Jewish Men Attack Lone Woman in NYC.

 

My only comments: this happened. It needs to be addressed. People are people and people from any ethnic group can do good or bad things. Mob behavior -- and that mob can be people of any ethnicity -- often gets very dark. 

The Shroud of Turin. Is Seeing Believing?

 

The Shroud of Turin
 Is seeing believing?

 

A storm had been brewing for days. You could bite the air it was so thick. Sleep was impossible. Sweat was constant. Black, muscular clouds, bruised, crazed, ready to blow, beat down on us as if we were the head of a drum. My toes were sunk in the sand on the bank of the Wanaque River.

 

It came from the west, right over the river, emerging from thick and twisting thunderheads. It wasn't more substantial than air; it was the embodiment of air; it was animate sky; more air than air, more sky than sky. White and black, gleaming as a sunstruck cloud, sharp as a slicing wind. Swinging from left to right, seeking and gobbling its dragonfly prey. And that fast it was lost to my eyes downriver.

 

That was a swallow-tailed kite!

 

This Florida bird did not belong in New Jersey! Its exotic home was a thousand miles south, casting its shadow on earthbound alligators and colorful flowers.

 

Birders keep something called a "life list." We record every bird we've ever seen. For the past fifty years, alone in my room, no witnesses, I cannot bring myself to check the box opposite the words "swallow-tailed kite." I am stopped by the barrier between perceiving and accepting. 

 

The part of my brain that instantaneously assembles disparate details into a coherent whole and reports, "This is a chair; this is a table;" told me "This is a swallow-tailed kite." But bird-watching requires firing up the part of the brain that disassembles details and analyzes each. That part of my brain that would have consciously ticked off each detail – the snow white breast, the dipped-in-ink wings, a storm that may have tossed the bird off course – that part of my brain was not in gear. I was too awed by the whole to inspect the parts.

 

And it's more than that. Now that I'm an adult and I've lived away more years than I lived there, I can recognize that my hometown was special. We never locked the door; we were surrounded by neighbors we knew and woods full of deer and berries and spooky stories. But when I was a kid, my hometown felt like prison. Even as we kids enjoyed the woods, the sleepovers, the close, warm kitchens full of kielbasa and lasagna and paella, we yearned for anywhere else where everything, we were certain, was better. Such an elegant bird simply did not belong in the turbulent sky over the humble Wanaque River.  

 

In the 1986 horror film The Fly, a mad scientist tries to explain to his girlfriend that, thanks to an experiment gone wrong, he is turning into a fly. She says, "I don't get it."

 

He replies, "You get it. You just can't handle it."

 

A swallow-tailed kite in my factory-pocked hometown? I got it. I just couldn't handle it.

 

Over seventy years earlier, a world-class French scientist occupied that same rickety bridge between perceiving and accepting. Anatomist Yves Delage wrote of his "obsession" with a "disconcerting contradiction between" a mind-blowing artifact and the "impossibility to find a natural explanation" for that artifact.

 

Moi aussi, Yves. Like you, that's how I have long felt about the Shroud of Turin.

Publications since the Shroud of Turin 1988 Radiocarbon Dating

The list, below, is of publications addressing the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. 

Some of these publications are peer-reviewed; some are not. One was published before the 1988 dating, and addresses issues in radiocarbon dating. 

X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample

Evidence for the Skewing of the C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin Due to Repairs

Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin

Discrepancies in the radiocarbon dating area of the Turin Shroud

Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence From Raw Data

An instructive inter-laboratory comparison: The 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin

The 1988 C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin: A Stunning Exposé

Statistical and Proactive Analysis of an Inter-Laboratory Comparison: The Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin

Radiocarbon Measurement and the Age of the Turin Shroud: Possibilities and Uncertainties

Snow White 2025 Review

 

Snow White 2025
 
Is it Woke or Disneyfication that hobbles the movie?

 

Ever have one of those days when no matter how hard you try to be rational, pleasant, and productive, the universe seems to hate you? You walk out the door and a pigeon poops on  your head? You cross the street and a cab splashes you? You show up for work and everyone blames you for every snafu? Relax. At least you are not the 2025 film Snow White.

 

Snow White is a musical fantasy produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Marc Webb directs. Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the screenplay. Her best-known work is Secretary, an explicit exploration of a sadomasochistic relationship between a submissive secretary and her dominant boss. The songs "Heigh ho," and "Whistle While You Work," from the 1937 Snow White, but with new lyrics, re-appear. The song "Someday My Prince Will Come" is cut. Lyrics to new songs in the film are by EGOT-winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Snow White is 109 minutes long. It opened in the U.S. on March 21, 2025.

 

Some scenes in Snow White put a smile on my face and made me laugh out loud. I'd rate the film three out of five stars. What handicaps Snow White is not so much Woke, as it is the Disneyfication of the source material. More on that, below, after a bit of background.

I'll be posting non-Polish-Jewish related material for a while

 As I've mentioned before, I'll be posting non-Polish-Jewish related material here for a while, and maybe forever. 

I had another blog for such material, but Google hid it because I criticized a religion one must never criticize, and also a fad one must never criticize. So now that blog is still on the web, you just can't see it.