Frank's Musings

The MAGA supporters of Donald Trump follow him because he dismisses the need for a functioning government. They believe they can live better lives by minimizing interference from pretentious public officials.

Western Countries’ politics seems to have come to a critical turning point.   It is abandoning civil decorum and welcoming violence for the resolution of disagreements.  The most recent examples include the mutually threatening behavior of a union leader witness and a U.S. Senate committee member during a 11/14/2023 hearing.

In the meantime, the terrorism and military violence into which the Israel/Palestine dilemma has exploded in the area around Gaza has compounded the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.  Furthermore, antisemitic violence has increased throughout the liberal democratic West, and libertarian impatience with slow and deliberative institutional resolution of social problems has erupted in violent demonstrations by groups of disaffected democratic citizens.

But it is especially the recent displays of schoolyard bullying in the U.S. Congress that most illustrate a deterioration of comity in modern government affairs.  Besides the committee hearing exchange of challenges there was an alleged elbowing of one HR member by another that day and a build-up of abusive language between several Congressmen. These officials are representatives that the people sent to Washington to govern the country’s business, not to perform in a reality show.

The country’s economic success and the globalization of industry have led almost half of Americans to devalue the need for hard work—Let it be done by foreigners, overseas or immigrant. We’ve reached an apex in which entertainment has become the main desire of many of the people instead of a periodic form of rest and relaxation. And when those who actually get things done (including professional entertainers) aren’t sufficiently vigilant, they can lose control of the nation’s affairs to populist self-aggrandizers like Donald Trump.

Ross Douthat wrote today in the New York Times hat the personal need for religion may, for some, spring from the fear of death. For those of us suffering with chronic disease there is, on the contrary, an underlying longing for it.

He also affirms that society’s need is for organized religion to provide a shared narrative that binds it together. That is to shirk the more rigorous Rawlsian argument that the best prescription for societal order is behavior that favors rational civic order.

Religions have been corrupted throughout history to engender sectoral conflict. Lifting the common intellect to understand what is in everyone’s interest is the leadership task accomplishment of which will contribute the most to world peace.

Many of us are shocked that even Trump thinks that it’s a winning campaign argument that he would weaponize the DOJ to get even with his opponents if he were to be returned to the Presidency. Perhaps that is only his strategy for competing in the Republican Primary and that he would change his tune in the general election.

Unfortunately, if Democratic voters return to the same blasé attitude that they displayed in 2016, we run the risk of a second presidential term of chaos. Moreover, that risk entails destructive authoritarian rule. It’s happened before—Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Peronist Argentina, and others.

It’s not enough for Biden to celebrate in a Veterans’ Day speech that we are the only country founded on an idea; that ephemeral objective can easily be replaced by the simplistic libertarian entrustment of the country’s affairs to the hands of a showman like Trump.  The danger of a retributionist government administration must be made clear in ways that will grab the attention of the MAGA crowd simultaneously with stimulative ways to energize the liberal democratic crowd (Republican and Democratic, alike).

I’m afraid that the commitment of Americans to the ideals of the Founders of the republic has been corrupted by easy living, partisan commercial news organizations, and unedited social media.  Sure, there are very important issues of racial and cultural discrimination that we struggle to resolve as well.  However, none of these and other societal shortcomings will ever be adequately addressed by abdicating government control to careless management.

Right-wing Jews in Israel have been provocatively settling on land in reservations to which desperate Palestinian families have been confined under rules invented with international consent to separate equally emotional claimants to the same disputed Middle Eastern lands.  Wealthy nations in the West are being tempted, as in Afghanistan, to throw up their hands and abandon the antagonists to resolve their dispute alone, were it not for the political strength of sympathizers with Israel’s existence and the economic leverage that has been attributed to the Palestinians because of their assumed solidarity with oil-rich Arab states.

However, the political balance has begun to change. Climate change has suddenly become a more urgent and widespread concern because of the excessive global temperature increase in 2023. There have been some encouraging advances in the expanded use of non-CO2-producing sources of energy, like solar, wind, geothermal, thermonuclear, hydroelectric, and other technologies. This development has, for example, seemed to impress on major oil and gas producers, including exporting nations and commercial companies, that their future wealth depends on devoting their stores of capital to alternative enterprises, as well as to shifting their energy-producing activities to carbon-neutral, if not absorptive, methods.  The technological and entrepreneurial leadership of Israel has led oil-rich Arab countries to give serious consideration to promoting the commercial alliance of their sovereign wealth with the innovative power of Israel by perforating political barriers to collaboration between citizens and institutions from the two sides.

An important consequence of these trends is the weakening of the perceived international political power of the Palestinians to influence the outcome of their dispute with the Jewish state over the disposition of the Holy Land.  Moreover, a terrorist organization like Hamas is losing a major component of its strength, i.e., its image as the underdog fighting oppression by Israel.  Gaza and the West Bank are not only losing their appearance of victimhood in Western eyes, but also their brotherly appeal to Arab states. Commercial priorities are shoving sympathy and ethnic solidarity aside.

This recasts Israel’s military campaign against Hamas as a police action rather than a war.  Hezbollah’s choice not to join Hamas’s attack on Jewish residents of Israel is not so much a “smart” move as a display of their greater discipline. The Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout their incipient state, should ask Israel to collaborate with them to rid their lands of the scourge of Hamas terrorism. The only point of Hamas’s savage 10/7 attack was to prevent a reasonable resolution of the dilemma of competing claims on the Holy Land. Continued Hamas activity will only endanger the peaceful lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course, Hassan Nasrallah is not entirely wrong to say that the U.S. is responsible for the war in Gaza. More accurately, every member of the U.N. is no less at fault for having encouraged and ratified the establishment of the Israeli state.  Now a resolution of the competing claims on the Holy Land must be imposed by the whole society of nations.  The time for playing games tied to Israel politics has come, demoting religious fanaticism below peaceful international behavior. 

A genuine two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem will potentially be costly for both the current Israeli coalition and the Democratic U.S. Administration.  However, the entire world has been paying a high price, not only in expensive energy, environmental destruction, international conflict and, ultimately, in human life for protecting sectoral cultural differences.  The dualistic nature of human thought has caused stress and conflict since time began.  Perhaps we shall never escape that dilemma; the challenge is to prolong any temporary suspension of the violence preventing the peaceful coexistence of the competing nations.  That will require Palestinian reliance on Israel to assure border security and permanent termination of further and obsessive settlements by Jewish Israelis in the West Bank.  Moreover, religious fundamentalists in Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere must be enjoined from interfering in national foreign policy. 

Israel is faced with the need to eradicate Hamas, not only as the government of Gaza, but as an organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction.  The Palestinian people and world Jewry both have a justifiable claim on the territory occupied by the state of Israel—it is the homeland of the Arabs that have lived there since before the creation of Islam, and it is the traditional and internationally recognized seat of the Jewish state, which the Jewish people have sought to reclaim in order to separate themselves from discrimination in virtually every other country ever since the destruction of the Temple of David in Jerusalem.

The compromise reached by the world community in 1948 recognizing the formation of Israel under exclusive Jewish religious rule, of course, created a genuine dilemma.  Both Zionist and Arab Palestinians found themselves with irreconcilable justifications for statehood.  The de facto sovereign power over the entire region, consisting of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, of course, is no longer in actual control.  The claim of the Palestinian Arabs is only pusillanimously supported by some in the United Nations, including Russia, and only in words by the Arab League.   These competing claims on the land occupied by the Israeli state, therefore, have engendered resort to terrorist tactics by non-state organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.  It has also incentivized Israel to use indiscriminate (and some say inhumane) military means of retribution for violent attacks on its citizens.

The inevitable outcome of the current balance of power in the conflict will be the extinguishment of organized violent attacks on Israeli individuals together with the forceful imposition of a non-violent status of coexistence of Jews and Islamic Arabs in this region, regardless of the political (and financial) strength of Israel’s sympathizers.  As Barack Obama recently stated, “We are all complicit” in the creation of the irresolvable conflict between the Jews and the Muslim Arabs in the region.  With no other institutional process for deflating violent conflict, Western countries and the United Nations have no choice but to abandon their professed commitment to self-determination and force the occupants of the Israeli/Palestinian region peacefully to divvy up the territory between the two sides, without exceptions for radical extremists, and to offer compensatory funds to displaced Jewish as well as Arab Palestinian residents.

Right-wing Jews in Israel have been provocatively settling on land neighboring reservations to which desperate Palestinian families have been confined under rules invented with international consent to separate equally emotional claimants to the same disputed Middle Eastern lands.  As in Afghanistan, wealthy nations in the West are being tempted to throw up their hands and abandon the antagonists to resolve their dispute alone, were it not for the political strength of sympathizers with Israel’s existence and the economic leverage that has been attributed to the Palestinians because of their assumed solidarity with oil-rich fellow Arab states.

However, the political balance has begun to change. Climate change has suddenly become a more urgent concern because of the excessive global temperature increase in 2023. There have been some encouraging advances in the expanded use of non-CO2-producing sources of energy, like solar, wind, geothermal, thermonuclear, hydroelectric, and other technologies. This development has, for example, seemed to impress on major oil and gas producers, including exporting nations and commercial companies, that their future wealth depends on devoting their stores of capital to alternative enterprises, as well as to shifting their energy-producing activities to carbon-neutral, if not absorptive, methods.  The technological and entrepreneurial leadership of Israel has led oil-rich Arab countries to give serious consideration to promoting the commercial alliance of their sovereign wealth with the innovative power of Israel by perforating political barriers to collaboration between citizens and institutions from the two sides.

An important consequence of these trends is the weakening of the perceived international political power of the Palestinians to influence the outcome of their dispute with the Jewish state over the disposition of the Holy Land.  Moreover, a terrorist organization like Hamas is losing a major component of its strength, i.e., its image as the underdog fighting oppression by Israel.  It is not only losing its appearance of victimhood in Western eyes, but also its brotherly appeal to other Arab states. Commercial priorities are shoving sympathy and ethnic solidarity aside.

This recasts Israel’s military campaign against Hamas as a police action rather than a war.  Hezbollah’s choice not to join Hamas’s attack on Jewish residents of Israel is not so much a “smart” move as a display of their greater discipline. The Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout their incipient state, should ask Israel to collaborate with them to rid their lands of the scourge of Hamas terrorism. The only point of Hamas’s savage 10/7 attack was to prevent a reasonable resolution of the dilemma of competing claims on the Holy Land. Continued Hamas activity will only endanger the peaceful lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course, Hassan Nasrallah is not entirely wrong to say that the U.S. is responsible for the war in Gaza. However, every member of the U.N. is no less at fault for having encouraged and ratified the establishment of the Israeli state.  Now a resolution of the competing claims on the Holy Land must be imposed by the whole society of nations.  The time for playing games tied to Israel politics has come, demoting religious fanaticism below peaceful international behavior. 

A genuine two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem will potentially be costly for both the current Israeli coalition and the Democratic U.S. Administration.  However, the entire world has been paying a high price, not only in expensive energy, environmental destruction, international conflict and, ultimately, in human life for protecting spiritual sectoral differences.  The dualistic nature of human thought has caused stress and conflict since time began.  Perhaps we shall never escape that dilemma; the challenge is to prolong any temporary suspension of violence during the coexistence of the competing nations.  That will require Palestinian reliance on Israel to assure border security and permanent termination of further and obsessive settlements by Jewish Israelis in the West Bank.  Moreover, religious fundamentalists in Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere must be enjoined from interfering in national foreign policy. 

Israel is faced with the need to eradicate Hamas, not only as the government of Gaza, but as an organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction.  The Palestinian people and world Jewry both have a justifiable claim on the territory occupied by the state of Israel—it is the homeland of the Arabs that have lived there since before the creation of Islam, and it is the traditional and internationally recognized seat of the Jewish state, which the Jewish people have sought to reclaim in order to separate themselves from discrimination in virtually every other country ever since the destruction of the Temple of David in Jerusalem.

The compromise reached by the world community in 1948 recognizing the formation of Israel under exclusive Jewish religious rule, of course, created a genuine dilemma.  Both Israelis and Arab Palestinians found themselves with irreconcilable justifications for statehood.  The de facto sovereign power over the entire region, referred to as Israel and the West Bank, of course, is in actual control.  The claim of the Palestinian Arabs is only pusillanimously supported by some in the United Nations, including Russia, and only in words by the Arab League.   These competing claims on the land occupied by the Israeli state, therefore, have engendered resort to terrorist tactics by non-state organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.  It has also incentivized Israel to use indiscriminate (and some say inhumane) military means of restitution for violent attacks on its citizens.

The inevitable outcome of the current balance of power in the conflict will be the tamping down of organized violent attacks on Israeli individuals together with the forceful imposition of a non-violent status of coexistence of Jews and Islamic Arabs in this region, regardless of the political (and financial) strength of Israel’s sympathizers.  As Barack Obama recently stated, “We are all complicit” in the creation of the irresolvable conflict between the Jews and the Muslim Arabs in the region.  With no other institutional process for deflating violent conflict, Western countries and the United Nations have no choice but to abandon their commitment to self-determination and force the occupants of the Israeli/Palestinian region peacefully to divvy up the territory between the two sides, and to offer compensatory funds to equalize the expenses of displaced Jewish as well as Arab Palestinian residents.

Israel is faced with the need to eradicate Hamas, not only as the government of Gaza, but as an organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction.  The Palestinian people and world Jewry both have a justifiable claim on the territory occupied by the state of Israel—it is the homeland of the Arabs that have lived there since before the creation of Islam, and it is the traditional and internationally recognized seat of the Jewish state, which the Jewish people have sought to reclaim in order to separate themselves from discrimination in virtually every other country ever since the destruction of the Temple of David in Jerusalem.

The compromise reached by the world community in 1948 recognizing the formation of Israel under exclusive Jewish religious rule, of course, created a genuine dilemma.  Both Israelis and Arab Palestinians found themselves with irreconcilable justifications for statehood.  The de facto sovereign power over the entire region, referred to as Israel and the West Bank, of course, is in actual control.  The claim of the Palestinian Arabs is only pusillanimously supported by some in the United Nations, including Russia, and only in words by the Arab League.   These competing claims on the land occupied by the Israeli state, therefore, have engendered resort to terrorist tactics by non-state organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.  It has also incentivized Israel to use indiscriminate (and some say inhumane) military means of restitution for violent attacks on its citizens.

The inevitable outcome of the current balance of power in the conflict will be the tamping down of organized violent attacks on Israeli individuals together with the forceful imposition of a non-violent status of coexistence of Jews and Islamic Arabs in this region, regardless of the political (and financial) strength of Israel’s sympathizers.  As Barack Obama recently stated, “We are all complicit” in the creation of the irresolvable conflict between the Jews and the Muslim Arabs in the region.  With no institutional process for deflating violent conflict, Western countries and the United Nations have no choice but to abandon their commitment to self-determination and force the occupants of the Israeli/Palestinian region peacefully to divvy up the territory between the two sides, and to offer compensatory funds to equalize the expenses of displaced Jewish as well as Arab Palestinian residents.

The most recent NYTimes/Siena polling numbers showing declines in Biden’s approval numbers compared with Trump reflect, more than anything else, the resentment felt by poll respondents towards commercial media-reported opinion leaders, domestic and foreign, who they believe mistakenly think a majority of Americans doesn’t know what’s good for the country.