Friday, May 17, 2024

Who to Vote for President?

Tom Kando

The presidential election is coming up. We will have four more years of the same president we had before - either a good and decent octogenarian who is doing his best, who is a normal human being, who is overseeing a country that is doing quite well despite  turbulence overseas and a general domestic malaise, Or an unpredictable weirdo  who is likely to steer the country deeper into right-wing  chaos and extremism.  

The president of the US matters. So I Googled this topic once again. Who were our good and successful presidents, and the bad  ones? One Wikipedia website offers this in the form of metadata:

Twenty-one separate rankings obtained throughout the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st.  

US Presidential Rankings

I summarize the combined results below: 

Read more...

Thursday, May 9, 2024

Israel's Mistake

Tom Kando 

I have always been a strong supporter of Israel. Of its right to exist. Of Jews’ right to have a homeland. Of this homeland existing peacefully side-by-side next to an independent Palestinian homeland. Does this make me a Zionist? I also happen to be Jewish, in the sense that my family on my mother’s side was Jewish. In the last year of World War Two (1945), my grandparents and other relatives were evicted from their homes in Budapest, forced to wear a yellow star, and incarcerated in the city’s Jewish holding centers awaiting shipment to Auschwitz. 

I remain a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist, but that country is now going in the wrong direction. I am not addressing the moral question underlying the current war in Gaza. My plea stems from fear and a desire for pragmatism 

What Israel is doing right now is not going to work. The country is going the wrong way. I’m not speaking morally. The moral objection to what Israel is doing has been stated clearly by the thousands of marching students all over the US and elsewhere as well as by a majority of the world’s public opinion. 

What I’m talking about here is the future of Israel, and how to make sure that the country HAS a future. Part of the problem is that in this war, both parties’ objective is the total destruction of the enemy. But what Israel seeks is the destruction of a militant group, whereas Hamas’ objective is the destruction of an entire country. 
Read more...

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Eric Hoffer's view on Israel *

 


* Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic.
Read more...