You rated this movie: 5 , Itching to get out of her retirement community but estranged from her family, Marie uses her granddaughter’s wedding as an excuse to go on a walk.
Woman my age dons a backpack and hikes roughly 100 miles up the California coast dodging search and rescue, refusing rides and shooting molesters in the face with bear spray.
Seems more obvious every day that wossname, George Bush Sr. needed to stay the hell out of wars in the Middle East instead of waging them and giving himself a premature ejaculation. That Desert Storm I must have been the absolutely most senselessly waged war in US history even before he pulled out and splattered the proceeds across the belly of the whole region.
That would have been a good time to sigh and notice the cold war was over and bring the troops home from Korea, Europe, and all those pestholes across the world where they don’t speak English. George Bush was never any great shakes, but Desert Storm 1 followed by him not noticing the end of the cold war when the USSR ceased to exist defined him. He set the course as surely as it could be set to continue disastrous military spending and constant military adventures for the foreseeable future.
For this reason George Bush Senior qualifies as the worst president in US history until those who followed him.
There’s no need to go through the litany of tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees who came after GB Sr, identical to him in every respect aside from being lousier presidents. They all marched to his drum and carried the country into more endless wars and a bottomless pit of national debt directly resulting from military expenditures, wars, and foreign aid to bought-and-paid-for friends we only need for more wars and military adventures.
What else he didn’t do? He didn’t sit Israel down and insist they withdraw inside their International Boundaries as recognized by the UN and every other country in the world. On pain of losing what eventually became $130 billion in foreign aid from US taxpayers.
Because GB Sr., had he done what any responsible president should have done, could have ended the next generation of troubles we’re experiencing as a contributory factor, today.
The US, and the US Presidents are frequently accused of responsibility for not stopping what some Roosky strongman’s doing, or some Mexican from Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan does or doesn’t do. Or what some Chinaman from Japan, or Burma, or North Korea does or doesn’t do.
What a laugh! What a stupendous irony.
The only thing in the entire world a US President might control, might influence helpfully, is the slaughter between Palestinians and Israelis. The problem we helped create.
By insisting Israel return to inside its established boundaries and withdraw the settlements. Cease claiming lands assigned to others, cease claiming mineral rights offshore belonging to Palestinians.
The US Presidents love to toss around sanctions against, say, Russia, or Syria, or Iraq, anywhere. Except the one place they’d surely resolve the fundamental problem.
When people in Israel shout, “They don’t acknowledge we have the right to exist!” what they mean is, “They don’t acknowledged we have the right to take their lands designated for Palestine for our own!”
This series of duckwalking ducktalking clowns who’ve occupied the White House could probably have made two gestures to appear to be something other than the mediocre hopscotching puppets they were .
They could have brought the troops home and sliced the military budget to something approaching what other countries have.
They could have forced Israel back inside its borders and bribed Palestine to accept things as they are with foreign aid akin to what Israel receives.
But I suppose imagination is too much to hope for in a duckwalking ducktalking politician.
Old Jules
Who’s Profiting From Israel’s Offensive in Gaza
Israeli Military Torturing Palestinian Children ~viewer discretion~
How the Jews Treat Christians in Israel – It’s Serious!
Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land
THE TRUTH HURTS JEWS ADMIT THEY ARE NOT THE JEWS OF THE BIBLE
Shlomo Sand: Challenging notions of a Jewish People
Israelis: What do you think of settlers forcing Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem?
More Library Mail Art Project came in while Jeanne was off doing whatever people do when they’re climbing Mount Ranier and wasting their lives away in boredom from not being home with the cats. Old Jules
We had several great submissions while I was on vacation, so let’s catch up with more mail art!
First, from Suzlee Ibrahim in Malaysia. I’ll show both sides of the card because I think stamps, postmarks, and air mail stickers are also interesting! Thank you, Suzlee.
Next, our youngest contributor, Elizabeth Schwartz, age 9. This one is postmarked San Francisco. Nice work, Elizabeth, thank you for participating! If any other children are interested in sending their art, we would love to see it!
The next one is titled “Book Love” and is from Jill Wiggins, in Austin, Texas. Thank you so much, Jill, and thank you for your description of your process in the message!
Our next artist is Consuelo Debiagi from Campinas, Brazil. Lieratura Literatura. The encaustic technique, using wax, will take a polish to preserve the shine. It’s lovely to see in person. Thank you, Consuelo!
Most of you probably are aware that as soon as human beings discovered, sometime during the 1700s, I think, that they were Homo sapiens, they figured out they needed a dictionary to find out what they were. When they discovered they are wise and judgemental by definition, they immediately began wondering what they thought about.
The question was a tough one. Mostly humans seemed to think they’d like a little something to eat. Or they thought they’d like another brewsky, or they thought they were horny. Sometimes, particularly during the winter months Homo sapiens thought it was cold and some even thought they’d like something to wrap around themselves to get warmer.
But otherwise Homo sapiens sapiens were less obvious about what they were thinking and discovering the nature of it eluded scientists. Until psychology, then Facebook came along to allow them to publicly display what they were thinking.
“I think [name a celebrity] is awesome!”
“I think those [name a sports team] are awesome!”
“I think [name a consumer item] is awesome.”
“I think mean people suck!”
“I think I need a raise in pay!”
“I think the boss sucks!”
Researchers confirm that 98.7 percent of homo sapiens thought are either among these, or are within the same family of concepts.
Hi readers. Hydrox and Ms. Shiva did Snoopy dances last night when Jeanne arrived back here. She’d been the past couple of weeks climbing wet mountains and doing other things people do out there under the Japanese nuclear threat. Although she didn’t say so to the cats, her arrival was timed in such a way as to suggest she came back fleeing the Japanese invasion of Hawaii.
It’s long been known, both by Japanese military planners and by US historians that WWII would have gone a lot differently if Japan had followed up the Pearl Harbor attack with an invasion of the island. The recent reinterpretation of the post-WWII Japanese constitution allowing renewed military adventures by Japan requires absorbing lessons learned from WWII so they don’t make the same mistakes again. Practice landings on Hawaii, and possibly later on areas of the US west coast not yet too heavily contaminated by radiation from Japanese nuclear plants will help assure that next time things will be different.
Anyway, Jeanne didn’t say anything about all this. Her climbing of Mount Whatchallit, Ranier? etc etc etc went as well as could be expected. She took plus/minus 2500 photographs, stayed various places, and despite the radiation, wasn’t all that anxious to return.
Today’s a new beginning returning to working two, count’em, two, jobs again. Which evidently still weighs in better than radiation poisoning as a way to count off the days she has left in life.
The cats and I were glad to see her back, everything else being equal.
Hi readers. When Keith and I were kids in Portales in 1954, a boy named Harold Hodges ran around with us a little. For some reason we called him Winkie. Keith and I discussed him sometime a while back and he knew Winkie a long while after I lost track. Winkie was one of the really honest-to-goodness poor kids we knew. Hardscrabble farm kid out in the sand hills off the Clovis highway.
I knew his dad died in the mountains deer hunting in 1955, I remembered that. And I remembered his mom became a bootlegger to make a living in alcohol-dry Roosevelt County.
Anyway, I was remembering an incident on the school grounds involving Winkie, Keith and I getting into one hell of a lot of trouble with a teacher named Mrs. Tate. The meanest teacher I ever had, maybe the meanest woman I ever encountered this lifetime, though she had stiff competition on both avenues.
But Winkie, Keith and I made her cry. On the other hand, thanks to her I didn’t learn long division until a quarter-century later. It wasn’t an even trade, but it was the best three 4th graders could do given the resources available.
Anyway, I did a websearch for Harold Hodges, then Winkie Hodges. Just curious. All I came up with was an obit for a name I’d encountered several years later when I lived in Borger, Texas. Small world. Winkie was still alive in 1998, still in Portales, and they were still calling him Winkie.
Abbie G. Friend BORGER – Abbie G. Friend, 85, died Monday, Nov. 2, 1998.
She married Deane Friend in 1975 at Borger. She was preceded in death by a son.
Survivors include her husband; three sons, Wayne Vaughan of Mission, Jack Vaughan of Pryor, Okla., and Gerald Vaughan of Long Beach, Calif.; three brothers, Volly Hodges of Friona, Teet Hodges of Roswell, N.M., and Winkie Hodges of Portales, N.M.; seven sisters, Lorene Cunningham of Lubbock, Lois Hill of Odessa, Bernice Alexander and Natoma Reigle, both of San Antonio, Geraldine Farmer of Ozark, Ark., Maggie Rae Gibbs of Silver City, N.M., and Lena May Gibbs of Portales, N.M.; seven grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
The family suggests memorials be to the Women’s Abuse Center.
Sooooo. Bound to be a story worth knowing why the family wanted memorials sent to the Women’s Abuse Center, but it didn’t have anything I could discern to do with Winkie Hodges. Just Coincideneces trekking around roping and branding everything in sight.
Anyway, Winkie’s dad died of a heart attack early in life, but I think he might still be alive. I didn’t find an obit on him, anyway. If I ever figure out I’ve got enough heart left to travel I think I might try to look him up or find his gravestone.
If Israel were a religious, rather than secular nation, pointing out THOU SHALT NOT STEAL is a commandment. But Israel deliberately chose to become a secular state. A state where Christians, Muslims and Jews would all be treated equally. Where stealing just ain’t all that big a deal if you can get by with it. If you’ve got heavier artillery than the folks you’re stealing from.
A friend of mine, a mainline Christian of US lineage, supports Israel and always has. He reads and believes the Israeli websites pointing fingers of blame away from Israel and carefully examining ‘what’s been done to Israel’ and the spotlighted victimized Israel loves to portray. Along with muted Holocaust innuendo so’s to keep him from examining Israeli reality. Using the tragedy of the camps to enrich themselves with stolen land.
Because US Christians have responded to Israel’s guilt-button pushing so long it’s almost impossible for a Christian to take an honest look at Israel without remembering Christian treatment of Jews throughout history and deluging Israel with cleansing forgiveness. For anything. Closing the eyes because Christians slaughtered Jews for 2000 years.
And Christians do so hope to see the Second Coming of Jesus. Who couldn’t overlook the stealing by Israel of the land the Temple of Jerusalem sat on so’s to hasten Jesus coming back? Stealing it back and killing any SOB Palestinian standing in the way of Jesus coming back. Nobody likes Palestinians anyway. Israel’s had a propaganda machine working 24/7 to make sure of that.
But that isn’t what Jesus would do, is it? Jesus don’t like stealing, even if it’s Jews doing it. Jesus don’t like killing, even if it’s Jews doing it.
If Jesus could somehow preemptively come back today without waiting for Israel to tear down that mosque and rebuild the Temple, what do you think he’d say?
I think he might say Blessed are the peacemakers,
I think he might say, put some teeth into enforcing International Law against them, same as you’ve done in other countries,
I think he might say Boycott those bastards and quit selling them weapons to help them hold on to their ill-gotten gains.
I think he might say, Shun them
Because it’s the Christian thing to do.
Shunning Israel without reverting to keeping regular, honest Jews out of the country clubs or herding them into camps in the Christian countries ought to add some novelty to riding herd on International piracy by Israel.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. That Israeli Jihad against Hamas and the Palestinians is just another example.
Israel is confused and distraught. Nobody seems to understand them, including Hamas, which shoots at them. The UN and the International Community keeps telling them they’re violating International Law by occupying and putting settlements in the lands occupied.
The world just doesn’t understand. Because the world hates Jews.
So. What is ‘right’? Israel is occupying land that belongs so someone else according to the unanimous view of the rest of the world. The people who own that land consider the Israeli occupation an act of war. They’d approve of anyone doing anything to Israel out of retaliation in hopes of eventually getting what belongs to them back.
Israel is an outlaw among nations. Declared itself to be by its own persistent behavior. And it is perpetrating its outlawry with new settlements on stolen land, attacks on the owners, and blaming everyone but themselves.
Whatever happens to Israel as a consequence will be a tragedy. Likely there’ll come a day when Israel will be lamented :
Map of Israeli settlements (magenta) in the West Bank in 2012.
CIAremote sensing map of Greater Jerusalem, showing Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugee camps, fences, walls, etc. in May 2006.
Map of the Golan Heights with Israeli settlements in 1992.
Israeli settlements in the occupied territories[1] (commonly referred to as simply Israeli settlements[2]) are the Israeli civilian communities[i] built on lands occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. Such settlements currently exist in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and in the Golan Heights. Settlements also existed in the Sinai and Gaza Strip until Israel evacuated the Sinai settlements following the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace agreement and from the Gaza Strip in 2005 under Israel’s unilateral disengagement plan. Israel dismantled 18 settlements in the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, and all 21 in the Gaza Strip and 4 in the West Bank in 2005,[3] but continues to both expand its settlements and settle new areas in the West Bank,[4][5][6][7][8]despite being condemned by 158 out of 166 nations in one vote, and 160 nations out of 171 nations in a different vote, in the UN.[9]
The international community considers the settlements in occupied territory to be illegal,[10] and the United Nations has repeatedly upheld the view that Israel’s construction of settlements constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.[11][12] Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and communities in the Golan Heights, areas which have been annexed by Israel, are also considered settlements by the international community, which does not recognise Israel’s annexations of these territories.[13] The International Court of Justice also says these settlements are illegal in a 2004 advisory opinion.[14][15][16] In April 2012, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, in response to moves by Israel to legalise Israeli outposts, reiterated that all settlement activity is illegal, and “runs contrary to Israel’s obligations under the Road Map and repeated Quartet calls for the parties to refrain from provocations.”[17] Similar criticism was advanced by the EU and the US.[18][19] Israel disputes the position of the international community and the legal arguments that were used to declare the settlements illegal.[20]
In July 2012, according to the Israeli interior ministry, 350,150 Jewish settlers lived in the 121 officially recognised settlements in the West Bank, 300,000 Israelis lived in settlements in East Jerusalem and over 20,000 lived in settlements in the Golan Heights.[27][28] Settlements range in character from farming communities and frontier villages to urban suburbs and neighborhoods. The four largest settlements, Modi’in Illit, Ma’ale Adumim, Beitar Illit and Ariel, have achieved city status. Ariel has 18,000 residents while the rest have around 37,000 to 55,500 each.
The plot thickens on the politician wannabe in Montana who coincidently used identical words, sentences, paragraphs and phrases that had been used before. The paper, The Case for Democracy as a National Strategy, was also similar in content to approximately one point seven million [1,700,000] papers written by high school seniors during the past seventy years. As well as 90 million [90,000,000] papers written by university freshmen for Government 101 and Political Science 101 courses.
Back when Martin Luther King was a young man doing his doctoral dissertation he encountered approximately the same phenomenon, though nobody much remembers it nowadays. King’s dissertation was found to contain huge amounts of text previously written verbatim in dissertations earlier by doctoral candidates. And like the guy from Montana, King didn’t want to bog himself down by identifying in footnotes all the people who coincidently had been inspired to the same choice of words and thoughts as his own.
By the time the anomaly was discovered in the academic community Dr. King was a big item on the Civil Rights scene in the US [probably which is the reason it was discovered at all]. And academic reviewers were forced to conclude coincidences happen. Huge, 30-40% or more of the document verbatim coincidences.
Well, I don’t know what the Montana guy thinks about Civil Rights. And I honestly am appalled the Army War College is accepting papers from anyone on the subject of, The Case for Democracy as a National Strategy. In this instance the similar verbage found itself dually existing in the Montana guy’s paper, and a paper put together by some national think-tank foundation a few years earlier. Probably the Montanan believed nobody anywhere would have read it, and in a better world, he’d have been right in thinking so.
Maybe he just got caught up in some statistical thing being done by institutions of higher learning, scanning the web to discover how many doctoral dissertations across the country were composed of identical text from that particular document without being cited. And once they discovered a few thousand masters theses and doctoral dissertations were founded on identical text not cited from the think-tank, they concluded someone had to be made an example of.
Someone safe, not from a top-drawer university, someone white from someplace where people go to South Dakota wintertimes for the warmer weather. The Army War College and Montana seemed right. And after all, this guy already had a claim to victimhood with his post-traumatic-stress-syndrome.
They threw the word ‘honor’ in there somewhere, but the whole issue of honor went away a longish time ago around the time Martin Luther King was doing his doctoral dissertation. Honor’s just something high-ranking soldiers use to justify following orders to bomb civilian populations and whatnot. A thing of the past.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. Let’s face it. I’ll say with complete candor that the Army War College has been pestering the hell out of me for a long time to write something original for them so’s to get all this losing wars all the time fixed. Naturally I’d like to do it, but every time I write a page I discover Robert Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George Patton or come Chinaman or German already said it. It’s lucky I’ve read so much of what they all wrote, or I might have fired off my own original words to the War College only to find out afterward I was saying what Dwight David Eisenhower donealready said already without citing my source.
So this dick running for the US Senate in Montana turned in his work at the Army War College and whooooooops! Surprise! Someone else donealready said it. And Montana residents, almost all of whom have never had an original thought during the entire span of their lives, are pissed.
Montana veterans, especially. Whatever the hell veterans think they might know about originality, war, or much anything else that someone [they can’t even remember who] didn’t tell them or they read somewhere questionable. They’d need to punctuate every sentence, every piece of every sentence with [I heard that from Charlie down at the sewer plant, or my 3rd grade teacher told me].
Hell the guy is a dick, same as everyone else in Montana and any reason for keeping him away from Washington is probably a good one. But let’s not be hypocrites about it. Just accept that nobody ought to be in Washington and set about making sure nobody goes there.
Let’s not obscure something that makes excellent sense with a lot of BS about citing sources and pretending someone alive today has original thoughts he could say and the rest of us could cite him. Every damned opinion any of us have were tucked into our heads by Rush Goddamned Limbo, the Holy Bible, some magazine or book we read, or just crawled in waiting around the coffee machine and infected the minds of the entire workplace.
Army War College needs to quit making unreasonable demands on our service men who can’t be expected to know a damned thing or they wouldn’t have volunteered in the first place. And where do they get off with expecting original thoughts. The first thing a drill sergeant tells newcomers into the military is, YOU ARE NOT HERE TO THINK! YOU ARE HERE TO FOLLOW ORDERS.
Which is good, because there’s an immeasurably better chance they’ll be able to follow orders than that they’ll screw up and think something.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 