Before I forget, I wanted to take a moment to wish a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my very good friend Greg, aka mirage897.

Greg is a wonderful guy to know. Very sweet, caring, funny, smart, and incredibly generous with his time and good cheer. He always takes a moment to look out for me and see how I'm doing, and is a fantastic person to hang out and shoot the shit with.

We should all be so blessed to have as good a friend as he, and here's to many more years of friendship to come. I'm gonna miss you, buddy.

(I seem to recall that LJ was mangling Greg's birthdate at some point, so if this premature or post-mortem, let me know. The sentiment is what counts, but accuracy doesn't hurt.)

The LiveJournal oracle tells me that today is the date of birth of two distinguished individuals, whom I shall recognize accordingly.

First we have bitterbert, aka Charles. I've had the pleasure of knowing Charles for over a decade and witnessed him grow into a fantastic husband and father of two (soon three!), even though he's still crazy as all get out. You're a great guy and a good friend, Charles, and here's to many more years of happiness to come.

Then there's purpletempest, aka Sara. I met Sara at the Philly game several years back, and have had the privilege of watching her bloom into a smart, sharp, well- spoken, funny, and eloquent writer. She's tough as nails and makes no apologies for living her life as she wishes, and I'm proud to know her.

I also want to wish an early Happy Birthday to the avatar of fabulosity known as jourdannex. I hope to finally meet you once I'm safely ensconced in El Lay. :)

You have to leave behind everything that makes you what you were to find out who you really are. Or, as Tyler Durden said, "It's only when you've lost everything that you're free to do anything."

People can change. Whether through cycles of continuous improvement (a la Kaizen, but on a personal level), or dramatic, sudden changes, we are forced to shed our skins and evolve. To become more than we are. To be greater.

Each time this has happened, I've been better for it. Healthier, smarter, stronger, and further along the road to being the man I am meant to be. Now it's happening again, and I'm not scared of it. Sometimes it's as simple as changing one thing, one small habit you've held for years, and doing something different. Other times it's a dramatic change.

To answer Kelowna's question, what is my word?

"Transformation."

I'm ready for it.

A quick update on the personal state of affairs in the land of Boztopia:

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The poetess Aradia B recently gave me a shoutout as a blog worth reading, an accolade of which I am woefully undeserving due to my pathetic output of late. That'll be changing soon (Stay tuned!), but in the meantime, after a lovely walk through Adams Morgan and a much-needed haircut on a beautiful spring day, I wanted to note two LJs (and specific entries) that I recommend as good reading, and my thoughts on what they had to say.

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I tend to have very lucid and memorable dreams, but I don't generally write them down or think much about them after I wake up. Indeed, the ones I don't remember often turn out to be precognitive or predictive in very real fashion, enabling me to make better choices for the future when the moment is upon me.

But man, the dream I had last night was an absolute corker, and I need some answers as to what it means.

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Crossposted at Scholars & Rogues. You can comment here or there.

I’m Jewish. You don’t hear me blog about this much for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that you are then inevitably asked to take a stand on Israel–as if such a thing even needed to be discussed, like Marx’s odious asking of “The Jewish Question.”

My faith influences my thinking in a lot of ways, but it is not the sole arbiter of my thinking, and I don’t feel that I have to travel in lockstep with what any other Jew thinks–certainly not about Israel, which has every right to exist as a sovereign state, yet commits indefensible acts against peoples it (rightly or wrongly) perceives as implacable foes. As such, people like myself stay out of the debate, allowing it to be usurped and dominated by a cabal of crazy ultrahawkish right-wing Zionists who claim that anything short of total annihilation of Palestine will end with, as my father says, “the Jews being driven into the sea.”

Thankfully, there’s an alternative coming around, and it is called J Street.

The project, organized by a veritable “Who’s who” of Jewish liberals, promises to both reframe the debate on the lobbying level and actually push money towards candidates with a more progressive approach to Israeli/Arab politics:

“The genesis of this is really the frustration on the part of a very substantial portion of the American Jewish community that despite the fact that there is broad support for a peace-oriented policy in the Middle East, there doesn’t seem to be the political will to actually carry it out,” Ben-Ami said. “We have not been effective at transmitting the message that there is political support for these positions in the American Jewish community and their allies.”

Another article on J Street from the Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman catches a very smart point about the differences between America and Israel on this issue:

An irony of the American-Israeli relationship is that, while J Street’s perspective is controversial in the U.S., it commands a good deal of support in Israel. “We’ve been dealing with this in Israel since the late 80s and the 90s, from [assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin to the Kadima phenomenon,” said Levy, who negotiated peace accords for multiple left-wing Israeli governments. “If you understand security only as the war on terror and you’re not dealing with the occupation, you’ll never solve the problem. That fundamental change [in perspective] never took place here. We want to be a catalyst in closing that gap.”

This is absolutely correct. Safe from viewing the brutalities of occupation close-up, the armchair generals and quarterbacks of AIPAC and their allies in established media outlets can safely call for the eradication of Arabs as an ethnicity and culture, without even blinking at the irony of this coming from a bunch of those goddamned Jewish New York Liberals ™. As if it wasn’t less than seventy years ago that we were being gassed to death by the millions and buried in ditches by the hundreds.
Don’t forget that many equally insane fundamentalist evangelical Christians have every desire to see a great war begin in the Middle East, as it heralds for them the start of the return of Jesus and the great Armageddon that will send them rising on waves of rapture into Heaven. Think I’m kidding?:

At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.

He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”

Wow, that Hagee sounds like a real nut. Good thing he isn’t in bed with any of the current Presidential candidates.

Seriously, we have let these lunatics dominate the discussion of Israeli/Palestinian affairs for longer than I have been alive, and that has to end. You can’t expect any kind of peace or rapprochment to come from these people–they’re too far gone. It’s time for the debate to be realigned. As Matt Stoller so succinctly put it:

It’s a significant moment for progressive Jews who have previously not had our voices represented in the foreign policy realm, drowned out by right-wingers intent on the most hawkish policies out there. I am pro-Israel, I believe that respect for the Palestinians is the only way to build a sustainable living space for the Israeli populace to live in peace.

In less than two weeks, it will be Yom Hashoah. As we take time to remember those lost to the greatest act of villainy in human memory, I am happy to see many of my fellow Jews taking a step into the future and not letting the dogma of the past dictate their actions. I’ll be doing my part to take those steps with them.

It's Lights Out, Game Over.
If you wanna you can check my stats.
It's Lights Out, Game Over.
Make way cause the kings is back.

Man, it's pretty easy to take part in a 24-hour LJ content boycott when you've been busier than 100 black mules from Mexico and don't have time to post a damn thing. But this isn't an April Fool's joke. I really am back.

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Originally posted at Scholars & Rogues. You can comment here or there.

I have little to say about the Kabuki theater that is Elliot Spitzer’s fall from grace, so aptly summed up is the situation by my man Motherwell over here. But it does tie in to a larger point–if a former Attorney General and current Governor of one of the most powerful states in the country can be brought down by a wiretap this easily, what chance does anyone have in this, the modern surveillance state?

Because that’s what this is, folks. We’re living in a surveillance society now, our every move tracked, our emails catalogued, our phone calls traced, our Web sites marked for future reference. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad, they know when you’re sleeping and awake. And they know who your friends are, who you speak to, where you go, what you buy, and what you do with all of it.( Read onCollapse )

I'd like to take this opportunity to commemorate three birthdays at once, starting with the 70th birthday of my father yesterday.

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Today, the LiveJournal oracle informs me that this is the date at birth of one Joe.

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And last but certainly not least, tomorrow is the date of birth of an individual known by many names, but who generally responds to Larry.

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