What Israel Means

On this day:

1789
Alexander Mackenzie finally completes his journey to the mouth of the great river he hoped would take him to the Pacific, but which turns out to flow into the Arctic Ocean. Later named after him, the Mackenzie is the second-longest river system in North America.
1789
French Revolution: citizens of Paris storm the Bastille.
1790
French Revolution: citizens of Paris celebrate the constitutional monarchy and national reconciliation in the Fête de la Fédération.
1798
The Sedition Act becomes law in the United States making it a federal crime to write, publish, or utter false or malicious statements about the United States government.
1916
Start of the Battle of Delville Wood as an action within the Battle of the Somme, which was to last until 3 September 1916.
1933
Gleichschaltung: in Germany, all political parties are outlawed except the Nazi Party.
1965
The Mariner 4 flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos of another planet.
1969
Football War: After Honduras loses a soccer match against El Salvador, riots break out in Honduras against Salvadoran migrant workers.
2003
To discredit U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had written an article critical of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Washington Post columnist Robert Novak reveals that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame is a CIA “operative”.

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“Given the fuss they tend to make, I wonder if we should mention the Catholics too,” one Mamdani staffer debating the planned July 4th comments.

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Critical Theory is little more than a conspiracist epistemology to rationalize why none of Marx’s predictions panned out and why the revolution didn’t happen the way he promised. It achieves this rationalization by casting all conflicting arguments as a construct to sustain the “oppressors” who allegedly stand in the way of Marxist normative goals for society, and dismissing them accordingly without having to address their substantive challenges or evidence.--magness

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Misiorowski getting scratched from his Sunday start also means he will miss Tuesday's All-Star Game. It is said he has "arm fatigue."

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“The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World,” Trump, as in trumpeting, said in a Truth Social post on Monday.

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Roughly 252 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic extinction event, often called the "Great Dying," wiped out about 96% of marine species and 70% of land animals. Species whose metabolisms were less able to cope with warmer, oxygen-poor water suffered the highest extinction rates.

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Leveraged ETFs are quietly distorting a fragile market.
Roughly $200 billion sits across about 700 leveraged ETF funds. Because these products use derivatives, that $200 billion controls a notional value near $500 billion, with real market exposure about 2.5 times the money invested. Assets Under Management (AUM) runs 13:1 leveraged long versus short: for every $1 wagered on things falling, $13 is wagered on things rising. The exposure is concentrated almost entirely in tech.

TQQQ's $32 billion in AUM amplifies every Nasdaq-100 move 3x, turning a 10% index drop into a 30% single-day loss for holders.

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What Israel Means

For much of the last several centuries, Jews have wandered back, disorganized but hopeful, to Palestine and the land of the Old Testament. As part of the settlement after the first world war the British, still locked in their fading struggle with France, took control of this area called the British Mandate and, in July of 1922, divided Palestine into two administrative sections, east and west, where Jews were allowed only in the west. (The Balfour Declaration in November 2, 1917 to "establish a national home for the Jewish people" was a hope, not a policy.) November 29, 1947 the General Assembly of The United Nations voted 66% to partition western Palestine into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab. (The Arabs rejected it.) Israel became a recognized separate state and Egypt, Iraq, Jordan Syria and Lebanon invaded it, fought a war, and lost. About 600,000 Jews left Arab lands for Israel, 720,000 Arabs left Israel for Arab lands. An armistice was signed in 1949.

In 1966-67 Syria began shelling Israel from parts of the Golan Heights, Egypt expelled the UN peacekeepers from the Israel border and attacked in the "Six Day War' and lost again. When the dust cleared Israel held the Gaza Strip, The Sinai Desert, Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights.

In 1970 a civil war broke out between Arafat and King Hussein in Jordan. Arafat ended up with better control of the West Bank but no control over the rest of Jordan.

In October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt again attacked Israel and lost. To get peace, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt and signed an agreement with Jordan.

What are we to conclude from this history? Debate continues over the Arab handling of Arab refugees, of Hamas and Hezbollah, of bombing schools and strapping bombs to children. But as important as these points are individually, there are some overwhelming truths here. One, Israel was created out of whole cloth; there were people there whom the British displaced to create the state. Britain can claim the land was gained as a spoil of war, but the circumstances are still the same. Two, the Arabs will continue to throw themselves at Israel forever. They are not deterred by defeat, regardless of how humiliating. They will come back. And each time they are better armed and better prepared. Two Arab states have nuclear capability. Three, Israel will, with its last breath, destroy all her enemies. There will be no TKO, with Israel led bleeding to the side to decline in a new Palestine state; Israel, at its end, will take all of its tormentors to hell with her.

This brings us to the fourth point: This nightmare--which could easily blow the industrialized world back to the steam age--is a direct result of political arrogance and stupidity. The political leaders--from the British to the U.N. to the Americans now--have guided this area through one devastating, homicidal period to another without any apparent second thoughts or guilt about the destruction and death they have unleashed or the clear danger to all the world that lies ahead. This homicidal fine-tuning, this murderous goodwill, this apocalyptic optimism is repeated and repeated by administration after administration, state after state, until now we are faced with real Arab power staring back at the West and its feckless leaders while we poor souls wait and wonder how much the dead and wounded will be expanded this time and whether we will be included.

(I wrote this in 2011. It wasn't that I was prescient; it is that nothing has changed except the weaponry.)