=jr050328 NEW ENTRIES FROM 27 March '04 (Easter Sunday) ----------------------------------------------------------------- He locks up everything but the potty goes home to Easter dinner and says, You're the boss here now. He asks if I have anything to eat. I say, Pasta. He says, OK. (Campra, 27 Mar '04 -- Easter Sunday -- a grey drizzly day -- 16 Adar Bet ) ----------------------------------------------------------------- If glass is pareve, why is not Teflon. But then I might argue -- and why is not a well-glazed bit of crockery, for it is impereable. (Though now one must ask, why is not porcelain pareve, for it is impermeable all the way through, it is not covered.) The answer to the well_glazed cup is that there might be a break in the glaze, exposing the permeable clay beneath. But then too there might be a scratch or gouge in the teflon coating, exposing the permeable metal beneath. So I'd better eat my hamburger raw, since I only have -- had, rather -- one (teflon-coated) frying pan. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The IHT 31 Mar '05 reports that "Google plans to digitalize 15 million books from the collectios of Harvard, S_tanford, the Universit of Michigan, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University. For copyright books, only excerpts will be available online, but the full texts of books first published more than 70 years ago will be posted." Just what the world or culture needs: A 70-year old mega-library. Google seems to have a gemius for doing great things wrong. ------------------------------------------------------------------ IHT 31 Mar '05 (AP) . A man is convicted of possession of child pornography . He recieved it over the Internet. It is not clear if he downloaded it from E-mail to File-Save, nor (less likely) if he printed it. This conviction feels wrong. Of course child pornography is repugnant, and involving a child in sex acts is a crime -- not only because the child is under the age of consent, but beause this is an act that can be psychologically very harmful to a child. And it is not clear how one draws the line to excuse somoene who receives and holds unrequested child pornography as Email But it is not clear why possession of such material should be illegal when possession of wholesome heterosexual pornography is not. The criminalization of possession is a very problematic notion, since it is only acts, not intent, much less predisposition, that are criminal. To prosecute for predisposition is a witch-hunt. (And that is also the flaw in telephatically intuiting where a person is at -- one may see the predisposition, but not see the over-riding values and the will to adhere to those values. For example, in Judaism homosexuality is, as the Bible says, simply forbidden. It makes no difference to whom or what one is drawn, a married man is to do his marital duty with appropriate frequency with his wife, if (and only if) she so desires, however he feels. (One ancient homo is quoted in Vanity Fair, where else, as saying that the thought of waking up beside a woman struck him as repugnant. Well, one can imagine such a frame of mind -- a fear of caves and fecund cavities maybe -- but it is hyper-sensitive and highly neurotic. Or as Victorian women were advised, close your eyes and think of England. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Takunun: "Let us fall into the hands of LORD, but into the hands of man let me not fall." This sounds like a free ride, but it ain't. And that is the story in Jewish Treasury of Folklore of the Czar's servant who bought and bad fish, and was given the choice of eating the fish or being whipped 50 times, and chose what seemed to him the easier path only to find that it was too hard for him, and so asked to change to the other option, and so had the worst of both. The inner agony of the spiritual path, and the outer agony of the physical path. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I guess now that Honest George has a closet homo -- he has a family with grown children,and is of course a prominent figure in the Olivone community -- relationship with Mr. Surely, and expected to make a little lovenest here, only to find I was here as a sort of imagined watcher. Well, I do keep an eye on all that goes on, this is part of being an Israeli, but one intervenes only within one's area of responsibility -- for me, the property of Zenith and of the Vanzetti's; and Modi'in, the safety of the residents -- and overlooks the rest. And of course PVK could see everything, but overlooked personal weaknesses, as HIK says, "Do not attempt to uncover the secret of another." (apr.) And R. Shlomo too was nobody's fool, but never said a censorious word. When I first came here it was my sense that I was disrupting something for Honest George & Co. I assumed it was something clean and simple, like offloading truckloads of stolen herring in the middle of the night. As for Mr. Surely, I think he is merely an opportunist, not honest enough even to be a homo; an emotionally asexual type who would use sexuality only as one more possible device. There is apparently an unwritten Swiss principle of restaurants that the waiter must open -- and then pour -- a bottle of beverage, apparently in a show of serving it, to justify the outrageous markup. Well, that's most unhygienic -- who needs someone else's hands the vessels from which one eats or drinks -- and from a spiritual standpoint, rather an unwanted laying on of hands. It is something one would want only from someone to whom one might look for blessing. Not from someone filled with unspoken curses. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Add to Rap notes: Guracamole, F_ck 'em all ---------------------------------------------------------------- The USA haa never been as grotesque as it is now under the Bushie's. Not even in the I Like Ike 1950s. This Sciavo case is the worst image yet to emerge. Starving a comatose woman to death -- and in the eye of the mass media because no-one dares risk prosecution for giving her an injection. Stupidity -- or rather, narrow-mindedness -- combined with a sociopathic opportunism, with bathetic sentimentality, leads to grotesque results. --------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 31 Mar '05 (Danforth) One should term the fanatically Christian Bushie's sectarian, not religious, and not Conservative Christians. They are motivated by a shallow, narrow-minded parody of religion. Islam and Judaism have their literalists too, but , apart from an Islamic indulgence of blowing up busloads of elderly infirm and childen infidels, these literalist movements are not as bad as the Bushie literalism. ----------------------------------------------------------------- MY LIVING WILL: It was the lack of a written living will that caused Sciavo to be chained to a practically dead body in a hospital bed for 16 years -- which must seem like millenia when one can no longer retreat into the distractions of the physical world. So here, once again, is my Living Will. As I have repeatedly stated, on donor cards, eg the last one I got in the USA in Watertown in 1986 -- and those details should confirm my identitiy, in place of a signature and witnesses -- if I am so strickened that there is no realistic possibility of regaining bodily function, I would not want to be enslaved by those who would "rack him to this world" (Sharkespeare, King Lear, last scence). Unlike those yahoos who would force-feed a zombie, I am, as the Catholic catechism, I think (in any case, it's in the text of the Bach B Minor Mass) "confident in the life of the world to come". In that case I would not to be kept alive by artificial means, including a heart-lung machine and force-feeding. And I would like all transplantable body parts to be put to that use, but not to be used for "medical research". That accords with what I stated on the 1986 Mass. Dept of Motor Vehicles Organ Donor card. Stephen Benjamin Amdur, Campra, 1 April '05. This date notwihstanding, this is not an April Fool's joke. ---------------------------------------------------------------- File-sharers, eg Grokster, do not 'induce' consumers -- those poor silly sheep, so easily impressed with evil ideas -- like an Amserdam hooker waylaying a choirboy -- to download music, thay make it possible for them to do so. And incidentally, it has almost nothing to do with depriving musicians of royalties. An author's royalties are a very small percemt pf the profit of the publisher. The record-producers are here hprocritical. And it is not true that everyone who takes something for free would otherwise have paid for it. This is not even true of necessities, let alone luxuries, and still less of whimsical purchases -- things for which the purchaster has neither a great need, like food or medicine, nor a great desire, but merely purchases on whim. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 29 Mar '05 (Friedman) Best way to fight global warming is to ban private autos. --------------------------------------------------------------- I'm just trying to keep the bridge propped up so she can come back over it if she wants to some day. -------------------------------------------------------------- "both Sodom and Gamorrah" (IHT 1 Apr '05 (Grimes) You can say that again. (G)Amorah , a repeater, one who preserved the Mishna, when it was still confined to oral tradition, by memorizing and repeating, ---------------------------------------------------------- Again: Chagall is a touchstone to Judaism, for he evokes its essentially joyous character. I think it is fair to say that both HIK and PVK missed this. HIK seemed to focus on the nobilitg, and PVK on the sorrow, and then on joy transcending sorrow. But that is still too close to the Christian paradigm of Jesus/Christ -- eg PVK's image of Christ dancing on the Cross -- one might say, on the cross on which Jesus is being crucified -- except that Jesus/Christ is a duality, a two-in-one, not a dualism, a disjunction. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Newsweek 21 March '05 (Beith) Contrary to the Newsweek spin, a Jordanian proposed law to deny trade unions the right to engage in political activity, although undemocratic per se, is not necessarily repressive. Denying rights to organized groups may tend to safeguard the rights of individuals. In this case it may be that Jordanian trade unions, representing the largely Palestinian working class, would tend to be an anti-monarchist and maybe pro-theocratic destablizing force. --------------------------------------------------------------- Again; Literalistic religion -- the USA Bushie Christian sect, jihadist Islam, and to an extent -- though I think I much lesser extent -- some aspects of some groups of Jewish ultra-orthodoxy -- is barely spiritual, and 'religious' only in a limited sense. For instance, the hysterical clining to physical life under any conditions implies a disbelief in non-material life ("life after death" -- or for that matter, before birth) , and an insistence on capital punishment implies as a disbelief in Divine Grace -- as Bush demonstrated in one of his last acts as Governor of Texas, in refusing to commute the execution of Kayla Thorpe, who had obviously become in prison an exceptionally good person. --------------------------------------------------------------- I think it will some day come out that Sharon, far from being a bold and courageous visionary, was a coward who yielded to blackmail from the USA over undisclosed evidence of his obvious knowlege of and culpability in the Greek island bribery affair. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Writing from Singapore, someone says Wsuperstitious Chinese gamblers believe that for everything bad, something good will happen." Well, true enough, but the correlation is statistical, not causal. Though also a person of good faith and strong will can salvage and build some triumpth from an unfortunate event -- this is how PVK views the story of Jesus/Christ -- "a -- I forget if his word was debacle, tragedy, disaster, or what -- and it does matter -- which avered itself to be the greatest triumph the world has ever known" -- and it is also Wittgenstein's (in Culture and Value) "Striech Gelt von jeder Fehler." ---------------------------------------------------------------- This so-called MidEast democracy is so obviously only a media blip that it is hard to imagine how, or that, anyone believes it. Iraq will remain an anarchy, and further degenerate, and this imagined Palestinian quasi-state will never become a contiguous independent state, and will remain an anarchic, extortionate organization. Though Lebanon may again emerge as a propserous and automonomous state. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: Newsweek 21 Mar '05 (Dickey) It is not clear that there was any sort of terrorist campaign against the USA at the time of the World Trade Center destruction. Indeed, the absence of any demonstrated terrorist attacks agains the USA since then suggests that there was not. But the Bush Admimnistrations's opportuisitc insistence, as an ongoing virtual media event, that there was -- apparenently as a sort of Reichstag Fire exxxxcuse for repressive if not plutocratic policies -- has started to create one. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Re; Newsweek 21 Mar '05 (Pape9 I would say that Israel hasbara in Switzerland has been practically a complete failue. I move in the usual liberal community -- exceptionally intelligent and caring people. And I no longer expect any of my friends not to be biased against Israel. It is part of the 'conventional wisdom' of the Eruopean liberal community. One friend recently remarked that Israel reprisals in the aftermath of terrorist attacks are "revenge". One might better say that they are militarily advisable moves, deferred until a terroirst incident occurs and provides a climate mof media-reality in which they will not have serious dipolomatic etc. repercussionsl. In response to this article on a European-funded Palestinian film humanizing suicide bombers -- a reasonable enough point, since every human being is human, but a point easily enlisted through simplistic sentimentality into pro-Palestinian and at least implicitly anti-Israel propaganda - Well, there is a common media-myth that suicide bombers are oppressed or desperate young people who spontaeously act out their despair -- and that may be true of individual motiviation, but as for the act itself, it is deliberately planned for ulterior objectives by well-organized and externally funded groups. There are few genuinely spontaneous, individual terrorist attacks, and most do not succeed. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Really who cares about Holocaust museums. Let them build musems about Israel. And multi-media librarires to preserve the destroyed culture of Jewish Eastern Europe. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Can't even get a simple workshoe with durable shoelaces. It's all yuppified -- those half-hooks where the lace always comes lose in a loop that you trip over. And tipped cloth-wrapped shoe-laces, where the tip soon wears off and the darned thing takes minutes to rethread -- where a simple leather lace would not. Even an unwrapped cloth lace is more durable. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The Talmud says, never live a place where no dog barks. And I think somewhere it says, where there is no cat, but maybe I'm mistaken. Cats ain't much for scaring off burgulars, but they do keep away the mice and rats. So anyhow, I add: never live in a place where you can't pss out the front door. I'm paying about 500 a month -- SF, but that's only 1.2 times dollars nowadays -- to live in an attractively refinished shipping container with one door and one window, no water and of course no privy. About 8 feet wide and maybe 20 feet long. And now the patron stops by and says, don't piss out the front door. Fine, a 20 yard walk in pitch black when I wake up in the middle of a foggy night and try not to trip over my untieable shoelaces. If I ever get the trots, it's a 30 yard uphill dash through 3 doors. They talk of age-ism, but never spell it out. For one thing it means some very practical consideration for the nees of the weakening bodies of the elderly. Eg a nearby privy. With my computer and sound-copying stuff, and my dining supplies, and my clothes, and bed, this place is almost as condenses as the sleeping quarters on a sailing boat. Especially with weakening short-term memory, it's hard for me to keep all the appertenances of a civilized life organized and accessible. It seems a trivial reason for moving to another ocntinent and ecosystem, but it is a continual low-level background aggravation and frustration. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Re: JP Int 4 Feb '05 (the last known issue to hit the Zurich Bahnhof, which was the last place in Switzerland to carry it, except for the Zurich Jewish Bookshop, and a kiosk in davka Zernez): Attorney-General Mazuz, a Grade A Wimp, has reportedly (JP Int 4 Feb '05) ordered that Israeli Arabs "must have equal purchasing access to Israeli land parcels under the control of the Jewish National Fund and the Israel Lands Administration. The JP adds "Mazuz reportedly declared that such a policy could not be defended in court." Again, as he most conveniently did in closing the Sharon case, Mazuz has abandoned the role of Attorney-General and instead 2nd- guessed a possible judicial ruling. A corporate or private lawyer may concceed a a case he thinks unwinnable, a state Attorney- General must bring a prosecution when he considers it justified, rgardless of what he may imagine his chances to be of winning. And in this case a Court could reasonably hold that as an essentially private organization, the JNF was purchase land for re-sale to whoever it choses -- in this case, to Jews who wish to build up the world's only Jewish state, not to Arabs who are more inclined to see it added to the encircling Arab states. Similar reasoning would seem to apply to the Israel Lands Administration, a government organization which holds land to ehance the quality of the Jewish state. This is not ethnic nor religious discrimination, the issue is onoe of national loyalties. Saying this makes me sound like a USA jingoist from the Withunt Eera of the 1950s -- repreised by the Bushies -- and that is not a political image I like wearing, but one must adhere to one's obligations of loyalty, however unfashionalbe and foolish one may then appear. --------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 7 Apr '05 (Lyall): "Poet serches for the right words: Writisting tasefully about royal wedding can be tricky "none of the obvious rhymes -- vanilla, flotilla, Godzilla -- seems appropriate, somehow" Let us now praise Ms. CAMILLA so normal she could be VANILLA Charles' Ship of State will her FLOTILLA now enhance; the Prince may now into her pants get legally and regally with wingED ears like to GODZILLA. the Queen won't give away the groom "looming like Banquo at the feast" "'Every single time, it's an impossible job,' Potts said ...'On is not entirely clear why anyone bothers to do it'" "Motion declined to be interviewed on how his poem was coming along" "Poets as a group tend to be think-skinnerd, jealous and supicious and the elevation of one to such a jpublic post inavriabl opens the door to everone else's rude comments." ------------------------------------------------------------------ re: IHT 7 April '05 (Klinkenborg) An occasional public fool who incongruosly sits on the New York Timed editiorial board is incomprehensibly indulgent of an unspeakably obscene commerical public display, in the tradition of Nazi thanatophilia, of grotesquely re-aranged cadavers. ---------------------------------------------------------------- If glass is pareve, is not teflon. But then I can ask -- is not a well-glazed cup -- for nothing can seep through the glaze and be absorbed in the clay. But the glaze can be scratched or chipped, and the clay exposed. But so too may the teflon, and the underlying metal exposed. And metal is not pareve. Whereas glass is glass all the way through. But then I can say: so porcelain too, must be pareve, for it is impermeable all the way through. ------------------------------------------------------------------- "You keep changing direction" Ever try to steer through fog toward a harbour? --------------------------------------------------------------- Good morning and good-bye, lady I wept you for a day It's time to work and play now The pain can go away The morning star sits high Find coffee. "Liebe kan brernen un nit oirflehrnen a Hary kan weinen, weinen oin trairnen" (Yiddish riddle song) "You may think you are bing disloyal to your sorrow but your sorrow can take care of itself." (PVK, Zenith) HE gave us things to do, too a blessing for the Way. Snow still lies on the heights and the sun-warmed air is cold. "as children break their toys" (HIK) "amd ginger be hot in th' mouth" (Shakespeare) pale blue, pale green have come again "The day breaks. Your mind aches." (Beattles) (Campra, 4 April '05 -- 24 Adar II -- 27 Safar ) ------------------------------------------------------------------ ================================================================= sa, Campra, 7 April '05 -- 28 Adar II -- -- light rain, should be snow before morniing -- =================================================================