What a heck of a morning! Two days left in the pool season, the weather ambiguous about how to treat the swimmers who will have to transition to inside aquatics with more chemicals and strange dedicated citizens in more crowded circumstance.
It is a mild metaphor to the events on this day in 1939, the ones in which the Germans decided to invade Poland in recompense for the savagery that followed their parent’s first adventure of this epoch into the fields of France. That chapter of humanity’s collective madness began in Sarajevo some 110 years ago, and is not complete yet. Victor Davis Hanson is one of our favorite military historians, renowned in his survey of the classics, and he is out with an appreciation on the fact that we have a similar playing field of outrage, aggression and revenge in this change of seasons, only with America, Russia, Israel, Iran and China all with atomic weapons and a certain ambiguity about actually using them to solve perceptual problems.
Like Gaza. This is the word from yesterday. You recall the issues. The people in Gaza are termed “Palestinian” in some quarters, though there is some ambiguity about who exactly is whom in that neighborhood. Iran has provided money and motivation in the Gazan struggle about the other refugees in that neighborhood, the ones who returned after exile by the Romans for somebody and genocidal slaughter by the Germans whose invasion of the Poles we observe today.
The Iranians supported the strange raid on an Israeli music festival last year, the one that killed some 1,200 civilians and took hundreds hostage. The Israelis took umbrage at that act, and apparently are near resolving some of the military aspects this weeks There are interesting stories about how this was accomplished amid the mixed messaging of outrage and success. It includes reference to Artificial Intelligence mixing all sorts of data from a variety of sensors and synthesizing new and rapid lethality into the battle-space.
We don’t claim to understand it, but with the reports of drones and missiles and robotic augmentation to the traditional means of violence, we suspect we are into something as new as the lightning war introduced in 1939. The “Blitz Krieg.”
So, that is this morning.
There is also something of a blitz of something called “joy” in the abruptly changed campaign here in America. You may also recall that the current President who we had been assured was “sharp as a tack” was a little fatigued and unable to campaign with all the stresses of the current world situation and is taking a little time at vacations on the beach, then California, and then at the Beach again. With tack-like precision, he registered his disapproval on the murder of six of the hostages who had been held for nearly a year before being executed on this Labor Day Holiday as the Israelis advanced toward the tunnel where they had been held.
The Gaza turmoil is just a chapter of the larger story of Iran- old Persia’s modern incarnation- and its struggle to assert its place on the World Stage with Russia’s turn to an emasculated Europe and China’s assertive motion in the South and East China Sea. Taiwan is naturally interested.
So, 64 days left to some resolution of this beach vacation or electoral frolic here in America.
We are stocking up on a few things to ensure we can cover minor disruptions in distribution, should they occur. But what an interesting time, you know? They might have said this on the first day of September 85 years ago.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com