Well, what with the summer heat, an unavoidable home renovation project and various other leaky pipes and infrastructure “malfunctions”, I’ve been running out of time and energy to blog. As well, my blogal lobe has been trying to process the events in Lebanon and unfortunately it’s doing a “heckuva good job” (in the Mike Brown/FEMA sense of the phrase). I keep hearing about the need for “nuanced” discussion and understanding of the conflict. But I can’t seem to get anywhere near such a thing. I’m not sure I want to although “On the Face” provides a thoughtful — and mostly nuanced — Israeli point of view.
But in the less-nuanced world, today we saw pictures of a happy, smiling Condoleezza Rice meeting with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Earnestly, she told him how the U.S. is “deeply concerned about the Lebanese people and what they are enduring”. But the U.S. has many concerns. In April 2005, Israel asked the U.S. to sell them 100 guided bunker-busting bombs and (several days ago) asked that the sale be fast-tracked. Yesterday Bush agreed so an unspecified number of two-ton bombs may already be en route to Israel. Has anyone checked the FedEx tracking number to see exactly where these things are? So how do you reconcile Condee’s “deep concern” with the fact that the U.S. is selling/giving a good chunk of the hardware to Israel for use in this war. Anyone?
So what’s with the Ladybug? Well… I didn’t manage to snag any decent bird photos this week. We checked out the local sewage ponds for interesting shorebirds on Sunday morning and all my camera has to show for it is this Ladybug with aphids. So, imagine if you will, that the green leaf represents some remote corner of the world. The Ladybug represents a large, technologically advanced army. There are at least two kinds of aphids. One color represents ordinary citizens and the other may be some sort of militant organization. The point of all this is that, as Marissa K. Bergman proved in the 2002 California State Science Fair, Ladybugs are color-blind and can’t tell which is which. Essentially, almost all of these aphids are about to become the Ladybug’s lunch. Given the number of Lebanese families that have been destroyed and the number of Lebanese children that have been killed or maimed, this is about as nuanced as I can get.