Hopeless

The lessons on which my childhood was built ;)

Why?

At least 40 dead in Gaza, medics say, as Israeli tanks pull back from camp

Israeli military strikes killed at least 40 Palestinians overnight and on Friday in the Gaza Strip, many of them in the Nuseirat refugee camp at the centre of the enclave, medics said, after Israeli tanks pulled back from parts of the camp.

But ...

How do we know that this number of Palestinians died? How do we know these Palestinians who did die were civilians? Why do we think Israel is spending time and resources and the lives of their troops just to murder innocent women and children?

Because Israel is evil? Then why does Israel send in aid, why do they help innoculate children, why do they ask people to move out of harms' way?

There is no press in Gaza, and the info the press relies on comes from Hamas-run agencies. Why do they take the word of terrorists?

Citizen Spokeswoman @rachelreserves sets the record straight: Hamas manipulates casualty figures, inflating death counts and falsely identifying terrorists as civilians. It's high time to hold Hamas accountable for starting this war and sacrificing their own people as human… pic.twitter.com/KVTSaU0Ub8

— Israeli Citizen Spox (@IsrCitizenSpox) November 28, 2024

Don McLean

Don McLean singing at the BBC in 1972 his song about the 1959 plane crash deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens ... "the day the music died". I've always thought he was really good at songwriting.

Happy Thanksgiving

We hope you have a compassionate #Thanksvegan 🥧🍂 Let us know what you’re thankful for this year 💕 pic.twitter.com/tnbCEZb55n

— PETA (@peta) November 28, 2024

Why not?

In The Washington Post ...

Opinion: Netanyahu reached a cease-fire with Hezbollah. Why not with Hamas? by Max Boot

Short answer ...

Hezbollah did not invade Israel and rape, torture, muder, and kidnap more than 1000 Israelis, including children and the elderly. And Hezbollah does not still have 101 Israeli hostages in its grip. And Hezbollah will be behind an almost 20 mile buffer zone - the land between Israel and the Litani river.

But maybe more to the point, with the ceasefire with Hezbollah, Israel has guarantees it can go back in and resume the fight in Lebanon if Hezbollah does anything squirrely. But it's probable that once Israel stopped the war in Gaza and left, that the condemnation of the international community would make it almost impossible for Israel to return and resume the fighting.

Project Iceworm

- Camp Century trench construction in 1960

In the news, scientists find an old military base in the Greenland ice ... California scientists accidentally find nuclear fever dream in Arctic snow. The article has some photos too.

Wikipedia has a page on this. It is what was known of as Project Iceworm ...

a top secret United States Army program of the Cold War, which aimed to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. The end goal was to install a vast network of nuclear missile launch sites that could survive a first strike. This was according to documents declassified in 1996. The missiles, which could strike targets within the Soviet Union, were never fielded and necessary consent from the Danish Government to do so was never broached.

To study the feasibility of working under the ice, a highly publicized "cover" project, known as Camp Century, was launched in 1960. Unstable ice conditions within the ice sheet caused the project to be canceled in 1966 ...

This seems both horrifying and kind of cool. I sense a future movie or tv series down the road ;)

If you look on Youtube, you can find a number of videos on Project Iceworm.

Amos Hochstein

The ceasefire is happening. Lawrence O'Donnell speaks with Amos Hochstein, the US Special Envoy who has been negotiating the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon.

From The Times of Israel ...

Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire comes into effect, halting nearly 14 months of fighting

[...] The agreement, which Israel’s national security cabinet approved in a vote of 10 ministers to one on Tuesday night, will reportedly provide for a 60-day transition period, during which the IDF will withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon, while the Lebanese Army will deploy some 5,000 troops south of the Litani river, including at 33 posts along the border with Israel.

Hezbollah forces will leave southern Lebanon, and its military infrastructure will be dismantled. The US has also reportedly provided a side letter specifying Israel’s rights to respond to violations of the ceasefire, should there be any ...

War crimes

From The Washington Post editorial board ...

The International Criminal Court is not the venue to hold Israel to account

The ICC is needed to help resolve war crimes in Russia, Sudan, Myanmar. Targeting Israel makes that harder.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons and waged a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing in his brutal suppression of an uprising that has killed half a million people, many of them civilians. In Myanmar, military dictator Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and his army have been responsible for bombing civilian villages in its war against the long-persecuted Rohingya minority. And in Sudan, a new potential genocide threatens the Darfur region’s Black Masalit people at the hands of Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is known as Hemedti, and his Rapid Support Forces. ...

Ceasefire

The US is saying that a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah is imminent. Hopefully it happens, but will it?

There are reports that Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to a ceasefire. These are my thoughts that I shared during my Daily Briefing livestream this afternoon for @IsrCitizenSpox. Listen on 2x speed and you'll get through it in half the time! pic.twitter.com/hFQcdvXRx9

— Daniel Rubenstein (@paulrubens) November 25, 2024

It's not just Republicans

For those who think that all Democrats are against Israel, that isn't so. The recent ICC decision has caused anger among Democratic lawmakers as well as Republicans ...

- Arrest warrants for Israeli leaders amplify Democratic rupture

[...] Biden issued a brief statement on Thursday hammering the arrest warrants as “outrageous.” And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) delivered a similar rebuke a short time later, calling the ICC’s move “shameful.” ... “I stand with the Biden administration in fundamentally rejecting this unserious decision,” Jeffries said in a statement ...

- Scoop: Congress threatens ICC over Israeli arrest warrants

[...] It's not just Republicans lashing out and warning the ICC that warrants could be met with a legislative response. Staunchly pro-Israel Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) have both criticized the reported warrants, with Torres calling for "strong consequences from both Congress and the President." ...

- Nineteen House Dems call for U.S. sanctions on the International Criminal Court

[...] 19 pro-Israel Democrats signaled in a letter to Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday that there is still bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for sanctioning the international tribunal ... The letter was signed by Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Donald Norcross (D-NJ), Dina Titus (D-NV), Jared Golden (D-ME), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Darren Soto (D-FL), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Susie Lee (D-NV), Debbie Wasserman Schutlz (D-FL), Don Davis (D-NC), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Vicente Gonazalez (D-TX), Juan Vargas (D-CA), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Dean Phillips (D-MN) ...

It does seem, though, like most Democratic lawmakers lean against Israel, and use the idea that Netanyahu is a super conservative as one of their reasons. But I think that's a mischaracterization of Netanyahu, who really stands in the middle between the liberals and the conservatives of his government. He needss to pacify them all to keep his coalition together, but he hasn't given in to many of the conservatives' wishes, like colonizing Gaza or Jews praying on the Temple Mount.

The truth is that most of Israel's decisions about the war have been almost unanimous among both the government and the citizens. And Netanyahu is prime minister, not because he is some conservative tyrant, but because a majority of citizens of that democracy keep voting for him.

The Wall Street Journal

Here's a bit from an article I saw today on the recent ICC decision on the Israel/Hamas war, from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal ...

The ICC’s Assault on Israel—and the U.S.

[...] This is about more than Israel, whose military may have achieved the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in the history of urban warfare. The effect of the ICC warrants is to disarm any Western democracy that is responding to atrocities from terrorists and rogue states. This precedent will be used against the U.S., which, like Israel, never joined the ICC.

The charge of deliberate starvation is absurd. Israel has facilitated the transfer of more than 57,000 aid trucks and 1.1 million tons of aid, even though Hamas’s rampant theft means Israel is provisioning its battlefield enemy, something the law can’t require.

The international Famine Review Committee found on June 30 that famine isn’t occurring in Gaza—Hamas attributes 41 deaths in the entire war to malnutrition—but that elevated risk of famine will persist as long as the war goes on. Especially when the world backs Egypt’s decision not to allow refugees out of Gaza, trapping civilians in the war zone.

Using Palestinian civilians as political weapons is the essence of Hamas’s strategy, which the ICC now vindicates.

ICC warrants

Daniel Rubenstein comments on the ICC warrants

International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

[...] In a statement on Thursday, the Netherlands-based court said it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu bears criminal responsibility for war crimes including “starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” ....

The court on Thursday also issued a warrant for Hamas official Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was one of the masterminds of the October 7 attack. Israel said it killed him in an airstrike in July but Hamas hasn’t confirmed his death ...

This seems to be a result of hatred of Israel. I don't see how else anyone could think Israel is trying to starve all the Palestinians to death ... Israel has been continuously sending in food to Gaza, and though people keep saying famine is "imminent", there still is no actual famine.

If Israel wanted to commit genocide of the Palestinians, they could easily have accimplished that without instead fighting an urban door-to-door battle against the terrorists of Hamas, which has cost Israel almost 1000 of their soldiers' lives.

BTW, nice touch to also release warrants for three of the Hamas leaders who actually started the was ... so convenient that they're all dead. Why didn't the ICC go after the living Hamas leaders who have scuttled off to Turkey from Qatar like roaches whose rock has been overturned?

In the yard

My sister and I were out in the side yard, cleaning out the rain gutters on the garage before the bomb cyclone/atmospheric river strike us here in California ...

From here you can look out at the back yard and see the pop tent under which I keep the backyard cats' food and a couple of chairs for them. Also you can see some of the gray cat condos my nice neighbor made for the cats, to keep them warm and dry in the winter ...

Do something

In the news, a UN resolution for ceasefire on the war, and aid trucks are looted by Gazan civilian gangs, and Netanyahu offers $5 million and safe passage out of Gaza to anyone returning a hostage

I don't think the UN ceasefire resolution will do anything. UNRWA refuses to admit Gazans themselves are keeping aid relief from getting to Gazans, and meanwhile, the US, unlike Netanyahu, seems to have no real plan to get the hostages back, some of whom are Americans.

Biden should throw caution to the wind, as he is now doing with Ukraine, before it is too late. Offer money like Netanyahu. Lean on Turkey, where the families of Hamas leaders, and now the leaders themselves, are holed up. Send in a military team. Do something.

The Pope and genocide

So now the Pope thinks Israel is committing genocide. Does he actially know what "genocide" means? A crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part - UN document

The US has determined (Biden: What's happening in Gaza is not genocide ... US says Israel hasn't breached its law against blocking aid in Gaza) that genocide is not what Israel is doing, and anyone with a brain would know this, as Israel is actually acting to save lives in Gaza by sending in aid, relocating civilians to safe zones, and even helping children be vaccinated against polio ... all during a war, one in which 101 hostages, some of whom are Americans, are still being held.

But what's happening in Israel now? Daniel Rubenstein speaks about UNRWA, the war in the north of Gaza, and Iran.

Amsterdam again

From an opinion piece in The New York Times today by Brett Stephens ...

A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’

If any doubts remained about the motives of the Amsterdam thugs who last week terrorized and assaulted Israeli soccer fans in droves, an investigation in The Wall Street Journal should settle the questions.

It wasn’t merely a reaction to provocative behavior by some of those fans. It wasn’t just overflowing anger over the war in Gaza. It was something altogether darker ....

Which makes it even more remarkable how strenuously some people initially tried to obscure the nature of the Amsterdam pogrom. The media are rarely shy about calling out certain kinds of hate crimes as racist. Yet for days the word “antisemitic” was either put inside quotation marks or attributed to Dutch officials when talking about the violence. The identity of the attackers has been treated as a mystery, or a secret, beyond delicate references to people with “a migration background,” in the words of Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof ...

Bernie on why we lost

Bernie was on Meet the Press today and he really told it like it is for many of the "lower class". I share his opinion that this is how the Democratic party failed to win the election ...

The political autopsy

- my grandpa

After a terrible defeat, political parties often have an "autopsy" to figure out what went wrong ...

More Democrats fear the party’s image isn’t just damaged – it’s broken

Some Democrats are saying the party went to far to the middle or right, with trying to win over disaffected Republicans. Some say Harris didn't try to appeal to working class and lower class voters. Etc, etc, etc.

When I think of what the Democratic party should be, I think of how it was when my grandfather was a Democrat, and what it was like when I was a kid.

Back then, the Republican party was the party of educated wealthy conservatives, business interests, with a touch of nutball (John Birch Society).

But the Democrats were for the working class, unions, the poor, women, racial minorities (civil rights) and religious minorities (Jews, Catholics). It was what they called the New Deal Coalition, and they tried to help people after the Great Depression with programs like the New Deal ...

The New Deal was a series of domestic programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, with the aim of addressing the Great Depression, which began in 1929. Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, and won the election in a landslide over Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected. Roosevelt believed that the depression was caused by inherent market instability, and that massive government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy.

The Democratic party of today has changed a lot. Now we are (also) the ones affiliated with the rich, with Ivy League universities. I assume (hope) Democrats are still trying to help the poor, the elderly, the homeless, but they act as if they are ashamed of doing so, and politicians like Harris leave those groups completely out of their speeches and promises - they don't believe those people vote, and they don't want to estrange the "working middle class".

And the Democratic party has adopted stances that seem extreme to me ... why must every person who wants to liive in America be able to? We have more than 600,000 homeless people here living in terrible conditions who never get a word from Democrats (except Bernie) ... shouldn't we be helping them first?

And why does being a Democrat now mean we would rather side with Middle Eastern terrorists than with Israel?

Oh well, I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand about all this, and of course times have changed. But I just remember that I used to be proud to be a Democrat like my grnadfather. I don't feel that way anymore.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is in the news. I've actually been to Amsterdam but it was long ago, on my family's one trip to Europe in 1976. What I recall ... the houseboats, the Heineken museum, and especially the Rijksmuseum ...

- The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn

But I digress.

People in the press have been noting the history of Amsterdam's mistreatment of Jewish people before and during WWII (Kristallnacht, Anne Frank), and connecting that to this recent attack.

But the attack after the game does not seem to have been by right-wing Dutch people (neo-nazis). The attacks were carried out by pro-Palestinian Middle Eastern immigrants living in Amsterdam. I guess it's not politic to mention that, but it is relevant.

Women and the election

Yes, a rapist is soon to be our president, voted in by a majority of men.

I feel like all that women have been trying to do sicne the dawn of time is to just be seen and treated as people in the same way men are. And we've never gotten there. Maybe we never will.

And men don't have to do all the work of keeping us down. Many women project themselves as meat puppets in order to get ahead in this world ... think of Kim Kardashian, wealthy and famous, whose main "achievement" in life is that she has an unusually huge butt.

I despair.

The news that's fit to print

All the News That's Fit to Print

The press is reporting that the IDF is ordering evacuations from northern Gaza and that civilians will not be allowed to move back to their homes afterward ... The Guardian: Palestinians will not be allowed to return to homes in northern Gaza, says IDF ... CBS: Israel expands offensive in northern Gaza with new ground operation, says civilians won't be allowed back

But that's not true.

The truth is ...

UK’s Guardian appears to muff general’s quote on return of north Gaza civilians

Contrary to a Wednesday report in The Guardian, the commander of the IDF’s 162nd Division did not say that Palestinian civilians will be prevented from returning to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip and that no humanitarian aid will be delivered there.

The British newspaper appears to have mistakenly taken a somewhat inaccurate paraphrase of comments by division commander Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen from a report in Israel’s Kan public broadcaster, presenting it as a direct quote from the general ...

I offer this as an example of the predjudice against Israel which seems to inform most of the European and American press. They have a belief about Israel and the war, and appear more open to stories that will support that opinion. That isn't "news". The press is supposed to be impartial.