It's Been A Hard Day's Night

It's been a long week, hasn't it? It's hard to believe Chanukah was over just a week and a half ago...

At Casa SerandEz, we've been weathering a mild case of strep for Serach that knocked her out of commission for a couple of days, helping plan and make calls for the Lander Alumni Shabbaton for next month, following the news, and otherwise surviving. Now we're preparing for a nice reunion weekend with some good friends, while wondering how to defeat the Empire of G and why people never tell us their thoughts on our rare serious piece of writing. Ah well.

There's just too much happening to round things up or express coherent thoughts, so some random musings on different subjects:

• Just as a reminder, first: Jameel & Aussie Dave are live-blogging everything from Israel (with some assistance from friends to keep it going 24 hours a day). Jack is rounding up posts and articles from all over consistently (usually twice a day). The IDF Spokesperson puts out official summaries and videos here and there. And it's worthwhile to plug an amazing blog: An Israeli Soldier's Mother.
  

• There are countless pieces all over the internet about what is going on in Israel; the objective of my piece was to actually go through the options available to Israel, which is something I haven't really seen.
• Pictures you won't be seeing anytime soon on the major news media: Israeli soldiers helping out Palestinian civilians (can't find the blog now, anyone know?) and Hamas terrorists who had just been shooting at them who they captured. (Pictures you won't be seeing anywhere, ever: Hamas helping Israeli civilians or soldiers. Pictures you'll rarely see, either: These.)

Other good stuff, thoughts:

• If you're a Browns (or Bengals) fan - ouch.
• Not sure what to think of Mangini... posted my thoughts in short here.
• Napping works better than caffeine.
• Elder of Ziyon (who has been awesome - check out the rockets calendars especially) rips the Guardian for letting Hamas' Meshaal write a propaganda op-ed.
• Great piece on Dan at BeyondBT. Ironically, as a kid, I always wanted to be from Shevet Dan. Lots of lessons well put in the post...
  
• The WSJ has really good pieces [all very different aspects] by Natan Sharansky, Bibi Netanyahu, and its own Brett Stephens.
• WestBankMama thinks Hamas is losing both short-term and long-term.
• Treppenwitz thinks the SkyNews studio he was interviewed in demonstrates well how others see the Middle East.
• Hard to know what to make of this: The New York Post goes after a former SEC mid-level employee who was named by Markopolis as having worked on (and let go) Madoff. While I'm sure she did the best she could and that it wasn't the easiest thing to catch, Markopolis had laid out pretty well why it had to be bogus; the real story is that the SEC is probably full of hard-working, well-meaning people just not cut out for the task: "...branch chief in New York, actually investigated [Markopolos' claims] but with no result that I am aware of. In my conversations with her, I did not believe that she had the derivatives or mathematical background to understand the violation." Ouch. Yet another problem with the ideas of regulation - people end up relying on them, and guess what! Government often can't do things as well.
• Loved this one, which a number of people have pointed to - Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic (!) rips the world: The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure.