Another End of Times < Parries

With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.

Latest Parries

December 2012

Some Consumer Affairs

I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.

April 2012

From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S

Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.

February 2012

2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous

After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.

January 2012

A Scheme of a Number of Friends

Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.

October 2011

The Mouse and the Cantilever

Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.

March 2010

Friendship is for Weenies

It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.

Before the Setup

Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.

February 2010

Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio

On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.

October 2009

My Hope: Obama’s Change

Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.

July 2009

At Modi’in Mall

There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.

eligious nutters talk despicably about how the end is always nigh but now that we have nuclear proliferation and a genocidal regime very near to having the bomb and missiles on which to place it, it does seem conceivable that we are in the golden age before the radioactive darkness descends.

And once again the Jewish people is smack in the middle of it. Anti-Semites speak of us as being the Judas but to me a more disturbing comparison is to Jonah. There’s a scene in Master & Commander when the scientist is outraged by the drowning of the Jonah character but the more experienced captain, the Russell Crowe character, is quite blase about it and accepts the verdict. Our mere wish to live is the catalyst that could bring about a nuclear exchange, the biggest disaster to visit earth.

What a position. But in this case it does no good to consider backing down and sacrificing one’s own existence for the larger good (not that we are considering such a thing) because it is merely homicidal tendencies among those others that is driving the thing, so if you’re no longer there for them to wish to murder it’ll be someone else. And even if Israel had a will to self-immolation (which I don’t believe we do) the stated ethos of our nationstate — “never again” — would shake us out of it.

Indeed, perhaps with the recent reported training exercises over Crete, the strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.

When will the Arab nation realize that they have been blessed with not one but two natural resources, oil and Jews? If they made but one small twist in the mind they could be putting both to work for them. As it is, by pitting one against the other they merely squander both. To be sure, they fear Jews, they fear that if they leave the Jews alone to thrive in their midst the Jews will become their masters. But Israel is thriving anyway, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that Israel presents less of a threat to Araby than Iran. Just as Israelis embrace pleasures of Arab culture, so Arabs could embrace just a bit of the Jewish way of pro-activity, and just a bit of that could inoculate them against being dominated. Yes, they can continue their childish pretence that Israel isn’t there and refuse to talk to us and try to eradicate us, but with Israel defensible and smack dab in the middle of the Levant it is destiny that the Semites intermingle again. Whichever Arab nationstate embraces this wholeheartedly will reap untold benefits. And in trying to tame the Israeli beast that they have embraced they will be surprised at the depth of their own innate tastes and talents and the Arab Muslim reformation we’ve been waiting for will tumble out from events quite quickly.