hudebnik

I guess it was 60 years ago today, at the train station I use almost every day.

... I had the day off work ("March global reset day"), so I've been doing miscellaneous household things.

• Took dog to vet for shots and annual exam. Made appointment for dental cleaning next week. Picked up flea/tick pills for both dogs. We still have two months' supply of heartworm pills.


• Watered plants on enclosed porch. They don't need much water in the wintertime, but they were starting to look a bit withered, and an hour after watering, they look much happier.


• Scrubbed and applied Rustoleum to rusty spots on the handrails of the front steps.


• Took down candle-lit houses from front window. Some people take down this stuff on Dec. 26, some on Jan. 1, some on Candlemas, some on Ash Wednesday, but we've missed all of those, and now it's March. Also put away the Xmas-themed front-yard lights (which shalmestere brought indoors two weeks ago).


• Mostly filled out form for historic-district home-renovation tax credit. Not sure how much of the cost to attribute to which part of the project; e-mailed contractor to get a cost breakdown because only certain parts are eligible for tax credit.


• Paid some medical bills.


• Put away some clothes that were hanging up to dry in the basement.


• Made lunch, using up the last sniglets of frozen salmon that weren't big enough for a dinner for two.


• Picked up prescription refill, and a couple of OTC drugs, from pharmacy. Bought some groceries.


• Tacked down the felt weather-stripping in the front door: it was crumpling every time the door closed, and this offends my sense of rightness. Also whacked a loose door hinge pin back into place, ditto.


• Took a nap.


• Checked work e-mail. Started triaging a bunch of probably-low-priority bugs that were assigned to me over the last few days, but found that most of them had been closed already.


• Went to dinner & Trader Joe's w/shalmestere.

I have my phone set to read me the news headlines from several major news organizations as I do my morning ablutions, and one of them (by default) is Fox News. And it's always interesting to hear how Fox's take on the news differs from everybody else's: for example, last year when Fox News was hit with an $800 million lawsuit verdict for lying about Dominion voting machines being rigged to shift votes in the 2020 Presidential election from Trump to Biden, it was a headline on every news agency except Deutsche Welt and Fox, which didn't mention that there had been a verdict at all.

This morning there was an offhand mention that "Republicans in the US House rejected an aid bill to Ukraine and Israel because it didn't contain border security measures." That's not how it was described on any other mainstream news source (Reuters, NYT, WaPo, NPR, AP...): the usual story is that Republicans in the US House, after months of bipartisan negotiations, rejected an aid bill to Ukraine and Israel that contained almost every border security measure they had ever asked for, because Trump didn't want a border security bill to pass before the November election so he could run on Biden's inability to do border security. And then the US Senate, with almost all Democrats and about half of Republicans, passed the same bill without the border security stuff, but the Republican Speaker of the US House refused to even call a vote on it.

Friday: house-cleaning, grocery shopping, pre-cooking, printing sheet music for music party on Saturday. One of the four people (plus one greyhound) invited reported a COVID exposure, and bailed on the music party.

Saturday: more house-cleaning, more cooking. People started showing up a little before 11:00. Walked dogs in the park (three greyhounds rather than the usual two). Emptied, filled, and ran dishwasher. Served lunch: lentil soup with smoked turkey (the latter of which had been in the freezer for a year, and this was a delicious way to use it up), garlic toast. Got out recorders, viols, lute, and played various Christmas-y music for several hours. Walked dogs again, played a little more Christmas-y music. Served dinner: roast turkey, turducken hand-pies (with turkey left over from Thanksgiving, duck left over from Christmas Day, and chicken to make sure there was enough, seasoned with ginger, dates, and dried cherries), carrot slaw. Set out a plate with ~five each of six or seven different kinds of homemade cookies, and sent guests home with packets of cookies. Emptied, filled, and ran dishwasher. Put away leftovers. Decompressed. Watched animated Christmas specials. Walked dogs again.

Sunday: Buy bubbly for midnight toast and breakfast mimosas. More house-cleaning. Walk dogs in the park. Give away a bunch of money. More cooking -- single-serving Beef Wellingtons with potatoes and either green beans or Brussels sprouts for Sunday dinner, not sure about Monday. Package and deliver boxes of cookies to neighbors. Watch Christmas-y stuff? Play shawms on the front steps at midnight?

Monday: More house-cleaning? Walk dogs in the park? Watch Christmas-y stuff? Watch non-Christmas-y stuff?

If you saw your toddler playing with a sharp knife, would you run and grab it away? Probably not: the toddler would instinctively tighten its grip on the knife, probably cutting itself. Instead, you would offer it something better.

I've seen a lot of posts saying, roughly, that the people of Gaza deserve what they're getting because they overwhelmingly support Hamas, which committed such barbarisms on Oct. 7. To which I respond "Of course they support Hamas -- it's the only game in town. When is the last time they were offered something better?"

Which raises the obvious question: what does Hamas offer the people of Gaza? For that matter, what does Fatah offer the people of the West Bank?

If you were a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7, you could expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every day on your commute to work, which you might not get to at all if the searches took too long. Eventually, the next time the simmering war heated up, you might die at random, for no reason, when an Israeli bomb fell on your home. You would live and die ignominiously as a victim. Hamas offered you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor: if Israel was going to kill you anyway, it might as well at least be for a reason of your own choosing.

If you're a Palestinian living in the West Bank, you can expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every time you try to leave the West Bank, or even go from one part of the West Bank to another when there's an Israeli settlement in between. Eventually, a bunch of Israeli settlers will damage your home, intentionally, and the law won't punish them, but if you try to repair it to livability, you're the one breaking the law. Or they'll force you out of your home at gunpoint, and anything you do in self-defense will get you killed; if you come back to your home the next week, you'll find Israeli settlers living in it, having declared it theirs because you abandoned it. Or they'll just kill you outright and tell the police it was in self-defense. In any case, you'll live and die ignominiously as a victim. Fatah, or Hamas for that matter, offers you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor.

Some time in the past two months I saw an excerpt from a speech by one of Netanyahu's cabinet laying out the theory that what sustains Palestinian terrorists is the hope of destroying Israel and having their own country, and that hope must be destroyed: they have to understand that they will never succeed, that they have no hope. Which is perhaps correct for the people whose primary motivation is revenge, but for most ordinary Palestinians, like most ordinary Israelis, the primary motivation is living through the next day, year, even decade, perhaps giving their children a better life than their own. And the lack of hope is exactly what turns people into terrorists: people who have no hope, nothing to lose, do things you wouldn't think any human would stoop to (like October 7).

So what could one offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank that would be better than what Hamas offers them? In the abstract, hope: the hope of living a normal life, with equal rights under the law, not treated automatically as a criminal, not killed or forced from your home at random, seeing your children and grandchildren grow up and thrive. Making that more concrete is tricky, though.

I'm not convinced that a two-state solution will ever work. The British in India tried a religiously-based partition of the land, only months before the British in Palestine tried a religiously-based partition of the land, and the result in both cases was years of unspeakable bloodshed. Even eighty years later, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are still openly hostile to one another, and there's official oppression of religious minorities within each country. Wherever you draw the lines, there will be many Palestinians who see it as not enough ("they forced me/my parents/my grandparents out of our homes at gunpoint, and they're being rewarded for it by gaining legal title to our homes, while we get pushed into the least-desirable pockets of land"), while there are also Israelis who see it as not enough ("this has been our land for thousands of years, why should they get any of it?"). The bloodshed may slow down somewhat, or it may not.

Of course, having grown up in the US, what's obvious to me is a one-state solution, with equal rights for all regardless of race or religion. What can you offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Citizenship, full stop. (And some kind of recompense for property illegally taken from them, at least recently.) Which would mean the only officially Jewish nation in the world would no longer have a Jewish majority population, and (if all its people really do have equal rights regardless of religion) would no longer be a Jewish nation. Which is no big deal to me -- why should a nation have a religion? -- but thousands of years of Jews living as somewhat-unwanted guests in other people's nations have dreamt of having a nation of their own, and I don't know what that feels like so I'm not in a position to discount it.

Last night I made fried rice, with mixed veggies and Chinese sausage, for dinner. Within a minute or two of starting to eat, shalmestere said the epithelial cells in her mouth were doing something funny, and her sense of taste was off. I replied "Me too: I'm not noticing taste problems, but it feels like there's something stuck to the insides of my gums, yet when I try to scrape it off, nothing comes off." After a few minutes, including swishing water around in our mouths, the weird gum sensation went away.

Neither of us had any subsequent gastrointestinal distress, so it wasn't the sort of food poisoning that makes you sick for 24 hours.

I imagine it was an additive in the Chinese sausage, which was a different brand than we've bought before. But has anybody else encountered this particular symptom?

claiming to be from Chase Bank (misspelled), telling you to visit some site at maksaaecole.edu.pk to clarify the problem with your credit card. Apparently there really is a Maksaa Ecole in Pakistan, but... are they not even trying?

Went to Trader Joe's on Sunday, but walked out when I realized that the checkout line stretched all the way around the store's perimeter, starting about twenty feet from where it ended. Went back mid-day Monday and the store was busy, but no checkout line at all. WFH FTW. Bought Merlot after dinner and made cranberry sauce last night. Still need to do a regular-grocery-store run before more pre-cooking; maybe do that mid-day today. Picking up spatchcocked heritage turkey mid-day Wednesday.

I am not wise in the ways of Indian cooking: I've probably eaten food from an Indian restaurant a few dozen times in my life. But I like basmati rice, and I generally try to eat less-processed, higher-fiber versions of things when I can. Fortunately, my local grocery stores carry 10-pound bags of brown basmati rice.

So for the past year or two I've been making brown basmati rice in an Instant-Pot, following directions I found on the Web: 1 cup of rice, 1-1/2 cups of water or broth, the "rice" setting followed by 20 minutes of "keep warm" before serving. And it's been OK, but not the fluffy, separate-grains texture I expect of basmati rice from a restaurant.

The latest 10-pound bag came with cooking instructions: rinse 1 cup of rice, soak for 90-120 minutes, drain, add to 2-1/2 cups boiling water, cook uncovered until the water is absorbed, then cover and let sit for a few minutes. And the rice did come out fluffier and more separate, and with a nice aroma ... and WHITE. No hint of brown in sight. Huh? What happened?

So I read somewhere that the Israeli military dropped a bomb on an apartment complex, because a major Hamas command center had been intentionally built underneath it, and under international law siting military installations in close proximity to civilians (and therefore making them targets and/or using them as human shields) is a war crime.

I haven't fact-checked all that, but it's all quite plausible, and I don't care. There's plenty of blame to go around, and motes in every eye.

You can make an argument under international law that building a Hamas command center under a civilian apartment building is itself a war crime. But that legal argument doesn't bring back hundreds of dead civilians. That legal argument doesn't erase the Mogen David painted on the bomb that killed them. That legal argument doesn't make their survivors hate Israel any less, or make them any less likely to join Hamas themselves to take revenge. That legal argument doesn't make Israel any safer or its current military campaign any more productive.

Besides, Gaza has 1.65 times the population density of Manhattan. Where could Hamas have possibly built anything that wasn't adjacent to lots of civilians? Perhaps when they won their election in 2006 they should have knocked down a civilian neighborhood to build a Hamas-only headquarters with "Bomb Here Please" painted on the roof in Hebrew. But I don't imagine many Hamas personnel would report to work in such a building, even those of them doing something constructive like organizing trash pickup while others planned how to slaughter Israelis.

At the start of its retaliation, Israel ordered the civilian population of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south. There are, of course, logistical difficulties in moving a million people from a place with twice the population density of Manhattan to another place that's already denser than Manhattan, on 24 hours' notice. Especially when the local government, Hamas, is trying to prevent them from moving (it wants its human shields, of course), and Israel is still dropping bombs on both north and south and the roads in between. And one could forgive Palestinians for doubting that they'll ever be allowed to return to their homes in Gaza City after the current violence calms down, or suspecting that if they do, they'll find Israelis living there.

I do not in any way support or defend Hamas's slaughter of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 200 more, on October 7. But Israel seems to have taken every opportunity, even arranged the conditions, to give themselves an excuse to slaughter as many Palestinians as possible. They've already taken at least five eyes for every eye, extracted at least five teeth for every tooth, and show no signs of stopping.

Israel's stated goal is to completely destroy Hamas, apparently by killing every individual who was a member of Hamas and therefore complicit in the October 7 attacks. I've seen estimates that Hamas has about 30,000 personnel. If Israel has extremely good intelligence and targeting, and can manage to kill only ten civilians for every Hamas member, that's 300,000 civilians, about 15% of the (prior) population of Gaza. If the intelligence and targeting are less good, it could easily approach 100% of the population of Gaza. Which we might call a final solution to the Gaza problem.