5 May 15:07
=jplt14
[Apparently I have no =jplt12 [       

================================================================= 
[copied from =jplt12, Posted to my Website; Insert added now:]
INSANITY'S NOT IRRATIONALITY

Looks like Gonen Segev's gone insane, but not irrational except in
one small self-destructive patch.  But the M'Naughten rule
applies; presumably he rationally knows, even if, like a
psychopath,  he is too distraught to empathetically feel, the
difference between right and wrong.
 And 
[THE FOLLOWING, ONLY, WAS PRINTED IN JP 29 Apr '04 ]
[Editors add: Re: "Segev indictmenet on the say" (April 26) 

a pediatrician who would push the apparently brutalizing drug
Ecstacy -- grotesquely disguised as candy -- to adolescents,
should be locked up. 

=================================================================

[Printed, JP 2 May '04]

The Palestinians will do anything for a state except build and run
one.

==================================================================
To Newsweek:  editors@newsweek.com
Re:  Newsweek 18--24 April '04, Letters (Armstrong)
 

In publishing a (tediously banal) anti-Semitic letter, your
newsmagazine becomes complicit in it.

============================================================
=============================================================
                                                     
To:  The Boston Globe:
From: Steve Amdur (Belmont High School '58), Mevo Modi'in, 73122
Israel; Tel: +972---8--971-6255 (10:00--19:00 = 03:00--12:00 EDT)

CLUELESS GEORGE GOES TO BABYLONIA:

As Ted Kennedy said, Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam.
(That remark reportedly (IBA English AM news 1 day only) provoked
Colin Powell into untypically intemperate rejoinder.)  

Bush has led the USA into a quagmire.  USA forces are sitting
ducks (or dodos) for guerilla attack.  The guerillas control the
places and tempo of conflict.

It is a disaster  that most likely cannot be won (despite Bush's
desperate optimism) and quite likely cannot be managed.  The USA
electorate can only choose between amateur and (hopefully)
professional management.

Clearly enough, Bush has been dropped by the Establishment.  
(The breaking  point seems to have been when he gave Congress a
$87 billion initial bill; that week both Time and Newsweek put him
in a bad light.)
Some sort of residual chivalry if not monarchic nostalgia seems to
hold a dunce President untoucheable.  Eg Ronald Reagan, or George
Jr.

The 9/11 Hearings were clearly a political attack, and an unfair
one:  '20--20 hindsight' and "you can't drive the car when you're
staring in the rear-view mirror" (Mark Steyn, JP 28 Apr '04) 
are appropriate phrases.
Those hearings  were "the right thing for the wrong reason".  The
Bush Administration should be held severely to task for many
things; but even the best-managed nation leaves a residual random
number of its citizens vulnerable to occasional terrorist attack,
as it does  to automotive mayhem and to cancer. 

Had the members of Congress not, as usual, let themselves, for
fear of risking their comfortable sinecures, be stampeded into
endorsing jingoistic foreign adventurism, they could have blocked
a small clique of narrow-minded "ideologues" from shunting the
USA, prosperous and peaceful under preceeding administrations,
into a major disaster.  

Of course in retrospect one can see all the missed opportunities;
because the conclusion is known.  But in realtime, one has to make
a best guess of which of many possible alternatives will manifest.

The USA cannot afford a stupid President.  Much less one who is
both stupid and arrogant.

There is no basis for saying that "the USA is at war with
terrorism."             

First of all, it's nonsense; terrorism is a tactic, not a
movement.  As if a feudalist were to say, we are at war with
gunpowder.  Or crossbows.   

Israel is under chronic terrorist attack.  The USA is not.  Except
for those rather odd apparent anthrax scares, there has been not
even an attempted terrorist attack on the USA since 9/11.  And the 
previous terrorist attack, on a federal building in Oklahoma, came
from an apparent group of USA ultra-right terrorists.

Even the Warren commission indicated that it made a "rush to
judgement" (Mark Lane) of a 'lone assassain' theory, in order to
head off a much more dangerous public "rush to judgement" that
might have demanded war with the USSR.  
     Ironically, the Bush Administration seems to have done just
that, in a limited and controlled way, in channeling shock at 9/11
into support for overthrowing the governments of Afghanistan and
Iraq.
 
The Arab bloc is justiied in regarding this as a regression to
19th-century European economic imperialism.  
     On the other hand, de-colonialization has, with few
exceptions, brought only domestic tyranny and economic decline,
not individual freedom nor economic prosperity.                  
     (And one would not expect better if the predominantly
'Palestinian' areas of Israel succeed in expelling their Jewish
residents and gaining political self-determination.)


Terrorism exists.  Some terrorist are Islamic.  But it is not the
case that "September 11 [was] the day Islamic terrorist declared a
world war" (Dopener, tr./repr. JP 4 May '05).  There is not a
world war; and the forces of Islam are not (much as they seem to
wish it), again pressing eastward from the sands of Arabia toward
the orange groves of Seville.  

Nor, though they persistently strive to undermine Israel, is there
any substantial evidence that Arab states nor factions are
attacking the USA. 

Nor is the USA, nor even Europe, unquestionably more civilized
than the Islamic nations.  
    Nor is this some archetypic, titanic clash of cultures;
Islamic and western cultures have many good features (and some bad
ones) in common, and much to learn from each other.  
    Nor is 'western civilization', especially the USA's
much_mocked homogenized version of it, reduceable to a shelf of 
unread plastic-bound 'Great Books' by Dead White Males.  Leave
that to Gore Vidal and Howard Bloom.
    Mme. Bovary would wince.

    Nor is the USA a paradigm of democracy; with the abdication of
Congress and co-option of a Supreme Court majority (and what
Byzantine  rationalizations they contrive, in disregard of law, to
support their political position), USA governmental power has been
almost entirely usurped by the Presidency.
There are scarcely even two distinguishable political parties.
Presidential campaigns have become King_of_the_High_School_Prom
mass-media defensive tennis games of pseudo-puritanical 'Gotcha!'. 
                          

Clueless George wears pretty thin.  
Jack Armstrong the All_American Boy.
    Leave that act to Tom E. Friedman.  
George Bush Jr. plays Charlie McCarthy; but it's not clear who
pulls his strings.  Cheney obviously plays a major part.  Insofar
as Bush (carrying on the family tradition) is a front for a sort
of group, Cheney maybe serves as their representative.

    It would seem from the present prisoner-abuse scandal that the
Bush Administration (counting Powell as Loyal Opposition) learned
nothing from Vietnam.  The US public, in abandoning the chronicly
unwinable Vietnam war, also repudiated a USA strategy based
largely on war crimes.  The primary US strategy was wholesale
attacks on the civilian population and its ecology, by means that
included defoliation, napalming civilian centers, widespread
bombing of North Vietnam, and field torture interrogation.
    
    (As for the Palestinian conflict with Israel, it is top-down,
and only ostensibly a popular revolution.  It is essentially
surrogate attempts by surrounding 'Arab' states to destablize
Israel, and only ostensibly fraternal assistance to a supposed
popular revolution against an oppressive occupying power.  The
Palestinians are oppressed and exploited primarily by their own
people.
    And this is an old Maoist trick:  to divert popular
indignation from internal oppression, define and attack an
external enemy; patriotic fervour can hide hunger pains.)
    

The USA suffered one terrorist attack (preceded by two other
attempts.).  That attack was a logistic and psychologic tour-de-
force.  
    The USA Manhattan World Trade Center, practically the highest
building in the world, was destroyed.  To follow the destruction
of the first tower with an identical destruction of the second was
the most devastating psychologic attack since the USA followed the
destruction of Hiroshima with destruction of the predominantly
civillian city Nagasaki.
    (The attack on the Pentagon, essentiallly disregarded by the
public, and an apparently passenger-thwarted possible attack on
the White House were apparently intended to complete the
demoralization of the USA electorate.  
    But it might take a nuke to dent the Pentagon.
    However, had the 4th plane crashed into the Capitol or White
House, the psychologic impact would have been overwhelming. 
 maybe the perpetrators would have identified themselves with some
sort of ultimatum (as the USA successfully did (bluffing, as a
matter of fact) with its threat of an atomic "war of ruin", to
conclude the war against the would-be Japanese Empire).

Apparently it's not known who organized the 9/11 attack.  The
co_rodinated timing of 4 seperate kamikaze hijacks makes it look 
like a professional tour de force.  To suppose that it was
directed by a newly-religious ex-playboy exiled to caves in
Afghanistan, possessed of substantial but scarcely unlimited nor
easily deployable funds,  strains credulity.                       
    
    The popular notion of Al-Qaidea, shared if not shaped by the
President, seems like something out of a Batman movie -- a secret
hidden international spider's-web capable of hitherto unknown
levels of evil, controlled by a single, solitary evil genius. 
Osama ben Laden is probably long dead (maybe strangled by the
Pakistan secret service), but this pop myth may yet haunt the USA
by catalyzing real villainy.                                

     But the Bush's are not very bright, and like to personalize
foreign policy.  They need their little villains.  For George Sr.
it was Norriega; for George Jr., it was bin Laden and then Saadam,
an aging vain brutal tyrant half-way into his dotage who, as the
Europeans realized,  might easily have been bought off with no
more than a few truck-loads of flattery (to use the non-
agricultural term).

From what I read in the newspapers (almost exclusively the
Jerusalem Post and International Herald Tribune), I suspect that
much may remain to be revealed about the role of 

Wolfkowitz in 9/11; he is apparently regarded as an exceptionally
cold-blooded and even apocalyptic military theorist and planner. 
And there may yet be much to be said about the supporting role,
both passive and active,  played by Ashcroft as Attorney-General. 
The still-unresolved questions about the Kennedy assassinations
should have steeled the American public to "think the
unthinkable."

One must note that the Bush Administration, in making a policy of
detaining (a limited number of almost entirely foreign) suspects
at will, without even nominal due process of law, has violated the
USA constitutional tradition of civil liberty.

One should also note that Bush Administration policies do little
to retard and much to accelerate the world-wide slide toward
ecologic disasters.
 
Regardless of what, if anything, it knew beforehand, the Bush
Administration did move with astounding speed and efficiency to
translate national shock at the attack into support for
overthrowing ( with little thought of the difficulty of replacing)
the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq.   And by destroying those 
oppressive tyrannies, the Bush Administration  thereby produced
the anarchic  "breeding grounds for terrorism" that it claimed
were its causi belli.  Although the potential for state
sponsorship of terror has been destroyed, so has the possibility
of state control.  A dictator is at least an address for carrots
and sticks.

Again:  As Colin Powell, (the one statesman in a pseudo-populist
administration of jingo's' or yahoo's) apparently foresaw in
aborting the first Gulf War, the easily-achieved USA overthrow of
the tyranic government of Iraq seems to have produced a major
foreign-policy disaster for the USA.  It is not now clear, least
of all to the Bush Administration, how this catastrophe can now be
managed, or even contained.


==================================================================
==================================================================
                            

DISTILLED BILGEWATER                 

Re:  JP 28 Apr '04 (Steyn)

Hacking away for George, "Mark Steyn" resussitates, or puffs up,
LBJ's "helpless pitiful giant" argument:  that the USA must not
abandon an unwinnable campaign for fear of appearing weak.
    George Bush Jr., like one of Snoopy's bird-brained Boy Scouts,
hastily dragged the USA into what his Daddy once called "deep doo-
doo".  The Iraq quagmire is potentially much more dangerous than
the Vietnam debacle was.  The USA electorate may choose  not to
entrust Bush with any further management of it.

===========================================================

The Post's three weekly columns on the portion of the week are
consistently dull.  The Post should emulate the Jerusalem Report
in inviting contributions from a wide range of different writers -
- ultra-orthodox, national-orthodox, conseervative, reform,
secular-humanist, et. al.

================================================================= 

Serious charges have been raised about the honesty of Sharon's
Likud referendum.  The procedures would be unacceptable in any
bona fide national or municipal election.  The absence of poll-
watchers from the two competing blocs is the most serious;  using
instead hired temporary workers is an invitation to electoral
fraud.  And locating polling stations in the homes of party
workers would seem to invalidate votes registered at those
stations.

===============================================================
 
It is misleading to say that a majority of Israelis support
expelling Jewish settlers from Gaza.  A larger majority would vote
to evacuate Savyon.  Although Israel is one of the world's
smallest nations, its people remain quite tribal.  Most would not
give a french-fried mouse patootie for the welfare of inhabitants
of another region.

================================================================
                                                        
BEATS SHOOTING CRIPPLES WITH MISSLES FROM A HELICOPTER

A society and religious sect which supports the knowing individual
murder of a mother and her four girls has no place in a civilized
world, much entitlement to support from it. Palestinian Gaza has
no economic base but international terrorist extortion.  It
survives on diverted foreign aid and Israeli infrastructure. 
Israel can and should take the appropriate economic steps to
isolate and subdue these groups.

=================================================================
To: letters@iht.com, cc: nicholas@nytimes.com
From:  Steve Amdur, Mevo Modi'in, 73122 Israel; +972--8--971-6255
(10:00--19:00)
Re:  IHT 29 Apr '04, Op-Ed (Kristof)

It is not clear why Mr. Kristoff finds the Palestinian strategy of
deliberately murdering and maiming randomly selected groups of
civilians and civilian-soldiers unremarkable, but deems the Prime
Minster's tactic of assassinating individual terrorist organizers
"bloodstained".  Nor why he endorses the Palestinian line that
continuation of the  USA's policy of support for Israel's survival
is "undermining" the Bush administration's apparently hopeless
attempt to re-impose stability on Iraq.

=================================================================

                                                      
If our Fearless Leader insists of replaying the Nixon Scenario,
someone should buy him a condo in San Clemente.

===============================================================

Sharon says that he will "honor" the results of the referendum,
while continuing to make any deal he can get away with.  And Bush
used to say that he "respected" his opponents, while using any
dirty trick in the book to undercut them.  Like Wittgenstein said,
"an 'inner' process stands in need of outward criteria."  Or like
R. Shlomo Carlebach used to say of various liturgic innovations,
"It's cute and sweet but it's not Yiddishkeit."

===============================================================
Sent (w/out title) 4 May '04 letters@iht.com; bcc: JP, HaAretz     
                         
Re: IHT 4 May '04 (Knowlton)
		
SETTING NEW BENCHMARKS FOR SANCTIMONIOUS HYPOCRISY

Reprimanding 7 military police officers won't quite placate
international outrage at apparently systemic torture and
humiliation of Muslim prisoners by U.S. interrogation units in
Iraq.  Rumsfeldt might start by resigning.

==================================================================
                                   
"What is art" 
( Or as a much-maligned local Administrator for an occupying
empimre once said, signing off on a very questionable political
execution, "'What is truth'".) 
The question is sometimes hard to answer, and can be answered
incorrectly; but those necessary limits of indeterminancy and
inaccuracy do not constitute criteria of meaninglessness.

A critic is not free to pack up go home and sniff glue; nor need 
one throw his church-key or kippa down a well and go out to the
Friday night disco.

Tolstoy was challenged as a pacifist by a critic who said:  What
would you do if you met a tiger on the way home.  Tolstoy replied,
"Do the best you can; it happens rarely."

At first glance Klee's watercolours look childish; gazed at for a
while, each reveals a particular harmony of colours.  At first
glance Moore's sculptured abstract nudes look grotesque; then one
may see the harmony of shapes.  

But artistic technique may be used in non-artistic ways:  as
commerical art (including subliminal inducement, and including
self-promoting shock-shlock), or political art.  'Conceptual art'
seems to be the use of artistic venues if not techniques to use
visual symbolic means to make a conceptual point, or at least to
do something sufficiently bizarre that a jaded public with cash to
burn will pay to see it.

Political art may have at least some, and maybe predominantly,
artistic value:  Picasso's Guerinca; Goya, Diego Rivera, much of
the socialist-realist art.  Even Delacroix, with his topless
chicks leading the way to the barricades.
              
===============================================================

"Ma femme est morte; je veux un capeau noir." 
"Ah, quelle politesse"

Re: JP 5 05 '04 (Sullivan)

It is, pardon the expression, long overdue, that once a year, on
davka Lag b'Omer, Israel offers a free massage, to say the least,
to reservists, those lonely middle-ageing men who serve, often for
weeks at a time, thousands of paces and more away from their wives
and/or ladyfriends.

================================================================= 

TO THE TUMBRILS, CHAPS

Speaking as right-wing extremist -- as which, as an erstwhile USA
1960's issue-oriented united front semi-socialist liberal, I can't
quite picture myself -- may I ask what's so fanatic about
suggesting that Israel, a reasonably good democracy narrow enough
to jog across, continue to administer what little territory it's
got?

================================================================ 
THE GREEK SOPHISTS WERE AMATEURS

     How can Sharon honor his pledge to respect the decision of
the Likud referendum he ploughed through (but failed sufficiently
to rig), while simultaneously continuing do do whatever it was
that he secretly promised Bush?
     No problem: just change a few details and resubmit the plan
(somewhere).  Ad infinitum; sooner or later he's bound to win one.
    Take the mandate and run:  Applied semantics is the last
refuge of a scoundrel.  Sharon is spinning like a gyroscope with a
panic attack.

===============================================================

CAUSALITY:  'THE GAMBLER'S FALLACY' vs. NECESSARY UNCERTAINTY IN
DECISION-MAKING

Those pushing  security measures of obvious cost and dubious value
sometimes argue:  How can we not:  if something happens which
might have been prevented by this measure, we will be resposible
for having caused that mishap.  But this is the 'gambler's
fallacy':  The gambler rationalizes risking money he cannot afford
by saying to himself:  how can I not -- if I would have won, but I
did not bet, then I will have deprived myself of a great gain.

But causality is linear only in the limiting case (eg Hume's game
of billiards); in general casuality is both partially- and
multiply- -determinative.  A large number of factors , not all of
them efficacious in a given instance, contribute to the causal
nexus behind any given event.

And one must be rational, and accept the responsibility of taking
the risk of making wrong decisions.  Otherwise we wind up with
something like the USA's 'defensive medicine', while doctors will
cut you open, find nothing, sew you back up, and leave you to
months of painful recupreation at your own expense, just to ensure
that if there was a condition requiring such treatment, they can't
be sued for negligence.

=================================================================
    
Re:  JP 5 May '04 -- 'US expects Sharon to deliver" (Analysis,
Janine Zacharia)

I don't want to know anything I'm not supposed to know, but:
What is the USA secretly threatening to do or not do, that our
past 4 Prime Ministers, despite their distinguished military
careers, have tried to give away parts of the land of Israel.      
     

===============================================================

Re: Passim from the better goyische press, eg IHT 4 May '05
(Jennifer Schenker) NYT Weekly Review 2 May '04 (reprinted, JP):   
             

There ought to be more cultured types of porno DVD's, considering
the wide variety in refinement and pretended social class of men
who have or had sex less often than they wish.  And it's really
not necessary always to show everything, as if the actress might
be sued for deception.  And the usual standards for merchandise --
quality, unexplitative working conditions, and societal propriety
-- should be used by distributors.

================================================================

Re, e.g.:  JP 5 May '04 -- Lead Headline, 'Quartet backs
disengagement'

Some Quartet:  A pneumatic jack-hammer, a rusty steam calliope, a
half-skinned Siberian Mastadon, and the screams of a million
children starving in the 3rd-world nations while their rulers sit
in a UN penthouse and bash Israel after a leisurely lunch.

=================================================================
                                  
There seems to be evidence that the pro-PLO policies of most EU
nations, and the support for the PLO by wealthy Arab nation, are
an attempt to shield themselves from terrorist attack.

George John (AP), reporting a letter dated 29 Apr '04 from the
Vienna misson of the Arab League to the Mayor of Vienna,  (JP 5
May '04) writes:

"The Arab League letter appeared to suggest that the Vienna plan 
 [to name a city square after Theodor Herzl ] could hurt Austria's
status as a nation that has escaped the terrorist violence linked
to turmoil in the Middle East and Iraq.
   It contrasted the plan to the "clever politics that has
protected Austria up until today from conflicts and problems."

   One may recall that France turned sharply against Israel after
several cafe bombings.  And one may note the vulnerability of the
dispreportionately rich rulers of self-styled "Saudi" Arabia --
named as if it were a private fiefdom -- to terrorist attack. 

=================================================================
                                  
Re, e.g:  JP 30 Apr '04 (Steinhauer/Bloomberg)

Google seems to have done the impossible:  it is poised to exceed
even Microsoft in obtuseness to end-user needs.

However ingenious its "complicated alogorithms" may be, Google's
Search Engine (which is still easily subverted, and recently
ranked a hate-site first in "relevance" in a Search for 'Jew')
is poor from an end-user perspective.  (Like those modern
buildings and cities that look great in the architectural
drawings, but are not very pleasant to work or live in.)  Google's
'Advanced Search' is minimal; and does not even offer set/subset
ranking, nor offer to separate commercial from informational
sites.   Whatever one looks for, one is likely to get  mostly
Amazon-like ads.  And Google's much-hyped 1 Gb free E-mail (with
its own free SPAM) is apt to be a still-born turkey.

=================================================================
 
The International Herald Tribune (IHT) and to a lesser extent the
Jerusalem Post (still the only forum for the English-speaking
people of Israel, erstwhile managed by old-world socialist
intellectuals, but presently run by a small crew of US-export
brash  neo__Ayn_Raynd_ist, determinedly optimistic young Jews who
have bought and bet everything on a WASP suit) is designed as a
journal for capitalists, not intellectuals.  We are at best
allowed to stand outside the window and, trying to read between
the lines, peer in at that Feast of Fools.  Behind a facade of
objective reporting, the IHT offers a comfortable world-view in
which the new multi-nationalism is producing the best of all
possible worlds for everyone who counts.  So too the ostensibly
Zionist Post pushes Israel to divest itself of Gaza first, because 
that will, or so the international business community insinuates,
be good for business.

=================================================================
 
To:  Boston Globe
Ref: IHT (Romney tries to devise and reinstate a more just death
penalty)                                       

THE PASSION OF SACCO & VANZETTI, TAKE 2:

There is an inherent indecency, which cannot be rationalized, in
deliberately putting to death a helpless member of one's own
species who wants to live. And it is crude thinking to suppose
that this gives some sort of "completion".
 
The legalization of capital punishment disregards the most
fundamental religious principle, which is that the Supreme Being,
or Reality, is one of Love, or Grace (Chesed), or Mercy; rather
than of retribution (a notion erroneously attributed by some to
the 'Old Testament') or of mere mechanical causation.  It also
contradicts one of the 10 Commandments, generally considered as
having ethical priority over quaisi-rabbinic specifications of
capital punishment.  

(And Jewish rabbinic tradition from the outset, while not
explicitly contradicting biblic prescriptions of capital
punishment (since the Torah is deemed sacrosanct), practically
precluded its applicability, stating "a Sanhedrin which executes
one man in 80 years is regarded as bloodthirsty". [qv ref].)

A childish mind, eg that of our crafty little present President,
needs good guys and bad guys.  If bad guys are very bad, they are
inherently and irredeemably 'evil', and must be annihilated.  The
Quaker insight that "there is something of good [or some would
say, of G_d] in every person", is rejected.

Execution of those who kill others is regarded as being, in some 
crude sense, "justice", although it is often less, and
occasionally more, than equal retribution for the harm done.



================================================================

It's not clear why the USA is even interogating prisoners, much
less using psychologic and in some cases physical torture as a
prelude to interrogation.  Even that recent defender of western
civilization, the Inquisition, tortured only prisoners who refused
to co-operate with interrogation.

There is little the USA can find out from prisoners in Iraq.  The
USA won the war a year ago (though it is losing the peace at an
accelerating rate.)
There are no hidden stocks of "unconventional" weapons to be
uncovered and destroyed.  The USA, unlike Israel, is not
confronting a campaign of terrorist attacks against its civilians;
it is merely subject to low-grade, apparently decentralized,
guerilla attacks against its occupying armed forces.

=============================================================

START DRAFT ESSAY:  THE PASSION OF MENI MAZUZ:  Sophistic
rationales for not indicting Sharon

 HaAretz 5 May '05 )Moshe Gorali):

"In order to build a bribery case, you ahe to prove "gift" (what
the bribers gives), "awaareness" (of teh bribe recipient) and
"reward" (given by the recipient). ... "there is a aquesation of
wehter a certain poicy, which does enefit the giver of the bribe,
was devised specifically for him"
     "Awareness of the intent to bribe is difficult to prove, and
is the main obstacle in most white-collar cases.  In the case of
Sharon, it will be especially difficult to prove." ...

Apparently Mazuz would consider proof of intent to be either a
spoken (wiretapped) statement from Appel that he intended the
extraordinary consultant fee that he was paying Sharon's son to be
understood by Sharon as a bribe of Sharon (and not, let us say, as
(a) an extravagent gesture of Christian charity (b) an intuition
that this young man might turn out to be a genius at public
relations (c) an attempt to seduce the young man (d) a random
attempt at financial self-destruction in the interest of assuming
monastic vows of poverty (d) a secret support payment for an
illegimate child that young Sharon naively imagined to be his.
I mean, the possiblities are endless. 

A file that stated an intent to bribe Sharon (perhaps with a
heading:  'Enhancing the Kid's Allowance:  Tell Papa to buy him an
Ouzo' ) would be regarded as merely circumstantial evidence:  The
Writer (Gorali) continues, apparently summarizing Mazuz in his
interview with the Writer: "but such a file must be very tight,
such tath it can easily rebuff any other wsdplanaiton, leaving the
bribery scenario as the only possiblity, beyond any reasonable
doubt."                  

In a rather shocking aside, the writer adds:  "the vast majority
of the public believes [Yigal] Amir should rot in his cell
forever.  Without a pardon, without parole.  Alone and isolated,
prohibited from contact with otehrs, prohibited from marrying. 
Why?  Because he murdered a prime minister." [though one should
note:  a prime minister who, as a junior officer, apparently
sought, presumably acting on orders from the then-Prime-minister, 
to murder another future prime minister, as the latter came onto
the bridge of the Altalena. ]







=============================================================
To:  letters@haaretz.co.il                   

As far as I've noticed, HaAretz/English is generallly held in
contempt by national/religious--oriented, mostly college-educated
native-English olim.  Several, myself included, have for that
reason at times stopped subscribing to the International Herald
Tribune a readable, literate, moderate, temperate newspaper with
only a slight anti-Israel bias (none of those virtues
overwhelmingly shared hy HaAretz/English).

===============================================================
=================================================================

THE PASSION OF MENI MAZUZ:  Fallibilist Epistemology as the last
refuge of a Scoundrel

Re:  HaAretz/English 5 May '04 (Gorali)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

It's a spot of tragi-comedy to watch Sharon's Attorney-general
scrambling through the junkyard of obsolete epistemology, to find
an excuse to let the boss slip the hook again.

For most of us, bribery's not that complicated:  
     I toss the Chief Surgeon the keys to my spare Mercedes for
his kid to learn on, and hope that later he puts in something
that's not made in China.  Or I buy the lady a Lobster Thermidor
in Iced Champagne Moet, and hope that later she puts out something
of analogous value.  
     (One does not ordinarily in such cases draw up a notarized
contract and insist upon receipts; a simple throwaway Cobra
answering machine is more than sufficient.)

Zeno's Achilles lost the 100-yard dash to an exceptionally linear
tortoise.  Because first Achilles had run the first half of the
distance; which was no problem.  Then he had to run half of what
was left; at which point he had a lead of slightly under 75 yards,
and looked like a sure bet.  But then he had to run half of that
remainder, and so on ad infinitium.  Meanwhile the tortoise, who
was too obtuse to comprehend differential calculus, just kept on
truckin', and in the end won by a tail.
                       
One can see and show that the AG is re-defining bribes out of
existence.  Coming from someone in his Office, not my concrete
bungalow, that has serious consequences.

If bribery could be proved to the AG's exacting standards, it
would be either legal or suicidal. 

It is because bribery is illegal that such transactions are
necessarily ambiguous and deniable.  
And also, no gentleman or lady likes to acknowlege having been
had.

So Mazuz, an epistemologist of the old school, analyzes the
concept of 'bribery' as follows (HaAretz 5 May '04 (Gorali)):

There is   'Gift'   'Awareness'    and 'Reward'
But it's more complex than that:  these concepts can be subdivided
(and will be, by the Attorney-general, while the clock, the Prime
Minister, and the Tortoise all move on, until the last settler
straggles out to Bat Yam Elite):   

With GIFT , we have   Giver   and  Givee (or 'Gimmee') 
GIFT must be given, but to whom:                     
Gift may be Given, not Directly to the Gimmee, but to a CUTOFF ,
who may or may not be an AGENT of the Gimmee.             
   "Excuse me:  Did you say your name is Gilad MESSERSHMIDT?  Do
you happen by any chance to still have that Envelope?" 
   Or:  "Look, the kid has his own allowance, his own room, his
own friends; I can't keep up with younger generation."

AWARENESS is predicated of both Giver and Gimmee
    Did the Gimmee know the Quid was pro quo, not pro bono?
And with Awareness, we have INTENT.
And Intent is predicated of both Giver and Gimmee.
    "But officer, I always tip the Attendants at Washrooms and
Passport Control."
    "My Dad's friends would always bring me candy and stuff, maybe
a little Hanuka gelt.  And we had to get a new bull, and the old
man was running short that week."                           

REWARD may be a Reward, but maybe it isn't; maybe it's just
coincidence: 
      "I told them you could chop down the forest, but I didn't do
it for you; it just happens that I hate trees ever since I sat
under one and a bird pooped on my cupoloe, so I would have done it
anyhow, so you didn't really bribe me, but thanks for the check
anyhow."

And that's just for starters; the analysis can, if necessary, be
made much more complex.

In the LIMITING CASE (the Simplest Case): 
I hand the Minister a certified check for a half-million, tell him
I want a zoning variance even though it's against the rules; he
pockets the check, says I realize you're trying to influence me to
do someething that's against the rules, but for you I'll make an
exception; and the next day he comes back and tells me, we just
bought a really big new tractor, glad your check didn't bounce, go
ahead and chop down the forest.

If all that is the case, and if there is clear evidence that this
is the case, then the Attorney-General may, with due diligence,
post an indictment (assuming, of course, that his postillion is
not struck by lightning.)

But if all that it is not the case, the Attorney-General will envy
Hamlet his decisiveness.                  

==================================================================
sa, Mevo Modi'in, 6 May '04  -- 15 Iyar -- gvurah sh'b; HOD
================================================================


Has it occurred to anyone that someone who used as atrociously bad
judgement as Sharon did in his various scandals, might be
similarly wrong with his policy initiatives?

===============================================================
 
The cover of the 7 May '04 Post Magazine (with its lame humour,
lacklustre graphics, and tendentiously untypical composite photo-
cartoon) raises a question:  is the primary loyalty of the present
editorial staff of the Post to Israel, or to the present
administration of the USA?

=================================================================

There is only one possible Republican nominess for President: 
Powell.

================================================================
To:  Boston Globe
cc:  letters@jpost.com
From:  Steve Amdur (Belmont High '58); Mevo Modi'in, Israel

The next question in the Bush Administration's prisoner-abuse
scandal is:  did Rumsfeld deliberately hire private contractors to
interrogate security prisoners, just because they could use
indecent techniques without being subject to court-martial?

===============================================================
                
To: onlanguage@nytimes.com
                    
William Safire, discussing the phrase "cut and run" (NYT, repr.
IHT 3 May '04) , offers an interesting but questionable
explanation.

Safire writes:  "The nautical metaphor was defined in the 1794 
"Elements and Practices of Rigging and Seamanship" as "to cut the
cable and make sail instantly, without waiting to weigh anchor."

Now first of all a colloquial phrase is may be 'explained' or
'reported', etc., but not 'defined'; a definition is a stipulation
of usage made when setting up a formal conceptual system, eg a
geometry.

Next, I'd question whether the correct spelling is 'weigh anchor'
or ''way anchor' (as in: "Away, anchor!").  If the latter, then
its original usage might have been to call out, when anchoring,
that the anchor had been cast into the water -- an sudden event,
as distinct from the gradual process of hauling the anchor back up
and alongside the bow.            

But my main question is:  under what conditions, if any, would a
ship have be forced "to cut the cable and make sail instantly"?
                      
A ship anchors a short distance off-shore, usually in a harbour
(especially if there may be wind).  A harbour protects a ship from
along-shore winds.  One might need to run from a sudden very
strong off-shore wind; but the only place I've seen that is on the
Golan side of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), when a 'sharaf' from
the Arabian desert comes down the Golan cliffs, strong enough to
raise white-caps.

 And of course one could not run from an off-sea wind.  Nor, for
that matter, could one run out of most harbours.
Also, to run free would take a lot of sail, and that would take
some time to set, since a ship sits at anchor with practically no
sail.  So there should be time to pull up the anchor while the
sail is being unfurled. 

I can't challenge a nautical handbook; but on the other hand, who
knows who wrote it, or even read it.

Safire also notes "the earliest citation in the OED:  In 1704, The
Boston News-Letter reported that "Cap. Vaughn rode by said Ship,
but cut and run."              

This, I guess, may better suggest the metaphor behind the phrase. 
I imagine the Captain riding past the ship at a leisurly pace, as
he determined its nationality and nature, and then, perhaps
fearing musket fire from the sailors, suddenly turning his horse's
head sharply to the left (if he had come down to Boston Harbour
from Dorchester Heights) and galloping quickly inland, out of
range. 
Note that sharply turning the horse's head would tend to cut its
tongue with the bridle.

===============================================================
sa, Mevo Modi'in, 10 May '04 -- 19 Iyar -- yesod sh'b' HOD
==============================================================
=================================================================
                   
Re: English AM news, 10 May '04
                
COMES FROM SITTING TOO LONG IN THOSE EUROPEAN SALONS

Barrenboim has reportedly behaved shabbily, but it's not as if he
were a columnist for HaAretz.  Still, he might keep an eye on
where that $100,000 he sends to Ramallah really goes.  Or else
entrust it to the prevailing winds. 

================================================================

Why must the Post serve as an apologist for the Bush
administration?

=============================================================== 

Israel should try not to be too closely associated with the USA;
we're apt to get a bad reputation, as an occupying power that
mistreats those under its control.

===============================================================

SORRY ABOUT THAT WE SHOT YOUR SACRED BULL         
       
Prisoners in Israel are treated more humanely than in most of the
world.  Married prisoners are granted the right to conjugal
visits, on the ground that every human being has the right to
procreate.                                                       

Some outspoken if not predominant elements of the electorate,
including the state prosecutor's office (under the liberal-minded
Mr. Mazuz), want to make Yigal Amir the first exception to that
principle.
It is argued, surprisingly, that Amir might reveal state secrets.

That raises the question:  what state secrets could be revealed by
someone who ostensibly was never more than a security guard for an
agency that helped Jews leave the USSR.

There are two outstanding questions about the Rabin assassination: 
How could Amir get so close to the Prime Minister.  And what, if
anything, is the meaning of the fact that someone was reportedly
(Jerusalem Post) heard to shout out, immediately after Amir fired
his shots, 'Don't worry, they're blanks.' 
And in the days immediately after the assassination, some
reportedly ( Jerusalem Post) speculated that it might have been "a
work accident."

One may also note that, for a regicide, Amir has received
surprisingly humane treatment (by world standards, if not by
Israeli standards); although he is apparently held incommiunicado,
and under constant surveillance.  Again, one might ask why, since
there is no indication that he is suicidal.  

One may speculate that Raviv, working for a secret and possibly
rogue element of the government, had enlisted Amir in a plot to
simulate an assassination of the Prime Minister.  There's no guess
why.  Maybe it would then have been used, like the Reichstag Fire,
as an excuse for imposing some sort of maritial law, maybe to push
through cessessation of territory.  But Amir double-crossed his
handler(s?), and used (appropriately) dum_dum bullets instead of
blanks.                                                          

Although there is dignity and a certain poignancy to Rabin's death
( immediately before leaving the podium, he was photographed, with
an unchraacteristic opening of his crusty facade, singing along to
a sentimental song of yearning for peace), he was no martyr.

Rabin enters the stage of history firing at another future Prime
Minister (Begin, on the bridge of the Altalena), presumably on the
instructions of the then Prime Minister and Chief of Staff.  At
the time of his assassination, Rabin had made clear his intent of
ceding practically all post-1967 territory, including the Golan,
and had said that his critics could "spin like propellors."  
Some have suggested that it may have appeared to some that the
possibilities of democratic opposition had been exhausted.

Had Rabin lived, we might today be at peace, although not
necessarily in the land of Israel.

Well, these are all just musings, based only on the Jerusalem
Post. 

When the news broke on TV, I was sitting by the Golan shore of the
Kineret, a few meters from abandonned artillery shelters, 
watching a Crocodile Dundee movie on TV.   The heroine had just
removed her blouse, ostensibly for fear of a snakebite.  I still
regret not having seen the rest of that movie. 

==================================================================











=================================================================

There is nothing exceptionally immoral or unusual, at least by USA
standards, in a neatly dressed young woman, perhaps in the company
of her colleagues, holding a naked man by a dog's leash; far worse
occurs each evening in the better lofts of Manhattan (south of
Houston, they say), although usually the gentleman requests and
pays extravagantly for the experience.  

Still, a sexual act to which one of the participants does not
freely consent, is a form of rape.

Indecent acts are not usually the worst possible sins; "a fate
worse than death" is rarely evaluated as such by the victim,
except for the Spirit of Southern Maidenhood in "Birth of a
Nation".  And Griffith seems rather a proto-facist.

Imagine that the man at the end of the leash is James Bond; he
will doubtless make the best of a somewhat uncomfortable mishap,
and be reclining with the young lady and a shared pitcher of well-
iced martini by the post-climactic sentence of the paperback.

Or imagine that this incident is one of those "ticking bomb"
scenarios that occasionally exist , or which must prudently be
believed to possibly exist (as in Israel's "Bus 300" incident),
and which, apparently extended to the point of attenuation, serve
as the rationale for much of the questionable aspects of Israel's
policies on prisoner interrogation.

Suppose that the prisoner knows of an anthrax  time-bomb left
somewhere in Manhattan and set to detonate within 24 hours.  What
types of interrogation, and pre-interrogation processing, would
then be deemed ethically justified or justifiable.

But now consider the other possibility:  suppose that the prisoner
really is innocent, let us say a  life-long pacifist who was
arrested on the way to his wedding because the real terrorist had
simulated his identity.  And henceforth, even if physically
unimpaired ( the  strictest definition of torture; although most
would say -- the deliberate infliction of physical pain)  will be
able to consort only with spaniels.                    

At this point one must ask:  why is the USA interrogating
prisoners.  It has been concluded that Iraq does not possess non-
conventional weapons.  The USA, unlike Israel, is facing, not a
linear sequence of centrally meticulously planned terrorist
attacks on their civillians, but a continual campaign of guerilla
harassment of military and quaisi-military occupying forces (and,
unlike Israel, the USA forces really are present as occupiers, not
as an occasionally incurring defensive force.)  

Nor is it clear why a prisoner must be spiritually broken before
even commencing interrogation.  Leaving aside questions of decency
(not to mention the fundamental principle of all religions that,
as B'tselem makes clear, humankind is created as the image of the
Divine) morality, and the appalling likelihood that the enemy with
then reciprocate with captured US personnel -- informants of any
substantial value are likely to better respond to the sorts of
businesslike inducements offered collaborators and defectors.

An apparently routine procedure of using psychologic torture in
interrogating prisoners would have to been known to and at least
passively approved by the Secretary of Defense and the President. 
From what little one can infer of the true character of those two
men, it is not inconceivable that they did so.  It would surely be 
known and supported by senior military commanders. 

But so far, reportedly (Yahoo news, 10 May (AP)), the only person
facing a court-marital is a 20-year old pregnant young woman from
West Virginia (one of the poorest states in the USA, with some of
the most hard-working people, exploited and left behind from the
coal-mining era) who served in the National Guard (with the rank
of Private!) in order to make money to become a meteorologists,
because she loved storms (IHT 10 May).  One must admire the spirit
of such a young woman, and grieve that is probably has been and
will be broken.      

Apparently (Yahoo, loc cit.) one of the interrogators put a leash
on the naked prisoner and handed it to the lowest-ranking soldier
present, in order to snap a photo that could be used to blackmail
the prisoner or intimidate other prisoners.  She whole thing was
probably made to seem to her like a sort of fraternity prank. 
Nothing in the sketch of this young woman suggests sadism, or even
hostility toward men.

One recalls the Levinsky affair, where another naively
enthusiastic young woman was corrupted and in a sense ruined by
one of the great lords of our time.

With its phony profession of traditional American values, the Bush
administration, like the LBJ Administration before it, which sent
a generation into the surreal hell of Vietnam, leads nany
genuinely good and patriotic young Americans astray.

==================================================================
         
HELPFUL HINT 050513:
 
The competing 'Palestinian' political/terrorist groups should
agree to fixed shares credit (or 'responsibility', to use the
politically fashionable if hypocritic term) for the numbers of
Israeli civilians and civilian-soldiers intentionally killed and
maimed each month.  Say, 35% for Hamas, 15% for Islamic Jihad, and
50% for the PLO (and all its subsidiaries) as the enabling local
authority.  Those figures could then be reported to the secret
services of the various sponsoring Arab states, which could then
return monthly funding on a businesslike basis.  The EU, which
does not intentionally fund Palestinian terrorism, need not be
advised.

===============================================================
         
Atacking Israeli soldiers is not an act of terrorism, it is an act
of declared guerilla insurrection.  Israel should ackowlege that
and respond accordingly, within the appropriate international
conventions.  If Egypt will not control its border with Gaza and
end arms smuggling, Israel must enlarge the border zone on its
side, to the extent necessary to safeguard border patrols.

===============================================================
  
Old Don Rumsfeldt, whose blunt speech hides a mediocre mind,
claims that the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war
does not apply to prisoners held at Guantanamo [which he claims is
not subject to U.S. law because it is not in the USA ], because
those prisoners are suspected terrorists, and "terrorist don't
comply with the laws of war.  They go around killing innocent
civillians." 

 The Bush administration has also claimed that persons who do not
wear uniforms are not protected by the Geneva convention. 

The mind boggles at the implications, if these incoherent ad hoc
attempts at a quick fix are taken as theory.

When a plane leaves Cape Cod to the West, can the passengers
unpack the pot because they are no longer in the USA?

Does a suspected terrorist forfeit protection of international law
until it is proved that he was only an innocent bystander? 

If a General is captured in the bath, does he forfeit protection
of the Geneva Convention because he is not wearing a uniform? 
What of CIA staff?  What of contract employees?  

There are no laws of war, except that war crimes were committed
only by the losing side.  
But there are conventions of decent behavior; and some of those
conventions have been formalized in international Conventions.

The present scandal is shocking because it violates, not only
formalized conventions, but the even more basic principles of
human decency.

Is 'innocent civillians' a redundant term:  are all civillians
innocent 
#l2
(and are all military personnel uninnocent; 
#l3

so that it is somehow honorable for the professional
terrorists of Hamas to kill young men (and occasionally
young women) who are doing obligatory military service,
almost always in a defensive capacity. )
#l1
Killing civillians is a basic aspect and often tactic of warfare. 
In biblical times, a city under siege was warned that if it did
not surrender, its civillians would be massacred when the city
fell.
There is the aerial bombardment by Spanish Facists of the market-
town of Guernica, the British Air Force fire-bombed Dresden, the
USA incinerated not only Hiroshima, but the essentially civillian
city of Nagasaki. US strategy in Vietnam was directed primarily
against civilians.  ( Incidentally, the Vietcong were not
uniformed, but it was not argued that they were terrorists, nor
that they were not entitled to the minimal protection of the
Geneva Accords.) 

One keeps coming to, and trying to withdraw from, the conclusion
that the Bush Administration is quaisi-facist.

===============================================================

AND HOMER SIMPSON?                                             

I hear on the news that the AIPAC Convention has refused to let
Sharansky speak, but will be addressed by Tommy Lapid and George
Bush Jr.  The dumbing_down of the USA continues.

=================================================================
Sent, letters@haaretz.co.il, cc: letters@jpost.com  16 May '04

MAZUZ BLUES TAKE 2:

HaAretz/English 16 May '04 (Hannah Kim):

     "The meeting dealt in a highly practical manner with the
evidence in the [Sharon] case, through a sort of simulation game
in which criminal intent and awareness were examined.
    "For example, does the conversation in which contractor David
Appel informs Sharon that his son will be receiving a great deal
of money from him, while Appel in the same time period asked
Sharon to help him with the Greek island project, and large sums
of money indeed flowed into Gilad Sharon's bank account from
Appel's company, constitute evidence that Sharon was aware of the
quid pro quo between himself and Appel?"

It absolutely does not, if we presuppose the neo-Democrotian
theory of ethical atomism.  In that theory, as T.S. Eliot so aptly
put it (while on the edge of a mental breakdown) "I can connect
nothing with nothing.".  However, this ethical theory has not yet
received academic recognition (nor, for that matter, been
propounded), perhaps because it would be applicable only to to a
community of persons living in a closed ward with incapacitating
brain damage.     

Although it is applicable to the hitherto real world if we
presuppose a causal theory of absolute synchronicity:  everything
that occurs is the most astounding coincidence, no matter how
regularly the sequence recurs.  Though it's 0 or 00 on every spin
of the wheel, only a cad would look under the table and only a
piker stop betting.  

As they say in the lesser baal tchuva institutes, everything that
happens is a miracle (tho this reduces the notion of 'miracle' to
no more (or less) than an exhortation to awe.)

The accused shot his pistol, and a hate-monger fell with a
surprisingly similar slug of lead disruptively in a place never
intended by Nature, but who except Superman (absent that day from
Manhattan) is to say that these were one and the same.  Aquittal
(if not quietus).                                                 


Again:  to articulate a conceptual analysis of bribery,  let us
first distinguish between 'Giver' and 'Givee'.  (As a mnemonic,
the latter may be re-termed the 'Gimmee', aka Papa.)  

We must also distinguish the 'Cutoff' (or 'Kid'), whose
relationship to the 'Gimmee' is necessarily ambiguous, since a
criminal act is necessarily (however implausibly) deniable.  
(A criminal act which is not necessarily deniable is either 'civil
disobededience' or attempted voluntary incarceration.)

In attempted bribery, the Giver slips the Kid a Quid, who may or
may not pass a piece to Papa.
(The Giver should (deniably) 'slip' the Kid a quid, not blatantly
'lay it on' him.   However, the essential deniability is of
criminal intent, so the quid may be unambiguously given if it is
received by a 'front' ostensibly unempowered to return a 'quo' to
the Giver.

If no quo is expected, then we have either philanthropy, naivete,
or a would-be criminal with a terribly defeatist attitude.

 We must also distinguish the 'quid' (a unit of British currency
once of significant value) from the 'quo' (a notoriously
unpalatable gamebird; call 'nevermore').
'Criminal intent' is predicated primarily of the 'Giver';
'Awareness' is predicated primarily of the 'Gimmee'.
'Criminal intent' entails 'awareness'; as does any sort of intent.
'Awareness' does not seem to entail 'criminal intent'; but that
needs more exegesis.                    

The Gimmee may or may not be Aware (or 'have Awareness' for those
who like abstract substantives) of the 'Quid'.  
If he is `Aware' of it he may or may not be aware of the 'Giver''s
'Criminal Intent'.
("But gosh, he just seemed to me like an unusually nice man.")
If he is aware of the Giver's Criminal Intent, he may or may not
intend to return a 'Quo'.                         

If he does intend to return a 'Quo', he may or not have been
motivated to do so 'Because' of the 'Quid'.
(This refinement to our emerging Theory of Bribery, which Kim does
not note, was developed (at public expense, of course) by our
Attorney-General.)
("You could have saved your money, Chump; I was gonna do it
anyway.")
If that is the case we have a 'superfluous bribe'.  

If the Gimmee intends to return a Quo, but fails to do so, we have
an 'unsuccessful bribe'.  As any worldly School of Business
Management must note, this is a statistical cost of this aspect of
business.

If the Gimmee does not intend to return a Quo, then we have a
'failed bribe'.
(As-it-is-said, "a honest politician is one who, when bought,
stays bought".)

If the Gimee has no Awareness of the desired Quo, then we have an
'inept bribe', and the Giver may be obligated by his colleagues to
return his Platinum Card and go back to breaking kneecaps.

If the Gimmee has no Awareness even of the Quid, then the Cutoff
better run to Romania.

Well, maybe that's enough start on a Theory of Bribery for now. 
This sort of conceptual analyticity (or anyhow fractionalization)
was a popular alternative to, if not evasion of, (Wittgensteinian)
ordinary-language analysis, at least in the '60's.  I'm not sure
how much it resolves, or even clarifies, but it does let one pin
on lots of new little labels. 

The Attorney-General's conclusion in the Sharon Affair is a
foregone conclusion; his long and intensely expensive re-
examination of the entire matter would be necessary only to
someone desperately trying to construct a rationalization large
and elaborate enough to joust against common sense.  Several
Republican picks on the U.S. Supreme Court are considered rather
good at that sort of sophistry.

===============================================================
sa, Mevo Modi'in, 16 May '04  -- 25 Iyar -- hod sh'b' YESOD
===============================================================
Sent letters@iht.com 16 May 
Re: IHT 15-16 May '04 (Meller)

A MARKETING TIP FROM P.T. BARNUM                                  

If a USA multi-national manufactured chocolate-coated anthrax, the
Bush Administration would charge  any nation which refused to
import it with unlawful restraint of trade.

=================================================================