botf: Bible Belters, White People, Semites, Historywife and Poor Old .39

I've just watched a good deal of Alexandra Pelosi's "Road Trip" through the Bible Belt. And mostly, it made me want to move to Europe. Not because the people featured are stupid, for they are not. Rather, they are ill-educated and deluded and pretty much thoroughly unwilling to recognize science or contrary opinion. Europe seems better only because it has already burned through its centuries of stupidity and intolerance. Stupidity, maybe. But their supply of intolerance is intact - simply look anywhere there exists a minority in Europe, and you will find animosity toward that group. The continent only seems less racially divided because up until recently everyone there was white.

In twenty years "anti-semite" will be about as startling an epithet as "liberal." Individual Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a right to exist as a people in the sense of freely practicing the customs that give them special identity. A state however has no "right to exist," because morality is irrelevant to states. … What these right-wingers are implying is that 'Israel has no right to exist' is equivalent to 'Jews have no right to exist.' Maybe in some of their minds this honestly makes sense. To anybody but a nationalist, however, Israel is not the sine qua non of Judaism, but rather a political project like any other. And whatever the jingos might say, nationalism is not the moral default. I know or know of at least five other Jews who feel the way you do. It takes courage to stand up against such a torrent on principle, and you have my love and respect.

Historywife gave me Chloe, her left kidney, last Tuesday. She kept its sister Zoe. We got out of the hospital this weekend. Different surgeries have different results: Now she can move around but can't eat and I can eat but can't move. In the next few days as fatigue and pain decrease I'll try to post more fully on the experience and on our ongoing second honeymoon (close to our 20th anniversary). Like the first, spent mostly in bed. Unlike the first in most other ways.

RE: Forget .36 This made me sad. How can anyone forget .36, which is one and a step away from my favourite number named for my favourite mathematician (taking the limit of the idiot's method above, although admittedly his relationship between number of variables and accuracy is only a happy accident).