Tag Archives: psychology

A less-biased source of Israeli news

Palestinian children collect water in Khan Yunis.

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Luckily, what happens in Israel and Palestine shouldn’t be a concern to US citizens.  It’s none of our business.  Or it wouldn’t be if we in the US weren’t sponsoring the Israeli land grabbing, looting and ravaging of the land next door outside their legal boundaries established by the United Nations and International Law.

But US taxpayers have sent $130 billion dollars, mostly in the form of weapons, to Israel.  And that makes every US citizen somewhat responsible for what Israel does with those weapons.

My personal thought is that I, none of us, can trust most media reports about what’s going on in the Middle East, particularly where Israel is involved.  The US news media has had a love affair with Israel for at least half-century.  They barely reported the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty which lasted several hours and left more than 100 US servicemen as casualties.  The conventional media slanted all reports of the Six Day War and the Yom Kipper War to seem Israel was the defender instead of the country initiating surprise attack.

Israel started every war it has ever fought.  Which has somehow escaped the notice of most of the conventional news media.  And Israel has gobbled up more land outside its borders after every war of Israeli aggression.  And blamed it all on the Arabs.

But I’ve digressed.  I wanted to tell you about a Jewish website where the reporting is evidently somewhat more honest.  Maybe not as good as it could be, but better than anything you are likely to see elsewhere.  They don’t appear to be the usual rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth, kill’em all and let God sort them out Zionists, anyway.

Evidently they don’t go overboard with it, any more than Arabs would be likely to get fanatic about accurate and unbiased reporting of events.  But http://www.haaretz.com/news comes nearer to being a source of attempted truthfulness than I’ve found thus far.

Unfortunately they want to charge a buck for access after the first few stories.  Which I have no intention of paying.

It’s entirely possible everyone within the borders of Israel and Palestine is not a lunatic religious fanatic terrorist killer.  But there’s no evidence of the fact manifested in the behavior of Israelis, Palestinians, or dual-citizenship US citizens who march undercover as Israelis disguised as Americans.

Maybe if  http://www.haaretz.com/news was more widely distributed, more readily available to interested non-Jews there’d be a believable side to something Americans hear and see about Israel and Palestine.

Old Jules

Police Officer Doesn’t See A Difference Between Black, Light-Skinned Black Suspects

The Onion – News in BriefpoliceracelawNewsISSUE 50•32Aug 13, 2014

FORT WAYNE, IN—Explaining that his sole concern is serving and protecting his community, Fort Wayne police officer Vincent Turner told reporters Wednesday that he does not see any difference between black and light-skinned black suspects. “As an officer of the law, I am committed to administering justice swiftly and even-handedly, regardless of whether the suspect has dark skin or really dark skin,” said Turner, adding that he has no problem giving a full pat-down to any potential criminal or hauling them down to precinct headquarters in the back of his patrol car, even if they are more of a light mocha color. “When you’re responding to reports of gunshots fired, or sprinting down an alleyway, you’re not thinking about where the suspect falls on the spectrum of African-American skin tones—you’re thinking about doing your job. Heck, the guy could be a very dark-looking Latino, for all I care—I treat every one of them the same. He’s still just a suspect to me.” Turner added that his dedication to upholding the law stems from a belief that all local residents should be able to walk their streets without fear, whether they come from an affluent white neighborhood or a working-class white neighborhood

The dual-citizenship US/Israeli friend to So Far From Heaven

Perhaps you readers will find this anecdote interesting and edifying.  I certainly do.

So Far From Heaven blog has a reader and sometimes commenter who holds dual US/Israeli citizenship.  Not to suggest it’s unusual.  I might be the only US citizen alive who doesn’t hold dual Israeli citizenship.

But this So Far From Heaven reader is special.  Back during the Vietnam War, maybe 1966-67, he adopted Judaism and fled to Israel to avoid the draft.  Became a weaponry salesman for Israel, maybe to Israel, probably helping them furnish weapons for every drug lord in South America.

And a thoroughly interesting, admirably loyal [to Israel] US citizen. http://leanpower.wordpress.com/

Yeah, this guy was a sight to behold back in the day.  Running along the railroad tracks with a backpack full of rocks in training for the Israeli army when he arrived in Israel sometime hence.  He knew if he became an Israeli he’d have to be in the military, but Israel never loses anyone in their wars.

Tens of thousands of casualties in the armed forces the Israeli military attacks by surprise and defeats.  A few hundred Israeli casualties.  Fell off trucks or something, most likely, or accidentally shot themselves.

Look up the statistics on every Israel war if you don’t believe me.  Any one.  Take your pick.  Look at the Israeli casualty counts, and the body counts of the countries they attacked.  Including the USS Liberty.  No Israeli casualties on that surprise attack on a US warship lasting several hours.  Not one.

Obviously our Israeli/US citizen reader/draft-dodger knew that.  He picked a winner for a country he could ‘serve’ in complete safety.  And when it was all over he came back to the Good Old US of A to buy and sell big guns.

They’re everywhere.  Even here on So Far From Heaven.

Old Jules

He was captured once before. Was Foley a dual-citizenship American/Israeli?

Hi readers.  Today with tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of ‘Americans’ holding dual Israeli citizenship it isn’t enough to report an ‘American’ journalist was beheaded.  Heck, more than a dozen US Senators hold dual Israeli citizenship.

The fact is, evidently James Foley was held previously with other journalists in Libya and one of them was killed.  But Foley returned to the war zone.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean he worked for the CIA or Mossad and richly deserved what he got.  It only means the question is worth considering.  His story of the Libya capture is in the video above, along with the story below:

http://www.jrn.com/tmj4/news/135208003.html

Journalist James Foley reflects on being captured in Libya

By Lacey Crisp. CREATED Dec 7, 2011 – UPDATED: Dec 7, 2011
 
MILWAUKEE- As a journalist, James Foley says it’s weird being interviewed and says he’d rather be reporting. He says he’s glad that so many people are interested in learning about his days in captivity Libya.
 
“I’ve thought about it a lot, I’ve had hours and hours to think about it. Of course in retrospect you had the signs that we should have pulled back,” Foley explained.
 
Early in April, Marquette grad James Foley and three other journalists went past a check point they knew was pushing the limits.
 
“At one point we said, this is dangerous, but we don’t want to go back yet,” Foley said.
 
The group of journalists was shot at and three were taken into custody.  Photographer Anton Hammerl was shot and killed.
 
“We were thrown in the back of the truck and zip tied for hours,” Foley said.
 
Foley explains he was treated well during his captivity, but admits the first day was brutal.
 
“We were knocked around.”

Then, nearly three weeks after his capture, Foley was able to call home.
 
“I was just praying, let my mom be home, because I didn’t know her cell phone number!”
 
His last night in Tripoli he spent at the Hungarian Embassy and was able to see for himself on the Internet the outpouring of love and prayers from his friends back in Milwaukee.
 
“I saw a vigil on YouTube somehow, and I clicked on a few links. I said, this is unbelievable.”
 
Foley says it was that love and support from his Marquette friends that kept him strong.
 
“I can’t babysit, rake enough leaves, paint enough interiors to every repay them,” Foley said.
 
Three months after Foley’s release he went back to Libya and was there when leader Moammar Ghaddafy was killed.
 
He says he will continue reporting in war-torn areas.

 If he held a dual citizenship of US and Israeli he was traveling on dangerous ground.  Similar to being a resident of Gaza over the past few weeks.  And he was innocent of any wrongdoing and still got beheaded, well, so did a lot of innocent people in Gaza.  Thousands.

Being an ‘American’ doesn’t mean a person isn’t a foaming at the mouth kill’em all and let God sort them out Zionist hiding behind US citizenship papers.

Old Jules

 

Funniest video I’ve seen in a while

Hotshot survival prepper shoots his thumb off and calls it a misfire.

That pistol functioned precisely the way pistols are designed to function:  squeeze the trigger and they fire.  With or without your thumb in front of the muzzle.

Thanks http://beasurvivor.blogspot.com/ for a lively laugh.

Old Jules

Israeli wedding of Jew, Muslim of different sexes draws protesters amid war tensions

http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-wedding-jew-muslim-draws-protesters-amid-war-000304290.html

Hi readers.  People in the Middle East do not like it when people of opposite sexes marry.  Currently in Tel Aviv there’s a huge hoopla going on where a man of Arabic descent and a woman of similar, though Jewish religious persuasion wish to marry.  Protesters of both sexes gathered to shout slogans pointing to the fact they were genetically identical, not far removed from being cousins.

There’s considerable fear in Israel and Palestine that intermarrying of opposite sexes will lead to deformed offspring and genetic drift.  It’s feared the children will be violent, greedy, unreasonable and probably profoundly dishonest.

This simply will not do,” one protestor shouted, “Find someone of your own sex to marry!  Death to opposite sexes!”

I don’t know much about Israeli and Palestinians overall, but I do hate to think of genetic drift confusing things over there.  And opposite sex marriages seem to be a bad idea in a place where any offspring are likely to carry similar traits to their parents.

Old Jules

Blacks in Ferguson, MO, emulate Israel rampage of destruction

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

We human beings would be a lot more believable if we weren’t such lying, greedy, opportunistic sneaky creatures.  Some cop in Ferguson, MO, shot himself a young black man the other day, as cops have a way of doing when the wife has a headache or the dog bites them, or the car needs new tires.  And when they do it tends to piss off the black Native Americans who live in the communities where it happens.

Black Native Americans aren’t that different from White Native Americans or Hispanic Native Americans in that regard.  They don’t like people killing their kids just for the amusement it gives them.  If it were the kids of middle-to-upper-middle to upper-class White Native Americans the cop-bosses would be on the shooters like stink on crap if they couldn’t arrange for a throw-down weapon or construe some other excuse for the officer having a bad day.

But Hispanic Native Americans and Black Native Americans only enjoy the privilege of having cops beating their kids to death on pain of having the copshops shaking his hand and congratulating him, mostly.  The copshop attitude toward those matters is generally that if the kid wasn’t doing something at that moment they probably owed him one from sometime they didn’t know about.

Which tends to raise the ire down in the hoods among the family and potential targets for police officer tension management moments.  Down in the hood it’s not difficult to understand some mild frustrations exist as a result of the fact the problem’s lingered so badly, overall.  They’d like to see something done about it.  This time, every time.  They’d legitimately like to see the officer beaten to death, or otherwise treated with reciprocal formality.  Legitimate grievance.

So what the hell do they do?  They smash and loot candy bars and free potatio chips out of the local convenience store.  Owned by people who didn’t have a damned thing to do with killing the kid.  Stand off in the distance and yell, throw rocks.  Stupid.

It’s as though they’re taking lessons from Israel, going on a binge of killing and property theft and destruction directed at people who had nothing to do with firing rockets or kidnapping Israeli kids.  Smash and grab for the property in Palestine they haven’t settled yet with good Israelis.  Stealing candy and potato chips in the form of minerals in the Med off the coast of Gaza.

We human beings are surely sneaky.  But we still have a lot to learn from Israel, and Israel doesn’t learn from anyone, even their own history and the long history of Jews worldwide.  Same as the rest of us they’ve never been guiltless.  But it would be a shame to see Israel screw things up for honest, only  ordinary-level dishonest and greedy Jews elsewhere in the world.  Jews who are behaving the way the rest of us barely believable and secretly greedy non-Jews behave.  Which is about the best anyone could ask for from humans.  But Israel going over the top with it makes everyone look bad in the eyes of people prone to hate Jews anyway.

We’d be a lot more believable, we humans if we weren’t so dishonest.  And greedy.  And mean as snakes.

You’ve got to admit, Israelis and the Black Native Americans down in the worst neighborhoods stealing anything they can get their hands on and mugging anyone weak enough to be mugged, are surprisingly similar.  Both begging for handouts from the US Government, and Israel actually receiving a cumulative $130 billion or so for their efforts, though mostly in weaponry.  Nobody buys guns for anyone in the hood, which is unfair any way you cut it.

Old Jules

Hell, since I’m posting poems I wrote about depression

Written sometime between 11pm and 7am at the what?  Roadway Inn? motel, anyway, Grants, New Mexico.    Probably 2002, 2003.  Hell, it wasn’t me who was depressed.  Can’t recall what inspired this:

The Voyeur

Soul sucked darkness from eternity
Fashioned this, my tiny room;
This monumental construct of infirmity;
This animated tomb
With a peephole to observe
The profanity:
The bell shaped curve
Of insanity.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003, NineLives Press, Jack Purcell

Sylvia Plath and so many other suicides

Hi readers.  Someone female sitting in the lobby late one night tossed The Bell Jar aside and groaned a curse.  Headed for the wagon yard, I reckons.  So I picked up Plath’s tome and read enough to remember everything else I ever knew, ever wanted to know about Sylvia Plath.  Most vividly I remembered a poem, Daddy, by Ms Plath.  Some University of Texas poetry course caused me to write a ten page paper about it once.

I learned to hate the thought Sylvia Plath and her lot shared this planet with regular human beings.  And after reading a while on Bell Jar, chunking it, I wrote this:

Virus of the mind

The drumbeat litany of hatred
And blame;
Of smug mindless naiveté
Numbs the mind.
Alienation is a welcome gift
From the universe
When it involves the inability
To identify with THAT.

The preoccupation with death
As though death is an unnatural state,
Created by a dark maker for the shallow purpose
Of providing a source of terror and sadness
For tiny humans;
Leaves me with a yearning:

Just once I’d like to see a poem
Just once.
A poem full of truths:

“I gave you permission
to hurt me and make me angry;
because of my illusions and expectations
you never agreed to satisfy
and didn’t
now I’m angry.

“I wanted you to behave a certain way.
Because I wanted it, I demanded it
In my expectations of you
without saying so.

“I wanted you to give up your choices.
I didn’t want it
because giving them up would make you
happier
Or more fulfilled.
I just wanted it because I wanted it.

“I’m used to getting my way.
I’ll hate you if I don’t get it.

“I’ll hate you fiercely
and if that doesn’t work
I’ll threaten to kill myself
Just to get you back.”

Or,

“I’m angry.  I’ve always been angry.
Life isn’t fair and it pisses me off.
I haven’t gotten everything I want.
Sometimes my parents weren’t kind to me;
Didn’t give me what I wanted.

“I talk to my friends and they’re angry, too.
The more we talk the more we realize life isn’t fair
And it pisses us off.

“We talk among ourselves
About how cool it would be
To kill some of those flawed bastards
We don’t like.

“We savor our anger; our hatred
We wallow in it
And think of different ways we’d like to kill
The bastards we don’t like;
How much we’d enjoy killing.
We all know
Because took a voice vote.

“Some nerd who wears his glasses crooked
And isn’t cool;
Some football jock who gets all the girls
We’d like to get;
We hate the girls and the jocks.

“Some sarcastic adult who isn’t cool
And doesn’t respect our views
About how the world is.

“We’d like to kill them all.
We took a voice vote
And we all agree.”

“We haven’t studied much
Nor read much
Nor lived much
Nor listened much
But that doesn’t keep us
From knowing how life is;
How life should be.”

“We’re angry and we’d like to kill them all!
We took a voice vote.

“And by God you’ll see
You’ll be sorry
When I kill myself!”

And the Ted Hugheses of the world , the Daddys

Sort through selective memories to avoid the truth

About this creature they loved.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003 Jack Purcell

Suicide: Make it count, son. There’s money to be made.

Hi readers.  Shortly after I came back to town after The End of Life As We Know It and the Y2K I gave myself [you can probably find the stories of that by searching the blog for Y2K] I went to work graveyard shift.  Travel Lodge, maybe, or Motor Inn, night clerk.  11pm-7am.  That story’s here somewhere, too.

Those nights in that motel were always long, sometimes interesting, never boring.  At least not to me, but I don’t recall ever having been bored this lifetime.

One night a guy came down from his room and sat in the lobby, just wanted to talk.  He was in town as part of a team cleaning up a particularly messy suicide.  That’s what he did for a living.  Travelled all over the place where suicides happened and left a terrible mess, maybe a hazardous one.

Interesting guy, with a perspective about suicide and life that I mightn’t agree with, but am glad I encountered anyway.  So sometime one of those long nights later I wrote this thing I might have once called a poem:

Industry

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Is tasteless and inconsiderate.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.

Lawsuits, insurance forms
Police reports
Accident reports
For a non accident.

Clerks, cops, lawyers
Funeral directors
Morticians
And the little guy.

Someone has to clean up
Those brain and bloodstains
On the walls and carpets;
Pick the bone fragments
Out of the doorframe
With a pair of needle nosed pliers;
Plug the holes
Re paint. 
Mop up those
Sidewalk body fluids
Untangle the lariat
Or phone cord
From the light fixture
Scrub bathtub
crimson rings.

Someone has to manufacture
Sleeping pills
Bullets
Razorblades
Ropes.

And hospital beds
For the faint of heart.

Some of that’s still
Made in America
(Good quality, too
And I’m damned proud
To say it.)

It’s hard times.
A man has to go where the work is.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.
It’s commerce.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003, NineLives Press, Jack Purcell

Old Jules