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  • THE DEMOCRATS, THE DSA, JIMMY CARTER AND GAUGUIN
  • 10 WAYS AMERICA IS WEAKER.
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  • WHY NETANYAHU CHOSE NOW
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  • NOTES ON LIFE AND THE NEWS: Right Wing Israeli Podcast

    October 31, 2024

    MONDAY 28 OCTOBER 2024

    Podcast. “Israel News Talk Radio” (Note: Right Wing Israeli) The Jews Wo Make the Best Combat Soldiers 10/28/24)

    •        (Note: Many on the right in Israel strongly support the election of Trump.)

    According to Lenny Goldberg, host of this podcast:

    •        So many of the fallen Israeli soldiers are from the settlements.

    •        These are great soldiers because they live on the land, grow upon the land, unlike the (citified) kids that come from Tel Aviv.

    •        “Hill top youth” they are called by Goldberg.  “They know who the enemy is.”  “They hate the enemy.”  They know that “this government and this army is so messed up.”

    •        The “hill top youth” knows that the military command has no idea what they are going to do with Gaza when they get “the Hamas” out of there.

    •        “The government and the Shin Bet persecute the hill top youth” but they still go out and fight.  The “settler kids” make “the best soldiers.”

    •        There are “response teams” in these settler groups. These kids go out with the response teams and so they are familiar not only with the land, but with fighting and weapons.

    •        They know “the deck is stacked against them.” 

    •        Many Israelis are “upset” because there are so many extreme right wingers in the military.  Some soldiers are complaining that the military is filled with right wing extremists.  Lenny (podcaster) quotes the headline from a newspaper where over a hundred soldiers, after seeing a “far right spirit sweeping the army” and frustrated over the failure to get back the hostages, they are saying that if Netanyahu doesn’t make a deal with Hamas, 130 reservists will no longer report for duty.  The fact that there are right wingers in the military means that there are “good jews in the army with motivation” who are only extremists “for these leftists.”  “Thank God” for these “extremists.”  If the leftists see “right wing fanatics” then don’t serve.

    •        It’s like these movie stars who threatened to leave the US if Trump wins.  “Let them leave.”

    •        A lot of these leftist soldiers are “very dangerous and very idealistic in their leftwing ideology.”  Goldberg talks about a practice of the Israeli army where they are entering a building that they are not sure of, and they get an Arab to go into the building first.  Goldberg agrees with this practice. 

    “Why should a Jewish soldier get blown up?  Let the Arab be blown up.”.  Leftist soldiers film this and send it out, to get these soldiers into trouble.  “It’s the settlers or the religious soldiers who understand Jewish war ethics that the life of one Jew is worth all the Arabs in Gaza.”

    •        Moses last words to the Jewish people were  “You shall tramp on their high places.” (Note: The high places of the enemy.)

    •        But, “We have one ear on what Washington wants us to do.” 

    •        In the Six Day war, we didn’t care what the world thought.  “It’s the religion that gives you the motivation to fight.”  “You’re doing God’s work.”

    •        “The entire world belongs to God Almighty….he gives the land of Israel to whoever he wants to….” There were people here (in Israel) when God gave the land to the Israelis.  (He’s using the story of God giving them the land of Caanan?) God said,  “I’m bringing in new tenants.” ” That’s our claim to the land.”

    •        There are a number of claims to the land 1) the historical claim that we lived there (Netanyahu used this), 2) the claim that the Arabs attacked us a number of times and he who conquers wins, 3)  and the air tight claim, “that God gave Israel to the Jewish people.  “It’s in the Bible.”

    •        The first argument can be discredited by the fact that Jews were conquered by the Romans.  So the historical argument is not air tight.  The only real genuine claim is that God gave Israel to Jews.

    •        In Lebanon there are villages not far from the Jewish towns, “fancy…. European style” houses are there.  There were fancy houses in Gaza as well. In the basements of these houses, you see “weapons of war” the quantity and the quality our soldiers have never seen.  Soldiers see “what they are planning for us.”  Hezbollah was prepared for a wave of attacks.  Everything “was so sophisticated” “Like nothing they (the soldiers) had ever seen.”  The medical kits as well, were “high level…equipment.”  It was all from Russia.

    •        This is a “war of survival….we have no choice”….we have the soldiers but we don’t have the heads.  As the leaders of the military admit, we have only used a portion of our capabilities.

    •        The military leaders and the government have this “thing about proportionality.”  We are getting attacked on four fronts, 100,000 people displaced in Northers Israel and they are worried about proportionality.

    •        Rabbi Mer Kahana, talking about the first Lebanon War. 

    •        The “tragedy of the IDF pulling out of Lebanon before really finishing the job.  And we have to…pray that that scenario doesn’t repeat itself.”

    •        Parallels to the Lebanese war today. 

    o       There “will be a great cheer from all the leftists and from the American Jewish Committee.  Israel will pull out of Lebanon….”  “We had in our power to physically liquidate these … Nazis….kill them, kill them.  Stomp, pressure…”  Unafraid of what the world says.

    o       In the first weeks of the (first Lebanon) war “Peace Now, and the leftists, and the world, and CBS, and the New York Times…gave orders to its troops” not to use air power when attacking PLO positions that are in civilian areas because you “might kill civilians.”

    o       The Israelis had to go in without cover.  It was an “Insane decision….All the Arabs of Lebanon are not worth the life of one Jewish soldier….In World War II, the Gentiles understood how to fight a war…bombed the cities….They were bombing the German people, because….the German people that was going to back Hitler….who cheered Hitler.”

    o       “…there wasn’t time for misplaced pity…our rabbis tell us, he who has mercy on the cruel will someday be cruel unto the merciful.  We had pity on the Arabs in Lebanon….”

    o       “Nothing happens in this world except that God wills it…Jewish weakness is a desecration of God’s name….The lesson of the Holocaust, the real one…the Germans laughed at them and mocked them and said, Jews where is your God?…We empty God from the world by our being weak.”

    o       “…he (God) shows the nations through the Jewish people…only Jewish strength and only Jewish power and only Jewish victory can prove to them that there is a God in Israel.”

    o       The state of Israel was “an explosion of Jewish power…Jewish strength…Jewish pride…”

    o       In the six day war: “We saw God. The world saw God.  The world trembled….we took this miracle and we threw it away….”

    o       Moshe Dayan, opposed taking the Golan Heights in 1967 because it might kill Russians.  “He was a secular man of little faith, no faith.

    o       End of speech.

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  • Straight White Jesus Podcast.

    October 31, 2024

    This is a fascinating, terrifying podcast episode about the role of evangelicals and Pentecostals in the election.

    podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/straight-white-american-jesus/id1441649707

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  • Podcast. Maleness

    October 29, 2024

    podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/straight-white-american-jesus/id1441649707

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  • SUPREME COURT AND KENNEDY

    October 29, 2024

    apple.news/AZAnRIUDWT2OVBhISzx0vbw

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  • Voter Suppression in Virginia

    October 29, 2024

    apple.news/AKud4umMtT0yPufuRswHIBQ

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  • UNWRA

    October 29, 2024

    www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/28/israel-bans-un-agency-unrwa-working-inside-country/

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  • ISRAEL AND UNWRA

    October 29, 2024

    www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/29/israel-iran-war-hezbollah-lebanon-latest-news1/

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  • INCENDIARY DEVICES: TELEGRAPH SAYS RUSSIA SUSPECTED

    October 29, 2024

    Polish authorities have reportedly arrested four people in connection to an alleged plot to conceal incendiary devices in airfreight shipments. According
    — Read on www.aircargonews.net/policy/air-cargo-security/four-arrests-over-air-cargo-incendiary-plot/

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  • Democracy and war: Politics and Identity in a time of global threats : Amazon.sg: Books

    October 29, 2024

    Democracy and war: Politics and Identity in a time of global threats : Amazon.sg: Books
    — Read on www.amazon.sg/Democracy-war-Politics-Identity-threats/dp/3423264268

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  • TRUMP RETAINED CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS IN DRAWER

    October 26, 2024

    www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/14/donald-trump-handled-records-marked-classified-after-presidency-court-filing-alleges

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  • PROTESTS IN ISRAEL

    October 26, 2024

    www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-26/ty-article/.premium/regional-escalation-would-impose-a-death-sentence-on-our-loved-ones-in-captivity/00000192-c98c-d63b-adb3-dded8c0d0000

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  • MICHIGAN MUSLIM MAYOR SUPPORTS TRUMP

    October 26, 2024


    Two years later, Mr. Ghalib created another stir when he and other socially conservative Muslims banned the L.G.B.T.Q. Pride flag from publicly owned flagpoles, alarming liberals who said the move was discriminatory and harmful to the city’s welcoming reputation.
    Their fears only heightened last month, after Mr. Ghalib endorsed Donald J. Trump, who as president had ushered in what is known as the Muslim ban, blocking immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations, including Mr. Ghalib’s home country. Adding to the tensions was a visit by Mr. Trump, who hoped the mayor’s support could peel off a meaningful number of Muslim voters in Michigan, a swing state.
    Explaining his support, Mr. Ghalib pointed to a distaste for liberal social views, anger at President Biden’s support of Israel and a belief that Mr. Trump will end the conflict in the Middle East.

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  • October 26, 2024

    podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/straight-white-american-jesus/id1441649707

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  • Insights on Israel-Iran Tensions: What to Expect Next

    October 26, 2024

    NEWS AND LIFE NOTES

    SATURDAY 26, 2024

    Podcast: BBC Newshour 10/26/24

    Israel

    • Reporter from the Economist:
    • We still don’t know the exact path the Israeli planes took to get to their targets in Iran.
    • Saudia Arabia and the UAE have condemned the attack.
    • The route is probably through Syria and Iraq.  The Israelis struck targets in both Syria and Iraq.
    • There are Iran backed groups in both countries.  The air defense sites were struck, and this may have been to clear the route only.
    • There would have been voices in Israeli encouraging a larger attack arguing “this is our chance.”
    • This is not the end.  It is a sequence of attacks.  We might see more ambitious attacks in the future.
    • A former Israeli MP, former diplomat comments: Ruth Landa (Benny Ganz’s party).
    • Iran has been attacking Israel for years.  Trucks of armaments are going through Iraq to Syria to prepare another front against Israel.
    • No, this is not the end of it.  There is an “obsession” to destroy Israel.  “This is just the first step.”  “Iran will just not stop.”

    Georgia Vote

    • The Georgia Dream Party is pro-Russia.  They have been ruling. 
    • Rehan Demitri correspondent:
    • Young voters are supporting Georgia’s future as part of the EU.  They fear the Dream Party will stay in power. 

    Cuba

    • Severe power outages.  Schools and universities are shut until next week. 
    • Will Grant reports:
    • The island’s electrical grid went down. 
    • There are criticisms about the government building hotels and not investing in the infrastructure.
    • Government officials are blaming it on the US embargo (note: which Biden left in place after Trump reinstated it.)
    • The COVID pandemic coincided with a “sharp economic downturn” in Cuba. 

    Nelson Mandala: “To be angry and bitter is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die.”

    Donald Trump called for bringing back the death penalty.  He took out an ad in the New York Times at the time of the Central Park Five case. 

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  • MUNCH: THE SCREAM 1893

    October 25, 2024

    ART NOTES

    MUNCH: THE SCREAM, 1893

    Edwardmunch.org

    As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our own age – wracked with anxiety and uncertainty.

    Essentially The Scream is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based on Munch’s actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his two companions, seen in the background, had left him.

    Fitting the fact that the sound must have been heard at a time when his mind was in an abnormal state, Munch renders it in a style which if pushed to extremes can destroy human integrity.

    ….the flowing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion (note: ?) imposed upon nature, whereby the multiplicity of particulars is unified into a totality of organic suggestion with feminine overtones (Note: ?).

    …man is part of nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates the individual.

    Beginning at this time Munch included art nouveau elements in many pictures but usually only in a limited or modified way. Here, however, in depicting his own morbid experience, he has let go, and allowed the foreground figure to become distorted by the subjectivized flow of nature; the scream could be interpreted as expressing the agony of the obliteration of human personality by this unifying force.  (Note: I’m not sure about the “unifying force.”)

    Significantly, although it was Munch himself who underwent the experience depicted, the protagonist bears no resemblance to him or anyone else. The creature in the foreground has been depersonalized and crushed into sexlessness or, if anything, stamped with a trace of the femininity of the world that has come close to assimilating it.  (Note: What?  What is this about the femininity?  It seems clearly male to me.)

    Several facts indicate Munch was aware of the danger of art of this sort for a neurotic humanist like himself. He soon abandoned the style and rarely if ever again subjected a foreground figure to this kind of radical and systematic distortion.

    At the top of another version of the subject (National Gallery, Oslo) he wrote: ‘Can only have been painted by a madman.’

    He certainly had a horror of insanity, which had afflicted his sister Laura.

    Within the picture, he has set up a defense, in the form of the plunging perspective of the roadway and its fence, which preserves a rational world of three dimensions, holding at bay the swell of art nouveau curves.

    Safe in this rational world, the two men in the distance remain unequivocally masculine.

    In the foreground unified nature has come close to crossing the fence, close enough to distort the form and personality of the protagonist. But the fence still protects it from total absorption into subjective madness.

    Further Facts:

    The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts. In 1994, the version in the National Gallery was stolen. It was recovered several months later.

    The 1895 pastel-on-board version of the painting was sold at Sotheby’s (in 2012) for a record US$120 million. The previous record for the most expensive work of art sold at auction had been held by Nude, Green Leaves and Bust by Picasso, which went for US$106.5 million in 2010.  The highest price paid for art at an auction is still held (in figures accounting for inflation) by Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh, which sold for $82.5 million in 1990, or about $151 million 2012 dollars. There have been reports that The Card Players, by Paul Cezanne, sold privately for $250m in 2011.

    See edwardmunch.org

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