Heroes and zeros

Several thousand New York City convenience stores are owned by Lebanese Americans, and they have had enough of the demonizing of Ilhan Omar.  She may represent only the Minnesota fifth, but she has become a hero to millions for standing up to the increasingly violent and vicious attacks of the white nationalists and their bully-boy Trump.  The store owners say they will no longer sell the New York Post after it conflated Omar with the 9/11 criminals in a particularly loathsome cover story.  Expect their boycott to be denounced as an attack on press freedom and yet another example of Islamic terrorism (though most Lebanese are Christian).  Since many of the city's newsstands are also operated by Arab-Americans, the Australian pornographer may soon be reduced to delivering his nasty paper on a bicycle.  Meanwhile, Rep. Omar has received enough death threats that Speaker Pelosi had to arrange security for her.   Thus stands democracy in the third year of the Russian occupation.

What would you save if your house was on fire?  Somebody thought the most precious object in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris (still burning at this hour) was the "Crown of Thorns," a piece of gimcrack that some illiterate Crusader bought from a wily Jerusalem merchant in the thirteenth century or thereabouts.  It looks like the fragment of the True Cross was not so accessible, or the plank from Noah's Ark or whatever other bits and bobs the faithful venerate.  Really, the rubbish in Catholic churches...well, I can see what Luther was going on about even as I grieve for the old pile.  I've never been closer to Notre Dame than the Laughton movie, but it's part of us if we consider ourselves at all civilized.  The roof, the spire, the rose windows, gone.  Of course, the French themselves trashed it in 1789 for liberte, egalite and if memory serves fraternite, even beheading the statues of kings, so the place is pretty resilient.  That the fire coincided with the run-up to Easter has resulted in endless patter about hope and resurrection, not to mention dark mutterings about conspiracy, false flags and al-Qaeda.  Trump is desperate to distract from the promised Thursday release of the heavily expurgated Mueller report, and the continued non-release of his tax returns, but would he go this far?  You may very well think so; I couldn't possibly comment.

If ever there was a day to tweet some version of "thoughts and prayers" and then leave it alone, this was it, but when you're a Stable Genius With a Very Good Brain, the impulse to offer advice is overwhelming.  Fox News must have covered the story because its Number One Fan soon urged the Paris firefighters to work faster and to put out the flames by bombing the cathedral with tons of water from a tanker plane.  The fire chief felt he had to pause in his job and point out that this would pretty much flatten the place.   He did not add, "And if I owned a building where a resident died because I was too cheap to install sprinklers, I would shut the fuck up," but others did.

Stable was full of helpfulness today.  He's got a handle on Boeing's problem with the 737 Max, which has been grounded even in this country after more than three hundred people died in Indonesia and Ethiopia:  Rebrand it and add tons of great features, like maybe something to prevent all the crashing.  "No product has suffered like this one," he thumbed, homing in on the real tragedy, the depression of Boeing's stock price.  "But again, what the hell do I know?"  Finally the right question.