23 July—In a brief interview this morning included in one of the public radio network’s anti-Israel stories that are becoming more common of late, a Gazan woman allegedly ready to give birth was bitching that because of the famine and malnutrition intentionally and inhumanely inflicted by the nasty Israelis she wouldn’t be able to feed her baby when it’s born. War is hell.

But what the hell were that woman and whatever man may have contributed his sperm doing making babies in the first place—in a barely habitable war zone with a bleak future at best? While there’s no reason not to have compassion for all the victims of Hamas’s aggression on 7 October 2023 and its entirely predictable aftermath, enough is enough. Already.

Before leaving Israel, here’s a laugh courtesy of the Associated Press through the editorial in this morning’s Hearst Republican-American. The editorial, about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is titled “A leader who can’t be trusted,” and it’s right on the mark.

The laugh is a comment by a 31-year-old ultra-orthodox (Jewish) yeshiva (seminary) student and presumed draft-dodger on Israel’s legislation, enacted just last summer, to rescind the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox. Wait for it: “You have to understand, we are part of the Jewish army. . . . Some people serve in tanks. We serve in yeshiva.”

It’s not likely that the schmuck was thinking of “They also serve who only stand and wait,” from John Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness,” about—guess what—his own blindness, in which he essentially rationalized whatever effect his blindness may have had on his ability to serve God. It was negligible, as it happens.

While stifling laughter, consider the pizza war that Connecticut has fomented against New York City. Of course it’s a marketing strategy to boost tourism and thus tax dollars by making the Unconstitution State a pizza destination. We have no idea at the moment how much the ridiculous campaign is costing taxpayers, what with billboards and other meaningless marketing crap. But are people really going to shlep to New Haven, say, from the Rotten Apple just to get a pizza? More to the point, will Connecticut taxpayers get their moneys-worth?

And does anybody really care if Connecticut rather than New York is the Pizza Capital of America? Ned Lamont’s marketing mavens don’t care either. Because the real purpose of the pizza war is to draw attention from the important things the state’s tripartite Democrat state government is doing to screw the state.

By the same token, outside of everybody’s prurient interest in the Jeffrey Epstein files, the real purpose of keeping the dead scandal in the headlines is to draw attention from the important things the tripartite Trumpublican federal government is doing to screw the country . . .