=jr050211 JOURNAL, FROM 11 Feb '05 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Miscellaneous new entries, input 2 March : 2 March´'05 -- 21 Adar Aleph -- "Be Hetzi Happy, it's Adar Aleph" -- 23 Muharram -------------------- Zermatt is the Matterhorn region. It must have been a sacred mountain in the good old days that Jean Auel evokes. Swamped with ski-ers in High Ski Season. If you must stay in Zermatt, I recommend the BahnHof Hotel, 027--967-6400 . Dorm, with kitchen available to all; also private rooms. About SF 70. The cog-railway runs up to Gornergrat, 3000 m. The hotel is from the 1800's. About SF 135 including dinner. --------------------- It is as if I got chlled layer after layer, and each layer has to give back its chill, hitherto unfelt, and carefully re-warm, before I feel unchilled. Well, maybe that is not only psychologically but also physiologically true. The epidermis does have multiple layers. I wake up, and see I've been sweating parts of my T-shirt, yet still feel cold. As it were, all lis numb to X but the chilll of hte outermost layer -- as that warms, onc feels the chilll of the next layer. ----------------------- CNN is the main source of news, or vitual reality, for most tolks -- but one could show that CNN is very thin -- the moments of news vs. the the total program time, which includes ads, etc. The number of repeates of as story in 24 hours could be shown to be very high. And the lenght of each story can be shown to be very short, in time and in significant words (for that is a lot of uninformative chatter in a CNNN story.). One could show that CNN compares poorly to even the old USA Network TV news networks -- NBC, CBS, even ABC (which, I once thought, one could not get much lower than). And one might compare the number of words on a given story, between CNN and the IHT (International H>erald Tribune). I'd guess that CNN has about 5 percent of the words that the IHT has. I have said that CNN builds the virtual reality through which most people viw Israel, but now I wonder if CNN has even enough words to do so. Maybe the virtual reality of hoi polloi is not even built from the TV newscasts, but only from what Newsweek once called "conventional wisdom" (in its 'Conventional Wisdom Watch'. What Plato called the Idols of the Agora (Marketplace). So not only are the politics of hoi polloi not analytic nor critical, their politics are not even literate. --------------------------- The post-midnight softcore ads for telephonic intercourse have obsoleted the lads magazines, where, like proper Victorians, the ladies do not move. ------------------------------ A nuclear weapon, like a national government, is a right of nations that is not necessarily in the best interest of their citizens, nor of the the nations much less peoples of the world. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Babilas of Poznan, Poland (IHT Letter, 26 Feb '05) misread a prhase in IHT 22 Feb '05 . 'Polish concentration-camp survivors' means: 'Jewish citiy3ens of Poland who survived the Nazi German concentration camps.' The Polish people fought valiantly through futiley agains German conquest. And in Poland, unlike some other countries, especially Austria, there does not seem to have been a high level of collaboration with the Nazi occupation. ----------------------------------------------- 24 Feb '05 -- 15 Adar A -- Sent IHT via Swissom 24 Feb `05: Re: IHT 24 Feb '05 and see below: It's a bit late for Mr. Livingston to apologize, though he might still resign. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 23 Feb '05 (Cohen) George Bush Jr.'s Iraq war was folly and wrong. Folly because most typrants can be contained. And now the USA is trapped in the Iraq quagmire, and cannot quit without unleasing a haven for terrorist anarchy upon the mid-East, and maybe the entire world. Besides being a strategic disaster, it is not clear that Bushie's War can be justified on principle nor on ethics. It has made a mockery, maybe intentionally -- the Bushie's are incredibly archaic ideologues. of the John Birch Impeach Earl Warren era -- of the United Nations principle of collective national responsiblity. As for human rights, Sadaam's torture and murder of suspected dissidents has its parallel in the USA's torture and occasional unintentional killing of imprisoned suspected jihadists. And the horrors which Sadaam inflicted on the Iraqui people are in some respects (not including using poison gas on the Kurds) by the terrorist attacks to which the Iraqui people have been subjected by the jihadists -- for which the USA is the indirect cause but not the indirect agent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 23 Feb '05 (Waddell) People in vegetative states, if one can still call them peple, have a right, like all other beings, to nutrition and hydration. But they also have a human right to be freed from conditions that "rack him to the world" (King Lear) if the undiverted course of nature, and their soul under present circumstances, would have it so. The radical right, associated with Bush Jr., often shows a cruel simplistic sentimentality. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Re IHT 23 Feb '05 reprinted Boston Globe editorial: The Web need not be as bad as the Boston Globe supposes. Sleveable problems include the obtuseness of Microsoft's closed-source monopolistic software to the range of end-user needs, and the collaboration Servers and U.S. regulatory agencies in SPAM. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Non-Aristotelian Logic (after watching the after-midnight commericals on several satellite TV channels) C_nts are wasted on woman. I mean, almost every man oftimes wants a piece of one now and again, yet omen walk around with one all the time and hardly ever even use it for anything that's fun. (Well, there are some lines which one would rather not even think in public.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another Aristotelian Quartet: In the first-class railroad car the no-smoking Swiss sit in the no-smoking section, which is crowded. I sit in the smoking section, which is empty except me; and I don't smoke. But the no-smoking Swiss don't sit in the smoking section, because the smoking section is for smokers. (25 Feb '05, Sedrun--Andermatt train) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20 Feb '05: The IHT 20 Feb '05 has a front-page center photo, unsupported by an article, centered on a small boy with upturned gaze before a tangle of barbed wire, captioned "Some of the Palestinians whom Israel deported more than two yearas ago from the West Bank crossing into Israel on Sunday." What the alleged truth is behind that remark is not said. The photo was taken by Muhammed Saber for the Eruopean Pressphoto Agency, whatever that is. Well, such publication does constitute propagandizing for the PLO and against Israel. --------------------------------------------------------------- translation of a sign in a railway carriage: defense de pencher en dehors don`t take freebies from the ladies -------------------------------------------------------- George the Plump Alp Restauranteur After Hours: Taking money from people is fun but its even more fun to tell them they can't eat. (Campra 13 Feb '05, light snowstorm) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 9 Feb '05 (Bob Herbert) Guantanamo -- may Castro speedily blockade and liberate it -- is comparable, not to the World War II USA internment camps for West Coast Japanese-Americans, but to Stalin's Gulag. And some aspects of reported interrogation procedures historically resemble those of the Nazi genocide camps. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Business note: Moshav Modi'in, of whose business practices one might well not speak, carrying on in its old bad habits under involuntary new management, has welcomed my request to renew my rental contract -- that was $200 a month for a year when the place as a disaster area, and $350 for the next year, after I had put over $1000 into repairing it -- for all of which they did nothing but get there first. But now, merely to comply with the letter of the rental contract (prepared and rewritten at great lenght by their lawyer, who has produced a document that would be laughted out court -- for one thing, it states that the signers agree to override pre-existing JNF regulations -- they ask that I pay a NIS 10,000 'Security Deposit' -- security against what is not said, nor why that should now be deemed necessary, in this and/or any other case. They neglect to say (1) what interest will be paid, and when, on that deposit -- a return of 10% to 15% would seem required by Israel market conditions -- (2) How that deposit will be secured -- a bank time deposit, perhaps, withdrawable only upon joint consent of renter and rentee -- (3) How determination will be made that the security deposit has been forfeited, in part or whole. For that matter, I don't recall reading of such a deposit in previous contracts, but they were in Hebrew various sections were waived or altered as we read through it -- though I intialed -- no, in general signed -- every change, as far as i recall. I rather doubt that any other renter on the Moshav has been asked to pay such a deposit: and very much doubt that anyone has. At least in the USA, a security deposit, usually set at 1 month's rent, is security against damage and against non-payment of rent, and is something that one usually does not get back. Repair and improvements taht I've made include the following; Whitewashed roof (Billy did it): shower fixtures; toilet spritzer; bathtub shower attatchment; front door inside safety-escape lock; replaced almost all overhead light fixtures; put in refrigerator and portable radiators (both used: which I would leave unless I move somewhere in Israel where I need them): put in two tables (ditto); redid wiring in left room (sufficient for running computers: also installed dimmers (EG)) and right room. (Some of that rewiring woul dbe needed in any event -- the one line was overloaded, so Mike ran a tap off the air-conditioner line.). Fixed outlet in kitchen (EG). Fixed sink leak (Mike). The value of this work greatly exceeds the price paid; EG works on a sort of barter basis, and Mike's prices, especially to me, are much lower than what the Moshav would pay eg to Hanan, I reckon.) Paid AH NIS 3500 to replace kitchen sink housing. This was necessary because water damage which existed at the time I began renting had caused lower life forms to proliferate within the sink housing. Some of the wood was rotten and damp. So I should charge them NIS 10.000 to leave. It seems now that this is a deliberate attempt to get me out, on the pretext that it is merely enforcing a clause in the contract. A clause which I doubt occurs in any other rental contractd. As noted, that rental contract, which went through many revisions by the lawyer, whom I hope was on retainer not per-hour, was preposterous, and patently illegal, as the contracting parties agreed that they would not hold the contract responsible to pre- existing regulation. That is, that where it violated JNF policy, the JNF being the owner of Modi'in, the contracting parties agreed that the contact , not the JNF regulation, would prevail. A legal instrument cannot legally presuppose its own legality. Uncle Peter's expensive if degenerate lawyer once drafted a trust fund document for me which held that if the beneficiary challenged the document in court, the trust fund would be dissolved. This word did not prevail, I assume Sue Persky put in a word on that point. One does not have to have worked under Dershowitz, as she had done, to do so. In any event, a defacto decision to expell a resident cannot properly be taken without full Vaad consideration. When I first moved in Eliahu said, as soon as you fix the place up, they'll kick you out and take it over. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Revelations from Rodos: A gentleman may piss in his boots, but he may not piss in the boots of another gentleman. -----------------------------------------------------------------