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The death toll rises

  I am preparing a Current Events session for our group at MonteCedro on the continuing war in Gaza. We discussed this in the fall of last year when it started but it has become obvious that an update is (sadly) necessary. The death toll in Gaza has passed 32,000 but as the New York Times notes, it is likely much higher than that.   “ Gaza has become a 140-square-mile graveyard, each destroyed building another jagged tomb for those still buried within.” I have read through numerous accounts from a wide variety of news sources. The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was unprecedented, barbaric, and horrible: 1143 dead, 250+ hostages taken, rapes and sexual assaults. Israel’s response was predictable but equally horrible in its consequences. Dead: 32,000 and counting. Wounded: many, many thousands more. Gaza became a major humanitarian crisis overnight with forced evacuations from Gaza City to the south followed by an air and land assault of immense size. Famine looms, especially...
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Disease and drugs

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Off to Trump 2.0

In the eight days since the election of 2024, Donald Trump (DJT hereinafter) has flexed his flabby brain and looks to be installing what will be both a kakistocracy and a plutocracy to replace our existing government. My phone pings almost hourly with a parade of incompetent clowns who DJT proposes to put in a cabinet of total Trump loyalists, sycophants to the core. How to write about this is dismayingly hard but I decided that it needed the same approach as eating en elephant (yeah, I know, horrible example). That is, one bite at a time. Because I am a retired Navy O-6 (who spent 4 years in the Army Reserve before going on active duty in the Navy), my first bite is the idea of Pete Hegseth as nominee for the Secretary of Defense. He has impressive education credentials, a BA from Princeton and an MPP from Harvard. He joined the Minnesota National Guard as an infantry officer and is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, in my book, nothing extraordinary. It i...
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