Freaked out my cat tonight by trying on my Halloween costume.

She (the cat) was ok when I put on the satiny white nightgown, with ragged, gauzy white pieces hanging from the sleeves.

It's when I tried out the face makeup that she crawled under a table and peaked out at me nervously. I had sprayed my face (eyes closed) with shimmery white colored hairspray and surrounded my eyes with dark charcoal eye shadow. The final straw for kitty was when I draped white cheesecloth over my head and shoulders to match the gauzy, ragged pieces hanging from the sleeves. Kitty ran and kept backing away from me when I tried to get near her so that she could see that it was still me.

I guess she got "spooked" seeing me as a spook.

Shooting - Buffalo NPR just interrupted programming to announce

that shots were fired on the I-190 near an exit to the Peace Bridge that connects NY with Ontario, Canada.

Two persons known to have been shot.

https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/crime/police-respond-to-incident-on-i-190s/71-7f13e644-bf29-47cf-a104-3a9db8a9f552

EDIT TO ADD: One person dead, 2 others in the hospital in serious condition. Several shots fired at their car. They are all Sewer Authority employees who were in an official car.

https://www.wivb.com/news/local-news/buffalo/police-activity-shuts-down-large-stretch-of-i-190-sb/

Does anyone here remember a Yahoo political message board about the 2000 election?

It was called the Y2K Election message board, or the Yahoo Election 2000 board. It began as reader comments at the end of a Yahoo article about the fiasco in Florida.

Initially there were hundreds of readers commenting on it with dozens of threads. Eventually the numbers dwindled down to several regulars from all political stripes who continued discussing and arguing the issues.

When the election was finally decided by SCOTUS and Bush was inaugurated, we expected that the board would be closed down, but it wasn't. It continued into the 2012 election before Yahoo finally disbanded it.

I only remember a few of the handles used on that board. They were dunndat, bushvgore, soopadoopa, and northcoast citizen (NCC). We were dedicated political junkies, so I thought that some of the lefties from that board would have found their way here to DU.

Any former Y2K Election posters here on DU?

NYC tonight - dueling protests, separated by a police line

Pro Palestinian protesters and pro Israel protesters face off in Washington Square Park in NYC, near NYU.

2 hours ago. CBS

Peaceful so far but very vocal. Palestinian group was largest initially, but Jewish group is growing.

Cats and pianos

Description of the Hamas attack from a survivor.

This is from the half hour long NYT radio program called The Daily. My local NPR station carries it. The link is an audio, no video, but it is worth listening to. The survivor tells how people in the kibbutz texted each other during the attack on where the attackers were and how to escape.

A sad irony is that victims were advocates for peace and humanitarian concern for Palestinians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/podcasts/the-daily/israel-hamas-kibbutz.html

Some old music that seems right for these times.

She sings this for everyone. There is a lead in before she begins singing, which blends in well with the song when it starts.

Israel's apparent goals in fighting Hamas.

This is how the Israeli goals and actions appear to be shaping up, from what I've heard in BBC and NPR interviews with Israeli officials (including one IDF officer), and various ME experts on the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts.

The Israeli shut off of power in Gaza is a bargaining chip for the hostages and a threat of what will happen indefinitely if the hostages are harmed or if Hamas carries out its threat to start killing them.

The bombing is clearing a way for ground troops to go into Gaza, retrieve hostages, and capture or kill Hamas terrorists. Israel does not want to get the hostages back through hostage bargaining. They have done that in the past and it obviously emboldened Hamas to commit more attacks for more hostages.

Several posters have said that their concern for Palestinian children and other civilians does not mean that they condone the terrorist attacks on Israel. The other side of that is that people who support Israel going after Hamas does not mean a desire to see innocent people in Gaza harmed or killed.

Inevitably, Gaza civilians will be harmed in the war that Hamas started against Israel with the attacks last weekend.

I've been thinking about WWII when thousands of civilians lost homes or their lives or were permanently maimed when the Allies invaded Europe to defeat the Nazis. British and American planes bombed facilities in Germany. German civilians (including women and children) in or near the targets were killed and had their homes and businesses destroyed. Stores and hospitals ran out of supplies or got destroyed due to proximity to the bomb targets. Starving, homeless German civilians roamed the streets searching for food or garbage to live on. They sought shelter in the remains of bombed out buildings. They had nowhere to go for treatment of injuries, or had no medicine even if they found a hospital or doctor. The shelling of Germany was brutal because Germans would not give up.

Right to the very end, the German soldiers and even civilians tried to fight off the Allies from behind makeshift barriers as the Allied armies reached Berlin. In the death camps, the SS rushed the killing process to complete as many exterminations as possible before the Allies reached them. When they could not kill off enough people fast enough, they marched them on foot to other locations, causing several to die because they were too weak. In other cases, they put weak and emaciated camp prisoners on trains to ship them out of the camps, then blew up the camps and tried to cover up what had been happening there.

Allies sped up their attacks and brutal onslaught in order to defeat Germany with no negotiations. FDR had declared "Unconditional surrender" was required of Germany, Italy, and occupied countries.

Thousands of civilians in France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, died from allied bombings and ground fighting. Some of them were people who opposed the Nazis and had looked forward to the Allied invasion.

Then there was Japan and the deaths of millions of civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Should the Allies not have invaded Europe in order to avoid killing civilians? Should they not have bombed Germany? Should we have chosen military targets in Japan instead of 2 cities of civilians? (IMO, yes, we should have targeted the Japanese military, not civilian cities.)

When you retaliate against a brutal and ruthlessly cruel enemy, the strength and power you need to use will injure and kill innocent people. It will leave innocent people homeless and without food, water, and medical help. That's why war is a terrible thing.

But when a ruthlessly cruel enemy attacks you, you cannot sit back and do nothing.

Whew! Still some honest people in the world.

Got home from grocery shopping today and realized that I'd left my purse in the store grocery cart, in the parking lot, when I loaded my groceries to go home.

I keep my keys in one back pocket of my jeans and my bank card and driver's license in the other pocket. But there were things in the purse that I did not want to have to replace - papers, inhaler, cosmetics, etc. Plus a $50 Amazon gift card.

Called the store and had to describe the purse and give my name. Yes, they had it. So, back across town and to the suburban store.

Everything was intact, including the gift card and my change purse, which only had $8.50 in it.

Whoever turned it in saved me the loss of the gift card and cost and hassle of replacing items . Good to know that there are still people like that around.

False belief that FBI has officially declared MAGAs a domestic terrorist group.

There is a false belief going around DU that the FBI has officially declared MAGAs to be a domestic terrorism group. This belief is based on claims in RW publications like Newsweek. This RW talking point supports claims by Donald Trump and his MAGA followers that DOJ and the Biden administration are weaponizing DOJ and the courts for political attacks on the right.

Do a Google search for the claim that there is an official designation of MAGAs as a domestic terrorism group. You will NOT find any such official declaration because it does not exist. But you will find RW publications like Newsweek and RW websites making this claim.

The FBI and other LE and security organizations do investigate acts of domestic terrorism, along with threats of it and conspiracies to carry it out. That is their job. Most domestic terrorism threats today do come from the right, from such groups as neo Nazis, RW militias, various White supremacy organizations, and anti government groups. But the FBI and LE have had those types of groups under surveillance since BEFORE Trumpism and MAGAs. Those groups now align themselves politically with MAGA Republicans, but they are NOT being investigated or charged for being MAGA Republicans. They are targets of the FBI for their criminal behavior against fellow Americans and attacks on infrastructure.

When we support the false claim that DOJ is officially targeting MAGAs for being MAGAs, we feed right into Trump's narrative that he is a victim of political attacks by BIDEN and DOJ.