Follow this link to an article about Israeli historian Shlomo Sand and his book, The Invention of the Jewish People.

The controversy is surely about his claim that the Roman Diaspora of the Jewish people a myth that has been misused to justify the current displacement of Palestinians by European Jews, whom Sand argues have no geneological connection to the Holy Land.

In a discussion of  Russian Jews:

According to Sand’s historical analysis, they are descendents of European converts, principally from the Kingdom of the Khazars in eastern Russia, who embraced Judaism in the Eighth Century, A.D.

I found this part of the story particularly interesting because I have always wondered about the origin of my Russian ancestors prior to the root of the known family tree circa 1850.

Of course this claim of this author will have to stand up to the test of time.  If you read the whole article, it does suggest some counter claims.  Just from my own thinking I can raise questions about some parts of either side of the story as presented in the article.  I may have to buy the book to see what parts are filled in by the author that are not covered in the article.

The fact that my first Hebrew name is also Shlomo is pure coincidence, I assure you.

Watch this TV ad featuring the actual Chairman of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party “explaining” Senator Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the public option.

Follow this link if you would like to help sponsor this ad in Connecticut.

Below is the video of President Obama’s weekly address to the nation. I think the pose in the static picture that introduces the video is very unfortunate. Other than that, I agree that President Obama needs to keep repeating the message.

I know everybody wants the economy to turn around faster. That desire is hardly a good reason to stop the progress we have already made and go back to the policies that got us into the mess we are trying to get out of.

It is fashionable in the anti-Obama wing of this nation to deny that any progress has been made. Fashionable doesn’t make it truthful.

As of December 3, 2009 at 09:25 pm, the video below is the complete debate and it comes from WGBH.

The debate was among Michael Capuano, Martha Coakley, Alan Khazei and Stephen Pagliuca.

I found a key discussion occurred when the subject of new regulations for the banks came up. Stephen Pagliuca made the case that if we did not allow the U.S. banks to grow to large size as they did, then they would not have been able to compete against the bigger banks in other countries and we would have lost the business to those other banks.

Can you imagine what would have happened if the bankrupting business had all been left to the other world banks?  Of course, I can imagine that the other world banks would say that they wouldn’t have gotten into the troublesome business if they had not been driven by competition from the under-regulated US banks.

What happened to the banks over the last few years does bring to the fore the arguments that behavioral economists and many modern economists of other stripes have been trying to explain to the American people.  The way the system works now without adequate regulation, whatever insane scheme your competitor comes up with to make money in the short term, you have to follow in order to compete.   Pagliuca was right about that.

Even worse, if you know the scheme is insane, you cannot afford to stay out of that market. Even with the knowledge that if will probably bankrupt you if do you get in, what are you supposed to do?

What Pagliuca got wrong is how things need to change now that we understand what happened.  He doesn’t apparently fully understand what happened on the grand scale.

Only a Federal (and International) regulator can set the ground rules to say that none of you can get into that business without the proper safeguards (like capital requirements and true risk analysis and disclosure).  Not only does it keep the bad actors from acting, but it helps protect the sane actors who don’t want to be driven out of business in order to compete with insanity.  It also protects the rest of us from this flaw in unregulated capitalism.

The upshot is that with all his private business experience, Stephen Pagliuca has shown that he is unable to step back from that role to see what different responsibilities a U.S. Senator has.  We do not need another government official who cannot understand the proper place of the government in the regulating of society which includes the regulation of an essential capitalist economy.

Contrast this to Mike Capuano’s positions on the economy. I have much greater confidence that Capuano gets it more than any of the other candidates.

December 2, 2009 at 10:45 pm

NECN claims that there are 4 clips showing the debate and that a video of the entire debate will be posted later.

Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3, Clip 4

December 3, 2009 at 09:25 pm

The text below is no longer relevant. I have swicthed to using the link on WGBH.

As soon as I get a link that works, I will post the video of the debate here. So far I have only found snippets of the debate. One of which is shown below. See comments about video clips at the bottom of this post.

Follow this link to the story about Google’s response to the Microsoft/News Corp initiative mentioned in my earlier blog post, Microsoft to Pay News Corp to Delist From Google.

I had suspected that there would be an ongoing negotiation between these businesses to split the profits in a new way.  I cannot believe that Google hadn’t had some method in the works to respond to the attack by Microsoft.  Microsoft’s initial ploy could never have passed anti-trust scrutiny in its major markets.

What has me a little confused though is that there are already numerous sites that are searched by aggregator sites like Huffington Post and yet have paywalls of various sorts.  Perhaps Huffington Post already pays a fee to these sites.

Follow this link to view video on the President’s web site and also see a transcript of the speech.

Follow this link to view video on C-SPAN’s web site instead.

I urge you to pay little attention to the sound bites, the talking heads on the news shows, and other distractions. First listen to what the President said, and hear it in his own words, and see it without interruptions.

Then, if you must, go research what others think about what he said and is planning to do.

Follow this link to the reality check article posted on the White House blog.  The intial paragraph of the blog best explains its purpose.

In today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer takes great pains to paint a bleak picture of health care reform as “monstrous,” “overregulated,” and rife with “arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.”  The columnist’s argument may be cogent and well-written, but it is wholly inaccurate.

This reality check was written by the new Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer on November 27, 2009 at 05:14 PM EST. The article has many links to background information including a link to Krauthammer’s article.

The thing that I liked about this item is that it cites specific sections of the House of Representatives health care reform bill to demonstrate that the bill contains items that its critics say it lacks.

Prior to this posting, I was able to look into the bill to counter claims of things people said were in the bill but were actually not in the bill.  I hadn’t figured out a way to sift through the massive bill to find things in it that critics claimed were missing.

I have not checked the sections quoted in the article yet.  I have created this blog posting to record the location of the article for future reference.  As I see some of the claims made again that I have seen before, I will be able to look them up and demonstrate that the claim is false.

I just participated in a telephone conference call town hall meeting with Mike Capuano.

This lead me to do a little research on the web where I found this story from WBUR.

Follow this link to hear the audio of a radio report on what he did to establish an ethics body to investigate the ethical behavior of members of the House of Representatives. (I must admit his calling members of the Enterprise Institute “academics” was almost more than I could stomach.)

Follow this link to Mike Capuano’s campaign web site.

Having read the book How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer, I know that I am trying to find reasons to justify my gut reaction that I like Representative Capuano as a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy.  I like to think that at least if I had found stuff not to like, I would have been able to change my mind. So far, the story just gets better as far as I am concerned.

Also I realize, having read Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nicholas Taleb, that I am tending to look for confirmation of my preconceived notion when it might be more powerful to search for a counter argument. I’ll depend on my readers to present me with counter-arguments.