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Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Old Soviet-time Russian joke
Ex-Russian Jew is reading Pravda on the street in Tel Aviv. His neighbour comes up and asks, "Moshe, why reading Pravda? There's all sorts of newspapers you can read here." "Well," says Moshe, "every Hebrew newspaper tells me that unemployment is going up, shekel is going down, Arabs are developing new ways to attack us, and nobody is willing to help. But, according to Pravda, we are rich, have super-weapons under bed, and run the universe to boot!"
Every time I look at the Guardian, front page news is along the lines of "Bush and Kerry dance to the tune of Ariel Sharon, but I cannot tell you about it, since Sharon also controls all banks and media, in fact a Jew is about to take away my typewrite..... [sound of silenced dissent]"
Maybe I've been looking at it the wrong way all along. Ariel Sharon runs the universe, and controls all banks and media. Jews the world over are safe in their beds, with every major political figure in every country safely bought-and-paid-for. Everyone who even looks at us the wrong way gets into a mysterious "accident". The Mossad never ever screws up, thanks to magical Jew-power. Every article about Israel in the major world media is perfectly balanced. Journalists worry more about 70,000 dead Africans than about 70 inconvenienced Palestinians. This is a good thing. From now on, it's the Guardian all the way for me, boy.
posted 4:56 PM
Thursday, October 14, 2004
thank you thank you thank you
i got a new job -- for way more money, with more interesting tasks, and with a much reduced commute. i must have done something right sometime :)
huge thanks to everyone who wrote and linked. The email address on the left is a spam sewer, but I promise to waddle through it and reply to everyone eventually, with a real solid, please-do-not-distribute email address. (I will be deleting the netscape address soon. If you want to be able to contact me again, you can write, too.)
Al-Reuters?
I don't like to be jumping on every news item that seems odd to me as some well-planned anti-Semitic/anti-Israel assault by the united Jew-haters of the world. But then there are things that just make me go umm...
Now that I work in the financial district, I walk by a huge Reuters news ticker every morning. This morning's top story: "Sharon can't find flack jacket to fit girth."
For one thing, I simply refuse to believe that flack jackets in a country with universal conscription only come in men's size medium. Sharon is not some 700 lb grossly obese monstrosity - he is fat, but he is as wide as plenty of fit muscle-men I saw working out at the Y. But, for the main thing, is this REALLY honestly truly what Canadian movers and shakers need to know this morning: Not the explosion at Halifax airport, not Paul Martin's latest adventures in France, not the threat of Russians buying Stelco? Not even the latest death toll from Iraq or the results of the US presidential debate? It's Sharon's sartorial difficulties?
It's difficult to imagine that this daily assault of inconsequential Israel-in-negative-light news does not affect people's views and perceptions. And the alternative to someone somewhere setting this as company policy is that hourly, a different Reuters flack decides that what the world really needs to know is some inconsequential bit of Israeli news that invariably puts Israel in a negative light. Which is realize is the truth, but it is still difficult to entirely comprehend.
posted 1:04 PM
