Happy Memorial Day:
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Sometimes you can't repay people for an act of kindness, loyalty, charity, sacrifice, or courage, but you can try -- sometimes life is in the effort...

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"He did not understand the war --

"He understood the blistering injustice of it; the stroke-like fear in the faraway sight of the raped as they blamed him for not being there; the accusing eyes of the children that leered from atop distended bellies even as they starved; the seeping lines of grief lacerated into the faces of fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives who had lost all they loved; the tortured and the maimed becoming in part or in whole separate from who they once were; and the Dali-draped carcasses of the dead…

"The evil of the war bored into his heart, twisted with agony until he learned to ignore it --
"Until he could ignore it no longer."   - from The Invisible War aka The Forgotten War, a short story by Kevin O'Kendley
 
  
"He’d seen a lot of death in his life but it hadn’t inured him to the pain of it, the tragedy, the loss, the suffering.  On the contrary, it had a cumulative effect: on darker days this effect swamped him in a Tsunami of emotion, after all the smaller waves passed, a big one threatened.  He would watch it nearing shore with a rising dread…"  - from Chandler's Bar, a novel by Kevin O'Kendley



​Please give to The Paralyzed Veterans of America: VA Palo Alto Health Care System/
3801 Miranda Avenue/ Palo Alto, California  94304/ 650-858-3936/ And: 
The Wounded Warrior Project: National Processing Center/ P.O. Box 75840/ Topeka, Kansas  66675/ 877-832-6997

Today is Peace Officers Memorial Day in the United States:

                                          A Good Cop Makes The Job Noble
                                        or Good Cops Make The Job Noble.

(edited 10/4) 
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​​Please give to the Police Protective Fund:  P.O. Box 1084/ Schenectady, New York  12301/ 877-343-2477
                                

A Semite:  "From modern Latin Semita, via late Latin from Greek Sem 'Shem", son of Noah in the Bible, from whom these peoples were traditionally supposed to be descended."
   - Google
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“The term came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians, and Aramaean tribes. Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa, have all been proposed as possible sites for the prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples, but no location has been definitively established.
"By 2500 BCE Semitic-speaking peoples had become widely dispersed throughout western Asia. In Phoenicia they became seafarers. In Mesopotamia they blended with the civilization of Sumer. The Hebrews settled with other Semitic-speaking peoples in Palestine.”   - Encyclopedia Britannica

There were 2.2 billion Christians (32% of the world's population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%), 400 million people (6%)
that practice African, Chinese, and other folk religions, approximately 58 million people (less than 1%) that belong to other religions (Baha'i, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca, and Zoroastrianism, etc.), and 14 million Jews (0.2%) on the planet in 2010.   - Pew Research Center/ edited 5-19