Aaron the little piggie edition!
He loooooooooves the grownup dry food. It’s adult weight control formula, so I try to keep him from eating too much of it.
Thoughts on Gaza
There’s a classic Jewish story that goes something like this:
Avram and Shlomo have a dispute, so they go to their Rabbi to have him settle it. He and his wife welcome them into their parlor and settle down to hear them out.
Avram speaks first and tells his side of the story to the rabbi. He is articulate, emotional, and logical. He makes a great case for himself. And the Rabbi said, “Avram, you are right.” Next Shlomo stands up. He speaks with such passion and persuasion about his side of the dispute that the Rabbi says to him, “You, too, are right, Shlomo.”
The Rabbi’s wife is upset by this and says to her husband, “How can you say that both of them are right? If one is right, the other must be wrong.”
The Rabbi thinks long and hard and finally says to his wife, “You know, you’re also right.”
When it comes to the issue of Gaza and the West Bank, this story is particularly apt. After 30+ years of anger, misunderstanding, and bloodshed, nobody’s hands are clean, and nobody wants to admit that they might have been wrong about some things. And through all the hatred, lies, and pig-headedness, somehow, a way needs to be found for everyone to co-exist. (I didn’t say like each other, that might be asking for too much.)
Personally, I do not hold with those who say that all of Israel was given to the Jews, and that giving back Gaza is a sin against God. I don’t think God sits there with a map drawing lines as to what is or is not Israel. Israel existed in the heart of every Jew during our long Diaspora. Israel will continue to exist, with or without Gaza. And the wounds the occupation have given us, the spiritual coarsening we have fallen into in a vain attempt to hold onto that land is bad enough. For the sake our our collective soul, we need to let go in order to heal.
But even if giving up Gaza is a good thing, it’s still a hard thing to do, and a sad one. Seeing the photographs of weeping settlers holding onto IDF soldiers who were also weeping, was hard. The settlement policy was a deeply misguided one, but the settlers themselves are not puppets, they’re people. They are not all gun-toting Arab haters, and now they have lost their homes. Perhaps this is the karmic payback we have to go through in order to make amends for past wrongs. If so, then perhaps some good will come of it.
And I do wonder whether giving back Gaza will allow Hamas and their ilk to claim victory, or even worse, give them a reason to keep on sending out suicide bombers and spilling innocent blood. Giving up land for peace is one thing. Giving up land and not getting peace in return would be intolerable.
(Crossposted at the All Spin Zone)
Wal-Mart coming to Oakland
Sometimes, when I have a blogging lull, it’s because there’s not much that I want to talk about. Recently, the opposite has been true. There’s a number of things going on that I want to talk about, but I’m not sure what exactly I want to say about them. So rather than sound insipid or downright wrong, I’ve been keeping my mouth shut.
Here’s an example. 11,000 people applied for the 400 jobs at a soon-to-open Wal-Mart in Oakland. It was front-page news in the SF Chronicle yesterday.
I had to run some errands around town last night, so I got to listen to two different KGO talk radio hosts opine on the subject. And since this is the Bay Area, it was pretty easy to predict what people were going to say about the whole thing: “Our economy sucks! Wal-Mart is evil! This is terrible!”. All of which happened as expected. Although it was funny listening to one host try to defend the concept that any time you have a willing buyer and a willing seller, the result is a “good job” no matter how crappy the wages and benefits are. I was tempted to call in and ask if that extended to things like murder for hire, but I figured that might not get past the screener.
So here’s some of what I think. On the one hand, although those job numbers sound bad at first, when you break it down, that’s about 27 applicants per position. Competitive, but from where I sit, not horribly so. Not after hearing stories of hiring managers getting flooded with hundreds of resumes for one job posting on Craigslist. Now, not being a tech hiring manager myself, I don’t know if those stories are still true, or if that was only in the immediate post-bust timeframe. Maybe I’m wrong and these days, getting 27 applicants per job is really bad. Or maybe it’s not that bad after all. Bottom line is, I don’t really know, and therefore have a hard time taking a firm stand either way.
Something else I thought about, but have been hesitate to talk about, is the intersection of race and class and hiring here — note this photograph of the new Wal-Mart employees. But frankly, as relatively privileged member of society, I don’t feel comfortable making a lot of points about race and class and employment. It’s not my area of expertise, and I run the risk of sounding clich
Melting Pot or Mosaic?
Michael at AmericaBlog asks two related and very difficult questions:
What do you do if a people want to live in your society but don’t embrace the values that society stands for?
and
If you don’t want to live in a free society that respects the rights of women and infidels and other religions, why did you move to the UK/France/Holland/etc in the first place?
As a member of a minority culture, I’m all for retaining one’s unique religious and/or ethnic identity. But if you’re going to live in a country dominated by a culture other than your own, you need to face up to reality and make your peace with it. If you can’t find a way to navigate the differences, that’s where the problems happen.
America’s history with regard to immigration issues is far from pristine. But overall I think we’ve managed fairly well. Our country’s relative youth and large geographic size has helped. Europe doesn’t have those advantages. On the plus side, though, the creation of the EU and the Euro currency unification have given them some object lessons in how to play nicely with their neighbors. We’ll see how it all plays out.
Interesting Mortgage Factoid
Seen in the SF Chronicle today:
Interest-only loans were the dominant home finance instrument before the Depression. Sharply declining property values, coupled with the fact that the principle was never paid down, contributed to widespread foreclosures in the 1930s. That led to the introduction of the amortizing loan, in which the principle is paid off during the life of the loan.
Interesting. And if you want more details on other things that happened to the mortgage industry in the 20th century, here’s a useful link.
The Anti-Military Right?
Digby offers the following, very fascinating, suggestion:
I’ve been thinking for a while that we might be seeing the beginning of a new trend in American politics — the anti-military right. Rush is calling marines “pukes,” veterans are being called cowards and fakers, disabled vets are mocked for not having the right wounds or getting them in the right way, GOP hags are wearing cute little “purple heart” bandaids on their cheeks. People are selling busts of the president using his lack of combat experience as a selling point saying outright that physical courage is no longer particularly worthy of conservative approbation. Being a veteran buys you no credibility and no respect in today’s Real Murika.
This is how they transform Chickenhawkery into a badge of courage.
I suspect that what we are hearing (aside from the self-loathing fidgeting of those who loudly beat wardrums yet are too selfish to serve) is the distant rumblings of a massive rightwing frustration with the military’s inability to just “win” this damned thing so we can move on to our next country. It was supposed to be a cakewalk.
UPDATE: Thinking some more about it this morning, I wonder whether a “we got stabbed in the back by our own military” right-wing meme couldn’t emerge out of this line of thinking. Sadly, they’ll probably find some way to blame this on Bill Clinton or at least “the liberals” instead.