I thoroughly recommend Robert Crumb’s new book The Book of Genesis Illustrated; exceptionally well done, and done straight, word for word.   One note: while reasonably tastefully done, there’s no way to render the begats and things like Lot and his daughters without pictures that would make your maiden aunt Edna go *gleep, that’s a bare hiney*, so you are warned.

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

While retrieving THE FIXER from one of my off-air VHS tapes, I ran across the real-life story that the movie/novel was based on - see the story of the Beilis Trial in late Tsarist Russia in Wikipedia.  Wow.

Martin Gidron’s THE SEVERED WING, 2003 Sidewise Long Form Award Winner.    Reviews here and here.

(Update: I’m noting this story about Frankfort, KY schools and their handling of gay students, but I’m beginning to think it’s a crock.)

Stephen Fry:

• his blog (he’s a big techie)
• his letter to his 16 year old self.  About love, mostly.
• -on manic depression
• -on his new BBC series on the USA (which I’m about to dig into)
• -on hate and anti-semitism (he’s part Slovakian Jewish)
• his column from the Guardian on tech items (RSS)
• -comparing laptops to books (MP3)
• -on smartphones

A French court has ruled that the Vichy government of France during World War II was instrumental in the handing over of Jews and others to the Nazis for extermination camps.

Calling for a “formal admission of the state’s responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered”, the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government’s guilt. “As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state … became its responsibility,” it added.

The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France’s unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris’s police force.

“It is a decision with which I am content,” Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. “France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s.”

For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France “was never involved” in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France’s “inescapable guilt”.

• GM to lay off 10,000 white collar workers this year (if they don’t go belly-up first).

• Ohio Governor and Senator agree that the stimulus is vital to keeping things going, and new Republican Congressman from Ohio says that FDR caused the Depression by wild spending.

• Mike Huckabee claims that the stimulus package is anti-religious – because the Feds won’t pay for chapels and other religious-sole-use buildings on college campuses, etc. Of course, the Feds haven’t been doing that for 46 years, because of church and state legal separation issues, but hey, why not make a fuss about it now and say it’s all Obama’s fault? Sheesh.

• Along with everything else, people are concerned about their future economic stability that it’s affecting their personal relationships at home. With $75k as the cutoff point!

• Morgan Stanley says those aren’t bonuses, those are ‘retention payments’. My mom used to sing this ditty: “Don’t send my boy to prison, where he’ll be cold and alone. He didn’t steal that chicken, that chicken just followed him home.”

• Maureen Dowd on Financial exec whining about controls: “In this economy, simply having a job should energize them.” Amen. The whining is cataloged here, if you’re interested.

• Lovely: a new poll by the Anti-Defamation League says that 31% of Europeans blame ‘the Jews’ for the global financial crisis. Same poll has 23% saying that they blame Jews for the death of Jesus Christ. I thought we were past this kind of crapola.

• Sirius Radio is ready to declare bankruptcy. Apparently the Dish Network people are buying up their debt to take it over.

• Chris Dodd is taking a political pounding over his acceptance of sweetheart mortgage deals from a big mortgage lender. Since he’s the Senate Banking Chair…

• Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
• The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with.  Of course, government policies for a LONG time promoting hardshell settlers with lots of government support and funds created this mess in the first place.
• Pat Robertson now thinks Bush is a bumbling schmuck who has mismanaged things terribly, and has nothing but praise for Obama. *faint*

From the New York Times…one more place for fear:

The origins of India’s Jews remain uncertain, but according to some accounts they may have come as emissaries from the court of King Solomon. They established communities and lived peacefully with Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and, later, Muslims. The absence of anti-Semitism throughout this history has been a source of pride in India.

“This is one of the few countries where Jews never faced discrimination and persecution,” said Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, a leader of the Jewish community in New Delhi.

Jews played a prominent role in several coastal cities, but nowhere more so than in Mumbai. Jewish merchants from Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries arrived in the late 18th century in what was then British Bombay and quickly established themselves as leading businessmen, opening textile mills and international trading companies.

Only about 200 of these so-called Baghdadi Jews remain in Mumbai, with the rest having immigrated to Israel, Britain and the United States. But their legacy endures: synagogues, libraries and schools, many of which serve Jews and non-Jews. They also financed the construction of several city landmarks, including the Flora Fountain and the Sassoon docks.

Today, most of Mumbai’s Jews have roots in a group known as the Bene Israel community, which claims to be descended from seven Jewish families who were shipwrecked on India’s shore while fleeing persecution in the Galilee during the second century B.C. Over the centuries, they adopted Indian language, dress and cuisine. Since India became independent, these Jews have often played influential roles in Indian society, including in government and Bollywood.

“We always felt we were Indians first and Jews second,” said Mr. Malekar, a Bene Israel Jew.

Kosher meat production in the US has been hit - 65% drop in supply of beef.  Part is due to a fire, most is due  to a big processor in Iowa’s problems with raids on the plant by the Feds for employing tons of illegal immigrants, etc.

The skyrocketing IT presence in Bangalore, India is honking off the old-school residents to tighten the rules.  Such as bar hours, services in the local language or English, but not in Hindi, and so on.  Hasn’t stopped the parties and the inflation in prices and housing.

If you think Phil Gramm is going to admit he was wrong about the mess he helped creeat in the world banking system, guess again.  “They are saying there was 15 years of massive deregulation and that’s what caused the problem,” Mr. Gramm said of his critics. “I just don’t see any evidence of it.”

Going through my pile of clippings, I ran into a Tribune article about the creation of an eruv in the Lakefront area of Chicago.  Never knew what the durn things were, but it’s a fascinating part of Orthodox Jewish practice.  Of course, that may be my law school education talking or something.

Interesting stories about a group of Ugandans who converted to Judaism in the 1920s being recognized as Jews, and about German-speaking minorities in Belgium near the border...as the Walloons and Flemish argue endlessly with one another.