Too much insanity going on in the world, too little time. A few things I overlooked:
(a) Battleswarm Blog looks at two major scandals in the EU
The scandal everyone is paying attention to is Qatargate, where a rich, middling despotic gulf petrostate has evidently been hosing down the faces of eager Euro-types with bundles of unmarked bills to improve their image while hosting the quadrennial outbreak of EuroFlopBall. […] Following the raids at [European Parliament deputy president, Eva] Kaili’s home, her father was later arrested as he tried to flee the Sofitel hotel at Place Jourdan in Brussels after being tipped off about the raids. Investigators found a suitcase with “several hundred thousand euros” on his person as he attempted to flee. […]
Keep in mind here that the European Parliament is mostly pseudo-democratic window dressing — the real power rests with the European Commission, the executive made up of unelected bureaucrats — the mother of all “Deep State”s, if you like.
As the Qatargate scandal widens, questions are being asked as to whether its reverberations will reach the Commission, the EU’s executive branch. Recent revelations suggest the EU’s Chief Diplomat Josep Borrell could be implicated.
Since erupting last weekend with police raids on MEPs’ homes and offices in the European parliament, the Qatargate scandal has done nothing but mushroom. What began as a criminal probe into current and former MEPs and parliamentary assistants implicated in a bribery ring aimed at burnishing the public image of the current World Cup host has widened significantly — not only in terms of the number of people involved but also the number of organizations and third countries, which now also include Morocco.
Read the whole thing.
(b) Tim Pool on the latest in Twittergate, and Elon Musk’s brinkmanship about the future of the company
(c) So just before the deadline, Binyamin Netanyahu went to President Herzog [The Younger] saying “he’s done it” and assembled a coalition, even though no coalition agreements have been inked yet.
Alas, Bibi seems hell-bent on tarnishing his considerable legacy because being our longest-serving Prime Minister in history is not enough for him: he’s desperate to be back in the PM’s office and his corruption trials. Hence, he’s put together what looks like the worst cabinet in Israeli history, with theocratic parties (one of them left by a convicted bribe-taker) and a far-right bloc that includes a truly rancid neo-Kahanist faction. And no, none of these parties are “right-wing” by American standards, as all of them want more government money handouts for their sectorial special interests.
The main opposition will be competing center and center-right parties, as the left has basically made itself irrelevant (and thus helped bring about this situation).
Speaking as a politically homeless person here[**], I cannot say outgoing PM Yair Lapid, an erstwhile journalist and talkshow host. has been the light to the nation [ahem] that his name suggests.[*] In fact, I’ve been known to refer to him as “Yair Vapid”, since in a discussion with Ursula von der Leyen about the situation in Ukraine he started spouting trendy pro-LGBTQWERTY BS instead of sticking to the real issues at hand.
(d) What was the original Chanuka festival really about? No, this article does not engage in rewriting history, but compares different answers from four different ancient sources.
• the story of the successful revolt against the Hellenizers comes from the apocryphal (for Catholics and some others: Deuterocanonical[***]) First Book of Maccabees. That book, in fact, makes no reference to miracles nor does it use any named of G-d. It does describe an eight-day rededication festival [that’s what the Hebrew word Chanuka literally means, “dedication”] for the now-cleansed Temple, which began on the 25th of Kislev — the same Hebrew dates of today’s festival
• there is no mention there of the miracle of the oil in the Temple: that story comes from the Talmud (Shabbat 21a) which casts it as the origin of the holiday itself. Note that the Mishna (on which the Talmud is an enormous collective commentary) does not even mention the holiday by name (it does mention Purim, likewise a post-Biblical holiday but some centuries older).
• the Second Book of Maccabees is more religious in spirit than the first and has a number of tales of martyrdom. However: “This book begins with an epistle directed to the Jews of Alexandria exhorting them to keep an eight-day festival, a Sukkot of winter, complete with the “four species” (Lulav and etrog) to commemorate the Maccabean victory, the rededication of the Temple, and a miracle. However, the miracle referred to here was the sacrificial fire that Nehemiah found almost three centuries before the Maccabean rededication. In this source as well, the cruse of oil and the Menorah are not mentioned.
Possibly the festival of fire was referring to the water libation festivities (Simchat Beit HaShoeva) which took place on the last day of Sukkot. These festivities included the descent of the High Priest to the Gihon spring in Jerusalem resplendent in all his official vestments and surrounded by numerous candles reflecting in the water. The Babylonian Talmud, compiled centuries later, comments, “He who has not witnessed Simchat Beit HaShoeva has not seen true celebration in his life.” (Sukkot 53a)”
• the Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, written about two centuries later, do refer to an eight-day “Festival of Lights” and refers to the very first Chanuka and to it being observed every year for eight days since. However, description of the holiday ccustoms we observe today are lacking.
In short, there was likely an elaborate eight-day rededication of the Temple after its purification, and the event was considered momentous enough that some sort of eight-day festival was marked from the beginning — but the present form was likely only settled upon in Talmudic times.
[*] “Lapid” literally means “torch”. His father Yosef “Tommy” Lapid (z”l), born Tomislav Lempel in former Yugoslavia, Hebraized the family name thus.
[**] There is nothing resembling a constitutional conservative, pro-market party here that could even meet the electoral threshold. Some individual MKs go in that direction, but their parties come with other baggage and one can only vote for a party slate here, not for an individual MK.
[***] Literally, “canonical the second time”
Spin, strangeness, and charm 