Heretics' almanac

Sopranos prognosis: grim

Poor alpha male Tony. Everything's gonna fall apart soon. He'll be in the middle of a New York family taking it to the mattress. Carmela is about to get really vindictive. Adriana is volunteering info to the Fed. Christopher is jealous. Paulie is more psycho than ever. Who knows what Finn (pressed into service as Meadow's fiance) will end up doing, caught as he is in the surreal world of mob-controlled construction work. None of this gives Tony panic attacks, though - it's talking about cousins that brings this big guy to the ground. You could feel bad for the guy, except he's not a very nice person.

But neither is anyone else. I suppose you could stay neutral on Meadow and feel some sympathy for Adriana, but even Carmela is too addicted to the lifestyle brought to her by broken thumbs and destroyed lives to find her moral compass.

Likud and the terrorists: a confusion of purposes

Arik Sharon foolishly put the matter of unilateral "redeployment" (a euphemism if there ever was one) to an internal Likud referendum, and he lost, because most of the Likudniks think this is a dovish move. Of course, the outside world thinks that Sharon's proposal is mostly hawkish, because they can't stop believing that Sharon is a hawk.

The Head Heeb thinks that adherents to the "Greater Israel chimera ('An imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts')" won, and that by extension Hamas had a great day. I honestly don't know what's "greater" about an Israel that includes the West Bank and Gaza, and I am not convinced that Israeli hawks play into the hands of Hamas. But I do think the situation is confused.

Atrocities at Abu Ghraib

Let me for the record add my voice to those who condemn the mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of coalition troops in Iraq. The matter should be investigated and the guilty punished harshly - turning big rocks into small rocks for the rest of their lives at Leavenworth sounds like a good idea.

I looked at the pictures and am disgusted by what I see. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, which characterizes the cold-blooded murder of a Jewish "settler" and her four daughters as a mere "attack," nevertheless views this abuse as "atrocities" that "terrorize" the prisoners.

The European Question

TOH to document.no for this pointer:

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe met in Berlin these last few days to discuss antisemitism and concluded that there was plenty of reason for concern. The Berlin Declaration is the document intended to make this conference historical.

I am encouraged that the OSCE takes this seriously enough to convene a conference to discuss it, and that they acknowledge that anti-Israelism is sometimes used as a cover for antisemitism. I don't want to belittle what was done.

But it still isn't enough. Here's why: