10/7/2026

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

1985 PLO terrorists seized the Italian cruise liner, Achille Lauro

1990 Israel began handing out gas masks to its citizens

1991 Law Professor Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments to her

1996 Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News with Roger Ailes as CEO

2016 Washington Post released a videotape of Donald Trump boasting of groping and kissing women without consent

2023 October 7th, Israel was attacked by Hamas

In bed at 9, up at 4:55; 0510 117/74/70 100 202.2; 57/49/71/55, sunny

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.  Entresto at 5:45 a.m. and p.m.

Benjamin Moser's book.  For some reason, I thought of Yeats' poem The Stolen Child as I read Chapter 6 of Anti-Zionism, A Jewish History, "The Baghdad Bombs:Avi Schlaim, Iraq, Isreal, United Kindom."  This is where the author first mentions the historical work of Ilan Pappé and Avi Schlaim, where he discusses the Zionist myth of "the immaculate conception" of the State of Israel, that the State came into existence because of minority group of courateous, plucky Jews in Palestine were surrounded by hostile Arab states and a hostile Palestinian Arab population who were unwilling to live with this bunch of mostly Ashkenazi European Jews in Palestine and that Israel bears no responsibility for the @750,000 Palestinian refugees.

By “immaculate conception,” Shlaim meant an account in which the new state was born essentially without moral stain or responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948—in other words, without an “original sin.” He used the phrase in the historiographical debate of the late 1980s and 1990s between Israel’s traditional historians and the so-called New Historians, including Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Simha Flapan.

The traditional narrative Shlaim was criticizing tended to emphasize several propositions: Britain had obstructed Zionism and favored the Arabs; the Jewish community was a military underdog in 1948; the surrounding Arab states were united in trying to destroy Israel; Palestinian Arabs largely fled voluntarily or at the urging of Arab leaders; and Israel earnestly sought peace afterward while Arab rejectionism prevented it. Shlaim characterized that cluster of claims as the “immaculate conception” version of Israel’s birth.

The New Historians challenged parts of that picture using Israeli archives opened decades after the war. Benny Morris, for example, argued that the Palestinian exodus had multiple causes, including flight from combat and fear, but also expulsions by Jewish forces in a substantial number of places. Shlaim challenged the picture of complete Arab unity and argued that there had been significant contacts and tacit understandings between the Zionist leadership and King Abdullah of Transjordan who wanted the West Bank for himself and Jordan.

Shlaim explicitly said that neither he nor Morris was arguing that Israel alone was guilty of everything that happened in 1948. His point was that the traditional account treated the state's birth too much as a morally spotless national epic and was resistant to evidence of expulsions, political maneuvering, military superiority in important phases of the war, and missed opportunities for diplomacy.

“Immaculate conception” = Israel was born essentially innocent of wrongdoing.

“Original sin” = Israel's creation involved a serious injustice to the Palestinian population, particularly the refugee problem.

The terminology was deliberately borrowed from Christian theology, which several historians noted was an ironic vocabulary for a dispute over Zionism and Jewish history.

This book is reinforcing my thinking that Zionism was a bad idea from the very beginning.  I had the thought long before I read the book, but, not surprisingly, this book by a dedicated Jewish anti-Zionist reinforces the belief.  Regardless of whether Herzl's great idea was flawed ab initio, his dream came true in 1948 with the creation of Israel as a Jewish state, an ethno-nation dominated and completely controlled by Jews for Jews.  There was an abundance of support for the new nation around the world almost immediately, largely due to the world's shock upon discovery of the nature and extent of what came to be called the Holocaust, but I can't lose sight of the fact that Israel hasn't known one moment of real peace in the entire 77 years of its existence, and that condition is not likely to improve now that it is considered by millions of people to be a pariah nation.  It's also significant that the State of Israel is especially disfavored among young people, for whom the Holocaust is a matter of ancient history.  Also significant is the fact, in my opinion anyway, that nothing has contributed to anti-semitism more the Zionist state of Israel, its historical treatment of non-Jewish Palestinians, its continued occupation of Palestinian land, and its apartheid.

The Stolen Child (1886)

William Butler Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland / Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island / Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rats / There we've hid our faery vats,

Full of berrys / And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child! /To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. . . 

Away with us he's going, / The solemn-eyed:

He'll hear no more the lowing / Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob / Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob / Round and round the oatmeal chest.

For he comes, the human child, / To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

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Take me out behind the barn and shoot me.  That's the feeling I had as I read Ezra Klein's interview in this morning's NYTimes of David Robinson, who wrote OpenAI’s safety protocols and who resigned from OpenAI last week.  The interview lasted 75 minutes, and confirmed my many fears about the world that awaits us with the competitive development of what Donald Trump has tried to re-name Superintelligence.  Here are some excerpts.

David: Ezra, what was part of the cognitive dissonence for me was we keep publishing these warnings, but ultimately we're still training and deploying these dangerous models that we're warning about.  In telling colleagues why I way leaving, one of the things that I said was, look, no matter how many warnings we publish, we've got to ask whether what we're actually doing is reasonable.

Ezra: Astra 6 was the first description of model where I saw you all say, well, this model looks like it's doing what we want it to do, but we're not sure if it's deceiving us.

David: Yes.

Ezra: And we're not sure if we now have the capability to know whether it's deceiving us. 

. . . .

David: The reality now is that we have systems that are really at the limit of our ability to understand and control what they're doing . . . Paul Christiano, [a member of OpenAi's  board of directors and] one of the world's leading experts on AI safety, has said there's a meaningful chance of catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.

Ezra: I see all these reports about rogue AI incidents. . . And Sam Altman just said in an interview with Politico there are more rogue incidents than we even know about publicly yet.  .  . We are put a huge amount of company resources into getting these AIs that we don't control into building AIs we will understand even less, even faster.

David: Yes.

Ezra: And I saw that and I feel like I'm a crazy person.

David: It seems crazy to me, too. . .  This system doesn't make sense.  I said to myself, this is nuts.

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Another small part of the interview addressed whether AI is simply a major advance in software development or "a new species."  David Robinson sided with those who say it's a new species.  This question is intimately related to the question of whether these programs/models// or whatever we call them have consciousness, like human consciousness, whether they can feel emotions and whether they can suffer, as humans do.  They also raise profound questions of what all this means in terms of our idea of God and of the Creation, all sorts of theological questions.