World Chaos and More!
I've been away from LJ for a while because I'm so busy over here. I really want to post something in my own thoughts as opposed to just dumping a bunch of links, but I rarely have the time. Today, as a way to ease back into the old system, I'll write some thoughts I heard from the Lubavitcher Rebbe in a video then I'll dump some links...
1) [Note: I watched a video and didn't take any notes so these observations are much less articulate than when the Rebbe stated them in the first place... I hope I don't distort anything he said.] The Lubavitcher Rebbe observed that the Jewish calendar is a combination of lunar and solar with an extra month every few years to keep the holidays in the proper seasons. The sun, he noted, is the same at the beginning of the week and the first day of the month as it is on the seventh day of the week or the fifteenth day of the month. The moon, however, is constantly in flux. This corresponds to the human inclinations to remain constant and to innovate. The Rebbe explained that some people are natural innovaters and therefore don't naturally care to study the wisdom of the past, preferring instead to constantly innovate. Others would much prefer to rely on what they've memorized rather than seek new ways of doing things. The Rebbe argued that, like the calendar, we must transcend nature and find a balance between the two. (A strict lunar calendar [innovative person] would cause the holidays to be out of season while a strict solar calendar [constant person] wouldn't follow the proper monthly lunar cycle.)
He said a lot more but I don't remember where he went from there. Sleep deprivation will do that...
2) Republicans are happier.
3) It's about damn time someone in Israel grew some beytzim:
Israeli soldiers using helicopters, tanks and bulldozers burst into a Palestinian jail Tuesday to seize militants wanted for the assassination of a Cabinet minister, triggering a 10-hour standoff that ended when the prisoners gave themselves up. ...
The raid came amid a breakdown in a four-year-old deal between the Palestinians, Israel, the United States and Britain over the guarding of the prisoners, and it underscored the wider collapse of relations between Israel and the Palestinians since the Islamic militant group Hamas won Jan. 25 Palestinian elections.
Israeli officials said recent statements by Palestinian officials and Hamas leaders of plans to release the prisoners, combined with the withdrawal of the monitors, forced them to act.
"We couldn't have a situation where murderers would be walking around free instead of being behind lock and key," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
Unfortunately, this is probably little more than an election stunt on the part of Ehud Olmert. I haven't really talked about my thoughts on him. In short, he's disgusting. At least Sharon grieved when he ordered the expulsion of Jews from their homes in Gush Katif. Olmert seemed excited to order Israeli soldiers to beat Jews living in Emunah in the West Bank, before dragging them out of their homes...
4) I have to take issue with how the above story was reported. Here's one example:
The Israeli action set off a wave of violence against foreigners in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The British Council offices were torched in Gaza City and vandalized in Ramallah, where furniture was tossed out of windows. Demonstrators and gunmen broke into the European Commission building in Gaza and offices of AMIDEAST, a private American organization that provides English classes and testing services.
The media's paradigm says that the West (especially America/Israel) are always culpable and that the 3rd world (especially Arabs and *especially* Palestinians) only reactive, hence the active tense for Israel and the passive tense (conspicuously missing a specific subject) for the Palestinians. Who are the "[d]emonstrators and gunmen" anyway? This follows the general pattern of headlines such as "Twelve die in bus bombing" followed by "Israeli military kills fifteen Palestinians" where you don't find out that all fifteen were armed terrorist members of Hamas until you flip to page A24 and read until the last paragraph.
Or am I just being oversensitive?
5) The UN Human Rights Council reform is bogus. G-d bless US ambassador John Bolton for speaking truth to incompetence, pointing out that the UN is riddled with "bad management, by sex and corruption" and strongly opposing the new "reforms" which actually exacerbate the problem. I defer to the wisdom of the NRO editors:
Without meaningful eligibility requirements, any "reform" of the UNCHR is unworthy of the name. The UNCHR's basic problem - which is, come to think of it, also the basic problem of the U.N. - is that it puts liberal democracies side by side with genocidal despotisms as though they were equally legitimate. That's how it happened that six of the 53 current UNCHR members - China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe - are on Freedom House's list of the worst human-rights abusers. That's also why the UNCHR has barred Israel from its meetings over invented human-rights abuses while failing to rouse itself to action against real ones (to take one example, it has never passed a resolution against the Chinese government). The proposed human-rights council would do nothing to solve this problem. Even a laughably weak eligibility criterion - that any country under U.N. sanction for human-rights violations be barred from membership - self-destructed during the negotiations.
6) And just for fun... Is George Clooney a closet neocon?
1) [Note: I watched a video and didn't take any notes so these observations are much less articulate than when the Rebbe stated them in the first place... I hope I don't distort anything he said.] The Lubavitcher Rebbe observed that the Jewish calendar is a combination of lunar and solar with an extra month every few years to keep the holidays in the proper seasons. The sun, he noted, is the same at the beginning of the week and the first day of the month as it is on the seventh day of the week or the fifteenth day of the month. The moon, however, is constantly in flux. This corresponds to the human inclinations to remain constant and to innovate. The Rebbe explained that some people are natural innovaters and therefore don't naturally care to study the wisdom of the past, preferring instead to constantly innovate. Others would much prefer to rely on what they've memorized rather than seek new ways of doing things. The Rebbe argued that, like the calendar, we must transcend nature and find a balance between the two. (A strict lunar calendar [innovative person] would cause the holidays to be out of season while a strict solar calendar [constant person] wouldn't follow the proper monthly lunar cycle.)
He said a lot more but I don't remember where he went from there. Sleep deprivation will do that...
2) Republicans are happier.
3) It's about damn time someone in Israel grew some beytzim:
Israeli soldiers using helicopters, tanks and bulldozers burst into a Palestinian jail Tuesday to seize militants wanted for the assassination of a Cabinet minister, triggering a 10-hour standoff that ended when the prisoners gave themselves up. ...
The raid came amid a breakdown in a four-year-old deal between the Palestinians, Israel, the United States and Britain over the guarding of the prisoners, and it underscored the wider collapse of relations between Israel and the Palestinians since the Islamic militant group Hamas won Jan. 25 Palestinian elections.
Israeli officials said recent statements by Palestinian officials and Hamas leaders of plans to release the prisoners, combined with the withdrawal of the monitors, forced them to act.
"We couldn't have a situation where murderers would be walking around free instead of being behind lock and key," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
Unfortunately, this is probably little more than an election stunt on the part of Ehud Olmert. I haven't really talked about my thoughts on him. In short, he's disgusting. At least Sharon grieved when he ordered the expulsion of Jews from their homes in Gush Katif. Olmert seemed excited to order Israeli soldiers to beat Jews living in Emunah in the West Bank, before dragging them out of their homes...
4) I have to take issue with how the above story was reported. Here's one example:
The Israeli action set off a wave of violence against foreigners in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The British Council offices were torched in Gaza City and vandalized in Ramallah, where furniture was tossed out of windows. Demonstrators and gunmen broke into the European Commission building in Gaza and offices of AMIDEAST, a private American organization that provides English classes and testing services.
The media's paradigm says that the West (especially America/Israel) are always culpable and that the 3rd world (especially Arabs and *especially* Palestinians) only reactive, hence the active tense for Israel and the passive tense (conspicuously missing a specific subject) for the Palestinians. Who are the "[d]emonstrators and gunmen" anyway? This follows the general pattern of headlines such as "Twelve die in bus bombing" followed by "Israeli military kills fifteen Palestinians" where you don't find out that all fifteen were armed terrorist members of Hamas until you flip to page A24 and read until the last paragraph.
Or am I just being oversensitive?
5) The UN Human Rights Council reform is bogus. G-d bless US ambassador John Bolton for speaking truth to incompetence, pointing out that the UN is riddled with "bad management, by sex and corruption" and strongly opposing the new "reforms" which actually exacerbate the problem. I defer to the wisdom of the NRO editors:
Without meaningful eligibility requirements, any "reform" of the UNCHR is unworthy of the name. The UNCHR's basic problem - which is, come to think of it, also the basic problem of the U.N. - is that it puts liberal democracies side by side with genocidal despotisms as though they were equally legitimate. That's how it happened that six of the 53 current UNCHR members - China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe - are on Freedom House's list of the worst human-rights abusers. That's also why the UNCHR has barred Israel from its meetings over invented human-rights abuses while failing to rouse itself to action against real ones (to take one example, it has never passed a resolution against the Chinese government). The proposed human-rights council would do nothing to solve this problem. Even a laughably weak eligibility criterion - that any country under U.N. sanction for human-rights violations be barred from membership - self-destructed during the negotiations.
6) And just for fun... Is George Clooney a closet neocon?