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 22 Jan 2004 @ 18:40
Churchill taught his pet parrot Charlie how to swear.
And Charlie, still alive, is carrying on the great man's inspiring words.
Reading this did my heart good.
The Mirror story. More >
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 18 Jan 2004 @ 18:19
Thomas Friedman's NY Times Opinion Piece "War of Ideas, Part 4" (Sun. Jan. 18, 2004) where he calls for Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories demonstrates this Middle East expert's ideologically-based ineptitude in understanding the basis of Arab animosity toward Israel and the Jews.
Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza (collectively known as Yesha) remain for him "fanatical Jews" for their insistence on their legal right to live in the heart of the historic Jewish homeland. The ease with which Friedman equates these Jews and their supporters with the Palestinian Authority's suicide bombers indicates an appalling moral blindness.
Where does Friedman's demonization of the Jews of Yesha come from? More >
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 12 Jan 2004 @ 14:28
Robert P. Pula, our close friend and teacher, died at the age of 75 yesterday (1/11/04) after a bout with double pneumonia. Until his death he remained the world's foremost living general-semantics scholar and one of the most important continuators of Korzybski's work.
Bob served as the Institute of General Semantics' lead lecturer for many years. He also edited the General Semantics Bulletin from 1977-1985 and served as the Director of the Institute of General Semantics from 1983-1986. He wrote the "Preface to the Fifth Edition 1993" to Korzybski's Science and Sanity
A polymathic poet, painter, pianistic composer, Polka historian, Polish culturalist, cartoonist and extraordinary teacher (only a short list of his many talents), Bob will be sorely missed by his children, family, students and friends More >
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8 Jan 2004 @ 18:02
Socialism as a system-- reducing or trying to eliminate private property while nationalizing as much of the economy as possible in the name of all citizens--doesn't work.
When pointing this out I have often been told in response--"Hey look at Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries. Look at their wonderful standard of living. It really does work well there."
Yeah, right. More >
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1 Jan 2004 @ 12:54
Individual moderate Muslims--do exist. But they come from a tradition much rooted in intolerance and a bloody quest for world domination.
Offensive to 'Goodists'. Tough realizing that some cultures do not share their sunny, tolerant view of life. Eventually 'Goodists' wake up and become realists or someday they don't wake up at all.
Read what I consider an accurate picture of the religion of 'peace' or rather submission. Not politically correct.
The Agenda of Islam by Professor Moshe Sharon
Welcome to World War IV! More >
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31 Dec 2003 @ 13:54
Colonel Allen B. West has become the latest victim of the politically-correct B.S. that has infected even our military.
For more on how P.C. B.S. is sapping our military read Front Page Magazine's Man of the Year: Col. Allen B. West
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29 Dec 2003 @ 18:01
Something like 25,000 bodies have been pulled from the earthquake rubble around Bam, Iran.
How many dead--and maybe still some living--remain buried.
The suffering Persian people could surely use all the help they can get.
The mullahs who rule the Islamic Republic there have welcomed international aid.
Except from Jews.
The extent of their Jew-hatred have led them to refuse Israeli offers to send in rescue teams and other forms of assistance.
This could have been expected--given the extent of Muslim antisemitism. Yet ,the Persian people deserve better. I am sure that there are other ways that their fundamentalist Islamist government is mishandling and increasing the disaster.
Once the dead are buried and the rebuilding begins--I pray for a political earthquake there that will bury the miserable mullahs who rule Iran. More >
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 23 Dec 2003 @ 13:02
"I have for Saddam Hussein a limitless admiration and gratitude."--Yasser Arafat
For more on the time-honored leadership techniques of the Butcher of Tikrit (admittedly an extreme case), Yasser Arafat , and others see Saddam's Defense Speech by Barry Rubin
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12 Dec 2003 @ 19:36
There is a disease that has reached epidemic proportions worldwide. No-- I'm not talking about influenza or AIDS.
I'm talking about the political disease of Goodism.
Goodists, carriers and spreaders of this disease, like Yossi Beilin, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, The Editorial Writers for the New York Times, etc., think, for example, that lack of peace in the Middle East comes from the Israeli side not being nice enough.
Oy Vey. More >
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 8 Dec 2003 @ 17:37
The following story "I am Abdul"... The War of the Minds: How to Win It and How to Lose It" by William R. Perl was first published in the Times of Israel and World Jewish Review v.1:no.11 Apr. 1975.
Perl, an American Jew born in Czechoslavakia, helped rescue thousands of Jews from Nazi hands before World War II, later managed to escape to the U.S., and then had a distinguished military career in U.S. Army Intelligence, where he specialized in the psychology of communications and propaganda. After retirement, he worked tirelessly for Soviet Jewry. He died in 1998 at the age of 92 having devoted his life to the Jewish people, to his country--the United States of America, and to the cause of human liberty.
As the Times of Israel described Perl's story, it gives "...a U.S. Army propaganda expert's astonishing analysis of Arab propaganda--and how Jews can still win the war for people's minds. His analysis is presented in a unique fashion--[as a fictional account, after the destruction of the State of Israel, as told] through Arab eyes."
Reading this 1975 story in late 2003, I find that its alternate universe reveals in many ways a soberingly prescient picture of Arab propaganda efforts over the last quarter-century. I have not found this story elsewhere on the World Wide Web and consider it of enough potential interest that I've decided to republish it electronically on this newslog. More >
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5 Dec 2003 @ 11:31
The Geneva virtual 'peace' paper between a group of Israeli leftists and some of Yasir Arafat's colleagues may have some people confused about who these individuals, in particular the Israelis, represent.
The Geneva paper's Israeli promoters (Beilin, Burg, Mitzna, etc.) are left-wing politicians rejected by Israeli voters. They represent a minority viewpoint of a part of the Israeli left. However, backed by the European Union, the Swiss government and private Swiss 'moneybags' , these individuals are presenting themselves as legitimate representatives of Israeli sentiment while they provide cover for further Arab propaganda against Israel More >
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2 Dec 2003 @ 16:53
Today's New York Times (print edition) carries a story about the virtual 'peace' agreement signed by Israeli leftists and Palestinians in Geneva, Switzerland.
The signing was attended by many of the 'usual suspects' including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who in an interview "criticized both leaders in the region for not moving forward to make peace and the Bush administration for what he called its 'bias' toward Israel. He speculated that history might have been different if he had been re-elected president in 1980." More >
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1 Dec 2003 @ 11:53
Columnist Julie Burchill, bless her soul, is leaving her job at the British newspaper, the Guardian. She has gotten fed-up with the pronounced anti-Israel prejudice of that so-called 'liberal' publication.
As she put it in her Saturday, Nov. 29th article Good, bad and ugly : "...if there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under...I don't swallow the modern liberal line that anti-Zionism is entirely different from anti-semitism; the first good, the other bad..." More >
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28 Nov 2003 @ 15:23
Mansour Al-Nougaidan, a Saudi Arabian journalist writes in today's New York Times about the dangers of Wahabism and the terrorist culture it has spawned in his country. He has been sentenced to receive 75 lashes for such dangerous talk but he's still writing. Yes, the Muslim world is thawing. And that's something to feel thankful for.
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22 Nov 2003 @ 12:40
The lights have come on and the roaches are running. There are alot of roaches. But also a few more people with flashlights.
Do you want to know something about Democracy in the Middle East? More >
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 21 Nov 2003 @ 16:59
An excerpt from a recent commentary by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:
"Fighting for liberty brings out the best in Jews. When I arrived at Oxford University as rabbi in 1988, Jewish students were energized by the struggle to liberate Soviet Jewry. But after the crumbling of the Iron Curtain, the grand cause was lost, and along with it, the commitment of some of the most uninvolved students. I believe that world Jewry should now inaugurate a global movement to liberate our Arab brethren from the same tyranny that Soviet Jews once suffered.
In the same way that Jews were instrumental in creating the NAACP to help unfetter our Black brethren at the turn of the century, we must now create organizations that bring the incarceration of Arab peoples to the world's attention.
In the words of my friend David Suissa who coined the phrase, we should launch a campaign to "free the 400 million" who live under brutal dictatorship. In the same way that Jews marched on world capitals to protest the oppression of Soviet Jewry, we should campaign around the world to protest the persecution of subject Arab peoples. " More >
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18 Nov 2003 @ 17:53
"Liberal" can be used to refer to "being committed to a rational and peaceful approach to political questions, to the benefits of pluralism and an open society, to individual freedom and individual rights." (Wisse, p. 134)
In that sense I qualify as a 'liberal'.
"Liberal" unfortunately has also come to also imply a kind of fellow-traveler of the leftist quest for cosmic justice under philosophical socialism. I've been there, done that, and dropped it. More >
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17 Nov 2003 @ 13:37
"...facts are irrelevant to political anti-Semitism [ Jew-hatred], which operates through a logical consistency of its own." More >
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14 Nov 2003 @ 10:28
For those puzzled by George Soros' recent remarks blaming the Jews for the huge upsurge of worldwide--especially European and Arab-Islamic--antisemitism (Jew-hate), Ruth Wisse has written a clear and (to me) very likely analysis of what drives Soros and others like him in her book If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews:
". . .in the absence of deeply held religious faith, liberalism became synonymous with an optimistic outlook on life, and many of those adherents--including many Jews--would sooner have sacrificed their lives than their optimism. The choice was even simpler when the lives to be sacrificed were not their own. More >
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18 Oct 2003 @ 12:18
An Open Letter to Greg Easterbrook
Dear Mr. Easterbrook,
I winced when I read your blog commentary on the new Quentin Tarantino movie "Kill Bill."
You wrote: "Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice."
I also read your apology and accept its sincerity. However, although I accept that you yourself may not qualify as an antisemite or Jew-hater, your (to me) self-righteous lecturing about some Jews (who may not feel very much connection at all to their culture or religion) has led you to unintentionally broadcast the antisemitic meme. More >
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15 Oct 2003 @ 12:48
Although I favor the capitalist, free market orientation, I eschew economic fundamentalists who operate under that banner. Just because I despise the socialist ideal of ensuring equality of results by negating individual rights and incentives, doesn't mean that I approve of every maneuver done in the name of 'capitalism'. More >
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 13 Oct 2003 @ 16:54
Political analyst Barry Rubin writes that, "... like everything about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the fence issue has become wrapped in misperceptions and outright lies." More >
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11 Oct 2003 @ 16:46
As grateful as I feel for the internet library facilities of the Pasadena and Los Angeles Public Libraries, there is nothing comparable to wandering among the stacks.
What treasures they contain, especially in the main downtown library of Los Angeles. There on a business-related research mission, I took some time to wander too and found a delight (for me), Mary Everest Boole's The Mathematical Psychology of Gratry and Boole: Translated From the Language of the Higher Calculus Into That Of Elementary Geometry, published in England in 1897. I've already completed my first reading. Here is a short sample of what the book holds: More >
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10 Oct 2003 @ 13:52
It goes without saying (and apparently, goes even better with saying) that I don't consider all socialists stupid, immoral tyrants or murderers. There have been and continue to be different socialisms and they're not all the same.
Almost thirty years ago, I lived in a socialist community, an Israeli kibbutz, for two years. I learned that on that small scale (about 400 people) "democratic socialism" was not quite an oxymoron. However, I could see the strains in the utopian effort to abolish private property for the sake of social equality. More >
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 9 Oct 2003 @ 17:27
California has tremendous economic and social problems. What possibility of success in surmounting these problems does California's next Governor, Arnold Schwartzenegger, have? More >
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 8 Oct 2003 @ 10:52
Labeling and labels,i.e., words, and the classifications and categories 'behind' them--as a human you cannot avoid these if you talk (and probably even when you don't talk). More >
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 7 Oct 2003 @ 17:32
Fundamentalist egalitarians tend to reflexively assume that differences in the socio-economic standing of individuals or groups must always be due to oppression of the 'have-nots' by the 'haves'. More >
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6 Oct 2003 @ 15:55
As a California Voter, I look forward to..... More >
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6 Oct 2003 @ 14:33
Thinking about the difference between the map and the journey....
Quite a topic to deal with in business and elsewhere. Lately, I've been exploring that issue in politics, i.e., in regard to what could be called "post-communist marxism," the contemporary political left. More >
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 30 Sep 2003 @ 10:33
Say What? Anti-Semites? Who, us anti-Zionists? US? We have nothing against Jews as such. We just hate Zionism and Zionists. We think Israel does not have a right to exist. But that does not mean we have anything against Jews as such. Heavens to Mergatroyd. Marx Forbid. We are humanists. Progressives. Peace lovers.
Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies. The two have nothing to do with one another. Venus and Mars. Night and Day. Trust us. More >
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