Brain Freeze Summary

Brain freeze: can come from eating ice-cream too fast and also from having too many things to write about: from Mumbai to Madoff to Gaza. Also I have some foot-freeze going on (my basement office is unheated and the portable heater I bought from Bed, Bath and Things just plotzed). These three are important to interrelate; each are Jewish tragedies, made special for the modern world. Mumbai was a hi-tech terrorist attack that we often see depicted in movies: a bunch of good-looking bad-guys technologically integrated moving with lethal efficiency. What fun! Well, see my stuff on misanthropic entertainment: I don't like the glorification of evil and now that I have children, I like it even less.

But the evils of Mumbai were washed away by the Jewish super-villian Bernie Madoff. Wow: he may be the world's biggest non-tyrant crook. I need to add the tyrant caveat because one thing that dictators can - and do - do better than others is to steal in massive scale. 50 Billion in made-up money is crazy, but compare that to Mao-Zedong or Fidel Castro who stole entire countries.

In any case, as I said elsewhere, the scale of his crime is so grave that it's the first time I can understand the death penalty for a thief. He has destroyed thousands of lives and in a psychopathic drive of greed. While it still cannot equal the tragedy of Mumbai, as some have said, there's quick and there's slow death. The Sages claim that impoverishment is like death and that makes sense in a world without a safety net... yet Madoff may have successfully destroyed the safety-nets of many people.

And then we have Gaza. I may have more to say on this (I will have more about Mumbai and Madoff), but the international reaction is perplexing after Mumbai. Didn't people get the picture that people like Hamas will torture and kill Jews just for the fun of it? This is pretty black and white: Hamas is evil. The only reason to not call them Nazis is because they lack the means, not the will. Maybe I will devote more to this, because if this isn't clear now, in this world, then its quite revealing.