A Rabbi’s Thoughts From Israel: The Disgusting Irony of the Current Crisis: J Street.: (in part) “Our work is to never, ever, lose sight of that humanity. To remember always that everything that we talk about or read about or watch on the news is really happening to real people and that those people should not be suffering.”
“Remember what Benito Mussolini said,
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
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Don’t you think there is entirely too much discussion in the followup of the Supreme Court’s obscene debacle concerning Hobby Lobby? Me too but it does suggest that there is a lot of meat in what SCOTUS shyly refers to as a limited ruling. The thing that has me shaking my head, however, isn’t the crassness or stupidity of the court or the hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby, but rather the regular folks that are defending and supporting this expansion of corporate power as if it was going to make their lives better. It isn’t. But just like everything Obama does being reviled, no matter how good for the country it might be, so too do the duped Americans who must support anything their distant masters tell them to. So don’t look behind the curtain and one day you’ll wake up and wonder where your Democracy has gone.
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Did you know that John Boehner is considering suing the president?
Why? Because the president is trying to use his powers to act on immigration reform, which Mr. Speaker Boehner refuses to do.
I hardly need to remind you that the president has executive powers (he is, after all, the head of the executive branch), and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly rule that he has the power to enforce the law of the land.
The game of politics can be played in many ways. Sometimes only one player knows how to play, and sometimes a player gets outplayed.
The president is sending a clear message to Speaker Boehner. He is daring Boehner to sue him, because by threatening a lawsuit, the Speaker has opened the door to the entire discussion about why Congress doesn’t get anything done. More importantly, the focus is shifting towards the matter of who is responsible for the lack of legislative action in Congress.
Boehner’s lawsuit has the potential to change the 2014 election. Republicans thought that they were going to be able to run on the idea that President Obama is a tyrant whose power must be checked, but the threat of the lawsuit has caused millions of voters who might have been content to sleep through 2014 to wake up and pay attention.
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If he isn’t careful, the lawsuit against Obama could end up being one of Boehner’s last major acts as Speaker.
I’m not in Boehner’s district. I don’t get to vote for him. But if you are in his district you should consider, while voting, whether Boehner’s losing play is a big part of the game. I hope he get’s “Cantored,” as Patty Murray called it.
Many people consider Friday the Thirteenth an unlucky date. I don’t even need a citation for that. You know it’s true. But you do know why many people consider Friday the Thirteenth to be unlucky? An internet search could tell you the same thing that I will summarize for you. My source is Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Whether the book got some historical guesses wrong, which they now claim, the history of Friday the Thirteenth is very real and not guess work.
Many of you have heard of The Knights Templar, thanks to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and other recent readings.
The Knights Templar came into existence in the 12th Century, at best guess. Certainly they existed by the early 12th Century, because they were being written about between 1175 and 1185, and had already been around for a guess of fifty years. According to Guillaume de Tyre – the first chronicler of the The Knights Templar – the Order of the Poor Knights and the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1118.
The stated role of the Poor Knights was to keep the roads safe for pilgrims. King Baudouin I of Jerusalem (yes, there was a king of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, and a titular king for centuries) like this idea. He liked this idea enough to give the Poor Knights an entire wing of the royal palace.
The Knights proceeded well through history, returned to Europe, and, in 1139 received a Papal Bull stating that The Templar would owe no secular or ecclesiastical order allegiance; their only allegiance was to the pope.
Like all who come to power – even corporations (and the Templars become a corporation and founded some of the Wests’ most advanced ideas for the time, such as checks for money, and encrypted notes) – The Knights Templars rose through history with great acclaim, welcomed, indeed begged for, in royal courts . The Knights Templar became fabulously wealthy (each joining knight was required to forfeit his land to the common cause). Along the way they met enemies.
“By 1306 Philip IV of France – Philip le Bel – was actually anxious to rid his territory of the Templars. They were arrogant and unruly. They were efficient and highly trained, a professional military force much stronger and better organized than any he himself could have mustered….Philip had no control over the order. He owed it money.” He wanted the wealth of the Templars.
Philip had to get the pope to cooperate, to who, in theory, the Templars owed allegiance. “Between 1303 and 1305 the French king and his ministered engineered the kidnapping and death of one pope (Boniface VIII) and quite possibly the murder by poison of another (Benedict XI).” Clement V came to the papacy with the help of Philip le Bel.
“Philip planned his moves carefully. A list of charges was compiled, partly from the king’s spies who had infiltrated the order, partly from the voluntary confession of an alleged renegade Templar” Philip “issued sealed and secret orders to be opened everywhere simultaneously and implemented at once.”
“At dawn on Friday the Thirteenth, 1307, all Templars in France were to be seized and placed under arrest by the king’s men.”
Philip somewhat succeeded, but he never found the Templars great wealth. I encourage you to read the rest as you ponder whether Friday the Thirteenth is really an unlucky day for you, or just another date to note in the history books.
Problems are never solved by recrimination and finger pointing. An educator writing about education reminds of us this fundamental fact of life and – maybe I say it – politics. They, the problems, “are solved through hard work and honest compromise. All of us: parents and teachers, unions and politicians, administrators and business owners, have failed our students who are continuing to fail themselves. It is time to quit playing the blame game, because it is a game where everyone loses.” This does not only apply to education.
To say that politics doesn’t contain finger pointing would be a massive understatement and an untruth. That doesn’t make pointing fingers a cure-all, it makes it an easy and temporary ‘cure’ which solves nothing except kicking the can down the road.
Guns and Weapons
Fast and Furious is a complicated subject to say the least. As Forbes reports:
By 2009 the Sinaloa drug cartel out of Mexico had made Phoenix its gun supermarket and recruited young Americans as its designated shoppers. Dave Voth, of the ATF and his agents began investigating a group of buyers, some not even old enough to buy beer, whose members were putting down as much as $20,000 in cash to purchase up to 20 semiautomatics at a time, and then delivering the weapons to others.
On Dec. 14, 2010, in a remote stretch of Peck Canyon, Ariz., Mexican bandits attacked an elite U.S. Border Patrol unit and killed an agent named Brian Terry. The attackers fled, leaving behind two semiautomatic rifles. A trace of the guns’ serial numbers revealed that the weapons had been purchased 11 months earlier at a Phoenix-area gun store by a Fast and Furious suspect.
Ten weeks later, an ATF agent named John Dodson, whom Voth had supervised, made startling allegations on the CBS Evening News. He charged that his supervisors had intentionally allowed American firearms to be trafficked—a tactic known as “walking guns”—to Mexican drug cartels. Dodson claimed that supervisors repeatedly ordered him not to seize weapons because they wanted to track the guns into the hands of criminal ringleaders. The program showed internal e-mails from Voth, which purportedly revealed agents locked in a dispute over the deadly strategy.
Conservatives pummeled the Obama administration, and especially Holder, for more than a year. “Who authorized this program that was so felony stupid that it got people killed?” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, demanded to know in a hearing in June 2011. He has charged the Justice Department, which oversees the ATF, with having “blood on their hands.” Issa and more than 100 other Republican members of Congress demanded Holder’s resignation over this incident.
As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that “the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again.”
Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
A six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
“Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa’s committee.
Here’s the long conclusion about the subject, and it’s a quote from Forbes. ” How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election.” The article was published in the end of June, 2012, just as campaign season started.
This itself is just one incident involving guns which gets the media and therefore the politicians mighty excited. If Fast and Furious was the only gun issue that has massive effects on national politics it would be more memorable and more important. Instead it’s just part of the story.
As said earlier in relation to education “it is time to quit playing the blame game, because it is a game where everyone loses.”
Then there are other issues involving guns and weapons, such as Cliven Bundy, who sounds like he belongs on a TV show, though not a terrible reputable one. Frankly, when the issue first started I was confused about what was happening, or, indeed, whether it was happening at all, because my source was something far from what I would consider mainstream news. The issue is not over, it’s quite fresh, and it seems to be starting again – or continuing. It’s both complicated and simple. Clive – is it Clive or Cliven? Who names their son Cliven? – has said he doesn’t recognize the existence of the federal government, and he will continue using the government land to graze his livestock. The government started taking his livestock as payment for money owed for grazing fees at which point militia – that is, armed people looking for a fight with the government – started to show up in support of Cliven.
At this point the Bundy issue became very simple. Should the government fight wingnuts?
As this article is being written – which is taking much longer than desired – more shootings, indeed more mass shooting have occurred. I need hardly mention Elliot Rodger, and you might recognize his name as the person who killed seven and wounded thirteen more in Isla Vista last month. It would be nice to be able to ask him why – beyond his written declaration – he was led to do such as a thing, but he is one of those who died – indeed, he killed himself – in this shooting.
There are so many shootings that some pass by hardly noticed. A shooting in Las Vegas in which five people died is beginning to catch the attention of the news. It was not depression, or the realization that life is hard, that caused this shooting. It was, however, like so many homicides and mass shooting, it was anger and disgruntlement at something. The something, in this case was the government. The unnamed killer, a woman, along with her husband (or significant other) shot a policeman at point-blank range and another officer moments later, then went to Wal-Mart and killed another stranger; then she killed her significant other finally herself.
Five dead seems hardly newsworthy these days; it happens so often that it hits the twenty-four hour news cycle and moves on, but in this case it might gain attention. The woman and her accomplice had been inspired by Cliven Bundy and came west to follow his ideology of being anti-government (which, of course, includes police).
The Second Amendment, often cited by people as the document that allows them to carry guns in all sorts of places (depending on what state you’re in) says “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; of abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (emphasis mine).”
Which comes first, the First Amendment or the Second Amendment? The right to redress grievances or the right to use Arms?
Drugs and Violence
Events such as Fast and Furious (see above) have shown that drugs are an international issue and problem, and lead to violence (and to the political repercussions of such violence).
There are some organizations that keep track of death caused by drugs, particularly legally prescribed drugs. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has written a damning article for many or all of the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years. Most of those shootings, perhaps all of them, where done by a person prescribed legal drugs for mental problems, such as depression.
There’s no doubt that people are violent, and, unfortunately for any hope of world peace or the arrival of the messiah, will continue to be violent. Altering peoples’ brain chemistry may lead to violence or docility. Both are contrary to what we should be. It’s time to stop blaming without reason and to start showing some empathy and to provide some method in which people who are depressed, feel threatened, angry, or belong in a mental facility (there are such people), in which these people are cared for and cared about.
D-Day, this longest day, has always been portrayed as I see it as a slaughterhouse, with innumerable, unprecedented casualties. So many of us have stories of D-Day told by survivors and by wanna-be-there’s. The fact is, if you look at more information and less propaganda, D-Day was just another day at war.
There are many anniversaries today, and days so close to today that we would consider them today. June 6, 1944, of course will live in fame as the day of the largest amphibious assault in history. 15o years ago today (and a few days before), on June 3, 1864, America lost as many men as were lost by the Allied forces taking a beach in Normandy. On June 3, 1864, Grant and Lee, stumbling and pushing their way through the Wilderness of Virginia met at Cold Harbor, which was a faster slaughter than against German-held beaches. On , June 3, 1864, at Cold Harbor the Union and Confederate forces combined lost about 8,500 men – and 7,000 of those were Union. And how many did the Allies lose in Normandy? Perhaps 10,000 a little more; a few thousand of which are American.
Why did the Allies lose so few men on D-Day? By war standards, 10,000, or even the possible re-estimated 12,000 men is a battle, but not a slaughterhouse. The following references and facts come from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Germany had been expecting an invasion for months, and there had been hundreds of report of the possibility of one coming since April. However, the time (and date) of the invasion was unknown, and Allied planes prevented the Germans from general reconnaissance which might tell them where the Allies were coming.
Were the Allies coming near Pas-de-Calais, where the Channel was narrowest? Rundstedt and Rommel thought so. Forces were increased in this area. Hitler, however, thought the invasion would be in Normandy. (Why did he think so? It’s unknown. Hitler had a great intuition, even after he’d lost his hypnotic powers). Hitler, then – Supreme Commander that he was – told his generals to watch Normandy. General Friedrich Dollman, commander of the Seventh Army, in Normandy, ordered a relaxation of the standing alert on June 6, and gathered his generals to look at maps, in Rennes, about 125 miles away. Most of the German forces were still north, between Le Havre and Dunkirk, and were encouraged by Ally maneuvers to do this.
I don’t need to remind you that the Allies landed on June 6. At 1 a.m General Dollmann, commander at Normandy, realized what was happening. American and British airborne division landed in the midst of the German army. At 1:30 the general alarm was sounded. Forty-five minutes later the chief of staff of the Seventh Army got on the phone to Rommel’s headquarters say it looked like a “large-scale operation.” General Spiedal, at Rommel’s headquarters didn’t believe it; General Rundstedt was in similar disbelief. Even when after dawn the news reached Rundstedt that a huge force was disembarking did the Commander of Chief in the West believe it.
Spiedel telephoned Rommel at 6 a.m.; in the meantime Spiedel, Rundsedt, and others had telephoned headquarters, which was at Berchtesgaden (it moved around occasionally). Everyone was waiting on orders. Hitler had issued an idiotic order than no general could act with permission, not even to deploy Panzer divisions. And Hitler? When he heard of invasion her chose to wait for more information, and could not be reached until 3 p.m.
The invasion had been going on for twelve hours, and the Germans had not been given an order to fight, or to deploy units.
Twelve thousand men in a single day is a large loss for any army. Many things saved the Allies and ensured an Allied victory; one was the determination of drafted men to march into fire of the enemy, another was Hitler.
If you’re thinking of getting a climate change … well, better see if your partner is okay with that. Because they’re probably more likely to let you have an abortion than a climate change.
“Love Thy Palestinian Neighbor:” A Bar Mitzvah Dvar Torah by Elijah David Gold. I have a habit of quoting from sources and writing long critiques of subjects. In this case, I can’t do it. Just read the link, which is an incredible Bar Mizvah speech. I wish I had been so good as to be Gold.
On the wall in France in a site of the deportation of nearly 200,000 (mostly) Jews it is written (translated and recalled from memory): “we can forgive but we must never forget.” On Yom HaShoah it is time to remember and it is time to forgive and it is a time to work for peace.
The full name of the day commemorating the victims of the Holocaust is “Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah”— in Hebrew literally translated as the “Day of (remembrance of) the Holocaust and the Heroism.” It is marked on the 27th day in the month of Nisan — a week after the end of the Passover holiday and a week before Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers). It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
For all those who struggle for freedom today – those who come to mind first are the Palestinians who are irreparably oppressed by the state of Israel – let this day be one of remembrance and of forgiveness and of peace.
I have been remiss in writing here. There are several reasons, all of which which, individually, make sense for the lack of writing, but together, maybe or may not make sense for the lack of writing.
Which reason is the primary reason? Which reason is the reason I have stopped writing? Not only have I stopped publishing here, but I do not write for myself either. Is it because the strokes I suffered last year, which, as I have written in “The MELAS Game,” affected my writing ability to a large degree? Is it because I began to fear, perhaps with reason and perhaps without, that the NSA was and is reading my writing, and that the government is watching my writing and profiling me? Is it because I feel (and I do feel this way) that I have written about a diverse amount of topics here, and have said what needs to be said?
I have thought of all of these reasons as reasons to stop writing. They are all ‘true’ in the sense that I have thought of them, or that they happened, or that I have perceived that they happened (I have no proof that the NSA passes judgment on my writing, but I am not persuaded that they don’t).
One of the tenants of political science research is “trust in government.” Do you trust your government? I’m a Democrat and I like the idea of government and government regulation. Progressive though I am, I am conservative in the way of Oakeshott: I like things the way they are and I resist change. I don’t like the advent of technological spying, which has pervaded government agencies. There are a host of other things I don’t like about government, and I will not list them here for the exact reason that I do not want to write about them in fear that I am being watched. Do I trust my government?
This fear is precisely what the government wants. Even liberal democracies want to suppress peoples’ voices and want the populace to fear the power of government. In some sense the government has succeeded, even over me.
In other senses, I can not take back who I am or who I have developed into as a person. I have written things both in favor and against what government does, and, being published, that writing can be found and cannot easily be retracted. Therefore my fear of what I’ve written is mute, and what I’ve written stands for what I am and, in large part, what I believe – certainly what I believe what was important to note at the time. I do feel in some way that I’ve written in this extensive writing what comprises my weltanschauuung, or world view. It is therefore correct to say, at least in some sense (and does not dictate the future) that I have not written because I feel that the writing I have written comprises what I have to say.
For personal reasons related to my ability to write, and, even as I write this months after the fact (of a left temporal stroke) I feel that my typing and especially my speech is still awry, I have not written.
For these three reasons, and perhaps a plethora of more reasons, I have not written and have not published any writing that would reflect my world view.
The Dole Blog 