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Category Archives: Journal

FTAC: ALW: Earth Consciousness; Human-Universal Inter-Consiousness

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by commart in A Little Wisdom, Asides, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journal, Philology, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

When I started my journey around the world Online (In English), I had never even heard of “Partition”.

While I forget much or what I read, I’ve had the wisdom to keep my reading — my books — close by and may rapidly access what I’ve read.

I have 2,000+ close by reading options and could do my own in-house “Great Books” education, languages included, but I have to match age and mission sense with available resources. ??

As a species, our issues on Earth are profound, and that includes not only our search of political reconciliation and the diminishing of war, God willing, but the greater taking up of the stewardship of our planet, so that we may enjoy the image of our survival much farther into the future than the end of, say, Epoch of Oil.

We can and should open our eyes more widely than we do today:

http://thomasberry.org/


From another conversation this day:

Do you believe in the existence of conscience? Empathy?

God also may be described as an “inter-consciousness” between man and nature across the universe.

Thomas Berry has promoted “earth consciousness” with our species as stewards.

I’d go the extra light year and may — or not as Internet publishing appears to promoted promote abbreviation and compression of thought.


Many years ago, I played with Heinrich Böll’s “Murk’s Collected Silences“, a short story about revisionism involving a radio host and his indecision about the invocation of that singular and most Proper Noun, “God”. At the end of his career and interested in shaping the memory of himself, he decided to hedge, and instead of the recorded invocations of “God”, he had his technician cut out the world and replace it with “thou higher being whom we revere”. Murk, the technician, then cut even the resulting moments of silence for splicing together.

Here on BackChannels, this editor has been using as a trope, similarly hedging but advancing a concept at the same time, “God, Nature, and the Universe”.

It may be that we humans merely process chemicals faster than rocks, and that is all that differentiates our species and all else that lives from stardust.

Indeed, one may see pools of blood where spilled become flakes the color of rust (for the same reason) and drops of it diminish to powder dissolving in air.

That is all we are.

When dead.

When living . . . what a piece of work!

As a species, we needs must be or become the stewards of all that lives and all that in addition supports the beautiful and thriving mission of life.

–33–


Smart Alik! Skating Across the Era of Soviet Absurdities

22 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by commart in Books, Journal, Library, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

contemporary Russia, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orwellian state, Pentacostal Christians, refuseniks, religious persecution, Soviet Era, Soviet history, Soviet injustice, Soviet intolerance

6 x 9Polishchuk, Arkady.  Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter.  Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2018.

In the news at the time:


At the unusual session, General Shchelokov was said to have told the Jews that he had heard of the alleged beatings on a newscast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. He insisted that he was not in charge of security at the reception office.

“I would never permit beating,” Mr. Shcharansky quoted the minister as having said. “If it were my affair, I would arrest the organizers.”

Four of the Jews were missing tonight. They were Boris Chernobylsky, a radio engineer; Arkady Polishchuk, a former editor of the magazine Asia and Africa Today; Viktor Yelistratov and Mikhail Kremen, both also radio engineers. It was not known whether they had been arrested.


Simpler, David K. “Jews in Moscow Resume Visa Sit-In.” The New York Times, October 22, 1976.

The missing “refuseniks” plus one — Arkady Polishchuk notes in his account of that distant day that he had not applied for a visa but was with a crew that had — knew where they were, and the one doing the remembering through his memoir was in that place called pain.

A doctor in the Sklifosofsky Institute said that I had two cracked ribs and recommended to wind a towel around my trunk.  He refused to give me an x-ray film or a written reference.  An exhausted night nurse of this principal trauma center muttered, “If we give a reference to every hoodlum beaten in a street fight  the country would soon run out of ink and paper.”

They certainly had shortages of x-ray films and painkillers.

p. 211

Having been Jewish but not at the time a refusenik, Polishchuk would similarly take up the cause of Pentacostal Christians persecuted by the Soviet Union for their possession of faith.  With empathy and wry humor, he conveys what it’s like for the criminalized pious:

“The local KGB should pray for you every day,” I said.  “Without you, they would’ve stagnated here, without an increase in rank and salary.”

After this lively exchange of views on the role of light and darkness in the spiritual life of mankind, we all crossed the kitchen garden planted with heavenly potatoes, passed by green onions and fragrant dill, and, through a narrow opening in the fence, began making our way to the house of Vera Shchukin.  One by one or in pairs, we used the most roundabout paths between houses.  The village was asleep.  Almost all windows were now unlit.

I wiped sweat from my forehead and whispered to Goretoi, “Muggy.”

He said nothing.  I couldn’t stop talking.  “For how long have you been aware that this gathering is prohibited by articles 142 and 227 of the Criminal Code?”

“For as long as I’ve believed in my Savior,” he whispered.

p. 244


Near the time of this writing, Polishchuk’s telling of the plight of Pentecostal Christians may take on an eerie resonance as Capo, Colonel, President, Emperor Vladimir Putin’s government goes after the community of Jehova’s Witnesses in today’s  Russia:

“It began about 10 o’clock in the evening and didn’t wind up until 4 a.m.,” Tatyana Petrova said of the raid. “I didn’t see how it started because I was in the kitchen, but I heard my husband go to the door. I heard a woman introduce herself as someone from the electric company. She said she needed to read the meter. My husband opened the door and then a whole crowd of people pushed into the apartment.”

Filimonov, Andrei and Robert Coalson. “‘Extremist’ Faith: Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses Report Wave Of Police Raids, Detentions.” Radio Free Europe, June 15, 2018.


In Polishchuk’s day:

Children giggled and jostled each other in the ribs.  The men were pushed up against the walls.  Two old women sat close to the invisible gap between the door and its frame, in hope of catching a breath of fresh air.  On stools sat an old man, white as chalk, and two pregnant women.  One of them, with a hand-copied New Testament, offered me her chair, but I shook my head and clung to the wall.  When nearly forty persons had squeezed into the house, the deacon turned on the light, and ducked outside to check if it escaped to the street.

p. 244


Life’s a long enough journey for most, but in the Soviet Union, the unutterable sadness of situations posed against the boasted heroic strength of the state must have made it seem so much longer.  “Alik”, when referred to with affection, sent to write about a community for the blind discovers instead of a refuge for those so afflicted a familiar metaphor and dismal reality:  “. . . a leper colony.  There was nothing I could write about them.  I was frantically looking for a way to say at least half-truths about their everyday concerns instead of reporting on the contribution of the blind to our common cause of building socialism.”

In the wings always and frequently spotlighted: spooks . . .  KGB — as colleagues (around whom to be cautious) on publications; as agents sent to disconnect his home phone before the refusenik Natan Sharansky could relay a statement by Andrei Sakharov to a listener in Canada; as minders, followers, and thugs.

The games played in Putin’s courts today seem no different then they were then.  Polishchuk covered one of the trials of Dr. Mikhail Stern whose latest crime had been to give his son “a written permission” required in support of the application of the same to emigrate.  The whole becomes an absurd nightmare of examinations of minute evidence to none.

While the phantoms of the Soviet live on in the spiritual descendants of the KGB, perhaps the haunting swirls on in the earlier victims of their omnipresent bureaucracy, observation, manipulation, sabotage, entrapment and framing, capricious “justice”, and punishment.

Additional Reference

Wikipedia. “Soviet Dissidents”.

–33–

 

Battered, Jaded, Numbed? Here’s An Old Tonic

01 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journal, Philosophy, Poetry, Political Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

decency, Don Quixote, humanism, idealism, universalism

As have many days for many years, this one started with a glimpse at conflict and crime news, some searched up, some by way of Facebook forum conversations: Mexico’s national addiction to drugs and money (in that order); a look at human trafficking — it appears China receives from Columbia a steady stream of duped women to be forced into prostitution and then takes little action against the trade.

Web surfers visiting here have probably had their own fill of experience or news — or both — vomited up from the evil and ugly world.  For those so offended but in themselves good and noble and perhaps in need of a refreshed idealism and inspiration, I offer an old memory.

Here’s a trailer.

And here — from another company — the greater quotation.


Related On the Web

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/08/20/richard-kiley-at-55-the-once-and-present-man-of-la-mancha/30d559ae-bac1-47f6-b7f4-cffc93304468/ – 8/20/1977

https://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1088321 — 11/21/2015 Message board topic: 50th anniversary of the musical.

–33–

Old “King Code” – A Note on The Long War for Cybercrimefighters

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Journal

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

information space, information warfare, life online, online security

Start with the good guys’ white hats —

http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/hacking-team/ – n.d.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/hacking-team-leaks-reveal-spyware-industrys-growth — 7/8/2015.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/07/08/hacking-team-iphone-android-malware/ – “Hacking Team’s $175,000 Apple Store And Google Play Surveillance Apps Flirt With Illegality” – 7/8/2015.


And let’s got on to the bad guys’ black hats (who could be the same guys or white-hat guys who have had their ideas / methods / products / processes stolen) —

According to the documents, 400GB of which have been published, Hacking Team has also been working with numerous repressive governments – something it has previously explicitly denied doing. It has not been possible to independently verify the veracity of the documents.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/06/hacking-team-hacked-firm-sold-spying-tools-to-repressive-regimes-documents-claim — 7/6/2015.

As with other tools, like axes and guns, software has itself has neither consciousness nor conscience.  It doesn’t know who’s using it or how or for what noble or ignoble purpose, and the sawing will go this way: “Software doesn’t destroy, shield, or steal digital assets: programmers and end-users do.”


And now return to the good guys — so I freely presume the avatars of the lawful to be themselves lawful — and another electronic-communicating aspect of their problem with the bad guys of the certifiable kind:

The director of the FBI has warned that criminals and terrorists will be able to talk ‘with impunity’ if encryption goes too far.

James Comey said that anti-surveillance measures being deployed by the likes of Apple and Google will ‘inexorably affect my ability to do that job’ if they continue to expand.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3152226/Is-web-security-putting-DANGER-Criminals-terrorists-communicate-impunity-encryption-sophisticated-FBI-warns.html#ixzz3fP58ZMC5 – 7/7/2015.

Related: FBI – Cybercrime Page: “We are building our lives around our wired and wireless networks. The question is, are we ready to work together to defend them?”


  • What is being hidden from whom?
  • What would be exploited by whom were it not kept safe?
  • Where is the war?

One of my distant correspondents noted of a small community project beneath his wing that he dared not display too much of physical improvements online for there were those in his village that might want a cut just because.

Those guys.

Wiseguys.

Greedy, jealous, suspicious.

Thugs.

Scale it up:

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-russia-mafia-kleptocracy – 12/1/2010.

Or scale it back down:

On May 1, 2014, a grand jury in the Western District of Pennsylvania indicted five members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for 31 criminal counts, including: conspiring to commit computer fraud; accessing a computer without authorization for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain; damaging computers through the transmission of code and commands; aggravated identity theft; economic espionage; and theft of trade secrets.

First paragraph description of one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Cybercriminals (as viewed in July 2015).


It appears that not so many decades ago, technologists went to work on eliminating space as an impediment to forming basic social relationships while migrating the digitally empowered away from paper-based banking, gasoline-enabled shopping, and family-room television: mission accomplished.

In the process of eliminating so much work while producing incalculable savings, the same have done away with troves of evidence of physical bother: who needs cash, or even a courier, when numbers shuttled between computers move wealth?

Who needs a theater and ticket counter when the talented — whatever the talent — may put on a show, flash mob or flash bang, with the distribution of a signal from a cell phone?

What army is needed where one gunman — recruited online, minimally “handled” — can walk a weapon into some space and inside of a few minutes commit mass murder, damage a state’s tourist industry, or destroy a community’s sense of security in relation to racial or religious harmony?

For the west and geopolitical space integrating with the western mind (of the lawful), all of the traffic, however massive, ultimately educates, informs, or entertains while facilitating either comparatively healthy private and social behavior or behavior not yet codified.

A few of quite another mind — feudal, malignantly narcissistic, plainly malign by normative standards — diverge to disagree in expression and action.

Given free expression (short of direct conspiracy or incitement to crime), conflict between the lawful and the lawless has now long been moved to an electronic boundary between publically empowered and trusted investigators and privately enfranchised criminals, and along that boundary on both sides, software — code is king wherever it “wins” and for as long as it works — has become shield and sword.

Those of us who spend a fair part of our day online reading, writing, shopping, and watching YouTube videos, are going to be witness to and monitors of this challenge to the lawful control of information for some time to come.


Related on BackChannels: “FTAC — On the Opposition of the Lawless to the Influence of Israel” (June 19, 2015).

Related in the News: Reuters.  “FBI says thwarted Islamic State-inspired attacks on July 4.”  July 9, 2015.

Update – Reference – July 10, 2015

Levine, Mike and Jack Date.  “22 Million Affected by OPM Hack, Officials Say.”  ABC News, July 9, 2015.

Waddell, Kaveh and Dustin Volz.  “OPM Announces More Than 21 Million Affected by Second Data Breach.”  National Journal, June 9, 2015.

# # #

FTAC – Twitter Choice

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Journal, Middle East, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green, Yemen

≈ Leave a comment

Following, for a while. As with so many others incapable of rejecting a sect (in its entirety) within a religion of which one is not a part and over a conflict that is distant and — and I will assign blame to Khamenei and others of feudal mind and ambition — archaic, I don’t want to weigh on the scales. I’ve found the same divide in Shiite and other circles where claim is made about being “the Jews of islam” (and persecuted by Sunni Muslims). Nonetheless, one understands: where this kind of conflict is hot — the bullets are flying and the bombs are going off and lives are being ended, shattered, or threatened in the most direct ways — polarization is as unavoidable as it is destructive and seemingly impossible to repair.


The place where the bullets are flying: Yemen.

The drift of sympathy: against the Houthis as representative of Ayatollah Khamenei’s War by Proxy that in turn defends feudal absolutism and seeks to expand the regime’s power against Sunni interests.

In another and now increasingly distant age — even 25 or 50 years ago may now seem like centuries — the Yemeni part of the Islamic Small Wars would been played as a clipping in the back of the “A” section of the newspapers, a remote tribal war to be overlooked by western indifference.

Those days are gone.

Our Facebook friends are either there or have family and friends who are close to live fire — not only in Yemen but everywhere being razed and ruined by these forces — and we’re watching without recourse to choosing a good and bad side except against the “al-Qaeda Typicals” and the “Hezbollah Virus”, i.e., operations with military wings so awful that the good of the planet would seek to shut down regardless of other disagreements stemming from nominal affiliations and associated cultural, political, and religious self-concept.

Instead, some of us seem to be standing by friends on both sides and hoping the theme of “The Medieval vs The Modern” will catch on before the medieval world, which some are working hard to sustain, swallows the modern.  That outcome may not be possible across continents, but it seems to be proving possible in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe (with Putin-Khamenei as the hub from which so much chaos, destruction, and political confusion emanate).

# # #

FTAC – Retreating Into the Library

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Journal, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Arrived! David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? — I may be absent for a while . . . .http://books.simonandschuster.com/Putins-Kleptocracy/Karen-Dawisha/9781476795195


Fatigue sets in.

# # #

FTAC – On Global Conflict’s Edge

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journal, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dictatorship, Far Left, information, political, politics, propaganda, rhetoric, totalitarianism

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yuri-Bezmenov/46501554141 Sign on. 🙂 Not quite everyone’s on Facebook, especially if they’re wanted (by INTERPOL) or popular in some heavy (as in the 1960’s “heavy, dude”) way, in which case they may be found at their university or think-tank address.

What’s interesting here, perhaps, is watching this edge in conflict surface, a conflict between the criminally deluded and utterly dishonest and the victims and targets of that form in political delusion and dishonesty.

Related: Yuri Bezmenov – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; (1) Yuri Bezmenov (Facebook).

Video one-of-nine about control of political language:

Soviet Subversion of the Free World Press 1/9 – YouTube – 1/5/2009.

From the above-cited personality page for Yuri Bezmenov:

Yuri Alexandrovitch Bezmenov (1939 – 1993) is a former KGB propagandist who was assigned to New Dehli, India, defected to the West in 1970, and was interviewed by Edward Griffin in 1985. Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology.

* * *

Not so oddly, I spent the morning watching Gene Hackman and Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Then after brunch this cold rainy day turned to Facebook where I had a message waiting from a correspondent in South America noting the Far Out Left’s desire to destroy Israel. My response to that:

Far Left: thieves.

I’m a liberal socialist.  Correa and I would probably understand one another.

These guys of the Far Out Left seem descended from the 1970s. Time Warped. Everyone’s a Carlos wannabee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal

If he / they didn’t have a convenient political lingo, he / they would be — and have proven so — dumb criminals.

The world faces stark choices as regards the political kleptocrats (sometimes, when I’m feeling jazzy, I call them “kleptocats!”) we have come to know and sometimes love — for being too easily charmed — as dictators, but when you watch what they do to constitutions, courts, and laws, then to men — old ones too, and women and children — in their unbridled ambition for absolute control over others, you know that the war “over there”, or perhaps the one you’re in, is no longer a lonely war but rather a war — sub-state, transnational, global — neither contained nor isolated.

* * *

Often for revolutionaries there are two wars: one rages outside of the person, the other rages within.

* * *

My South American correspondent acknowledged (and here I quote with light editing for style), “many studied in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with scholarships.”

Such would be at least in their 40s — it has been more than 22 years — and in the prime of their programming.

Others, say the first to rifle through abandoned STASI offices in defunct East Germany, may be in the prime of their counter-programming program, and I should think them today an unknown quantity in the former Soviet empire.  Perhaps they too will surface in the coming days, weeks, and months.

# # #

Odds ‘N’ Ends 130916-1422ET

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Journal, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

independent scholarship, journal, politics

In Washington, D.C. — WASHINGTON: As many as 3 gunmen attack Navy Yard, 6 dead – Politics Wires – MiamiHerald.com

From Cairo — Tarek and John are on hunger strike | Justin Podur — Two Canadians detained by Egypt’s interim government (ever the optimist, I am putting off the day when I may be forced by time to call it a “ruling junta”) have gone on a hunger strike.

Rather than cover the second-hand news for the rest of the afternoon (unless someone really wants me chatyping and doing the social network pass-along furiously (and offers sponsorship to do it), I’m inclined to continue reading Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin: Ben Judah: 9780300181210: Amazon.com: Books.  As the numbers on this blog climb, I feel it incumbent upon myself to read as if in the ivory tower — with concentration and patience enough to better see what I feel I have been seeing.

Related: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah – review | Books | The Guardian 6/27/2013.  The author, Luke Harding, has had a young career as a Kremlinologist and has gotten a couple of books out of it: Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State, which is due here quite soon, and Mafia State: How one reporter became the enemy of the brutal new Russia.

Never mind autocrats: any conflict involving integrity and power also involves a lot of thinking about the management of surface, sub-surface, and compartmented information.  Neither countries nor persons may wish to “let it all hang out” (God forbid) but the development beyond copyright, patent, and basic proprietary business concerns of extended secrets-keeping societies bodes ill for humanity.  The dignity of man, if there is to be any, demands to know the substance of true states of affairs.

The cuckoo and two peacocks, one in the brig, another in Ecuador, the last in Russia may have been a bit screwed up about the relationship between their empowerment, their observation, and their views, but taken together and with a continuously emerging global intelligentsia, the idea that mankind will live like a happy idiot in a cave managed and fought over by supertechnologists has a particularly enslaved and hideous aspect to it.

Related and also cued around this place: Brazil and 12 Monkeys.

# # #

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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