Intelligence

I'm trying to understand what I just saw on television.

Apparently Israeli intelligence had the battle plan (in detail) of the Hamas attack about a year in advance. And the suits were warned when the opening stages of the attack went into motion. But Israeli intelligence leadership dismissed all that. 

The political leadership likely knew about the plan. Yet, according to The NY Times, Netanyahu moved his military away from the Hamas attack site and sent them to the West Bank instead. 

The result was an unchecked, catastrophic onslaught of torture, rape and murder. 1200 defenseless civilians killed one at a time by Hamas. 

The failure needs investigation now.

And Israel needs new leadership.  

Free Will

So why do humans believe in free will? 

The main reason might be that free will is part of the foundation of the universal human survival system. Darwinian stuff. Remove  a belief in free will and society won't function. If Putin doesn't have free will, he is not responsible for his war. 

A belief in free will might be an example of what Wittgenstein called a foundational certainty.  By "certainty" he meant something no one doubts. People may say they doubt the reality of free will, but no one actually walks that walk. 

Foundational assumptions shape our thinking. They are basic to our interpretations. They structure how we evaluate reality claims.    

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Killing Strangers

A recent poll showed that young Americans tend to support Palestinians in the Hamas-Israel butchery, middle-aged  people mostly support Israel and the Silent Generation (those born from 1928 to 1945) condemn war.

My wife and I belong to the Silent Generation, which means little except that we're old. I'm thinking that maybe if you live long enough, you lose the drive to kill strangers. It begins to seem wrong. 

Rachel and Chris

Tonight MSNBC let us know that Rachel and Chris will be doing a podcast or something together. At last! 

The sparks are going to fly. What most of us hope for is that the encounter can be converted into a series of books ghost-written by staff, explaining America to us, maybe ten best-selling books, each analyzing the book that preceded it. What was the Boston Tea Party really about? What happened to the Mohicans? And how did psychology get started!

I look forward to Chris and Rachel guesting on each other's network shows to explain why seriously informed folk should read more. And then joint appearances on CSPAN, Kimmel, Colbert, You Tube and so on. Get the answers. 

Stay tuned. I'll be right back.

Command Centers

The rules of war say that you can flatten a hospital if the enemy has hidden a command center under it. The Israeli military has bombed a number of hospitals, killing helpless patients and medical personnel. Netanyahu claims that they found tunnels and command centers beneath the hospitals. The American government backs his claims. But the press has not found command centers or tunnels. If there are no command centers, then the attacks on the hospitals are war crimes. 

What if we are being lied to?

Some experts say that Hamas does not have command centers. As a terrorist organization without tanks, bombers or submarines, Hamas may consider a cell phone an adequate HQ.

I hope that Hamas fails off a cliff. But I also remember my government flat-out lying us into wars in Vietnam and Iraq. 

Are we being lied to by Joe Biden? If so, will that impact the next election?  

Joshua Fit the Battle

Below is the definition of genocide by the UN. We hear a lot about genocides these days. Good to know what the word (about 80 years old) means.

__________________________

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 

1. Killing members of the group; 
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Ms. Darcy

I knew it would be a unique experience, going to see our granddaughter perform in her high school production of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. 

I expected to suffer. The tiny folding chairs, elbow to elbow, leg cramps familiar to those in their eighties, etc. But our granddaughter played two quite different character parts, stealing the show. 

The play opened with many young actors milling on stage. I'm not sure why. I couldn't tell which one was Elizabeth (protagonist) or her counterpart, Mr. Darcy. 

One oddly prominent character seemed to be Mr. Darcy's sister, dressed in heels and a long black skirt. In earlier versions I'd seen, Darcy's sister had played a minor role, but in this version things seemed to revolve around her.  

Then, about a third of the way through the play, my wife whispered that the sister might actually be Darcy himself. It turned out that Darcy was a woman and Elizabeth was a lesbian.

We had gone to the play with a young lesbian couple. They'd been watching a little glumly, but now they broke into broad smiles. 

Backstage, my granddaughter told me later, some of the cast got into a big fight, and Darcy began to cry. In the scene where Darcy asks Elizabeth for her hand in marriage and gets rejected, Darcy took it harder than usual and stumbled out of the room weeping. 

Not long after that, Elizabeth was asked to play the piano to amuse a rich woman. With remarkable foresight, she pounded out Beethoven's ODE TO JOY, which he had written only 15 years after Jane Austen's death. 

Which goes to show that there is always a new way to look at things. 

Courthouse Square

Yesterday, at Courthouse Square, I joined about a hundred people standing in light rain. My object was to protest against the Hamas-Israeli war and in favor of a path to peace. 

The protest, I read later, was controlled by the North Coast Coalition for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. They held the microphone. No one else spoke.

I'd attended to protest against the killing of civilians, not to support one side in a war. 

I found several protestors who believed that if a soldier of Hamas cut up a living baby in front of its Israeli parents, that wasn't terrorism; it was patriotism. 

The sole speaker called for a cease fire and, at the same time, an attack to drive Israel into the sea. And so on. This was not a peace rally.

Keep in mind that Israeli bombings had killed more than 3,000 children in three weeks. War crimes.  

MLK told us that violence against children (or anyone) corrupts you. If you witness evil, speak against it. What would he say about the Hamas murders and the IDF bombings? 

When I got home, I watched, on TV, a man attempting to find a path to peace, Sec. of State Blinken. That is his job. He met with a series of corrupt regional leaders no one trusts, looking for solutions. Meanwhile America is not committed to peace. Biden is losing support.

I am 88. This morning I woke thinking about my mother, who died 40 years ago, lost in the war we call life itself. I believe she was disappointed in how her country was behaving. 

The Peace Movement

Tomorrow, if weather allows, I will go to Courthouse Square to join the demonstration against the Hamas--Israel War. 

I am not pacifist. I believe in selfdefense. I did my hitch in the army. But I am anti-war.

I've been demonstrating against wars of aggression for about 60 years. I've demonstrated a thousand times. This is the first time I've felt uneasy about demonstrating. 

At Courthouse Square will I find groups seeking vengeance?  Instead of peace? 

Six to One

 Where the Code of Hammurabi and Leviticus restricted retaliation to one eye for one eye and a tooth for a tooth, Netanyahu has so far required six eyes for an eye and six teeth for a tooth. That ratio will be climbing to seven to one, eight to one and so on in the next weeks.