Month: May 2021

The most purely unbounded sport to have ever existed

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A sport with no rules and no “team” evolves at warp speed. The pressure of individual creativity forces evolution, and what spontaneously emerges is the most technical, most creative, and most individual sport in existence. Or can this even be classified as “sport”? It is a deeply technical, deeply personal pursuit. Both a goal to be pursued, but also engaged in for its own sake. There is the unconscious pursuit of “flow”, the desire to function at the very limit of our abilities, while pushing against, and sometimes breaking through, that boundary. Experienced skateboarders even appear to move beyond talent and to have developed a ‘palate’ that is evident in their skating. This is kaleidic, unbounded evolution in realtime.

 

July 22nd, 1946: Zionist militant group bombs British headquarters in Jerusalem, killing 91

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The Arab/Israeli conflict is complex, fascinating, heartbreaking. One such incident amid those violent first years is the 1946 Kind David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people. The bombing was committed by the Irgun Zionist militant group in response to the British-led Operation Agatha. Over 10,000 British soldiers had raided various Jewish militant headquarters, arresting 2,700 in the process. The purpose was allegedly to find proof of official approval of various terrorist activities on the part of the Jewish Agency, which they did. The response from the Zionist terrorist groups was the King David bombing, which ironically proved British suspicions.

I’m neck deep in this history at the moment. I’ll be writing almost exclusively on this topic because it is fascinating, and also because no one knows anything about it. Terrorism is encoded in the DNA of modern-day Israel, but it didn’t have to be this way. There were movements to establish a peacefully-coexisting state, but those voices were overrun, and a violent ultra-nationalist, ethnocentric government was born.

The heart of every excuse behind Israeli atrocities

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If we’re talking millennia, then all of us could easily trace some blood relation back to anywhere in the world. So if my magic conch shell tells me that Ireland or Scotland is somehow divinely ordained to me because “my people” once lived there, I must then have the right to expel whoever happens to be living there now, by any means necessary, and establish my own government? And then proceed to corral those who won’t leave into an open-air prison and reign terror and death upon them as a punishment for refusing to leave? Am I doing this right? I realize that this type of primitive back-and-forth has been going on since the dawn of our species, but I would prefer that my own government not fund and arm one side. Israel doesn’t get along with its neighbors because it doesn’t have to. Uncle Sam, meaning the US taxpayer, is footing the bill. No different that our funding of Saudi Arabia’s slow motion Yemen holocaust. By all means, let them fight it out, but lets remove our thumb from the scales. Let’s see how Israel does in a fair fight, without big brother standing behind it. My guess is they would play nice.

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