Israeli warnings and air strikes on Lebanon raise fears of regional escalation into full-scale war.

Israeli air raids hitting mostly southern and eastern Lebanon have killed at least 492 people and wounded at least 1,645, according to the country's health ministry, in the deadliest day of conflict in Lebanon since its 1975-90 civil war.

The ministry said the death toll on Monday included at least 35 children, 58 women and two medics as the bombardments hit homes, medical centres, ambulances and cars of people trying to flee.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese fled the south, and the main highway out of the southern port city of Sidon was jammed with cars heading towards Beirut in the biggest exodus since the 2006 fighting.

The occupation state's now-daily killing rampages across Lebanon have not disrupted Hezbollah's ability to retaliate. Importantly, the resistance intends to meet Israel's every crass massacre with a qualitative military thrust into the enemy's depth and vulnerabilities.

A significant shift has taken place on the southern Lebanese front in the last few days. Barely had Benjamin Netanyahu's government announced its new war goal of returning displaced settlers to their northern homes and begun the transfer of military weight to the north before Tel Aviv launched a series of incendiary strikes throughout Lebanon.

Israel's first salvo was two terror attacks conducted simultaneously in several parts of the country by detonating consumer-tech devices - pagers and walkie-talkies - that killed 39 civilians and permanently blinded and dismembered thousands more. Two days later, Israeli fighter jets bombed two residential buildings in Beirut's southern suburb, killing 54 people, including women and children, and assassinating several commanders of Hezbollah's elite Radwan Forces, including the head of the forces, Ibrahim Aqil, while expanding its air strikes to target what the Israelis claimed were Hezbollah's "military capabilities."

The Lebanese Resistance movement does not deny that the strikes on the southern suburb were painful for both Hezbollah and its supporters. But they make clear that the Israeli attacks did not affect either their military structure or operation capabilities. The evidence of this came swiftly, with an initial Hezbollah retaliation targeting the Ramat David Military Airbase - the main base for occupation airforce strikes on Lebanon and Syria - and the Rafael military industries complex, southeast and north of Haifa, respectively.

If there is a politico-historical thread running from Louis Riel and the buffalo-hunting Métis rebels in Confederation-era Manitoba, via Ottawa's creation of three second-class Prairie provinces, followed by decades of friction over resource ownership and taxation, all the way to the convoys of diesel-powered trucks that rumbled into Ottawa to protest federal vaccine mandates in the winter of 2022, few have taken note. David Solway is one. As the main convoy leaders await a court verdict, Solway is taking the long view. He asserts that the truckers' protest is a powerful contemporary manifestation of a recurring theme - perhaps the defining theme - of how Canada is governed, and to whose benefit. But while Canada's late-19th century leaders were flawed men who made mistakes, Solway finds, the country's current federal leadership appears outright bent on destruction.

The method of history stands in jarring contrast to that of the journalist with his "spot news." Its study becomes an exercise in proportion...If men would only apply to affairs the time-scale which even their own single life-span (to say nothing of the centuries) puts at their disposal...

— Arthur R.M. Lower, Colony to Nation: A History of Canada

Canadian society has evolved since 1867, but the basic outline of our national political institutions has not. As was the case in 1867, these institutions still lack the capacity to accommodate regional circumstances and regional equality.

— Donald J. Savoie, Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions

A German "Citizens Council" has submitted recommendations to the German Ministry of the Interior calling, among other things, for the potential criminalisation of "disinformation". The council was assembled by the Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany's most influential public policy think-tank, in partnership with the Ministry of the Interior itself, and it was tasked with formulating recommendations on how best to combat "disinformation".

The project as a whole, known as "Forum Against Fakes", included both a "council" of 120 German citizens, ostensibly selected to represent the diversity of German society, and an online survey. The "Citizens Report", which was handed over to Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser on September 12th (see photo above), includes a recommendation titled: "Consideration of criminal prosecution and/or penalising of the dissemination of disinformation".

Since 2020, or maybe even before that, one of my central mottos has been "choose the lesser of two evils if you have to" or maybe even "choose the lesser of many evils."

That always seemed like a rational and prudent philosophy. You had to choose something, didn't you? You had to vote or had to make day-to-day choices in life, you couldn't just sit around and do nothing. And if you couldn't find a choice that seemed perfectly balanced, perfectly seated in goodness, and love, then you were forced to choose something that wasn't so pristine — something that maybe was not all bad, and maybe better than the other choice.

Or you could not choose at all. If it wasn't exactly, or close to exactly, what you thought was ok, you could also just not make a choice. And wait for the better thing to come along one day. But who was going to do that?

Well, truthfully, doing nothing never really seemed like the right thing to "do." That seemed lazy, unconscious, blind, and irresponsible. As humans, isn't that our first responsibility to ourselves and to the world — doing something?

Remember the adage, "Faith without works is dead." A materialist male must have come up with that one. I don't necessarily disagree with its fundamental reasoning. If our inaction (or "works") is due to laziness or fear, then the saying is right on. But action could also be spurned on by fear. And in that case, a decision of "being" becomes the right one. (Often, we correlate "doing" with the masculine, and "being" with the feminine.)

I do believe, in today's world, there is a place for "doing nothing" — and the word "doing" is the key here. When I say "doing" I mean physically manipulating matter. "Thinking," as per my specific definition here, is not doing. The definition of these words needs to be more refined to use them properly in my context, but I hope you understand what I am getting at. I am making a distinction between "doing" and "being." So, for further clarity, my definition of doing doesn't include prayer, for example, prayer falls under "being" in this context. "Loving" is not "doing" — expressing love in the physical realm is doing, but "feeling love" is "being." Holding the truth in God is "being" — not "doing."

Get the picture?

I'm not sure about you, but the last thing I want to talk about is elections. When I think of how much of my precious time has been wasted hearing about politics in the last year, I want to puke. No more from pollsters, talking heads, or statisticians.

Well, maybe I'd like to talk about statisticians, as in the old joke about the one that drowned because he forded a river that was only three feet deep, on average. See, isn't that better than politics already? However, as funny as a drowned statistician may be, there is a serious side to the problem with relying on averages. You really can die, for starters.

Before getting back to death and/or politics again (redundancy, I know), let's think about the use of averages. A car may be designed for the average - one doesn't find the tallest person on earth and design an interior to accommodate them. The exceptions get to either bang their shins or dangle their feet, but that's the way it has to be.

Sharmarke Issa was responsible for $7.6 million of the $50 million in the Feeding Our Future (FOF) nutrition program fraud scheme. He took $35 million for himself, but must pay it back in restitution.

A Somalian refugee who chaired the board of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA) pled guilty on Wednesday to federal wire fraud charges. Sharmarke Issa, 40, of Edina, facilitated a multi-million dollar money laundering operation that stole money from a COVID fund intended to feed hungry children, court records show.

Issa was responsible for $7.6 million of the $50 million in the Feeding Our Future (FOF) nutrition program fraud scheme, Assistant US Attorney Matthew Ebert told the court. $3.5 million was the portion that Issa took for himself and will have to pay that much in restitution as well as forfeit the properties he bought with fraud money as part of the plea agreement.

Authorities in Gaza have accused the IDF of committing a "horrific massacre" at the al-Falah school.

At least 21 people, including 13 children, have been confirmed killed by an Israeli drone strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza, the enclave's government has said. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claims that Hamas was operating a command center in the building.

The strike took place at the al-Falah school in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City on Saturday morning. Six women and a three-month-old baby were also among the victims, according to Gaza's Government Media Office. At least 30 people were reported wounded and two more are unaccounted for, in what the office called a "horrific massacre."

In a scathing revelation before Congress, former San Diego Sector Border Patrol Chief Aaron Heitke accused the Biden-Harris administration of covering up a sharp rise in encounters with suspected terrorists at the U.S.-Mexico border.

During a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing titled "A Country Without Borders: How Biden-Harris' Open-Borders Policies Have Undermined Our Safety and Security," Heitke said he was muzzled from releasing critical information on the number of Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) — individuals with known or suspected ties to terrorism — apprehended in California.

Heitke testified:

"I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIAs or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border."

Russell 'Texas' Bentley went missing in Donetsk in April.

Russian authorities have accused four members of the Donetsk People's Republic militia of kidnapping and killing an American, Russell 'Texas' Bentley, earlier this year.

Texas-born Bentley joined the militia in 2014, when Kiev-backed forces attempted to quell an uprising against the armed coup that had overthrown the government. He later became a Russian citizen and worked as a stringer for Sputnik news agency. He disappeared on April 8, during a Ukrainian artillery attack on Donetsk.

On Friday, the Russian Investigative Committee announced criminal charges against four soldiers, alleging that they tortured Bentley to death and then tried to cover up their crime by destroying his car and moving the body.

Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko named the four suspects as Vitaly Vasnyatsky, Vladislav Agaltsev, Vladimir Bazhin and Andrey Iordanov, all members of the 'Oplot' brigade of the Russian armed forces, formerly the DPR militia. They face multiple charges, including assault and torture causing death and covering up a serious crime.

According to the investigation, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev and Iordanov assaulted Bentley on April 8. The torture they subjected him to inadvertently killed him, whereupon Vansyatsky and Agaltsev used a block of TNT to blow up a VAZ 2115 car with Bentley's body inside. The following day, Vasnyatsky ordered Bazhin to cover up the crime by moving Bentley's remains elsewhere.