Onward, Upward, and Foreword!

I stumble upon a vocabulary quiz in an online U.K. magazine. It consists of 15 commonly confused word pairs. You know, words like lie and lay, affect and effect, tortuous and torturous, horde and hoard, etc. The editors claim only 1.5 percent of the U.K. population get all 15 right.

Little do the editors know! Watch this working class hick from Westland, Mich., U.S.A. do his thing!

I scoff. I take the stupid test. I click on the submit button and smugly await confirmation of my excellence.

"CONGRATULATIONS!" comes the reply. "YOU SCORED 14/15! THE 92ND PERCENTILE!"

What?!

I scroll down to review my checked responses. Sure enough, a red "X" mars the sea of green check marks. It glares at me from the left margin next to the passage "Don't just delve into the book. Make sure you read the Forward/ Foreword."

Wait. The word is forward, isn't it? That's what you read before you proceed, i.e., move forward in the book, right? Right?! I swivel round my chair and pluck Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln off the bookshelf behind me. Sure enough, right there on page ix looms the late Prof. Walter Williams' . . . Foreword.

How many books have I read over the years? How many forewords to those books? How many times have I looked that first-page, front-and-centered, all-caps word square in the face and presumably read it?

Still I processed foreword "forward"?! The self-loathing runs thick on this one.

Purveyor of Pep

It's a bitterly cold February morning. I'm on southbound Woodward Avenue in Detroit, just north of Seven Mile Road, when I spy a figure on the side of the road holding a sign and pointing at Westbound Seven Mile traffic. He turns his body 60 degrees--Woodward intersects Seven Mile at an angle--to face northbound Woodward traffic, and then turns again, 120 degrees, to face eastbound Seven Mile traffic. 

The guy's not panhandling. He's just standing and pointing at incoming traffic. He wants people to read his sign. 

I'm about a hundred feet away when he turns to face my direction. He's a young black gentleman. Smiling broadly, he's all bundled up--wool cap, scarf, parka, boots, and mittens--and now he's pointing at me. I read his sign: "I SEE GREATNESS IN YOU!"

Maybe he had a few screws loose. I don't know. This much I can tell you: he made my life a little more beautiful that day. 

Everybody's Hitler!

Ayatollah Khomeini was Hitler. Noriega was Hitler. Milosevic was Hitler. Osama bin Laden was Hitler. Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Khadafy was Hitler. Putin is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler.

When everybody's Hitler, nobody's Hitler. Maybe not even Hitler.

"Justifying" Terrorism

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability . . . . Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

~IDF Maj. Gen. (ret) Yitzhak Brick, 12/3/2023

"Gee, why do they hate us?"

~Bewildered American, 9/11/2001

Everything's A Miracle!

 I come home from work one evening some years ago. It's a Monday in February, it's cold, the sky's gray and the trees are bare, and I've had a trying day at the office. As I put my key in the side door, I can see my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter waiting for me on the landing through the window.

It wasn't unusual for her to come to the door to greet me. On this day, though, she's really excited about something. She's jumping up and down in place! I open the door and she can't wait to tell me the news.

"Daddy! Daddy! Red bird! Fence! Fly away!"

She grabs me by the hand and escorts me to her bedroom window. There on the fence enclosing our humble backyard, in the middle of a dreary Michigan winter, a cardinal landed. Then it flew away.

Everything's a miracle. Sometimes you just have to look at the world through a child's eyes to remind yourself of it.

Let's Make Gaza Dresden Again!

The "Good War" mythology surrounding World War II has done much to sanitize and mainstream state terrorism. At least, when the "right" state terrorists--e.g., the U.S. and Israel--perpetrate it. 

It stands to reason former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin invoked Dresden when he urged the IDF to flatten Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7th attacks on The Only Democracy In The Middle East (TM). Ideas have consequences. The ends do in fact justify the means--so long as the proper parties inflict those means on the proper improper parties.

No, the ends don't justify the means in my (deontological) book . But what do I know? I'm a benighted Medieval obscurantist. The utilitarians rule the roost.

Deontology be damned, we're all operationalists now. Does it "work"? That's all that matters.

The Amish are a Hate Group!

In-group preference is perfectly acceptable when exercised by Israelis, Saudis, Japanese, Chinese, Singaporeans, and Zimbabweans, among others. It's self-preservation when they do it. It's only racist-Nazi-xenophobic when practiced by a Euro-Christian, or Euro-Post-Christian, tribe.

There exists a clan of White Supremacists who have fallen through the social-justice cracks nonetheless. Let's take a look at them.

Blood? Check. Soil? Check. Family? Check. Tradition? Check. Christianity? Check. Community? Check. Ethnic purity? Check. Separatism? Check.

Separatism puts it mildly. We're talking total border control! Not enforced by mere ICE agents, but rather by notoriously Spartan living standards. These serve only to cement their racial and religious superiority! Throw in homeschooling, rabid anti-vaxxism, midwifery, traditional farming, raw milk-trafficking, and opposition to the permanent U.S. regime to Americanize the globe via humanitarian bombing.

But wait. There's more.

Their Scriptures are written in German! That's right! German! The language of Schicklgruber himself!

See? I told you the Amish are a hate group.