You know this Israel-Hamas War is newsworthy because I've been gazing at MSNBC all morning, and there has yet to be even one commercial.  On nostalgic Tuesday today, I focus on the Hamas and the Gaza Strip.   My posting 15 years ago said :   End to the Gaza Strip War : “Why don’t those #&%#@* Hamas idiots just stop lobbing rockets into Israel,” courtesy of a golf buddy pundit expressed at the Ala Wai Golf Course Clubhouse. He wanted me to repeat this in my daily blog, but I thought we should protect both of us from any possible fatwa by not specifically identifying the source.  Two years later in 2010 , I reported that the 128th country to visit this blog site, was the  Gaza Strip , with, then, a population of 1.5 million.   I might add  that I am now up to 221 entities and 2,731,530 pageviews.  That 875,512 pageviews in the graphic is because, I stopped paying Google many years ago to carry my blog. While there are only 195 countries in the world, their are 221 entries because

  First, this is a big day for celebrations: Columbus Day. Still a federal holiday in the USA and many countries of the Americas. Italian Christopher Columbus  representing Spain arrived in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492 after a journey of 3 months.   This was a surprise, for they were expecting to find a way to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Asia.   However, America was named after Italian  Amerigo Vespucci  ( right ) on his second journey across the Atlantic in 1501, for Portugal, because he was the first to indicate that he found a New World. The other controversy is that many today feel that Columbus was responsible for lands to be taken away from the Indians.  Thus, there seems to be sentiment for this day to be called something like  Indigenous Peoples Day . The third controversy is that the first European to visit North America was Leif Erickson, around the year 1000, almost 500 years before Columbus.  Congress in 1969 did designate October 9 as Leif Erickson Day, but efforts to m

All three wars are of course intertwined.  Many Republicans don't want more Ukraine support, exacerbating their civil war.  The conflicts in and around Israel could well bring order to Congress, which in the House will mean bipartisan cooperation. About that Middle East conflict : The numbers are in flux, with deaths rising past 1000 and hostages in the scores. Then again, there is little being said about two  Afghanistan earthquakes this weekend, killing more than 2000 . While there seems to be no immediate terroristic threat at this time to the continental USA, we are most definitely involved, and Congress will need to quickly add funding for Israel. The Navy's newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, with a task force of 5,000 personnel, has been deployed to this area.   Carrier cost $17.5 billion . The grave danger is expansion to other parts of the region.   However, this might not happen  because it is more and more appearing that the attack occurred because the Hama