http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon1007mm.html#.UlQOTi4PsR4.email Contra Bill de Blasio, the real divide is between those who pay taxes and those who live off them. As its very name suggests, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s tale of two cities is pure fiction, a myth that formed the intellectual basis of leftist politics long before Marx turned it into “science.” Its […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5913 The largest funeral in the history of the state of Israel took place on Monday evening in Jerusalem. More than 700,000 mourners attended the procession of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to the Sanhedria cemetery, causing virtually the entire city to shut down. Anticipating the mob scene and potential public safety risk, police spent the hours […]
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/10/why-bother-being-jewish.php?pf=yes Why should American Jews bother to be Jewish? According to a new Pew Research Center survey of the American Jewish community, more and more American Jews have reached the conclusion that there is no reason to be Jewish. Outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, intermarriage rates have reached 71 percent. Thirty-two percent of Jews […]
The giant scissors of destiny are clicking and clacking their way to our national credit card. If we don’t raise the debt limit, so we can borrow more money to pay the interest on the money we borrowed before, the scissors will snip and snap like economic armageddon.
And then the big shiny credit card that pays for everything gets cut up in two pieces. But never fear. If worst comes to worst, we still have options.
Our government is big. Really big. So big that the nearly 3 million government employees should be their own state.
The population of government employees is already larger than the populations of Rhode Island, Wyoming, Delaware, Alaska, Montana, North and South Dakota, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska and New Mexico. It’s so big that if government employees formed their own state, it would be the 36th largest state in the union.
So why not go for it?
Call it Bureaucratia, its state flag will be a stapler on a manilla background, its nickname will be ‘The Inaction State’, its state bird will be the Ostrich, its state flower will be made of plastic and its entire population will spend all their time in committee meetings to determine a suitably inoffensive state motto, pending that its motto will be, “I’m On Break”.
Under this arrangement, all government employees would be folded into a single state with two senators and the correct number of congressmen, and no more clout than that. And the other 50 states will finally have senators and congressmen working to create jobs for them, instead of jobs for government workers.
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Now-Irans-nuclear-program-should-glow-menacingly-328139
We may have good reason to doubt that Mutual Assured Destruction could work as well in the Middle East, as it did during the Cold War.
Unhindered by the flagrantly contrived diplomacy launched recently in Washington, Tehran now marches unhindered to full nuclear weapons status. When this condition is finally achieved, any American rapprochement with new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani notwithstanding, Israel and the United States will desperately try to contain a long-anticipated atomic menace. Asymmetrically-sized, but more-or-less jointly imperiled, the two allied states will then seek to identify still-available remedies.
In essence, this compensatory default position will center on instituting a dependably stable system of nuclear deterrence.
To be sure, any such residual effort by Washington and Jerusalem would be well-intentioned and indispensable. After all, to avoid a possible future of near-measureless lamentations, these allies would need to reconstruct certain earlier core elements of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” MAD, of course, was the nuclear threat-based scheme that had successfully preserved superpower peace during the US-Soviet Cold War.
Moreover, already back in 1995, David Ivry, then director-general of the Ministry of Defense (later, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States), had openly referred to MAD “as a model for Israel.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamadontcare-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by intellectual Michael Chandler, Conservative TV and Movie Star Morgan Brittany and Filmmaker Orestes Matacena (“Two de Force“).
This week the Gang discussed Netanyahu vs. Iran. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 12:50 mark) and focused on when Israel will have to make its move against the Mullahs’ bomb. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of Republicans are Jihadists? – which shed light on how the Left uses the words against its political opponents that it never dares utter about Islamic terrorists.
Forty years ago today, a Egyptian/Syrian invasion surprised and almost destroyed Israel. The attack was the culmination of a complex Soviet/Arab disinformation plot and secret military build-up. We know this because of Russian dissident-historian Pavel Stroilov, and from professional Arabists who over the years have paid attention to the Arab press and the antics of Middle Eastern regimes.
In the Russian archives, Stroilov uncovered [1] the secret diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev, deputy chief of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union International Department (a successor to the Comintern). On July 15, 1972, Chernyaev’s diary reports:
Last Sunday, Anwar Sadat publicly demanded an immediate withdrawal of all Soviet specialists and all Soviet militaries from Egypt, in protest, because he did not receive what Brezhnev promised to him at the latest negotiations in Moscow, namely the offensive weapons: SU-17 fighter bombers. This began a turmoil. Egypt’s Premier Sidki was persuaded to come to Moscow, and, I think, they have settled it. I mean, they must have given much to him, if not all he wanted.
President of Syria Assad, too, was here a week ago. Although he is a moderate, he has forced us to practically approve the “military solution”, and received a lot from us.
The rest of the world was not aware that Egypt and the Soviet Union had settled their differences, and thus the two countries used this to their advantage. Using [2] disinformation and influence agents like Victor Louis and Armand Hammer, the Soviets were able to dupe Israel and its allies into believing that Israel was in no danger. Meanwhile, they were preparing for the “military solution” that Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad had pushed for.
On the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Rose-al-Yusuf — the official organ of the only political party then allowed to exist in Egypt — published [3] excerpts from a book by the magazine’s military correspondent, Abd al-Satar al-Tawila. This was prepared on behalf of and revised by Anwar Sadat himself, and with access to secret documentation:
In this next phase of my life I have lots more time to get out across America to meet and speak with great people. This past weekend was the beginning of that trek, and it started in Atlanta where I addressed Dr. Michael Youssef’s 25th anniversary luncheon for his “Leading The Way” ministry.
As always, it is special to be home. I even had the chance to drop by my old stomping grounds, Henry Grady HS, and to visit with the JROTC Cadet Battalion staff. What a treasure it was to gaze into the eyes of those who continue a legacy I was able to be part of from 1976 to 1979. (The Allen West Foundation has established a scholarship fund for the Cadet Corps.)
After speaking in Atlanta, and watching a classic SEC football game between Georgia and LSU, I flew to Lafayette, Louisiana, on Sunday. Being a good southern fella, I arranged to attend church services Sunday morning at the First Baptist Church of Lafayette. Before the service, I met with Pastor Steve, who told me the sermon would not be terribly exciting because it would be about stewardship. Well, he was wrong. The service was lovely, the hymns were uplifting, and I found Pastor Steve’s terrific sermon worth sharing here.
The topic was “Five Principles of Christian Stewardship,” and the accompanying biblical reference came from the Book of Acts 4:32-5:11. He succinctly articulated these principles: unity, generosity, necessity, personal integrity, and accountability.
I recall thinking this was a message every single person on Capitol Hill, including the occupant of the White House, should hear.
Anyone who may have thought that, after the Holocaust, antisemitism would be passé is revealed in retrospect as naïve.
Sixty-eight years after the genocide, antisemitism remains rampant in the Arab world and much of the Muslim world. It’s back with a vengeance in Europe, largely—but not solely—Israel-focused. Today the world’s only country to be subjected to a global delegitimization and BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaign is the Jewish one.
A study released last spring by Tel Aviv University found that worldwide antisemitism rose 30 percent in 2012 compared to the previous year. That particularly involved “violent acts against Jews,” with “273 attacks on persons of all ages; in addition, 190 synagogues, cemeteries and monuments were desecrated, and over 200 private and public properties damaged.” Most of the attacks occurred in countries having the largest Jewish communities outside Israel—in descending order of attacks, France, the U.S., the UK, Canada, and Australia.
The report also “noted the rise of anti-Semitic parties on the far right in Greece, Hungary and the Ukraine” and observed that in those countries,
vociferous representatives of these parties openly incite in parliament against local Jewish communities. Blatant anti-Semitic and anti-Israel expressions appeared to ignite violent activity in Hungary, and a significant rise in desecration of cemeteries and Holocaust memorials was recorded in Poland.
This series, counting down from 10 to 1, will profile ten of the worst purveyors of antisemitism—whether individuals or groups—in the world at large; an ensuing series will focus on U.S. antisemitism. In our era, antisemitism is most endemic in the Arab and Muslim sphere; outside of that domain, it tends to be most concentrated on the far right (both religious and political) and far left. All the categories will be “represented” in the series.The Anti-Defamation League calls David Irving “one of the world’s most effective purveyors of Holocaust denial.” He is indeed probably the most effective in the English-speaking world. Though perhaps best known for his failed libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, the scope of his activities goes far beyond that episode.
Unlike classical liberals, the liberals of today hew to doctrine in the face of the evidence.
A classical liberal was characteristically guided by disinterested logic and reason. He was open to gradual changes in society that were frowned upon by traditionalists in lockstep adherence to custom and protocol. The eight-hour work day, civil rights, and food- and drug-safety laws all grew out of classically liberal views. Government could press for moderate changes in the way society worked, within a conservative framework of revering the past, in order to pave the way for equality of opportunity in a safe and sane environment.
Among elite liberals today, all too few are of this classical mold — guided by reason and empirical observation. By far the majority are medieval and reactionary. By medieval I mean that they adhere to accepted doctrine — in this case, the progressive doctrine of always finding solutions in larger government and more taxes — despite all the evidence to the contrary. The irony is that they project just such ideological blinkers onto their conservative opponents.
Reactionary is a good adjective as well, since notions of wealth and poverty are frozen in amber around 1965, as if the technological revolution never took place and the federal welfare state hadn’t been erected — as if today’s poor were the emaciated Joads, rather than struggling with inordinate rates of obesity and diabetes, in air-conditioned apartments replete with big-screen TVs, and owning cell phones with more computing power than was available to the wealthy as recently as the 1980s. Flash-mobbing sneaker stores is more common than storming Costcos for bags of rice and flour.
In the medieval-liberal worldview, gun control stops violence like that in Chicago or Detroit. Solar panels are the energy way of the immediate future; fracking is not. Voting fraud is almost nonexistent and mostly a right-wing conspiracy trope. High-speed rail is an efficient and economical means of transportation. The problem with public assistance is that there is too little of it, not too much. Affirmative action ensures fairness. Climate change is proven; further debate is counterproductive, and disturbing data to the contrary are little more than propaganda of the ignorant.
Like a medieval bishop, the new medievalists also seek to avoid the ramifications of their own ideologies. Like residents of a walled medieval city or religious order, they prefer enclaves and cloisters filled with others of their kind.
In California, the medieval liberal thinks it is terrible that the state’s public schools test near rock bottom in science and math. Cannot such testing be postponed? Are multiple-choice tests sufficiently sensitive to the contours of class, race, and gender? He senses that teachers’ unions and politicized mandates from the state may have something to do with the decline. Perhaps privately he is fearful that the vast migration of illegal aliens from Latin America, coupled with the inability of many African-Americans to achieve social parity, might be a contributing factor to the implosion in public schools, as well as the degeneration of the nuclear family across class and racial lines. Yet, in his projection, he accuses others of such blasphemous thoughts, even while he is usually guided by them in decisions he makes for his own progeny. For now, ensuring that the transgendered can use either public-school restroom is about all that he can offer to raise test scores and create a safe high-school campus.
