Playing Poker

Life resembles a poker game.  None of us has any choice but to play out the cards that we’ve been dealt, one hand after the other, until the game is over.  In this country, for the most part, we can reasonably assume that the deck is not marked and that the dealer is honest – or, if he is not, that he will be replaced.

There are those elsewhere who don’t enjoy that advantage:  Today, one of the worst subhuman games of rigged poker is being played out in the hostile environment of northwestern Iraq, close to the Syrian border to the west and to Kurdish territory in the north, where the chances of ever being dealt a decent hand are low to nil. 

The Middle East on Fire, Again

On Friday August 1^st, in a full-page ad in the print edition of the Washington Post, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel directed a plea to Hamas, imploring it to reject what he termed the practice of “child sacrifice,” Hamas’s alleged military tactic of using children as human shields in its war against the State of Israel.

With the clarity of a survivor of WWII’s Nazi genocide, Wiesel stated that “what we are suffering through today is not a battle of Jew versus Arab, of Israeli versus Palestinian,” but that “it is a battle between those who celebrate life and those who champion death . . . . a battle of civilization versus barbarism.”

A Most Disingenuous Use of Words

Mourning the death of 40 of victims shot down over Ukraine.

The early efforts by Washington-on-the-Potomac to tone down the gravity of the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East by using language that minimizes the nature of those conflicts is one more clue as to the tepid leadership of this nation’s executive branch.

Words matter.  Several in particular which were in vogue until recently have completely mischaracterized violent events taking place in those two areas of the world.

The first term appeared on U.S. TV screens by some talking heads and reporters who initially called Ukrainian separatists in the pro-Russian stronghold of Donetsk “thugs.”

Christie Still Fund-Raising, Still Dodging Bullets

As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie keeps up his out-of-state fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Republican Governors Association, his state-wide political critics in New Jersey, together with the editorial page writers of the region’s largest daily newspaper continue to batter his record.

However, outside of New Jersey it’s a different story.  Despite all of the heavily negative reporting about the so-called Bridgegate incident, no evidence has yet surfaced showing that Christie had direct or indirect participation in its planning and execution.

Millions have been spent on investigating what amounts to a two-lane, four-day closure of certain access lanes to the George Washington Bridge.  So far, if the purpose was to nail Christie, it has failed.

The Matriarch of Supermodels

The last place that I thought to find inspiration for a post is on the obituary pages of a newspaper, to wit, The Star-Ledger.  I don’t often read obituaries, usually flipping over those pages onto other stuff.

Who wants to read about death, especially in the middle of summer when the weather prompts us towards other interests?  However, life precedes death and, in a way, an obituary – if carefully written – is, through words, a celebration of a person’s life.

The obit that I stumbled across yesterday heralds the life of a person who was so full of uniqueness, so rich in character, and who appeared to have been so resolute in not giving up the high ground in her search for success and in her attainment of it, that it deserves a close read – even a second pass in order to savor her accomplishments,