Israel Palestine 1000:1

A great celebration in Gaza is anticipated, as a thousand prisoners are about to be released. Prisoners with many heads on their belts: heads of butchered children, of toddlers, of people who took the wrong turn; prisoners who planted bombs in school busses, or knifed civilians and cut their hearts out.

In return for these prisoners, a single Israeli soldier will be released. And the Arab street is rejoicing. Not only does it celebrate the release of sons and daughters. It celebrates bringing Israeli to its knees. A thousand to one, can there be a bigger victory against the empire of evil?

The world, as well, does not understand. How can a country be so irresponsible? How can it release a thousand, many of whom will, undoubtedly, return to commit more atrocities and murders?

It was, no doubt, a painful decision, which no other government would have taken. But it was a brave one.

For over five years, an entire country cared about the captured soldier, stood by his family, demonstrated day and night for his release. Pain, disagreements and political disputes do not change the fact that a lost son is everyone’s son. This is the very reason that despite the wars and the terrorist attacks, Israel is a lively vibrant culture. When bombs blew up coffee shops and bars, Israel night life remained like no other. When war called people to their military service, and budgets away from the people, Israel has turned itself into a high-tech power house, second only to the Silicon Valley. A place where the daily encounter with death makes it alive. So in times when Arab governments are busy sacrificing thousands of their own people, Israel is sacrificing its own safety to save one. This is a culture that the Arab world could never accept, and has always tried to destroy: a culture where the life of a single person is worth the world.

Quotes From the Honest Guru: War

 

You need two willing parties for a war, but only one for a genocide.

Quotes From the Honest Guru: Revolution

Every successful revolution has been the result of anger and dissatisfaction, rather than philosophical pursuits.

Quotes From the Honest Guru: War

A single wolf is all that is needed to wipe out an entire herd of well-intending sheep.

Refuting a scientific theory: the theory of ether

 
This post is a continuation from The Boundaries of Science

To demonstrate how established scientific theories can be refuted, let’s look at the theory of Ether, which was the dominant theory for an entire generation of scientists.

Since Maxwell (1831–1879) formulated the electromagnetic theory in 1865, 19th century scientists had puzzled how electromagnetic waves, such as radio or light, traveled through vacuum and the emptiness of space. Just like waves in water or sound in air, the argument went, electromagnetic waves needed a physical medium to travel through. For this reason alone, a new substance, ether, was proposed. (Although the term ‘ether’ was borrowed from Aristotle, the 19th century’s ether was a different concept altogether.)

According to the theory, ether filled in the entire universe, including vacuum and the inside of material bodies. As such, it had to be a weightless, transparent, frictionless matter that did not take part in any physical or chemical interaction, and was, therefore, impossible to test or verify.

Yet, the theory of ether could predict that light emanating from a moving object in the direction of its movement would travel faster than light emanating from the same object in any other direction. (To illustrate, imagine an item thrown from a moving car. Clearly, if we threw it in the direction of our travel it would travel faster than if we threw it in the opposite direction.)

Michelson and Morley relied on this hypothesis in 1887, when they attempted to determine the speed of earth in space by measuring the difference between the speed of a beam of light traveling in the direction of earth, and that of a beam of light traveling perpendicular to earth’s movement.

Had Michelson and Morley detected the difference they expected, it would have put their names, in a side note, as the first scientists to measure the absolute speed of earth. As it turned out, the experiment failed and no difference was detected. Even though Michelson and Morley could not explain their result, it was sufficient to inflict a death sentence on the theory of ether, and to win Michelson the 1907 Nobel Prize for physics. This experiment subsequently led Einstein to develop the theory of relativity.

Israel - the benevolent guardian

I wonder if it is the right timing for the Palestinian to demand their own independence now, while the Arab Spring is devouring its victims, and the Arab summer is likely to get worse.

After all, the way the Arab are treating their own people (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, …) as they have always done (Hamas in Gaza, Lebanon Civil War, Algerian Civil War, Jordan 1973, Egypt invading Yemen 1960s, to name a few ) makes Israel look like a benevolent guardian.

Every spring leads to winter; in Egypt it may skip summer altogether

In a typical convoluted Arab political logic, a senior Egyptian source blamed Israel that the raid of the mob on its embassy in Cairo did not yield the desired results.

A senior Egyptian security source said that the room which the mob was able to breach in the embassy's first floor was left unsecured, and the documents that were found there were "worthless."

"This was a trap for those who broke into the room, so Israel could drag Egypt into a diplomatic crisis by claiming that the embassy was compromised," the source maintained.

Many in the west have called it the Arab Spring.