Category Archives: Israel

UPDATE II (4/15): The Beef Vs. Bugs Phony Dichotomy

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Gender, Israel, Justice, Literature, Logic, Reason

3 Replies

Animal husbandry—Intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, in this case—is humanity’s Mark of Cain …~ilana

To be Right and reactionary (check) you don’t have to be gang-ho about and indifferent to the horrors of industrial livestock production ~ilana

The idea that humanity has only the bug vs. meat-guzzler eating options sets up a false dichotomy and gets a fail on logic and ethics ~ilana

On or around the time of this travesty—the evil, the indifference—of letting 18 thousand cows go up in flames—author Meir Shalev died, aged 74.

For the richness of his descriptions and the depth of the depictions and characters, down to his achingly exquisite unusual sensitivity and sensibility about animals—Shalev is up there with the greatest writers. (Nobel Prize winner Shai Agnon was a vegan.)

Nabokov of the Israelis? Maybe, but Shalev was unburdened by Nabokov’s prurient preoccupation with decadence, mired as he was in it.

Meir Shalev was a soulful innocent.

About the cow, Shalev said that she is the longest suffering, most abused of livestock—made to lactate unnaturally and painfully for a lifespan (which is why milk is puss-filled, by the way; to “regulated” levels, of course), her young removed, and then she, at life’s end, led to the slaughterhouse.

Shalev has described the cries of a heifer when her calf is removed. They go on for a very very long time.

Animal husbandry—Intensive animal farming or industrial livestock production, in this case—is humanity’s Mark of Cain …

*Screen pic image credit

*Shalev as screen pic

UPDATED: Animal Ethics @TuckerCarlson. NONE.

This update is from a January 18, 2023 tweet. It concerns the tenor on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show when it comes to animal ethics. Many of my readers have long-since abandoned the Republican line of rape-and-pillage-the-earth-it’s-yours. (That’s not in or from the Hebrew Testament!)

One person, whose comment I posted to Twitter and Gttr, appreciated my disgust with the flippancy on conservative shows as to animal ethics and husbandry. Other than dogs and cats, the traditional pets that comply with humanity’s slobbering needs—cons have no animal ethics bar utilitarianism: squeeze all you can from em to sate your ugly big gut.

On masking a cow:

Nobody on Tucker Carlson made an ethical argument against CRUELTY to one of the longest-suffering animals in the barnyard: the cow.

But great strides in thinking were made thanks to a cute, blond, fashionable farmer girl in serious war-paint (make-up).

AND, blond and cute is more important than ethics anytime.

Today, April 14, 2023, came a repeat performance, in the form of an idiotic segment on bug eating. Run for cover. They’ll force feed you bugs.

The Beef Vs. Bugs Phony Dichotomy

Every country in the West emulates America’s Fox News in producing their own standard issue Tomi Lahren quality thinker and lookers to compete for segments on Tucker. And so it is that the US, Fox News, creates a global marketplace for blond bimbos.

My mother, a Dutch citizen for over four decades, tells me that the Dutch, a serious and glum people, despise such Americanism. Among the Hard Right, the Dutch still carry the torch for that brilliant orator, Geert Wilders, who comes close to Assange in leading a life of martyrdom for truth.

For another, a good journalist would question the so-called veracity of the global plan to force-humanity to eat bugs en masse (don’t believe every conspiracy Tucker feeds ya). Bugs serve important ecological functions. Eat them all and you really won’t have food.

The creation of these false dichotomies and straw arguments when it comes to ethics in animal husbandry is loathsome—certainly irrational and illogical.

One can eat animals if one must and do so ethically. Of course, you cannot mass-produce animals ethically. But the idea that humanity has only the bug vs. meat-guzzler eating options sets up a false dichotomy and gets a fail on logic and ethics.

Moreover, the rah-rah of badmouthing of vegans is also worse than pathetic. Many young conservatives, or sensitive conservatives, are likely not on board. It’s of a piece with the phoniness of the old Republican, red-blooded girl and guy shtick. Not all vegans are activists with pink hair. Most are simply concerned with the ethics around eating animals.

In sum, to be Right and reactionary (check) you don’t have to be gang-ho about and indifferent to the horrors of industrial livestock production.

 

UPDATED (1/11): Is Diana West Investigating ‘Just Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine’? Dunno

Argument, Conservatism, Conspiracy, Government, Israel, Law, Political Philosophy, Sex, The State

Leave a reply

People who are killed or entombed by the state’s emissaries are usually not that powerful

Diana West, one of the few writers with whom I check back every now and then as she deserves dwindling energies, offers this tease on her website:

I decided to take the Whitney Webb challenge and fact-check the endnotes of her new book, ‘One Nation Under Blackmail (Vol. 1).’ Here, at my Patreon channel, are my initial results.

The link takes the reader to Diana’s Patreon home, to which, alas, one has to sign up.  “Signing-up” always feels like “signing away” something or another.

The Patreon post is titled “Fact Checking [Whitney Webb’s’] Salacious Endnotes (Someone’s Gotta Do It).”

No idea what Diana found, but I know that the low-watt Webb woman doesn’t warrant my own energies. Most of the Internet’s news porn does not. Quality output, my own, over decades without much appreciation exhausts. Worthy individuals will find that fact worth respecting, and recognize that I’m uninterested in addressing the Internet’s commentary crap or the dummy du jour, anointed fleetingly by elderly conservatives as Delphic oracle. Pelt me all you wish with questions about my own voluminous, wide-ranging writings—good or bad. Those I will happily address.

I’ve been around those fleeting brain infarcts long enough to ignore “Just Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine” (Yes, that title found a home <smile.> And, by the way, where is S.E. Cupp?)

These days, American publishers, as anatomized in the Foreword to Into the Cannibal’s Pot, published on VDARE, no longer publish important texts, but, rather, those written by popular dummies, as determined and selected according to social-media following and favor curried with equally loud, influential, TV mouths, for this reason:

Sidekick X, Y, Z (mostly interchangeable) is on TV, weighing in on weighty matters, because however hard she and her ilk try, they cannot outsmart their hosts

I can’t say for sure, and I might be wrong—but, from her use of “salacious,” I gather Diana is unimpressed.

A solid reference with respect to the Security and Surveillance State is Glenn Greenwald (if raw intelligence matters any more). He’s a good investigator, whose end-notes are unlikely to be “salacious”, and, to the extent his theoretical constraints allow—his deductions too are solid. Greenwald’s best work, of course, was in facilitating Edward Snowden’s revelations—not that it did any long-term good—and ferrying him to safety.

“Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden“

Naturally, I’ll listen to Diana’s dispassionate analysis pertaining to said end-notes if she provides it.

However, an author can provide end notes that check out, while still using the data to string together a poor, phantasmagorical thesis. Thus, Diana’s verdict matters on the matter of the data, but  this will not change my own sense of the “thesis” underlying Webb’s Epstein, Israel and Ghislaine Maxwell nexus:

My antenna is not even up. The root of all evil is not in Epstein and his ho. Did they serve the powerful? Yes. Did they imagine they were powerful? I suppose. They are both dead–Ghislaine, poor woman, is as good as dead.

In this connection, an important book to write would be on the loss of due process and the rules of evidence. Paul Craig Roberts wrote the first installation. It is he, not dumbo distaff at large, that ought to be paid to write a second volume, analyzing as I often do, the final death knell dealt to Law by MeToo movementarians, the same species of “due process” that has entombed Maxwell.

In all, people who are killed or entombed by the state’s emissaries are usually not that powerful.

As I say in my blog post, “Ghislaine Maxwell: Not Evidence-Based Law, But MeToo, Sexual Moral Panic,” I didn’t support the couple’s prosecution.

Consider: Matt Gaetz is also libeled now as a so-called pedo, for cavorting with young greedy gals. Mind you, he’s been smeared as a sex trafficker, no less, since he traveled with one willing lass on an airplane. Crossing state lines with a young, willing woman I guess is a crime in Police State USA. Tragic.

The state, overt and deep, is corrupt, and that includes the Israeli state, although Israel distinguishes itself by not dispossessing its own; the Jewish state acts in self-interest. That’s the real scandal: the treason of the Anglo-European Axis. Anything else is a distraction to me.

UPDATED (1/11): Diana West, author of the superb American Betrayal, has promised to provide us with her forensic examination of the “history” of low-watt Whitney Webb. Not that I doubted them—but my instincts have been confirmed. Stay on this page.

US Extends Vaccine Passport Requirement To Enter Country, As The World Drops Requirement

Canada, Constitution, COVID-19, Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Democrats, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Israel, Law, Propaganda, Regulation, Republicans, The State

Leave a reply

Naturally, if you are among the millions crossing the Rio Grande illegally into the United States, are of a swarthy complexion and can produce a current, up-to-date rap-sheet, as well as valid, reliably low IQ and literacy scores—you may enter the US no questions asked, all expenses covered

…Nobody expects our representatives to work for their pay, as in make a difference in the lives of their constituents. Politics being an extension of the cellphone Selfie; a good TV appearance or a ‘feisty’ tweet is considered as good as work

Unvaccinated non-citizens are still barred from entering the Evil Empire’s territory, despite the fact that it has been widely accepted by the criminally negligent Covid cartel that the vaccines—issued under and Emergency Use Authorizations, absent longitudinal clinical studies and while exempting vaccine makers from product liability—are ineffectual and might be dangerous.

As of November 2022,

eligible international visitors must [still] have a current Covid-19 vaccination to enter the country.

As of Thursday, April 21, 2022, DHS will extend COVID-19-related land border entry requirements. Non-U.S. travelers seeking to enter the United States via land ports of entry and ferry terminals at the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide proof of vaccination upon request.

Defund and abolish TSA and DHS (established by Genghis Bush Republicans, if memory serves).

The human detritus known as the US president had, originally, On October 25, 2021, … issued a Proclamation requiring that non-U.S. citizen show proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before traveling by air to the United States from a foreign country.

The famed CDC—so institutionally rotten that it now is regularly usurped by Israeli research— (“Israeli study: Natural immunity gives better protection than COVID shot” 8/2021) has extended that restriction to 2023.

Naturally, if you are among the millions crossing the Rio Grande illegally into the United States, are of a swarthy complexion and can produce a current, up-to-date rap-sheet, as well low scores on IQ and literacy tests—you may enter the US no questions asked, all expenses covered.

The Evil Empire is among the last countries to persist in extending the Covid tyranny. And don’t be fooled by Republican campaign foreplay. They looked the other way during the commission of Covid-related constitutional infractions and they continue to do nothing.

I’ve come to believe that our US elected representatives think their role is to tweet their outrage (we’ve got that covered, @laurenboebert). Or, rant flamboyantly on the Tucker Carlson show.

Notice that no TV bobble-head EVER asks these people, “What are you doing about said urgent matter? Tell us how you mean to work for the people to repeal Covid tyranny,” for instance.

Why? Because nobody expects our representatives to work for their pay, as in make a difference in the lives of the constituents. Politics being an extension of the cellphone Selfie; a good TV appearance or a ‘feisty’ tweet is considered as good as work.

I suspect that the intellectual quality of our representatives and the voters has so degraded—that both voters and candidates know not the channels and ropes through which to act on our behalf. The American federal scheme is no longer straightforward.

Note how Boeberts speaks like an outsider to power, like one of us, when she is an insider. A tweet by an elected representative like herself should go something as follows:

“X is an outrage, in violation of … and flouting all the scientific evidence. I intend to call on … and make sure the Republican caucus does … ”

But no. Colorado Representative Boebert, and many of her colleagues, conducts herself as though she’s just a girl tweeting out to her followers on twatter.  American democracy is an idiocracy.

 

*Image screen shot credit

UPDATED (12/28): I Met Archbishop Desmond Tutu Twice: Con Inc. Should Just Hush Their Mouths About Him

Christianity, Conservatism, Iraq, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Neoconservatism, South-Africa

2 Replies

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has died (this BBC “stellar” news report does not “report” whether it was today or yesterday). I had attended the Archbishop’s inauguration with my father, the late Rabbi Ben Isaacson, who had been friendly with Archbishop Tutu.

My father and I also took a gracious (and sumptuous) afternoon tea with the Archbishop decades back in his official residence in Cape Town. (These events are mentioned briefly in my 2011 book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.)

However, the tracts being written about Tutu by American conservatives and neoconservative—and what a resurgence we are witnessing in this reflexive mindset!—are laughable. (Americans must refrain from writing about cultures that are not American; they are simply too insular and chauvinistic to shed anything but darkness on these matters.)

For example, the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, reviewed years back by Jack Kerwick on FrontPage Magazine, had picked on Desmond Tutu as an example of black privilege in South Africa! Of all things. Again, this is as laughable as it is to bang on ignorantly and endlessly about Tutu’s criticism of Israel, as if that’s never valid or permissible.

It must be an authorial tic peculiar to neoconservatives, and applied to anyone with an anti-Israel position, for which Archbishop Tutu is famous. He also opposed the Bush travesty that was the war on Iraq. It is also typical of the neoconservative’s ahistoric approach, where a proposition or an idea (black privilege) is applied without context or nuance, to any and all annoying blacks (Tutu became that alright).

In truth, Tutu embodied the old-style, old-school African gentleman. The Archbishop grew up in wretched poverty, received—and gladly accepted—a decent education courtesy of the Church, and worked his ministry so hard as to reap the rewards. (In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” I discuss the wonders done by the white-run churches in South Africa. What good equalizers were some schools in the old South Africa:  Desmond Tutu, myself, and hundreds of thousands of other Africans, belong to the same alma mater: UNISA.)

Sure, Tutu was left-liberal and a critic of Israel and of neoconservative project (God bless him for that). But to me, as I said in “King Tut(u) Not So Terrific,” his impiety stems from never having piped up about the ethnic cleansing of rural whites, Afrikaners mostly, from the land in ways that beggar belief. Saint Mandela certainly remained mum about farm murders that are Shaka-Zulu worthy in grisliness.

And so, by the way, had our conservative and libertarian friends remained silent about farm murders until quite recently when talking about anti-white South Africa has become all the rage.

In any case, my meeting with the Archbishop Tutu was memorable. From that occasion I took away that Desmond Tutu was fond of my father and respectful of dad’s Jewish faith and scholarship. The two had a brief and lively exchange about a philosophical difference between Judaism and Christianity. My father was a redoubtable debater. Ditto Tutu. But both men were far better religious leaders than they were political activists, for which they, alas, became known.

UPDATE (12/28/021): In the tackiest manner, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, who is currently using his analytical prowess to justify forceful, aggressive vaccination, deployed a visit to a Fox News set on an unrelated matter, to libel the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. As follows:

“The world is mourning Bishop Tutu, who just died the other day,” hissed Dershowitz. “Can I remind the world that although he did some good things, a lot of good things on apartheid, the man was a rampant antiSemite and bigot,” spewed Dershowitz.

“The man minimized the Holocaust. The man compared Israel to Nazi Germany. When we’re tearing down statues of Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington, let’s not build statues to a deeply, deeply flawed man, like Bishop Tutu. Let’s make sure that history remembers both the goods he did and the awful, awful bads that he did as well.”

Others on the Fox News panel looked on at the Dershowitz train wreck in horror. Aside his uncivilized and boorish timing, Dershowitz’ views are skewed. They are utterly Israel and Jewish-centric. Tutu was indeed pro-Palestinian, but this did not make him an anti-Semite. And he certainly was no “Holocaust minimizer,” what ever that means. As mentioned, I had visited with him with my rabbi father, who was friendly with the archbishop. Tutu was polite, warm and kind.

Far more illuminating and interesting than Dershowitz’ Israel compliance shtick is my account, in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” of Israel’s friendship with Apartheid South Africa. Israel had refused to follow the West in isolating South Africa, and actively and productively—especially militarily—engaged with South Africa. Ronald Reagan tried the meeker form of “constructive engagement” before he was overridden by his Republican party, and told specifically that he was out of step in his wish to engage with South Africa, rather than punish her.

It’s not like Dershowitz ever met Tutu, but wait a sec, I had actually met the Archbishop, and even had the honor of attending his inauguration. Imagine! Mine is a real-life assessment that dares to fail the Israel First test. OMG!