The Jewcer
Collapse a lung, support cancer research: Well, okay, you can skip the pulmonary burst. Just join Israel Cancer Research Fund's Next Generation at Columbus 72 tonight at 6 p.m. Cocktails, food, raffles. It’ll cost you $60 at the door, but it’s for a good cause and who knows? You might meet someone, get lucky, and Sarabeth’s is practically right there for Bloody Marys on Friday. See that, we’re one step closer to the cure. 246 Columbus Avenue (between 71st and 72nd). [Events]
Pentateuch Players: Join Jewcy “Storahtelling” blogger Amichai Lau Lavie and Peter Pitzele for a series of 5 master classes on the lesser known myths and essential motifs of each of the Five Books of Moses. The classes include commentary from classic and modern sources, live interaction and no required pre reading. Thursdays 6:30PM-9:30PM: The Actors Temple, 339 West 47th Street. $12 per session, $50 for complete series. (Would have been $150, too, if Mel Brooks hadn’t have dropped that other tablet.) [Events]
The World
Republicans deserve to lose: My other employer Jacob Weisberg on why the GOP should get walloped next week for their PR alone: “If there were an Oscar for political slime, it would go to ‘Twilight Zone,’ a [campaign] spot run by Vernon Robinson, a congressional challenger in North Carolina. In 60 seconds, the ad manages to tie Democrat Brad Miller to Osama, gay marriage, ‘lesbians and feminists,’ activist judges, infanticide, flag-burning, racial quotas, space aliens, illegal immigrants, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. In another ad, Robinson stamps ‘XXX’ across Miller's face, claiming that his opponent refused to support body armor for troops in Iraq but that he ‘pays for sex’ and that he ‘spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia.’” What, like we need more freeways? [Slate]
Animal rights activists against the war: If they’re not already, they will be. A medic assigned to wounded Marines in Iraq: “’The idea is to work with live tissue,’” he said. ‘You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.’ ‘My pig?’ he said. ‘They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.’” Now, I happen to think pigs are noble creatures, which is why I don’t eat bacon or ham. Halahkic nonsense be damned! It’s Snowball I’m looking to protect. But sadder still is the fact that these excruciating methods of assault are simulations of actual methods used by jihadists against our troops. The soldier this medic could not save within the course of this article was killed by an armor-piercing sniper’s bullet, which cut through his Kevlar helmet like a warm knife through butter. Where’s the budget update on DoD spending to account for these tactics? I wonder… [NYT]
The end of conservative faith: John Derbyshire, who participated in a Jewcy dialogue with Joey on the subject of Jew-baiting evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, has a very readable piece in NRO on the subject of belief – his own, to be exact: “Religion is first and foremost a social phenomenon. That religious module in our brains is a sub-module of the social one, or is very closely allied to it. To deny it expression is just as foolish, just as counter-productive, as to deny expression to any other fundamental social feature of human nature — sexuality, or aggression, or the power urge, or cheating.” The sounds like Freud to me. And as it happens, Derbs is a lapsed Methodist and very well-informed on cognitive science. His defense of the Creationists’ fear of modern biology can’t sit well with Creationists at all, and the whole argument seems to me the perfect place for the intellectual right to be heading – which is to say, right back to where it came from: secular empiricism. (Kingsley Amis was once asked by the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko whether he (Kingsley) believed in God. “What? Oh, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.” Bang on, old boy.) [NRO]
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