Obama’s proposal to limit charitable deductions to twenty-eight percent for those with incomes over $250,000 is repulsive.  One argument that has been made to support the proposal is that charitable tax deductions unjustly favor the rich, because if you’re a teacher making $50,000 a year and decide to donate $1,000 to the Red Cross or United Way, you enjoy a tax break of $150, but If you make millions and you make that same donation, you get a $350 deduction.  This is unfair, but taxing the teacher at a 15 percent rate and the millionaire at a thirty-percent rate in the first place is fair?  Really?  It is not fair to get some of the extra money, that you took away from me, back because I chose to give some of the money, that you so kindly did not take away from me, to charity?  Lenin would be proud of this argument.

What is more troubling is Obama’s belief that he can distinguish between the right and wrong reasons to donate to charity.  Donating because you are motivated by a tax break (the biggest tax break anyone gets for a donation is under forty percent, that person is still making a net donation of over 60 percent) is wrong, but donating because you are altruistic and have a good heart is good.  Ohhh, how sweet!  If someone donates $666,666 to the leukemia and lymphoma society because he thinks that satan will come down in a fiery clound and eat little children, who gives a shit?!  Give that man or woman a tax break and send that money to the leukemia and lymphoma society so they can save lives.

What is next, should firefighters not get paid at all?  Because really, what ass hole would be so selfish as to want to get paid for rescuing a child form a burning building?  That should surely be motivation enough.  Pilots too, what dickhead, egotistical pilot flies a plane because he wants to make $120,000 per year, he really should be doing it to help get 120 people from point A to point B because that’s what anyone with a good heart would do.

What made $250,000 or the top one percent the magic number?  Why not $150,000 or the top six percent, surely that will make ninety-four percent of the population happy.  How about $100,000 or the top sixteen percen?  Still sounds good right?

Americans donate more to charity than any other country.  In 2006, American donations were 1.7 percent of our GDP.  The second highest percentage was in Britain where donations made up 0.73 percent of the GDP.  Private, individual charitable donations don’t work right?  As Obama is proposing, it is clearly better to remove incentives for private donations and have the government decide how to spend the money saved on those incentives, right? I am not so sure, and I am afraid history is not on Obama’s side.

Sources:

• Original Quote.

• US Household Incomes

• US 2006 Charitable Donations
  

There are many reasons why Iran should not be allowed to become a nuclear power.  First, they are the foremost sponsor of organized terrorism in the world.  Iran provides extensive funding to Hezbollah and Hamas.  Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon prevents that state from being a moderate, democratic friend of the West and pushes it towards Islamic fundamentalism that would have it resemble its neighbor, Syria.

Hezbollah has most likely been involved in the assassinations of multiple moderate members of Lebanon’s government, most recently of Prime Minister Rafik Harir in 2005, and has facilitated their pro-Syrian replacements.  It’s terrorist instigations, kidnapping of soldiers and firing of Katushas at population centers on Israel’s northern border led to the second Israel-Lebanon war in 2006.  In addition to causing the loss of innocent life, the war led to further destabilization of the volatile region.

Iran also provides extensive funding to Hamas, a terrorist organization whose declared goal of Israel’s destruction justifies, in their eyes, the indiscriminate loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives.  Hamas’s take over of Gaza, which involved the torture and murder of members of the rival Fatah, has put it in full control of the territory.  It has used this position to fire thousands of Iranian made missiles at Israeli population centers.

A nuclear armed Iran would mean nuclear armed Hezbollah and Hamas which would push the already explosive turmoil that these groups are sowing to new levels.  This leads us to the second great concern over a nuclear armed Iran.  Iran would not discriminate in nuclear arms sales and organized terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas would not be the only ones to end up with nuclear weapons.  Smaller, rogue groups that came up with sufficient cash could also purchase nuclear weapons from Iran as they saw fit.  This would put the entire world and not just the regular targets of Hezbollah and Hamas, Israelies and moderate Lebanese, within the scope of Iranian made nuclear weapons.

Third, a nuclear Iran would lead to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.  Countries across the moderate to extreme spectrum, from Egypt to Saudia Arabia, would feel threatened by a nuclear, omnipotent Iran and would themselves pursue nuclear weapons.  Weather they succeeded or not, the outcome for regional stability would be grim – countries that failed to acquire nuclear weapons would resort to being Iran’s puppet states, countries that succeeded would add to the potential that a nuclear weapon got used.

Conditions are ripe to halt this problem before it spirals completely out of control.  Iran is facing an economic perfect storm with falling oil revenues, spiraling inflation, poverty and high joblessness. The Iranian economy is in dire straits-the Iranian government is trying to drive down its unemployment numbers by counting students and housewives as employed.  These conditions mean that at least a significant fraction of the Iranian population must be fed up with their government’s expenditure on research towards nuclear weapons instead of on local infrastructure – schools and hospitals.  Now is the time to use economic diplomacy and hope that these potential allies on the inside will help prevent war.

There is a flip side to the condition of the Iranian economy.  High unemployment and general unrest make it easier for a totalitarian leader like Ahmadenajad to manipulate the populace into accepting a scapegoat solution – development and use of nuclear weapons.  Thus the same conditions that give us a better opportunity for peaceful, diplomatic action also make the window for such a solution narrower.

So what can we do?  The optimal solution would be a comprehensive, world wide carrots and sticks policy.  These efforts have been stifled by international companies and countries who have refused to seize dealing with Iran.  There are five companies that provide refined petroleum to Iran, Total, Vitol, Trafigura, Reliance Industries and British Petroleum.  These companies are enabling Iran to reach their goals and undermining the difficult economic situation that could prove crucial to a peaceful transition of Iran’s direction.

In addition to the five companies above, Russia and China must be convinced to cease doing business with Iran.  The efforts must succeed in convincing all that they each have more to lose in security than to gain economically by cooperating with Iran.  If these companies and countries come on board, there is a chance that Iran will be  stopped now before they master the fuel cycle and achieve industrial capacity in their efforts to enrich uranium.

It is urgent to work on these issues today because a nuclear Iran will almost certainly result in nuclear weapons in the hands of organized terrorist like Hezbollah and Hamas,   nuclear weapons in the hands of smaller, rogue terror cells that may operate in the Middle East as well as the West, and lead to nuclear proliferation in the already volatile Middle East.  The time to work with America’s allies to solve the Iranian threat – hopefully peacefully – is now.

to the BBC on January 7th, 2009:

I would like to appeal to you to avoid anti-Israel bias in your publication. Israel’s response to Hamas’s indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israeli civilians is proportional and necessary. The situation in Israel is dire as neighborhoods of innocent Israelis are being deliberately attacked with rockets as often as dozens of times a day. In 2008 alone, Hamas has fired 3,000 rockets at Israel. A significant fraction of these rockets were fired during the six month long “cease fire”.

Israel withdrew from all of Gaza more than three years ago in hopes of peace and a two-state solution. Now, Israel has an obligation to defend its citizens from the threat of Iran-backed terrorists now just as it did when Iran-backed Hezbollah attached Israel not long ago. Israel is no different from any other sovereign nation that must protect their citizens from those who would kill them.

Hamas’s ties to Iran are unmistakable. Iran’s President has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map.  They are developing nuclear materials in defiance of the world while supporting, training and arming Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and others. Israel and the Palestinians need a lasting peace–which will only come when the Iran-backed terrorists are defeated. Media bias against Israel sways public opinion against it and forces Israel to cut its operations short under international pressure. This in turn enables Hamas to continue its terrorism and results in the loss of Israeli civilian lives. I urge you to avoid biased and one sided reporting (only reporting on Israeli actions and leaving out Hamas’s rocket firing and use of Palestinian civilians as human shields) and to perform thorough fact checking before reporting.  I also urge to avoid unfair, one-sided articles such as this one.  The article reports sitting in a peaceful Sderot cafe.  Are you kidding me?  Sderot has been and is the target of hundreds of Hamas rockets in the past months, where are the BBC stories reporting on the carnage and mayhem that those rockets cause to Sderot civilians?

Sincerely,
X

from the BBC on January 23rd, 2009:

Dear X

Thanks for your e-mail.

Firstly, please accept our apologies for the delay in replying. We know our correspondents appreciate a quick response and we are sorry you have had to wait on this occasion.

I understand that you’ve been disappointed by our coverage of the Gaza conflict. I note your concern over a report from Sderot and that you feel we only report on Israeli actions.

We’ve reported the casualty figures from both sides: the fact is, however, that there have been many more Palestinian deaths than Israeli. We’ve also explained clearly and frequently that Israel sees this conflict as a necessary defensive action because of the rocket attacks it has faced for many years. It is for the audience, not the BBC, to judge whether, in its view, the action is justified.

We’ve reported from Sderot frequently in the past – and our Middle East correspondent Paul Wood did so again on 30 December for both radio and television – this is part of his script:

“People head for the shelters in the town of Sderot. This is the routine now. The Palestinian rockets are crude, but the fear is real. A rocket fell in the building behind me just a couple of minutes ago.”

You can also see Paul Wood’s article on the BBC news website, headlined “Taking cover on Sderot front line.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7805464.stm)

We report the facts on the ground impartially. But this isn’t an evenly balanced conflict. The fact is that many more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the fighting.  We cannot ignore this fact but must report on it fully but fairly.

In addition we’ve devoted considerable time to coverage of the causes of the conflict – for example, Israel’s stated need to take action against the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza. To that end, we have reported in detail both on the rocket attacks and on Israel’s rationale.

Whether the means justify the end is not for the BBC to judge and we would not aim to ‘paint’ anyone as the ‘aggressor’: our role is to report on the causes and the impact of the conflict freely but fairly, providing enough context for the audience to make up its own mind.

I realise that you may continue to feel there is an element of bias in our reporting from Gaza. Therefore, let me assure you I’ve registered your comments on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

All feedback we receive, whether positive or negative, is always appreciated.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your views.

Regards,
Y

to the BBC on February 1st, 2009:

Dear Y,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

There are a number of problems with reporting just the casualty numbers without the underlying details of the situation and letting readers make their own decisions based on the numbers.

One, while Israel does everything it can to prevent casualties, Hamas does everything it can to maximize them.  Since Hamas has started shelling southern Israel and the western Negev a few years ago, Israel has scrambled to install rocket alert sirens and shelters in all towns within Hamas’s reach.  Hamas on the other hand utilizes their resources not to ensure the safety of its citizens but to rearm itself.  In fact, not only does Hamas not attempt to prevent casualties on its own side, but it attempts to maximize them by the use of human shields and by the launching of rockets from schools, mosques, hospitals and other highly populated areas.  Here is a quote from Nuaf Atar who was captured by the IDF during the conflict, “Hamas had set up rocket launchers and fired rockets into Israel from within school compounds since the operatives knew that the Israel Air Force would not bomb the schools.”  Letting readers come to conclusions based on numbers alone without explaining that Israeli casualties are lower because of the country’s efforts to keep their citizens safe while Hamas’s are higher because of their use of human shields and complete disregard for their own citizens’ lives is misleading.

Two, the numbers alone do not convey the fact that this conflict was instigated completely by Hamas.  After Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005 Hamas has been goading them into a confrontation by firing rockets at Israeli cities.  If it weren’t for this rocket fire there would be no casualties on either side.  Further, Israel had refrained from responding for an unprecedented amount of time in the hopes of avoiding extensive casualties.  If Hamas put down their weapons there would be peace; if Israel put down theirs there would be no more Israel.

Three, the numbers alone do not tell the truth about who Hamas really is.  Hamas is an organization that has humiliated and executed members of the rival Fatah.  It is an organization that shoots their own citizens in the legs if they oppose the use of their land and homes as rocket launch pads.  It is an organization that hijacks UNRWA food supplies and refuses to feed supporters of the rival Fatah.  It is an organization that booby traps their civilians’ houses with explosives in the hopes that Israeli soldiers along with those civilians are killed.

Four, the accuracy of the numbers themselves are disputed.  A recent investigation by the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, concluded that, “no more than 500 or 600 could have been killed in the IDF attacks, and that most were men between 17 and 23 recruited to Hamas’s ranks.”  In 2002 after an Israeli operation in Jenin to combat the second intifada it was originally reported that 1,500 were dead.  In the end it turned out to be only 54 – of whom 45 were militants.  If publications such as the BBC initially report the orders of magnitude higher death toll, how many readers would notice the correction if and when it were published?

I greatly appreciate the time you take to consider and reply to my feedback.

Best Regards,
X

from the BBC on February 27th, 2009:

Dear X,

Thank you for your e-mail.

We wanted to let you know that we’ve received your further complaint and will respond as soon as possible, however we hope you understand that the time taken to do so can depend on the nature of your complaint and the number of other complaints we’re currently dealing with. We issue public responses to concerns which prompt large numbers of significant complaints and these can be read on our website at:

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

We would be grateful if you would not reply to this email – in the meantime, we would like to thank you again for contacting us with your concerns and appreciate your patience in awaiting a response.

Thank you for taking the time to contact the BBC.

Regards

Z
BBC Complaints

Although I don’t believe that America will ever be a communist country or that things could change drastically over night, I do think that some of Senator Obama’s policies and beliefs are significantly socialist and are of concern.  The best place to start is his proposed tax policy changes.  His tax credits include “refunds” for people who already pay no taxes at all.  Where does the money for these refunds come from?  The 5% of Americans who are not getting a tax break under his plan.  The plan is a proposal for direct redistribution of income, but since 95% are getting money and only 5% are losing it, it sounds great to most, right?  This is the same “platform” that the Bolsheviks preached during the Russian Revolution.  Five years later the previously most productive farmers were chopping wood in Siberia as punishment for having too much, while millions in the country were starving because the previously unproductive farmers surprisingly remained unproductive.

Senator Obama’s recent affront on the virtue of selfishness seems to be a direct challenge to those who agree with Ayn Rand’s views on the topic.  Ayn Rand understood “selfishness” to mean a concern with one’s own interest.  “Since a concern with one’s own interests is a character trait that, when translated into action, enables one to achieve and guard one’s own well-being, it follows that selfishness is a virtue”.  America was built on this principal and on the belief that individuals and not governments are in the best position to decide how to improve their own well being.

Lastly, there is the concern with Senator Obama’s own admittance of being drawn toward Marxist professors in university and the increasing number of his communist associations.  The defense of “I have many friends and by no means share all of their views” is valid, but when the number of the friends whom you don’t agree with keeps increasing, one has to ask why do you have so many friends with the same troubling viewpoint, that you happen to disagree with?

I have no evidence of any anti-Semitic acts having been committed by Senator Obama.   The concern here is again with the large number of his associations that do practice the most modern form of it – blatant anti-Zionism, and with the unpleasant trend in the US of the far left very often being virulently anti-Zionist.  At the fore front of the apprehension is his relationship with Rashid Khalidi, a man who has supported Palestinian terrorism and was a member of the PLO while it was a terrorist organization.  His lack of a strong condemnation of Louis Farrakhan, a man who described him as the Messiah, is also troubling.  Finally, his willingness to talk without preconditions to Ahmadinejad, a man who has hosted a Holocaust deniers’ conference and has promised to wipe Israel off the map while pursuing nuclear weapons,  is absurd.  It is even more offensive in the light of Iran’s preconditions for talking with the US – withdrawal of all troops from the Middle East and halting of support for Israel.

I don’t believe that the US will resemble the Soviet Union any time soon.  However, thanks in part to the mistakes of our current president, the politic pendulum is beginning to swing towards extremes, opening the door for Senator Obama.  I just hope that unlike Ayn Rand eighty-two years ago, I am not uncomfortable staying where I live now.

Israel’s immediate response was to accept responsibility and issue an apology.  However, after performing an investigation the IDF determined that the shots could not have originated from their location and independent investigators confirmed this verdict.  A cloud of controversy engulfed the incident as the authenticity of the video and credibility of Monsieur Enderlin began to be questioned.  A French media critic, Philippe Karsenty, had the laudable courage to sue France 2 claiming that they fabricated the video and duped the French populace.

Charles Enderin who was not himself present at Netzarim Junction and relied on the footage and credibility of Palestinian camera man Talal Abu Rahma, defended himself vehemently and sued Philippe Karsenty for defaming France 2 and himself.  In 2006 a French court agreed with Enderlin and found Karsenty guilty.  Karsenty did not give up and appealed the decision.  Recently, amid growing evidence of the fabrication of the video (including inconsistencies in Enderin’s and Rahma’s testimonies and Enderlin’s refusal to provide the non existent parts of the video he earlier claimed to be proof of Israel’s guilt), on May 23, a French appeals court dismissed the libel suit against Karsenty finding that he was justified in calling out Enderin and France 2 for doctoring the video.

It is interesting to compare the world wide media reaction to the original announcement of the video in 2000 and the official verdict of its fabrication eight years later.  The former reminiscent of a starved mob running to a source of free food and the latter of crickets chirping in a field.  Kudos to the Wall Street Journal – the only international publication to post an article about the fabrication verdict!

Even if the verdict were noticed by all those who originally saw the Al-Dura video in 2000 and the anti-Israel propaganda techniques noted, it would have been too late for the Israeli citizens who were murdered by terrorists brainwashed by the video’s imagery.  As it stands, few have been alerted to the true nature of the video and the trend to incriminate Israel in reports and check their credibility later continues.

On July 2, 2008, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem driving a bulldozer went on a terror rampage on Jaffa street, randomly murdering three Jerusalem residents and wounding dozens by overturning crowded buses and crushing cars.  BBC’s headline for the article reporting this cowardly massacre, “Israel bulldozer driver shot dead”, implies that Israel’s police was at fault for killing this innocent man.  The caption below footage of the attack read, “Jerusalm bulldozer driver shot dead by security”.  Some would want to give BBC the benefit of the doubt (others familiar with their quality of reporting would not) and say that they hastily made the report before all of the evidence was available to them.  This would be a noble thought if the Jerusalem offices of the BBC were not on Jaffa street overlooking the scene of the massacre!  BBC later modified their headline but not before numerous readers were made to believe that Israel is the aggressor when in reality a terror act was carried out against her civilians.

As this trend to falsify reports to make Israel out to be the villain and correct them or not later continues, one may ask why is Israel singled out as the target of such media behavior?  I believe the answer to this question is the same as the answer to the following questions.  Why were Jews across Europe blamed for the spread of the Black Death in the fourteenth century?  Why had the Catholic church until a declaration in 1965 accused Jews of deicide?  Why did Russians under the Soviet Union accuse Jews of killing Lenin and then once communism was no longer in vogue in the nineties claim that Lenin himself was Jewish?  Why did the world look on as six million Jews were exterminated across Europe only sixty years ago?

Over the past two millennia, without a country of their own to stand up for them, Jews have been an easy scapegoat and incitement target for any body of power at a time when the authority of that body of power was being challenged.  The creation of Israel sixty years ago, by giving a voice to Jews world wide and providing them with a safe haven, was supposed to stop this world wide indiscriminate dumping of responsibility for undesirable events on Jews.  To a large extent it has succeeded in doing so, but its response to incidents like the Al-Dura one has not been steadfast or firm enough.

Many Israelis are so desperate for peace that they refuse to believe that their partners on the road to peace are capable of fabricating videos like the Al-Dura one in order to incite local and world wide agression towards Israel.  They convince themselves of this in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and with the deep down knowledge of the truth.  T.S. Eliot once said that “humand kind cannot bear very much reality”.  The challenge for Israel and the world is to bear reality long enough to see through dirty tactics such as this one.

Sources:

1. Wall Street Journal-1
   
2. Wall Street Journal-2
3. Jerusalem Post – 1
4. Jerusalem Post – 2
5. New York Times
6. Honest Reporting
7. The Second Draft

In any case I have always been perplexed by how half of the kids in the US grow up playing soccer but the sport is so unpopular. Have all those kids forgotten their childhoods, were they forced to play soccer by their abusive parents, maybe all those headers have given them dementia? No matter, it’s about time the US came around on the sport.

• age 16 – Albert Einstein
• age 21 – Richard Feynman
• age 24 – T.D. Lee (physicist at Columbia)
• age 30 – “…I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France.”

This is an epiphany indeed and an extremely apt observation. I think that all of us could construct a similar display of our personal ambition’s degradation, and I do a little further down. So why does our ambition degrade?

Recall Muad’Dib (Paul Atreides, Usul) from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Muad’Dib had the gift of prescience and when in a deep meditative state, enhanced of course by the spice melange, he could visualize all possible futures. I believe that our personal degradation of ambition is tied to our views, as limited and inaccurate in comparison to Muad’Dib’s as they may be, of all possible futures. As we get older some of the branches in our tree of possible futures are pruned and the set of things that we perceive as realistic goals within our lifetimes diminishes. Picture Muad’Dib in meditation with billions upon billions of multi-colored threads spinning out of him, some groups of threads are closely intertwined and other groups branch out on their own. As Muad’Dib gets older, “pop”, “pop”, “pop”, whole groups of threads disappear while millions of others remain. Note that since Muad’Dib had almost perfect prescience no new threads ever appear because he really did foresee all possible futures in his initial meditative state. Since millions of threads disappear every few years, it is very likely that our choice thread from a few years ago no longer exists as a possible future. We are thus forced to pick the most optimistic one from the remaining threads and this process continues on and on until the optimal thread appears to be one not so far removed from our current reality (not necessarily a bad thing).

Muad’Dib is my analogy, here is another quote from the same paragraph of Derman’s book, that demonstrates his, “In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.” A bleak and poignant comparison.

As a thought experiment, I decided to look back and see what my ambition chart looks like to this point and verify whether it also slopes downwards.

• age 2 – a monkey
• age 5 – a nice little communist (ambition shared by all brain washed youth in Soviet schools)
• age 8 – my grandfather
• age 12 – Mario Lemieux
• age 16 – Howard Roark
• age 18 – Rock Star (only lasted for a day or two)
• age 20 – Michael Sipser (theory of computation professor at MIT)
• age 25 – An architect at a software company dealing with interesting algorithms
• age 29 – A guy who makes enough money to enjoy the things he enjoys, educate his kids, and donate to charities he feels are important

So my graph has peaks and valleys and is not necessarily all downward sloping. On closer inspection these ambitions are silly given the differences in circumstances and time periods between our own lives and those of our idols. I cannot be my grandfather any more than Derman could be Einstein. Nonetheless, Derman’s point is clear, we all have an urge to achieve something great during our lifetimes and with every passing year we adjust our aims to reflect the opportunities that we have missed.

The first page of Derman’s book contains the following quote, “Ambition is a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the present.” This clearly portrays the paradox of ambition’s relation to our levels of happiness – most of us need to have some ambition (in the form of setting and achieving goals) to be happy and at the same time having such ambition makes us perpetually dissatisfied. This complex relation deserves its own detailed analysis. I close on a lighter note,

I love watching little kids do something seemingly completely routine and then get a big smile on their face and laugh. They’ll kick a toy and watch it roll around on the floor then come over to it and kick it again and after about five iterations they get this elated look on their face like, “Holy shit, I finally figured it out if I kick this thing it moves a foot or two. This is fucking awesome! I am going to spend the next six hours doing this.” I don’t often see adults having similar experiences unless they’ve consumed copious quantities of illegal substances. What are the other options, switch jobs every few years, move from city to city from time to time? Travel every chance that you get?

The other popular option seems to be having kids of your own and experiencing these simple elations vicariously. A fair enough option whose absence was poignantly portrayed in Children of Men. If no one has kids anymore, adults can’t get their kicks from watching one year olds get psyched by starring at checkered patterns and the whole world goes to shit. Immigrants are placed in cages, otherwise morally impeccable anti-government groups become corrupted and turn on each other, and the rich get richer by simply not thinking about it all.

I’d like to disagree with both pieces of advice above.

First, I believe that chess is much more beneficial for a developing brain than peek-a-boo. The baby may not immediately agree with this (although I think that the menacing look being sported on the left is an exaggeration, and is most likely accredited to being woken up at some ungodly hour or being forced to miss a favorite cartoon than to a friendly chess match), however when this zygote is 15 and kicking ass at chess while his buddies are still playing peek-a-boo he’ll be gratefull.

Second, if you politely peek at a baby’s diaper like that (Oh, pardon me sir, if its convenient for you, I just want to check if you’ve maybe soiled yourself recently), the baby will never learn to not poop in his pants and will still be defecating himself when he is 15 and kicking ass at chess. The more correct approach on the right tells the baby you mean business and to hurry up and learn how to take a dump on his own.

The show started out with eight or so Floyd songs. The entire audience was in a collective state of awe due to hearing songs that they’ve listened to so much but had never heard performed live. After playing “The Fletcher Memorial Home” Roger played his first non-Floyd song of the set, “Perfect Sense”, which contains the lyrics:

And the Germans killed the Jews
And the Jews killed the Arabs
And Arabs killed the hostages

The first two lines compare the Holocaust to the worldwide treatment of Arabs by Jews. Roger compares the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews for the sole reason of being Jewish to Israel’s attempts to protect its citizens from often hostile neighbors. Further, he uses the common anti-Semitic device of attributing anti-Israel sentiment towards all Jews. Whatever Roger perceives the killing of Arabs by Jews to be, it apparently justifies the Arabs killing the hostages.

One has to ask is this done out of stupidity, naivety, or intentional bigotry? Its hard to imagine that anyone who could have come up with, “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl” is stupid, or someone who has traveled the world is naive. The only logical conclusion that one can come to is that Roger is being intentionally anti-semitic. Maybe when he said, “And that one looks Jewish, and that one’s a coon … If I had my way I’d have all of ya shot,” he was expressing his own beliefs and not describing Pink’s hallucination of himself as a dictator as satire of being a popular musician with influence over the impressionable masses.

A few songs later Roger played “Sheep” and augmented the experience by having a two-story sized inflatable pig hover above the audience, which in my estimate consisted of about 30,000 raving fans. The pig displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam wielding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls.” The underside of the pig simply read “Obama” with a checked ballot box alongside. Roger’s message to Americans is don’t be gullible sheep led to the slaughter by your evil government. Funny to convey such a message by hovering a school bus sized pig over the heads of 30,000 impressionable fans while they sing along with you and waive their arms in approval, much like Pink’s fans in his hallucination. As Maynard once said, “Repeat after me – Think for yourself, question authority, think for yourself, question authority, think for yourself, question authority… and never ever do what others tell you to do.” Thats wisdom, floating an inflatable pig over your audience is cheap.

After a short break, Roger played all of Darkside which was pretty phenominal. The band left the stage and came back a minute later for an encore. The first song they played for the encore was Another Brick in the Wall (Part II, for those keeping score) pretty amazing to hear this live, but once again it was tarnished as the images in the background were of Waters spray painting “tear down the wall” on the wall in Israel between Jerusalem and the West Bank. With regard to the wall Waters has said,

“It’s craziness, it’s a horrific edifice, this thing. I’ve seen pictures of it, I’ve heard a lot about it but without being here you can’t imagine how extraordinarily oppressive it is and how sad it is to see these people coming through these little holes.”

I wonder if Roger has seen, first hand or even in pictures, the torn up, charred remains of a bus and human body parts after a suicide bomber has come from the other side of that wall and blown himself up. The wall is controversial and without a doubt slows down mobility of law abiding citizens, but to present it out of context, without any reference to the terrorism that it attempts to prevent is disingenuous. When the trade offs are between an extra hour to get to work on one hand and random people being blown up on buses on the other, unfortunately the mobility has to be sacrificed and people have to go through these little holes. In my opinion, going through little holes on your way to work is better than being blown up on your way to work. Hopefully, once there is a Palestinian leadership in place that does not explicitly support terrorism (Hamas, Arafat) or implicitly support it by not doing enough to stop it (Abbas) there will be no need for the wall and it can be torn down.

The final piece of Israel bashing came during the second to last song of the show, Bring the Boys Back Home. Towards the end of the song four flags were displayed on the screen behind the band. The first was Israel’s and the last was the U.S.’s. One has to ask, where does Roger want Israel to bring their boys back home from? From the Lebanese border so that Hezbollah can come in and destroy the North of the country? From the Golan Heights so that Syria can come back and at will shoot at the Ein Gev Kibbutzniks as it did prior to 1967? From the Gaza border so that Hamas can come in and kill people without having to shoot Qasams at Sderot and Ashkelon as they are doing now?

The show closed with Comfortably Numb. The overall musical performance, if it could be appreciated independently of the anti-Israeli and anti-semitic sentiment, was absolutely amazing. I however could not separate the two and the three hour extravaganza was ruined for me. At the end I was left wishing that Roger’s lips moved but no one could hear what he was saying.