The dentist told me I have Tartar.
Vasty Tartar Back
There’s not usually much to say in a dentist’s chair, and it’s a good place to try to remember Shakespeare. I know he wasn’t referring to this Tartar, but it did make me think of the line “he might return to vasty Tartar back” from Henry V, Act II, Scene II.
In this scene, Henry V learned that fellow English lords had been paid by France to kill him in Hampton before Henry and his men made effort to sail to France and fight for Henry’s claim to French throne. Henry condemns three men, one them Henry Scrope, 3rd Baron Scrope of Masham, or Lord Scroop. Lord Scroop, who, Henry said, “knew’st me the very bottom of my soul, that almost mightst have coined me into gold,” seem to have been to have been taken by a devil that “gull’d thee” who should then “with his lion gait walk the whole world, He might return to vasty Tartar back, And tell the legions ‘I can never win A soul so easy as that Englishman’s.’
Returning to vasty Tartar, I ways understood it, meant returning to vast expanse of land stretching to Siberia to China – an area hardly reachable in Shakespeare’s time. It also means, according to SharespeareWords, and a Google search, Tartarus, the underworld place of confinement for those who incurred the wrath of the gods.
I know that’s not what the dentist was referring to, but that whole monologue from Henry V, Act II, Scene II crossed my mind, and has been in my mind for years.
Steak Tartare
I know the dentist wasn’t referring to Steak Tartare. It crossed my mind in the dentist chair. Now I have the liberty of my internet, and I can look up steak tartare. It has an interesting history for something as unexciting as ground beef, some tartare sauce, and other things that add flavor.
This isn’t what the dentist was talking about when he said I had tartar, but it is something with tartar with a different spelling.
Tartar (hardened plaque)
Tartar is apparently hardened dental plaque. I brush my teeth and I’m convinced my dentist has a contract with the electric toothbrushes and dental picks because I have both at his suggestion.
He could have told me that I have hardened plaque and that the only to remove is to see him on a regular basis. I’m also convinced he ha a contract with the x-ray machine company, and I don’t think it’s good that the price of a visit increases every time they want to use the x-ray machine to see if (among other things) the plaque has turned into tartar.
Perhaps I just miss the family dentist I had growing up who was a friend of the family and I felt like I was visiting a friend.
With few resources and little funding, makeshift educational facilities established over the past several months are working to provide some schooling to children in Gaza.Read on Substack
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Published in Drop Site News, from a writer in Gaza. A touching story of the children trying to learn among the destruction.
When hundreds of Israeli settlers rampaged through Huwara and surrounding Palestinian towns in the occupied West Bank on February 26, 2023, an article in the CNN says, “what unfolded was violence so brutal that the Israeli military commander for the West Bank called it a ‘pogrom‘.”
A few months earlier, in December, 2022, Netanyahu once again became Prime Minister of Israel. He formed the “most right wing government in Israel’s history,” an accomplishment in itself.
The settler “rampage” in Huwara was in response to the killing of Israeli settlers by a Palestinian. This will sound oddly familiar.
The West Bank started as a modern description of a place following the creation of Israel in 1948. The Oslo Accords in the 1990s divided the West Bank into areas A, B, C – administrative zones with some facade of Palestinian control in some parts of the West Bank. In February an article in the Washinington Institute for Near East Policy thinktank titled “Annexation by Design: How Israel’s New West Bank Policies Are Reshaping the Conflict and Testing U.S. Strategy” said it expects a risk of escalating violence in the West Bank caused by Israeli settlers engaging in arson an property damage.
There is no good starting point to talk about the history of the West Bank, so Huwara seems like a good place to convene a description of current ongoing events in the West Bank.
Huwara is south of the city of Nablus, surrounded on three sides by Israeli settlements. It’s almost directly south of Burin, a village (or small town) of a few thousand residents known for it’s annual Kite Festival.
Northwest of Huwara and Burin, and southwest of Nablus is the Palestinian village of Tell. In what the Times of Israel calls a “deadly gunfight” settlers were killed by a Palestinian a couple weeks ago, on Friday, July 24, after the settlers “illegally entered” Tell. As a result, there was a “coordinated wave of retaliatory violence sweeping across the West Bank within hours” by settlers.
Immediately after the “deadly gunfight” in Tell Israel responded with collective punishment as usual. It immediately arrested dozens of Palestinians across the West Bank. With increasingly clear support since October 7, the Israeli government, arms, funds, and protects the settlers. Within hours and days hundreds of settlers had set homes and vehicles on fire in Sarra – west of Nablus – burned Palestinian farms in Jiljiliya and Urif, damaged homes in Far’ata (near Qalqiliya), poisoned a farmer’s flock, uprooted dozens of olive trees in Masafer Yatta, and bulldozed olive groves in Tell. Near Burin, settlers gathered on stolen land and began breaking ground for a new outpost, using the day’s chaos as cover to expand their ethnic cleansing.
UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese described Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians across the occupied West Bank as “pogroms”, the same term of targeting livelihood of a minority group that an Israeli commander used to describe Huwara, three years earlier.
Today the United States is celebrating the Declaration of Independence signed two hundred and fifty years ago. Since it’s creation the United States has been a increasingly committed to capitalism, which in turn has led to an a human-induced climate crisis.
On the same weekend the United States is celebrating Fourth of July, “extreme temperatures, high humidity and intense sunshine combine under a massive heat dome” that will effect two hundred and fifty million people”. According to Accuweather, this will be the hottest every 4th of July for many people, and every year we set records for temperatures previously never reached on a certain date.
During the unprecedented heat wave at the end of June in Europe thousand of people died.
The climate crisis is not coming for us. It’s already here.
We had the the ability to crate it. Do we have the ability to end it, mitigate it, or change the policies that will continue to crate it?
Some advocacy news sources reported that Friday, July 4, has been 1,000 days since October 7, the day that several groups including Hamas broke through a security barrier fencing them inside the Gaza Strip and took more than 250 Israelis and foreign nationals hostage. Other advocacy groups say that it was yesterday, July 3, that was the 1,000th day. A friend also tells me today is also 2 years, 30 weeks from October 7. So who’s counting?!?
Common summaries say that Hamas killed close to 1,2000 Israelis that day – excluding the mentions of foreign nationals, including U.S. citizens serving in the Israeli army. It’s important to mention that Hamas was not the only group that able to breach the security that always fence Gaza’s into an open air prison. More importantly, it’s long been known that many of the people killed on October 7 were killed by Israeli forces.
Israel’s response, over the last thousand days, has been to “flatten Gaza,” as the Jewish Voice for Peace describes it. That “flattening” has extended to Lebanon, where Hezbollah has made effort to distract Israel from the north.
The Office of the Commissioners of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) snapshot of Gaza at the end of June describes some of the devastation of Gaza and it’s people:
- 87% of cropland damaged
- 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are expected to experience acute malnutrition
- 93% of schools will require reconstruction
- …. and a lot more important and troubling facts.
It’s estimated that it will take up to 60 years to rebuild Gaza due to the destruction caused by Israel.
This is what Gaza looks like after a “ceasefire” that has resulted in Israel controlling more than half of Gaza, and the “Board of Peace” that was developed by President Trump pushing the remaining Gazans into “humanitarian zones” to be continuously monitored.
It’s important to remember the facts if you expect to create peace.
Before October 2023, Diana Buttu said in a round-table discussion organized by Al-Shabakah (the Palestinian Policy Network) there was a major push within Israel to advance the normalization project with Arab states.
That project was, she said, mainly “about sidelining Palestinians and sending a message to the Israeli public that the regime never really needed to address the Palestinian issue. Instead, it could have peace and economic ties with the Arab world without ending the occupation, without dismantling the colonial project, and, of course, without addressing Palestinian fundamental rights and, crucially, the right of return.”
Sidelining Palestinians is not a new idea. It’s an ongoing effort, and that exactly what the Abraham Accords are designed to do.
The Abraham Accords were, and and are, agreements between Arab states and Israel to have diplomatic and economic relations that would not depend on any expectation that Israel be required to guarantee Palestinian rights or a Palestinian state. The Accords, in essence, tries to end support for Palestinians from Arab governments.
The “push”to advance normalization continues, but, like many of Trump’s grand projects, is not succeeding as envisioned. That’s good news for everyone that believes peace includes Palestinians having human rights.
An email from Back From the Brink informs me that forty years, ago, on June 12, about a million people gathered at a rally in New York to call for global nuclear disarmament. This is backed up by the Museum of the City of New York.
The email also led me to an article on the increasingly dangerous threat of nuclear war.
The gathering and protest on June 12, 1982, was part of the aptly named Nuclear Freeze movement. Nuclear war – and any use or misuse of nuclear weapons – causes a nuclear winter that destroy global agriculture and other necessary parts of civilization, possibly for decades.
The good news is that it’s possible to abolish nuclear weapons, and that no nuclear weapons have been used in war since their first use in 1945.
The bad news is that nuclear weapons testing has long-lasting multi-generational impacts.
The even worse news is that of the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, countries continue to threaten their use. (The US against Gaza in 2024 and 2025, Israel against Gaza)
Join the movement to abolish nuclear weapons before it’s too late.
On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israel attacked Egypt. This became known as the 1967 War, or the Six day War, or the Arab-Israeli War.
Zena Tehlan, in an Al Jazeera article explains some of the debated history that led up to the war. It’s not debated that Israel preemptively began the War by attacking Egypt.
Tehlans’s artticle “The Naksa: How Israel occupied the whole of Palestine in 1967” gives a provides a summary of some of the immediate and ongoing results of the endless occupation and oppression of Palestinians.
The Palestinian-created and Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Sanction, Divest) Movement has suggestions on actions to take to end the Naksa, and it’s precursor, the the Nakba of 1948.
Today Israel continued to act with impunity. Once again Israel violated international law with impunity. Today Israel once again “intercepted” civilian boats and “detained” dozens of people from more than fifty boats. Last month Israel Israel did the same to similar boats, the same to dozens more boats and people last summer, and have done the same many times in the previous decades.
The Freedom Flotilla organizes a coalition of international boats and people that set sail to break the illegal seize of Gaza. Several flotillas have been launched since Israel implemented a full blockade of Gaza in 2007. All the efforts by civilians to break the seize of Gaza have failed since 2008. Countries have never even tried, and seem to accept and approve of the blockade that controls all people and goods allowed into Gaza, and prevents dangerous objects like wheelchairs and pencils from entering Gaza.
It is for that reason that international civilians from around the world have been increasingly gathering to sail together to provide the basic goods to Gaza that countries of the world have chosen to not provide.
Last month dozens of boats were attacked by Israel while in waters off of Greece. Dozens of the civilians on boats from around the world ended up in Greece, beaten badly enough to end up in the hospital. Today the boats were “intercepted” again in international water near Cyprus.
Israel has no right under international law, the law of the seas, or the Geneva conventions to attack civilians boats. It also has no right to attack civilian, and also has no right to maintain the seize of Gaza.
Unfortunately, this will continue until Israel has been held accountable for violation of international law and it becomes clear that piracy at sea, and the “interception” of civilian boats is has consequences for people that do it.
Celebrities have a social media presence, sometimes unexpectedly as Alysa Liu found out as her following online increased by millions after winning gold at the 2026 Olympics.
Like many people I follow some celebrities online. I pride myself – as if it matters – that I follow people some celebrates I feel have good values.
For instance I follow an actress so many of us grew up with, Emma Watson, a former goodwill ambassador for the United Nations.
More recently I follow on Facebook a young actress Jenna Ortega, who left the Scream franchise in support of a co-star who was not welcomed back due to support of Palestinian rights.
Jenna Ortega’s co-star in the trending Netflix show, Wednesday, is a fellow young actress, Emma Myers.
What happens when you not only follow, but dare to comment on, a Facebook post by actors, actress, and such?
Almost immediately I received a friend request on Facebook by some account claiming to be Emma Myers, and then another one claiming to be Emma’s mom. Within twenty-four hours I had a about four accounts with names like, or similar to Emma Myers, and two requests from her mom. When I accepted the request from an account that looked like Emma’s mom accounts I quickly got over the next day several messages saying things like “hi,” “how are you,” and “why aren’t you answering me”.
By the looks of it, these clearly aren’t Emma’s accounts, or her mom’s accounts on Facebook. Most of these accounts have joined Facebook in the last week, and have about five or so friends, non of which are in the movie industry or people that the real Emma Myers might actually know.
Does it matter? No.
Is it funny and kind of sad? Yes. … What’s real and what’s fake on social media, and what we actually need from it is rather sad, funny, interesting, and important.
Social media is good for some things. It’s even good for following celebrities. Doing so is both real and unreal.
The Dole Blog 