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Pope Leo XIV appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. Vatican Media.

Three major religions – A trifecta of good and bad trouble for Earth 
“Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters, terrible but somehow inevitable beyond anyone’s control,” is the opening sentence in Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article “A Time to Kill.” 

At the present time we have two major wars and a dozen minor ones supporting Gopnik’s point dominating the news. The wars between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Palestine, and the possibility of a major one between India and Pakistan, and other “small” wars too numerous to mention have been caused by major religions – Christian, Jew, Muslim – and may end because of religion. 

These wars have been led by leaders classified as war criminals subject to Geneva Conventions and a host of international laws. Just to mention a few since World War II: Putin, Arafat, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, Netanyahu, Kissinger, Ho Chi Minh, Nixon, Hamas leaders and Trump.

The Roman Catholic Church has caused more wars only because it has been around for the last 2,000 years. Now it has a new pope, Leo XIV, who emphasized war in his first major address. He is against it. He called for a peace conference to end Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a ceasefire in Gaza to stop Jews and Arabs from killing each other, and urged a truce between the Hindus of India and the Islamists of Pakistan. 

He repeated words used by Pope Francis: “I, too, address the world’s great powers by repeating the ever-present call, ‘never again war’.”

There were saints and sinners 
among the 266 popes
In 236 A.D. the conclave was having difficulty finding a good candidate. A devout farmer came to the conclave to vote for a pope and a dove flew through a window and landed on his shoulder. The other voters thought it was a message from God and elected him pope immediately! That was Pope Fabian. 
In the early days popes were elected before and after street brawls, bloody riots, beheadings and bribes. One pope was so disliked he was sentenced to clean out horse stables instead of ruling the church in Europe. 

The first papal assassination took place in 882 A.D. when Pope John VIII was clubbed and poisoned. Close to a dozen popes were assassinated in the next 300 years, some by strangling. ‘Twas rumored that a woman called Pope Joan disguised as a man dominated the church for 25 months. Was this the first transgendered pope?

After Pope Callistus II died in 1124, two of the wealthiest families in Rome went to war over getting one of their own elected. In 1268 it took three years to name a pope. In 2025, it took about 48 hours. 

In 1274, a friar was named pope in one hour with one vote. In 1309 the conclave was moved back to Rome from France and the cardinals faced a mob of 20,000 Romans with this demand: “Give us a Roman pope or your heads will be as red as your hats!”  

They quickly named an Italian bureaucrat to the job and left town. Pope Urban VI went violent and was mentally disturbed so the cardinals elected Pope Clement VII to replace him. But Urban wouldn’t quit, so the church had two popes for a time. 

In 1605 the cardinals had a brawl over two candidates which featured broken bones and lots of fisticuffs. These incidents covered about a couple dozen popes. If you wish further entertainment, research the lives of the 266 popes. There were way more sinners than saints, so it is a fascinating task.

 Senator Sanders: “Civilized people do not starve children to death!”
That old socialist from Vermont, the Pied Piper of the world’s young people because he always tells the truth without trimming or covering with sweet icing, described another holocaust happening in Gaza by war criminals. Directly, on the floor of the Divided States of America Senate, because other members don’t seem to want to talk about it, he spent an hour describing the war: 

“Today marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks Israel has blocked all supplies, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel (such actions are violations of international law). Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities.” 

Sanders pointed out that the U.S. nonprofit World Central Kitchen trucks loaded with supplies are waiting to enter Gaza in Egypt and Jordan.

Sanders also calls Bibi Netanyahu a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court for the war crimes committed in Gaza and Israel: “There is no ambiguity here. Netanyahu’s extremist government talks openly about using humanitarian aid as a weapon. Israel’s policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.” 

For almost a decade I have been writing that Bernie Sanders had a young brain and Joe Biden had an old brain. The new book Original Sin about Biden’s decline proves my contention. As young people prefer the democratic socialism of Sweden and Denmark over the disaster capitalism of the U.S. and Great Britain, they would have gone to the ballot boxes in tsunami waves to elect Bernie Sanders president of the United States in the last presidential election. 

Remember: Almost 90 million eligible voters did not vote in 2024, most of them below age 50.

Once a victim of one, now Israel and the Jews are committing a holocaust
The April 28 issue of The New Yorker has an article written by Dr. Clayton Dalton, a member of Doctors Without Borders, who signed up to work in a Gaza hospital. Not only did he work in Gaza hospitals, he wrote about how Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu and his ultra-government is committing war crimes by the dozen to counter the war crimes committed by Hamas by the dozen on October 7, 2023. 

Here is part of his article: “Israel has now dropped more explosives on Gaza than fell on London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during World War II. The World Health Organization has reported that more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed. Hospitals have not been spared, and most are no longer functional. More than a thousand health care workers have been killed during 654 strikes on hospitals and other medical facilities. Many bombed hospitals and clinics have received more than 1,000 victims in a day. They frequently run out of supplies and fuel for generators used to power facilities. Soldiers have been filmed firing on ambulances. 

In one hospital staffed by Dr. Dalton, Israeli soldiers in one large storage room fired one bullet each into dozens of blood pressure monitors, EKG machines, cardiac monitors, generators,and all electronic medical equipment. Gaza’s health facilities have been systematically dismantled. 

Besides the doctors and other medical workers, 169 media workers from around the world have been killed in attacks. Many entire neighborhoods have been turned to rubble and the smell of death is everywhere there is rubble, indicating that the current death count is low – and probably will never be established until the mountains of rubble are removed and replaced with Trump resorts and casinos. Many areas within Gaza are covered with hundreds of improvised shelters made of sheet metal, car doors, carpets and tarps erected among concrete slabs and floors.

  Dr. Dalton described one day in Nasser Hospital where he worked. After a bombing and air raid, 221 Palestinians were brought to emergency rooms. After a quick examination 92 were declared dead. The rooms were filled with kids dying on the floor, bleeding, screaming and crying. Several children had serious head wounds from shrapnel but the hospital had no neurosurgeons.

When will this holocaust end? The Jews and Muslims have had almost 80 years, a lifetime, to make a deal about a two-state solution – or a long-standing cease fire. Our presidents have been battling over the Jewish vote for at least a half century, thus burning up millions of gallons of jet fuel to gain Jewish support – and piss off the Palestinians. 

I blame both parties for this holocaust. Just when a deal was about to be made, the Palestinians would kill a soldier, child or politician and the Israelis would hurry up and start building houses on lands considered to be Palestinian. 

Netanyahu got to be an expert timer, constantly blowing up the two-state solution with hammers, joists and rafters. 

I finally said: “A plague on both your houses.”  But then I think about our own civil war which is in its 166th year with no lasting solution yet.

How did Germany rehab from Adolph Hitler to Angela Merkel? 
At its absolute peak, the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi) in Germany had eight million registered members, only one-tenth of the citizens. The victorious Allies had quickly agreed to cleanse the officialdom of Germany, the people who actually run the cities, towns and provinces of a country. They also agreed they would have to use Germans to destroy the Nazi Party – a tough assignment. 

But those with experience were all ex-Nazis. How do you make a socialist or a democrat out of a fascist (Hopefully, we’ll be able to do that in the near future)? 

Germany was split in two parts because East Germany was filled with communists while West Germany had the most fascists. In that fascism had failed to win the war, it was not too difficult to convince Nazis to take another fork in the road. To make a long tough path shorter, I will quote Frank Trentmann who wrote Out of the Darkness: The Germans/1942-2022: “And despite this enormous task and difficult past, The Germans were remarkably successful at disentangling themselves from their hateful past. Over the course of 80 years Germany has gone through a remarkable moral and material regeneration. The Federal Republic is the most successful attempt at democracy in German history. Today Germany stands as an exemplar of the virtues of parliamentary democracy and is a pillar of the European Union.”

After the war many Germans faced starvation, epidemics and homelessness. In July 1946, the average German man in his 20s weighed 130 pounds. By February 1948, he weighed 114 pounds. After all of the pictures of the death camps were distributed around the world, the Third Reich was exposed as a criminal state. The murder of six million European Jews led the list of hundreds of German sins.   

One German has always been in my mind. Adolf Eichmann escaped to Argentina after the war. He was the Nazi who kept the trains running to Auschwitz and Buchenwald on time. He was one of the 200,000 Germans involved in the Holocaust. He was finally caught, convicted and was hanged. 

Trump’s right hand Nazi Stephen Miller reminds me of him. Miller is keeping the planes flying to the terrible prisons of El Salvador on time.