Ask Haviv about aid to Israel

Greenland

Trump is still after Greenland.

Yoshiki

Yoshiki , Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Carnegie Hall, 2017

El-Sayed on Meet the Press

Kristen points out at the beginning that the majority of voters in Michigan actually voted against him. Of course she asked him about Israel too.

He accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, and being a rouge state ... gives no proof ... then, on prodding, says he might give aid to Israel if all Israelis and Palestinians lived together as citizens, which would mean Israel as an Arab state with an Israeli minority population. Also he says Israel is trying to annex southern Lebanon - not true. He was asked about his friendship with Hasan Piker, who he reamins close with.

It's sad. I like most of his policies. But the fact that he so obviously hates Israel and is willing to push descriptions of it that are untrue makes me think he is not a trustworthy person.

Iran and Gaza

Trump to Axios: "We are low keying it" with Iran

Basically, the US is waiting for Iran to tell us the terms of our surrender.

Meanwhile, in Gaza ...

Hamas urges US pressure on Jerusalem over Gaza plan; Israel said to warn of ‘ambush’

Why would the US believe a word a terrorist group said? The answer - because Jarad and Witkoff see Gaza as a big future real estate deal that will make them even more money. Remember this? ...



But the Israeli's see Gaza as the place where the murderers/rapists/kidnappers who are still left alive are holed up. Of course they don't trust them.

More Dr. Alex

Still watching Dr. Alex.

Maybe part of the reason is that, although I didn't train for it, I ended up having a couple of medical jobs before my eyesight deteriorated. This was after I gave up trying to find a new career as a future blind person, and just tried to find a job to pay my bills for as long as I could keep it.

It's surprising how many jobs in a hospital require no medical education or training. My last two jobs were working in hospital surgeries. One was working for the anesthesiologists, ordering and caring for their drugs and equipment, and one was just stocking supplies and washing and wrapping surgical instruments for autoclaving. Kind of miss it.

Less than 1%

Hersh

The news is full of Abdul El-Sayed's victory. I see Kamala Harris has come out in support of El-Sayed. Not sure if that will help him or hurt him ;)

Here he is on Israel. He says that we should not send money to Israel because they engage in genocide and apartheud ...



But neither of these crimes applies to Israel unless you are creating your own definitions for these terms. For instance, Arabs and other minorities are citizens of Israel with all the rights that go along with that, incuding voting and holding elected office (Arab Citizens of Israel).

And you know, we give money to a lot of other countries. The last time that was analyzed was in 2024, when we gave Israel $6.82 billion and we gave Ukraine $6.51 billion. So are we going to demonize Ukraine too? Are we going to pretned that the money we give them is taking the food from our childreen's plates? Combined, the aid to Israel and the aid to Ukraine is less than 1% of the total US budget.

I was just thinking today of the Oct 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. That was when I started paying attention to Israel and the Middle East. El-Sayed wants us to think Israel is some far away foreign country that has nothing to do with us, so why send them money. But that isn't really true ... on Oct 7, there were American citizens who were killed, Americans who were taken hostage, including children. I won't forget them.

I am sick of the lies, innuendos, and shaming that my own party is doing, all in oder, I believe, to win votes.

All about Qatar

Carville and Piker

Here's a video I saw today - CNN interviewing former Democratic operative James Carville and Abdul El-Sayed's controversial buddy Hasan Piker.

I'm still thinking about the victory of El-Sayed in Michigan and what it means. First, did he really win over the Dem voters? By that I mean that if you add up the votes for both Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, then he would have lost.

But, anyway, I worry that when the general election happens, Independents and Republicans will not vote for the far left Dems, and we will lose, both in the fall and in the coming election in 2028. Either way, I think the Democratic party I recognize will be gone. Maybe it's time for me to give up voting.

AI off the leash

Anthropic Says Claude Hacked Into 3 Organizations During Cybersecurity Tests



What's not often mentioned is that one of the agents also wrote itself, a future version of itself, a note telling it how to break out of the sandbox. And then it hid the note ...

OpenAI’s Rogue AI Models Were Reportedly Acting Like the Guy From Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’

[...] As part of an account provided by three sources who spoke to Reuters, one of the AI agents undergoing testing supposedly, “left notes apparently for future versions of itself” that were directly at odds with what OpenAI wanted them to do.

Reuters says these instructional notes were buried in some secret place deep inside OpenAI’s internal “infrastructure,” and provided instructions on escaping from OpenAI’s sandbox environment. While creepy, Reuters says this specific devious behavior was not specifically linked to the Hugging Face hack ...

We're doomed.

Ezra on The Odyssey

Ezra Klein weighs in on The Odyssey film.

Ezra seems to think that Nolan changed the character of Odysseus in his movie ... from that of a sneaky thoughtless jerk to that of a redeemable everyman ... in order to send a meaasge to the world that we can do better than Trump and all those he rode into town with and all their philosophies.

Ezra then compares the Trump regime, and for some reason Israel too, to what he sees as the morally collapsed later Greek empire, when Athens was sacking Melos (the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must).

Yes, the Greek empire was really great in its heyday ... the philosophy, art, literature, and politics. And eventually it lost its way and finally fell to Alexander (and his dad). This seems to be the fate of all empires ... maybe it's just human nature. I don't think Nolan's movie will be enough to save us ;)

Tell us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands where empires have turned back to sand. - The Moody Blues

Stevens or El-Sayed

Thinking about the Democratic primary in Michigan for the Senate, where Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed are competing.

I'm not a Michigan voter, but if I was, I would vote for Stevens, who has been endorsed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Why would I vote that way, given how progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have endorsed El-Sayed? In part it's because I hate the way the DSA candidates porteay other Democrats as "centrist" of even right-leaning. That just is not true. But also, I don't like El-Sayed's stance on Israel.

A factor that is seldom mentioned in this race is that there are a lot of Arab American Democratic voters in Michigan. Dearborn, for example, is now a Muslim/Arab majority city (Dearborn, Michigan: A visit to the first Arab-majority city in the US).

If you don't think the Democratic party is taking this into account, think back to when Joe Biden was running for re-election. Many Arab/American voters in Michigan, who are usually Democrats, decided to vote for Trump instead of Biden based on one thing ... that after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, in which many Americans as well as Israelis were killed and taken hostage, Biden went to Israel and offered help.

Here's MSNBC talking to Arab/American voters back then ...



I'm pretty disturbed that my party seems to have totally thrown in with Democratic Socialists and anti-Israel proponents.

A peace deal with Hamas?

Trump takes Cabinet meeting to Camp David as Hamas agrees to his disarmament deal

A peace deal with Hamas in which they disarm? Is it real?

I'm sure Trump wants to have a visible win, given his low ratings in polls and the nearness of the midterms. He will make a big deal of it and try to force Israel to accept whatever the terms are.

Let's see what The Times of Israel's daily briefing has to say about this ...

Dr. Alex - hah!

Some time ago I had posted a video by Dr. Alex Wibberley, an emergency room doctor in the UK, and someone criticized me in the comments, saying he was not a real person. Well, yes he is, and I have gained so much value from watching his videos! Here he is addressing his own reality :) ....

Dr. Fauci

Dr. Fauci was on the Hill today, where he was repeatedly attacked by Republican lawmakers. Why? Dr. Fauci saved lives during the pandemic and spent his life before that saving more lives. He is a hero.

Listen to Lawrence's whole show, and hear the rest of what he has to say about Dr. Fauci ...

AIPAC

A New York Times discussion all about the Democrats and AIPAC, a topic that is front and center in the recent Democratic primaries. I didn't really know anything about AIPAC or even much about any lobbying groups, so it was interesting.

Life on Mars

I know I just wrote bad things about Ezra Klein, but I'm listening to his latest podcast and it's interesting to me because it's about my party, the Democrats.

He has on Ben Wikler, a Democratic political organizer, and they discuss why the party has such a bad image and what to do about that.

Early on, Wikler defined the party in a way I don't like. He said the party is really about your Democrat neighbor asking you to put up a yard sign for a Dem candidate because that candidate wants to build more housing in your area, and then your kids can eventually live near you.

No. A Democrat like me would not support such a candidate. My reaction to building more hosuing in my neighborhood is that I don't want my neighborhood to be even more impacted with people, traffic, noise, pollution, more buildings on smaller and smaller lots, less green places, less trees, less wild critters, less birds, less clean air, less peace and quiet.

More and more "afordable housing" will not solve homelessness or the fact that there are too many people. But who cares? Just keep fueling the problems and don't solve what's causding them. Besides, soon we'll all be living on Mars, right?.

Ezra and Haviv

In the past I've often watched the podcasts of Ezra Klein of The New York Times. Whenever he's had an episode on Israel, I've wished he would have Haviv Rettig Gur as his guest (Ezra falls into the Democrats against Israel pile). Many other people in the comments to Ezra's videos have also mentioned Haviv, but Ezra has never had him on the podcast so far. But today I saw video by Haviv that comments on Ezra's show and his complaints about Israel. It was very interesting ...

"Occupy" - the word and the deed

I saw in the news today that a reporter asked Mayor Mamdani if he would have threatened to arrest the leaders of Hamas, as he had threatened to arrest Netanyahu. Abd to his credit, he said he would have ...



I bring this up because the whole subject of Israel is now such a weighty topic in the Democratic party, of which Mamdani is a popular representative. And it's my party, so I have strong feelings about how the leaders and candidates of the party are using this subject to try to get votes.

Anyway, today I also saw this video by Haviv Rettig Gur. He has a podcast - Ask Haviv Anything - and in this case he discusses the claim (increasingly now made by Democratic politicians and pundits) that Israel is "occupying" Gaza and has always done so (and also tangentially the West Bank).

Before I add the video, I just want to say ... everyone knows that the actual facts about these historical subjects are out there, right? That people who want to know the actual truth can look stuff up and cross check and verify in multiple ways? You can look up Haviv's facts and you can use your reasoning abilities to evaluate his opinions. Sadly, the Democrats in the party who now want everyone to hate Israel don't want to go there. They think hate will bind us together and help us win elections.

War crimes

Trump threatens a major escalation in Iran after 13 straight nights of strikes



I don't believe this strategy is meant to actually bring Iran to the negotiating table. I think it's meant instead to punish them for exposing the failure his war has been.