Friday 27 March 2009

kenny rogers coward of the county

Rock'n Roll Gypsies by Vinegar Joe

Vinegar Joe - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On 1973

Peter, Paul, and Mary-"Puff, the Magic Dragon" (1982?)

Leaving On A Jet Plane - Peter, Paul and Mary

Joe Cocker - She came in through the bathroom window

Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone (High Quality)

Bob Dylan - Just Like A Woman

Bob Dylan - Mr Tambourine Man

Beatles Medley by The MopTops

Meshugga Beach Party -exodus

Meshugga Beach Party - If I were a Rich Man

Israel Matzav: Spring forward#links#links

Israel Matzav: Spring forward#links#links

Israel Matzav: Olmert made 'final offer' to Abu Mazen; Abu Mazen never answered#links#links

Israel Matzav: Olmert made 'final offer' to Abu Mazen; Abu Mazen never answered#links#links

Israel Matzav: UN 'Human Rights Council' urges laws to ban criticism of religion Islam#links#links

Israel Matzav: UN 'Human Rights Council' urges laws to ban criticism of <strike>religion</strike> <i>Islam</i>#links#links

Israel Matzav: Out 'Palestinianing' the 'Palestinians'#links#links

Israel Matzav: Out 'Palestinianing' the 'Palestinians'#links#links

Israel Matzav: 'A hideously anti-Semitic cartoon;' 709 terrorists out of 1166 Gaza casualties#links#links

Israel Matzav: 'A hideously anti-Semitic cartoon;' 709 terrorists out of 1166 Gaza casualties#links#links

Israel Matzav: Roger Cohen and Henry Siegman look for the 'moderates' in Hamas#links#links

Israel Matzav: Roger Cohen and Henry Siegman look for the 'moderates' in Hamas#links#links

Israel Matzav: 30 years of cold peace#links#links

Israel Matzav: 30 years of cold peace#links#links

Israel Matzav: CBS News: IAF hit weapons trucks in Sudan#links#links

Israel Matzav: CBS News: IAF hit weapons trucks in Sudan#links#links

DoubleTapper: Who bombed Sudan's Weapons Convoy?

DoubleTapper: Who bombed Sudan's Weapons Convoy?

A View From the Target Zone - Israeli Operation At Gaza Strip - Creative Writing and Israel

A View From the Target Zone - Israeli Operation At Gaza Strip - Creative Writing and Israel

AND STILL COUNTING IN GAZA



I'm not certain why we have two items on this on two consecutive days, but perhaps Haaretz was simply being sloppy yesterday. Knowing them, it's certainly possible. Anyway, Y-net cites an official announcement from the IDF today.


The IDF said Thursday that an internal inquiry found that 1,166 people were killed in the three-week offensive that ended in January. It said 709 were Hamas militants, and just under 300 people, including 89 children aged 16 and 49 women, were civilians.
According to the military, it is unclear clear whether an additional 162 men who died were militants or civilians.


These numbers are rather different from the Palestinian ones that were quoted world-wide and are by now etched in stone and won't be dislodged.


It's possible they're both wrong; it's not possible they're both right. You might perhaps expect respectable media outlets to try to get to the bottom of the matter, and figure out what the truth is - but I can't say why you might expect that.


taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

THE ROT REACHES THE WASHINGTON POST



I don't know much about Pat Oliphant, a Washington Post cartoonist. Abe Greenwald at Contentions intimates he's a fellow with a record, tho Greenwald doesn't think that exonerates anyone. Personally, I'm more interested in the top editors of the Washington Post, perhaps the second most influential newspaper in the United States, for allowing this on the pages of their paper:





As Meryl Yourish adds, it's a version of the Israeli flag. Do you suppose Ari Roth would say that means it's art, and thus not to be evaluated for its truth?



They're not good days, these ones. Sure, our descendants will dance on the graves of these hate mongers, if they can find them in the dust, unless they're distracted by the antisemites of their own generation, but knowing your enemies will fail doesn't make them more palatable.


taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

ISRAEL AND INNOVATION





From time to time - with rising frequency these days - I ponder on how it must have been to be a Jew in the 1930s, with antisemitism the official policy of some of the world's greatest powers, with antisemitic parties in most countries, and with loud antisemitic cries from all sides. It must have been very frightening.





Not like these days, when the rising tide of Jew-hatred is very aggravating, certainly, but not really frightening.Less often, I think about how the world must have looked to the dazed survivors in Europe of summer 1945, or to their grim relatives elsewhere. Their story is not told that often, and very rarely is it dwelt upon. As a general statement, Israel's critics and enemies, both, detest it when Jews in general and Israelis in particular talk too much (or at all) about the Shoah. Israel hasn't learned the lessons of the Jews' own past, they'll tell you. Israel has learned the lessons too well, and is now copying its tormentors, they'll tell you. Israel, of all nations, should understand better, they'll tell you. Israel is trying to wield the ultimate victim-weapon to as to stifle thought, discussion or recognition of what's really going on, they'll tell you. And so on.





I expect a more profound reason for all the shrieking is a dim awareness that actually, the multi-stranded story of those dark days has the potential to disrupt almost all the pat templates they use to explain the world - so they ward it off.





Take, for example, the multiple-tiered explanations about how when people suffer, they aren't nice in return. They must be assuaged, their needs addressed, their woes removed, their grievances respected, acknowledged, and rectified. You know the line; it's one of the top meta-narratives of our age. It's also all wrong, fundamentally wrong, and quite pernicious. Those Shoah survivors disprove it by the simple fact of how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (after they acquired boots) in a mostly indifferent and partially hostile world.





Some fifty years later, on February 20th 1999, the Economist published a Special Report titled Innovation in Industry. It was a fun read, so much so that I made myself a copy, which was fortunate because I can't find it now on their website. They talked endlessly about Silicon Valley, of course, but also had this:




Apart from its genius for networking, Silicon Valley seems to have an abundance of two other ingredients that other places lack. One is a culture that rewards risk, handsomely, but does not punish failure. The other is simply chutzpah—that upbeat sense of self-confidence that says anything is possible, go for it, and never be too shy to ask for help. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the place emerging as California’s most likely rival in innovation is Israel, with its close-knit society that networks ceaselessly, deals daily with risk, reveres learning, and is blessed with a torrent of well-educated immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Natan Sharansky, a physicist and former gulag prisoner who is now Israel’s trade and industry minister, points out that a fifth of his new country’s population arrived in the past five years, doubling the number of technicians, engineers and scientists there. Israel has 135 engineers and technicians for every 10,000 people, compared with America’s 18. This abundance of talent shows up in the success rate of new ventures in Israel. No surprise that Israel trails only America and Canada in its number of new listings on the innovation-driven Nasdaq stockmarket each year. With such stellar results, the amount of venture capital chasing Israeli innovations has been increasing by around 35% a year. Last year more than $4 billion of high-risk money found its way into innovative start-ups there, not far off the figure that venture capitalists invested in Silicon Valley. If it can keep this up, Israel is set to become the innovation centre of the world.





That was then, and now is now. The Dotcom bubble exploded, the "Peace Process" did too, the Palestinian culture of death attacked Israel with its full potency while the world media looked on and tut-tutted; more recently the entire world economy is staggering. And on March 12th 2009, a decade and a week after the previous report, the Economist came back with another (it starts here). "Global heroes. A special report on entrepreneurship".





For me personally this one was even more fun that the previous one, since - contrary to any reasonable expectation I ever had - I'm deep in the entrepreneurship world myself, in spite of my advanced age and encroaching senility. More pertinent, however, after the first few conceptual chapters about the phenomenon in general, the reports turns to discuss who's doing what, and why. Sure enough, as if the decade never happened, Israel gets mentioned, again, and again, singled out beyond all others. Here, for example:




DOV MORAN’S desk is littered with the carcasses of dismembered phones. Mr Moran has already had one big breakthrough: inventing the now ubiquitous memory stick. But he dreams of another one: he wants to separate the “brains” of the various gizmos that dominate our lives from the “bodies” to enable people to carry around tiny devices that they will be able to plug into anything from phones to cameras to computers. Mr Moran sold his memory-stick business to SanDisk for $1.6 billion, creating a thriving technology cluster near his office. This time he wants to build an Israeli business that will last, challenging the giants of the camera and phone businesses.




Israel is full of would-be Dov Morans. It is home to 4,000 high-tech companies, more than 100 venture-capital funds and a growing health-care industry. Innovations developed in the country include the Pentium chip (Intel), voicemail (Comverse), instant messaging (Mirabilis, Ubique), firewalls (Checkpoint) and the “video pill”, which allows doctors to study your insides without the need for invasive surgery.




Even more than other countries, Israel has America to thank for its entrepreneurial take-off. A brigade of American high-tech companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have established research arms there. And a host of Israelis who once emigrated to America in search of education and opportunity have returned home, bringing American assumptions with them. Many Israeli entrepreneurs yo-yo between Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv; almost 70 Israeli companies are traded on NASDAQ.




The Israeli government helped by providing a ready supply of both human and physical capital. Israel has the world’s highest ratio of PhDs per person, the highest ratio of engineers and scientists and some of the world’s best research universities, notably Technion. The country’s native talent was supplemented by the arrival of 400,000 well-educated Jewish refugees from the former Soviet empire.




However, Israel’s main qualification for entrepreneurialism is its status as an embattled Jewish state in a sea of Arab hostility. The Israeli army not only works hard to keep the country at the cutting edge of technology, it also trains young Israelis (who are conscripted at 18) in the virtues of teamwork and improvisation. It is strikingly common for young Israelis to start businesses with friends that they met in the army. Add to that a high tolerance of risk, born of a long history and an ever-present danger of attack, and you have the makings of an entrepreneurial firecracker.




Eat your hearts out, Guardianistas and boycotters.





taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

LOOK WHAT EVERYONE MISSED





Last Friday Haaretz had an article about the nauseating T-shirts some IDF units print. The worst, according to the article, emanate from the sharpshooter units, and they include depictions of the wrong Palestinians in the cross-hairs: a child, a pregnant woman, a fleeing teenager who is taunted with the slogan "run faster before we get you".





True, the soldiers themselves admitted they'd never wear these T-shirts in public because of the total opprobrium they'd be greeted with; and also true the sharpshooters are carefully controlled and have strict guidelines for their operation and I can't remember a single case where it was alleged that even one of them ever did such a thing as is depicted on these shirts; but still, it's an ugly tale, and someone clearly needs to add some common sense to that course of training. Make no mistake: I'm condemning the shirts.





And yet. Achikam got home last night, and at about 1PM he got up to eat breakfast, wearing a T-shirt prepared recently by his unit depicting a hand shooting lightning over Gaza. He read the article, and agreed with me that it's an ugly story, but pointed out something I, and everyone else, had overlooked. In most of the cases where the drawing showed Palestinian civilians in the cross hairs... they weren't civilians. The pregnant woman shown behind the above link is brandishing a rifle, as is the child ("when they're smaller they're harder to hit"), while the teenager being exhorted to run has the full set of drawn knife, grenade, and suicide belt (these picture aren't online, they're in the paper version).




Bottom line: we've got ugly T-shirts,worn by sharpshooters whose actual combat behavior belies the message, while the message itself is much more complex than anyone gives credit for. Including the sophisticated journalist at the sophisticated newspaper whose main marketing line is that it's "a newspaper for thinking readers".



taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

HATRED TRUMPS FACTS (ALWAYS...)





A Palestinian who writes for an Israeli newspaper wanders around America talking at campuses. He repeatedly encounters a vocal minority who aren't even slightly interested in what he has to say, unless he castigates Israel. When he doesn't always, they turn on him with fury, and attack him for not being attuned to the circumstances of the Palestinians; when he cites facts he is threatened:




I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.




Nice, isn't it?





taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

AESTHETIC TRUMPS MORAL





Jeffry Goldberg has posted a fascinating conversation he had with Ari Roth (yes, of course he's Jewish, with that name). Roth is playing Caryl Churchill's antisemitic screed "Seven Jewish Children" at the Jewish theatre he runs in Washington, DC. Goldberg thinks that's a horrible idea. They argue past each other at great length; it's the transcript of an argument, not an edited article.





Roth's main justification for playing the screed is that it was written by a master, and is an accomplished work of art.




AR: I read this play and I said, "My God, she's been listening really, really closely to how Jews speak." She's not Jewish. She's gone to a shitload of cocktail parties, she's memorized every play that David Hare ever wrote about Israel. You know, her referencing the swimming pools is a reference to David Hare's "Via Dolorosa" when he talks about something fundamentally un-Jewish about Jews is Gaza sitting by their swimming pools and watching a Palestinian walk two kilometers with a jerry can for two liters of water. That's a direct reference to that. Every fucking line there comes from something else she's overheard or watched or said. And who the hell knows if she's ever been to Israel or not. I have no idea. But she is smart. She is a smart writer. And each one of these lines is doing something that is more sophisticated than you're giving her credit. And then --





JG: Oh, I'm not saying that she's not sophisticated. I'm just saying that she's using her skills and her shrewdness in order to paint a picture of Israel's that's a caricature. And she knows that Jews, because of their self-flagellating nature, will just go along with this to an extraordinary degree. I mean if she were brave, she would write about the Qu'ran, about Islamic fundamentalism...




AR: If it was written by a halfway decent writer and somebody wrote a play about the so-called pernicious Jewish lobby that's affecting the way the make our decisions. So listen to this. Here's why we're doing it. The fact that, over eight pages, so many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception. Meaning she has overheard, she has seen, she has captured the language that Jews speak to each other with and that is astonishing.





JG: It's astonishing that she overheard the ways Jews talk at cocktail parties?





AR: Because that makes her a ten-times better theatrical reporter than anybody I've ever seen. This is play written with extraordinary precision. She wrote a play that arrested my attention. And it has a problem title. I hate the title. It is a problem place where it ends, but it is subject to an incredible amount of interpretation. It's written with multiple characters. People argue with each other. It's not written as a diatribe. And so you have to allow for the art form of theater to have its way with her text. That is what's going to happen, that's what's happening in this rehearsal room. I struggle with the play. God bless me. I'm a struggling Jew. You know?





JG: You can't decontextualize it. I'm sorry. It comes out of a certain moment and it comes out of a culture that has demonized Israel. It comes out of a particular theater subculture in Great Britain that demonizes Israel...





AR: Okay, just stop for a second. Let's pretend we're not talking about a play but we're talking about a painting. Let's pretend Picasso. Picasso was going to paint, à la Chagall, the story of Gaza, like in "Guernica" -- he's outraged by the killing of children in Gaza. So let's say Picasso does with simple brush strokes, little artful renderings of who his friends, the Jews, used to be; who they were in the '60s; how they were in the '90s; and what he sees today. And he does them with little stokes, little hints of this. And they just happen to be the strokes of a master artist, as opposed to an idiot. And they end with a horse braying and an electric light bulb going off and bombs falling. And that is his cry from the soul.





JG: Are you saying Caryl Churchill is Picasso?





AR: I'm saying it's Caryl Churchill's "Guernica." Come and debate this. And how did Franco feel about "Guernica?" Who knows? He was angry too. I'm angry. I don't think this is a great work of art, but I think there's a great artist doing something interesting here...





AR: I want your very, very smart blog readers to understand that the way to discuss this play is not to lift lines from the last page and a half of it. That is not how to fully experience and understand the meaning of any drama. I can't cede this to journalists who don't love theater enough to understand what's going on here. That is not a sophisticated way to regard art, by picking out a sentence here and then going apeshit over it!...





AR: There's a lot at stake here. There are big intellectual and political questions. And to boycott this and to just turn away and say "We don't hear Caryl Churchill. We don't hear this criticism," that's wrong. You asked why I said yes to this. I said yes to this because it's disarmingly, and maybe even unfortunately, so well-written.




Morality and truth are subordinate to art, says Roth. Goldberg could have taken the argument even further, of course, and pointed out that loud and consistent antisemitism has this nasty propensity to end up with dead Jews: this is one of the few constants in Western history these past thousand years or more. By aiding and abetting it, you ultimately have to own its outcomes. Yet my understanding of Roth's position is that he's not interested. If it's high art, it's valuable, and real-world outcomes be damned.





Which, taken one step further, means that aesthetics are superior to morality, and even to human life. Read George Mosse's books on the cultural environment that fascism originated in: they're full of such ideas. Though Ari Roth would be deeply deeply offended if he heard me saying so.



taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)

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