From what I have read, this war keeps dragging on because Israel can’t agree on what to do after the fighting stops. Hamas obviously hasn’t been destroyed and Israel either can’t or won’t do what is needed to destroy them, yet they don’t want to agree to a cease fire either.

“But from the perspective of a coherent story in a coherent world, ignoring the success in terms of sales, it was cobbled together without a plan, and it shows. It wasn’t until maybe order of the phoenix that she had a plan for how the story would end, and she had to do a lot of hand waving to make it happen.”

“But she wasn’t a good writer. She was mid tier at best. So the eventual success of the series got beyond her abilities. While the last book was much better overall than the first few, it still relied on shoddy world building”

Excellent explanation. The first HP book is excellent. It really sucks you in. After book 4, the quality declines and they become slogs to get through.

This simplest explanation is that JKR isn’t a very good writer. She came up with an idea “I’ll give hard working and ambitious Hermione a time travel device so that she can take more classes in the same amount of time” without thinking deeply about the implications of allowing time travel to exist in the universe of Harry Potter.

House Elves were one of the things that made me realize that JK Rowling was something of a hack. I found it odd that Hermione was the first person in the wizarding world to ever point out that House Elves were slaves and were being treated very badly. In the thousands of years that wizards and wizard schools had existed, no one ever protested the treatment of House Elves? Not even the ‘Good Guys’? Everyone just accepted this over the centuries??

And then she does almost nothing with this potential plot point…

I like the cut of your jib, good sir (or madam).

Does he “claw” the towel? By this I mean he reaches up to the towel and stretches, resting his front paws on the towel, then flexes his claws so that the catch into the fabric of the towel. Then, when he is done stretching, because his claws are embedded into the towel, pulls the towel down?

Both look pretty good to me. I’ll start with whichever you prefer. :-)

What political opponents have been killed? Of any political stripe??