Good Afternoon:
They call them the "Dog Days of Summer," and our own dog was quick to take advantage of the heat to stretch out in the sun. She actually objects to the fact that the Romans named these days after the brightest star in the sky: the Star Sirius, or the "Dog Star," rather than her ancestors.
The heat she so enjoys has been courtesy of low pressure situated to our east and a persistent counter-clockwise flow around it. Such winds are good to bring the heat, and they also limit the build up of wave heights, so this is a perfect time to go to the beach. By the way, we leave our dog at home because nothing smells worse than a dog that "smells like a dog" (and wet at that).
While slightly cooler weather may meet our mid-week time, we can expect a return to hotter weather again as the month of August ends, and turns into September.
Really -- it's hot, and it was actually a good time to head over to Cinema City in Jerusalem for a movie. We saw "Dora and the Lost City of Gold." I thought that it would be a movie for our teenage girls, but I couldn't stop laughing. In fact, folks young and not so were laughing so loudly it was sometimes hard to hear the movie.
Yet, it was both a fun movie, and a funny -- make you laugh movie, especially when the producers mixed real live scenes with a bit of fantasy. It also had an interesting story line, to keep you on the edge of your seat.
One interesting thing about movies is that we begin to feel that they are happening to us, or at least to the characters in the movie. In fact, if we think back about the movies we saw, our minds will fill in the scenes between the actual movie scenes -- because that is what happens to us in real life. We actually have to eat, burp, etc, and it takes more than a moment to go from one place to another. We actually create a reality for these characters that never existed.
Newspapers (writers and editors) also try to shape our perception of events, but in this case real events. For example, The New York Times made its top of the page news when Israel refused entry to the two congresswomen from Minnesota (all day). They even were sure to mention Congresswoman Tlaib's vile tweet when she refused to visit her grandmother. I thought the real news was that her supporters didn't even want her to visit her grandmother if it means actually speaking with an Israeli representative to do so. I guess she was going to parachute out of her plane instead of landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, first. When explaining the law used to bar the two women, The New York Times continued their biased reporting when they added the word "just" as in the decision to bar them "rests on a law passed just two years ago." (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/world/middleeast/bds-israel-boycott.html). The editors and writers of the times were really trying to put out the message that Israel is a really bad place and the law is not really a valid law since it was passed "recently." Where else would they write that?
Here, our own reality is quite sad. A young man was murdered outside our town, just on the road to the town across the hill. Two neighbors from the town over were just run-over. A young woman was just murdered in an explosion while out for a swim. Ihttps://www.timesofisrael.com/three-israelis-seriously-hurt-in-explosion-at-west-bank-spring/).
In response, our Prime Minister says that: "We will reach them. Our long arm will pay them their dues.” His word were not IRONY? Avi Issachoroff points out that our Prime Minister and his government have transferred 10s of millions of dollars to buy quiet from Gaza (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/selling-the-fantasy-of-transfer/). But the money used to buy quiet in Gaza is being used to murder Israelis in Judea and Samaria. We're paying all right -- both ways.
We all know that movies are not truly reality, but to paraphrase my late mother-in-law: time has passed and new generations have arisen, but there has always been terrorism -- and now our own policies facilitate its vile ends.
Barry Lynn
