I’ve picked up a student that I’m seeing at Mayfield High School in the mornings, and I’ve found a great place to stop going to and from the student when I have time to check email and depressurize a bit.

It’s the Arabica near the northeast corner of Richmond and Wilson Mills roads. A double espresso is $1 and a slice of breakfast pizza is $1.50. For $2.50 you can get a breakfast bagel with egg cheese and sausage.

And, of course the wifi is free, although slightly crippled with Port 25 blocked. I can access incoming Outlook mail but not send, but Gmail works just fine, so that’s no problem.

I haven’t written about Israel for a while, mostly because I’ve been overwhelmed by other events and because writing about this complicated issue requires tremendous thought and care on my part. And even then, I can get it wrong.

For a long time I’ve attempted to justify, to myself, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in general as a matter of national security and the colonization of the West Bank through the building of settlements in particular as a bargaining chip; I’ve actually believed that Israel would trade the settlements for secure borders and a peace treaty.

And part of me still believes that is possible, but I see the percentages ever shrinking as an end-times mentality grows among the settlers and political opportunists beat the drums of holy war. Fear of the other is a powerful political tool. Ask any historian who has studied the ravagers, great and small, of the past.

But when military chaplains tell Israeli soldiers that the Palestinians, as a people, are the children of darkness then the system is more than broken, it’s cancerous.

From this morning’s Los Angeles Times:

“This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,” a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. “His message was clear: ‘This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists.’ The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic.”

Here the United States we’re used to messianic preachers. We’ve even had to deal with them in our own military. As a nation we’ve seen what happens when religious extremists get control of weapons. There is no such thing as a good religious fanatic. People who are so delusional that they believe god makes their crimes just are dangerous criminals, nothing more.

What is happening in the Israel Defense Force is not a matter of a rogue rabbi or two, this infiltration of judaist (the Judaic equivalent of christianist or islamist triumphalist ideology) rabbis and officers is wide spread and organized.

In testimony reported by Israeli news media and in interviews with The Times, Gaza veterans said rabbis advised army units to show the enemy no mercy and called for resettlement of the Palestinian enclave by Jews.

“The rabbis were all over, in every unit,” said Yehuda Shaul, a retired army officer whose human rights group, Breaking the Silence, has taken testimony from dozens of Gaza veterans. “It was quite well organized.”

The army, which conscripts almost every Israeli Jew at 18, has been dominated for most of its history by secular officers. But over the last 15 years, as secular Israelis have soured on the occupation of Palestinian territory, religious nationalists have taken over senior positions in elite combat brigades.

With them have come hundreds of volunteer rabbis, who teach at pre-military academies for religious youths and serve side by side with the troops.

The rabbis’ role in Gaza came into focus last week along with testimony from soldiers who said that loose rules of war led to unwarranted civilian deaths and property destruction.

The testimony reported by two Israeli newspapers was the first such criticism to surface from within the army since the assault ended Jan. 18, leaving an estimated 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead. Most Palestinian casualties were listed as civilians.

Israel celebrated its 60th anniversary last year and the number of citizens, particularly politicians, who remember the experience of forging a nation is declining. Instead, many people’s defining moments came in 1967 and 1973, when Israel defended herself and defeated enemies whose only intent was to push every Jew into the sea. There is a generation in Israel now that only knows the Intifada. Like Americans whose defining political moments were World War II or the Vietnam War or 11 September 2001, their reality is cast from their particular crucible. And unscrupulous opportunists, seeking their own power, will seek to take advantage of those realities.

The solution is close examination under bright light. Like the cockroaches they are, theses children of darkness cannot withstand scrutiny by reasonable people who wish to live by the sage words of Rabbi Hillel who taught the cynic the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

And now we should all go and study.

Stephanie Simon writes:

The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.

The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a huge textbook market that many publishers write to the state’s standards, then market those books nationwide.

Via Derek Chatwood…

Could this be related to the return of the idiot to his village?

Matt Taibbi writes:

It’s over – we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline – a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

Perhaps a bit harsh, but this isn’t:

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders – people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground – and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people’s money would make his dick bigger.

That guy – the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown – was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP.

So what happened to Cassano?

The following February [2008], when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a “material weakness” in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month.

In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to “retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had.”

(Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

Does Virgin Air allow passengers to pack pitchforks and unlit torches in their luggage?

I don’t think so…

Emily Nussbaum writes:

At last, science has produced the case for cougars. As Madonna understands intuitively, nature clearly intends aging women-whether married, divorced, or single; on vacation in Cancún or just killing time on line at the DMV-to snatch up passing youths in our talons and gestate a race of supersmart children. Who themselves, I presume, will be smart enough to self-select their partners likewise, forming a superrace of egghead Demis and Ashtons, a Cleopatran paradise of trophy studs and December-May embryos. Denying this is denying biology itself, and far be it for me to deny biology!

The problem, as I see it, is that few 45-year-old women are really all that interested in having children.

Sex with their 21-year-old trainer? OK. But children?

Koo koo ka choo Mrs. Robinson.

John Cook writes:

Sarah Palin is seeking the advice of a Scientologist as she plots her 2012 presidential run, which just makes sense to us.

John P. Coale, a prominent Washington lawyer and power-broker, is secretly running Palin’s political action committee and working to “protect the Palin brand,” according to the Washington Post. He is very, very good at doing that because he can walk through walls and read minds and leave his body and never gets sick because he is a Scientologist.

Coale is also the husband of Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren, whom he recruited into the church. Van Susteren’s penetration of the Palin clan is total-she’s been in Alaska practically every other week burnishing Palin’s image in friendly profiles. The church’s recruitment strategy has always been to snag high-profile converts like Tom Cruise and Will Smith, and it is well known for dispatching operatives on elaborate covert schemes to draw unsuspecting targets into the cocoon.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin just got scarier by a factor of 10.

1130: Facebook oddness

[Update — 1456, 24 March: I’ve been had. After doing further research, it now appears that the coloring book is a parody satire drawn and for sale by artist Derek Chatwood. My apologies to my readers for my failure to check first. I should have listened to my bullshit detector when it went off over the raptor vs peaceful dinosaur issue.

And welcome Daily Dish readers.]

[Update — 0651, 25 March: According to artist Derek Chatwood, the following text is meant to accompany the art…

Beginner’s Bible Coloring Book! by The Searcher.

Dad, did dinosaurs really exist?

Sure they did, son. The Bible says so. They didn’t call them “dinosaurs” back then, but instead they were known as “leviathans” or “behemoths”.

But, my science teacher says dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. Is that true?
Of course not, son.

Then how old are they?

Well, let’s see. The Bible tells us [from Adam and Eve’s family tree] that the Universe is only a few thousand years old. So dinosaurs had to have lived within the past few thousand years. That’s simple logic, son.

Oh. So that means they were on Noah’s Ark?

Absolutely! The Bible says two of every animal were brought [by God] to the ark. Dinosaurs were animals.

So, using your logic again son, dinosaurs had to be on the ark.

Huh. So how come scientists say they’re older than that? and died way before Jesus?

Well, son, they just make that up. Dinosaur bones don’t have labels on them to tell how old they are. In fact, there is no proof whatsoever that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old. No scientist saw dinosaurs die-

Dad!

No I’m serious. Scientists only find the bones in the here and now, and because many of them are evolutionists, they try to fit the story of the dinosaurs into their view.

That’s sad. But I thought scientists were smart?

Sure, but they don’t know everything. So they have to make stuff up to fit their beliefs. While you and I, we have the facts, straight from the Bible.

I don’t want to be a scientist!

Ha! That’s ok, son. It’s better to be right, than smart. C’mon, wanna learn how to flip burgers like your Dad?

Yeah!

Thank you Derek.]

Two thoughts: first, don’t you just love how Jesus is riding a vicious raptor instead of the dinosaur equivalent of an ass; and second, I wish I’d had rapturous red in my Crayola box.

Katherine Dalton writes:

The assumption is that we will never have trouble obtaining from others the food or shoes we disdain to provide for ourselves.

That”s a rosy assumption. A nation that is no longer making anything has put itself in the extremely vulnerable position of depending for essentials on farmers and fabricators who live far away, and who can hardly be expected to care much about distant consumers. Such a nation also depends on an international transportation system that can be disrupted much more easily than anyone cares to imagine. Yet if we can”t ship in our foreign food, we can”t eat it. We live in a city that at any moment could be under siege.

I have argued this point endlessly for what seems like decades. We have become a nation that makes nothing but money; a people that believes we can make anything from nothing, and it has lead us to the current financial crisis that resulted from enough people realizing that there was no there there.

I’ve discoverd the Front Porch Republic today via The Daily Dish. Any blog where Wendell Berry is writ large in the tag cloud is a worth anyone’s reading time.

To improve my vocabulary (and my reading) I always keep a dictionary close at hand because I aspire to a Shakespearian vocabulary. Inspired by the new PBS Kids show Word Girl, I’ve decided to add My Words as an occasional feature here at Have Coffee Will Write. Today’s word is Fideism, which means:

Reliance on faith rather than reason in pursuit of religious truth.

Instead of seeing truth through the physical world, fideism sees truth in spite of the physical world and its natural counterpart, atheism, limits truth to the physical world.

Via Front Porch Republic…

Fideism strikes me as a word created to address the frustration of a thinking person uncomfortable with faith. The date of its entrance, 1885, would seem to support that thesis.

It’s Sunday morning, I don’t have to teach until 1 p.m. so I’m catching up on ancient emails. One from my dad links to a 9 January op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal by Stephen Moore that laments the lack of people in the Obama administration who have read the Cato Institute’s touchstone of wisdom Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Moore wrote:

If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Except Moore missed one teensy little piece of information. One of Ayn Rand’s greatest devotees, a man who had Rand at his side when he was sworn in as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the one individual who Moore must acknowledge knew Atlas better than anyone other than its author, former Chief of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was at the switch as the economic nightmare express jumped the tracks.

Can we stop worshiping at the altar of Rand now?

Suffering is relative. You know, the whole I-felt-sorry-that-I-had-no-shoes-then-I-met-a-man-with-no-feet meme, but those lacking the most basic of physical human needs — clean air, clean water, shelter — get my attention long before the poor tormented souls singled out by David Rothkopf.

Granted, Rothkopf isn’t asking for our sympathy. He says the people on the list are “ranked by just how little sympathy we should have for them.” He admits that his list has a driving-by-the-accident quality and more than a little the-bastards-got-theirs air in the text. But still, I’m uncomfortable with focusing on the likes of Bernie Madoff (No. 3), Bibi Netanyahu (No. 9) or the entire Forbes Billionaires List (No. 12) under an even tongue-in-cheek headline: The world’s biggest losers.

I get the whole how-the-mighty-have-fallen concept.

As commenter on Jimi Izrael’s blog on The Root noted last week, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. Prosecute the offenders, but don’t give them bad press, it just feeds their egos.

And am I guilty of violating my own principle?

From Lex18:

Five Clay County officials, including the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers were arrested Thursday after they were indicted on federal charges accusing them of using corrupt tactics to obtain political power and personal gain.

The 10-count indictment, unsealed Thursday, accused the defendants of a conspiracy from March 2002 until November 2006 that violated the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). RICO is a federal statute that prosecutors use to combat organized crime. The defendants were also indicted for extortion, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to injure voters’ rights and conspiracy to commit voter fraud.

Then in Calfornia:

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions’ (formerly Diebold’s) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That’s the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier’s Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier’s tabulator system.

When will our shoe drop?

Tim Russo writes:

But in the meantime, it”s sufficient if the names of these AIG bonus recipients are made public. I don”t care if some lunatics are sending emails with death threats. In fact, I”m actually thrilled that AIG and its organized crime ring will have to live with that knowledge. Because something needs to reach these people to make them understand that the party is over. Nothing has reached them to date. Apparently being forced to shrink in cowardice from anonymous spammers, as pathetic as that may be, is somewhat effective in delivering that message. Good. And when none of these people actually suffer anything anyway, breathe their sigh of relief that the spammers have moved on to their next rant – that”s when the Justice Department needs to come knocking.

Have we had our Let them eat cake! moment yet?