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I’m just about ready for some class warfare.

I’ve been doing these for awhile, but I should probably explain the “interfaith dialogue” series a bit.  Basically they are short videos with an interesting combination of incongruous parts, sometimes humorous, sometimes not.  An excellent interfaith dialogue is something that combines two very different cultures or ideas so well that we learn more about both.

This video is one of my favorites, a Charlie Chaplin film clip from 1940 that nevertheless is absolutely perfect for youtube.

The first incongruous combination is obvious — making Hitler climb the drapes and prance around the room with a balloon is easy comedy, though certainly much easier now than in 1940.

But what elevates it is Chaplin’s almost supernatural grace. Especially see the moment at 2:09 when he jumps onto the table.  He seems to float without effort and land without a sound, mirroring the fluid motion of the balloon, which becomes the only dance partner that could ever do him justice.  It’s this combination of the sublime and the ridiculous that makes the clip so magical.

The NY Times goes behind the scenes of the football recruiting battle for a kid that finally chose OU.  The nut graf:

Along the way, McFarland was wined and dined. He visited the house of the president of Oklahoma, where he was promised a spot in the prestigious President’s Leadership Class. He rode in a Hummer stretch limousine in Los Angeles. He attended parties, including one in Dallas, where he said there was free alcohol, drugs and young women taking off their clothes.

Plenty of shady stuff, though OU comes out of it looking not so bad. Then there’s this:

He also thought that the Longhorns offered him the best education and that Austin had the most entertainment.  “There ain’t nothing to do at Oklahoma except football,” McFarland said.

No comment.

As he is apt to do, Matthew Yglesias sums it up perfectly:

And what’s been happening is that whatever Hamas’ ambitions may or may not have been, they were scattering short-range inaccurate rocket fire on Israel that was causing little damage. Israel struck back with actions that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pushed over a million more closer to the brink of starvation. And in general this is an important aspect of the conflict — irrespective of intentions, over the years you have many more dead Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.

But another piece of the puzzle is that though American Jewish liberals tend to take a lot of comfort in the idea of Israel’s good intentions and good faith throughout this whole process, there’s a reason approximately no Arabs anywhere in the world see it that way. All throughout the “peace process” years — through the good ones and through the bad ones — Israel continued expanding both the geographical footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the “disengagement” from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation. Israel’s policy objectives in the West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like post-”disengagement” Gaza.