Man, I miss my girls (they're still in Ptown with Aaron as he shuts down the cottage). I feel an almost physical ache without their daily ups and howls, a craving for their affection and moods, a loneliness not just from people, but from nature. And, yes, I miss my husband too.
(Hat tip: BF).
The differences between 1948 and 2011, usefully explained.
Apple's stock dove on the news it was unveiling the iPhone 4S instead of the iPhone 5. Dan Lyons is disappointed. Dan Frommer expects the phone to be a bestseller regardless:
More than 90% of Americans still don’t own an iPhone. Heck, two-thirds of Americans still don’t own a smartphone. So the iPhone 4 design isn’t “old” to them. (Not any more than the Motorola RAZR that they still use.) It may not be a “must-upgrade” for everyone, but most people don’t buy new phones every year, anyway. Meanwhile, it’s an incredible upgrade for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G owners, as well as folks using older Android devices, BlackBerries, or dumbphones.
Engadget toys around with a 4S:
The most impressive part was the demo of Siri, the new assistant that lets you do just about anything you can do on your phone — but with your voice. We tried to psych it out with a bunch of random requests, including the history of Chester, Vermont (a lovely town) and the best Ramen places in San Francisco. Siri never faltered, never missed a beat. It worked as well as Scott's demo up on the stage. There's nothing better to say than that. We even sent ourselves a few text messages, which Siri transcribed to a T.
Chihuahua vs mastiff:
Sari Nusseibeh doesn't want Palestinians to accept Bibi's terms:
Rrather than demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as a "Jewish State" as such – adding "beyond chutzpah" to insult and injury – we offer the suggestion that Israeli leaders ask instead that Palestinians recognise Israel (proper) as a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism, and whose majority is Jewish. Many states (including Israel's neighbours Jordan and Egypt, and countries such as Greece) have their official religion as Christianity or Islam (but grant equal civil rights to all citizens) and there is no reason why Israeli Jews should not want the religion of their state to be officially Jewish. This is a reasonable demand, and it may allay the fears of Jewish Israelis about becoming a minority in Israel, and at the same time not arouse fears among Palestinians and Arabs about being ethnically cleansed in Palestine. Demanding the recognition of Israel's official religion as Judaism, rather than the recognition of Israel as a "Jewish State", would also mean Israel continuing to be a democracy.
Jonathan Tobin fumes:
After more than 2,500 words of dishonest incitement, Nusseibeh concludes by saying that Israel should be a democratic country with a Jewish majority and a Jewish state religion. But that is what it is now and what Israelis and those who support it understand to be a Jewish state. Palestinians who haven’t been able to create their own democratic culture can’t credibly claim that they are, as Nusseibeh says, merely worried about the future of Israeli democracy. Why then is it so hard for even a member of that small majority of Palestinians who actually believe in living in peace with the Jews to say the phrase “Jewish state?” Perhaps because to do so invokes finality to the conflict that gives even moderates like Nusseibeh pause. If even someone like him is moved to this level of invective by those words then it is hard to imagine when the rest of Palestinian society will accept them and the permanence of their Jewish neighbors’ hold on even part of the land.
Rincon, Puerto Rico, 10.50 am
Michael Kazin thinks about the anti-abortion movement through the lens of a new documentary on prohibition:
As the history of prohibition instructs, the surest way to defeat the right-to-life movement would be to make abortion illegal. Not solely because it would give the movement what it wants, but also because a firm majority of Americans still support the right to choose in all or most circumstances—just as a majority back in the 1920s probably thought it was all right to buy a drink (the polling business did not yet exist). A reversal of Roe (much less a “pro-life” amendment) would quickly make heroes and heroines out of health workers who violated the law—much as this film, and most histories of the period, glamorize tipsy flappers and gangsters wielding submachine guns. The long history of prohibition unmistakably demonstrates that a divided public will quickly turn hostile when protestors with decent motives elect officials who carry out indecent assaults on individual freedom. In America, a movement of moralists is never so vulnerable as when it succeeds.
I was transfixed last night as well. But my thoughts wandered to a more proximate analogy: the war on marijuana. What on earth are we afraid of? I like Cassio's take myself:
O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!
Slow-moving, ever-hungry, browsing beasts! The relief of it all.
More on the settlers' cumulative price tag:
Attacks by settlers against Palestinian property in the West Bank has risen by 57 percent in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period last year, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which documents violence in the Palestinian territories.
A reader chimes in:
Thank you for posting that disturbing video. The mosque burning that you refer to actually happened in Northern Israel, specifically, in Galilee. Northern Israel is heavily populated with Israeli Arabs and Galilee as a whole is majority Arab, although the demographics of the sub-regions within Galilee vary. There is an important point here: unlike the attacks in the West Bank, this bit of arson was committed against fellow Israeli citizens. While Netanyahu and others are condemning this attack, the settlers responsible for it decided to extend their "reprisals" to an Israeli Arab community inside Israel proper, which should give you some idea of their attitude towards Israelis of Arab descent.
Goldblog covers this as a matter of sin (which it is) but not as a matter of politics (because that would require scales falling from eyes about the increasingly ugly nature of the fundamentalists who now dominate the Jewish state). An Israeli reader has more detail:
The mosque burned yesterday is in Tuba-Zangria, which is a Bedouin village inside Israel, which arguably makes the item even more ominous. Tuba-Zangria is close to Safed, which is now the home of many extremist Jews, and in particular the city's municipal rabbi, Shmuel Eliahu, who is responsible among other things for spearheading campaigns against rental of apartments to Arabs, and against Arab students studying at Safed. In case it wasn't clear, this Shmuel Eliahu is on a government payroll. Needless to say, he was not fired for his hate speech, and probably will not be fired.
This is another escalation in my country's sad decline into a racist theocratic cesspool.
That's the kind of language only Israelis use, isn't it?
(Photo: An Arab-Israeli boy inspects a burnt mosque after it was torched overnight in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria, in the northern Israeli Galilee, on October 3, 2011. Vandals torched the mosque in northern Israel in a suspected revenge attack by right-wing extremists that sparked a 'furious' response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images.)
Now's the time to declare:
[D]on’t be too surprised if Palin sees an opening to dominate the political airwaves and internet for weeks and months to come. And don’t be too surprised if a shocking number of Republican voters forget about her allegedly toxic persona and respond to her primitive cry of defiance of everyone who has ever underestimated her—or taken them for granted.
Robert Paul Wolff is impressed with McGinniss's work:
Palin and her husband, Todd, give every evidence of being arrested emotionally at roughly the Middle School stage of psychological development. She is petty, vindictive, ruthless in her personal relationships, ambitious in roughly the way that a "mean girl" in the tenth grade would be ambitious — desperate to be the Homecoming Queen and jealous of any girl who threatens her dominance of the schoolyard. It is really difficult to believe how mean-spirited she is about things that any normal adult, let alone a Mayor, Governor, and Vice-Presidential candidate would consider beneath her attention…
Palin comes across as a profoundly psychologically troubled individual — ambitious, to be sure, ruthless, no doubt, but not at all in any coherently rational fashion. She is clearly a psychopathic personality, but she also exhibits very strange eating disorders, sleeping disorders, and a level of narcissistic self-involvement that is way beyond what one would expect in a public political figure.
Never mind what it says about America that she came very close to being the sitting Vice President in an administration with a man in his seventies with a history of heart trouble.
Yes, never mind. What the MSM and Washington want you to think.
The Dish 