Long time standup legend Steven Wright is the Aristotle of sad, one-line jokes. Apparently he goes out for coffee and sits there and lets lines pop into his head. Then he writes them down. Here are two.
1. The earth is bipolar.
2. Jesus loves you because he doesn't know you.
One of my daughters observed that everyone she knew had at least two personalities except for me. I only had one. She saw this as a limitation, like a broken leg, and she was right.
Some of my family, for example, have second personalities reserved for social occasions. In society they bubble with enthusiasm, laugh hard at weak jokes and smile like "My Last Duchess."
I can barely manage a single dour face.
Why does this matter? Humans have become the dominant mammal on Earth for several reasons, but one major reason is our skills in socializing. We can work together. Even I managed to serve in an army.
It takes a patient tribe to raise and educate human children. We had to become extra-social.
This is a good day to remember the time I was walking across the campus at UCLA. My goal back then was a teaching credential. As I started down from the central square (Royce Hall), I came on a small group of students standing around MLK. I joined them, and he talked with us.
This must have been almost sixty years ago. I don't remember what he said, except that it was what you'd expect. And his immense presence.
According to my morning newspaper, Joe Biden "is walking the fine line between deterrence and escalation" in our conflict with the Houthis. But there "is no science to the calculation." Several people on TV referred to Biden's attack on the Houthi as "tit for tat."
In fact, Biden's retaliation escalated the conflict. It was tit for TAAAAAAAAT.
There is a famous method for avoiding escalation that goes back to the Old Testament, the Torah and the Code of Hammurabi.
This is how it would work. The Houthi might fire five missiles at random passing ships and miss. In retaliation, we would fire five missiles back at the Houthi and miss on purpose. In short, we try to duplicate exactly what they did.
The Houthis might next fire ten missiles and hit something. We would do the same.
The lunacy of this chain of automatic responses might become obvious even to leaders living in the Bronze Age, when Hammurabi's Code limited retaliation to a tooth for a tooth.
Ethnic cleansing is the mass killing or expulsion of an ethnic or religious group from a region by a different group. Genocide is the extermination or attempted extermination of a group. Expelling isn't the goal.
I'm trying to understand what is happening.
Ethnic cleansing and genocide are not the same thing, although they are related. (South Africa seems intent on changing what "genocide" means.)
The first recorded genocide occurred when the Israelites attacked the Canaanites at Jericho, where the walls came tumbling down. Men, women and children were put to the Bronze Age sword, along with their domestic animals. (If the ancient story is true.)
In the current ruinous war in West Asia, Hamas has vowed to cleanse the area of Jews, and some leaders in Israel have vowed to cleanse the area of Palestinians.
Our government can and should stop the war. It's a road to hell.
Okay, I guess I understand the claim by Trump and Nixon that when the President does something, it is legal. It's like when an American President picks his nose, what he finds on the end of his finger is creme brulee.
Tom Smothers attended my high school. I believe he started about the time I was leaving. People say that Tom stood in the hall and cracked jokes that weren't funny. Students avoided him.
Tom kept getting better and the Smothers brothers shook up the dusty comedy of their time, mostly with folk music and an improv version of sibling rivalry with a bit of political edge to their work.
Tom ended up settling in Sonoma County; so did my family. Our paths did not cross.
It now occurs to me that hardly anyone is funny in high school.
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Archeologists have traced warfare in the Middle East (West Asia) back about 10,000 years, well before writing was invented. The first detailed written account of a battle in human history describes a conflict that took place in Israel in 1457 BCE.
Result: Egypt 1, Kadesh 0.
Kadesh was a set of allies, mostly Canaanites from today's Israel and Syria.
People have been fighting over Israel for 10,000 years. Sometimes Egypt wins, sometimes Kadish.
A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California stated that 61% of Californians believe we should not take sides in the conflict.
Meanwhile there's a bad war going on in Nigeria between the herders and the farmers. Americans don't mind that one. And Ukraine and so on and on.
I'm reminded of the key question raised in the movie "Blue Velvet," which is,"Why are there people like Frank?"
No answer.
Science tells us that a mass extinction killed the dinosaurs, except for those that could fly. A huge comet had struck the planet; that event created a deadly climate change, which some consider a liberal myth.
In the last 500 million years, five different mass extinctions wiped the slate on Earth almost but not quite clean of animal and vegetable life forms. The main cause each time: climate change.
Western civilization first collapsed during the Bronze Age, about 3,000 years ago. The Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and Babylonians fell. Probably from climate change.
The Maya civilization disintegrated 1200 years ago. Likely cause, a local climate change.
