He was curled up into himself like a babe,

the remains we found around the bend

beside the brook, as we perambulated

without a care until this old fellow

came into view. Poor, by his looks, and

quite dead and cold. Who did he belong to,

who had his heart?

nm 2017   Image: Fredrik Raddum

Repeated for mechanical reasons.

I was excited.  My post “Confession” got ELEVEN likes!  Then I realized I hadn’t written a post called “Confession.”  Thanks for the brief “up,” guys.  Must have  been Nan’s Notebook or Nan Cohen.

OH oh oh!  I DID WRITE CONFESSION!  Seems that post must have been held up for more than a month  (possibly being searched for any breaking of rules, since I mentioned others). If so, glad I made the cut, more than a month late. It was submitted on Feb. 1, 2024.

I DID WRITE CONFESSIONS!  Thanks for the real Likes!

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Types of female genital mutilation —  WHY?  Female Genital Mutilation (often referred to as FGM) is a destructive operation, during which the female genitals are partly or entirely removed or injured with the aim of inhibiting a woman’s sexual feelings. Most often the mutilation is performed before puberty, often on girls between the age of four and eight, but recently it is increasingly performed on babies who are only a couple of days, weeks or months old. — Google

Female genital mutilation (FGM) comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

In 1997, WHO classified female genital mutilation into four different types. Since then, experience with using this classification revealed the need to subdivide these categories, to capture the varieties of FGM in more detail. Severity (which here corresponds to the amount of tissue damaged) and health risk are closely related to the type of FGM performed as well as the amount of tissue that is cut.

The four major types of FGM, and their subtypes, are:

Type I. Partial or total removal of the clitoral glans (the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is a sensitive part of the female genitals, with the function of providing sexual pleasure to the woman), and/or the prepuce/clitoral hood (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoral glans). When it is important to distinguish between the major variations of Type I FGM, the following subdivisions are used:

Type Ia. Removal of the prepuce/clitoral hood only.

Type Ib. Removal of the clitoral glans with the prepuce/clitoral hood.

Type II.  Partial or total removal of the clitoral glans and the labia minora (the inner folds of the vulva), with or without removal of the labia majora (the outer folds of skin of the vulva). When it is important to distinguish between the major variations of Type II FGM, the following subdivisions are used:

Type IIa. Removal of the labia minora only.

Type IIb. Partial or total removal of the clitoral glans and the labia minora (prepuce/clitoral hood may be affected).

Type IIc. Partial or total removal of the clitoral glans, the labia minora and the labia majora (prepuce/clitoral hood may be affected).

Type III. (Often referred to as infibulation). Narrowing of the vaginal opening with the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the labia minora, or labia majora. The covering of the vaginal opening is done with or without removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans (Type I FGM). When it is important to distinguish between variations of Type III FGM, the following subdivisions are used:

Type IIIa. Removal and repositioning of the labia minora.

Type IIIb. Removal and repositioning of the labia majora.

Type IV. All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.

Deinfibulation refers to the practice of cutting open the sealed vaginal opening of a woman who has been infibulated (Type III). This is often done to allow sexual intercourse or to facilitate childbirth, and is often necessary for improving the woman’s health and well-being.

Despite the health risks, some women undergo a narrowing of their vaginal opening again after being deinfibulated, at the time of childbirth – meaning that they may undergo a series of repeated infibulations and deinfibulations throughout the life-course.

World Bank

https://www.worldbank.org › topic › girlseducation

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SORRY FOR THE DISCOMFORT OF THE INFORMATION, but do we want to know what’s going on or not?    The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda.

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Notoriously anti-trans author JK Rowling decided to celebrate Mother’s Day in the UK with slurs at transgenders.

I love you  all but I’m probably going to kill this blog.  Concerns I have are the following:

1. Today a post was interrupted and viewers were told “Subscribe to continue reading,” which is usually a harbinger of a message to pay, but with my small following it sounds like a way to get rid of my account.

2. Gravatar has wiped out some followers’ photos  and their sites are now unreachable. Unsure if that means they died, and I’ve no free way to get an answer.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all my thoughts, but I’m not worth squeezing people for money.

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Since I posted this, one person has urged me to stay, and I guess that’s all I needed.  (Thanks, Ned.)  I acknowledge I am wish-washy, almost constantly changing what I say I plan to do.  Maybe it’s from being old, or female, or just insecure.  Anyway, it also occurs to me that the above-described practice may be routine for Gutenberg, and if some of my referred articles are in Gutenberg, then maybe that’s what happens. (Gutenberg has a business-focussed blog opportunity.)

HI THERE

I may have mentioned that when I set up my blog posts I didn’t realize they wouldn’t be on my blog too, and I got tired of having them listed up there with no connection to my blog–really–so I’m getting rid of the pages and gradually adding tmy favorite page items to my blog. So here goes, a favorite post from a page headed for destruction.  Apologies if you have already visited and read it:

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Please don’t anyone tell my daughter Mandy that this article exists. Every word of it is true, and that’s the problem. Her flair for the dramatic might re-ignite, even at 29, and there would be trouble again—hilarious perhaps, but too much misadventure for a sixty-five year old mother to experience.
We spoiled Mandy a little, though not on purpose. Not only was she a Down’s syndrome baby, but she was initially predicted to die in very young childhood due to a congenital heart defect. Then, just in time, a new medical procedure was perfected, and open-heart surgery gave her a new life.
Did I say she was also hyperactive? Technically, I mean; really, although she was not officially diagnosed until the teachers had experienced her for a year or two. Ritalin didn’t help her; we did, her two sisters and brother and me.
Mandy was a card from the first getgo. For instance, she early coined the epithet “pantihose” for anyone who crossed her. Looking back, the first of these dramatic episodes occurred while she and her sibs were visiting their father in Atlanta one Christmas. I mean the first really dramatic episode. Luckily I didn’t hear of it until it was all over. It was at her father’s house that the event unfolded.
Apparently Mandy had grown tired of a lull in attention and decided to visit downtown Atlanta. While her sister Sallie was attending to the laundry, Mandy put on her coat and walked a couple of long blocks from her dad’s house to Ponce de Leon Avenue. Somehow shew managed to traverse that busy thoroughfare without getting killed. Mandy was patiently waiting for the city bus when it pulled up, headed for downtown Atlanta. Her heart was almost surely singing as she boarded the bus in anticipation of freedom and new adventures.
It was a blessing that the busdriver suspected something was amiss and notified the police from the phone in the bus. He also let Mandy board the bus without paying.
Meanwhile, back at the home, silence suggested that Mandy was into something. Just what that something was became evident after several frantic minutes of searching –she was missing! A missing persons call to the police happily coincided with the found persons call from the bus company. When Mandy disembarked from the bus her family was waiting.
The children and I were living in Ohio when Mandy discovered Jones Boys grocery store and noted that it was within walking distance from our home. If given half the chance she would streak out the door, take the road through the cemetery behind our house, and pay the Jones Boys a visit. The police inadvertently contributed to her mischieviousness by feeding her treats while waiting for our frantic phone call. After a time or two they didn’t have to wait. They knew where her home base was.
When Mandy began school, new vistas of possibility opened before her. She was taught how to use the phone, and use it she did. Thankfully, 911 was not yet available. But she had been taught how to use zero for help. One slow, uneventful and boring day while her grandmother was with her, Mandy’s fantasies got the best of her. She decided that a nonexistent boyfriend had loved and deserted her, and she called the operator in gasping, heart-wrenching tears, presenting a situation which was understandably difficult for the operator to comprehend.
When I arrived home, two police cars had pulled into my yard (and I mean over the curb, noses pointed toward my front door. Mandy had turned her attention to other matters by that time, and upon learning that no acts of domestic violence, murder or torture had been perpetrated, the officers departed. One-sixteen Vinton Street was becoming a known address in Gallipolis, Ohio.
The next incident that swims into focus involves an old antique gun that had been left in the garage by previous owners. We had recently moved to Athens, Ohio, and when I came across the antique gun (actually old and rusted), I put it up high, near the rafters in the garage. Need I mention that Mandy can find any hidden thing, anywhere? She’d never seen the gun before, but found it and headed down East State Street, toward Super America, gun in hand. She had not traversed half a block before the police received two phone calls about pistol-wielding Mandy stalking down the street.
Fearful that she might shoot, one policeman cautiously snuck up behind her while another approached her frontally. I received a call on that one at work and was told the incident was included in the newspaper’s police report column. Thankfully, that was one column I missed, although several well-meaning friends mentioned it to me.
Mandy has always been very observant and had long ago learned the route her school bus followed. So it came to pass that on the first day of summer vacation that year, when no bus tooted for her, she found it a cinch to traipse off to school on foot. Her journey took her more than a mile and a half, past the Health Department on West Union.
I can only imagine the dramatic tremor in her voice as she grandly made her brief entrance, which was just long enough to announce to the nurses and those in the waiting room, “I’m pregnant!” With that she cheerfully resumed her journey to school, only to be intercepted by a friend who returned her safely home.
Mandy’s sister Elizabeth was watching Mandy not long after, when Mandy’s next adventure unfolded. They had both fallen asleep while watching television. The set droned on and on, and the next thing Elizabeth knew, there was sharp rapping on the front door. Mandy had awakened and, apparently bored by the program playing, had decided to go out dancing. She went upstairs, changed clothes, and walked more than a mile downtown to O’Hooley’s bar, where she joined in the fun until an employee recognized her and drove her home.

Some of Mandy’s past adventures are understandably a blur, but I can’t forget waking up in the morning some time later and discovering that Mandy had deserted her bed sometime during the night and was gone. There was another frantic missing persons call to the police, who were at the house taking information when she appeared on the scene, escorted . The manager of the Shell Station catty-cornered from the house had discovered her asleep in one of his trucks parked behind the station. (She had fancied that one of the employees was her boyfriend and had apparently sought to be near his place of business in lieu of him).

Then there was her disappearance from the house during one of my Friday night soup group meetings. I had just missed her when a police car pulled in with Mandy in handcuffs, in the back seat.She had walked down East State to some halfway house near Children’s Services in search of a classmate to whom she was attracted. One of my soup group friends said she heard one of the officers indicate that she must have broklen free.

“They seemed to think you keep her chained up,” she said.

Apparently the handcuffs were applied after Mandy decided to play hide and seek with the police. The next to the last episode which I’ll share was scary and sobering, but reveals Mandy’s single-minded determination to accomplish her goals.

In addition to keeping Mandy safe, I was encouraged by the specialists to help Mandy take more responsibility for herself since she would soon be an adult. So one September I had an idea. Someone had always put Mandy on the school bus, and I thought this might be an opportunity for her to gain some experience with responsibility. There was a period of about fifteen minutes between the time I left for work and the arrival of her school bus. The day before school started I called the school and determined the bus’s scheduled arrival time. I suggested that if some day Mandy did not catch the bus, the driver should use his phone to report the fact, and I would come home from work to deal with her.

She liked going to school. I did not expect her to ever miss the bus.

I thought the agreement was in place, but in the world of treatment plans and paperwork, my words to the school staff had been processed as eventual possibilities, not present realities.

What happened was that one day Mandy missed the bus after I had left in my car pool. But she wanted to go to school! Up high, hanging on a hook, she spied an extra set of the keys to my car Eureka! She didn’t have to walk to school this time! She would drive!

There was a little hair dressing shop whose window looked out on my driveway. As the owner later related to me, Mandy came out the back door and climbed into the car. The motor started up, and Mandy gassed it. And gassed it. The car slowly rolled back into the street from the driveway, with Mandy racing the engine in a goal-directed fashion. The scenario, witnessed by the beauty shop’s owner and a draped occupant of the chair, brought swift action. Within minutes the police were on the scene, and once again I received a phone call at work. Perhaps you can imagine the content of that call.

The school denied any plan was in place, and I was cast in the role of the irresponsible one. If it seems our entire life was in chaos, remember that this was over a period of years and years… But it wasn’t always like that–just most of the time.

My son Ian and his wife Laura participated in the final scenario reported here. They were coming home from running errands and turned into our driveway just as a police car was approaching. The cruiser pulled in behind them. Ian was wondering if he had done something deserving of a ticket when he heard screaming.

Mandy was running around the back yard,shouting frantically and waving her arms. Ian and Laura scrambled out of their car and the officer scrambled out of his right behind them. “What’s going on here?” he wanted to know. Ian and Laura were curious, too.

Mandy pulled herself together sufficiently to gasp, “There’s a bat in the house!” With that, she led the way in through the back door and suddenly Laura screamed. At that, Mandy resumed screaming. The bat was swooping again.

In the livingroom, oblivious to all the excitement, lay Mike, Mandy’s boyfriend, asleep on the sofa.

The officer stared. “What’s wrong with him?”

Ian shrugged. “Oh, that’s just Mike.”

Laura pointed to Bubba the cat, who was drinking from a fish bowl wshose water level was alarmingly low, and gave a little hysterical laugh.

The officer was bending over Mike. “Is he okay?” Laura explained the sedating effects of Mike’s medication while Ian observed the bat entering and leaving the room, swooping up and down the staircase.

Our representative of law and order decided to take charge of the situation. He assigned Laura the task of checking on Mike, grabbed a broom from the kitchen, and directed Ian to open all the windows. He then began following the bat as it swooped around the house.

Ian later recalled suspecting that the officer was checking all the rooms to be sure there were no more bodies lying about.

Laura got Mike to sit up, Ian continued throwing open windows and doors, and all the while Mandy was running back and forth from kitchen to back porch, issuing tearful wails. Finally the bat man successfully rid the premises of the uninvited creature and then departed, after giving Mandy a fatherly lecture to the effect that bats are our friends.

Mike went back to sleep.

Years have passed, and now Mandy’s dramatics are happily limited to shouting “Yes! Yes! Oh, yes!” a la the Herbal shampoo commercial. But, please remember…Mum’s the word. This article doesn’t exist.

*Appeared previously in Pickin’ Fleas.

Before everything goes boom and burn, I’d like to understand why Josh Paul quit his State Department position over arms to Israel:
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“Today I informed my colleagues that I have resigned from the State Department, due to a policy disagreement concerning our continued lethal assistance to Israel. To further explain my rationale for doing so, I have written the attached note.”

From https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7120512510645952512/

His letter states:

“I joined the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (PM) over 11 years ago, and have found it a
fascinating job with engaging, and often immensely challenging – intellectually and morally –
tasks and objectives. I have been proud in my time of service to have made many differences,
both visibly and behind the scenes, from advocating for Afghan refugees, to pushing back (with
not insignificant results) on pending Administration decisions to transfer lethal weapons to
countries that abuse human rights, to sculpting policies and practices that advance human rights,
to working tirelessly to advance those policies and decisions that are good and just; from our
global humanitarian demining efforts to our support for Ukraine’s defense in the face of
murderous Russian aggression.

When I came to this Bureau, the U.S. Government entity most responsible for the transfer and
provision of arms to partners and allies, I knew it was not without its moral complexity and
moral compromises, and I made myself a promise that I would stay for as long as I felt I the
harm I might do could be outweighed by the good I could do. In my 11 years I have made more
moral compromises than I can recall, each heavily, but each with my promise to myself in mind,
and intact. I am leaving today because I believe that in our current course with regards to the
continued – indeed, expanded and expedited – provision of lethal arms to Israel – I have reached
the end of that bargain..

Yes, PM can still do an immense amount of good in the world: there is still, sadly, a great need
for American security assistance – a need for American arms and defense cooperation to defend
against the multiple military perils that democracy, democracies, and humanity itself, face on this
earth. But we cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and
against it. And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially
worse.

Let me be clear: Hamas’ attack on Israel was not just a monstrosity; it was a monstrosity of
monstrosities. I also believe that potential escalations by Iran-linked groups such as Hezbollah,
or by Iran itself, would be a further cynical exploitation of the existing tragedy. But I believe to
the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for
that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper
suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people – and is not in the long term American
interest. This Administration’s response – and much of Congress’ as well – is an impulsive
reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and
bureaucratic inertia. That is to say, it is immensely disappointing, and entirely
unsurprising. Decades of the same approach have shown that security for peace leads to neither
security, nor to peace. The fact is, blind support for one side is destructive in the long term to the
interests of the people on both sides. I fear we are repeating the same mistakes we have made
these past decades, and I decline to be a part of it for longer.

I am not ignorant when it comes to the situation in the Middle East. I was raised surrounded by
debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; my Master’s thesis was about Israeli
counterterrorism and civil rights (in researching it I met two men who have since been among
my lifelong heroes, Uri Avnery, and an Israeli Palestinian advocate I shall not name here); I
served for the U.S. Security Coordinator, living in Ramallah while advancing security sector
governance within the Palestinian Authority and liaising with the IDF; and, I have deep personal
ties to both sides of the conflict. Those who know me best know that I have opinions, and they
are strong ones. But this is what is at the core of them: that there is beauty to be found
everywhere in this world, and it deserves both protection, and the right to flourish, and that is
what I most desire for Palestinians and for Israelis. The murder of civilians is an enemy to that
desire – whether by terrorists as they dance at a rave, or by terrorists as they harvest their olive
grove. The kidnapping of children is an enemy to that desire – whether taken at gunpoint from
their kibbutz or taken at gunpoint from their village. And, collective punishment is an enemy to
that desire, whether it involves demolishing one home, or one thousand; as too is ethnic
cleansing; as too is occupation; as too is apartheid.

It is my firm belief that in such conflicts, for those of us who are third parties, the side we must
pick is not that of one of the combatants, but that of the people caught in the middle, and that of
the generations yet to come. It is our responsibility to help the warring parties build a better
world. To center human rights, not to hope to sideline or sidestep them through programs of
economic growth or diplomatic maneuvering. And, when they happen, to be able to name gross
violations of human rights no matter who carries them out, and to be able to hold the perpetrators
accountable – when they are adversaries, which is easy, but most particularly, when they are
partners.

I acknowledge and am heartened to see the efforts this Administration has made to temper
Israel’s response, including advocating for the provision of relief supplies, electricity, and water
to Gaza, and for safe passage. In my role in PM, however, my responsibilities lie solidly in the
arms transfer space. And that is why I have resigned from the U.S. Government, and from PM:
because while I can, and have, worked hard to shape better policy making in the security
assistance field, I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing
more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and
contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse, and which I wholeheartedly endorse: a
world built around a rules-based order, a world that advances both equality and equity, and a
world whose arc of history bends towards the promise of liberty, and of justice, for all.
And I would note with concern in parting, as regards competitions well beyond this current
conflict, that if we want a world shaped by what we perceive to be our values, it is only by
conditioning strategic imperatives with moral ones, by holding our partners, and above all by
holding ourselves, to those values, that we will see it.

I want to close by noting that while bureaucracy is not without its automatons, and that, as I have
learnt, physical courage comes easier than moral courage, I have had the privilege of working
with a large number of truly thoughtful, empathetic, courageous, and good civil servants, and
many of them can be found in PM, from its entry level to its most senior level. As they carry on
advancing the interests of the nation and the world in a field in which, perhaps more than any
other, it is easier to be better than it is to be good, I can say without hesitation that they are the
best. I wish them continued success, strength, and courage. And I wish all of us – peace.”

Josh Paul, October 18, 2023.

From:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7120512510645952512/

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Nan’s Quote of the Day:  “It is easier to be better than to be good.” …Josh Paul