RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/brain-gain/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=b8d77633e1-Mosaic_2013_10_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-b8d77633e1-41165129

www.globes-online.com
The news that two of the 2013 Nobel Prize winners are Americans with Israeli pasts hit Israel just when it was discussing emigration in general and the brain drain in particular. According to the partisans of the brain drain argument, Israel as a country, and its academic institutions, do not offer good enough prospects to keep people who have alternatives. The lack of university positions, small research budgets, and a country that can be hard to live in drive the best of us abroad.

The counterargument has it that what people call the “brain drain is nothing more than the natural development of an academic career. When Omri Casspi plays in the NBA and Yossi Benayoun plays for Liverpool, we do not call this a brain drain. It is natural that researchers with lofty goals will seek to achieve them in the most valued and best-networked places with the biggest budgets. The fact that Israeli universities have succeeded in retaining five Nobel laureates is proof of the opposite of a brain drain.

So is there or isn’t there a brain drain? According to the Ministry of Science and Technology, in 2011, 5% of Israeli academics had spent at least three years abroad. According to the Taub Institute, in 2007-08 (the worst years of the university budget crisis, which has since ameliorated) 29 lecturers from Israel were overseas for every 100 who stayed in the country. In comparison, 1.1 per 100 Japanese faculty members and 3.4 per 100 of French faculty members were in the US at that time.

Ministry of Science Chief Scientist Ehud Gazit told “Globes”, “Israel has no brain drain like in other countries. The example of Arieh Warshel is indicative: he wanted to stay here, he prefers Israel. If he had a post, he’d stay. A real brain drain occurs when educated people don’t want to live in the country, but many Israeli scientists actually want to come back.”

“Globes”: So what’s the problem?

Gazit: “We’re the country with the largest number of scientists per capita, but in terms of positions, we’re somewhere in the middle. That’s the problem. As a result, about 1,000 top faculty members in foreign universities are Israelis. Many of them would return if they had a job.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamadontcare-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

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 ObamaDon’tCare:

Part I:

Don’t miss Part II of this special episode which shed light on 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 analyzed how the Left uses the words against its political opponents that it never dares utter about Islamic terrorists.

Part II:

To watch previous Glazov Gang episodes, Click here.

To sign up for The Glazov Gang: Click here.

In the spring of ’48, the collision of wills between the free world and the red slave empire of the east came to a head in Berlin.

The Communist strategy had been to push forward, to violate the spirit of the agreements and then the letter of the agreements while claiming to be the aggrieved party. Their takeovers in Eastern Europe baffled a West that could not believe the Reds would show such poor sportsmanship.

Had the USSR waited a little longer, a weary United States would have withdrawn. Instead Stalin decided to humiliate the United States and demonstrate its impotence in international affairs.

The Berlin Blockade was a siege in all but name. Beyond the sheer fact of food and coal being cut off to a city of millions were a thousand minor humiliations by Soviet officials designed to break the will of their enemies to resist.

That was their mistake. And it’s a mistake that the left often makes.

The barricades around the Lincoln Memorial and the WW2 Memorial, the traffic cones blocking the view of Mt. Rushmore and the sawhorses around Old Faithful are no Berlin Blockade, but they come out of the same meanness of spirit and the same motives.

The petty harassment extended to a 24-hour blockade of an inn that had tried to stay open and rangers arriving to block Old Faithful every time it erupted. There are few moments that sum up the meanness of spirit of the Obama Blockade as well as a park ranger angrily telling senior citizens to get back on the bus and stop taking photos because they are engaging in forbidden “recreating”.

The Obama Blockade has no valid justification. Like the Berlin Blockade, it is about power and control.

No one actually has to go to the Lincoln Memorial or the WW2 Memorial or any of the other national monuments that were closed off. They are places that Americans assumed they could always go because they were part of their national heritage. It never occurred to them that they would be shut down.

The Pisgah Inn, the Cliff House, the Claude Moore Colonial Farm or any of the other private non-profits or restaurants on Federal land run themselves. It takes more resources to shut them down, to blockade them, than it would to let them keep on operating.

But it’s not about what’s easier. The Communists picked a fight over Germany’s future currency. The current fight is over ObamaCare. But ObamaCare, like the Communist Ostmark, is about more than its substance—it’s also about control.

The siege of America, unlike the siege of Berlin, is virtual; but it also depends on seizing control over the distribution of vital necessities. In Berlin, that meant food and coal. In America, that’s health care.

The question is will you agree to ObamaCare, just as in Berlin the question was whether you would get a Soviet ration card, fill your wallet with Ostmarks and submit to a Soviet takeover. The Communists assumed that cutting off food would force the residents of Berlin to use Soviet ration cards and currency.

They were wrong.

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/assimilationist-liberals-reap-what-theyve-sown/2013/10/10/ The recent study of U.S. Jews by the Pew Research Center reports that 58 percent of American Jews marry non-Jews. Since few of those who intermarry are Orthodox, the percentage rises to 71 percent when Orthodox Jews are taken out of the equation. The fact is, American non-Orthodox Jews are intermarrying their way into […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/gestapo-tactics-meet-seniors-at-yellowstone

The most outrageous yet?

Below is the horrendous, Uncle-Sam-shameful story of tourists who happened to be visiting Yellowstone as the shutdown took effect. Ordered out of the park (the tour bus guide had paid $300 the day before to enter), ordered not to stop (even at restrooms) along the road out of the park, ordered mid-snap not to take pictures of a herd of bison — Stop “recreating,” said the armed ranger — they were then locked in under armed guard at The Old Faithful Inn, ajacent to the famous geyser — around which the feds erected barricades to prevent them even from seeing it!

What I want to know is how it is that the park rangers slip so easily into thug-fascist-mode? And, more important, When do we say stop? I wish I had a boat to join the flotilla that retired Navy Capt Ross who is trying to organize to reopen the waterway Obama illegally closed in Florida.

As the tour guide put it: “The national parks belong to the people. This isn’t right.”

It’s a story straight out of 2010: A conservative candidate is challenging a long-time Republican senator in the upcoming Senate primary.

Dr. Milton Wolf, a distant cousin of President Barack Obama, announced last night that he would challenge Pat Roberts (R., Kan.), a three-term senator who had previously served eight terms in the House.

“Now Pat Roberts wants a fourth decade in Congress,” Wolf said in his announcement speech. “I’m sorry, no one should be in Congress for four decades. No one. Not even Moses himself should be in Congress for four decades.”

Wolf, like Liz Cheney in her Wyoming bid against Senator Mike Enzi, is pushing the argument that it is not enough to have a GOP senator who votes correctly most of the time: Instead, Republican voters must demand politicians who will actively and publicly promote their beliefs. “We need more senators like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee,” Wolf declared, depicting himself as a similar figure.

Wolf isn’t the first to make this argument: Cruz himself made it in his own primary against the Texas establishment’s favorite, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. Few doubted that Dewhurst would vote as a conservative on most issues. But since
Cruz took office, he has proven his point: It is inconceivable that Dewhurst would have spent his August recess pushing to tie the defunding of Obamacare to the continuing resolution, or would have stirred up the kind of ire that has caused Cruz to encounter questions such as “What’s it’s like to be the most hated man in America?” as Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked him earlier this week.

Wolf has already proven his bona fides as an outspoken conservative: He has made appearances on Fox News, among other outlets, and is a columnist and blogger. In his announcement, he railed against the same targets that Sarah Palin and other top conservative activists have taken on: He attacked “career politicians” and poked fun at “high-priced Washington consultants,” saying, “I thank the consultants for their advice, but I’m still the same guy I was growing up in Lyons [Kan.]: I don’t beat around the bush; I don’t ask for A to get to B, and I don’t apologize for telling the truth.”

Roberts’s record in Congress is fairly conservative, according to the relevant scorecards: He has an 89 percent rating from Heritage Action (the average for a Republican senator is 67 percent), and the American Conservative Union gave him a 72 percent rating in 2012. The fiscally oriented Club for Growth, however, ranked Roberts in 36th place in 2012, putting him behind such senators as John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

In 1990, New York City suffered 2,245 murders. By 2012, that number had been reduced by more than 80 percent, to 419 — a proud record of achievement.

A primary factor in this reduction was the police program known as “stop and frisk.” Under that program, mostly used in high-crime neighborhoods, if a policeman has “reasonable suspicion” of possible criminal activity, he may stop a person and then, “for his own protection, may conduct a patdown to find weapons that he reasonably suspects” may be there. Given that the Supreme Court has long held that “the primary function of government . . . is to render security to its” people, and that it specifically employed the quoted language in its 1968 approval of “stop and frisk” in another state, one would have expected a judge to have quickly rejected the lawsuit, commenced in January 2008, attacking New York City’s stop-and-frisk program.

But District Judge Shira Scheindlin last month issued a 198-page opinion in the case of Floyd et al. v. City of New York declaring the city’s stop-and-frisk program unconstitutional — as involving unreasonable searches and seizures — and discriminatory against blacks and Hispanics. If that decision is not reversed, we can expect the return of the high murder rate that preceded stop-and-frisk.

This is not simply a case of an erroneous decision. Rather, the facts establish that this judge, known to be hostile to efficient and successful law-enforcement tactics, ignored Supreme Court precedent and logic to follow instead her personal, politically correct agenda. Moreover, on the case’s filing, she grabbed it for herself, violating the district court’s rule requiring random selection of the assigned judge. Significantly, she then took five and a half years to announce her decision — a delay that may preclude appellate review. Finally, her opinion, holding this program unconstitutional, is unsupportable.

SCHEINDLIN’S GRABBING OF THE CASE
Scheindlin is one of over 40 sitting judges in the Southern District of New York. To implement the basic principle that our courts apply the rule of law — not the rule of man or woman — that court’s rules mandate that the judge for every case “shall be assigned by lot.” That was not done here. Rather, Scheindlin endorsed the plaintiffs’ avoidance of the lottery assignment rule, by asserting that this new 2008 case was “related” to a case, Daniels et al. v. City of New York (on which she had been the judge), commenced in 1999 and settled and closed in 2003.

The court’s rules do permit the assignment of a new case to a judge sitting on an earlier case if the two are related, but only “when the interests of justice and efficiency will be served,” and if “(i) a substantial saving of judicial resources would result; or (ii) the just efficient and economical conduct of the litigations would be advanced; or (iii) the convenience of the parties or witnesses would be served.” The rule also specifies that the presence of “a congruence of parties or witnesses or the likelihood of a consolidated or joint trial or joint pre-trial discovery” would indicate the new case is “related.”

So far, Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s peace ruse is still bearing some fruit. President Obama was eager to talk with him at the United Nations — only to be reportedly rebuffed, until Mr. Obama managed to phone him for the first conservation between heads of state of the two countries since the Iranian storming of the U.S. Embassy in 1979.

Mr. Rouhani has certainly wowed Western elites with his mellifluous voice, quiet demeanor and denials of wanting a bomb. The media, who ignore the circumstances of Mr. Rouhani’s three-decade trajectory to power, gush that he is suddenly a “moderate” and “Western-educated.”

The implication is that Mr. Rouhani is not quite one of those hard-line Shiite apocalyptic theocrats like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in the past ranted about the eventual end to the Zionist entity.

Americans are sick and tired of losing blood and treasure in the Middle East. We understandably are desperate for almost any sign of Iranian outreach. Our pundits assure us that either Iran does not need and thus does not want a bomb, or that Iran at least could be contained if it got one.

No such giddy reception was given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In comparison with Mr. Rouhani, he seemed grating to his U.N. audience in New York. A crabby Mr. Netanyahu is now seen as the party pooper, who barks in his raspy voice that Mr. Rouhani is only buying time from the West until Iran can test a nuclear bomb and that the Iranian leader is a duplicitous “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Why does the unpleasant Mr. Netanyahu sound to us so unyielding, so dismissive of Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to dialogue, so ready to start an unnecessary war? How can the democracy that wants Iran not to have the bomb sound more trigger-happy than the theocracy intent on getting it?

Virginia’s Democrats want to preserve ineligible-voter rights

Democrats in Virginia are stopping just short of opening polling places in the graveyards to make sure every ineligible voter is counted. The state Democratic Party last week asked a federal judge in Alexandria for an injunction to block state and local election officials from deleting the names of ineligible voters. When the roll is called up yonder, in the updated hymn, the dead Democrats will still be here.

Election officials have compiled a list of 57,000 names of Virginians thought to have moved and put down roots elsewhere in the country. Election officials want to cross-check the names of nonresidents against the voter-registration lists and cross off the names of everyone who shouldn’t be voting in Virginia.

Terry McAuliffe is obviously polling well among the dearly departed because his party tells the court that “the need for relief is urgent.” The lawsuit argues that “the [State Board of Elections] is rushing to complete the purging in time to have the desired effect on the upcoming election.” The appropriate “desired effect” is to make sure that those who no longer live here don’t vote here. Every vote cast illegally cancels a legal vote.

The 13-page lawsuit warns on several pages that “the harm to the [Democratic Party of Virginia] and its members,” if the purge is allowed to continue, would be “irreparable.” This suggests that Democrats can’t win without the help of the temporarily dead.

IS THIS “CUP”ITALISM? RSK

This is hardly the lunch lady of Adam Sandler lore.

A former Rialto, Calif., school district accountant with access to kids’ lunch money was reportedly captured on video stuffing her bra with bills and charged with ultimately racking up $1.8 million of stolen food fees over the span of eight years.

San Bernardino County prosecutors filed 16 felony counts, from embezzlement to falsifying records, against Judith Oakes, 48, CBS reported. She was initially arrested in August and released on $50,000 bond.

Ms. Oakes is now due for an arraignment hearing on Thursday.

She was responsible for depositing the students’ lunch money into the school’s bank account. School officials because suspicious when they noticed the account balance seemed a little low — by about $3.1 million. Ms. Oakes is suspected of being responsible for about a third of that, CBS said.

If found guilty, Ms. Oakes could be sentenced to 11 years in prison.