Gaza 2025

 

We in the U.S. have no clue.

 

And, then there's this...

 

The Israeli-Palestinian Perplex

Back to exigent concerns (in the wake of my prior transient dumbass reactive diversion).

   

  
Is hope for a real, durable, amicable, broad Middle-East peace naive?

One of my favorite conflict resolution experts:

Crisis, Contradiction, Certainty, and Contempt

A Professor’s Statement on the Current Situation at Columbia University
Peter T. Coleman

As a member of the Columbia University community for over 30 years, Director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, current member of the University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, and a student of intractable conflict and sustainable peace, I felt it incumbent on me to share my take on the extraordinary challenges facing our community today.

For context, I have studied, written and wondered about the many conflicts related to Israel and the Palestinian territories for decades. I have visited and conducted research on peacebuilding in the region on several occasions, written about how the conflicts there have manifested at Columbia University in the past, and have traveled through the West Bank, including Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus. I have not been to Gaza to date, although one of my top students, Naira Musallam, a Palestinian-Israeli, conducted her dissertation research there in 2010. I was last in Israel in May 2023 working with Israeli, Palestinian and international students through the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University (I later posted this blog on my experiences), and hope to return there this summer to continue this crucial work.

When I first visited the West Bank, I had a revelation. Some UN colleagues and I were traveling South out of Bethlehem towards Hebron on a dusty road, when we began to pass countless miles of a dilapidated refugee camp on our left (I believe it was Dheisha). This was one of the many camps where Palestinians who had fled Israel in 1948 had settled, and who still today refuse most support from the Israeli government as an active act of protest against the normalization of their ouster and a political statement signifying their struggle.

After passing by several miles of the ramshackle camp, I noticed on the right side of the road that a new, well-constructed municipality had been built, which in comparison to the camp looked like a nice suburb outside Cleveland. When I asked my colleagues about these structures, they explained to me that they had been built and were supported by the Israeli government, with running water, electricity, and sanitation. They also explained that at some point, many families from the refugee camp, desperate from the conditions they had lived in, chose to cross the road and set up home in the new buildings. However, doing so was typically seen as an unforgivable betrayal of the struggle by members of their family and community that stayed behind, who often disparaged them or cut ties with them altogether. This was just another glimpse into the complex web of multiple intertwined conflicts and moral dilemmas which constitute what many of us call the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”…

A fairly long read. Study it all carefully.

 

I've cited Dr. Coleman before (The Way Out).

 

 

More current Peter Coleman:

First, we are in a crisis. The current firestorm at Columbia is real, painful and deeply concerning. It was triggered most recently by the horrific combination of the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, and by the Israeli government’s violent, punishing and unrelenting response to Palestinians and its deadly effects on humanitarian workers, journalists and many others in Gaza.

But the crisis at Columbia is also playing out in the context of dramatic spikes in antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate across the U.S., which preceded but were exacerbated by the current war, by the politicization and weaponization of these trends by members of the U.S. Congress who seek to delegitimize “elite” institutions of higher education like Columbia for political gain, and in the wake of 60 years of pernicious political polarization in the U.S. where we are seeing increasing tolerance for acts of political violence — as we head into what is likely to be the most contested elections in our nation’s history.

Further out, our crisis is also fueled daily by the atrocious violence playing out in the Middle East — by the dogged intransigence of Hamas and its supporters during “negotiations” over a ceasefire, their depraved willingness to sacrifice the lives of Gazan’s for their cause, and proud declarations by Hamas’ leaders of their ultimate goal to destroy the nation of Israel “from the river to the sea.” Of course, to some degree, these actions are both reactions to and justifications for the violent, aggressive, militant, expansionist policies of the far-Right Netanyahu government in Israel who for decades have shown scant interest in securing a genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace and whose support amongst the Israeli population at home has plummeted…

 

OK, “wicked problem,” anyone?

As campus protests proliferate across the U.S. and the world, people of goodwill everywhere are flummoxed. Read Coleman carefully.

 

 

"SCREAMS BEFORE SILENCE"

Age-restricted, viewable only on YouTube.

Produced by Sheryl Sandberg. I'm sure she'll get "Jew Bitch" death threats.

 

MORE

Charge Palestine With Genocide, Too
The case for having the International Court of Justice hear two cases at once
By Graeme Wood

Israel has been convicted of genocide by protesters at Columbia and UCLA, but its genocide case before the International Court of Justice is still pending. Israel remains officially aghast that it, and only it, is subject to judicial proceedings for the crime of genocide—and that the ICJ’s rulings so far have implied that the judges think Israel might be guilty of the crime of crimes. According to reports this weekend, the International Criminal Court—a separate body that hears cases against individuals—is preparing arrest warrants for Israeli officials and possibly Hamas leaders. In the ICJ, Israel stands alone…

OK, WHILE WE'RE AT IT WITH THE SERIOUS STUFF

 

Kapish?

 

189 days to Election Day. Or, as Trump called yesterday, "Christian Visibility Day."

 

SPEAKING OF TRUMP

   

 

Of course.

UPDATE ERRATUM: MUCKING AROUND IN PHOTOSHOP

(And, yeah, I erased his flagrantly unearned flag lapel pin.) Highly recommend you read the new Time Magazine interview with Trump. "How Far Would Trump Go?"

The 26 minute article contains a link to the entire 83 minute transcript of the reporter's one-on-one interview. ~Six months, peeps, You ought know what we're all likely facing. I could scarcely be more irritated.

More to come...

_________

   

Pentagon Valley? Moving fast and breaking “things” (including human non-combatants)?

What could possibly go wrong? Not wholly a forward-looking speculation, it turns out.

  

This jumped in my face today. Been lying there on the coffee table for a couple of days. Finally got around to it. Totally coheres with the Kara Swisher stuff of my prior post.

Three months before Hamas attacked Israel, Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, announced that his agency had developed its own generative artificial intelligence platform—similar to ChatGPT—and that the technology had been incorporated quite naturally into the agency’s “interdiction machine,” assisting in decision-making “like a partner at the table, a co-pilot.” As the Israeli news site Tech12 explained in a preview of his speech.

The system knows everything about [the terrorist]: where he went, who his friends are, who his family is, what keeps him busy, what he said and what he published. Using artificial intelligence, the system analyzes behavior, predicts risks, raises alerts.

Nevertheless, Hamas’s devastating attack on October 7 caught Shin Bet and the rest of Israel’s multibillion-dollar defense system entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even more striking considering Hamas carried out much of its preparations in plain sight, including practice assaults on mock-ups of the border fence and Israeli settlements—activities that were openly reported. Hamas-led militant groups even posted videos of their training online. Israelis living close to the border observed and publicized these exercises with mounting alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence bureaucracies’ analyses and, by extension, the software that had informed them. Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, monitoring developments through the ubiquitous surveillance cameras along the Gaza border, composed and presented a detailed report on Hamas’s preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have their findings dismissed as “an imaginary scenario.” The Israeli intelligence apparatus had for more than a year been in possession of a Hamas document that detailed the group’s plan for an attack.

Well aware of Israel’s intelligence methods, Hamas members fed their enemy the data that they wanted to hear, using informants they knew would report to the Israelis. They signaled that the ruling group inside Gaza was concentrating on improving the local economy by gaining access to the Israeli job market, and that Hamas had been deterred from action by Israel’s overwhelming military might. Such reports confirmed that Israel’s intelligence system had rigid assumptions of Hamas behavior, overlaid with a racial arrogance that considered Palestinians incapable of such a large-scale operation. AI, it turned out, knew everything about the terrorist except what he was thinking…

Imagine our surprise. It gets worse.

…[M]isplaced confidence was evidently not confined to Israeli intelligence. The November/December issue of Foreign Affairs not only carried a risibly ill-timed boast by national security adviser Jake Sullivan that “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza,” but also a paean to AI by Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy is a seasoned denizen of the military-industrial complex. The undersecretary of defense for policy under Barack Obama, she transitioned to, among other engagements, a lucrative founding leadership position with the defense consultancy WestExec Advisors. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important,” she told The American Prospect in 2020. Headlined ai is already at war, Flournoy’s Foreign Affairs article invoked the intelligence analysts who made “better judgments” thanks to AI’s help in analyzing information. “In the future, Americans can expect AI to change how the United States and its adversaries fight on the battlefield,” she wrote. “In short, AI has sparked a security revolution—one that is just starting to unfold.” This wondrous new technology, she asserted, would enable America not only to detect enemy threats, but also to maintain complex weapons systems and help estimate the cost of strategic decisions. Only a tortuous and hidebound Pentagon bureaucracy was holding it back.

Lamenting obstructive Pentagon bureaucrats is a trope of tech pitches, one that plays well in the media. tech start-ups try to sell a cautious pentagon on a.i. ran a headline in the New York Times last November over a glowing report on Shield AI, a money-losing drone company for which Flournoy has been an adviser…

And, it gets worse.

 

This shit makes me ill.

The belief that software can solve problems of human conflict has a long history in U.S. war-making. Beginning in the late Sixties, the Air Force deployed a vast array of sensors across the jungles of Southeast Asia, masking the Ho Chi Minh trail along which North Vietnam supplied its forces in the south. Devised by scientists advising the Pentagon, the operation, code-named Igloo White, and designed to detect human activity by the sounds of marching feet, the smell of ammonia from urine, or the electronic sparks of engine ignitions, relayed information to giant IBM computers housed in a secret base in Thailand. The machines were the most powerful then in existence; they processed the signals to pinpoint enemy supply columns otherwise invisible under the jungle canopy. The scheme, in operation from 1967 to 1972 at a cost of at least hundreds of millions a year, was a total failure. The Vietnamese swiftly devised means to counter it; just as Hamas would short-circuit Shin Bet algorithms by feeding the system false information, the Vietnamese also faked data, with buckets of urine hung in trees off the trail, or herds of livestock steered down unused byways, which were then dutifully processed by the humming computers as enemy movements. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese forces in the south were well supplied. In 1972, they launched a powerful offensive using hundreds of tanks that went entirely undetected by Igloo White. The operation was abandoned shortly thereafter…

No, hardly a forward-looking speculative concern.

 

 Move fast and kill people. Armed or not.

 

We'll leave things here for now. Andrew Cockburn:

I was curious about Palantir, whose stock indeed soared amid the 2023 AI frenzy. I had been told that the Israeli security sector’s AI systems might rely on Palantir’s technology. Furthermore, Shin Bet’s humiliating failure to predict the Hamas assault had not blunted the Israeli Defense Force’s appetite for the technology; the unceasing rain of bombs upon densely packed Gaza neighborhoods, according to a well-sourced report by Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, was in fact partly controlled by an AI target-creation platform called the Gospel. The Gospel produces automatic recommendations for where to strike based on what the technology identifies as being connected with Hamas, such as the private home of a suspected rank-and-file member of the organization. It also calculates how many civilians, including women and children, would die in the process—which, as of this writing, amounted to at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them women and children. One of Abraham’s intelligence sources termed the technology a “mass assassination factory.” Despite the high-tech gloss on the massacre, the result has been no different than the slaughter inflicted, with comparatively more primitive means, against Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.

My links column ongoing list of concerns.

Armed State Conflicts + Malign Technologies ... No surprises here.

 

CODA

 

An old 2002 beef of mine with the DARPA "Total Information Awareness" tech+surveilance+military thing. (uh, has link rot). And, yeah, I actually sent this to Admiral Poindexter. I have long been outa [bleeps] to give.

 _________

 

Misk Joudeh

"Collateral damage?"

 

As a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, this shit just absolutely breaks my heart. The barbarity of Hamas, the inevitable crushing response of Israel...

 

Infant Misk Joudeh briefly had actual "personhood" (as did the Israeli infants butchered by Hamas). 

 

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE

 

__________

 

“It is not every day that snuff films of Jews are shown at an IDF screening hall.”

“At a military base north of Tel Aviv, the Israel Defense Forces held a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes of raw footage from Hamas’s October 7 attack. Members of the press were invited, but cameras were not allowed. Hamas had the opposite policy on cameras during the attack, which it documented gleefully with its fighters’ body cams and mobile phones. Some of the clips had been circulating already on social media in truncated or expurgated form, with the footage decorously stopped just before beheadings and moments of death. After having seen them both in raw and trimmed forms, I can endorse the decision to trim those clips. I certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again.”—Graeme Wood

  

“What’s already happened has been horrible beyond belief, and what’s coming next will probably be worse.”

“Predestined?”

__________

 

"Freedom?" (per "Volition?") "Culpability?" "Merit?” “Morality?" "Destiny?"

Are those delusions?

  

 

Timely topical upshot of reading a Science Magazine book review, especially in light of the latest Hamas vs Israel tragedy.

Freedom from free will
A scientist presents a case for a predetermined future

We all sometimes behave in ways that seem to conflict with our goals and intentions. One person might struggle to resist a favorite comfort food despite knowing that a different option will be more nutritious. Another may repeatedly snooze their alarm and miss their morning workout. Still others may wish to spend more time with family but instead find themselves mindlessly browsing social media. If we only had more willpower, the conventional wisdom goes, we could eat healthier, exercise regularly, and spend more time with loved ones. In Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that we have no free will and that such choices are thus actually determined by factors beyond our control.

Our genetic and epigenetic makeup, together with environmental and cultural factors, make us who we are and determine how we behave, Sapolsky claims. Whether a person makes it to the gym or opts for a decadent dessert is little more than a function of the architecture of their prefrontal cortex and the neurotransmitters and hormones circulating in their body, all of which in turn are physical manifestations of a person’s genetic inheritance and the environment in which they spent their formative years.

This claim is not new. It is a version of the “consequence argument,” popularized by philosopher Peter van Inwagen in 1983, which states that in a deterministic universe—one where all events are completely determined by an initial state and the laws of nature—all human actions are a consequence of the laws of nature and events in the remote past and are therefore not under our control. Nevertheless, Sapolsky’s coverage of the relevant science is first-rate and very much worth reading...

Sapolsky’s decades of experience studying the effects of the interplay of genes and the environment on behavior shine brightly in these discussions. In particular, he argues against the claim that “luck” evens out over time, with fortune and misfortune striking most people in equal measure over the years, an idea favored by philosopher Daniel Dennett and others. Instead, he provides compelling examples that bad luck compounds, meaning that many who are born “unlucky” have little chance of getting ahead. In later chapters, he convincingly argues against claims that chaos theory, emergent phenomena, or the indeterminism offered by quantum mechanics provide the gap required for free will to exist.

...If we accept that humans are not responsible for their misdeeds, will some of us feel emboldened to behave badly? He thinks not, citing epilepsy as a case in point. Once thought to be the result of demonic possession, it is now understood as a neurological disorder. In addition to leading to the development of effective treatments, this framework helped us to rethink to what degree an individual undergoing an epileptic seizure is responsible for any potential negative outcomes.

Although he is careful not to conflate determinism with the inability to affect change in the world, Sapolsky’s dismissive attitude toward how determinism might be compatible with free will is one of the book’s weak points. Indeed, he sets the bar very high for free will (“Show me a neuron being a causeless cause”). This well-written book is nonetheless worth reading. Better yet, pair it with Kevin Mitchell’s book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, also publishing in October 2023, which makes the opposite argument, and then decide for yourself whether you had a choice to do so or it was all predetermined.

Eyeball deep in both books. Had not planned on this. I can see right off the bat myriad definitional problems. Not being anywhere close to being the sharpest knife in the drawer, I have way more questions than answers at the moment.

Nice L.A. Times review by Corinne Purtill.

 

QUICK TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE?

 

1. A Technology of Behavior

IN TRYING TO SOLVE the terrifying problems that face us in the world today, we naturally turn to the things we do best. We play from strength, and our strength is science and technology. To contain a population explosion we look for better methods of birth control. Threatened by a nuclear holocaust, we build bigger deterrent forces and anti-ballistic-missile systems. We try to stave off world famine with new foods and better ways of growing them. Improved sanitation and medicine will, we hope, control disease, better housing and transportation will solve the problems of the ghettos, and new ways of reducing or disposing of waste will stop the pollution of the environment. We can point to remarkable achievements in all these fields, and it is not surprising that we should try to extend them. But things grow steadily worse, and it is disheartening to find that technology itself is increasingly at fault. Sanitation and medicine have made the problems of population more acute, war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution. As Darlington has said, “Every new source from which man has increased his power on the earth has been used to diminish the prospects of his successors. All his progress has been made at the expense of damage to his environment which he cannot repair and could not foresee.”

Whether or not he could have foreseen the damage, man must repair it or all is lost. And he can do so if he will recognize the nature of the difficulty. The application of the physical and biological sciences alone will not solve our problems because the solutions lie in another field. Better contraceptives will control population only if people use them. New weapons may offset new defenses and vice versa, but a nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. New methods of agriculture and medicine will not help if they are not practiced, and housing is a matter not only of buildings and cities but of how people live. Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.

In short, we need to make vast changes in human behavior, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology, no matter how hard we try. (And there are other problems, such as the breakdown of our educational system and the disaffection and revolt of the young, to which physical and biological technologies are so obviously irrelevant that they have never been applied.) It is not enough to “use technology with a deeper understanding of human issues,” or to “dedicate technology to man’s spiritual needs,” or to “encourage technologists to look at human problems.” Such expressions imply that where human behavior begins, technology stops, and that we must carry on, as we have in the past, with what we have learned from personal experience or from those collections of personal experiences called history, or with the distillations of experience to be found in folk wisdom and practical rules of thumb. These have been available for centuries, and all we have to show for them is the state of the world today.

What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world’s population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or move toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached absolute zero (even though both remain presumably out of reach). But a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology is lacking, and those who do not find the very possibility ridiculous are more likely to be frightened by it than reassured. That is how far we are from “understanding human issues” in the sense in which physics and biology understand their fields, and how far we are from preventing the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably moving…

Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity Hackett Publishing

Ahhh... And we'd thought Ol' Mr. Operant Conditioning Skinner had been safely remanded to a musty basement at Harvard.

"What we need is a technology of behavior."

Yeah. Nita Farahany's nightmare.

QUICK UPDATE

Burrowed down into both books at the moment, alternating back & forth in fairly lengthy chunks. My Kindle app tells me the Sapolsky book will take me 15 hours, and Mitchell's will consume 9. I can already see a lot of dueling definitional "No True Scotsman" stuff going on. "Depends on what you mean by ____________."

 

Inevitable, one supposes. ;) arf.

The writing styles are both quite engaging. Sapolsky is by far the funnier of the two. While I'm sure I will find these to have been fully enjoyable and worthy in their own respective rights, I have to wonder to what degrees these will settle much in terms of ethical policy utility.

Inevitable, one supposes? ;) arf.

 

I must admit to being a bit Pavlovian when it comes to rather reflexively delving into books I encounter via Science Magazine reviews.

 

Inevitable, one supposes? ;) arf.

A COUPLE OF CITES

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
Giving this section this ridiculous heading reflects how unenthused I am about having to write this next stretch. I don’t understand what consciousness is, can’t define it. I can’t understand philosophers’ writing about it. Or neuroscientists’, for that matter, unless it’s “consciousness” in the boring neurological sense, like not experiencing consciousness because you’re in a coma.

Nevertheless, consciousness is central to Libet debates, sometimes, in a fairly heavy-handed way. For example, take Mele, in a book whose title trumpets that he’s not pulling any punches—Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. In its first paragraph, he writes, “There are two main scientific arguments today against the existence of free will.” One arises from social psychologists showing that behavior can be manipulated by factors that we’re not aware of—we’ve seen examples of these. The other is neuroscientists whose “basic claim is that all our decisions are made unconsciously and therefore not freely” (my italics). In other words, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, an illusory, reconstructive sense of control irrelevant to our actual behavior. This strikes me as an overly dogmatic way of representing just one of many styles of neuroscientific thought on the subject.

The “ooh, you neuroscientists not only eat your dead but also believe all our decisions are unconscious” nyah-nyah matters, because we shouldn’t be held morally responsible for our unconscious behaviors (although neuroscientist Michael Shadlen of Columbia University, whose excellent research has informed free-will debates, makes a spirited argument along with Roskies that we should be held morally responsible for even our unconscious acts).

Compatibilists trying to fend off the Libetians often make a last stand with consciousness: Okay, okay, suppose that Libet, Haynes, Fried, and so on really have shown that the brain decides something before we have a sense of having consciously and freely done so. Let’s grant the incompatibilists that. But does turning that preconscious decision into actual behavior require that conscious sense of agency? Because if it does, rather than bypassing consciousness as an irrelevancy, free will can’t be ruled out.

As we saw, knowing what a brain’s preconscious decision was moderately predicts whether the behavior will actually occur. But what about the relationship between the preconscious brain’s decision and the sense of conscious agency—is there ever a readiness potential followed by a behavior without a conscious sense of agency coming in between? One cool study done by Dartmouth neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley and collaborators shows precisely this—subjects were hypnotized and implanted with a posthypnotic suggestibility that they make a spontaneous Libet-like movement. In this case, when triggered by the cued suggestion, there’d be a readiness potential and the subsequent movement, without conscious awareness in between. Consciousness is an irrelevant hiccup.

Sure, retort compatibilists, this doesn’t mean that intentional behavior always bypasses consciousness—rejecting free will based on what happens in the posthypnotic brain is kind of flimsy. And there is a higher-order level to this issue, something emphasized by incompatibilist philosopher Gregg Caruso of the State University of New York—you’re playing soccer, you have the ball, and you consciously decide that you are going to try to get past this defender, rather than pass the ball off. In the process of then trying to do this, you make a variety of procedural movements that you’re not consciously choosing; what does it mean that you have made the explicit choice to let a particular implicit process take over? The debate continues, not just over whether the preconscious requires consciousness as a mediating factor but also over whether both can simultaneously cause a behavior.

Amid these arcana, it’s hugely important if the preconscious decision requires consciousness as a mediator. Why? Because during that moment of conscious mediation we should then be expected to be able to veto a decision, prevent it from happening. And you can hang moral responsibility on that…

Sapolsky, Robert M.. Determined (pp. 31-33). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
________

…the sequence of the genome in a lineage comes to reflect information about the environment and the past experiences of the population of organisms in that lineage, both good and bad. For example, imagine a mutation that alters the function of an enzyme, such that the organism can now metabolize a new source of food (say, a different type of sugar). If that type of sugar is available in the environment, then that mutation may be beneficial and selected for. This sequence of DNA persists because it carries information about the environment; namely, that this type of sugar can be found in it.

That same process of adaptation happens across the whole genome, reflecting all kinds of aspects of the life histories of individual organisms in the lineage. And the unsuccessful mutations—the ones that don’t make it through—convey a kind of information too, by their absence. I described the genome as a reference template that carries information about the configuration of all the cell’s biochemical components and processes. In a sense, an abstract model of the cell is encoded in the genome. And by virtue of the optimizing actions of natural selection, the genome also embodies a model of the environment or, more precisely, of the fittedness of the organism to the environment.

This model allows living organisms to use information about the past to predict and anticipate the future—to adapt to the regularities of their environment by embodying useful functions or responses in their own structure. If we want to understand what happens in a biological system at any given instant, this historicity is a key part of the explanation. The sequence of the genome and the resultant structure of the organism right now reflect the configurations of its ancestors and whether those configurations promoted persistence or hastened death. In addition to whatever factors are impinging on an organism at any given instant, there are thus causes at work from the distant past, captured in the sequence of the DNA. In a very important sense, there are also causes from the future.

What’s the Point?
The sequence of events described in this chapter might suggest to some a purposive process—as if the point of all that was to generate life. But there’s no reason to assume a purpose. Life reflects an unlikely arrangement of matter, but its emergence and the resultant trajectories of its evolution are merely statistical outcomes of the application of the mindless algorithm of natural selection. There is a set of circumstances that led to its emergence but there’s no reason for it. If, rather than asking “What is life?,” we ask “Why is life?,” the answer lies in the question: life is why. It exists because it can. There is no cosmic purpose at play—merely thermodynamic tendencies played out in the particular conditions of our young planet (and of who knows how many others).

But once life does exist, everything changes. The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does. Natural selection ensures it. Living organisms are adapted to their environment—retrospectively designed to function in specific ways that further their persistence. Before life emerged, nothing in the universe was for anything. But the functionalities and arrangements of components in living organisms are for something: variations that improve persistence are selected for on that basis, and ones that decrease persistence are eliminated.

Nothing in this whole arrangement—not the organism, nor any of its components, nor natural selection—is aware of this purpose. Indeed, you might argue that this is not real purpose: it’s only the system behaving as if it had purpose. And its components don’t actually have functions; they only have physical and chemical properties and tendencies that fit well together to form a whole system that tends to persist over time.

But we can approach the question from the other end and ask, “What would be the difference in the consequences between a system with ‘real’ purpose and one that only behaves as if it has purpose?” If we put aside the fact that all this apparent design was actually imparted by the blind actions of natural selection, we can see that the result is a fittedness of the organism to its niche and a fittedness of each component to the whole system.

Just as importantly, there is a fittedness of the activities of the system to the future outcome of its persistence. Organisms are doing work in order to maintain themselves: all those activities are goal directed (and thus qualify as functions). At least that is the effect, and the pragmatic consequences are no different than if the organism was explicitly designed to have that goal. Things happen because of that goal. The system behaves in ways that advance it. The components of the organism and its internal processes have functions, with respect to the goal of persistence. Once you have those properties, what else is needed for something to qualify as a goal or for us to say the whole system has purpose?

And unlike the designed machines and gadgets that surround us in our daily lives, which also have a purpose or at least serve a purpose, living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing—their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value.

In a lifeless universe, things have consequences, but nothing matters. There’s nothing with respect to which they could matter. Things just happen, with nobody or no thing trying to make them one way or another. Nothing has meaning or value; nothing is good or bad. But living things do try (to stay alive), and because of that, things matter to them. As we will see in later chapters, meaning and value are the internal currency that drives the mechanisms of decision making and action selection that emerged as life continued to evolve.

From the rocks and sea of our early world, life emerged—organisms that actively maintain their internal states and sustain a degree of causal autonomy from the world around them. The next step in the evolution of agency is the ability of these autonomous organisms to act on the world, to become causes in their own right…

Mitchell, Kevin J.. Free Agents (pp. 40-43). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Lots to ponder. Below, I'll just drop this snippet in for now:

14.5 Living With Uncertainty
Without uncertainty, there would be no hope, no ethics, and no freedom of choice. It is only because we do not know what the future holds for us (e.g., the exact time and manner of our own deaths) that we can have hope. It is only because we do not know exactly the future results of our choices that our choice can be free, and can pose a true ethical dilemma. Moreover, there is much uncertainty in the world, and one of our most basic choices is whether we will accept that uncertainty as a fact or try to run away from it. Those who choose to deny uncertainty invent a stable world of their own. Such people’s natural desire to reduce uncertainty, which may be basic to the whole cognitive enterprise of understanding the world, is taken to the extreme point where they believe uncertainty does not exist…

Hastie, Reid; Dawes, Robyn M.. Rational Choice in an Uncertain World (p. 333). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Actually, you'd really like the entirety of Chapter 14 (and the Stats appendix).

 

A BIT MORE DETERMINED

…the Libetian Wars don’t ask the most fundamental question: Why did you form the intent that you did?

This chapter shows how you don’t ultimately control the intent you form. You wish to do something, intend to do it, and then successfully do so. But no matter how fervent, even desperate, you are, you can’t successfully wish to wish for a different intent. And you can’t meta your way out—you can’t successfully wish for the tools (say, more self-discipline) that will make you better at successfully wishing what you wish for. None of us can.

Which is why it would tell us nothing to stick electrodes in your head to monitor what neurons are doing in the milliseconds when you form your intent. To understand where your intent came from, all that needs to be known is what happened to you in the seconds to minutes before you formed the intention to push whichever button you choose. As well as what happened to you in the hours to days before. And years to decades before. And during your adolescence, childhood, and fetal life. And what happened when the sperm and egg destined to become you merged, forming your genome. And what happened to your ancestors centuries ago when they were forming the culture you were raised in, and to your species millions of years ago. Yeah, all that.

Understanding this turtleism shows how the intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.

Thus, we’ll now see how who we are is the outcome of the prior seconds, minutes, decades, geological periods before, over which we had no control. And how bad and good luck sure as hell don’t balance out in the end.  Determined [p. 46].

AND, BACK AGAIN TO FREE AGENTS

Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus–response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell’s internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions.

This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behavior, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing—and why it is doing it—in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense—it is informational.

Information and Meaning
Before we go on, let me discuss what I mean by information, why it is useful for organisms to have it, and how it can have causal power in a physical system. First of all, information is physical; that is, it has to be carried in the physical arrangement of some kind of matter. It doesn’t just float around in the ether but has to be instantiated in some physical medium. That is literally what the phrase to in-form means. As a result, the idea that information can have causal power in a physical system should not be so outlandish: it is the same as saying that the way a system is organized constrains how it evolves over time.

The word “information,” however, has multiple meanings, both colloquially and technically, which can create confusion. The most commonly used technical sense of the word was developed by Claude Shannon working at Bell Labs in New Jersey and published in 1948 in an article titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Shannon was working on a classic engineering problem of signal transmission: how best to encode a signal, send it via some noisy medium, and decode it at a receiver. He conceived a way of calculating the amount of information in any given message and derived a formula to calculate the optimal rate of information transfer relative to the noise.

Shannon’s deep insight—one that let him develop a theory of information in the abstract, independent of the message or medium—was to think of information in terms of uncertainty or probability. He reasoned that the way to calculate how much information it would take to send a message—a sequence or “string” of elements—is to ask how many other arrangements a string of the same length could be in.

If the string is just a single digit, say, then from the receiver’s point of view, there are ten possibilities for which one it could be. If it were a single letter, then there would be twenty-six possibilities. The receiver has greater uncertainty about which letter it would be than which number it would be, because there are more possibilities. Conversely, the message with a particular letter contains more information than the one with a particular number, because it resolves a greater degree of uncertainty. Obviously, longer strings carry more information than shorter ones.

The amount of information can be measured in bits—roughly, how many yes/no questions you would have to ask to know what the message says. The amount of information in the signal thus relates to how improbable it is, which is a function of how many other forms it could have taken. If this sounds similar to the discussion in chapter two about the probability of particular arrangements of matter, it should—there is a mathematical equivalence between these ideas.

There is something very fundamental about this framing that is crucial for understanding the role of information in living systems. For something to count as information and for it to have causal power in a system as information, the possibility must exist that it could have been different. We will talk about this concept more in later chapters, but it’s worth noting here that in a truly deterministic universe, such possibilities would not exist nor would information in this sense… Free Agents [pp. 62-64].

Y'see where we might be headed?

 

HASTIE & DAWES APPENDIX

 

apropos?

A recent president of the American Psychological Association gave as his presidential address a talk on “torque and schizophrenic viability.” In it, he presented some absolutely striking data. Of 52 children who had seen him 10 years earlier who drew circles clockwise, 11 were later diagnosed as schizophrenic; of the 54 who drew circles counterclockwise, only 1 had been diagnosed schizophrenic. This relationship reached the “.01 level of statistical significance.” He related his finding to the fact that “the world turns in a counterclockwise direction with respect to the north–south axis” and that “with some exceptions, this ‘left-turning’ is characteristic of living cells.”

Certainly, a finding of this magnitude—particularly when it is related to fundamental properties of the earth and of the very unit of life—should have set the psychological world on its ear. At the least, it might have contributed to our understanding of schizophrenia, which is one of the two most prevalent mental health problems in the United States (along with depression). The average citations by other scientists to that article hovered around three per year in the subsequent 8 years, until it vanished from the charts. Why so few citations? Perhaps the researcher will be neglected for 50 years, only to be rediscovered as the founder of a modern theory of schizophrenia. A more likely explanation is found in part of his talk: “Subjects for this study were 155 children first seen for psychological evaluation at my private psychological clinic.” Children seen for such evaluations are given many tests, each of which can be evaluated on a multiplicity of variables. The researcher reported his findings on only one of these tests in his presidential address. Our educated guess is that it was 1 out of approximately 200 that he could have easily related to later diagnoses of schizophrenia. (It is important to what follows to note that this guess is based on the authors’ knowledge of clinical practice, not on the plausibility that he looked at many tests. But imagine a scenario in which a child enters a psychologist’s office, is asked to draw a circle, and is then told to go away.)

How does one evaluate whether one of these very unusual findings might be important? The best answer, of course, is to determine whether it can be repeated. Attempts to replicate such “psychic power” findings have had a dismal history. Absent the possibility of prediction, control, and replication, the best approach is to precisely specify the hypothesis of interest in advance, to specify the conceptual sample space of possible relevant events, and then to systematically collect data—even anecdotes—to describe the entire space of possible outcomes. Persi Diaconis and Fred Mosteller (1989) have outlined such a strategy and illustrate it with an application to the common experience of encountering coincidental “clusters” of newly learned words in everyday life.

If we look hard enough, we’re bound to find something. After all, the probability that exactly nothing will happen is indeed exactly zero. And, as Diaconis and Mosteller (1989) note, “When enormous numbers of events and people and their interactions cumulate over time, almost any outrageous event is bound to occur” (p. 853). Both classical and Bayesian analyses of statistical significance and informativeness are addressed to questions asked beforehand. In evaluating research findings in order to reach rational decisions, it is crucial to determine whether they were hypothesized in advance or simply picked out post hoc— from the imagination of the person purporting to have discovered them.  Rational Choice in an Uncertain World [pp. 357-359]

".01 level of statistical significance." Don't get me started.

 

INTERMISSION: 2 HOURS OF ROBERT SAPOLSKY

 

 

AND THEN KEVIN J. MITCHELL

ROOTING AROUND...

 

Minimally, I'm now having some wafts of "Black Swan" misgivings. Also rummaging around on the Internets today to see what, if anything, the Buddhists might have to say on the topic. They are generally the only peeps who ever made any sense to me.

 TEXTING WITH A PROFESSOR FRIEND

 

MEANWHILE,

More to come...

__________

 

As bad as the passing week has been,

things appear to be about to get much worse.

  

 

Below: This bit of mindless savagery happened right at the outset.

 

Humanity is going increasingly insane.

 

ISRAEL BECAME A NATION WHEN I WAS A YEAR OLD

1947: Thousands of European Jewish emigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors, board a ship – which came to be called Exodus 1947 – bound for then British-controlled Palestine. Heading for the “promised land”, they are intercepted by British naval ships and sent back to Europe. Widely covered by the media, the incident sparks international outrage and plays a critical role in convincing the UK that a UN-brokered solution is necessary to solve the Palestine crisis.

A UN special committee proposes a partition plan giving 56.47 percent of Palestine for a Jewish state and 44.53 percent for an Arab state. Palestinian representatives reject the plan, but their Jewish counterparts accept it.

On November 29, the UN General Assembly approves the plan, with 33 countries voting for partition, 13 voting against it and 10 abstentions.

1948-49: On May 14, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, publicly reads the Proclamation of Independence. The declaration, which would go into effect the next day, comes a day ahead of the expiration of the British Mandate on Palestine. The Jewish state takes control of 77 percent of the territory of Mandate Palestine, according to the UN.

For Palestinians, this date marks the “Nakba”, the catastrophe that heralds their subsequent displacement and dispossession.

As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, hearing word of massacres in villages such as Dir Yassin, flee towards Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordanian territory, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq attack Israel, launching the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The Arab armies are repelled, a ceasefire is declared and new borders – more favorable to Israel – are drawn. Jordan takes control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem while Egypt controls the Gaza Strip.

1956: The Second Arab-Israeli War, or the Suez Crisis, takes place after Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal. In response Israel, the United Kingdom and France form an alliance and Israel occupies the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. The Israeli army eventually withdraws its troops, under pressure from the US and the USSR.
1959: Yasser Arafat sets up the Palestinian organization Fatah in Gaza and Kuwait. It later becomes the main component of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

1964: The PLO is created.

1967: The Third Arab-Israeli War, or the Six-Day War, between Israel and its Arab neighbors, results in a dramatic redrawing of the Middle East map. Israel seizes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

1973: On October 6, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Egyptian and Syrian armies launch offensives against Israel, marking the start of a new regional war. The Yom Kippur War, which ends 19 days later with Israel repelling the Arab armies, results in heavy casualties on all sides – at least several thousand deaths.

1979: An Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement is sealed in Washington following the Camp David Accords signed in 1978 by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. According to the terms of this agreement, Egypt regains the Sinai Peninsula, which it had lost after the Six-Day War. Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to recognise the State of Israel.

1982: Under Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Israeli troops storm into neighbouring Lebanon in a controversial military mission called “Operation Peace of Galilee”. The aim of the operation is to wipe out Palestinian guerrilla bases in southern Lebanon. But Israeli troops push all the way to the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

The subsequent routing of the PLO under Arafat leaves the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon essentially defenceless. From September 16 to 18, Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen – with ties to Israel – enter the camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut, unleashing a brutal massacre that shocks the international community. The massacres, the subject of an Israeli inquiry popularly called the Kahane Commission, would subsequently cost Sharon his job as defence minister.

1987: Uprisings in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza spread to the West Bank marking the start of the First Palestinian Intifada ("uprising" in Arabic). Nicknamed the "war of stones", the First Intifada lasts until 1993, costing more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. The image of the stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators pitched against Israel’s military might comes to symbolise the Palestinian struggle.

It was also during this uprising that Hamas, influenced by the ideology of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, was born. From the outset, the Islamist movement favours armed struggle and rejects outright any legitimacy of an Israeli state.

1993: After months of frenetic secret negotiations, Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sign the Oslo Accords. The accords see the creation of the Palestinian Authority, which gets administrative control of the West Bank and Gaza. On September 13 on the White House lawn, Arafat and Rabin exchange a historic handshake in the presence of US President Bill Clinton. The event is watched by over 400 million TV viewers across the world.

1995: On November 4, Rabin is assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

1996: Benjamin Netanyahu is elected prime minister for the first time.

2000: On September 28, Sharon provokes Palestinians by making a tour of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount site as leader of the right-wing Likud party, sparking the Second Intifada, also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada. It lasted until 2005, with 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis killed over five years.

2001: Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel and breaks off contact with Arafat, who is subsequently confined to his compound in Ramallah.

2002: The Israeli government begins Operation Defensive Shield – the construction of a wall to separate Israel from the West Bank. The UN Security Council speaks for the first time of a coexistence between the two states of Israel and Palestine. The Israeli army lifts the siege on Ramallah.

2004: On March 22, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic co-founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, is killed in an Israeli helicopter strike. Eight months later, on November 11, PLO chairman Arafat dies at a Paris hospital following a prolonged illness. Arafat's death has been the subject of controversy. Some experts believe he died of natural causes, while others are open to the possibility he was poisoned using polonium 210.

2005: Mahmoud Abbas is elected president of the Palestinian Authority. After a 38-year occupation, Israel pulls out of Gaza.

2006: On January 4, Prime Minister Sharon suffers a stroke and falls into a coma that he stays in until his death in 2014. Ehud Olmert takes over as prime minister and head of Sharon’s newly founded centrist party, Kadima.

Hamas sweeps the legislative elections in the Palestinian Territories, causing the US and EU to freeze direct aid to the Palestinian government.

Lebanese Islamic fundamentalist group Hezbollah launches rocket attacks on Israel and takes two Israeli soldiers captive. Israel retaliates with force and many civilians, mainly Lebanese, are killed. The war, widely viewed as a failure in Israel, led to mounting calls for Olmert to resign.

2007: Following months of internecine military fighting between Hamas and Fatah forces, Hamas seizes control of Gaza.

2008: On December 27, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launch a surprise offensive on Gaza, killing more than 200 people in one day. Shortly after, the IDF follows up with a two-week-long ground invasion of Gaza. A UN report concluded that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during the conflict.

2009: On January 18, Israel and Hamas declare unilateral ceasefires, ending the 22-day battle which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians as well as 13 Israelis.

2011: On March 27, Israel deploys an anti-rocket missile defense system called Iron Dome, which allows the country to intercept short-range rockets regularly fired from Gaza.

2012: Israeli forces kill top Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jaabari in an air strike on November 14 and follow with more strikes over an eight-day campaign during which Hamas retaliates by firing rockets at Jerusalem for the first time. More than 130 Palestinians as well as five Israelis are killed.

2014: In June, three Israeli teenagers are abducted and murdered near the West Bank city of Hebron. Israeli authorities blame Hamas for the incident and on July 8, launch multiple air strikes on Gaza, prompting an exchange of rocket fire with Hamas over a seven-week period. The Israeli missile strikes result in the deaths of more than 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza.

2018: On March 30, tens of thousands of Palestinians rally near the Israeli border in the Gaza Strip to protest Israel’s blockade of the enclave. Demonstrations continue for several months. At least 189 Palestinians were killed and more than 6,000 injured during these protests between the end of March and the end of December 2018, according to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry mandated by the UN Human Rights Council.

2021: Palestinian worshippers clash with Israeli police in May at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque compound following weeks of mounting tension. Hamas unleashes a barrage of rockets into Israel after demanding Israeli forces withdraw from the compound. Israel responds with air strikes on Gaza, setting off an 11-day conflict resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people.

2022: Israel pounds Gaza with air strikes on August 5, killing a senior militant of the Islamic Jihad group and triggering retaliatory rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave. At least 40 Palestinians are killed in the three days of fighting that follow.

2023: Israeli forces kill nine Palestinian Islamic Jihad gunmen and civilians on January 26 in a raid on a flashpoint town in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian militants hit back by firing two rockets, triggering retaliation from Israel. No further casualties are reported.

On October 7, Hamas mounts an unprecedented, multipronged surprise attack on Israel with fighters infiltrating the heavily fortified Gaza border in several locations by air, land and sea. Israeli forces respond with air strikes on Gaza and military reinforcements to the border.

And, yeah, I know the historical / cultural roots of Arab-Israeli-Persian conflicts way predate 1947.

 

UPDATE

[HuffPo] As Israel escalates its attacks on Gaza, the State Department is discouraging diplomats working on Middle East issues from making public statements suggesting the U.S. wants to see less violence, according to internal emails viewed by HuffPost.

In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”

The revelation provides a stunning signal about the Biden administration’s reluctance to push for Israeli restraint as the close U.S. partner expands the offensive it launched after Hamas ―which rules Gaza ― attacked Israeli communities on Oct. 7.

Bad portent. Update below:

Israeli President Says There Are No Innocent Civilians In Gaza
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog said as Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians to evacuate their homes.

...When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”

Wink, wink. Equally bad, if not worse.

 

 

MORE...

Rumors of a ‘Global Day of Jihad’ Have Unleashed a Dangerous Wave of Disinformation
The rapid spread of violent videos and photos, combined with a toxic stew of mis- and disinformation, now threatens to spill over into real-world violence.

FAR-RIGHT FIGURES IN the United States are making violent threats against Muslims in response to what they believe is a planned “global day of jihad” today.

The violent rhetoric comes in response to comments made in a statement by Khaled Meshaal, the founder and former leader of Hamas, to Reuters on Wednesday. Meshaal called for protests on October 13 across the Arab world in support of the Palestinians before adding: “To all scholars who teach jihad ... to all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application [of theories].”

While Meshaal very specifically made the calls for protests in “the Arab and Islamic worlds,” his comments were quickly mistranslated online to become a “global day of jihad,” a phrase he did not use.

In the toxic stew of misinformation and disinformation that has circulated online in the days since Hamas’ attack on Israel, those misinterpreted comments have been weaponized by right-wing lawmakers and influencers to suggest that Hamas is planning attacks on non-Muslims. This latest round of online disinformation now threatens to spill over into real-world violence.

Users of pro-Trump message boards and extremist channels on Telegram, as well as mainstream platforms like X, formerly Twitter, repeatedly claimed that they would be carrying firearms today; some claimed they would be prepared to use those weapons if or when they encountered Muslims. In many cases, people referred to Muslims using racial slurs.

In response, some police authorities in US cities, including New York and Los Angeles, announced that they plan to boost officer numbers to counter any potential violence. Some schools in the US and in the UK have closed due to concerns about “an international day of rage ” or “out of an abundance of caution.”…

#LIKEWAR

 

UPDATE

[via NBC News] Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa'ad, to "kill as many people as possible," seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.

The attack plans, which are labeled "top secret" in Arabic, appear to be orders for two highly trained Hamas units to surround and infiltrate villages and target places where civilians, including children, gather. Israeli authorities are still determining the death toll in Kfar Sa'ad.

The documents were found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists by Israeli first responders and shared with NBC News. They include detailed maps and show that Hamas intended to kill or take hostage civilians and school children…

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

apropos of some of my prior posts.

 

__________