That was the telephone office. It was also the bus stop where I picked up the newspapers for my paper route. See the old western town faux fronts on the stores? From the vehicles, this is a recent picture, looking like a Clint Eastwood movie set. I still like the place but I’m never going back. My family was the laughing stock of that town and many more.I woke up just not feeling right, a possible side effect of a new prescription, so I’m staying close to home for the day. Seeking a PA on sale, I looked through Craigslist and there have been some changes I see. So I looked in the personals, and my, have they ever cleaned up the ads. Did Craigslist get sued or injunctioned or something? Good old CL isn’t good old CL any more. They’ve even cleaned up the want ads.
Cancel my plans, though, I’m not even stepping out the door. Why is it I take ill on the worst television programming evening of the year? Those movies about the Bible all have the same watery plot. Shirley Temple bites and that Flicka makes Gilligan reruns seem like action movies. At least none of the creation films ever cast Eve as a frumpy thirty-something housewife with her hair in curlers. And Eve doesn’t claim she had to eat the apple because she later remembered an old man saw her naked when she was a little girl.
For the afternoon, I read a book about the early Zionists, the Jews who wanted to re-establish a homeland in Palestine. In the 1890s they report the area as uninhabited, but when the Turks pulled out after WWI, their records show a half-million Arabs in the general vicinity. Still, it is well established that the British made the Jews pay for all the land they occupied, and that the Arab landlords sold them the land. That’s a change of ownership, folks. The bottom line is the land never belonged to the Palestinians who are claiming it is their ancestral home.
As for the territory gained by warfare, it is mainly mountains and desert, unsuitable for just about anything. They don’t call it the Golan Heights and the Negev Desert for nothing. I don’t side with either party, but I understand how after four wars the Israelis are not giving back a square inch without an agreement on secure borders.
I had started reading about the Iraqi nuclear program in conjunction with the Zionist material. The two rogue states to watch are Iraq and North Korea. Atomic bombs are not that hard to build, but it requires money on a governmental scale. When you buy a German or French power plant, they are designed to make it very difficult to produce weapons-grade byproducts. To build bombs, you need a Canadian reactor. You might also want to keep an eye on Pakistan, where terrorist sympathizers could come to power overnight.
If the entire US can’t stop Mexicans from walking over the border, what chance is there against a nuclear bomb? The only defense is not to be where it detonates. Now, where would somebody who hates the US do the deed? Washington, DC. Runner’s up would be New York, or San Diego. But the easiest target would be Miami. Estimated casualties? Five million dead and it will bankrupt the country.
Don’t look at me. I said twenty years ago the result of any US troops in the Middle East would be an atomic attack on American soil. Oh, and before I forget, Merry Xmas.
