jr050923 JOURNAL FROM 23 Sept '05 Follows =jr0508v.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------ OOf course I will return to Israel. It has been too long since I have seen the Central Negaev, Ein Gedi, the Golan, the Kineret, the Arava. But I do not know if I would again undertake to live there. Post-Zionism has forfeited its claim to Zionists. One does not marry a Being busy deconstructing herself. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Looks like George bought the riding horses. They won't loaf on the trails any more. (Olivone, 23 Sept '05) ------------------------------------------------------------------ Another unearned calumny: Don't say he's cheap but when he stopped by to say farewell looks like he took my work_gloves and when he left the house he locked up the bottled gas. (Campra 25 Sept '05) ----------------------------------------------------------------- TO: letters@iht.com , media@actcom.co.il From: Steve Amdur, Campra, CH-6718 Olivone, Switzerland MEDIA BIAS: IHT 26 Sept '05 'Israel hits Gaza afer attacks by Hamas' (Greg Myre, The New York Times) This is apparently a matter of tendencious editting, presumably by the IHT, not necessarily by The New York Times. Page 1 paragraph 4 reads: "Earlier Sunday, 20 Palestinians were wounded in strikes against supected Hamas facilities, including a school. The wounded included women and children." The reader will reasonably assume that the wounded women and children were in the school when it was hit by an airstrike. The article is continued on Page 4: On Paragraph 19 of that page -- paragraph 29 of the article -- the 2nd_to_last paragraph -- one reads: "A bombing raid before dawn on Sunday hit the Dar el_Arqam school in Gaza City, Palestinians said. The school was empty at the time, but people in the neighborhood were injured." The next paragraph, which is the last paragraph of the article, reads: "Israel said the building was targeted because it 'has been used by Hamas terrorists as a training area.' The instituttion was established by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas founder and leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last year." Personally -- but in this I may be a typical reader -- I usually skip over the last paragraph or two of a newspaper article, especially a long one: I suppose I'm frustrated at finding that, with most newspaper articles, it contained much less solid honest information than the headline implied. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Grushenka's reply to T.S. Eliot: make, with all that crap a quite distasteful homo sap. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Variation on a sentimental song about Jonathon Pollard, left to rot to death in jail for sharing military intelligence about the PLO in Tunis with Isreal, promised but withheld for further political gain. Pollard was sentenced on the basis of am apparent claim by Casper Weinberger, then Reagan's Crony Secretary of Defense, that Pollard had revealed the identifies of undercover agents; subseequently it was seen that it was Ames who had done so. Weinberger's pre_sentencing memo to the Judge reamins classified. Pollard, a paradigmatic nerd, showed less than no professionalism, the Israeli Embassy had offered him sanctuary if he could get there undetected, he arrived with his wife and her cat, and in response to USA pressure the Embassy turned him outdoors, immediately ending his life as a free man. Wolf Blitzer's book, 'Territory of Lies' may be the definitive work on this affair, although he must have treated the USA rther diffidently, for he has gone on to a most Establishment career as a CNN Bookend. 'Rafi the Sthinker' was the Shin Bet agent who corruppted Pollard, pressing him to take money although his motivation had been purely idealistic. 'Shtinker' means 'informant'. ------------ on the Embassy greens collared was Pollard you know that Rabin ain't too much of a thinker so he's not to blame, it was Rafi the Shtinker Now Rafi the Shtinker floats in the Salt Sea counting his money unlike you and me ------------------------------------------------------------------- Shopping for groceries, an old man looks at everyone with wide starting eyes, as if to say, 'Are you the Angel of Death -- I've been expecting you.' ------------------------------------------------------------------ COLLECTED SHORTER BOOK REVEIWS: ---------------- Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak (Read through page 2) A bitchy mediocrit, posing as a macho man of lettes. Ho Hemmingway, not even Mailer with all that layered irony. Pop philosophy. Nobel, Oy. ---------------- Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed (Simon & Schuster UK Ltd) A ladies' weepy, spiced with barely enough ranche to pass into the 1990s, but wittier than whatever goyim do. Not a novel, just a fiarst autobiographic fantasy. ----------------------------- Howard Fast, The Dinner Party (1987) This is a 'gut radical' -- United Front CP-USA & all that -- invincibly innocent, Some good apercus stuck into an impossible plot. ------------------------------------ Jeffrey Archer, First Among Equals (1984) A good pot_boiler, for them what's got a good old chicken. -------------------------------------- Ann McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Power Play From the Used Book Shop and Internet Up/Down__Load stop 2 blocks uptown from the synaogue on MODERNO street in LUGANO. The writer is a good person, writing from a basis of nobility, who here treats even the villains with compassion and humour too. this here is a comedy, but only in the dark Shakespearian sense. ----------------------------- Ann McCaffrey, Dragondrums A tale of transcending pettyx jealousy and conniving , in the quest to build a good community. I found it surprisingly relevant this September in Campra. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Nelson deMille, By the Water of Babylon (Granada Publishing Ltd., 1979) "Not since EXODUS has there been such a raw powerful story of the Middle East" -- Harold Robbins Written from a Zionist perspective, on literary level of a cartoon_story, which of course I find comfortable, although most Israelis might not. But then, they've earned that need. Up to page 100 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Advocating dental implants, Bet Shin writes: "While conventional dentistry enables some people to wear dentures comfortably, over 85% of denture wearers experience some discomfort and difficulty with their prosthesis. Research has shown that approximately 50% of adults age 65 and older are missing all their teeth." Well, this is a bit of a bombshell. Though a statistic or two on the discomfort of implants, during the process and after the implants, would have been appropriate. I might better have been told it before I was fitted for a partial lower denture. I stopped wearing it afer a week, having found it a continual low_grade annoyance, and having found that I could do everything almost as well with it as without it except eat. And of course I felt guilty, unclean, and all that for having lost so many teeth. A social anomoly, of course. The dentist said, "You can't walk around -- in public, that was -- with no teeth." I had assumed that false teeth were something almost everyone wore when needed, like neckties. A social obligation. I am now down to a few remainders and stubs of lowers, and still find that I can eat almost everything, except lettuce, although a few foods take annoying long to chew. If lack of teeth is a norm of ageing, then there should be appropriate alternative menus for the elderly, just as there are salt_free and gluten_free options. And one should no more fault a person for not wearing false teeth, than for any other physical limitation. As a basic rule -- it is bad manners to fault anyone for something which they cannot remedy. That includes their sex, their age, their skin colour, and physical disabilities. Nor should a person be required to inconvenience themselves for the aesthetic pleasure of others. Negros cannot be constrained to straighten their hair, mothers cannot be constrained to refrain from nursing their babies as needed, the handicapped cannot be excluded from public facilities. Well, what of dress codes in restaurants. What of bathing when one smells. Not if one lives in an igloo. May women be required to wear brassiers in public. At the boundaries, as usual, it is blurred. But that boundaries are often blurred does not rule out clear decisions within the boundaries. Why does it not. I want to say, 'common sense'. You say, how naive. I say nu, to presuppose that intelligence is rule_governed is frightfully square, Thomism run wild. And anyone, first Godel and then Wittgenstein showed that rules are necessarily inadequate to describe meaning. --------------------------------------------------------------- "itching and scratching" that was Freud's Heaven. "loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to shit" said Ezra Taft Benson the day before they sacked him. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re; IHT 30 Sept '05 (Lyall) Mr. and Ms. David Victoria Posh_Beckham are chavs, they are aristocrats. George W. Bush, Jr. , is King “f the Chavs. ------------------------------------------------------------------- I no longer expect to be happy. It is a somewhat liberating realiz6ation. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Sent IHT 7 Oct via Swisscom: (Ref: IHT Editorial; and IHT 6 Oct '05, Maureen Dowd Why did George Bush Jr. nominate his nanny to sit on the US Supreme Court. -------------------------------------------------------------- Carbonated drinks remain popular because they are needed to clean the mouth and palate, especially in areas and situations of heavy air pollution. Hence selzer -- soda water -- was a staple for poor people in New York city during the past century. With the reliance of food producers on imitation and artificial flavours, most of the good soft drinks are off the popular market. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT Book Reviow 7 Oct '05 -- Hazel Rowly: Tete-a-tete -- Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (reviewed by William Grimes). Ricky Sherover_(Marcuse) once told me this annecdote; Every so often, Sartre would say to Simone de Beauvoir, we really should get married, and she would reply, reproachfully, "Now Jean-Paul." ---------------------------------------------------------------- So can I do a mikveh in a swimming pool -- it's big enough, and the water flows in and out -- No way Jose. A swimming pool is chlorinated enough to kill microbes and such. So it's not "living water". What about the sea. I sure can't drink it. You only say that because you're not a fish. But fish got Shabat too. That's why we don't catch them on Shabat, might break up the mackeral minyan. Rav Levy told me, in the old days, before WWII, on Rodos they wo do their mikveh in the ocean. And in the 1980's a pair of Chabadnikim did so too. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Why does the IHT waste about 2 pages on fashion. It must be really big business. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The destruction of the Jewish community of Gaza will rank with that of other unique Jewish communities -- Rodos, for instance. Sharon will rank as a lesser madman. But Jewish history will not forgive the cowardice and opportunism of the Knesset and the Israel intellectual establishment, including the Jerusalem Post, in failing to stop him. ------------------------------------------------------------------- With occasional exceptions, not including Shlomo Riskin's pareve torah commentaries, the Jerusalem Post has become dishwater -- a trivialized quick read catering, like El Al airline meals, to a captive clientelle of exiles who yearn for authentŚcity. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Saul Bellow, a man of letters fit to flagship The International Herald Tribune. Binnie Kirschenbaum -- now there's a name to conjure with -- second only to PoopooFace McGoo. A writer who can't even edit her own name. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lay on, MacDuff, quoth she. --------------------------------------------------------------- Rosh HaShana Conversation in the Lugano Great Synagogue after I failed to bid on an aliya: Do you keep all the mitzvot. No. Which ones don't you keep. Oh -- hexsure kashrut. Do you eat killed beef. Sometimes. Do you eat pork. No. Why not. We don't do that. How old are you. XX That old. -------------------------------------------------------------------