The scandal of the International Criminal Court---be something better

 

The action by the international criminal court is in a very real way on behalf of the people of the world. All people are responsible for the humanity of our species though it has been our history to defer exertion of our individual responsibility to others, namely governments. When the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the leaders of Hamas it was at least a symbolic cry or protest for human beings on earth, most of whom have no government control.  

 

There comes a time when the greater good of all of people on the planet rises above those of the individual views of how to conduct warfare, be that nations or the war leaders. The greater human need surpasses those of nations, tribes, individual sovereignty, or rank of brutish leaders. 

 

There also comes a time when as human beings we cannot simply watch barbarism and not feel the need to intervene. In this case prosecutor Karim Khan is acting on our behalf and in the cause of human decency. 

Warfare itself is an aberration of humankind. It is failure. It is a breakdown in diplomacy. It is humankind reverting to barbarism, abandoning higher reasoning. What has transpired since October 7 has been horrific. There is without doubt thousands of years of history of Jews being abused; pogroms, persecution, attempts to exterminate and a seemingly endless discrimination. It is inevitable that would lodge in cultural memory and the collective consciousness of a Jewish state. However, the way the Netanyahu government has conducted the war has been criminal. His actions and policies have taken a nation state, created as a response to the holocaust, to becoming perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Even Israeli citizens and world leaders have urged him to use more restraint and better judgement. There should be discussion about Netanyahu’s motivation. The request for arrest warrants by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is not an anti-Semitic act. It is a strike against barbarism conducted by a state that itself has been the victim of barbaric inhumanity. It is also against a terrorist organization that has no legitimacy in the world of civilized people and who seeded this evil. 

 

Netanyahu, defense minister Yoav Gallant, Hamas Leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh have behaved in ways that are counter to humankind. The Hamas leaders are cowards, manipulators of Palestinian people, and blood thirsty murderers. There was nothing noble in their orders. There was nothing in their actions that would/or could help the oppression of Palestinian people.

 

The politics of the International Criminal Court, The International Court of Justice another international tribunal, the United Nations, the treaty of the Rome Statue and individual national support or not, may dampen the righteous justice being sought, but now it’s out there and someone has said it. Netanyahu is a war criminal and the prosecutor has evidence that he says will not erode in court. Same for the Hamas terrorist leaders.

 

Those of us of an age to have seen what may be “the futility of all endeavor,” over many decades come the understanding of the lines from the Hebrew Koheleth, translated into Greek as Ecclesiastes: “Because in much wisdom there is much grief and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.”

 

Despite how modern we become, we live like primitive brutes beating each other with stones and clubs.  Now we have “national security interests” and the right to “self-defense” but in the end it is all intellectual lather to justify our failure to advance in how we live with each other. We still fight over land, money, resources, flags, dogma, doctrine and even our God or Gods or gods. 

 

Associates and friends will say here I go being an idealist again. Well to achieve this age and retain the vision of idealism is, I think, a star on my chart. In now more than 50 years of watching our behavior from alley ways to board rooms and capitols of government and slums, and battlefields and zones of conflict, and great cathedrals, and waddle huts I’ve also learned to be pragmatic, and understand that we are a conflicted creature and our own enemy in reaching the gold rings to which we aspire. We may desire to reach the summit, though we’ll beat up each other to get there. But with push, admonition, sacrifice, prayer and diligence we have made incremental steps in becoming more like humans and less like the brutish louts from which we have advanced. The action of the International Criminal Court, as criticized as it will be, is one of those nudges that tries to push to be something better.  

 

   See you down the trail. 

 

This is not 1968...

 

The spring flurry on American campuses has caused some to say it’s like 1968. It is not!

 

As someone who was on the ground as a reporter in 1968 please understand that while  some of the visuals are similar, what is playing out this spring is far different.

 

The protest movement of 1968 was focused on a singular objective, to raise hell mobilize public opinion and force a change of policy on the war in Viet Nam. 1968 was punctuated though by assassinations which fevered the frenzy of the national delirium. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were accelerant to a nation on fire.

 

The intellect of 2024 is vastly different than 1968. There are multiple “causes” and even aberrant reasoning behind the current occupations, forced entry of buildings and festival like eruptions on campuses this week. Some, there is no way to measure how many of the participants are sadly misguided and even ignorant to facts. Most administrators behave as if they are ignorant of history. At IU, the president acted in contradiction to long standing policy and history. The presidents have been boneheaded resorting to behavior more befitting a prison warden than an overseer of academia. There is good reason for the votes of no confidence. Schools have failed to recognize the teaching and learning moments presented by this time in history.

 

Where have these presidents come from? Apparently the land of professional academic careerism includes no training in reality, or history, or the constitution. 

 

The head of the Indiana state police, called to IU where a sniper was stationed on the roof of the student union, said he didn’t really understand the first Amendment. 

 

Welcome to America 2024 where we get our news with dance moves from TickTock and influences and where precious young things adopt restrictive dress for solidarity with what? a patriarchal terrorist group who slaughter babies and who keep women oppressed and repressed. There is no sane reason an American college student would voice support for Hamas or Hezbollah. They are enemies of even their own people, certainly the freedom of thought and expression the protestors are exercising. That behavior under Hamas and Hezbollah would cost them their heads. 

 

It is a signal of failure, a nail in the coffin, that American students cannot possess two truths in the same thought. One can, and should, be against the violence and be for Palestinian and Jewish people. Hamas has done no favors to the Palestinian people. Netanyahu’s war policy is criminal and is detested by the people of Israel.  A university student today should be able to discern the difference between Jewish people and the State of Israel, between Palestinian people and the evil of Hamas and Hezbollah. 

 

In 1968 when protests around the world targeted the US War policy  in Viet Nam, the anger was not with American citizens rather with the US Government. The victims today are largely the Palestinian people, but Jews in Israel, as well as Muslims and Christians also suffer.

 

In 1968 a few idiots carried the Viet Cong flag or sang about Ho Chi Minh, but they were rare. The bulk of the animus and demonstrations was toward the war policy. Americans disagreed with the government and carried out their right to protest.

 

Of course, those air head students who betray their ignorance have the right speak their less than reasoned minds and state their views as much as those who speak with knowledge and conviction. This could be a time of great learning, challenging the easy assumptions and misdirection of “influencers” and their own lack of intellectual vigor. 

 

That is a point lost on university presidents, chancellors, state police superintendents, local and campus cops whose first response is to start pushing and shoving on rights.

 

Breaking into building, stopping the function of a school, denying others their rights, speaking or chanting hate, intimidating or harassing other students is wrong and there are policies and laws to handle it. One need not point weapons of war at children, even belligerent children. 

 

Response must be measured and appropriate with an eye on history. I covered street demonstrations where tear gas cannisters flew and where people were manhandled and truncheoned. In those days police looked like police and were not outfitted to look like a combat ranger squad ready for lethal action. Recall that just two years after 1968, as the nation remained ripped apart our own national guard, city and state police shot and killed college students. 4 students died and nine were shot at Kent State by Ohio National Guardsmen. Two weeks later 2 students were killed and 12 were wounded by cops at Jackson state In Mississippi. Those tragedies followed a national commission that decried police and government heavy handedness in the city and street violence of 1968. You’d think cops, and college Presidents would have some residual memory.

 

What happened at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968  was called a “police riot” by a national study commission. The police beat and brutalized hundreds of demonstrators and others. The cops turned on the media too. In what was called “a rare moment of collective courage” all of the major newspapers telegrammed a protest to the Chicago Mayor. NBC News Anchor Chet Huntley reported  “the news profession in the city is now under assault by the Chicago Police department.” CBS Anchor Walter Cronkite was also outraged by the strong-arm tactics.

 

If you are interested, and I would hope that means a few academic leaders too, you can look back at 1968 via on line archives at Vanderbilt University, or CSPAN.

 

This is not like 1968 and it is simplistic notion to say so. 

See you down the trail. 

WILD Close UP

The 16th Annual Wildflower show, nothing short of spectacular.

Teams began gathering yesterday (Friday 4/26 and finished up this morning)

Somewhere between 400-500 individual specimens, all gathered from this area. 

Enjoy a few of them, thanks to the Friends of the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve.

 

This is one of the reasons Cambria is a hiker's paradise.

See you down the trail.

A Bipartisan Win Puts MAGA on the Ropes

 

        The view is clear. Bipartisan works.

        American citizens and the perception of us around the world got a measure of grace when a bi-partisan coalition passed a package of national security programs.

         112 Republicans, the MAGA extremists, have been pro Putin obstructionists taking their orders from the Russian patsy Trump. They were beaten up when Democrats and 101 Republicans declared 311-112 that vital aid would be sent to Ukraine as the suffering nation endures Putin’s brutality, war crimes and attempt to destroy the nation.

 

        There was a time in America when traitorous notions like those of MAGA would be scorned and efforts would be undertaken to drum them out of government. Today they openly avow to break the democratic republic while their master sits in criminal court facing the first many felony charges. Bi-partisanship came to the rescue and again reminded us that when reason prevails, congress can be effective. 

        The MAGA crowd has taken a hit. Not yet washed up, but foundering. Republican leaders say they have fallen prey to Russian propaganda and may be losing power. Trump is weakened as he sits in a courtroom and hears the accusations spoken. He’s left to whine to cameras and it’s an old act. His night time rallies, where he is bathed in make up and hidden beneath a red cap, are stale refrains increasingly punctuated with verbal slips and obsure riffs that have caused professionals to question if his cognitive skills are in steep decline. He is an out shape aging man play acting like a tough guy. He is tough only to the coop of low lifes, bullies and sleaze who are the MAGA caucus who readily go to their knees for him. 

        This vote and bi-partisan majority isolates how out of touch MAGA is with most Americans on national security. 

        And what do the crimes against humanity gang in Russia say? Here's a quote from 

 DmitryMedvedev after the vote to send more aid to Ukraine-something he counted on the Republicans blocking...

    "...I can't help but wish the USA with all sincerity to dive into a new civil war themselves as quickly as possible. Which, I hope, will be very different from the war between North an South in the 19th century and will be waged using aircraft, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all types of missiles and other weapons. And which will finally lead to the inglorious collapse of the vile evil empire of the 21st century-the United States of America."

        That is pretty much the sentiment of the MAGA crime syndicate. Why any American, despite how right wing they may be, can support the anti-American MAGA is beyond me. Brain washing, blind zeal and old fashioned stupidity are evidently Republican tools of the trade. 

    

        Stay informed. Stay free. Act like it.

        See you down the trail.

The Quantum Nap

        Is it my reading and viewing list, or have you too noted there's a lot of recent information out there about quantum physics, quantum computing and how things quantum make the potential of "multiverses" something more than fodder for science fiction?

        It's all a push for my pragmatic sense of things and my hard headed desire to "understand." 

        A recent science article and an Apple television series had me puzzling through the idea of "alternative realities" when the moon shadows seized my attention. I grabbed a camera and got a frame of myself standing on our upper deck, in the world of shadows. I haven't worked out how the distant Pacific surf may have sounded in that shadow universe, nor do I know what would become of that shadow reality if I, or someone, had not seen, observed or photographed it.

        What marvelous riddles, and possibilities there are!  And what potential there is for those to whom the future belongs. Still, there is that nagging human problem about learning-learning from our past and from our frequently misguided ways.

        But for now, a deep dive into the present here on the California central coast and in Lana's garden, all, appreciative of the season's rain.  
 

Is it one or many?

           The peas are growing well. 

         Lana complains the hillside is too full of weeds-she has had back issues and her weed eradication effort has been slowed. I continue my more than half a century protest that weeds are also life and provide their own contributions to the blue sphere. Alternate realities, eh? But Green is green.

        Our youngest of the brood, Sunny is enjoying the return of the Sun...     

The old tiger gal, Joy, is particularly taken with the beds near the front walk

    And the old boy Hemingway, our polydactyl, would be Garfield, does what he enjoys most, next to eating. Naps tend to make a lot of sense to me these days as well.

    Madmen still make war, a taste for power has driven a whole political cult into a trance of stupefaction and insensibility, and we've unleashed machine learning and artificial intelligence experiments on our children. Phones, screens and social media are rewiring our brains and undoing society. 

    It's like the meme, "Here hold my beer"  while we blindly jump into the next thing, never mind we have forgotten the word consequence and the mere idea of forethought.

    Yea, naps are a good alternative reality.

          Summon your wits good people, gird your loins and activate that life of experience and learning. 

        Our hand are no longer on the throttles of power, but we have voice and a vote and we are still to be reckoned with. There are facts to note, truth to tell and a Republic to defend between now and November. 

        We know this drill, we can still answer the call, and we'll be effective, if we take our nap and remember our meds. 

        Be of good cheer, we have the cosmos and eternity set in our hearts.

        See you down the trail.