I have finally understood what I would like to do with the rest of my life. It is so simple - like a 1000 watt bulb going off in your head!

And it happened reading this editorial in NYT. Wow, man! You get, like, a blog of your own, but a) you get paid a good buck and b) lotsa folks are going to read it. And all the other conveniences of the blog: anonymity (it is NYT that has written it, after all, not a specific bloke - go and clean the clock of all the flunkies there - quite a sweaty undertaking), ability to write any bullshit that comes to mind and stuff…

Just look at it:

Now, because of two culprits and one enabler — Hamas, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and President Bush — that hill is becoming a mountain.

I mean, isn’t it cool: that poor Ehud, barely a week in his job and already a “culprit”. Of course, he cannot bash the author’s teeth in for the reason stated above, but I bet he wanna to…

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On Tuesday night, I watched the first of the X-Men films. It’s been a long time, and I’d forgotten a lot of it, so it was rather delightful to see all over again. I remember thinking how incredibly annoyed I was that they left the Toad in Magneto’s brotherhood, but they did manage to make him interesting enough to bear. It was interesting, too, to see how they set up the Pyro character in that small bit in X-Men where he tries to launch a fireball at another student and Iceman freezes it.

I plan on watching X2 tonight, a film that I’ve seen more recently because it’s been all over the TV lately. Plus, it’s one of those films I tend to get hooked on if I’m channel-surfing and it appears.

And I will see X3 sometime this weekend. Unfortunately, I may not get to it until Sunday. B’nai Mitzvah season is upon me. The first one is this weekend, then there’s a break, then four in a row to fill out all of June. I’ve been invited to three of the five (two are newer students that I didn’t teach or meet until this year). That will be four of my first year’s class by the end of June. I think the twins are in August (on the same day, naturally). I know of one other in October. Not sure when Samantha’s bat mitzvah is. But from now on, I’ll be attending the b’nai mitzvot of my former students. But that’s okay. They’re going to have to attend mine in November of 2007.

As for the reviews of X3: Not interested. I will not be reading them, nor paying attention to anything anyone says. I’m going to see the movie and judge for myself.

Salon has a piece by a journalist who details the difference between covering “resistance” and civil war:

Having said that, a lot of the goodwill toward the foreign journo dries up when it’s Arabs fighting each other. Suddenly, you’re not documenting a noble struggle against occupation, you’re just some foreigner. And if you’re in a hospital full of pissed-off Military Intelligence officials tending to their wounded, it’s a disaster. As I tried to take pictures, I was suddenly surrounded by a mob of armed men grabbing at my cameras. Luckily, the son of a wounded official jumped into the fray and dragged me to a side room. Once he checked my digital images, he informed the angry crowd I had done nothing wrong and I was free to take pictures outside the hospital.

One frame later, I was chased off the hospital grounds by a half-dozen armed, screaming men. A local photographer — one smart enough to not even take his cameras out of his car — yanked me to safety.

“You know they’d kill me for saying this, but I miss the Israelis,” one droll local journalist told me after we watched the men beat another photographer and destroy his gear. “Sure they occupied us, but there were fucking rules, man. ‘Go here and we’ll shoot you. Stand there and you’re cool.’ We could work. We could live. Now we have this shit.”

It’s not worth sitting through the annoying ad to read the whole thing. The rest of the article is full of poor, poor, pitiful pal propaganda, all about how noble Hamas is for keeping its word on the “truce,” and how the world is screwing the terrorist organization by cutting off funds to the PA. Funny, for a broke organization, they managed to find funding to arm, clothe, and train 3,000 new militia men. The AK-47 is going for $800 a pop now. Anyone want to do the math on how much it cost to arm 3,000 terrorists with AK-47s?

Shyeah. Broke. That’s why their leaders get caught smuggling in close to a million dollars.

Here’s the headline:

Saudi Arabia Restricts Religious Police

Here’s the lead:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia May 25, 2006 (AP)— The Interior Ministry said it is taking measures to restrict the powers of the agency that runs the religious police, a force resented by many Saudis for interfering in their personal lives.

In a decree carried by the official Saudi Press Agency late Wednesday, Interior Minister Prince Nayef said members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or the religious police, can still make arrests in cases like the harassment of women, but probes will now be conducted by the public prosecutors.

“The role of the commission … ends with the arrest of the suspect or suspects,” said the decree, sent to provincial governors across the kingdom.

Wow, that sounds great, doesn’t it? Finally, the Saudi religious fanatics are going to start reining in the dreaded muttawa, the force responsible for sending young Saudi girls back to their deaths in a burning school because they fled without first putting on their hijabs.

So, an announcement that the Saudis are “reining in” the muttawa is a good thing. Right? So. Let’s go see what the big change is.

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Last week, I pointed out a quote by a Hamas legislator that pretty much proves they will never give up on their intent to destroy Israel:

“We are in favor of any steps towards establishing a Palestinian state in the borders of 1967,” says Mr. Bardawil. “When Israel stops its dream of a state from the Nile to the Euphrates, we will stop our dream of Haifa and Yaffa and Acco,” cities along Israel’s coast which had large Arab populations before 1948, and still have sizable Arab minorities. “Give us the land of 1967 and less us dream for the next 100 years.”

(Replace “less” with “let” and that last quote makes sense.)

Now we have Mahmoud Abbas issuing an ultimatum to Hamas: They have 10 days to approve the “prisoner’s plan,” which is essentially the return to the 1949 Armistice lines (a.k.a. “1967 borders”). Failing approval in ten days, Abbas will call for a referendum and see what the people have to say. It’s being called a “bold move” and oohed and aahed by various members of the media.

But something Abbas said struck a chord.

Abbas told a conference of Palestinian leaders Thursday that a national consensus exists on the borders of a future Palestinian state.

“All the Palestinians, from Hamas to the Communists, all of us agree we want a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders,” he said. “This is what we have, we cannot talk about dreams.”

It seems like Abbas is telling Hamas to give up its dream of a state “from the river to the sea,” but I’m not ready to believe that it isn’t also what he wants. He is a disciple of Arafat, after all, hand-picked by the corrupt Jew-hater to placate the West when it finally realized that Arafat was a waste of protoplasm.

I think Abbas’ statement makes perfect sense if you add the word “now” to the end of it.

While their “leaders” powwow in reinforced bunkers far from the fighting, it looks like the rank-and-file of Hamas and Fateh are still doing their usual negotiating in the streets of Gaza with bullets and roadside bombs:

A member of the Fatah-controlled Palestinian security forces was killed and four others were wounded Thursday, doctors and witnesses said, in the latest factional clashes in the Gaza Strip.

The shootout, which occurred on a major Gaza road, began when a group of security officers riding in a car on their way from the funeral of top Gaza security commander Nabil Hodhod clashed with members of the new militia.

So, when does Islamic Jihad start its own police force? And when does FOX get to ride along with these trigger-happy nutcases for an episode of COPS?

It’s good to know that when Hamas put in their charter that the Freemasons are part of the worldwide conspiracy against Muslims, they really meant it.

Unfortunately, the Americans are on Israel’s side …and gave the Israelis the green light for a conspiracy against our people.”

Haniyeh said the Palestinian government won’t comply to international demands that it make concessions in the pursuit of peace with Israel.

Haniyeh spoke of “international plotters” who conspired with Israel to “set up a network against the elected government to suffocate and starve us.”

Yes, the members are Hamas are as dumb as they look. And this line is simply a knee-slapper:

“Our unity is a religious must and a political need. Internal clashes harm our image in the international community. There will be no Palestinian civil war; Palestinian blood is holy,” he said.

So, about that Fatah bigwig who was murdered in the past few days — I guess his blood, not so much?

The UN is finally threatening Darfur. If Darfur doesn’t stop interfering with the UN auditors who are there to see what happened to all the money spent on the Darfur peacekeeping force (don’t laugh, there is one), the UN is going to pull the auditors out of Sudan.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N.’s internal watchdog agency has threatened to withdraw its auditors from Sudan to protest restrictions placed on it by the U.N. envoy to the troubled African nation, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The Office of Internal Oversight Services, known as OIOS, has been prevented from carrying out a thorough examination of the nearly $1 billion peacekeeping budget for the country, according to the internal e-mail memo.

The threat comes as the United Nations plans to expand its Sudan operation and take over peacekeeping duties in its conflict-wracked Darfur region, site of one of the world’s most serious humanitarian crises. It also comes in the midst of a major reform effort and greater scrutiny of U.N. peacekeeping missions with a goal of more openness and accountability.

That’ll show ‘em.

Does this strike you as the definition of chutzpah, or what?

The president of Mexico is touring America to tell us to give our illegal immigrants — his citizens, who can’t find work because of his crappy government’s decades-long culture of corruption, graft, bribery, and crappy economic policies — a break.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 24 — Adding a voice from south of the border to the national debate on immigration, Mexican President Vicente Fox is barnstorming the western United States this week, arguing against fencing off the U.S.-Mexico border and asking Americans for “decent treatment of our people.”

The U.S. tour is designed partly to enhance cross-border trade and investment. But Fox has also taken pains to present the Mexican view of the raging U.S. debate over immigration — or, as he calls it, “the migration phenomenon.”

Funny, we call it the “illegal immigration” phenomenon.

Addressing the Utah legislature Wednesday in accented but clear English, Fox insisted that Mexican immigrants have been a boon to this country. “Mexico is proud, very proud, of its people here, whose working spirit and moral values contribute every day to the economy and society of this great nation,” he said.

And he spoke out repeatedly here against proposals to build fences along the border. The U.S. House has passed legislation calling for a 700-mile fence to cut the flow of immigrants, and the Senate last week voted to build a three-tiered fence stretching 370 miles.

“We don’t put up walls,” Fox told a predominantly Latino crowd in Spanish at a lively rally Tuesday in a Salt Lake suburb. “That’s not the way you’re going to fix the problem. Walls that pretend to solve the problem only provoke distance between two peoples.”

Um, yeah, you do put up walls, and you don’t allow immigrants from points farther south than Mexico. But hypocrisy aside — am I the only one who thinks this guy should shut the hell up, go home, and fix his own goddamned economy?