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Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetative matter that missed the cut for bouquets, or were too late to the hospital?

Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners.

Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it.

There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so the men could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder.

It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids.

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Dave Neiwert at Orcinus specializes in domestic US terrorism, and the lack of a firm definition in this country as to who is a terrorist.

This CNN story talks about William Krar and reports that he had collected an arsenal:
“A raid in April found nearly two pounds of a cyanide compound and other chemicals that could create enough poisonous gas to kill everyone inside a space as large as a big-chain bookstore or a small-town civic center.

Authorities also discovered nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, machine guns, silencers and remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases, plus pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons, and anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-government books. ”

He was arrested and afforded all of the protections of the American criminal justice system.

Jose Padilla, a Muslim, was arrested at an airport and only a protracted legal battle has enabled him to receive some constitutional protections. He is reportedly suspected of planning to build a “dirty bomb”, in spite of the fact that he lacked the knowledge and materials to do so, and there is no physical evidence of any crime. An American citizen, he was declared an “enemy combatant” and held without charges by the military. Even the Cato Institute protested his treatment.

The US is not unique in its selective identification of terrorist.

The CBC tells us that Israeli ministers threatened by Jewish extremists. “Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer read a threatening letter to the cabinet. Had it been written by an Arab, the writer would have been jailed, he said.”

And TV New Zealand tells us of right-wing extremists who attempted an attack on Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a wedding.

“Rightists regularly heckled and threatened politicians in the days leading up to the 1995 assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish ultra-nationalist opposed to his peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians.”

For some reason it doesn’t make any difference what you do, it is your ethnicity and/or religion that would seem to determine if you are a “terrorist”.

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