Recent Comments

1. about 1 month ago on The Argyle Sweater

   I know someone who got a call late one night from a friend. “Sorry to bother you at this time, but I’ve forgotten the wife’s name. What is it?” He had called her “Mammy” in front of their children for so long he couldn’t remember.

2. 5 months ago on Ted Rall

   I’d take those figures with a pinch of salt.

   From Craig Murray’s blog, Feb 19, 2019:

   One antisemitic attack is too many and all anti-semitism is to be deplored and rooted out. But if all these claims repeated again and again over decades of 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70% increases in attacks per year were true, then we would be now talking of at least 12,000 violent attacks on Jews per year, if we take Ms Berger’s 2005 claim as the baseline.

   Yet we are not seeing that. The average number of convictions per year for violent, racially motivated attacks on Jewish people in the UK is less than one.

   www dot craigmurray dot org dot uk/archives/2019/02/democracy-and-the-corrupt-seven/

3. 6 months ago on Ted Rall

   Ted has been calling it for years. Biden will continue to decline. He will never be as sharp in the future as he was last night.

   What a shame that the debate didn’t include some of the other candidates. Here in Ireland all candidates took part in televised debates for the last two presidential elections.

4. 6 months ago on Ted Rall

   It’s a bit more than a collection of facts. I use it occasionally in my job as a software developer, and it can do a good job at turning requirements into code if you know how to phrase your request. It’s not perfect, and gives wrong answers with the same confidence as correct ones, but it’s impressive neverthless. It will revolutionise medicine and law and other disciplines involving large amounts of data, such as astrophysics.

5. 8 months ago on Ted Rall

   And more recently….

   [Israeli Rabbi] Eliyahu Mali, who was talking to an audience at the Shirat Moshe religious school in Jaffa, which he heads, said the killing of all civilians in Gaza was in line with Jewish law teachings, known as Halakha.

   He was addressing students who serve in the Israeli military.

   A video of his speech went viral on social media.

   “Do not spare any soul,” which Mali says is the basic rule when fighting a holy war, in this case Gaza, according to Jewish doctrine.

   “And the logic of this is very clear. If you don’t kill them, they’ll attempt to kill you,” he claims.

   He goes on to say that the women are the one who create “terrorists,” justifying the killing of these women and their infants.

   “Whoever comes to kill you with this concept does not only include the young man…who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future generation, and those who produce the future generation, because there is really no difference,” the rabbi continues.

   Elderly people are also legitimate targets, according to Mali, when asked about whether seniors should also be killed.

   “There is no such thing called innocent creature. By the way, the elderly man is capable of carrying a rifle and shooting. Therefore, the Torah is very clear in the ruling.”

   “The children too should be killed?” one person asked the rabbi.

   “It’s the same thing, the same thing. When the Torah says do not spare any soul, then you must not spare any soul.”

   “Today he is a child…tomorrow he is a fighter,” Mali says.

   He claims, according to numbers by the Israeli army, a vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza want to annihilate “us” – without clarifying if he meant Jews specifically or Israelis.

6. 8 months ago on Ted Rall

   Our media always minimize or hide Israel’s role in the deaths of Palestinian civilians and present news from an Israeli perspective. If any other country, especially one deemed an official enemy, was doing what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, would it be reported in the same way?

   This phenomenon has been measured over a 20 year period. See tinyurl dot com opendem1.

   In case the above link is excised from my post, here’s a brief extract:

   Another key finding from these studies was that Israeli casualties were given proportionally more coverage than Palestinian ones, and the language used to describe Israeli deaths was markedly different. Words such as “atrocity”, “murder”, “lynch-mob” and “barbarically killed” were used by journalists to describe the deaths of Israeli soldiers, but not those of Palestinians.

   Such patterns are also evident in current reporting. We examined four weeks (7 October to 4 November) of BBC One daytime coverage of the 2023 Gaza war using the database TV Eyes to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves (not in direct or reported statements) to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

   We found that “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could been seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

   But the issue goes beyond these differences. The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.

7. 8 months ago on Ted Rall

   The mainstream media is not telling us that Israel is doing the killing. Media Lens has a good article about it. For example:

   ‘An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn’t say the word “Israel” once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.

   ‘Saying who is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include.’
8. 8 months ago on Ted Rall

   The media won’t tell you that Israel killed them. “Famine killed them” or just “they died”. Even if our governments won’t stop supporting Israel, we can effect change by not buying products and services from Israeli companies, or from any company that actively supports the Israeli military. BDSmovement dot net.

9. 9 months ago on Ted Rall

   Those are powerful and horrific photographs Màiri, the sort of thing our media will never show us. The “most moral army in the world” at work.

10. 9 months ago on Ted Rall

    Yep, I got the reference too. America’s “ally” has no problem killing Americans.