Keeping Up With The News... and History

I used to read The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal, but no longer do, and I do not miss them, and the feeling is probably mutual. HuffPo I find irrelevant and the WSJ I find extremely suspect due to the William Randolph Hearst-like nature of the Murdoch empire.
In essence, if I wanted to be swayed by Rupert Murdoch's social and political views, I would accept his endless offers to chit-chat over tea and scones, but I do not.

To put it inelegantly, reading things like those put out by Murdoch and FOX is akin to playing cards... Skip-Bo, actually... with one's aged parents who have a rule of one Skip-Bo per turn to slow the game down into some sort of marathon of tedium, and one or both of which cannot get a purchase on the cards, and is thereby forced to constantly wet one's fingers with saliva before drawing more cards...

... and who have the same cards they had 15 years ago, 15 years of licking, skin oils, and Cheetos residue...

... and who store their Skip-Bo cards in recycled plastic containers with snap tops, creating a air-tight seal, and discover that in the middle of the hottest dog days of summer that there is an offensive odor when they crack open the old Hershey's clear plastic cocoa container to get them Skip-Bo pasteboards...

Well, it is just like that when you are force fed Murdoch's views on everything under the sun: there is an aroma.

I like Frum Forum - as mentioned before - and Bloomberg's. They are both invaluable. Then I read The Atlanta Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Science Daily, and the Al Masry al Yaum from Cairo. Add in The Root and Ha'artez and Le Figaro... and The Economist and McClatchey online... and strangely enough I like to read Trotskyite analyses of stuff!

And the BBC, although I do not like its new format one bit; they have developed the knack of making each sentence a separate paragraph and stringing them together like Tweets. I am surprised that this annoys me, but it does. It seems to create the illusion that what should be a single, coherent story is just a bunch of random sentences: I find it sometimes hard to understand.

Every now and then I find things that cause me to think:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-20/abbas-s-un-offensive-may-be-step-toward-peace-commentary-by-noah-feldman.html

For decades, the great mystery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been why there is no Palestinian Gandhi or Mandela, and no popular, widespread nonviolent movement in Palestine. As a democracy heavily dependent on another democracy, Israel should be doubly sensitive to the potential effects of nonviolent civil disobedience on its reputation.

First, many or most charismatics leaders are not so charismatic during the rough and tumble of the day to day; they become charismatic leaders and heroes with time and publicity.

Second, most of the 63 years of publicity in the USA has been heavily pro-Israel and tended to be flattering to only Palestinian leaders who were possibly perceived as "soft" by their fellow Palestinians.

Third, in the case of Gandhi, Britain actually had a tradition of wanting to dissolve the empire, freeing the various countries when they were deemed fit for self-rule.
The inter-play between Israel and the Palestinians is much, much different.
In fact, looking at the coalition that rules Israel presently, from Netanyahu to Liebermann, they actively demonstrate now all the moods that Britain had over 200 years: from the viciousness of the post-Mutiny period to the later living-apartness to a bemused stand-offishness.

Heroes and saints are never obvious until they have been polished and worked by the Narratives of mankind.

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