Wishing Ukraine Well

What Ukraine has been suffering under the attack on its people by Putin, a mass murderer, is unconscianal.  Can it survive?  I fervently hope so.  It was just going about the business of its people, despite Russia having taken Crimea from it and Russia infiltrating Ukraine's shore on the east with  Russian paid guerillas known as the Wagner Group.  Putin knows that the nations of the world all know this.  He just doesn't care.  He knows that de-nazification and his faigned fear of NATO are known to all observers as lies.  Indeed, he has a history of assaulting neighboring countries.

What Putin may not have guessed is the fight the Ukrainian people would put up against his supposed super power.  The Russians have only one thing left in their arsenal of weapons directed at this hapless country, and that is air power.  Here all freedom loving countries must help the brave Ukarinians.  Give them jet planes, and whatever else they may need to show the Russians they can not continue to perpetrate this crime.  

What are the Russians going to do?  Start a war with the West?  Drop an atom bomb?  There comes a time when you've got to call a killer's bluff.

Chris Rock vs Will Smith

 Okay, so on this one, I'm in the minority.  I support Will Smith and his slap of Chris Rock.

Will Smith did assault Chris Rock.  For that, he should apologize.  Oh, he already did?  Well what else should we require of him?  Punishment?  Let's examine the harm done.

The physical assault was a slap that didn't even muss Rock's makeup.  Did anyone mention the public humiliation of Chris Rock?  I hope so.  Humiliation is what this is all about. And, humiliation is what Chris Rock deserved.

In the first instance, it was Chris Rock who did the humiliating.  Trying to be funny about another actor's wife's ailment is off limits, or certainly should be.  You say, that humiliating people is one of a comedian's shticks.  Wasn'[ that what Buddy Hackett was all about?

But Buddy Hackett's shtick was different.  It focused on the person to whom he was speaking, or to someone in the audience.  People in his audience had a pretty good idea of what to expect. Chris Rock's poor excuse for humor was focused on someone who was there for the Oscars; not for Chris Rock. Chis Rock's humor, or for what some think passes for humor, was hurtful to a person who didn't come to hear Chris Rock.  She came to attend the presentation of Oscars.

I was never fan of Buddy Hackett.  But, people knew his shtick and a great many loved it.  Chis Rock, however, was just being an ass.  A comedians as big as Chris Rock should give some thought as to what they're doing.  Going off half cocked is for amateurs.

Islam, The Religion

 I know a bit about Christianity.  I also know a bit about Judaism.  Islam has me stumped.

The historical record is confusing.  Greek polytheism in bygone ages attracted some portion of Hebraic youth. The were attracted to Greek scientific ideas and they enjoyed Greek athletic games. The Romans borrowed heavily from Greek theology.  But they were more militaristic, and far more were brutal.  Under the Greeks you could take it or leave it.  Under the Romans, you had to acknowledge your subservient status.  That's where the Jews got into trouble.

The Christians were an offshoot of the Jews.  Jesus Christ was a Jew.  He was a particular type of a Jew.  He was a Pharisaic Jew, which distinguished him from the Sadducees. With the Sadducees, the worship of God was obeying his commandments and offering sacrifices.  The sacrifices were given at the Temple in Jerusalem,  It was run by the Kohanim, the priestly class.  You could offer bags of grain or or a pidgin or a lamb.  What you gave was a function of how rich you were.

However, when the Babylonians conquered the Jews, many of the leading Jews were exiled to Babylonia. There they had no temple.  However, the rabbis decided that Jews could offer up to God their prayers.  After about 40 years, Cyrus conquered the Babylonians and released the Jews from their exile.  They were free to return to Israel. 

Many of the returning Jews concluded that if prayer was a suitable form of worship in Babylonia, it was equally suitable in Israel.  Needless to say, there was considerable strife between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  The destruction of the temple by the Romans ended the Pharisees.  From that time on, Judaism was carried forth by the Pharisees.  Indeed, Jesus was a Pharisee; a Jew in conflict with the Sadducees.  

After the death of Jesus, at the hands of Pontus Pilat, the teachings of Jesus were spread by his disciples.  Their message didn't have a great impact on Jews.  They were, however, received with some favor by the non-Jews in Greece and Turkey.  The disciples found it necessary to drop a number of Jewish practices, such as circumcision and the prohibition against eating pork. So as not to offend the Romans, the disciples presented the cruel Pontus Pilot as an unassuming Roman Governor.

Early Christians were persecuted as heretics by the Romans.  However, when the Roman empire came under relentless attack by various gothic tribes from the north, Emperor Constantine decided to make peace with the Christians who were found throughout Turkey and who had multiplied by converting the people around them.  Constantine worshiped the sun god until the time of his approaching death. He then  converted to Christianity.  However, some years earlier, Constantine assembled various religious leaders in the city of Nicea.  All Christians, he decided,  had to subscribe to one Christian faith.  The creed they authored was the Nicene Creed.  It remains to this day the statement subscribed to by all Chistian denominations.

Let's now turn to the Muslims.  Most know about the Quran, the book dictated to Mohammad by the angel Gabriel, and committed to writing by Mohammad's wife.  There are two other books arguably as important; namely, the Hadith and the Sunna.   Some observations:  Mohammad was not born until many generations after Jesus.  How then could he designate the first Jew, Abraham, as the first of the Islamic prophets?  How could he view Jesus as another Islamic prophet?  How could he claim the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem as an Islamic site, when it was built by Jews, for Jews?

To be honest there is little consistency in any of the western faiths and probably within any of the various religious faith.  The only thing that has been observed is the historic propensity of the various faiths to fight one another.  The struggles between the Protestants and the Catholic have been bloody.  An equal level of enmity can be found between the Shia Muslims and the Sunni Muslims.  And, both faiths have been atrocious towards the Jews, the people who started it all.  The treatment of Druze and Bahai hasn't been much better.

Many, if not most of this religious strife has ebbed.  But how do we distinguish between the secular Muslim and the Sharia committed Muslim? 

The Darkness Ahead

 The book that is Ukraine lays out for us the pitch black darkness ahead.  

Chapter 1

What happens in Europe does not stay in Europe.  China also reads this book.  And they begin to  realize that they can move us further to the forthcoming disaster.  Their book will be titled Taiwan.  Nations whose people choose democracy will, it now becomes clear, be overthrown in favor of tyrants.

America, much as it may wish, can not isolate itself within its borders.  The Atlantic and the Pacific no longer serve as protective borders. The development of ICBMs should have taught us that lesson long ago.         Ukraine now adds a lesson.  It  teaches us that one tyrant with nuclear weapons can defeat all democracies.  And why should anyone think that this evil will end with Ukraine?  Imagine if Hitler had had the atom bomb.  His rockets were not quite as good as today's, but they were able to  reach London.

This book has a preface.  It is Chechnya.  But no one could read it.  It was written in a dark place; a place lacking light and television coverage.  And, did anyone notice Belorussia?

Chapter 2

People suffer when their leaders are inept.  Obama drew a red line in Syria.  It was washed away in the first rain.  Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan made it clear to tyrants that they had nothing to fear from our country.  They saw how little it cost them to shove out Americans when the cost of remaining there would have been less than the cost of withdrawing.  

Most decisions have a positive side and a negative side.  We now face climate change.  To reduce carbon emissions is a good thing.  The downside is that wind and solar panels, while they put us on the right path, are not nearly adequate to meet the nation's energy needs.  If you cut off carbon emissions too soon, our citizens will suffer.

And to reduce our output of gas and oil, when confronting a despot who has plenty of oil to sell to a world deficient in energy is lunacy.   Biden's failure to support a gas line from Israeli waters to Italy via Cyprus and Greece is beyond comprehension.

Chapter 3

Iranian supply of energy and their ongoing development of an atom bomb leaves democracies with few options in the face of Islamic aggression.  And it leaves Israel with no options.  Iran is hell bent to destroy Israel and they have made no secret of their intentions.  The solution is to destroy Iran's atomic development.  It would have been easier early on.  But late in the game though it is, it must be done.

So why hasn't it been done already.  Answer: America's disapproval.  It's size and economy make the U.S. a power.  Then too it has atomic bombs.

Democratic nations need to have a big brother.  For Europe, as well as democracies elsewhere, America has served in that role.  And it hasn't been an easy role.  First, until the Russian's destruction of Ukraine, most European nations believed Russia to be benign.  They now see their error and are trying to catch up.  But for Ukraine, it seems too late.

When today's tyrant seeks to take over a democratic state, he weaves together a tale of lies.  In the case of Russia, they declared that Ukraine was a military threat to Russia.  That most observers found this ludicrous didn't keep Russia from spouting this nonsense. To this lie, they added another; namely, that Ukraine was fascist state run by Nazis.

In the middle east, sharia-bent Muslims spouted their own set of lies.  The first lie, in a long list of lies, is that Israel's population of Jews is not indigenous whereas the Palestinians are indigenous.  In truth, both groups came largely as immigrants.  Around 1880, the total population of the area known as Palestine - and that includes Jordan, which did not exist before it was created by Great Britain - had a population no larger than today's city of Tel Aviv.  Only a few Arab, tenant farmers could be found scattered here and there.  And the Jews, for the most part, were situated in and around Jerusalem.  It was not until European bigotry and Hitler's madness took hold that Jews sought to immigrate to Palestine in growing numbers.  As Jews drained swamps and began building a country, the place began to be viable for raising a family.  The Arabs took note and also began to immigrate. The  British however, under pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood, waved the Arabs in while keeping the Jews out.

Other lies followed.  One held that the Jews sought to destroy Arab homes when it was the Arabs who built munition stores and warehoused weapons under hospitals, schools and along side Arab homes.  The Arabs tried to sell Israel to the world as a racist state that practiced apartheid. When it was Israel that has a population that is roughly 16 % Arab and where Arabs have risen to positions of judges, and members of the Knesset. 

 It is the Arabs, who proudly proclaim that no Jew will ever live in an Arab Palestine.

America forced Arafat onto the State of Israel.  America now seeks to make a nation out of Fatah and position it alongside Israel.  Iran is not Arab.  It is Persian.  But it is a sharia Islamist state that hangs gays.  This is what the U.S. wants to bring into polite society.  In the end Israel can rely only on itself if it wishes to survive.