Just saying - I'm tired of reading how "Hezbollah gives cash to rebuild" and "Lebanese signing up for Hezbollah aid". Perhaps it escaped me, but I wasn't aware that Hezbollah was a government that collected taxes.  Where DO they get there money from?  Iran of course.  It is Iranian aid not "Hezbollah" aid.

I say look at the bright side, Israel is forcing Iran to spend an untold amount of money to help rebuild southern Lebanon and (try to) re-arm Hezbollah.  Then again, others believe that Iran is making a huge profit from Hezbollah's actions which more that covers any expense from the war.

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I'm also tired of the media telling us that Hezbollah was created by Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 as if history started with some sort of unprovoked attack by imperialist Israel.  There was a small matter of the PLO being based in Lebanon at the time.

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I'm reading Cobra II, which seems like a relatively dispassionate accounting of how the armed forces were prepared (or not) for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.  It's a very sobering look at how screwed up things can get when theory meets reality.  It's sometimes a little difficult to plow through for non-military folks like me who can never remember the exact difference between a brigade and a division or a sergeant and a lieutenant colonel, but it's extremely instructive.  The thought that I keep taking away is that if we were so unprepared even though WMDs were not found, how much worse would it have been had Saddam actually had them, or G-d forbid used them?



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Last night, our rabbi, gave a sermon at Friday night services about l'affaire Gibson and the power of forgivness at this time of year, read a genrally nasty letter to Gibson excoriating him for his history of anti-Semitism and demanding that he donate $1mm to Israel to make up for it.  He said the letter was "signed...Steven Spielberg.  Now, I'm pretty damn sure that letter wasn't from Spielberg even if it was a real letter and not some general internet prank.  However, the Rabbi has read a fake letter like this once before and it bothers me that he would take this stuff at face value.  Even though the point of the sermon was that the "letter" was not acting according to our traditions, and he was preaching forgiveness, I didn't like him associating a supposedly negative behavior with Spielberg.

I'm still looking for proof that it was fake, but given that I can't seem to find a news story on the internet talking about it leads me to believe that it's fake.

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We're invited to a pool party for one of my 6 year-old's Jewish school classmates - our youngest also goes along on play dates and so is invited too.  Aside from the fact that I don't know the family well and hate little kid's parties, there's one other thing that ticks me off.  Although we're Conservative and the kids go to a Conservative Day School, families are asked not to have their parties on Shabbos so that any observant kids can attend.  This pool party is being thrown from 8-10PM tonight because it's"after Shabbos". Not really, since Shabbos ends at 8:47PM.  I don't know if it's general ignorance about keeping Shabbos or what, but there's a lot of very un-learned parents at the school and it's depressing.  The other day one of the parents seemed perplexed as to why a cheese pizza (with no meat) from any old pizza place wasn't kosher enough to bring into the school.  The school is very good about having "parent education" courses for those who want to learn more, and I'm not claiming to be the ultimate source of Jewish knowledge, but it's still depressing to me.