Isolation..

 

Israel’s edge over Hamas is so large, that any outcome other than victory is unthinkable. Nine weeks into bombardment and no end.

The question is in what timeframe and at what cost.

Hamas rallies a besieged population in Gaza around it in anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority government by ensuring Palestinians see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli military authority. 

Meanwhile, Arab states move strongly away from normalization with Israel, the Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s excessive indiscriminate bombardment, and massive human loses in Gaza, and an American debate erupts over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s. 

Isolation from humanity is the real loss.

Show..

 

Around 61 migrants, including women and children, have drowned following a “tragic shipwreck” off the coast of Libya, said the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“The central Mediterranean continues to be one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes,” the UN agency said in the post.

Earlier in 2011

Libya and the 2011 NATO intervention there have become synonymous with failure, disaster, and the Middle East being a “shit show” (President Obama’s colorful descriptor). It has perhaps never been more important to question this prevailing wisdom, because how we interpret Libya affects how we interpret Syria and, importantly, how we assess Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Just a thought.

Media..

 

The confirmed death toll in Gaza is now over 20,000 — nearly 1 percent of the entire population. Thousands more bodies are believed to be trapped under rubble. Hospitals, schools, ambulances, and refugee camps have been bombed.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to furiously lobby Congress to give Israel another $14 billion in military aid — with absolutely zero restrictions on how those weapons are used.

Major U.S. news media outlets have continued to repeat the Biden administration’s preposterous claims that they are doing everything possible to reduce civilian deaths and some outlets are firing journalists or sanctioning them for speaking out about the crimes being committed against Gaza. At The Intercept, that is part of our job.

The Media are playing an unfair game at this point. Just a thought.

 

Data..

 

According to new data from the World Bank, trade between BRICS nations is headed to reach $500 billion in 2024. While the value falls much below the average global trade, BRICS’ numbers are slowly yet steadily rising. The alliance is creating a foundation that could later turn into full-fledged trade agreements strengthening their native economies.

Overall idea of BRICS is to eventually cut ties with the US dollar and make local currencies thrive. The larger the trade numbers rise between BRICS, the bigger the threat grows to the US dollar. BRICS members China and Russia are aggressive in their de-dollarization efforts and are taking every step to make it a reality.

While US is busy starting wars somewhere and everywhere, others are building their own world.   Just a thought.

Loss..

 

Who is winning the Israel/Gaza war? or to be more precise, how much is the  looss.

A further indication came a few days later, when three Israeli hostages succeeded in getting away from their captors, only to be killed by IDF soldiers, even though shirtless and carrying a white flag. What has since made that worse, and is causing considerable anger in Israel, is that calls from the hostages were picked up by an audio-equipped IDF search-dog five days before they were killed.

There are other, wider indications of the IDF’s problems. Official casualty figures have shown more than 460 military personnel killed in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank and about 1,900 wounded. But other sources suggest far greater numbers of wounded.  Just a thought.

Hope..

 

Snatchers..

As Russia's war against Ukraine is set to soon enter its third year, Ukraine is getting desperate for more troops, so much so that military recruiters have confiscated people's passports and even tried to enlist a mentally disabled man, per a new report on recruiting efforts citing lawyers, activists, and other concerned civilians.

"There's lawlessness here," a 58-year-old Ukrainian taxi driver told The New York Times in a report published on Friday that details the forceful tactics Ukraine military recruiters have been reportedly taking to boost the Eastern European country's manpower in the bloody fight against Russia.

The taxi driver from the Ukrainian city of Kitsman told the Times that military recruiters seized his passport and only returned it to him days later after he showed up to a medical screening.
Local residents told the new outlet that recruiters from Kitsman have gotten a reputation as "people snatchers." 

When the people don't want war anymore while the politicians want it to continue by all means.

Help..

 

Re-build..

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote an op-ed Monday outlining three prerequisites for peace in the region: the destruction of Hamas, the demilitarization of Gaza and the beginning of a deradicalization process of Palestinian society.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu said once those three requirements are met, “Gaza can be rebuilt and the prospects of a broader peace in the Middle East will become a reality.

On the other hand I think Israel should return the territories that been taken from the Palestinians, Re build Gaza to state of the art, and stop killing civilians to clear the land for a larger Jewish State on the expenses of the poor Palestinians.

Mask...

 

The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask.

MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and John W.M. Bush, who teaches applied mathematics, developed a method of calculating exposure risk to Covid-19 in an indoor setting that factors in a variety of issues that could affect transmission, including the amount of time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunization, variant strains, mask use, and even respiratory activity such as breathing, eating, speaking or singing.

“What our analysis continues to show is that many spaces that have been shut down in fact don’t need to be. Often times the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good,” Bazant said. “I think if you run the numbers, even right now for many types of spaces you’d find that there is not a need for occupancy restrictions.”

Six-feet social distancing rules that inadvertently result in closed businesses and schools are “just not reasonable,” according to Bazant.