Great Television

 
The Atlantic's take on the event: 

Zelensky objected when the vice president castigated the Ukrainian president for not showing enough personal gratitude to Trump. And then in a moment of immense hypocrisy, Vance told Zelensky that it was “disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.” But baiting Zelensky into fighting in front of the media was likely the plan all along, and Trump and Vance were soon both yelling at Zelensky. (“This is going to be great television,” Trump said during the meeting.) The president at times sounded like a Mafia boss—“You don’t have the cards”; “you’re buried there”—but in the end, he sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about “gambling with World War III,” as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a century was Zelensky’s idea.

The Economist was there

 
During the Vance-Zelensky scuffle, Mr Trump initially appeared almost passive, the good cop to Mr Vance’s bad cop. Then Mr Zelensky went too far. “During the war, everybody has problems,” he asserted. With a “nice ocean” America was insulated for now “but you will feel it in the future.”

Mr Trump plainly did not like that. “Don’t tell us what we’re gonna feel,” he snarled, as the summit meeting tipped into catastrophe. He then added that Ukraine was in a bad place and was “gambling with world war three”. He warned that “what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country.” Mr Vance jumped in to helpfully remind the president that Mr Zelensky had appeared with Democrats in Pennsylvania during last year’s campaign, and told the visitor to show more appreciation to his benefactors. Mr Trump’s anger deepened.

It wasn’t long before Mr Trump was rambling about Hunter Biden, the son of the former president, and pointing out that he had provided Ukraine with Javelins when Barack Obama had refused to provide lethal aid. The president lamented, “it’s going to be a very hard thing to do business like this,” and continued to belittle Mr Zelensky and his country.

I watched the whole thing. I was surprised by the brutal attack on Volodimir Zelenski, but it is known that he bribed Hunter Biden. "You have no cards", said President Trump. The question in my mind is if the Europeans will finance alone the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The Tachash תחש

 The Torah mentions the TACHASH as an animal whose hides were used to cover the Tabernacle. Modern scholars consider the Mediterranean monk seal or dugong likely possibilities.

Dahudi Corridor

 Somebody posted this on X - connecting Israel with the Syrian Druze enclave and Kurdistan. 

Winter

 
Two months have passed and almost no money has come into my account - clients are not paying, and the Regulators are not approving the project but demanding more and more paperwork. The whole system of work I established in the last ten years is becoming unsustainable. I have to start paying more attention to collecting the money - possibly, in advance. The whole situation is discouraging. I am old, 13 years post pension and should not be working till 1 AM.  I wasting my time reading the vast anti-Israeli, anti-colonialist academic literature. By Israelis, by former Israelis in foreign universities, and by hundreds of European philosophers. Discouraging. 

P.S.: I started working and the hopelessness dissolved. Work is the solution. 

Europe loses the will to live

 

Old steelmaking equipment in a Dortmund plaza commemorates Germany's industrial past. Manchester has a wonderful industrial museum with real wooden textile machines. Manchester built a short railway to the port of Liverpool in the 18th century, probably the first in the world. We visited the port with its large warehouses, all empty and dead. There was nothing to see there, so we walked to the nearby Beatles museum. For us Jews, Europe is a cemetery, and slowly, it is being filled with funerary monuments.

When the Emperor mortgaged Hungarian Jewry

 In the Middle Ages, the Jews of Sopron (Odenburg) had issues with the municipality and the Habsburg Emperor intervened in favor of the Jews. Later when the Emperor needed money (Emperors are chronically short of money) he mortgaged his Jews. The legal status of Hungarian Jews was "King's slaves" and the rulers generally protected their"property" and the rights of the Jews. 

Pic.  Sopron's medieval synagogue.