In thinking about how to make a blog post out of this, I ended up in a circular, self-referential discussion about this with myself.  Here is a comment I made on a video clip of the Bill Maher show.

Maher has some very good advice for himself.  On a slight twist for what he is recommending for U.S. policy, maybe the people who say things about 9/11 that anger people should ask themselves, “Do I really want to do this?  What’s the point?”

Yes, they have every right to say what they do.  They even have a valid point.  They even know that the reaction might be to their remarks might not be rational.  As he says about the US putting bases in places like Saudi Arabia, “Do I really want to do this?  What’s the point?”

The people who get angry about this kind of remark about our Saudi Arabian policy don’t want to take this advice any more than Maher wants to take the advice about being cautious with his own remarks.

What irony on both sides.

As I thought about including the video in this post, I had to ask myself, “Do I really want to do this?  What’s the point?”

The point of this blog is only to allow people to think about the circularity about reasoning about this question.  It might also raise some thoughts about applying such reasoning on the reverse side of related issues.  Hence, the circularity of the whole discussion. And finally to the last part of the headline.  If we want to have a conversation to figure out what to do, how can we have it?

Since I do not want to anger people, I am not going to embed the video in this post.  I will give you a link to the item that has the video replay.  Click on the link only if you really want to see the video.  Maher, Moore defend Tony Bennett’s 9/11 comments.

To the mathematically inclined reader, shades of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

Now that I am on my Cenk Uygur kick, I stumbled across the video Israel Could Partner With Terrorists To Fight Turkey

If you want your head to really spin, watch this video that talks about Israel, Palestinians, Turkey, Armenians, and Muslims. I am not sure you can tell the good guys from the bad guys without a program. (My head is spinning so much, I can’t even figure out if that pun is intended or not.)

This really ought to light a fire under the discussion that has started on my Facebook page since I posted a number of articles about the Middle East today.

Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks are going to join Al Gore’s Current TV. That explains the reference in the video below to Al Gore being Cenk’s new boss.

The only reason for posting this video is to demonstrate why I like to watch Cenk Uygur so much. I have The Young Turks on my personal web page about the search for intelligent news as one of the 78 items there (not all of them really that intelligent). I should remember to watch it more often.

According to The Colbert Report article accompanying this video, Jeremy Ben-Ami,

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the [pro-Peace,] pro-Israel lobby J Street, discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Palestine’s application for full U.N. membership.

Even in this situation, sometimes a little humor can help to clarify. Well, I am not really sure what it clarifies.

Perhaps to fully appreciate some of the comments in the interview, you have to see the piece, Obama’s U.N. Gaffes & Rick Perry’s Support for Israel, that preceded this video.

The article on The Real News, Palestinians, Israelis Skeptic of UN Bid, provides fodder for the support of all the points of view on this issue.

Here is the video from that story.

Now that Google + is open to the public, I have managed to sign up.  It’s kind of lonely over here with only about 30 of my friends.  Why don’t you join us?

Steve on Google +

Sign Up For Google +

At Ohio River bridge, Obama calls out McConnell, Boehner on jobs describes Obama’s recent trip to highlight one of the bridges that he mentioned in his address to Congress about his jobs bill.

Speaking of the Brent Spence Bridge, Obama said the 48-year-old structure was “functionally obsolete.”

Local leaders have worked for more than 10 years to replace or repair the bridge. Current plans have a $2.4 billion price tag because they involve a 7.8-mile stretch of I-75 in the two states.

The bridge is a linchpin along the nation’s busiest freight corridor. About 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — or about $400 billion in goods — travels across it each year. But it was designed to carry 80,000 vehicles a day. Today, it carries about 170,000, Obama said.

There may be some who have trouble conceiving of the connection between infrastructure repair and job creation.  Imagine the impact on jobs if this bridge that carries about $400 billion in goods each year were to collapse due to lack of repairs.  I would think that spending $2.4 billion to repair or replace the bridge to make sure that the flow of good is not interrupted would have a very good return on investment.  That would seem to me a better investment than giving an equivalent amount of money to the wealthy “job creators” who would just turn around and park that money in US government bonds instead of creating and maintaining jobs.

The article Poll: Vast majority of Israelis would accept U.N. recognizing Palestine begins with the following:

Nearly 70 percent of Israelis surveyed recently said that Israel should accept a Palestinian state if the United Nations chooses to recognize it, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of The Jerusalem Post.

Contrary to the previous post, Obama U.N. speech sparks angry Palestinian protests, perhaps this one is a surprise to readers of this blog.

According to the Claude Shannon theory of information, this post with the surprise in it carries much more information than the one that is no surprise.  I am in the process of reading the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick where he explains Claude Shannon’s theories.

From the article Obama U.N. speech sparks angry Palestinian protests, comes the following first paragraph:

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Angry Palestinians on Thursday protested in the streets of Ramallah and Gaza after a UN speech by US President Barack Obama which was seen as unashamedly pro-Israel.

I can’t imagine that anybody is surprised by this. Just in case my imagination has failed me, for the one or two readers of this blog who might be surprised, I refer you back to the September 18, 2011 post Save the United States and Israel From Themselves.

I hope that the President has given careful thought to how the United States will respond to the inevitable backlash actions. Although, there is no evidence that President Obama has ever foreseen the consequences of his compromises with the Republicans.

This isn’t a new story, but I just stumbled across it. The article in The Lowell Sun is Helmet in hand during Lowell visit, Democratic front-runner Elizabeth Warren says she’s ready for Senate battle.

The Harvard law professor, who officially joined the race Wednesday as the Democratic front-runner, stopped by Xenith yesterday to tour the Lowell sports-helmet manufacturer. She toured the warehouse, shook hands with assembly-line workers, oohed and aahed over machines measuring impact on helmeted test dummies, and went home with a gifted football helmet.

I found the article interesting for a little bit of understanding of some aspects of Elizabeth Warren that I had not seen surface in the media yet.  It touches a little more on her personality and likability. There are a few personal snippets in the video.

If you are interested in more details about Elizabeth Warren, you can always read her WikiPedia bio.