In what is described as a "concession" the Israelis have agreed to a 48-hour suspension in their aerial attacks in Lebanon.
It's not much, but I suppose the Lebanese should be grateful for any and all favors -- no matter how small.
But there's a real joker in this deck -- the announcement was made by SecState Rice's deputy, an announcement concerning a tactical decision by the IDF.
So, what's the upshot? Now it looks like, if we really want to, the US can pull the plug on Israel's military activities at a moment's notice. And of course, the converse -- when we don't want to, we let them continue, unabated, while we send our diplomatic personnel on DOA missions trying to promote the US in the role of an "honest broker." I know that there is a lot of bigotry against the Pallys and the Arabs in this country, but really, how stupid do we take them for?
Certainly, the most heavily armed and homicidal intransigents among the bad guys [bad guys = any and all opponents of Israel] are going to see it just that way, and whip up the enraged masses with just that interpretation.
So, the next time Our Most Reliable ally In The Middle East resumes it's questionable military activities in Lebanon, despite honeyed words from the US deploring the loss of Arab life and the need to... how do you think it's going to be played out in the minds of the Lebanese? The US stops Israel, only whne the US wants to. So when Israel continues it's unconscionable carnage, guess who ultimately will be held rsponsible?
And here's an even more sinister possibility -- does anyone think it's beyond the calulations of the Israelis deliberately to prolong egagements and retaliations and airstrikes and artillery barrages with the intention of "creating" a few more enemies for the US in that part of the world?
Forcing the US, by default to befriend even more closely, Guess Who?
Just asking. I know Israel is The Light Unto The Nations and would never, ever consider the possibilty of such a thing [but it does have an attractive Machiavellianism about it]. [BTW,this is sarcasm and not anti-Semitism].
Yep, another "triumph" for the US.
you do besides bashing Israel? Inquiring minds want to know.
which calls to mind Schindler's comment, "When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings."
It's only the people you can't imagine knowing that you can demonize.
I perfer dorothy Parker in this case -- "Hell is other people." and I've been cast into Dante's ninth circle.
and also what BSD and many other people have told me until I stop them and tell them what they're going to say, that THEIR spouse or nanny or gardener is the most wonderful, virtuous, brave clean & reverent person, a true Credit to Their Race, but that Those People as a whole (including anybody else's spouse or gardener) are a Real Problem, Eroding Our Society, etc etc; it's not so much what an individual may do (eg bomb bldgs or murder people - Timmy & Chuckie, you know who you are) it's the Big Picture, which almost always means that people coming from Canada are not a problem, although people coming from Mexico are. Of course, you always have to look out for curly haired and hook-nosed people, and people with towels around their heads, and swarthy folk generally.
You have to understand the logic here: it's not about individuals or what they do, it's about categorizing people. Collective responsibility. Yes, it's the medieval way of doing things, but in your heart, you know it's right. Yeah, you may or may not be on the right meds, but that's true of all of us, isn't it? There's just no sense in trying to be right, as compared to merely feeling right.
Noble sentiments indeed re the Schindler quote, and I'd LOVE to be able to buy into them, but...
I think I have to go with that lesser figure, Alfrd E. Neuman, who supposedly said "familarity breeds contemp."
Or how about Joey Bishop [remember him?], "To know him is to vomit."
I could go on but the Prozac timer is beeping for me.
Ps. It's kinda true, ignorance is bliss, so why do I still need so many anti-depressants?
nor improve your credibility.
If you're depressed, you need to do something, anything. If you're under house arrest, you get yourself some weights and maybe some model airplanes, http://www.modelplanes.com/?source=googleaw&kwid=model%20airplanes&tid=exact . A little weight training, maybe you can get out to a pool, and it really doesn't matter if you are making models of the Red Baron blowing Duke Cunningham out of the sky, it's the physical activity.
You gotta watch what you eat, not too much booze or heavy shit. Cooking is another good physical activity that nobody can fault, and it does impress the chicks.
If you want intellectual exercise, start writing an essay, "Fuck all the Shrinks in the Ass with a 10' Pepperstick". Generally, they should be. And yes, judges should know better than to admit their reports without cross-examination, but they usually don't.
Just don't send the ms to the people who inspired it. And stay away from most nonfiction.
Because hey, it's not anybody's life but your own, and nobody's going to come around and see if you give a shit. Life's a bitch, and then we die. Everybody deals with it, just don't fixate on it.
-- Modified on 8/3/2006 4:37:13 PM
and in a former life that WAS a minor hobby.
However, time and tide changes, and for reasons both legal and psychiatric handling knives, or any other pointed and/or sharp-edged objects, is counter-indicated these days.
But you did mean well. And I appreciate it VERY MUCH.
PS. I think my blackness is very discriminate. Word !!!
[Disclaimer -- that last line was an admittedly very feeble attempt at levity, and should not be read as indicating anything about my views on issues concerning a multiracial/multiethnic/multicultural society].
Psychs are a bunch of morons who don't know what dignity or life or individuality or love is.
Nobody makes it thru life alive, and keeping a man from having a life in the misguided idea that they MIGHT, maybe keep him from cutting himself, that's bullshit from people who don't know what life is about.
If somebody wants to do a Van Gogh, or take a swan dive off the 30th floor, it's his life. These are the same fuckers who think you shouldn't ride motorcycles or fire weapons because somebody might get hurt. Yes, somebody might get hurt. But the certainty is that apart from using machines, everybody WILL die; and if they don't take chances in the meanwhile (like using edged tools) then they haven't lived.
But see if a shrink understands any of that. Soulless motherfuckers who suck our blood and insurance money.
But I think it's not necessarily me that the authorities are most concerned with here.
If I pick up the tab will you fly out to NYC to attend my next competency hearing?
-- Modified on 8/5/2006 7:04:10 PM
(a) Not intereested in attending. Might be interested in representing, but
(b) the tab will be damned high, and chances are real good you can get better counsel locally, and
(c) you may not want me to represent you, because I do things my own way.
Well, you know [or perhaps you don't] house arrest, the electronoc ankle braclet, the ever-inquisitive minions of the judicial systems taking an above average interst in my whereabouts and activities...
Would you believe I'm trying to work out a writers' block?
I'm a first generation American Born Jew, offspring of survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in 50's Los Angeles, a city full of racism and bigots.
I was 3 the first time gargbage was thrown at me and my family walking on the street to synagogue on Friday night.
I was 8 when I was beaten by a gang because I was wearing a "Jewbeanie".
I was 10 when a truck drove by, epithets and Jewish slurs were yelled at us, and as my fathr and i turned to move away from them, a stick of TNT was thrown at us. My father and i ran... the dog went after the TNT and grabbed it in his mouth right before the fuse ran out.
I was 12 when i was in Jerusalem, looking through the chicken wire at the Old City where Jewish gravestones were being used as flooring in latrines; that same trip an Arab terrorist operating under the orders of Yasser Arafat's El Fatah attacked and destroyed a child care center in the Galilee. Eighteen children were killed, another 30 children and adults wounded. That was 1964.
In 1971, shortly after I turned 18, I was injured in a terrorist attack on the kibbutz i was living at. The man sitting next to me was decapitated in front of my eyes by an explosion.
I have lost family to Arab terror, both in Israel, as well as the world Trade Center. My experiences and perspectives are based on a lifetime of experiences.
You have no idea what it feels like
-- Modified on 8/1/2006 10:06:01 AM
-- Modified on 8/2/2006 6:33:09 AM
Very, which makes for a poor excuse for their being only semi-civilized.
I agree with you, as far as you go.
At least the majority of Israel's Jewish citizenry has been exposed to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, liberal-democracy, representative gov't, and the like. Yet the government which represents them and whose officials they are "responsible" for in some manner are only an atrocity of massacre or war crime or two better than the Pallys [IMHO].
and so I would expect that we would all know that intent is the difference between crime and accident; and that IMHO the consistent and critical issue is the intended target.
I know that you'll take Osama at his word of his intentions, but not the Israelis; while my suggestion would be that we disregard statements, and look at actions. I don't see the Israelis sending kids with belt bombs into pizza joints, nor hijacking aircraft, nor pushing wheelchair bound old men into the ocean. But you notice that all their fancy-schmancy ordnance kills all hands within a CEP, same as US or Soviet or French fancy-schmancy ordnance. That's because Jewish bombs are special - they home on virgin flesh, right?
Those Jews are really clever about hiding their intentions, aren't they? You just never find any evidence of all the children they've eaten, but you're always finding the evidence of the civilian bodies they've planted to make it look like Hamas blew up some schoolbus. Crafty little fuckers, but they can't fool you or Mel.
So I didn't take the Renaissance course in college, and my DI said, "what-is-this-fucking-Renaissance-shit!?!" and pointed out that the meek often tend to inherit the earth, sometimes as much as 6 feet of it; so I just don't know that the Renaissance culture shit modifies the right of self-defense in most jurisdictions.
Ssome wise soul observed that if terrorism is the war of the weak, than war is the terorism of the strong. Imagine that. We may be no more useful than the mideval scholastics arguing about how many angels fit on the head of a pin [Doc, sorry for the excessively RC reference].
I'm sure the Pallys dispatched to the hereafter [and those 72 virgins], are content that they were killed with only the highest motves on the part of Israel. Makes a world of diference, I'm sure.
But they're no less dead than the terror victims of a pizza parlor suicide/homicide/martyrdom bombing.
Hey, as Sherman observed, war is hell. And as Dante observed, hell has nine circles. It's not clear which one any of us will end up in, and for what reasons, but it's still hell.
that it's equally justified for a weak party to use violence on an undefended and unsuspecting person who has no direct connection to a fight, as it is for a strong party to use violence on the weak?
Does that change if the strong party is acting in defense of self or others? Or if the party you thought was weak turns out to be the strong one?
How far back can we go to find provocation? Most courts have that figured out fairly well, ie, it has to be reasonably immediate. And I'm sorry, I have never been able to buy the idea that verbal violence is the same as physical violence.
I don't have a problem with insurgents targeting something that has military significance. But when you make a policy of hijacking 3rd party vessels in hopes of finding the most helpless to toss in the sea, that's really pretty pathetic.
You know, most partisans attack the alleged collaborators within a group. What we see pretty consistently in the mideast is that the various terrorist groups attack Jewish civilians generally. I suppose they could regard them all as collaborators, but that's pretty clearly an ongoing declaration of war against the entire group, and abandonment of any idea that anybody is excepted - kill the children, the disabled elderly - and it appears to me that they do this because it's most shocking. That's really a misunderstanding of the use of terror - you're supposed to make people afraid of doing things against you, not afraid of being something - if they are afraid of being something, they have no choice but oppose you to the death, because shit, you're going to kill them anyway.
Then they wonder why the shock is not confined to Israelis. Yeah, I remember Leon Klinghoffer. Most people don't remember Dora Bloch.
So are these groups stupid, or vicious, or what? Does their stupidity, viciousness or whatever else change anything? Anything meaning that they're a random, unpredictable threat to peaceful people, and also - other people learn by watching - if they are tolerated, other people have to compete at a lowest common denominator, and you will get more of the same. Bad behavior - however you define it - has to be unprofitable, or you will get more of the same.
I will grant you this, that religion is not a good cause for a war. The recurring problem is that it only takes one asshole to start a fight.
this Light Unto the Nations shit, but we still don't understand why you think Americans are going to take any fewer lumps than any other Children in the World, or if you really think that Idi Amin Dada's attitude problem w/r/t Israel was what excited people about His Excellence the President for Life.
You could always google the fellow to get some clues about him.