Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022

"Holocaust survivors across the world have united to deliver a message on the dangers of unchecked hate and the importance of remembrance at a time of rising global antisemitism."

"In a video released Thursday to mark Yom HaShoah -- Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day -- 100 Holocaust survivors asked people to stand with them and remember the Nazi genocide to avoid repeating the horrors of the past."

"The 100 Words project video was released by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference. The group represents the world’s Jews in negotiating for compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs, and provides welfare for Holocaust survivors around the globe."

"The 100 Word Project statement by Holocaust survivors says:"

“Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day

We all survived the Holocaust

We are here to give voice to the six million Jews who were murdered

We are a reminder unchecked hatred can lead to actions, actions to genocide

Just over 75 years ago, one-third of the world’s Jews were systematically murdered

Among them, over 1.5 million children were killed in the name of indifference, intolerance, hate

Hatred for what was feared

Hatred for what was different

We must remember the past or it will become our future

On Holocaust Remembrance Day we ask the world to stand with us and remember.”

Argus Hamilton Quips

Here's an anecdote from humorist Argue Hamilton's recent column:

"L.A. County Health Director Barbara Ferrer decided to defy a federal judge's ruling and reinstated mask mandates for public transportation. The mask isn't just a signifier of obedience to the state. My mask confesses my own white privilege and it protects pregnant Ukrainian men from climate change"

Poetic Justice for a Criminal

"A Texas man beat up a 72-year-old great-grandmother so as to take her car, only to die later in a crash, according to San Antonio police. Shirlene Hernandez, who was left with a nasty black eye and bruising covering half of her face, was assaulted as she headed into a gas station to a pick up her daily Diet Coke on her way to work around 8am on April 12. The assailant struck her several times in the face while stealing her car keys, per KABB/WOAI. He also 'hit her with the door, badly bruising her face,' Hernandez's granddaughter, Helen Garcia, tells KXXV.

The assailant, who'd earlier left the Texas Vista Medical Center, escaped with Hernandez's car despite three men attempting to tackle him, according to the outlets. Police say the car was later found wrecked on Interstate 35, with the deceased carjacker inside."

That'll teach you to attack the elderly!

So Much for "My Mask Protects You, Your Mask Protects Me"

They'll have to change this motto to read "My Mask Protects You, Your Masklessness Doesn't Protect Me."

A federal judge in Florida struck down on Monday the Biden administration’s mask mandate for airplanes and other public transport methods, and a Biden administration official says the order is no longer in effect while the ruling is reviewed.

US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the mandate was unlawful because it exceeded the statutory authority of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and because its implementation violated administrative law. 

'Wearing a mask cleans nothing,' she wrote. 'At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyance.”

Seeing airline passengers receive the pilot's announcement with cheers and applause just reinforced for me how selfish so many people have been during the pandemic.

BidenFlation

I love this headline from The Babylon Bee: "Jimmy Carter Arrested For Putting Biden 'I Did That' Stickers On Gas Pumps."

The Cruelty of COVID Death and Grief

The Atlantic has had some of the finest writing about the pandemic.  Ed Yong has a new column that's very touching -- and extremely infuriating.

"The Final Pandemic Betrayal. Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic."

Here are some excerpts:

"Deaths from COVID have been unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable. The pandemic has replaced community with isolation, empathy with judgment, and opportunities for healing with relentless triggers. Some of these features accompany other causes of death, but COVID has woven them together and inflicted them at scale. In 1 million instants, the disease has torn wounds in 9 million worlds, while creating the perfect conditions for those wounds to fester. It has opened up private grief to public scrutiny, all while depriving grievers of the collective support they need to recover. The U.S. seems intent on brushing aside its losses in its desire to move past the crisis. But the grief of millions of people is not going away. 'There’s no end to the grief,' Lucy Esparza-Casarez told me. 'It changes. It morphs into something different. But it’s ongoing.'"

"Grievers must also deal with lies and mocking. On the day that Esparza-Casarez’s husband died in April 2020, she watched a press conference in which Donald Trump stated that the virus 'is going away.' Zach, an artist who lives in St. Louis, saw a clip of Ted Cruz mocking masks at the Conservative Political Action Conference while his father lay dying in a hospital. (The Atlantic has agreed to identify him by only his first name to avoid heightening tensions in his family that have already been exacerbated by the pandemic.) 'It was just a punch in the gut … the mania, the cheering, the applause,' he told me. 'Imagine if you lost someone to cancer and half the country was making fun of cancer all the time,'  he said. 'Imagine that it’s just everywhere, every day, and it doesn’t go away.'"

Terrorism on a New York Train

And speaking of homeland insecurity: 

As if New York hasn't suffered from enough terrorism trauma!  

Per the New York Post: "At least 16 people were injured, including 10 who were shot, when a suspect set off a smoke grenade and unleashed gunfire on a Brooklyn subway train during Tuesday morning rush hour, the NYPD and law enforcement sources told The Post.

The gunman — possibly disguised as an MTA construction worker and wearing a gas mask — launched his bloody assault around 8:30 a.m. on a Manhattan-bound N train at the 36th Street station in Sunset Park, where authorities later discovered several undetonated devices, FDNY and police said. 

The suspect is believed to have set off the smoke grenade moments before firing off a barrage of bullets, police sources told The Post."

The amount of planning involved; the attack on a packed train during morning rush hour; the fact that America has a huge crime problem and a shortage of police,  have all resulted in today's horror.  Let's hope it's not the start of more deadly attacks to come.

Homeland Insecurity Agents

This is pretty disturbing. All I can imagine is that this was the beginning stages of a terrorist plot against America.

From CNN April 8:  "Prosecutors told a judge Friday that they still don't know a motive for two men charged with impersonating federal agents, whether they are connected to any foreign government or whether they received anything from the federal agents they allegedly duped.

'This investigation is less than two weeks old, and every day it gets worse and worse as more and more evidence comes forward, and more and more witnesses come forward,' prosecutor Josh Rothstein told a federal judge on Friday.

 

The Justice Department is arguing that Haider Ali and Arian Taherzadeh should stay behind bars while the investigation continues. Judge Michael Harvey peppered prosecutors with questions, many of which they couldn't answer. 

 

The hearing will continue Monday, and the two men will remain behind bars over the weekend. Neither Taherzadeh nor Ali has entered a formal plea.

The two men spent more than two years impersonating Homeland Security agents, currying favor with federal law enforcement officers, some of whom lived in a swanky DC complex where they had apartments, and amassing a small arsenal of weapons and surveillance equipment, according to court documents."

Shrugging Off COVID

The Atlantic has another good column that made me relieved to know that I'm not the only one who feels as if everyone else has just stopped paying attention to COVID and stopped taking it seriously -- even after a million U.S. deaths.

Katherine J. Wu's headline is "America is Staring Down Its First So What? Wave", subtitled "The United States could be in for a double whammy: a surge it cares to neither measure nor respond to."

This news doesn't exactly fill one with confidence: "As national concern for COVID withers, the country’s capacity to track the coronavirus is on a decided downswing. Community test sites are closing, and even the enthusiasm for at-home tests seems to be on a serious wane; even though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced a new deal on domestic pandemic funding, those patterns could stick. Testing and case reporting are now so 'abysmal' that we’re losing sight of essential transmission trends, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. 'It’s so bad that I could never look at the data and make any informed choice.' Testing is how individuals, communities, and experts stay on top of where the virus is and whom it’s impacting; it’s also one of the main bases of the CDC’s new guidance on when to mask up again. Without it, the nation’s ability to forecast whatever wave might come around next is bound to be clouded."

The American people had better wake up!

Sound Familiar?

The latest atrocity: "Russia Forced Hostages to Dig Each Other’s Graves, Ukraine Says." 

The Russians say they are de-nazifying Ukraine. The Russians ARE the Nazis!  In case anyone's forgotten, the Nazis did the same thing with the Jews and had them dig their own graves!

COVID's Horrendous Death Toll

In his article about COVID in The New Yorker, Dhruv Khullar wonders, "What Do We Do About COVID Now?"

"Our country is on the cusp of a grim milestone: soon, a million people in the United States will have died of COVID-19. Yet for many Americans this reality seems vague, abstract—a group problem for which we must take individual responsibility. We struggle to see the crisis we’re in.

"We can get booster shots and persuade others to do so; we can make plans for accessing monoclonal antibodies or antiviral pills. When cases rise, as they will, we can consider how we might lower the chances that we’ll pass on the virus to someone for whom the consequences could be catastrophic. After two years of ebbs and flows, of surges, variants, vaccines, and boosters, our choices matter, perhaps now more than ever."

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Well, many of us have been making the right choices for two years and have always taken personal responsibility, while others refuse to mask up or get vaccinated. The BA.2 variant is here, and there's a worrisome Omicron XE variant on the horizon. Contrary to what some people think, COVID isn't over, and more vigilance rather than denial is required.

Crimes Against Humanity

The film footage of these executions was horrifying to see. From The Times of Israel:

"BUCHA, Ukraine (AFP) — The bodies are strewn across the quiet tree-lined street in the town of Bucha as far as the eye can see.

All 20 are in civilian clothing, and all have their different poses in death. Some lie with sightless eyes staring at Ukraine’s overcast sky, some lie face down on the tarmac.

Three of them are tangled up in bicycles after taking their final ride, while others, with waxy skin, have fallen next to bullet-ridden and crushed cars.

One has his hands tied behind his back with a white cloth, and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his corpse, said AFP journalists who accessed the town.

Another lies next to a yellow billboard spraypainted with happy and sad emojis and the words 'Live Fast.'

Russia’s hasty retreat from its occupation of the region around Kyiv is revealing fresh devastation by the day.

'All these people were shot, killed, in the back of the head,' mayor Anatoly Fedoruk told AFP."

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Oh yes -- they beat a hasty retreat, but first they took the time to bind and kill innocent Ukrainians! These Russian barbarians should rot.