Good morning everyone. I am going to keep this one short this morning. Israel has convulsed in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s firing of his Defense Minister, who criticized his plan to overhaul and neuter the nation’s high court.

What, to me, is most helpful in understanding Israel is that this is as close as that nation has ever come to civil war, and in fact, it’s probably the strongest expression of the Israeli people short of actual violence, but violence—Jew on Jew, Israeli on Israeli—is so foul to Israelis that what we’ve seen is nothing short of a revolution. Or as I wrote last week, Israel has pulled a rabbit out of its hat.
Around the world, Israeli embassies have closed doors, a hundred thousand protesters surrounded the Knesset building, and Israelis all over the country leaped out of bed in the night to stand in the street opposing their longtime prime minister, whose head finally outgrew his nation’s ability to tolerate unlimited chutzpah.
And Netanyahu pulled back from the abyss. What else could he do? While in America, on January 6, 2021, about 10,000 fevered Trumpists invaded the Capitol, violently, Israelis got up and stood in the streets, ready for whatever the government had to throw at them. And the government threw…in the towel.
David Thornton has a more in-depth report on this coming later.
Also, regarding David: please read his devastatingly honest take on his cancer journey here.
Next, what should we be discussing following the horrible shootings at a Nashville Christian school? I know what we’re going to hear: one side pushing a complete ban on all semiautomatic hunting rifles, and the other focusing on the fact that the shooter here appears to have a beef with the Christian school and may be transgender.
The main point here is about mental health. People who walk into schools with lethal weapons don’t expect to live through it. It’s an extreme form of suicide, despair, and nihilism. Here we are talking about how to detect it in the most crass ways, and prevent those people from having weapons. But in many cases, those tests fail, because there are literally tens of thousands of motivations to be exploited by the mentally ill. Maybe Americans should take more time to define what mental health is before we test everyone for mental illness.
Our answers are far from agreement, but we need to start by agreeing on what’s open to discussion. Many things are deemed beyond argument. I could link a few, like for some gun activists, any kind of controls on transfer or purchase of guns, including waiting periods; for transgender activists, any discussion of actual dysphoria and the deleterious effects of early transition. There, I’ve canceled myself on both ends.
Thank you for reading The Racket News. I appreciate all of you so much. We are all so fortunate to be alive, with our families, when so many have experienced loss and pain. Perhaps some grace and compassion would help us pull a rabbit out of our hats.
"Mental illness" is not a uniform category to explain things, or explain things away.
There is mental illness that leads to suicide attempts or actual suicide.
Then there is metal illness that leads a person to drive am SUV into an Easter Parade held annually in a community leading to multiple deaths/injuries.
And mental illness leading to a school shooting taking the lives of innocent children who never caused any distress to the person who killed them.
There is no diminished responsibility on the basis of mental illness in these latter cases. The criminal behaviour in these cases is not merely disturbed - it is evil. Gross evil.
The death penalty is warranted.