Israel Lives

 Emily Schrader, on Twitter.

עם ישראל חי. @Vouch4Eachother pic.twitter.com/rL4RahZyqT

— Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) April 27, 2022

Kirstie Alley

Peace.

On Twitter.

Sarah Sentilles, Draw Your Weapons

At Amazon, Sarah Sentilles, Draw Your Weapons.

A single book might not change the world. But this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way you see the world—and that makes all the difference.

“How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperiled world?”

Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world.

In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles tells the true stories of Howard, a conscientious objector during World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, and in the process she challenges conventional thinking about how war is waged, witnessed, and resisted. The pacifist and the soldier both create art in response to war: Howard builds a violin; Miles paints portraits of detainees. With echoes of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, Sentilles investigates images of violence from the era of slavery to the drone age. In doing so, she wrestles with some of our most profound questions: What does it take to inspire compassion? What impact can one person have? How should we respond to violence when it feels like it can’t be stopped?

Brandenburg Gate Lit Up in Support of Israel

That's pretty spectacular, actually.

In solidarity with #Israel the Brandenburg Gate is lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag commemorating the victims of #Jerusalem attack pic.twitter.com/TjSDDLTsu6

— Embassy of Israel (@IsraelinUSA) January 9, 2017

'Little Drummer Boy (Peace on Earth)'

Sweet Christmas music, via Blazing Cat Fur:

'Come on people now, smile on your brother...'

Hey, folks, try to love one another while I'm slaving away today.

Sending out the love to Mastic, New York.

Peace brother. Eat all you want. This one's for you babe!

Via the Sound L.A.

At the video, Jesse Colin Young, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash et al. --- at the "No Nukes" concert, Battery Park, New York, 1979. According to this archive report (via the Tribeca Trib):

On Sept. 23, 1979, two years before construction of Gateway Plaza began, a crowd of 200,000 converged on the landfill for an "anti-nuke" rally. Prompted by the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the gathering was the biggest demonstration since the Vietnam War.

And at People, "From Bruce to Bonnie, the Hottest Acts in Rock Warm Up the No-Nuke Crusade."

Take Me to the River
Talking Heads
8:50 AM

Happy
The Rolling Stones
8:48 AM

Twist and Shout
The Beatles
8:43 AM

FAME
DAVID BOWIE
8:39 AM

Don't Stop
Fleetwood Mac
8:36 AM

No One Like You
Scorpions
8:32 AM

Get Together
The Youngbloods
8:18 AM

Surrender
Cheap Trick
8:14 AM

Caught Up in You
38 Special
8:09 AM

Love Is a Battlefield
Pat Benatar
8:04 AM

Free Ride
The Edgar Winter Group
8:01 AM

Malala Yousafzai Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Well, ahem, at least they picked someone who actually deserves it.

At the New York Times, "Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Children’s Rights Activists."

Alicia Keys Poses Nude for Peace

A fabulous woman, she posed nude and pregnant.

At London's Daily Mail, "Pregnant Alicia Keys posts nude photo of herself with peace sign painted on baby bump to draw eyes to We Are Here charity movement."

And at NPR, "Meet the Global Groups That Alicia Keys Got Naked For."

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann Calls on Secretary of State John Kerry to Resign

Via Israel Matzav.

She's awesome. Remember, Rep. Bachmann lived in Israel. She hits it out of the park with her comments here. Wow.



Previously Kerry "apartheid" blogging here.

Josh Rogan: 'Damn Right I Taped Kerry’s 'Apartheid' Talk...'

A great piece.

Rogan's got chutzpah, at the Daily Beast.

PREVIOUSLY: "Secretary of State John Kerry Excoriated for Israel 'Apartheid' Slur."

Krauthammer: John Kerry Must Resign for 'Pernicious and Extremely Harmful' Israel Apartheid Slur

Previously, "Secretary of State John Kerry Excoriated for Israel 'Apartheid' Slur."

And now at Pat Dollard's, "Krauthammer Slams Israel Hater Kerry: He Must Resign For ‘Extremely Harmful’ Remarks That Will Be Used Against Israel."

Secretary of State John Kerry Excoriated for Israel 'Apartheid' Slur

Wow.

It's all over the place. Democrats, leftists, Beverly Hills liberals: It's just hate, hate, hate. Nonstop hate.

At the Daily Beast, "Exclusive: Kerry Warns Israel Could Become ‘An Apartheid State’."

Also from Erika Johnsen, at Hot Air, "Ted Cruz: John Kerry should resign over that “apartheid” comment."

A bunch of Democrats have even condemned Secretary Lurch.

See especially Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "Kerry’s Apartheid Slur Sabotages Peace":

Last Friday while speaking to a closed meeting of the Trilateral Commission, Secretary of State John Kerry raised the ante in his bid to keep his Middle East peace initiative alive. While lamenting the latest collapse of the talks, Kerry cast blame for the outcome on both Israel and the Palestinians but made it clear that the consequences for the former would be far more serious. In the recording of his comments, which was obtained by the Daily Beast, Kerry not only repeated his past warnings that if peace wasn’t reached Israel would be faced with a new round of violence from the Palestinians as well as increased boycott efforts. He went further and said that the alternative to an Israeli acceptance of a two-state solution was that it would become “an apartheid state.”

In doing so, Kerry exploded the notion that he is an evenhanded broker since he is, as he has done previously, effectively rationalizing, if not justifying the next intifada as well as the continued efforts of the BDS—boycott, divest, sanction—movement against Israel. The point here is that if the maintenance of the status quo will make Israel an apartheid state, then it must already be one. Given the odious nature of such a regime, that would not only justify the boycotts but also violence on the part of the Palestinians against Israel...

Keep reading.

But seriously. Democrat Party racism and eliminationism goes right to the top. Mindboggling.

More at the Daily Beast, "Kerry Apologizes for Apartheid Comments."

And at Twitchy, "‘If I could rewind the tape’: John Kerry clarifies ‘apartheid’ remark."

Benjamin Netanyahu: Abbas 'cannot speak out of both sides of his mouth...'

The Israeli Prime Minister, on "Face the Nation" yesterday:



And here's the story at NYT, "Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust."

Also at Astute Bloggers, "NOBODY SHOULD BE FOOLED BY MAHMOUD ABBAS'S CONDEMNATION OF THE HOLOCAUST."

And at BCF, "Netanyahu dismisses Abbas Shoah comments, cites alliance with Hamas which ‘attempts to create an additional Holocaust’."

International Pillow Fight Day

Crazy.

And I'll tell you, back in the day when we had pillow fights, man that was no fluffy-feely affair. We got brutal!

At London's Daily Mail, "Feathers will fly! Trafalgar Square hosts a giant pillow fight as thousands around the world celebrate childhood tradition."

And a video, from AP, "Raw: People Celebrate World Pillow Fight Day."

Google Hegemony

At the New York Times, "Google's Road Map to Global Domination":

Fifty-five miles and three days down the Colorado River from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, near the Utah-Arizona border, the two rafts in our little flotilla suddenly encountered a storm. It sneaked up from behind, preceded by only a cool breeze. With the canyon walls squeezing the sky to a ribbon of blue, we didn’t see the thunderhead until it was nearly on top of us.

I was seated in the front of the lead raft. Pole position meant taking a dunk through the rapids, but it also put me next to Luc Vincent, the expedition’s leader. Vincent is the man responsible for all the imagery in Google’s online maps. He’s in charge of everything from choosing satellite pictures to deploying Google’s planes around the world to sending its camera-equipped cars down every road to even this, a float through the Grand Canyon. The raft trip was a mapping expedition that was also serving as a celebration: Google Maps had just introduced a major redesign, and the outing was a way of rewarding some of the team’s members.

Vincent wore a black T-shirt with the eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia of the United States Marine Corps on his chest and the slogan “Pain is weakness leaving the body” across his back. Though short in stature, he has the upper-body strength of an avid rock climber. He chose to get his Ph.D. in computer vision, he told me, because the lab happened to be close to Fontainebleau — the famous climbing spot in France. While completing his postdoc at the Harvard Robotics Lab, he led a successful expedition up Denali, the highest peak in North America.

A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States, Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won.

Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.

While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself.

Fascinating.

RTWT, at the link.

And ICYMI, the interview with Google's Sebastien Thrun, "'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'"

'I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention...'

That's Sebastian Thrun, Google's top research scientist, at Foreign Affairs, "Google's Original X-Man: A Conversation With Sebastian Thrun."

A phenomenal interview:

There are people who feel that the prospects of life are diminishing and that the next generation is not going to have a better life than the previous one. Do you think your child’s life will be more interesting and exciting and filled with larger prospects than yours?

If you look at history, the fear that the next generation would be worse off than the previous one has been around for many centuries. It’s not a new fear. And it’s often due to the lack of imagination of people in understanding how innovation is moving forward. But if you graph progress and quality of life over time, and you zoom out a little and look at the centuries, it’s gotten better and better and better and better.

Our ability to be at peace with each other has grown. Our ability to have cultural interchanges has improved. We have more global languages, we have faster travel, we have better communication, we have better health. I think these trends will be sustained going forward, absolutely no question. If you look at the type of things that are happening right now in leading research labs, I see so many great new technologies coming out in the next ten to 20 years. It ought to be great.

So you disagree with the notion that innovation is dead, or that we’re in a great stagnation, or a period of decline?

I think anybody who believes that we are in a period of decline or stagnation probably hasn’t been paying attention. If you look at the way society has transformed itself in the last 20 years, it’s more fundamental than the 50 years before and maybe even bigger than the 200 years before.

I’ll give an example. With the advent of digital information, the recording, storage, and dissemination of information has become practically free. The previous time there was such a significant change in the cost structure for the dissemination of information was when the book became popular. Printing was invented in the fifteenth century, became popular a few centuries later, and had a huge impact in that we were able to move cultural knowledge from the human brain into a printed form. We have the same sort of revolution happening right now, on steroids, and it is affecting every dimension of human life.

A century or two ago, you had innovations such as steam, electricity, railroads, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph and telephone and radio. Those things had ramifications that fundamentally changed the structure of society, the structure of political organization. Is the information technology revolution going to have that kind of impact?
I think the impact will be greater. I don't want to belittle any innovation. I think the steam engine, the car, television, all the examples you mentioned are landmarks of history. But if you zoom out a little bit, most of these inventions come from the last 150 to 200 years. Very few are a thousand years old or older, and given that humanity is much older than that, you could say that almost all inventions are recent. I believe the full potential of the Internet has not been realized yet, and we're not very used to it. But a hundred years from now, we will conclude this was one of the biggest revolutions ever.

I believe we live in an age where most interesting inventions have not been made, where there are enormous opportunities to move society forward. I'm excited to live right now. But I would rather live 20 years from now or 50 years from now than live today. It's going to be better and better.

Netanyahu's Christmas Greeting 2012

Via Linkmaster Smith: