Titan really wants to rant at everyone

With the fascist killer, 1943, Woody Guthrie born 100 years ago

Titan has much to gripe about this week, as you can well imagine.  First, however, we present the weekly commercial for the hotel in Mexico

THE WEEKLY COMMERCIAL PLUG
Usually Titan and Pollyanna shun what Click and Clack of Car Talk call shameless commerce. We are making an exception  to plug a hotel in Yucatan, Mexico run by the daughter of dear friends and her partner. Please check out the Mayan Beach Garden Inn-Hotel if you plan a vacation in Mexico.

 and wish our Muslim friends a belated Eid Mubarak.

BIRTHDAYS
We note the 150th birthday of the composer Claude Debussy, born August 22, 1862.

 We invite you a musical interlude.
;

We also mark  the centennial of Woody Guthrie.  Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma and died October 3, 1967 in Brooklyn.  The little Oklahoma town had a short-lived oil boom when he was a child that ended in a bust leaving all "busted, disgusted, and not to be trusted."
From his experiences in Okemah, Woody’s uniquely wry outlook on life, as well as his abiding interest in rambling around the country, was formed. And so, he took to the open road.  He wrote and sang hard-hitting songs about hard times, exploited people and rank, establishment-backed injustice.  He called his guitar, "the machine that kills fascists."  Now his son Arlo is a Republican and Woody was even memorialized on a stamp in 1998 about which Arlo  said "For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat,".   For more details and commentary see the article by Lawrence Downs and Woody's  biography.
The mantle of dissident songs has passed to a new generation who are loved by the objects of their attacks.
As Downs writes,  
"It's hard to be a troubadour with dangerous ideas if people refuse to be challenged or offended by them. Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, is a hard-baked right-winger who wants to bleed the government so it has no money to help people but all it needs to wage war. Yet he says one of his favorite bands is Rage Against the Machine, whose members gave inspiration to the Occupy Wall Street movement and organized resistance to the anti-immigrant freak-out in Arizona. This boggles the mind."
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger are said to have  invented the term hootenanney (a get together of folk singers)--I doubt either of them, dead or alive, would appreciate the one at the Lincoln Center.
MORE GOODIES
We strongly suggest that you go to our attached blog, Bad Astronomy, for The Amazing Meeting and a wonderful speech by the astronomer Pamela Gay
We also note a mote of good news--the lifting of political censorship of the media in Myanmar(Burma).  This is another encouraging sign that the military junta is giving up on running the country and democracy is advancing.

EROSION OF FREEDOMS AROUND THE WORLD
We hope the Guardian and Ben Jennings do not mind our starting out today with his cartoon of the Pussy Riot verdict. Indeed, as one commentator said, you can take the man out of the KGB, but you cannot take the KGB out of the man. The action of the Putin government in jailing the Pussy Riot women is obviously a way of putting a chill on dissent and making it clear that the regime will not tolerate anything that might threaten its control.  It happens everywhere, from the New York police putting down Occupy, to the Israeli police breaking the arm of a protest leader in the hope of getting her to shut up and and go away and the arrest of a student in Belarus who photographed some teddy bears dropped by Swedish journalists as a publicity stunt for freedom of expression in Belarus, highlighted in our Human Rights blog last week.   This has already cost a few bigwigs in Belarus their jobs, i.e. ridicule does work.  Meanwhile in the so-called democracies new technologies make it possible for Big Brother to track us by facial recognition as we go about our business, as pointed out by Naomi Wolf in the Guardian.  Orwell was indeed prescient, albeit a few decades premature.
What all these share is the desire of power and money to stick together and to prevent the voice of the people from being heard. Long ago Lawrence Britt in an article about fascism  pointed out the criteria by which fascism can be recognized in nascent forms in many Western democracies.  In addition to the subservience of political leaders to the power of money (vid. the standing ovation to Natanyahu in the US Congress, bought and paid for by casino earnings of right wing tycoons), Britt points out blatant sexism, as we see in the war on women fought by Republicans in the US and Orthodox Jews and others in Israel,

Sign in Beit Shemesh instructing women not to dally on the street. Photo by Michal Patel

 near deification of the military and a strong political involvement of organized religion as pointed out so clearly by Scott Arlan, highlighted by Pollyanna last week.  One can see a connection between the "protection of the faith" by Putin(a lifetime proponent of socialist atheism) and the blasphemy laws of Pakistan (see below), all, of course, with the acquiescence of a conservative, uneducated populace.  The BBC Moscow correspondent found a strong decrease in sympathy and support for the Pussy Riot women within a short train ride of Moscow, although they did enjoy support in the city itself.  Demonstrations were dispersed and we can see that the next in line may well be Gary Kasparov the chess champion who is one of the most vocal proponents of democracy in Russia.  He was arrested and beaten and now the police claim that he bit one of them.  BTW, this is a favorite tactic of the police in Israel, claiming that someone attacked them.  We like his response to the accusation:
KASPAROV: ABSOLUTELY NOT, MARIA. IF I'M TO TASTE HUMAN FLESH, I WOULDN'T BITE ANYONE UNDER THE RANK OF GENERAL.
You may read the rest of the transcript of his interview on CNBC’s “Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo".  These is also a link there to the video of the interview.
We say Gung Ho Gary--you and the Pussy Riot girls have it right. The one thing a dictatorship cannot tolerate is ridicule, and Putin and the Russian judicial system have got nothing but since his cops arrested the three punk singers. The name alone should have tipped him to the trouble he was bringing on himself.  Of course people with certain types of egos really are vulnerable to humor and usually have no sense of humor themselves.  We have noticed that not only in politicians but in doctors, especially male doctors, who need their aura of omnipotence and omniscience to maintain their self image. Of course, it may well be that Putin cares nothing about criticism, ridicule or whatever as long as he continues to hold power.
It should be understood that the fight against free speech is not confined to dictatorships.  We should all be deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Michael Moore and Oliver Stone writing in the New York Times point out a few of the achievements of WikiLeaks:
"Since WikiLeaks’ founding, it has revealed the “Collateral Murder” footage that shows the seemingly indiscriminate killing of Baghdad civilians by a United States Apache attack helicopter; further fine-grained detail about the true face of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; United States collusion with Yemen’s dictatorship to conceal our responsibility for bombing strikes there; the Obama administration’s pressure on other nations not to prosecute Bush-era officials for torture; and much more."
We might mention that a few plums about Israel have come out in WikiLeaks such as Amos Gilead, the "strategist" telling an American diplomat that Israel wants the Palestinians to remain violent since "we are not good at Ghandi." If the US government can pursue a foreign citizen for acts he committed outside the US and that are not crimes in the country where committed, we all appear to have a severe problem with free speech.
SACRILEGE AT AGE 11
The blasphemy laws of Pakistan are a disgrace to humanity and indeed an insult to religion.

Christians argue they are often falsely accused of blasphemy

 Now an 11 year old Christian girl has been arrested on the charge of desecrating the holy Quran.  Many of those accused of blasphemy have been killed by violent mobs, while politicians who advocate a change in legislation have also been targeted.  The girl apparently is suffering from Down syndrome and it is not clear exactly what she did to arouse the fury of the mob.  She may have held a basket containing Quran pages. Attempts to repeal or alter the laws have led to the murder of politicians including a Cabinet minister.  The entire matter shows a lack of humanity in the culture of the country and in the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. In general, religion can be very pernicious, as shown in this Oatmeal segment sent to us by Hadass.  Thanks, we love it.
Let us go a bit further with the question of what is blasphemy and what is understood as protected free speech in a liberal democracy. Muslims took terrible offense at a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting the Prophet in a not so respectful manner.  Indeed, a demonstrator in London stood with a "Down With Free Speech" sign (unfortunately the picture has vanished from the Web).  Yet when Tom Lehrer satirized the Catholic Church reforms after Vatican II with his hilarious Vatican Rag, no one became upset. He was summing up the events of 1964 and we quote:
"Another big news story of year concerned the ecumenical council in Rome, known as Vatican II. Among the things they did in an attempt to make the church more commercial was to introduce the vernacular into portions of the mass, to replace Latin, and to widen somewhat the range of music permissible in the liturgy, but I feel that if they really want to sell the product, in this secular age, what they ought to do is to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have a modest example here. It's called The Vatican Rag."



JUSTICE IN VIRGINIA
Before we leave the world scene and get on to the lovely things at home, we would like to comment on justice as administered in the great Commonwealth of Virginia.  A death penalty conviction was just overturned and the federal court had the following to say about the behavior of the prosecution:
“The Court finds these actions not only unconstitutional in regards to due process, but abhorrent to the judicial process.”
It does not get much stronger.  The case may or may not be retried, but let us hope the message gets through.  It shows how dangerous to justice the death penalty is.  We recall a case a few years ago when DNA evidence surfaced after the execution of the man who had been convicted.  The DA in Virginia chose to destroy this evidence lest it come out that Virginia had executed an innocent man.  The fact that there might be a killer out there who got away with it was less important.  Carry me back...We will leave Todd Akin and the gender politics in the US to more skillful bloggers, such as Andy Borowitz, who now has a job at the New Yorker, i.e. he has joined the workforce.  Mazal tov.
LABOR UNREST
We decry the violence and killing in the labor dispute in the South African platinum mining industry.

View Photo Gallery — Striking miners shot, killed in South Africa: In one of the worst shootings by South African authorities since the end of the apartheid era, police opened fire Thursday on striking miners who had charged a line of officers. Several miners reportedly were killed and others were wounded.

  The death of 34 workers and 2 policemen this week is a totally unjustified tragedy.  South Africa has not experienced such events since the end of apartheid.  Let us hope the issues can be resolved peaceably.  We have little doubt that the miners were both underpaid and betrayed by their official union.    We might mention that union busting goes on all over the world.  Even Amnesty International USA fell into a trap when it appropriately brought out a tee shirt with a Free Pussy Riot logo and then proceeded to market it via Amazon, one of the biggest union busters on the planet.   Please post and tweet this in the hope that AIUSA will be embarrassed and shape up.

HOME SWEET HOME
The two main issues this week in Israel are the question of initiating a war with Iran over their development of nuclear capability and the near lethal lynching of an Arab youth in Jerusalem by a gang of Jewish thugs.  Let us start with the war.  The debate has gone public and it appears that everyone, the public, the military hierarchy, the retired security chiefs--all are against a preemptive strike against the nuclear facilities in Iran.  The result would be regional war and instability, a rain of missiles on population centers in Israel and only a marginal delay in the nuclear development of Iran would result from it.  Nonetheless, the Katzenjammer twins, or Max and Moritz if you are more European, Natanyahu and Barak, are pushing the idea and as Aluf Benn points out in Haaretz the open debate seems to serve their purpose.  It has sunk to the level of senior defense officials and politicians briefing a 91 year old demented rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, on the issue because he controls the Cabinet votes of ministers of the orthodox Shas party.  The rabbi suggested that we all pray very strongly, which is probably the best advice he could give us.  In the meantime, we go to our futile little demonstrations in the hope that someone will listen and some rationality will sneak in through the back door.

  Zeev Sternhell, as usual, provides a cogent analysis of the situation and the alternatives.

MOB VIOLENCE ON OUR STREETS
On Thursday evening August 16, a group of Jewish teenagers cruised the streets of Jerusalem looking for Arabs to beat up.  They claimed later that the Arab youths had harassed Jewish girls.  In the resulting attack, a young Arab was beaten so badly that he is still in intensive care.  The youths also tried to prevent ambulance teams from helping him, saying, "let him die, he is an Arab." Police have arrested 7 Jewish teens, two of them girls, suspected of involvement in the beating of three Arabs.

Ohad Zwigenberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Two Israeli suspects in an attack on young Palestinians last week were led into a magistrate’s court in Jerusalem on Monday by police officers.

 An account of the events posted by a witness on her Facebook page has been translated for a NYTimes blogger.  Read it and shudder.  This is what we are. The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said in connection with atrocities in the Vietnam war, "a few are guilty, we all are responsible."  We must also ask about the hundreds of people who stood by while this was happening.  They stood by because the victims were Arabs whose lives are considered worthless by Israeli Jews.  
It is phony to say these are extreme cases. This sort of racially motivated hatred is the deliberately created result of Zionist education.  As Zvi Barel writes in Haaretz--    "Israeli "literature" promoting hate of Arabs predates the occupation. The children's book series "Danidin" by Shraga Gafni is full of expressions and illustrations that laid excellent infrastructure for Arab-hatred. The "Mikraot Yisrael" (Israeli Readers ) series, which helped educate hundreds of thousands of Israeli children, is striking in terms of the "incitement" concealed within it.

Similar books published in the Palestinian Authority keep those who monitor Palestinian incitement very busy. But there isn't really a need to list all the recipes for Arab-hatred that have been fed to us, and which we developed on our own, in order to come up with a defense for those criminals in Jerusalem, whose "only crime" was to do what Israeli pedagogy and the "Death-to-Arabs" ethos directed them to do.

This is an ethos that will continue to be an integral part of the Israeli-Jewish national identity, even if the occupation were to end tomorrow. Because "Death to the Arabs" isn't an expression of "routine" hatred of those who are different, or the loathsome slogan of some "price tag" gang. It does not resemble the xenophobia or the fear of Muslims that characterizes European racism.

Hatred of Arabs is part of the test of loyalty and identity that the state gives its Jewish citizens. A good Jew hates Arabs. A loyal Israeli will leave an Arab to die, because "he's an Arab." And someone who isn't like that, as we know, "sleeps with Arabs.""

A similar ideology, to kill because of ethnicity, drove a senseless murder of a black man by white teenagers in Jackson MS in the US last year.  The killing was captured on a motel parking lot security camera and you are invited to see it as reported by CNN.  The killer was given a life sentence.  We wonder what punishment will be meted out to these killers.  The juveniles will probably get off with a slap on the wrist and the adult leader will get a few years maybe.  Cast your mind back to Kafr Kassem in 1956 when murderers in uniform were punished only symbolically and October 2000 when no one was indicted despite the recommendation of a commission of inquiry.  We suggest reading the entire Barel article.

IN A LIGHTER VEIN
OK, even Titan the nudnik can get tired of ranting and would like to share a few tidbits with you.  We start out with the What If? answer from our friends at XKCD.  This is in general a fun site, great stuff Randall!


The passing of  Helen Gurley Brown was marked by sister Pollyanna last week.  In the wake of her death, the New Yorker released its reaction to the publication of Sex and the Single Girl in 1963:

Anyone who has raised a teenager will have some empathy for parents...

Titan greets you during Olympics Week

Sir Bernard Lovell at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, Cheshire, in 2003. Photograph: Phil Noble/PA, vid. In Memoriam below

 Titan too  is enjoying the Olympics despite all the garbage associated with such an event.  Pollyanna pointed out last week that many of the young gymnasts look like abused children.  We decided to check this out and indeed there are reports of abuse, but often brought by adults thirty years after the event.  We also have a  report from a woman who moved on and made a life.  One of her complaints was not of sexual abuse, but of of mental abuse and low self image  brought on by constant criticism and being driven to do more and better.  It is encouraging to see that the US Gymnastic organization is taking steps to provide better protection for the children, but as pointed out by many, loopholes remain.  A recent memoir by  Dominique Moceanu who, at 14, was the youngest member of the Olympic gold-medal-winning 1996 U.S. women’s gymnastics team in Atlanta digs deep into the dealing with a relentless father and the allegedly abusive coach Bela Karolyi. The Daily Beast picks the best bits from Off Balance.  Certainly food for thought as we watch these children performing for our entertainment.
HUMAN RIGHTS BLOG
Titan would like to call your attention to our Human Rights Action blog.  Please check it out and take the actions requested.
IN MEMORIAM
Sir Bernard Lovell OBE FRS Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester UK died this week at the age of 98.  Sir Bernard was the university's Emeritus Professor of Radioastronomy and the founder and first director of Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire. In a statement, the university said his "legacy is immense" and added that he was "a great man, he will be sorely missed".
Jodrell Bank is dominated by the 250ft (76m) Lovell Telescope, conceived by Sir Bernard. He began working with engineer Sir Charles Husband to build the telescope in 1945 and it has since become a symbol of British science and engineering and a landmark in the Cheshire countryside.
A hugely ambitious project at the time, the telescope was by far the world's largest when it was completed in 1957 and within days tracked the rocket that carried Sputnik 1 into orbit, marking the dawn of the space age.  We would like to think that the discovery of pulsars by graduate student Jocyln Bell Burnell for which her advisor received the Nobel Prize in 1974 is a more memorable event than the tracking of Sputnik I.
Jodrell Bank is still the third largest steerable telescope in the world and a series of upgrades mean it is now more capable than ever, observing phenomena undreamed of when it was first conceived.   People like Sir Bernard leave a legacy for all of us.  Titan has posted an image of the telescope with Sir Bernard at the head of this blog in his memory.  May he rest in peace.  We append an obituary from the Guardian.

MARVIN HAMLISCH the film composer died this week at age 68.

Marvin Hamlisch

 He won many awards for his music including Oscars, Emmys and the like, including for A Chorus Line and The Sting.  He made movie history in 1974 when he became the first individual ever to win three Academy Awards in one night in all three music categories.   Broadway's bright glow went dim for a moment on Wednesday in his memory to pay homage to a more than four-decade-long career that spanned film, music, television and theater. Manhattan's 40 Broadway theaters turned down their lights at 8 p.m. ET for a total of 60 seconds in symbolic tribute to the man who composed acclaimed scores for the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Chorus Line," as well as "They're Playing Our Song" and "The Goodbye Girl."   We append an obituary from the Los Angeles Times.

ANOTHER MASSACRE IN THE USA
Titan deplores the senseless killing of six Sikh worshipers at a temple in Wisconsin. 

Allen Fredrickson/Reuters

A vigil in downtown Milwaukee for the dead and the wounded. “Everyone here is thinking this is a hate crime for sure,” said Manjit Singh, who goes to a different temple in the region. “People think we are Muslims.” More Photos »

 The shooting came about two weeks after a gunman killed 12 people and wounded nearly 60 in an attack at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.  It is shocking that a nation that calls itself the supreme democracy and gives human rights ratings to the rest of the world cannot provide its own citizens with basic protection by instituting gun control.  This is total madness.

CLIMATE CHANGE
It should be obvious to every thinking person that climate change is here and that we are responsible for it.  Nonetheless, we find people who should know better taking irrational contrary positions.  Some of them, such as the oil barons, do so because any change in the way things are done would hit them in the pocket.  We would like to quote Juan Cole on this subject, what he calls contrarians as differentiated from skeptics, in Informed Comment:
"It is not proper to speak of “climate skeptics,” since all scientists (including we social scientists) are skeptical of all data and theories every day, all the time, and are willing to change our position if enough information and analysis emerges to challenge the old paradigms. But beyond just skeptics, there are always in any debate “contrarians,” people who challenge a theory with little more on their side than radical doubt and deep suspicion, and who unsystematically latch on to every little thing that the theory hasn’t yet accounted for, or which seems to challenge it. Skeptics can be convinced by solid data and argument; contrarians are either harder to convince, or impossible to convince. Some contrarians, as with the billionaire Koch brothers who fund propaganda against climate science, are committed to their position because it is central to their business model."
We suggest reading his entire post.
What is encouraging is that a serious skeptic, Richard Muller, whose research was funded by the oil magnate Koch brothers, has turned completely away from his  previous position and now affirms that human activities are responsible for global warming.

Prof. Richard Muller of UC Berkeley

We salute Professor Muller.

NUNS STANDING UP TO THE POPE
We salute also the American nuns who are refusing to submit to arbitrary repression by the Vatican and have launched a bus tour for decency and liberty across the US. 

 Their organization, the Leadership Council of Women Religious , is meeting to decide how to confront the scathing attack and the brutal takeover that they are experiencing from the Vatican.  What is in essence a power struggle between the nuns and the church’s hierarchy had been building for decades, church scholars say.

Sister Claudia Bronsing takes part in a vigil at St. Colman Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in support of Catholic nuns who were criticized by the Vatican. (photo: Michael McElroy/NYT)

At issue are questions of obedience and autonomy, what it means to be a faithful Catholic and different understandings of the Second Vatican Council.  Sister Pat Farrell, the president of the Leadership Conference, said in an interview that the Vatican seems to regard questioning as defiance, while the sisters see it as a form of faithfulness.  They enjoy backing from a large segment of American Catholics.
THE SOVIET UNION IS ALIVE AND WELL
We are aghast and outraged at the travesty of justice taking place in Russia.

Pussy Riot demonstrators (from left) Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Aliokhina during their trial. (photo: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

Three young women, punk singers, are being tried and face serious jail sentences for the "crime" of having sung an anti-Putin song in a church.  Please take action via the Amnesty web site and register your protest.  Please, also, make this go viral via every social network to which you have access.  We note that many famous figures in the entertainment world, such as Sting, Madonna and others are taking up the cause of justice for the Pussy Riot girls. This lack of understanding of democracy and freedom of expression is, alas, shared by politicians of Russian extraction in Israel.

HOME SWEET HOME
Since we blogged last countless horrible things have happened here and we certainly cannot rant about all of them.  The political scene keeps getting worse, the economy has tanked, the protest movement is fizzling (as we predicted long ago) and the right-religious coalition is taking over our lives.    We had the Romney visit and survived it.  He had a big fund raiser breakfast at the King David Hotel, explained that Jews are richer than Palestinians because they are culturally superior and moved on. He did not bother to take the short ride to Ramallah to talk to Abbas and Fayed and learn something of substance about what an occupation can do to an economy. Thomas Friedman does a better job than I could in discussing how Romney's campaign is a symptom of what is wrong with the relationship between Israel and the US.  It all boils down to money, in this case dirty money from the likes of Sheldon Adelson

Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

 (whose Las Vegas company is under investigation by the Feds) and other right wing American Jews who love Natanyahu and will fight to the last drop of blood of our sons and grandsons.

WAS THERE A PROTEST?   
The old comedy group Hagashash Hahiver had a sketch in which someone comes after the 1967 war to reclaim his car that the army had commandeered.  Each time he noted what was missing, the response was .."was there whatever?", climaxing in "was there an engine?"  We feel that way about the protest movement that boomed last summer.  Many people, such as the leaders of the Meretz party, the journalist Amira Haas and others called for the left to support it, but  alas, it is fading out, just as the Occupy movement faded in the US.  What was perceived as a strength, the lack of a formal leadership, was in fact the kiss of death.  The refusal of the leaders to confront the main issue before the public, namely the occupation of the West Bank, meant that the protest movement could never translate its half million people in the street

Israel social protest 2011

 to votes aimed at changing the political leadership and the social model under which the country is run.   The leaders and initiators appear to suffer from political naivete.

Daphne Leef leading to nowhere?

 We can only change the regime here via elections and that means political action, as distasteful as that may appear to some of the social protest leaders.  Zeev Sternhell provides an insightful analysis of the situation.

MORE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS UNDER THE OCCUPATION
The most moral army in the world is planning to evict hundreds of people from their homes in the South Hebron Mountain area.  Both the EU and the Palestinian Authority have protested.  The claim that the area is need for military training as a firing range is specious.  There is plenty of room in Israel for army training.  The idea is obviously to depopulate the area, where Arabs have lived for over a century in caves, to make room for more settlement building.   We apologize for the difficulties with the  Haaretz links.  Haaretz has become greedy, alas.  We are trying to find others whenever possible.  This link to the Fayyed protest should work.

IS THERE A LEFT IN ISRAEL?
Recent surveys have shown that while a significant fraction of the Israeli public shares the world view and the political positions of the left, the left itself is held in very low esteem. 

A new organization, designed to revitalize the left and to restore it to its proper position on the political map has been established under the leadership of Dr. Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset.  It is regarded as a project for a decade.  We wonder if we have a decade left to restore democracy in Israel in the face of the right-religious onslaught that is led by an unlikely coalition of the ultra-orthodox and atheist Putin supporters from Russia.  Burg has just published an op-ed in the New York Times on the fading of democracy in Israel.  Indeed it is true that the share of the electorate that support the parties of the left has plummeted by tens of percentage points in recent decades. It is not because of arrogance or lack of rapport with the working class.  Meretz was the party that took up the cudgels on behalf of residents of towns in the periphery who were being deprived of their public housing rights by special interest groups. It got them appreciation and admiration, but not votes, because Likud voting is in their DNA.  It may well be that by the time the public wakes up, the West Bank will have been annexed and we will have an apartheid   state that will eventually give way to a binational state with an Arab majority in the Knesset.  Zionism is in bad shape and we can only hope that the optimism of Bradley Burston is right and young Israelis stand up and say Yes we Can.  Yossi Sarid points out in Haaretz(the link does not work because Haaretz wants your money) that marketing the truth is never easy.  We cannot but recall that Jimmy Carter was a one-term president because he spoke the truth to the American people.  Reagan was able to defeat him easily by selling fantasies.

BOOK REVIEW
We thank Richard for calling our attention to a book
EINSTEIN’S JEWISH SCIENCE
Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion
By Steven Gimbel
245 pp. The Johns Hopkins University Press. $24.95.
reviewed in the New York Times by  GEORGE JOHNSON
Published: August 3, 2012.

Gimbel suggets  that Einstein was able to come up with his theories of physics because of his Jewish mode of thinking.  Of course, he dismisses the Jewish Physics canards of  Nazis such as Phillip Lenard and others and does not attribute any Jewish religiosity to Einstein.   What gives Einstein’s work a Jewish flavor, Gimbel believes, is an approach to the universe that reminds him of the way a Talmudic scholar seeks to understand God’s truth. It comes only in glimpses. “Thou shalt not steal” may seem clear enough. But is it stealing to keep a $100 bill you find on the ground? It depends. Did you see the person who might have dropped it? Was it found on a busy street or in a friend’s backyard? In a hotel lobby with a lost and found? Without the luxury of a God’s-eye view, we must reckon from different vantage points. (We have a friend who found a $10 bill on a California beach and reported it to the IRS.  It must have cost the government $100 to process his tax return.)
“The heart of the Talmudic view is that there is an absolute truth, but this truth is not directly and completely available to us,” Gimbel writes. “It turns out that exactly the same style of thinking occurs in the relativity theory and in some of Einstein’s other research.”
This is an interesting idea and worthy of consideration

A LIGHTER VEIN TO END
Rejection it appears is not forever.  A gem of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was rejected by the New Yorker in 1936 has been rediscovered and published in the magazine.  We enjoyed it greatly and recommend it to you, very short and possibly Fitzgerald in decline (he died in 1940 and was deep into the bottle), but worth a read.  The rejection memo from 1936 reads as follows:
We’re afraid that this Fitzgerald story is altogether out of the question. It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him, and really too fantastic. We would give a lot, of course, to have a Scott Fitzgerald story and I hope that you will send us something that seems more suitable. Thank you, anyhow, for letting us see this.

The discovery of the Higgs boson has caused many strange effects around the world.  One of them seems to be in the brain of  Gene Weingarten in his new incarnation as a cartoon writer.

 WHAT IF?
Our friends at XKCD have instituted a What If? column in which they respond to readers' queries.  We recommend reading it  The link will take you to the latest one,  but you can easily scroll back to previous weeks.  They are all fun.
. 

Finally we note that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (we usually have lox, cream cheese and bagels on Saturday morning) has an insightful take on justice:

an on Grandpa: