to be used prior to or amidst the energy launching frames shown here. alas this might also require some bits to be separate objects since blatantly the sparky bits that trail off do so for more than four frames. but mercifully that isn’t a decision that is harder to implement if I wait to see how necessary it is.

also some relatively non-silly trees from a location that this monster probably is not to be found in. Although probably more because there are dopes about than because there isn’t water.

whewish! It sure is good to know that no police were injured when they casually executed someone for being homeless, owning a knife and acknowledging their presence while pope fascist, o he of the bandaged ear, was in town.

people have been threatened, banned from websites and terminated from their jobs already for making light of the trump shooting, largely by self-described advocates of “free speech” who openly endorse the murder of immigrants, and probably homeless people also, if not through bullets than through public policy that deliberately harms them. It is socially acceptable to joke about Trump dying but it has to be from natural circumstances like choking on a pretzel or getting shot accidentally by the vice president while hunting for tiny little birds.

I personally favor him getting hit in the head by an errant golf ball or suffering an allergic reaction to the peanut butter he gets rolled in every morning. It is very hard to blame that on “The Left” except as a description of a relative point in space and frame Trump’s receipt in a heroic light. That won’t kill the willfully stupid movement that he appropriated into his political viability but no one in his sycophant army has successfully made such a lifestyle out of overtly avoiding accountability. Some of have tried, and a bunch of them were eventually sent to prison or placed under court orders. People are willing to believe that God personally intervened and stopped Trump from getting killed. They wouldn’t believe that about friggin Giuliani. For “his” part God apparently didn’t care if innocent audience members got killed or injured, nor was willing to suggest to the assailant to NOT buy a gun, climb on a roof and fire into a crowded venue, or maybe even just transform the gun into pudding. Believing in divine intervention, this or any time, only makes sense if you believe that God is an erratic spiteful jerk, which admittedly is consistent with scripture, but if that is the case God doesn’t care about your devotion either and will gladly throw a tornado at you just because he came in under budget this quarter and needed to spend the surplus to avoid cuts.

an alternative suggestion: God exists, and he’s American. And blue and naked.

and we all know how that turns out. Thankfully HBO’s newer management doesn’t like cartoons and will not be making a television series following up on this.

I thought I was done but the creepy oddly-shaded weird-eyed trump picture kept reminding me of someone and I couldn’t quite determine who. I now think it might be the character Colossus from Goblins 3 who manages to knock himself out by sneezing so hard he hits his head on what I always in the past interpreted to be his boots but I think now is meant to be the metallic control-box beside his hammock. I made this terrible gif out of screenshots I took 14 years ago, presumably knowing I would eventually find a weird public event to display them in the context of. I presume Colossus survives but if Trump sneezed so hard that he passed out repeatedly that might prevent him from issuing regressive policies. Much has been made of the vengeance Trump has vowed to issue in a second term, but he also said he would “drain the swamp” and get Mexico to pay for the wall meant to block itself in, and neither of those happened. Really, nobody knows what he will do. He doesn’t even know. Maybe he will build a wall around the swamp.

lerd again, this time to amend its aggressive motions.
oh boats; my most recent edits to angle 2 fixed some unusual erratic movements but I realized afterward that i was meant to leave those movements in place and just draw them better, to imitate the lunge of angle 3. whoopth. i may have to put them in as they are and see which looks less awkward to decide which to change to match the other. or just leave them alone since nobody who isn’t me could possibly care.
////////////////////////
i like blue electricity better but i do not want to use the same palette section as the tail segment, EVEN though I will probably need that split off into separate object(s) like with the move around frames. I would prefer to set all color changes on the main object (the lerd’s body) since additional objects created by it (such as its projectiles and its trail of body parts) can inherit its color swap settings, and thus i will only need to designate one color change for each base lerd type. I need at least two lerd types; one that crawls on land and one that hides underwater and jumps out like a seaworld captive to throw abuse and then promptly resubmerges. And later a third that, more like a Hexen stoker,

never leaves liquid and uses a more powerful attack that also doesn’t, since I presently don’t know a way to have a creature check what sort of floor it is on before attacking, but i CAN set a creature to not leave the floor it is on. It is probably possible to issue a floor-check command but it isn’t necessarily necessary that I know how to do that at this juncture since I don’t even have the main two that I DO know how to make implemented yet. And then like with the jumping fyip I will probably come up with a buggy half functional way of doing it, then ask for help on the zdoom forum and get an embarrassingly more efficient way that actually works explained to me by someone else, assuming north america hasn’t melted into the sea by the time I get around to that.

historically it has been able to launch two wimpy projectiles from its hands on that “ball” frame. It would also, and still does, throw a single larger shot when it crosses the arms. throwing magic out of your hands or mouth is not original, but from head protrusions is less common. i decided thus that i should have the twin shots launch directly from the electric appendages (using additional frames that are yet less complete than these) rather than the hands. Arms needing to cross in order to launch a blast is also unusual so I kept that. it is still dumb old doom engine which is inherently limited to stuff that has since been done in thousands of other games but i aim to do my best with the fate i have set for me. even if it kills me, though i won’t know if it has done that until probably right before it does.

also i call the hexen stalkers “stoker” after how kan naito pronounces “land stalker,” because I think dumb things are funny. and more recently after how the 1999 playstation port of final fantasy 5 supposedly refers to the wendigo monster, because this wiki proclaiming that fails to explain that stoker means stalker, not wendigo, since the later localizers opted to change the name entirely rather than correct the silly romanization of the original name that was simply a Japanification of an english word.

but admittedly it is easy, 25 years later, to look back and say OBVIOUSLY this naked blue horned steroid man with a club is too busy jumping stupidly and tickling his arms to waste time wendigoing about stoking, and I envy the optimistic ignorance of those days somewhat.

of course he was. they didn’t have cars back then.

but in all seriousness you’re telling me this guy doesn’t take guns on film sets seriously?

I think I made this “joke” a long time ago but I can’t find evidence. I realized I should do it here because just as many people care about my non-drawings here as on twitter but at least I can locate these later and don’t risk alienating people who might want to not pay me to draw embarrassing animal people cartoon drawings later.

instead I found this older gripe about people jumping on the opportunity to mock the topic not because an innocent person was killed due to the negligence and possible arrogance of multiple parties but because the actor involved made fun of their favorite treasonous rapist felon amidst a totally different project. Surprisingly none of them came looking for me (as we have established that this post is findable) to say “What about crooked Shillary Clinton? What about Bengazi? What about Ben gay grooming Our Kids? What ever happened to the other four Ben Folds Five? Think about it.”

and it reminded me that I have a reason to not like matthew broderick apart from my simply not liking him. Not that the killing was deliberate but it was negligent and he never did anything to raise awareness about shoddy driving and presumably never shared any of the millions of dollars he has accrued for being non-lethally-insufferable with the people he affected with the shoddiness of his driving. And indeed Baldwin has inexplicably continued to get hired for non-job jobs since he accidentally man-slaughtered a woman. Gosh consider that he should have already been in prison just for letting Boss Baby happen.

a recurring and stupid problem.
this is not the new comic strip page that I threatened last time! That is complicated. It will be better than this. Still probably underwhelming. But building it is complicated.

I read too much weird garbage about people who I do not understand

i inadvertently rather like the little red-cloaked creature

sorry and life, “rivals edition.” or “selling same bad old game at same price but with less stuff in the box edition.”

games like this are already extra stressful and boring when played with fewer people, particularly if one of them is a small child who can feel particularly targeted in a game like “sorry” where the primary choice a player ever encounters is “which other player’s piece do i banish from the board,” and I can’t exactly fathom adults in 2024 playing this game otherwise, unless they are using such mind-altering substances that ANY bad game would entertain them as much, why emphasize that? the same reason as always, to make more money for less value at the expense of non-cheaters.

monopoly cheaters edition. regular monopoly is already cheaters edition. i suppose this is a millennial-targeted concept. we can’t put a joke in a movie without some character or the background music pointing out that it is a joke, probably while saying “dude,” so we can’t cheat without pointing out that we’re cheating either. dude. I just took $500 when i wasn’t supposed to because the rules said i was supposed to. I do appreciate not swapping out the 19th century tycoon character Uncle Pennybags with another figure Hasbro determined less in need of having its image protected, as historically prior to the modern era of near-trillionaires and companies like hasbro trying to replace artists with robots trained to copy artists, nobody cheated more prolifically than Pennybags’ monopilkmen.

Although it is arguable whether the decision to replace his dot eyes with detailed retina-iris-pupil eyes while still leaving his hairless plastic mustache, nostrilless nose and nailless fingers was intended to make him creepier.
also observe the $35 price label; this costs more than twice as much as regular monopoly! Hasbro cheats consumers in exchange for the right to perpetuate cheatitude with only themselves as victims.

in fact there is a “bonus” version that costs nearly double that apparently just gets extra money and tokens. or you can buy a cheap regular or cheaper used monopoly game, assuming you don’t already have one in your house, and plunder resources from that. And you’ll STILL in the end just have a depressing board game that is too complicated if played properly according to the rules, much less cheated properly according to the rules, for the target audience to have any fun with.

ALSO:

it felt improper to accuse the sorry rivals edition of costing the same as the regular game. i looked it up on amazon and found that selling regular sorry for one dollar LESS than the real store.

with even creepier eyes.
but more alarming, an ADDITIONAL “rivals edition” of monopoly. which admittedly DOES cost less than the regular monopoly than the regular monopoly on amazon, but only by one dollar. Additionally amazon is an even wickeder company than hasbro and has much bigger-picture access to ripoff victims than relatively well-off american consumers.

if these people have such empty lives that they buy every version of monopoly and obsessively “vote” on the few unnecessary changes hasbro allows to be voted on, including to revert previous vote-changes, despite hasbro ALSO selling

and charging double for “vintage” versions that presumably don’t have those changes taken into account to begin with, except subtler ones that buyers aren’t told about for the sake of political correctness and the latest corporate ownership labeling, content nobody cares about the irony of Monopoly producer Parker Brothers and its biggest competitor Milton Bradley now being owned and disacknowledged by the same larger company but it ultimately doesn’t matter because it’s dumb old MONOPOLY and if you REALLy want to play an unchanged old version you can probably get one for $2 at a local yard sale, maybe they deserve to have empty bank accounts too.

2023 in pictures

january:


february:


march:


april



may


june


july


august


september


october


december

if anything else happened it probably was not important.

in its 1993 release Liberty or Death, the computer game company Koei recognized that preserving the essence of Banastre Tarleton’s stupid hat was a crucial priority, above even getting his nose and eyebrows correct.

Why is this no longer deemed important three decades later? What were our founding fathers and uncovering uncles fighting for if not freedom from foolish haberdashery? I bet kids these days aren’t even taught that Benedict Arnold switched sides exclusively so he could wear a sillier uniform. I also wasn’t taught that but I was in special education so I wasn’t taught anything else either

apart from “the length of this bus puts you at the bottom of even the dumbest and wimpiest of adult baby social hierarchies for the rest of your life,” which is what made it so important for me to determine the facts on my own.

I got/was allowed to get this cereal one time. I remember not being able to tell the difference between the two sides. Even description-wise I am not totally certain how berry isn’t fruity. Maybe it is just describing mario’s pose.

What I did not know until now was that it had multiple box designs. I wonder what is going on with the weird KICKING Link figure which Ralston kept recycling; it shows much less awareness of what link looks like in-game, or in anywhere, than the first box’s. The geru serpent and scenery in the zelda 2 boxes are accurate, and presumably weren’t part of the original plan, so why didn’t they draw a new Link, too?
only one of the marios is recycled.

i notice the marios somewhat resemble the ones from the “super mario world” bootleg of a bootleg sega genesis “super mario world,” possibly due to their consistent lack of necks

There isn’t anything to retroactively explain this link, though. In breath of the wild he can do all sorts of things he couldn’t in the past but kicking still isn’t among them. Is he auditioning to be a rockette? He would never pass the rigorous auditions, isn’t tall enough anyway, and he’d probably get better pay continuing to scavenge for rupees people dropped in tall grass. Maybe he accidentally glued his boot to his shield. Which would be pretty pathetic. I assume considering that and weeping is what Tears of the Kingdom is about.

I am fascinated by Earnest Evans. I have been on the internet so long that I have developed aversions to other people’s hive mentality about what “retro” games are “good” and “not good” and worth hoarding the original ephemera for and trying to impress your grandchildren with.
or even simply stating awareness of an old game as a point of your religion,

and it wears on me beyond reason.
Evans is hilarious to me, but since I never knew of it before I saw internet folk mocking it, I have worried that me thinking it was funny was inorganic to me and hypocritical, since I find their cycles of praise and mockery equivalent to what the previous generation of media did with the likes of britney spears.
However basic taste isn’t necessarily any individual’s fault. And also the judgement toward me tends to not be as harsh as my judgement toward others or myself, because while a lot of people think dumb things are important I generally think different dumb things are important.



However I refreshed myself with it and despite its interesting programming it still feels fairly irredeemable. Even save state cheating I apparently couldn’t get anywhere years ago, and trying it now* I still couldn’t.
*in september
but the important thing is I had an excuse to post that image I started with and also this stupid gif, since initially I made it after dwelling on my declaration of evans as “horrible” in response to arguably more worthless content on the twittor website. I give far too much effort to the crafting of remarks and imagery that nobody will see on there. I would much rather nobody see it here, where I can actually find it later.

And where I don’t risk losing followers for saying “obsequious mario fans aren’t just scum but also extremely boring” because the I don’t have followers here, and in fact the concept doesn’t even exist. But the real question, is it possible to be an obsequious fan of anything without also being scum and boring? probably not but that is what I get videos shoved at me about, generally. I should be glad their idiot fandom economy is largely created by them rather than the entirely corporate papacy that exploits obsequious american football fans or the crypto currency criminal pseudo-psience-pselling aspiring murderers who exploit obsequious mixed martial arts fans, but I don’t know any of them on twitter now that my brother is banned again. He also moved into my basement yesterday so I suppose I will know if he sees this.

Sheeran was exonerated for copyright infringement, or something of that nature, supposedly. I certainly hope so, I can’t fathom that he heard songs this bad and decided THESE are what I will lie about having made.
But that is fine if YOU like them, if you actually bothered to read any of this. You are real to me and i appreciate you for that.

//////////////////

JOHN LEGEND

AN EVENING

WITH

_{A NIGHT
OF SONGS AND STORIES}

when I saw this last week my eyes rolled so hard i almost went off the road. It is trying so hard to seem folksy and humble that it is obviously neither. he gives his stage name as “legend” for fleep’s beep. yet he isn’t creative enough to not be john.

I went to the website for foxwhoops (the casino at which this event is to occur) trying to find a picture of the billboard since, at that time, I thought it would be unsafe to take a photograph while driving, and later realized it was just ineffectual. but THAT says

JOHN LEGEND
AN EVENING WITH JOHN LEGEND
which comes across as somewhat less pretentious, if redundant.
However it shows the same “humble piano player with back to viewer in monochrome” photograph, and makes sure I know how many egots he won. and also that he is the first African American Man to win one
obviously I am not in the target audience, since even with Johnny Leg’s disco graphy in front of me, I don’t recognize any songs. That may even be in his favor to a degree but I still don’t want to pay twenty four thousand dollars or less for the right to hear them in person.

it reminded me of when I ended up on a terrible “screenrant” page last week

“the room is terrible” says conan o’brien
what a vague bizarre headline. it tricked me. it was designed to trick people and shove ads at them, not inform or entertain them. i disapprove of that business model. then the content of the story is like:

conan o’brien, the iconic, award-winning talk show host, sat down with the iconic, award-winning musician ed sheeran to discuss the iconic, award-winning cartoon series the simpsons

the simpsons, the iconic, award-winning cartoon series, has had many writers over the years, such as the iconic, award-winning talkshow host conan o’brien, who sat down with iconic, award-winning musician ed sheeran recently.

ed sheeran, the iconic, award-winning musician, recently sat down with the iconic, award-winning talkshow host conan o’brien and turned the tables on the iconic, award-winning talk show host to ask a question about the iconic, award-winning animated series “the simpsons.”

the phrase “award winning” instantly turns me into a skeptic if I wasn’t already. It is very much a phrase for marketing and for bad writers to fill space with. Do you have nothing to say? Just verbally lick the hindquarters of celebrities and list off their awards and other celebrities they have met, and you’ll have six intellectually barren paragraphs to surround your one scrap of new frivolous information in doh time. I even like Conan and have taken inspiration from him in some ways but I know from direct experience of hearing an offensively low effort generic bad song, looking it up out of pure anger and learning Sheeran was responsible, multiple times, that Ed is aggressively talentless.

breaking news: marginally talented irritating charlatans have a vested interest in keeping each other’s gravy trains going
I might become a “flat earth” adherent just to protest this piece of global news.

Everything about this guy has the aim of conditioning people to accept and pay for mediocrity. In 2019 in a london tube station I saw an enormous poster presented in this exact manner, presumably regarding the same product, but I did not photograph it since I didn’t want to seem as if i approved. also i was following nine other people, hauling excessive quantities of baggage and likely holding somebody else’s coffee cup and/or water bottle with the hand that should have been free and definitely wasn’t going to hold everyone up for dumb old ed sheeran when he doesn’t even care.
Why doesn’t he? And why should thousands of people trying to get to their trains have to be told that he doesn’t care? What he DOES care about is getting his name and the name of his mediocre cronies listed as frequently as possible.
He cares so little that he just “drops” shoddy songs and expects me to pick them up. I appreciate him linking himself to bruno mars though since the last time I heard a bad sheeran song in the supermarket I assumed Mars was responsible and only when seeking proof learned it was sheeran. it is extraordinary that I can see photographs of them beside a supposed musician wearing a cowboy hat and I complain about them instead. I assume the headline has been truncated and he doesn’t simply have the stage name “Chris,” but I am not angry enough at him to look it up.

I can appreciate that Mr. Legend can play a pianoforte instrument. I do not know if he does that especially well but there is definitely POTENTIAL there that Ed’s brand of bland unaccompanied acoustic guitar sappy moaning lacks. My Sheeran references happen to be several years old since it was precisely encountering songs like his that extra-emphasized the need for me to carry earphones in my personal satchel at all times. even if I do not take the satchel out of the house for a few days and need the ear phones for other tasks, I always store them in the bag because when I DO go to a place where I am at risk of hearing those songs, I WILL bring the bag, and if the ear phones fail to be in it I will quite lose my mind when struck by unblockable audio awfulness in public. It happened this summer with the beyonk “halo” song and that was hopefully enough to scare me straight for another few years. That and Sheeran’s too cohOOold outside crumbling like pASTEries are absolutely the worst songs I have ever heard that I remember right this moment. But Sheeran is a man with white celtic lineage similar to my own so there is no cultural or social “privilege” anyone can accuse me of having benefat from that he didn’t also so I feel more confident in declaring that he is absolutely horrible and without merit. Also Beyonce can dance or could at one point in her career. I don’t think I’ve seen a picture of Sheeran verifiably standing up.

look at that smirk. why stop with one cut?

hey guys we’re all unblemished rich privileged chums who get paid to be lazy together and call ourselves beautiful. I hope everyone involved with this dies immediately. But I know they didn’t because I saved this picture in January 2021 and I know at least Sheeran is still alive since the screenrant article that mentioned him was from more recently. It also didn’t mention him being permanently scarred by a sword attack so I assume that didn’t amount to anything either.
in retrospect I think he had no involvement with this but the convention of listing as many singers who need their faces looked as possible in the title confounded me initially. I only see two in the picture so the other two in the title are there for name-drop purposes foremost. And also perhaps so you don’t assume it is the beautiful people marilyn manson song, even though I would be more likely to listen to it if I thought it was the case that these ai-generated-looking forklogans were covering that raspy absurdity than whatever low energy misery Ed approved of, assuming “Khalid” didn’t bring anything new to that table, and really Sheeran has no financial incentive to allow that and I have no auditory incentive to consider that he might have. It might haven taken less time to check the song than to explain why I did not, but I would then be at risk of remembering it which I prefer to reserve the right not to. Good night!

I presume accidentally getting cut by nighto is even more embarrassing.

november 8 updeet: another wordy site entry is coming, which means it is late
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generally I am disinterested in decorating but halloween suits the awkward old toys that tend to accumulate here fairly well.

There were also some proper decorations but I did not take any decent pictures of those.

however I have a shot of this rotting pumpkin that my niece carved or assisted in carving. she had kicked it off the front steps to get rid of it on account of its recent mold harboring but I thought that made it eligible for an upgrade to the front of the walkway.

the kermit is debatably creepier without the mask but that would not fit on most of the display candidates

Another scrap of beet beast animation. I believe I am more than half done with this creature and after that theoretically progress could be if not faster at least more linear, with fewer multi-layer characters using multi-layer furniture that they are both in front of and behind. This seems a bit out of synchronization with the audio. as long it is out of synch consistently, moving it back in is simply a matter of dragging rectangles on a grid. the bootleg sony vegas that I use for video assembling –crucial, since the flash video data is presently in four different files, and two just for this part– tends to stutter at the start of clips so it is hard to match video to audio with precision without a few tries.
HM and that black spot in the center I thought was on my screen when I first noticed it a few minutes ago but evidently it is in the video! I wonder when it appeared. I hope it doesn’t mean what it does in Treasure Island, that pirates are coming to murder me, because I don’t want to die with my bedroom so untidy.

gosh what a monster

and I can hardly comprehend what an anti-semite my nine year old niece must be to own TWO of these.

for context I have never bought into the media cult around Thunberg, but rallying people against greed and corruption is ultimately doing something good. So when someone else looks at that work, ignores the actual message and evidence and seeks only what nits can be picked from it in order to dismiss it, I am disinclined to give their remarks much weight. Ha HA! An OCTOPUS which doesn’t resemble this in the slightest was used to discredit jews a long time ago! Therefore climate change is a hoax and one government which has Jews in it deserves to claim whatever territory it wants any way that it wants for all time. And if that comes from the same person who always says after a mass shooting is “too soon” to talk about gun control– no it is too soon for me to talk about this!

You can say that we need to consider that Hamas struck first, cruelly, without regard for the most basic human decency, but that doesn’t justify indiscriminately eradicating the population kept in the same scrap of land as Hamas as revenge. And this isn’t the first time for this unbalanced revenge. This conflict did not START two weeks ago. This is the same Gaza whose notorious stripping constantly dominated news I didn’t pay attention to growing up. No, the people who started it are all dead and we ought to be able to do better than to continue it forever, cheering for whichever “side” we were born into to “win,” like it’s championship figure skating or badminton.

when he says “both countries,” he means Israel and the US. He and the Israel government doesn’t consider Palestine to be a country and will do and say nothing in support of it becoming one, because that would require both admitting any level of fault in its policies and also ceding territory it claimed unjustifiably, which “both countries” here never do.

A criticism I see of Israel criticizers is that they don’t condemn Hamas. My initial thinking was, it isn’t necessary to condemn hamas, it was widely condemned immediately. The first and easiest reaction is to condemn hamas. But I also know there are people out there, too many in my own family, who believe in “the deep state” and will gladly tell you the evils of “the Rothschilds” and all that involves. So just to be clear, I now today condemn hamas, I curse hamas, I sneer at hamas. You can’t cure systemic oppression by beheading and raping people who have nothing to with it any more than you can cure a headache by punching someone who doesn’t appear to have a headache over your frustration at being unjustly denied ibuprofen.
Hamas has been funded by crypto currency since 2019. That alone is reason enough to shut it down.

this continuing text goes around in circles. I could cut it off here but I want to know it is SOMEWHERE even if it is repetitive. I put something roughly equivalent into facebook but evidently that was inadequate to getting me over it. There were no reactions whatsoever to it, even critical ones, which made me suspect the facebook machine simply hid my remarks since I mentioned a divisive topic but without being particularly inflammatory despite the large quantity of words used, so eventually it all came out of me again.

An irony with the gripe against Thunberg is that by insisting that someone who criticizes Israel must be attacking jews in general, it is you who makes the association, the same way someone who attacks jews in the US might accuse them of being agents for Israel just by the basis of their religion. That is absurd, and that would happen even without the stupid cephalopod there.
It needs to be possible to consider one separately from the other. Just as it is necessarily to consider people in Israel, many of whom are not Jews at all, separate from the government of that country, whose actions are not approved of by a staggering amount of those people. Not being able to differentiate these groups, or not caring to, is a big part of how these stupid conflicts get so intractable. so many ignorant belligerents live for nothing more than symbolic revenge against what they consider to be representatives of what has actually wronged them. The bosses who order soldiers into war are not harmed by nasty guerrilla attacks on civilians perceived to be symbolic of the bosses, and instead the bosses gain more leverage for their own bigger symbolic re-revenge.

Personally, I think the entire area should be vacated. That will never happen. Muslims, Christians and Jews all consider that “the holy land” and their least rational behaviors can always be traced back to ludicrous scriptural notions. A harmonious world will never be achieved when men with guns think god or gods told them they are right. And it’s usually men because god is usually also telling them to dominate and punish women much as they do heathen men. The Chinese communists ostensibly eschew religion but the government acts in a way that is consistent with one directed by religion.

The US had its own big terrorist attack in 2001 that you might have heard of, and also like Israel ignored reports it received that such an attack was coming. In fact the US just spent two decades trying to get revenge for that, and that made everything worse (though deliberately confounding the facts so George W Bush could cram in his own bonus revenge against Saddam Hussein did not help), and now the US is supporting another country trying to do the same, but with more volatile potential consequences. Stupid stupid stupid.
As much as idiots who voted for him may have WISHED for it, Bush was never going to and lacked the authority to blast Iraq off the map, even while that war killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Benji Netanyahu gang on the other appendage have a much smaller target entirely within their country’s border and are entirely capable of killing everybody in Gaza and have tried to sell that as an admirable outcome. That’s not good! Even if it ended there it wouldn’t be good but it won’t possibly end there. These wars cannot be “won.” And if they inexplicably destroy just Hamas it won’t end there either since they’ve already ensured the next generation of revenge-seekers whose existence they will use as justification for more oppression. It’s too late to stop this one. But it might not be too late to prevent the next one.
A sickeningly common right wing mantra after mass shootings is that it is “too soon” to talk about gun control. But they were disingenuous and meant to never talk about gun control and just hoped for another topic to come up, and sure enough we never talked about gun control. Now we have mass shootings every week now, meaning it is perpetually “too soon” after one. But it is never too soon for them to talk about gun USAGE.

I am glad to see more people unafraid to stand up to that thinking but I worry it might be too late.
Israel’s treatment of its own citizens, notably women, is superior to many of the countries in that region, and plenty outside of that region. I don’t see stories about Izzy trying to kidnap travelers at airports and as far as I know it is not punishable by death to renounce the state religion. But that is stuff NO country should be doing, so being better than them is not enough.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, and we condemn it. So regarding it as we do, we ought to hold ourselves to a higher standard than them, not merely exterminate them whichever way its fastest and say it’s done. Nothing is ever “done” just because a loud person declares it is.

This website entry probably isn’t even done, but I am trying to be quiet about it.