New Horizons by Max Roy

      Who Is Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf? I am. I’m afraid of the big bad wolf. Who is he? It’s more like an ”it”! I’m afraid of the world-wide Jihadist movement that has spread its tentacles far beyond its birthplace deep in the heart of Arabia. Its strongest visible emanations are currently coming from Iran, fostering it with Qatar. It is deeply implanted in Isis, Islamic State, Al Qaeda, in Syria and Iraq, HAMAS AND HISBULLAH in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. (Paradoxically the U.S. and western Countries, and the UN, are financing terrorism through UNRWA.)   Jihadism had its more recent origin in Afghanistan’s struggle, first against Russia and later the U.S., in the person of the Taliban. Its later evolution in Syria and Iraq devolved into a competition, physically and philosophically, between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.   While these groupings continue to exist, and actually oppose existing Arab regimes, (and are the reason for a U.S. presence,)...

  The Jig Is Up! We have to understand the realities in the Middle East, if we are to understand how things will evolve in the next little while. On one side we have Iran and its proxies, Syria, Iran, and, yes, the Houthis. On the other side we have the established states like Egypt, Jordan, and the oil states like Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf statelets. (Qatar is a special case.)The established states are haunted by sentiment in the street. They see that their very stability is at risk as a consequence of the Iran’s appeal to the Arab masses. They fear the power of the Moslem Brotherhood to arouse the masses. (The Egyptian Army orchestrated a coup to evict them when they were the democratically elected government.) Hamas is their creature on the ground in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, in Gaza and in the West Bank of Israel. Israel’s policy error in tolerating Hamas for so long has cost Israel dearly. Israel saw Hamas as a means of weakening. The Palestinian Authority which they saw as t...

                              WELL-BEING Went into a bookstore today. I saw a whole wall of books with the above heading. That is what I write about all the time, isn’t it? It seems that I have come very late to the parade. A flood of writers have been sharing their ideas on the subject for a long time from every possible point of view. Do you need another one? We, most of us, are pre-occupied with questions of wellbeing in a variety of contexts. It is certainly a concern of mine. Many of my diatribes have a concern for wellbeing at their heart. But they cover much more than concern for the physical aspects of the subject. There is also the wellbeing of the mind, of the spirit. And I worry about the environment we inhabit, both the physical natural one, and the psychic one. I know how worried we are about global warming and related topics like...

             The Dilemma 0f Democracy              In our attempt to present this analysis there may be some internal contradictions that do not destroy the cohesiveness of the argument. The more we welcome strangers the more we may resent how they diminish our ability to control our environment. The world today exhibits a continuing deep gulf between the developed economies and those that are less developed. This arises for various reasons that are not pertinent to this analysis. We can generalize that the developed countries can most-often be characterized as democracies with more or less ordered societies. A feature of these countries is that their economic well-being has been accompanied by falling birth rates. Their economic systems can be described as private enterprise or capitalist. (I would include both China and Russia even though they are not real democracies...

    Sunny Days, Sunny Thoughts! There are so many reasons to be gloomy about events in our world, and some in our lives, that it is imperative that we seek out those things in our lives that are joyful and celebrate them. My Bride has challenged me to do just that. We can rise to that challenge, can’t we? We live in Vancouver, the “sunspot, “ (so much rain here to keep our historic forests green,) of the Canadian panorama. We are surrounded by family at some remove. We are fortunate to have one offspring on site. He has made the life we lead uncomplicated. We have someone we can turn to whatever the problem. He is responsible for our being located very close by, and within reach, of most of the things we might need on a daily basis. The others offspring are within reach by phone or internet. It must be said that we must appeal for help from all of them from time to time. We are in the fortunate position that we have never found ourselves wanting when we make that appeal ...

          Some of The Brave Have Fallen! Today the IDF announced that the IDF has lost almost 600 soldiers since October 7 th .. These losses include those fallen among the 1200, mainly civilians, who were lost on that date in October. IDF soldiers were also slaughtered then, outnumbered, out-gunned and out-maneuvered, while doing their best to resist the onslaught. The war with Hamas has been costly for Palestinian civilians, behind whom Hamas hides, imbedded in every public place. There are no reliable figures for those losses. The IDF has estimated that Hamas has lost nearly 10,000. Civilian deaths are thought to be 1.5 times that number. With Hamas’ death-cult view of life, fighting has been bitter. Individuals Hamas terrorists were willing to sacrifice their own lives as booby traps to take Israeli soldiers with them. Now, however, we have been seeing Hamas terrorists surrendering in their hundreds. The war will end the moment that all Ha...

  The Story Of My Life Are you ready for this? We wake up as babies in a crib somebody organized for us. That’s true. And we spend ten or fifteen years, maybe twenty, in a place these strangers that we got to know organized for us. (If we were lucky! That was nice of them.)   But we are still the people we are, the persons our DNA says we are. We had to have added lots of stuff to what we were from what we learned from happenings around us.   As I watch the early days in the life of my great-granddaughter I think about that. We are a hodge-podge of what we went through in our formative years and what happened to us afterward. In the end, we are the ones who had to put it all together, We were the persons in charge. I am wondering now if I was in charge or just a sponge soaking it all up. How much of it all ran out of my pores and how much stuck? How much of what I learned actually stuck to the walls of my body, my brain? Think about it in your own life. How was it...