New Horizons by Max Roy

    Recollections Of An Earlier Time   I am thinking back to beginnings, about the things in our early lives that may have impacted the kinds of people we became. On the street where I lived during my pre-teens, in the terraced housing, drunken fathers beat wives and children. In one hovel, a woman drank peroxide to escape her unbearable existence. The neighbor’s oldest daughter dated a bootlegger with a shiny car. The younger children of our neighbor marched outside our door, shouting catcalls and throwing stones at our windows. This is the world I inhabited, with solicitous parents and two sisters, one older, one younger. Being the sole male offspring was a matter of some importance in the context of that time. My early years paralleled the years of the Depression in Canada. In that world, my father was unemployed and we were on Welfare. I had to scrabble around on the ground,  fighting my contemporaries many times, for no reason I could understand, except that only the

                     Baby Talk! I need to change the subject! Are any of the people out there experiencing a new life in their family? Has it affected your life in a serious way? Have you found that a baby is at the beginning of your conversation with people, and often at the end as well?   Are you experiencing a lot of baby talk? Is it ok to talk about personal things to people I haven’t seen for ten, twenty or never years? It could be the epitome of boring what I am attempting here, taxing your patience. Sobeit, the die is cast. I am looking forward to my ninetieth birthday, a few life experiences behind me. The truth is I am rather full of myself. I have plenty of stuff I want to talk about and I am not at all put off if the conversation turns around to a discussion of my exploits, current and past. But since I became a great-grandfather to my great-grand-daughter, the air is full of baby talk, some of it even initiated by me. There is something so exciting about a new lif

                           New Horizons! One thing we know, if we know nothing else, the world around us seems to be changing at an accelerating pace. In spite of the saying “plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose”, which may apply to the nature of man, we can’t deny what we are experiencing. This is nothing new, and yet we sometimes fear that the horizon we perceive will be like that imagined in the Middle Ages. Some believed that If we sail our ships to the new horizon, we could sail beyond that edge and we might fall off the world. Some are warning humanity that permitting the full development of Artificial Intelligence, (AI) unchecked, will confront humans with the threat we faced similarly with development of the nuclear option in warfare, mutually assured destruction. Can humans lose control of a robotic   mechanism that never ceases to learn from its experiences with no element of human intervention that can shut it down? Can the algorithm learn how to manage humans rather th

      No-one Promised Us A Rose Garden! We all arrived here with no notion of where we came from and where we were going. We had no idea where we would land. Looking around at the landscape as we became more aware, we could count ourselves pretty lucky if we were in a place where we could read and understand this story. There are so many places in the world where most North Americans believe prospects for living the good life would be much thinner. We could define that in many different ways, and one’s attitude could differ greatly depending what one has come to believe as “good”. There are billions of people around the world who believe that the lives they lead are “good.” And not just because they were promised such by a politician. We know that the kind of lives people lead can vary markedly from geographical place to place. We also have to know that people’s lives can differ markedly in the particular location where we are situated. We worry a lot about our particular fate. W

                                                                                    Jenin As in the instance of many complicated issues, we cannot begin a discussion of the specifics issues without providing background and context.  During the last few days of mid-August , 2023, The IDF entered Jenin in what Jews call Judea and Samaria. This portion of the originally mandated territory is   in Area A under the governing authority of the Palestinian Authority in accordance with international agreements called the Oslo Accords. This agreement was voluntarily implemented by Israel because the Accords were never signed by the Palestinian Authority then under the leadership of the now- deceased Yasser Arafat. At this time there was the international aspiration that there might be a two-state solution to the conflict. Under this agreement the disputed territory occupied by Israel after three wars was divided into three areas. Area C, the largest piece was essential vacant land with littl