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April 2016

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California’s Water Injustice Despite El Niño rains, the feds keep favoring fish over farmers.

By on April 15th, 2016

El Niño has doused northern California, but farmers in the state’s Central Valley won’t see much benefit. The Obama Administration is again indulging its progressive friends at the expense of low-income communities.

The Bureau of Reclamation recently announced that Central Valley Project agricultural water contractors south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta would receive a mere 5% of their contractual allocation this year despite brimming reservoirs in the North. Lake Shasta is at 90% capacity, and billions of gallons of water were released from Lake Folsom this winter to avert flooding.

Meantime, wildlife refuges and farmers north of the Delta—those in Democratic Reps. Jerry McNerney and John Garamendi’s districts—will get 100% of the water they’re owed. The liberal gentry in the Bay Area, which pipes its pristine water directly from Hetch Hetchy reservoir, also won’t be affected by this government water rationing. Federal biological opinions limit Delta water pumps to a third of capacity to protect endangered smelt and salmon, which can get sucked into the machines. Despite these restrictions, fish populations continue to decline.

The Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged last year that “existing regulatory mechanisms have not proven adequate” to halt the smelt’s decline and that “we are unable to determine with certainty which threats or combinations of threats are directly responsible.” The bigger culprits appear to be invasive species, Delta farm fertilizer, Sacramento effluence, the drought and, perhaps, natural selection.

The Obama Administration is nonetheless doubling down on a failed policy. Amid this winter’s storms, Delta water regulators reduced water pumping to protect putatively vulnerable larval and juvenile smelt. Three adult smelt—and no juveniles or larvae—have been killed by the pumps this year. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Making a Bad Iran Deal Worse By Lawrence J. Haas

By on April 15th, 2016

We’re witnessing a strange spectacle in U.S. foreign policy, one with no obvious precedent: President Barack Obama is trying desperately to protect his cherished nuclear deal with Iran, making one concession after another in response to Iran’s post-deal demands to ensure that Tehran doesn’t walk away from it.

Thus despite the terms to which U.S.-led global negotiators and Iran supposedly agreed in July, the deal is less a firm agreement than a continuing drama with one storyline: Tehran demands a concession, the administration proposes a response, Iran-watchers in Congress and elsewhere voice concerns and U.S. officials offer a middle ground to satisfy Tehran without igniting a revolt in Washington.

But the concessions – the most recent of which involve Iran’s ballistic missiles program and its access to the U.S. financial system – are not just rewriting the previous consensus among government officials, diplomats, nuclear experts and Iran-watchers in the United States, Europe and the Middle East over how the deal would work. They’re also serving to expand Iran’s military capability, strengthen its economy and leave U.S. allies in the region feeling more abandoned.

Washington’s post-deal maneuvering should not surprise us, for it mirrors the pre-deal negotiations during which the administration discarded several of its pledges to Congress and the public on key fronts – e.g., to secure “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected Iranian military-related nuclear sites, to include Iran’s ballistic missiles program in a final agreement and to prevent it from ever achieving nuclear weaponry.

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The Wall Street I Have Known Bernie Sanders should ask people like me—refugees from collectivist paradises—about income inequality.

By on April 15th, 2016

It takes an immigrant like me to parse the poison that Bernie Sanders is peddling to the naive youth of this country. It takes someone who has experienced socialism’s failures firsthand—as I did, initially as a small child, later as a young adult—to see why Sen. Sanders is succeeding: We elders, immigrants and native-born alike, have failed to teach our children and grandchildren about the economic history and false promises of the myriad forms of socialism that infest our world.

More than 75 years ago, I landed at Ellis Island as a 6-year-old child. My family had fled the despotism of National Socialism that had been foisted onto the gullible (albeit literate) German people. We were far from the only victims of collectivism. As all of us know but some refuse to admit, collectivism destroyed the economies of places like China, Russia and Cuba, and ruined the lives of millions of people.

Nine years after I arrived in America, the new state of Israel came into existence, making Jews like me both proud and curious. When I was 18, imbued with idealistic fervor, I decided to help the young nation grow and prosper by working the soil. Off I went to further the goals of social justice by joining a kibbutz, or communal farm. There the painful reality of the maxim Karl Marx popularized, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” hit home.

As an example of kibbutz ideology: Does it make sense for a person running the washing machines in the laundry to be receiving exactly the same pay and living benefits as someone who might be the community doctor after going to medical school? That may sound like an extreme example, but the same principles apply throughout the economic structure of a collectivist economy. Unlike Chinese or Russian collectivism, Israel’s was voluntary—but insane nonetheless.

I left Israel three years later, in 1954, because I was an American citizen and the time had come for me to serve my country. I was drafted and inducted into the U.S. Army. After two years of active duty, stationed back in my native Germany, I realized that my future lay in the capitalist U.S., not in Israel.

I came to see that I needed a college degree to get ahead in the competitive society of my home country. Because I had to work during the day to support myself and my family, I attended classes in the evening, taking eight years to get a bachelor’s degree in finance and an M.B.A. While going to night school, I got my first Wall Street job. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Civilizations go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 15th, 2016

We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West. Vigorous civilizations are a rarer breed. They change the world. But don’t last.

America used to be vigorous when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. It is growing decadent. And decadent civilizations fall to barbarians.

The barbaric civilization is purely crude. It runs on kinship. It is pre-rational and its guiding ethos is self-esteem often misspelled as honor. It has no notion of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It is incapable of recognizing inconsistencies in its code because truth is whatever it feels at a given time.

The barbarian has no morals. He obeys tribal codes that he does not understand, but accepts. Fairness exists only relative to his own interests. Empathy is foreign to him. He holds life cheaply and kills casually. He loathes outsiders and obeys no universal laws. His tribe is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery. And he assumes the world works the same way.

He cannot and will not interact with a more advanced civilization on any terms other than these. Cunning barbarians may learn the languages of more advanced civilizations and even ape their values for their own purposes, but they never adopt them. When a barbarian speaks of democracy, he means power. When he talks of religion, he means the worship of his own power. When he prattles of morality, he does not mean universal laws, but anything that impinges on his own power.

To the barbarian, all values are reducible to power. They are his gods, his religions and his laws.

The decadents are obsessed with filtering hierarchies of ideas and people. Their societies have grown too complex, too full of ideas, cultures and interest groups. The management of this unmanageable plenitude occupies all the energies of their fading civilization. They are the miser with the fading memory still struggling to count his gold. Decadents have too much of everything and no idea what to do with it except to squander it in fits of misguided and destructive impulses.

The decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively. Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are buried between equivocation. Decadents don’t believe in objective truths and so they cannot have universal laws. Instead they mire them in so many legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is always in violation of some obscure law. Life depends on a lawless dispensation from the law. Justice is impossible. Corruption is mandatory. The only way for the decadent civilization to function is to bypass its own safeguards through corruption, black markets and lobbying. This is true in all things.

The crucial task of the law is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished. This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.

This holds true in every other area of decadent life.

Interpretation is what the decadent civilization does best. While vigorous civilizations discover new things, decadent civilizations endlessly categorize and re-categorize them to accommodate intellectual fads. Decadents compulsively seek new systems of organization. The computer age is the glorious final era of the decadents who finally have infinite ways to manage infinite information.

What they lack is any way of distinguishing what is worthwhile in both information and systems.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

RUTHIE BLUM: OF KILLERS AND HEALERS

By on April 15th, 2016

On Wednesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party paid homage to a young woman who killed six people and wounded dozens more, when she detonated the homemade bomb in her handbag at the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem 14 years ago.

As was reported by Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah posted this tribute to the suicide terrorist on its official Facebook page.

The post reads: “Today is the anniversary of the death as a shahida [martyr] of the istish’hadiya [martyrdom-seeker], the hero Andalib Takatka from the town of Beit Fajjar, daughter of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades [Fatah’s military wing] in Bethlehem, who carried out a martyrdom-seeking operation in Jerusalem in which six Zionists were killed, and dozens injured. Glory and eternity to our righteous martyrs. We remain loyal to the path.”

As it happens, two of the “Zionists” Takatka slaughtered were actually Chinese construction workers.

In a video produced by her handlers in Fatah’s Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades prior to her final hurrah, Takatka was seen holding a Koran and stating that she was about to die as part of the Palestinian women’s fight against “Israeli occupation.” She also said she was going to finish the job that her cousins, Iman and Samia had started. (Their own plan to blow themselves up in Mahane Yehuda had been foiled by Israeli security forces.)

While Fatah was celebrating Takatka’s “martyrdom,” Abbas headed for a multi-country trip to Europe and the United States. Along with his fancy suits, he packed a draft of an anti-Israel resolution he intends to bring before the U.N. Security Council when he arrives in New York. Even the fact that his younger brother is critically ill did not prevent him from embarking on his “peace-seeking” journey. That is how serious he is about international relations.

One thing we can be sure he will not mention when he meets with foreign officials in Turkey, France, Russia, Germany and the U.S. is where his Qatar-based sibling is currently being treated for cancer, and not for the first time. Yes, Abu Lawi, as he is called, is lying in a hospital bed in the Assuta Medical Center in Tel Aviv.

The upscale hospital comes highly recommended by other members of Abbas’ family, as well. His wife, Amina, underwent surgery there in the summer of 2014. This was just after the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens at the hands of Palestinian terrorists — an event that precipitated Operation Protective Edge, otherwise known as the war in Gaza. And six months ago, Abbas’ brother-in-law received lifesaving heart surgery there.

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Georgetown’sAndrew Harrod: Jonathan Brown and a local imam put on a happy face on Islam to counter “Islamophobia” at a Presbyterian church in northern Virginia.

By on April 15th, 2016

The presentation “Islam: Fear over Knowledge” provides the “knowledge you need to combat Islamophobia,” stated Geneva Pope from the localInterfaith Communities for Dialogue on April 3 in an Annandale, Virginia, Presbyterian church. This biased introduction set the tone for a whitewashing of Islam before over 100 listeners by Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brownand Imam Zia Makhdoom in an event promoted by the Fairfax, Virginia, county government.

Makhdoom, whose Alexandria, Virginia, mosquehas featured various extremist affiliations, began the event proclaiming Islam a “message of peace, of brotherhood, and of equality for the entire humanity.” Christians in places like Egypt and Iraq “have lived there for centuries peaceably, as brothers and sisters,” although “conditions may have not have been perfect.” Numerous Middle Eastern Christians who have endured centuries as persecuted dhimmis under Muslim-majority rule refute his contentions (see here, here, here, and here).

“Taking one life is the equivalent of taking the life of the entire humanity” is a teaching “verbatim in the Quran,” Makhdoom stated with an oft-invoked reference to Quran 5:32. Yet, as is almost universal among Muslim apologists like him, his not so verbatim scriptural quotation ignored this verse’s exception forfitna, an Arabic word translated by the Muslim reformer Irshad Manji as “villainy in the land.” Sanctioned by the subsequent verse 5:33’s brutal death penalty, fitna invocations have justified violence against all kinds of Islam’s perceived opponents such as American troops in Afghanistan.

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To be kind is to be cruel, to be cruel is to be kind: David Goldman

By on April 15th, 2016

Just after the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, I warned that radical Islam would horrify the West into submission. In Europe, it has taken a giant step towards success. Europe’s horror at the prospect of human suffering has made it supine. Sadly, the more the Europeans indulge in their humanitarian impulses, the more Muslims will suffer. To be kind is to be cruel.

The Daily Mail recently described an incident off the coast of Italy:

The 240ft Monica had been spotted in international waters during the night.

When Italian coastguard boats drew alongside, the crews were shocked to see men and women on board begin dangling the infants over the side.

The refugees – mostly Kurds and many said to be heading for Britain – calmed down only when they were assured they would not be turned away from Italy.

What kind of people threaten to murder their own babies? The normal response would be to arrest them and put them in prison for endangering children. Instead, the British newspaper reported, “The Archbishop of Catania, Luigi Bommarito, was at the dockside to greet the Monica in what he called ‘a gesture of solidarity’. He said: ‘I’m here to appeal to people not to close their hearts and doors to people trying to survive. We mustn’t forget that in the last century many immigrants also left Italy.’”

The Monica incident is multiplied ten thousand-fold at the diplomatic level. Turkey’s President and de facto dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan last October threatened European officials with 10,000 to 15,000 drowned migrants, according to minutes leaked to a Greek news site and widely reported by European mainstream media–with no official denial. Erdogan demanded 6 billion Euros up front and 3 billion Euros a year to stop the refugee flow, telling European officials, “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses, What will you do with the refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees? the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

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Ghetto: The Shared History of a Word The Jewish ghetto haunts sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s new history of the American one By Adam Kirsch

By on April 15th, 2016

Today most Americans would be surprised to learn that the original ghettos were inhabited by Jews.
That is the experience Mitchell Duneier relates in his new bookGhetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, when it comes to teaching his own students at Princeton about the history of the ghetto. For the last 70 years, Duneier shows, the word “ghetto” has for Americans become exclusively associated with poor black neighborhoods, especially in big cities like New York and Chicago. Few people know that, for centuries before America even existed, Jews in many European cities were legally confined to walled neighborhoods known as ghettos. (“Ghetto” is the Italian word for “foundry”; the first Jewish enclave in Venice was located on the same island as a foundry, and the word came to refer to the neighborhood by extension.)

When it comes to understanding the black American ghetto, can we learn anything from the history of the European Jewish ghetto? It is a tricky question, which Duneier addresses carefully, since it seems to invite comparisons about who was more victimized and more resilient. Yet as he tells the story of the evolution of American thinking about the black ghetto—primarily through the lens of successive generations of academic sociologists, from Gunnar Myrdal to William Julius Wilson—the Jewish ghetto refuses to disappear. It haunts the subject like a ghost, raising questions that continue to define the way sociologists think about ghettos today.

Matters are complicated by the fact that, during the Holocaust, the word “ghetto” took on a very different freight than the one it had traditionally carried. Ghettos like the ones in Venice or Frankfurt were poor, isolated neighborhoods subject to discrimination and surveillance; but they were places where Jews lived and where their culture and civilization sometimes thrived. These ghettos had almost all disappeared by the 20th century, as European countries abolished official discrimination against Jews. It was the Nazis who brought the word back into common use when they created their own Jewish ghettos in occupied cities like Warsaw and Vilna. But the Nazi ghettos were not places for Jews to live; they were places for Jews to die of starvation and disease, or to await death in the gas chambers. The Warsaw Ghetto, in other words, had little in common with the Venice Ghetto except the name. As Duneier writes, “The Nazi ghetto was something entirely new.”

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Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism. Get Over It. By Liel Leibovitz

By on April 15th, 2016

Recent campus debates teach us an important lesson about bigotry and how to deal with it
Is anti-Zionism any different from anti-Semitism? The question is probably the most accurate seismograph we’ve got to measure where one stands on the ever-tremorous political grounds we all walk when we talk about Israel. Not that there’s necessarily any right or wrong answer; civil, well-meaning people can make arguments on both ends. Yes, because Jews and Jewish life cannot be reduced to the national aspirations of the Jewish state. No, because anyone denying Jews, alone of all the world’s nations, their right of self-determination is by definition a hater. It’s not an altogether useless debate to have, but it’s not the debate we’re having.

The debate we’re having, true to our times, is both dumber and more malicious, and it was on display this month as at least two of our finest institutions of higher learning, Stanford and Oberlin, treated us to the intellectual equivalent of watching a tightrope walker trip and go splat on the asphalt. Out west, a member of the school’s student senate argued that it was not anti-Semitic to argue that Jews control the media, the banks, the government, and all other social institutions. And in the Ohio enclave of righteousness, several Jewish students published a letter in a student newspaper defending a disgraced professor who had posted similar allegations on her Facebook page about the Jews’ malevolent omnipotence.

Both pronouncements are worthy of consideration. Like any good work of modern art, they’re one part parody, peenging poseurship at its most delightful, and one part dirge, announcing the death of good, rational thought. At Stanford, the portentously named Gabriel Knight, a junior on the school’s student governing body, claimed that it was, like, totally cool to talk about how the Jews control the world. “Questioning these potential power dynamics, I think, is not anti-Semitism,” sprach Knight. “I think it’s a very valid discussion.”

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Vermont senators declare war on Israel by Richard Baehr see note please

By on April 15th, 2016

For their anti Israel bias the Senators get good grades from the Arab American Institute: rsk

Patrick Leahy on the Issues Rated +3 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record.Bernie Sanders on the Issues Rated +2 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record.

Vermont was the state that gave President Barack Obama his largest margin of victory in the 2012 election — 36%. While Gallup poll rates it the second most liberal state after Massachusetts, that rating seems erroneous, given that Massachusetts delivered Obama only a 23% margin despite having a significantly more diverse population than Vermont, which usually equates to higher vote support for Democrats (Vermont is 94% white, Massachusetts 76%). Massachusetts even elected a Republican governor in 2014, as it has done frequently in recent decades.

Today, Vermont seems to be the center of a new political development, testing the waters for how far the Left can go in the Democratic Party in advancing an anti-Zionist agenda. The push to separate Democrats from the traditional support for Israel is currently led by Vermont senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, and a self-proclaimed socialist, is of course one of the two contenders for this year’s Democratic presidential nomination. He has had a string of successes in both caucuses and primaries, and has so far won 15 states and a few territories, and earned over 7 million votes. In 2008, Hillary Clinton lost the nomination to the younger, far more charismatic African-American newcomer, Obama. To lose state after state to a 74-year-old avowed socialist who calls for a revolution in politics is in some ways much more shocking than Clinton’s previous defeat. Assuming Clinton wins the nomination, still very likely due to her huge lead among Democratic super-delegates, and her far greater appeal than Sanders to minority votes, especially African-Americans, Sanders will have demonstrated either Clinton’s weakness as a candidate, particularly among younger voters, or demonstrated the power and appeal of his hard left message.

The New York primary is to be held on April 19. New York is the state with the largest number of Jews and the highest percentage Jewish population. Most Jewish New Yorkers, apart from Orthodox Jews, will cast their votes for Democrats.

One might expect that, like most politicians, Sanders would use the time before the primary to stroke that base of Jewish voters who will be a major component if he can pull off an upset in New York. Given his weakness in prior state contests among African-Americans and Hispanics, the traditionally liberal Jewish vote might seem made to order for Sanders. A fair number of liberal Jews (although probably a declining number each year) are pro-Israel.

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