Chit Chat

By Ted Belman

From now on comments on every post must relate to the content of the post.

Comments that don’t relate to the post must go here.

Any person who contravenes this demand will be put on moderation. Also their offending comment will be trashed.

The reason for this demand is so that people who want to read comments which pertain to the post, don’t have to wade through the chatter.

Everyone will be happier.

April 16, 2020 | 8,825 Comments »

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50 Comments / 8825 Comments

  1. @Edgar Thanks for
    the good wishes. Interesting. That’s also the traditional Korean practice. but my mother held a benefit concert to celebrate my late sister’s life on her birthday for almost 30 years so I’ll do it that way. You didn’t google SBNR, did you.

  2. SEB-

    I understand how you feel. But the Centenary date means nothing in Jewish Law. It’s the death date. Next May end PG, I hope to send you a LONG LIFE wish.

    I’ve been doing it all my life beginning after Barmitzvah with Kaddish for my beloved Eldest Brother who passed away in 1935, preceded by my baby brother just 7 weeks before. An almost shattering time then. We never really recovered from this. It overshadowed our whole life, and the family was dysfunctional for over 2 years, like zombies.
    He was 16 1/2, healthy, kind, brilliant, caught something they had no cure for until 18 months later. It was called Cerebral Meningitis. Ill one afternoon, gone the next day..

    My dear sister, passed away in March of last year aged 103, which I posted here. She was the eldest I was many years younger, but now it doesn’t seem so many after all.
    I’m the only survivor of a large very happy family.

    7 Kaddishes and Yahrzeit lights to switch on every year as long as I live, not that I don’t think of them every day, which I do. I loved them all.

    I now use a small night light plugged in, which has a Magen David on the plastic cover.

  5. “I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our “state” will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefilte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way) and I’ll take it.” ??

    “Warrior of Zion
    A review of Jabotinsky: A Life, by Hillel Halkin.”

    by Jeremy Rozansky

    https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/warrior-of-zion/

  6. Today is the centennial anniversary of the birth of my mother who passed away last year at the end of May. I got a battery operated Yahrtzeit candle and said Kaddish with a kippah on though I wasn’t brought up that way and I would still describe myself as SBNR (the latest term for it.) except in a political context and then I bloc with the Israeli religious Zionist movement.

    1

  9. Iran has supplied Hezbollah with bombs capable of emitting an electromagnetic pulse that can paralyze Israeli communication systems and radar, according to a report Thursday in the Kuwaiti Al-Jareeda.

    The paper said that the Lebanese terror group and its allied factions plan to launch an offensive against Israel in the Golan Heights and Galilee in retaliation to a potential Israeli ground operation in southern Lebanon.

    https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-hezbollah-possesses-bombs-capable-of-knocking-out-communication-electric-systems-report

    My comment: Disinformation? They’re getting their news from Arabs now? Lying is a central feature of Muslim and Arab culture. Mordechai Kedar has explained this at great length.

    “Mordechai Kedar contends that Israel needs to get tough with its media enemies. He said that Israel already keeps out reporters for Hezbollah, Iran, and Hamas, and must take a tougher stance on Al-Jazeera, by forcing them, for example, to solicit an official Israeli reaction to every story they publish.”

    https://mishpacha.com/the-lies-al-jazeera-tells-us/

    1

  11. The United States Congress endorsed the British Mandate for Palestine in June 1922 with the Lodge–Fish Resolution, a joint resolution introduced by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Republican Representative Hamilton Fish III of New York. The resolution, which became effective on September 21, 1922, favored the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

  13. I have been wanting to write something about the draft military age haredim, which has become such a hot button issue iin Israel. T

    The IDF is complying, or seeming to comply with the Supreme Court’s order to draft haredim, but not in the way that High Court and its acolytes wanted or expected. It has issued summons for physicals only to those haredim whom it knows are likely to enlist anyway, and whom it knows have the necessary skills, education and motivation to render good service to the IDF. The overwhelming majority of haredi yeshiva students have not been called up. That is because the IDF is aware that 90 percent of haredi yeshiva bokers of military age are both physically andecucationally unfit to serve in the IDF. They are nearly all legally blind or close to it because of the way that they are required to pray and study by their yeshivas. Also, they are too fat to serve in those yeshivas that provide them with adundant food, and extremely thin and scrawney from those yeshivas that cannot give them much food. Presumably because their donors have provided these yeshivas with enough money to feet them. This while it is true that there are 60,000 haredim of military age who could theoretically be called up, the IDF knows that would be a useless exercise. So thet IDF is only calling up those haredim that it knows have the necessary skills and education to serve competently as soldiers. These “qualified” haredi recruits or potential recruits either have experience holding down real jobs in the real world, or they are graduates of technical institutes where they learned some useful, marketable skills. Everything from website design to auto mechanics. The IDF has so far called up 1,000 of these “useful” haredim, and it has announced its intention to to call up 2,000 more this year and 3,000 in 2025. This is remarkably close to the total number of “capable” haredim who have been volunteering for service and reuesting physicals for the past 3-5 years. About three thousand a year. In this way the IDF has sillfully manipulated the Supreme Court order to enlist only those haredim who are physicaly and mentally fit to serve ,

  19. Democracy in action:

    United States Senate election in New York, 2024

    Democratic primary election
    The Democratic primary election was canceled. Incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand advanced from the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate New York.

    Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
    William Schweitzer (D)
    Tyrrell Lev Sharif Ben-Avi (D)
    Khaled Salem (D)
    Reece Wright-McDonald (D)
    Daniel Foti (D)
    Republican primary election

    The Republican primary election was canceled. Mike Sapraicone advanced from the Republican primary for U.S. Senate New York.

    Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
    Calvin Driggers (R)
    Jeffrey Rozler (R)
    Joshua Eisen (R)
    David Bellon (R)
    Cara Castronuova (R)
    Conservative Party primary election

    The Conservative Party primary election was canceled. Mike Sapraicone advanced from the Conservative Party primary for U.S. Senate New York.

    Working Families Party primary election
    The Working Families Party primary election was canceled. Incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand advanced from the Working Families Party primary for U.S. Senate New York.

    https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_New_York,_2024

    —

    And there are three independents, two of whom represent fringe partiess I haven’t seen before and probably won’t again, none of whom have any political experience, The Republican candidate doesn’t either.

  21. Nikki Haley Voters PAC Announces Support for Kamala Harris

    https://www.newsweek.com/nikki-haley-voters-pac-announces-support-kamala-harris-1928198

    Oops. Sorry, I had just read the misleading headline. It goes on to say,

    “The political action committee (PAC), previously known as Haley Voters for Biden, which now features Harris’ name, seeks to amplify the voices of former Haley voters in support of Harris’ White House bid.

    ‘It is not affiliated with the Stand For America or Nikki Haley for President PACs. On Monday morning, the group posted on X clarifying this, writing “Just to clarify, we are not the Nikki Haley affiliated PAC. That was Stand for America.”

    Just another case of “violins on television” Neeever mind. 😀

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZLeaSWY37I

    https://allenrsmith-com.medium.com/the-risks-of-violins-on-television-f5f1a38805dd

    Apropos of nothing, in important news, a major string quartet, Cuarteto Casals of Barcelona has hired Cristina Cordero of Spain as its new violist.
    She’s fantastic. Listen to her playing the Bach Chaconne 5 years ago on Youtube.

    https://slippedisc.com/2024/07/top-quartet-swaps-violist/

    https://youtu.be/iLRcwSvPOcE?si=hBfvAY_lajCjYeb_

    and

    “French court rules Ravel was sole author of Bolero in financial blow to descendants”

    My comment: It’s also a blow to string players in community orchestras who have to wear out their fingers with 4 note chord strumming all the way through whille the brass blare the melody over and over – presumably for 75 years – right behind them, destroying their ears because it remains in the public domain because the court ruled that the set designer wasn’t the co-author. 😀

    – Euronews
    also https://slippedisc.com/

    – Scott Slapin, another fantastic violist recording of all 6 solo sonatas and partitas for violin transcribed for viola, including the Chaconne. Another beautiful interpretation.

    https://youtu.be/SyCR1UEsf-Y?si=8FUKc1D9G2L-UbzH

  22. It is now being reported that Harris had the delegates to gain the nomination. She will announce her VP this weekend. My money is still on Newsom, the heir to the Pelosi mafia.

  23. Amid speculation about Biden being alive, @amuse is reporting that the Israeli embassy was contacted by the White House to cancel the meeting between Biden and Bibi without explanation. @amuse also relates that there was no US officials present to greet Bibi on arriving in the US amid the ensuing chaos surrounding the Biden withdrawal from both public scrutiny and the presidential race.

  28. Fauda creators Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff will make a movie titled “October 7th.”
    The movie tells the heroic story of Noam Tibon, a retired general and grandfather, who saved his son, Amir Tibon, Amir’s wife, and their two young daughters from their Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7th.
    Via Inbar Cohen

    “The Real Israel” pop-up on my News Feed on FB just now.

  31. It’s Vance. I had a feeling it would be after legacy media pundits began saying he was unacceptable because of
    what he tweeted after the attempt on Trump’s life. The most important characteristic a VP must have is to be unacceptable.

    2

  32. I just had a thought about “proportional” responses. In regard to the attempted assassination of former President Trump, shouldn’t the Secret Service have responded proportionally by just shooting the assassin’s ear off?

    3

  36. Apparently, there were two shooters? Just like the JFK shooting. Trump has promised to declassify the rest of the JFK files. The CIA had apparently pressured him out of it before. Could this have been a warning like the one Reagan apparently got when he survived an assassination attempt? I mean what are the odds, that a) a shooter would get this far, much less, two and then b) fuck it up? Just enough. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. Just speculating here. based on the videos posted. I’m not a spook, retired or otherwise.

  42. @Michael

    “For those interested, Nigel Farage and Michael Tice swearing fealty to Charles III, Sovereign of the UK, Antigua & Barbuda, Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guine, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.”

    Actually, Jews were doing much better in the old empires on the eve of WWI than the nation states that replaced them.

    Case in point in the Twilight Zone. As I said, there is no ideology or system of government you could name that has not been alternately used to promote persecution, toleration and/or indiffference towards the Jews, sometimes just persecution. Ironically, it’s just another false universalist solution to a particularist problem that no one will solve for us, but one we must solve ourselves with the help of any friends who wish to, of course.

    Napoleon Bonaparte conquered much of Europe and freed the Jews from the ghettos, issuing a letter calling for the rebirth of the Jewish Commonwealth in the land of Israel under French imperial protection in the 1790’s before he was even Emperor.

    Jews couldn’t serve in the Parliament [ of Great Britain which defeated him and restored the status quo ante) without taking the Christian oath until 1858!

    Here’s John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha) being knighted by the Queen in 1956 for your edification.

    You may recall, he organized the Jordanian Arab Legion and led them in attempting to exterminate the Jews of Israel in 1948. Enjoy.

    “General Glubb Knighted (1956)

    https://youtu.be/1wsJbMiMSH8?si=Fm5Z-xUvhrv0Asqp

    Say, where do I go to swear fealty to this guy, while we’re at it, if we’re gonna go all feudal:

    “On this [5th] day [of May] in 1821 His Imperial and Royal Majesty Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, First Consul of the French Republic, President of the Italian Republic, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, Mediator of the Swiss Confederation, and Co-Prince of Andorra, died.”

    Alas, no Youtube video of his coronation available. Can’t understand it. Censorship?

    The film clips on the television news every day of Reagain’s death lasted a week, at least. General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator’s death lasted much longer than that as SNL noted at the time.

    “”Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” is a catchphrase that originated in 1975 during the first season of NBC’s Saturday Night (now called Saturday Night Live, or SNL) and which mocked the weeks-long media reports of the impending death of Francisco Franco. It was one of the first catchphrases from the series to enter the general lexicon.

    Origin
    The death (on November 20, 1975) of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the first season of NBC’s Saturday Night originated the phrase. Franco’s presumed imminent death had been a headline story on NBC News and other news organizations for several weeks. On slow news days, United States network television newscasters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive.

    Following Franco’s death, Chevy Chase, host of NBC’s Saturday Night’s comedic news segment Weekend Update, announced Franco’s death and read a statement from former president Richard Nixon: “General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness.”[1] As an ironic counterpoint to this, a picture was displayed behind Chase, showing Franco giving the Roman salute alongside Adolf Hitler.[2]

    In subsequent weeks, Chase developed the joke into a parody of the earlier news coverage of Franco’s illness, treating his death as the top story. “This breaking news just in”, Chase would announce – “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”[3] Occasionally, Chase would change the wording slightly in attempts to keep the joke fresh, e.g. “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still valiantly holding on in his fight to remain dead.”[4] The joke was sometimes combined with another running gag in which Garrett Morris, “head of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing” would cup his hands around his mouth and shout the news as Chase read it. The gag ran until early 1977, with occasional callbacks in later seasons.

    Legacy
    The phrase has remained in use since Franco’s death. James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column at OpinionJournal.com used the phrase as a tag for newspaper headlines that indicate something is still happening when it should be obvious. On February 8, 2007, during Jack Cafferty’s segment on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on the day of her death, he asked the host: “Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead, Wolf?”[5] It was also used now and then on NBC News Overnight in the early 1980s, and Keith Olbermann occasionally used it on Countdown. In 2013, it experienced a brief resurgence in a different context, when it began appearing on social media a few days after the death of Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco.

    The Wall Street Journal used the headline “Generalísimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead – And His Statues Are Next”[6] on its front page March 2, 2009. The newspaper used it once again on its front page in the headline “Generalísimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead – But for some not dead enough” on August 21, 2015, when it reported about critics calling to enforce a 2007 anti-Franco law in Madrid and to rename streets and plazas, after the last election had ended the 24-year reign of conservatives in the city council.[7]

    Although SNL’s use is the most widely known, it is predated by the “‘John Garfield Still Dead’ syndrome,” which originated as a result of extensive coverage in the wake of actor John Garfield’s death and funeral in 1952.[8]

    After a brief in memoriam during SNL’s 40th Anniversary Special on February 15, 2015, Bill Murray ended the segment with the famous phrase which “just came in from Spain.”

    The phrase is listed in The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases.[9]”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axByUFSa7N8

  44. This one’s for Michael and Felix co-mmiserating ’cause it’s summer:

    Amputee lion who survived being gored and attempted poachings makes record-breaking swim across predator-infested waters

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amputee-lion-record-breaking-swim-across-predator-infested-waters-with-brother/

    Article doesn’t say whether the lion was a Christian, a Jew or a Trotskyist but I’m sure global warming was the first thing on his mind so it’s a moot point, of course.

  45. A post by Vivarto popped up on my FB newsfeed:

    Real friends help their friends to see their blind spot.

    I shared his post on mine with my response:

    Only in a debating society like Israpundit. In every day life, it’s a guaranteed recipe for remaining single and friendless. 😀

  46. A Question popped up on my FB newsfeed:

    If you had to give a 30-minute presentation on a topic with no preparation, what could you talk about?

    And I responded:

    I did that – I mean I had done a ton of research but I didn’t know what to say – and then somebody asked me the right question at the luncheon just before and it all came pouring out of me – And I won the City University of New York Scholars Day Competition in the Humanities in 1994 – First Prize. The topic was “Thomas Nast and the Historiography of the Political Cartoon in Reconstruction-Era America” with slide show and Q&A.

  47. A significant number of Jews gave their energies to the antislavery movement. Many 19th century Jews, such as Adolphe Crémieux, participated in the moral outcry against slavery. In 1849, Crémieux announced the abolition of slavery throughout the French possessions.

    In Britain, there were Jewish members of the abolition groups. Granville Sharp and Wilberforce, in his “A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”, employed Jewish teachings as arguments against slavery. Rabbi G. Gottheil of Manchester, and Dr. L. Philippson of Bonn and Magdeburg, forcibly combated the view announced by Southern sympathizers that Judaism supports slavery. Rabbi M. Mielziner’s anti-slavery work “Die Verhältnisse der Sklaverei bei den Alten Hebräern”, published in 1859, was translated and published in the United States as “Slavery Among Hebrews”.[163] Similarly, in Germany, Berthold Auerbach in his fictional work “Das Landhaus am Rhein” aroused public opinion against slavery and the slave trade, and Heinrich Heine also spoke against slavery.[163] Immigrant Jews were among abolitionist John Brown’s band of antislavery fighters in Kansas, including Theodore Wiener (from Poland); Jacob Benjamin (from Bohemia), and August Bondi (1833–1907) from Vienna.[164][165] Nathan Meyer Rothschild was known for his role in the British abolition of the slave trade through his partial financing of the £20 million British government compensation paid to former owners of the freed slaves.[166]

    A Jewish woman, Ernestine Rose, was called “queen of the platforms” in the 19th century because of her speeches in favor of abolition.[167] Her lectures were met with controversy. Her most ill-received appearance was likely in Charleston, Virginia (today West Virginia), where her lecture on the evils of slavery was met with such vehement opposition and outrage that she was forced to exercise considerable influence to even get out of the city safely.[168].

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery

  48. @Sebastien

    If I were a Christian…

    Nicely noted. Geller and Spencer are to be highly applauded for their efforts to promote these reports, and they are terrible and horrific to contemplate.

    1

  49. @Michael If I were a Christian, my top issue would be the Islamist persecution of Christians in Africa and Pakistan. These almost daily atrocities are well-covered by Jihadwatch and the Pamela Geller report as well as the Sudan anti-Slavery society yet despite the fact that the abolitionist movement in the U.S. was led by Evangelical Christians and some Jews like John Brown’s lieutenants, , the silence from Christians abroad is deafening. Who is leading the solidarity fight on their behalf, as usual?

    Nobody here but us chickens {Jews}

    https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/07/muslims-in-pakistan-murder-one-more-christian

    https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/06/dr-congo-islamic-state-claims-responsibility-for-murdering-over-80-christians-closing-several-churches

    https://gellerreport.com/2024/05/children-piled-up-and-shot-gruesome-details-emerge-of-islamic-genocide-of-black-africans-in-darfur-sudan.html/

    https://www.jns.org/a-new-alliance-between-black-africans-and-jews/