Today marks the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the day on which Yahweh pronounces His annual judgment upon His chosen people, the Jews, whom He has chosen to harass for the past 5,000 years, having, it would seem, lots of free time on His hands. Speaking of Jews, I picked up a copy of the The Jewish Press at the train station the other night in order that I might more fully familiarize myself with the ways of those Jews who are actually Jewish and not simply Jewish to the same extent that I am a Methodist. This whole uber-Jew lifestyle is very confusing to me, particularly seeing as how this particular publication is peppered with Hebrew terminology of the sort that I somehow did not manage to pick up during my childhood among the considerably less pious Scotch-Irish wastrels of Dallas. Nonetheless, I did manage to pick up a few tidbits here and there. For instance, the observant types up here in New York are none too fond of this new, female, and very secular Israeli prime minister who just came to power by way of some Byzantine process that even most Israelis do not understand. A certain Professor Paul Eidelberg, consumed with distaste over the elevation of yet another secularist to the highest office in the Holy Land, proclaimed the concept of Israel as operating under a "democratic system" to be "the mother of all frauds," the process whereby the latest prime minister came to power to be "unheard of in any genuine democracy," and Israel to be merely a "so-called democracy." Elsewhere in the same issue, we are informed that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Apparently, someone forgot to tell Professor Eidelberg, who, incidentally, is the president of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, and would thus be in a position to know! Incidentally, Lebanon, which, as even the most reactionary of our nation's anti-Arabists would agree, is located in the Middle East, and has long been a constitutional democracy despite having been invaded by Syria, Israel, the U.S., and, for all I know, the Irish mafia. I was also reminded by the same publication that we are approaching the year 5769 of the Hebrew calendar, which is actually pretty awesome insomuch as that it puts us farther in to the future than does the more widespread Gregorian accounting. This is not quite as a cool as being ten thousand years into the future ala Dune, much less forty thousand years into the future ala Warhammer 40,000, but it still beats the pants off of the goyim's paltry 2008 years since the birth of Christ, whose arrival on our fair planet set back the clock in both the literal and figurative sense. So perhaps I shall convert to Judaism out of love for the science fiction ethos.