Things To Ponder

 Why do peanuts float in a regular coke and sink in a diet coke? Try it.

 

I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.

 

Can you cry under water?

 

How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?

 

Why do you have to "put your two cents in"... but it’s only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going? (taxes)

 

Once you're in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?

 

What disease did cured ham actually have?

 

How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?

 

Why is it that people say they "slept like a baby" when babies wake up like every two hours?

 

If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing?

 

Why are you IN a movie, but you’re ON TV?

 

Why do people pay to go up tall buildings and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?

 

Why do doctors leave the room while you change?  They're going to see you naked anyway.

 

Why is “bra" singular but "panties" plural?

 

Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?

 

Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane?

 

If the professor on Gilligan's Island can make a radio out of a coconut, why can’t he fix a hole in a boat?

 

If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?

 

If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?

 

Why do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?

 

Why did you just try singing the two songs above?

 

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

 

HOW DID THE MAN WHO MADE THE FIRST CLOCK, KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS? 

The Exennials.

 We are the Exennials,

 

We grew up in the 40s-50s-60s.

 

We studied in the 50s-60s-70s.

 

We dated in the 50s-60s-70s.

 

We got married and discovered the world in the 60s-70s-80s.

 

We ventured into the 70s-80s.

 

We stabilized in the 90s.

 

We got wiser in the 2000s.

 

And walked firmly through the 2010s.

 

 Turns out we've lived through NINE different decades..

 

TWO different centuries...

 

TWO different millennia...

 

We have gone from the party-line telephone with an operator for long-distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world. We have gone from slides to YouTube, from vinyl records to online music, from handwritten letters to email and WhatsApp.

 

From programs on the radio, to black and white TV, and then to HDTV.

 

We went to Blockbuster and now we watch on Netflix.

 

We started with manual typewriters, learned electric, proportional spacing and S electric typewriters,  got to know the first computers, punch cards, diskettes, and now we have gigabytes and megabytes in hand on our cell phones or iPad's.

 

We dodged infantile paralysis, meningitis, H1N1 flu and now COVID-19.

 

We rode skates, tricycles, invented cars, bicycles, mopeds, gasoline or diesel cars and now we ride hybrids or 100% electric.

 

Yes, we've been through a lot but what a great life we've had!

 

They could describe us as "exennials"…people who were born in that world of the late 30s, 40's and 50's who had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.

 

We're kind of—You've seen it all!

 

Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.

 

It is our generation that has literally adapted to CHANGE.

 

A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, who are UNIQUE. Here's a precious and very true message that I received from a friend:

 

TIME DOES NOT STOP

 

Life is a task that we do ourselves every day.

 

When you look... it's already six in the afternoon; when you look... it's already Friday; when you look... the month is over; when you look... the year is over; when you look... 50, 60, 70 and 80 years have passed!

 

When you look... we no longer know where our friends are.

 

When you look... we've lost the love of our life and now, it's too late to go back.

 

Do not stop doing something you like due to lack of time. Do not stop having someone by your side, because your children will soon not be yours, and you will have to do something with that remaining time, where the only thing that we are going to miss will be the space that can only be enjoyed with the usual friends. The time that, unfortunately, never returns.

 

The day is today!

 

WE ARE NO LONGER AT AN AGE TO POSTPONE ANYTHING.

 

Hopefully, you have time to read and then share this message... or else leave it for Later, and you will see that you will never share it!

 

Always together.

 

Always united.

 

Always brothers/sisters.

 

Always friends.

The Hamas One-Eyed Jack

Victor Davis Hanson

@VDHanson

Gruesome details of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians continue to come to light. Hamas gunmen who have been captured or found wounded are quite candid in taped interviews about their killing spree. They apparently remain unapologetic about the heinous crimes they have committed, given they correctly assume that their mollifiers in the West—from the General Secretary of the UN to university presidents—have issues with unequivocally damning their mass killing. Daily such people offer timely re-instruction about their kindred predecessors between 1939-45, and thus how and why the world then was and is now again so willfully blind to the Final Solution The testimonies of Hamas killers—along with the helmet-camera and mobile-phone live-streamings taken by hundreds of the murderers, in the proud photographic tradition of the Einsatzgruppen (the mass murders were likely videoed to provide incentives for enlistment in Hamas)—confirm the emerging pathologists’ reports on the dead from Israel. This multifaceted evidence confirms a picture that all the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Harvard, in the streets of New York and Los Angeles, and in the halls of our Congress can no longer deny—if they even made such at attempt rather than cheered it on. It is hard to think of any precivilizational act that Hamas did not relish. Their death work included but was not limited to executions, torture, beheadings, desecration of corpses, rape, necrophilia, incinerating people alive, dismemberment, and hostage-taking. The captured killers mentioned that their Hamas leaders expressly ordered them to behead and mutilate. All that and more are what Ivy League and Stanford students apparently believe to be legitimate forms of “resistance”—and by their support have now become party to. The Democratic Left is screaming “proportionality” and “stop the cycle of violence” at Israel to cease their retaliatory attempts to destroy Hamas. Their apparent theory is that Hamas has an inherent right to invade and commit barbarities while continuously shooting thousands of rockets hourly and with impunity at Israeli civilians—and yet any response that inadvertently kills Gazan civilians, perhaps most likely impressed Gazans used as shields by Hamas, constitutes a war crime. So in the unhinged West, it is now a more moral act to launch rockets designed only to kill civilians than it is to take out those killing pads. From the Hamas prisoners’ own admissions, and from their videos of the attack, it is additionally clear that many Gazancitizens were eager to tag along in the killing, torture, and looting—albeit only once it became clear to them that the targets were mostly unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly, and the IDF was not there in force. It was again analogous to the Eastern Front of World War II, when Baltic and Ukrainian prisoners, thugs, and Einsatzkommandos eagerly joined with the SS to murder Jews—and often outdid their death instructors. Purportedly, free apartments and $10,000 bounties were offered by the Hamas leadership to Gazans who brought back Israeli hostages. And at that moment, though not now, there seemed to be hundreds of takers zealously following the Hamas death squads into Israel—including a few who had been prior guest workers in border kibbutzes. That picture of eager civilian involvement was apparently confirmed by videos that emerged from the Gazan street, as the Israeli captives and dead were spit upon, struck, and reviled by civilian mobs—at least in the heady days after news of the easy killing of Jews in Israeli but before the IDF aerial response. No doubt public opposition to Hamas is impossible for Gazans; but the idea that a vast majority of civilians became sickened by Hamas and ashamed of their subhuman killing is so far not demonstrable. Similarly, the idea that any Western leader should accept at face value the casualty figures from Hamas ought to be evaluated in light of Hamas leaders still swearing that their henchmen did not murder civilians or commit atrocities in Israel. In Hamas’s world there were no beheadings—and an Israeli rocket hit a hospital, killing 500. For the truth, instead listen to what the killers themselves recited. Watch their own triumphalist videos taken in medias res. Read the placards and listen to the chants at pro-Hamas rallies on campuses and in American cities. And the picture emerges of a death cult, proud of its macabre civilian body count in Israel and of the public support it thereby won—at least until the IDF demonstrates in Gaza the wages of such one-sided murdering. So yes, much of the acclaim for Hamas is not just found in its ferocious barbarity, but also fueled by a feeling that the killers are “winning” the propaganda war. Thus their cowardly but useful idiots of the West increasingly ally with the  “oppressed” oppressor that can both butcher and claim victimhood simultaneously—and not only get away with it, but win global support for it. And this is all the more reason why Israel must crush and thereby humiliate Hamas—as a lesson to its numerous enemies that the price for butchering innocents will always be too steep for even mass murderers to pay.

Israel vs. a Death Cult

Victor Davis Hanson

@VDHanson

Here are three critical considerations that must be understood about the current Israel-Hamas conflict. It is a sort of half-war. It consists of a military trying to defeat an organized clique of passive-aggressive, media-obsessed tribal murderers.

It is not really a war. This ‘war’ did not begin with a military assault. It is nothing like the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, or indeed most other conflicts. It broke out with a surprise assault by between 1,500 and 2,500 gunmen of the Hamas death squads. During peace and on a holiday, they entered Israel in a long-planned hit operation to murder civilians and take captives, focusing specifically on butchering the most vulnerable—the elderly, women, children, and infants—and in the most grotesque fashion imaginable. Their desire was to be as savagely pre-civilizational as possible—the more macabre the manner of murder, the more fertile their sophistry that they were reduced to such repulsive blood lust by their worse “oppressors”. It would be as though gruesome Mafia hitmen had claimed they were forced to become animal-like due to even worse systemic anti-Italian bias. Even the Mexican cartels do not claim they are led to behead because of the injustice of the Mexican government. By preplanned design, women were raped, and children and infants were burned alive, bound and executed, and (yes) beheaded. The dead were often mutilated. Some 1,400 Israelis were butchered, the vast majority civilians. Some 3,500-4,500 were wounded. Hamas never planned to stage a preemptive war against the Israeli military. Its only agenda was to send killers to unprotected villages to murder the unarmed as they slept—in the manner of Nazi Einsatzgruppen and other mobile death squads on the Eastern Front. Almost immediately they counted on using hostages, human shields, and the media to avoid any accounting from the IDF. To distract from the murder mission, Hamas launched some 5,000 rockets—all intended as terror weapons to strike civilians, in the fashion of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on London. What followed is the most asymmetrical “war” in memory. The IDF is the only military in the world told to be “proportionate” in its use of retaliatory force—not the U.S. after 9/11, and not Ukraine after February 24, 2022. No Arab army or terrorist cadre has ever waged a war under the rules of “proportionality”. Can anyone remember a conflict, other than ones involving the U.S. or Britain, in which the attacked in its response is expected to first phone or drop leaflets warning its target areas? Does Hamas do that when it launches its rockets at Israeli cities? It is not an anti-colonial struggle. Gaza is not anyone’s“colony”. It has been autonomous since 2006-7. No free Israeli Arab Muslim citizen would willingly emigrate there to live under the dictatorship of Hamas. And for good reason. Gaza has been the recipient of aggregate billions in cash from the Gulf monarchies, Europe, the US, the UN. and expatriate remittances. The more money came in, the less Hamas had any intention of using it to serve its people. Most of the gifted funds were used to build the world’s largest subterranean city of death, to buy drones and rockets, and to pay gunmen to kill Jews. Essentially Hamas is an enormous mafia-like, shakedown and hostage-taking operation that threatens the general peace, the moderate Arab nations, the Western democracies, and Israel with terrorist operations and kidnapping unless sufficiently bribed to behave. Usually, soldiers wear uniforms in battle and their far away civilian overseers do not; Hamas killers in action wear anything, but their distant leaders in safety often prefer uniforms. So, Hamas is primarily neither a government nor even an armed force designed to fight other soldiers, but rather some eerie updated SS or Mexican-like cartel. Was that reality at the time unknown to Gazans who once voted them into power, or to its unhinged supporters on the streets and campuses of the US who celebrated its murder missions and damned Israel—even before Israel responded? Only Hamas is deliberately targeting civilians. Hamas fires its rockets at Israeli civilians from hospitals, schools, UN facilities, and mosques. Again, note the logic: Hamas assumes that Israel fights wars more humanely than Hamas itself does, and so will both try to avoid Hamas’s Palestinian human shields, and of course never itself employ such a barbaric tactic—since, among other humane reasons, Israeli civilians would attract, rather than deflect a Hamas rocket. The Israelis avoid collateral damage; there is not even such a concept for Hamas: all of its attacks are primarily aimed at civilians. Collateral damage for Hamas follows from accidently encountering the IDF. How Orwellian that the world demands that Israel, in its efforts to prevent Hamas rocket launches aimed exclusively at its civilian population, must not hurt a single civilian who is impressed to shield the rocket launchers. Note well: Hamas’s air campaign is specifically designed to kill civilians—Israel’s to avoid them. In Israel rockets are used to shield civilians; in Gaza civilians are used to shield rockets. Hamas seeks to force the Israeli military to violate the rules of war; Israel accepts that there are no rules that Hamas gunman would ever follow. The odd result is that a sick world is more accepting of deliberate mass murdering by Hamas than occasional accidental collateral damage by Israel.

The horror of Hamas

Andrew Neil

@afneil

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Chairman Spectator Magazine UK, US, Australia. Presenter The Andrew Neil Show, Channel 4. Ex-Editor Sunday Times, BBC political presenter, Chairman Sky TV

 Journalists in tears as IDF shows them body cam footage of massacres by Hamas terrorists on Oct 7 with civilians and soldiers being shot, stabbed, tortured and burned merely because they were Jewish.

Their corpses were bound, gagged and riddled with bullet holes and knife wounds.  In one clip, a Hamas terrorist throws a grenade at a father and his son. The blast kills the father, while the young boy is covered in his blood. The child is dragged inside and forced to sit next to his brother, whose eye is a bloody mess after being subjected to horrific torture. One of the boys sobs: 'Why am I alive?' Other footage shows IDF soldiers beheaded with their headless corpses left splayed in the streets, while a contingent of female soldiers were injured by a grenade then shot at point blank range.  A Hamas gunman brags on the the phone to his parents about 'killing 10 Jews'. He is using phone of a Jewish woman who has just been murdered and boasts that he 'is a hero' after killing Israelis with his 'own hands'.

12:08 PM · Oct 23, 2023

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