TOOTH PASTE...

DO YOU SQUEEZE THE TUBE FROM THE BOTTOM OR FROM THE TOP?

Granted, this is rather a silly question on Christmas Eve but it has been on my mind of late.

When I was a kid the issue never came up ...Until...

And Until it did, I merrily squeezed to my heart's desire from the 'top of the tube'.

'Until' occurred one day when my mother returned from her nursing shift at the local hospital.  It was in the 1960s don't you know.

A Doctor that particular day had had a major rant about the waste associated with squeezing tooth paste tubes from the top down...the only sensible and indeed apparently moral way to squeeze a tube was from the bottom up.

Back in those days the words of Doctors were taken as sacrosanct and hence from then on my mother went to war on anyone in our household who squeezed the tube the wrong way.

From that day on, my sister, brother and I were guilted into proper squeezing.  That said, knowing my sister she probably squeezed the tube the 'proper way' from the get go.

All to say when I finally left home I left behind proper squeezing..back to the top for me.

Just the other day, I was about to brush my teeth and this all came back to me.  Of course, I was about to squeeze from the top and thought back to my mother's obsession caused by a pompous doctor.

(You would have thought the guy would have had better things to occupy his mind even then than how best to squeeze tooth paste even in the 1960s !)

And I got to thinking what the hell does it matter which end you squeeze a tube from ...in the end, the damn tube is empty nonetheless.

I wish my mother was still alive so I could have a last set her straight and put that Doc figuratively in his place.

So now I can go back to squeezing the tube from whichever end I want.

On that note - Merry Christmas to All.

'K.D. Galagher'

BARACK OBAMA...A LEGEND IN HIS OWN MIND

In keeping with a recent trend in some of my weekly Blogs, I have included parts of the following article written by the renowned Leon Wieseltier, a columnist with The Washington Post.

His piece also ties in with the current Hell known as Aleppo which, as you know, is the subject of my current focus. 

Moreover, on countless occasions, I have categorized 'the little man in the white house' as the worst US President ever ...even worse than the georgia peanut farmer... and my hat is off to columnist Wieseltier for the excellent way in which he captures Obama's ineptitude on the International Scene.

Here goes:

Contemplating the extermination of Aleppo and its people, I was reminded of a sentence that I read this summer. It appeared in an encomium to Elie Wiesel shortly after his death. It was a sterling sentence. It declared: “We must never be bystanders to injustice or indifferent to suffering.” That was Wiesel’s teaching, exactly. The problem with the sentence is that it was issued by President Obama.

And so the sentence was not at all sterling. It was outrageously hypocritical.

How dare Obama, and members of his administration, speak this way? After five years and more in which the United States’ inaction in Syria has transformed our country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time, they have forfeited the right to this language. Their angry and anguished utterances are merely the manipulation of the rhetoric of conscience on behalf of a policy without a trace of conscience. You cannot be cold-hearted and high-minded at the same time.

Historians will record —that all through the excruciations of Aleppo, and more generally of Syria, the United States watched. 

The president is enamored of his eloquence.

But eloquence is precisely what the wrenching circumstances do not require of him. In circumstances of moral (and strategic) emergency, his responsibility is not to move us. It is to pick up the phone. “Elie did more than just bear witness,” Obama said in his eulogy, “he acted.” And he added: “Just imagine the peace and justice that would be possible in our world if more people lived a little more like Elie Wiesel.” Just imagine.

If Obama wants credit for not getting us into another war, the credit is his. If he wants credit for not being guilty of “overreach,” the credit is his. If he wants credit for conceiving of every obstacle and impediment to American action in every corner of the globe, the credit is his. But it is a shameful and incontrovertible fact of our history that during the past eight years the values of rescue, assistance, protection, humanitarianism and democracy have been demoted in our foreign policy and in many instances banished altogether. The ruins of the finest traditions of American internationalism, of American leadership in a darkening world, may be found in the ruins of Aleppo. Our ostentatious passivity is a primary cause of that darkening. When they go low, we go home. The Obama legacy in foreign policy is vacuum-creation, which his addled America-First successor will happily ratify. Aleppo was not destroyed by the Syrian army. It was destroyed by a savage coalition led and protected by Russia. While they massacred innocent men, women and children, we anxiously pondered scenarios of “deconfliction.”

As a direct or indirect consequence of our refusal to respond forcefully to the Syrian crisis, we have beheld secular tyranny, religious tyranny, genocide, chemical warfare, barrel bombs and cluster bombs, the torture and murder of children, the displacement of 11 million people, the destabilization of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, the ascendancy of Iran in the region, the emergence of Russia as a global power, the diminishment of the American position in the world, the refugee crisis in Europe, the resurgence of fascism in Europe and a significant new threat to the security of the United States. 

It is amazing how much doing nothing can do, especially when it is we(he) who do(es) nothing.

Not long after he mourned Wiesel, the president engaged in another one of his exercises in empathy without consequence. At the U.N. Summit for Refugees and Migrants, he spoke of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy who washed up dead on a beach in Turkey. “That little boy on the beach could be our son or our grandson,” the president moistly said. “We cannot avert our eyes or turn our backs.” And then we proceeded to avert our eyes and turn our backs. The people who had the power to prevent, stop or even mitigate this catastrophe should now bow their heads and fall silent and reflect on how it is that they brought us so low. Aleppo is no more, and we are weakened and disgraced.

                                               ------------------
I appreciate good writing and find the above to be so and am not afraid to admit that there are far better writers than me. 

Especially those with whom I am in 100% agreement with; that is to say, with those who tell it like it is. 

As I see it...

'K.D. Galager'

Richard Cohen: What’s the Obama Doctrine? A shrug of the shoulders.
The Post’s View: The United States is giving Putin the green light for atrocities
Charles Krauthammer: The stillborn legacy of Barack Obama
The Post’s View: As Aleppo burns, the U.S. hems and haws

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Leon Wieseltier is the Isaiah Berlin senior fellow in culture and policy at the Brookings Institution.

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. (Has anyone ever heard Obama mention Bosnia?) It was no different from the obligation to act

SARAJEVO...ALL OVER AGAIN?

Yesterday's assassination of Russian Ambassador, Andrey Karlov, could be seen as a mirror image of the slaying of Archduke Ferdinand some 100 years earlier.  

As per the piece below; both assassinations involved Turkey and Russia, and both occurred in the same tinderbox part of the world.  

• The Treaty of Berlin (1878) settled the disposition of lands lost by the Turks following their disastrous war with Russia. 

It was the ongoing insult to Turkish pride at the loss of these lands that ultimately led to the Archduke's death and to the disastrous consequences of World War One.

The Big Difference between then and now is that the First War's new weapons consisted of the machine gun and the tank whereas should another conflagration breakout today, it would be with Nuclear Weapons.  

I have yet to read or hear of anyone else connecting the two assassinations but I suspect that it is only a matter of time before it happens.

As I have mentioned on countless occasions, the Middle East is on fire thanks to the two most recent US Presidents - George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  Bush foolishly took out Saddam Hussein thereby creating a vacuum that Iran and its lackey - Syria, were only too happy to fill. Obama then fiddled while the Middle East burned when all he had to do was impose a 'no fly zone' over the contentious parts of Iraq and Syria which would have effectively blocked Iran, Syria and Russia from entering the fray. 

Once they were there, it was too late.

And to add insult to injury, the current little guy in the White House entered into an agreement with Iran which guarantees its entry into the World's Nuclear League of Nations... a nation that is committed to removing Israel from the face of the earth. 

Brilliant, n'est pas? 

Hopefully the world has learned its lesson from the disastrous wars of the last century but I would not be willing to bet the farm on it.

As I see it...

'K.D. Galagher'