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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303382004579129233031899894.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

From Lewis and Clark, to the canal system, to the steam train, America’s expansion across the continent kept on speeding up.

I had always thought that the tumbleweed—”a ghostly botanical thing looking like a bouffant hairpiece,” as Simon Winchester describes it in his vivid, valuable book—disturbed the stegosaurus in its grazing. But no: This fixture of the American West arrived in a sack of flax carried by settlers to the Dakotas in the 1870s, not even a fraction of a second compared with the near-eternal ancestry I’d believed the weed could claim.

“The Men Who United the States” is all about recent arrivals. Mr. Winchester (himself something of a recent arrival, being naturalized in 2011) explores the alchemy that made residents and settlers come to feel part of a country whose whole turned out to be much more than parcels of real estate inhabited by people who didn’t have any evident common ties.

This is a story of many individuals, well known and less so, who worked, very often with no such goal in mind, to unite physically the various parts of the country. That this enterprise was largely a commercial one does nothing to diminish the somehow spiritual architecture of its results. When a farmer’s grain reaches a market—and thus allows him to get a Sunday suit for himself and shoes for his daughter and a nice corner shelf for his wife’s knickknacks—the farmer forms a social link to the people who sell him the suit and the shoes and the shelf. “The Men Who United the States” explores these connections and shows those involved steadily overcoming the limits of what seemed possible at the time.

Anyone who thinks America’s best days are behind it should take a close look at the latest Nobel haul.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303376904579135283429301854.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop In its proud and storied history, Hungary has produced a dozen winners of the Nobel Prize: four for chemistry; three for physics; three for medicine; one for economics; and one for literature. Not bad for a […]

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“Socialist Zionism: Part 1” describes how socialist-Zionism came to dominate the Yishuv, as the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine was known. It was one of three Zionist visions that competed for control within the Zionist movement.David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, summed up the socialist-Zionist vision:

“The State of Israel must be an ideal state. The Jews will not relinquish their profound historical belief in a fusing of national redemption with the redemption of all mankind.”

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The shutdown of manned parks and memorials is understandable. The shutdown of open air, unmanned memorials, parks and scenic overlooks is not. It raises a number of serious questions about the behavior of our American government. I suspect that Congress will not ask these questions and, if they did, the Administrations would not answer them.

1. Whose bright idea was the closing of areas like scenic overlooks where it costs money to close them and nothing to keep them open? 2. When was this idea conceived? 3. Who approved of these ideas?
4. When was it approved? 5. Why did the president not order it stopped as soon as he found out about it? 6. Was he told about it or did he find out from the news media? 7. When did the president find out about it?
8. Who told the Park Rangers to make life as difficult as possible for tourists? 9. When were the told?10. When was the decision made to print and distribute signs?11. Who made the decision? 12. Who decided to make signs?
13. Who designed the sins?14. When and how were the signs distributed?15. When it became public, why wasn’t this stopped?

Jan Mel Poller

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/10/14/how-jihad-war-doctrine-in-sunni-and-shiite-islam-are-equivalent/ Shia and Sunni doctrines on jihad are fundamentally the same. 1 Even the so-called “requirement” for the “hidden” Shia Imam’s “consent” to wage jihad, was already argued away regarding “defensive jihad” by Abu Jaffar al-Tusi during the 11th century as the Shia of Iraq were beset by the Sunni Seljuk Turks. 2 This position […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5965   It is fitting that on the 75th anniversary of the appeasement at Munich, which enabled Adolf Hitler to seize parts of Czechoslovakia without a fight, the current presumed “leader of the free world,” President Barack Obama of the United States, has decided that the avoidance of war with Iran is now the principal […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4017/uk-muslim-underage-marriage “Forced marriage is probably the last form of slavery in the UK.” — Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for Northwest England. More than a dozen Muslim clerics at some of the biggest mosques in Britain have been caught on camera agreeing to marry off girls as young as 14. Undercover reporters filming a documentary […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/arts/design/museum-of-tolerance-inaugurates-an-anne-frank-exhibition.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1381831630-2TP5n1L5mwaGt8H403LQDQ

Museum of Tolerance Inaugurates an Anne Frank Exhibition

A new exhibit at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance restores Anne Frank’s diary to its horrific historical context—and then distills that context into fantasy and platitudes.

LOS ANGELES — What lessons do we learn from Anne Frank? Since her diary is the chronicle of an education, we learn what she learns: the lessons of daily life and early adolescence, acquired during a horrific time. We watch a meticulously observant girl, age 13, evolve into a self-consciously observant young woman, age 15. We watch — as one of Philip Roth’s characters pungently remarked — a fetus growing a face.

What we don’t learn from the diary is what happened after the last entry, on Aug. 1, 1944. We don’t learn how this self-described “chatterbox,” whose most-quoted pronouncement is “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” must have come to doubt that sentiment; nor do we learn that by that winter, she was a typhus-ridden, starving, naked, weeping, walking corpse in Bergen-Belsen, where the Germans had shipped her from Auschwitz along with other condemned souls in the waning months of the war.

One achievement of a permanent exhibition opening on Monday at the Museum of Tolerance here is that we do learn those things; history is not treated as the diary’s footnote but as its context. The exhibition is a $4 million, 9,000-square-foot examination of Anne’s life and times, offering films, touch-screens, reproductions and artifacts; it is perhaps the most extensive exploration of Anne Frank in any museum outside Amsterdam. It required arrangements with both the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, which holds the copyright to the diary and most of the images here. (The museum is charging a supplementary fee of up to $15.50 for admission to the exhibition.)

Bizarrely, though, for all its strengths, the installation nearly undermines its own achievement at the end. Understanding that also requires some history.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the sole survivor of the “secret annex” where Anne, her parents and sister, and four others hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam, published an edited version of Anne’s diary in 1947. Since then, partly because the diary only vaguely reports on history, the temptation has been to make history almost irrelevant. The diary’s subject is often turned into a generalized idea of injustice.

Sometimes the effort to lift the diary out of the particulars of its past has just meant a shift in emphasis. Mr. Frank wanted it treated as a universal tale. (“Do not make a Jewish play out of it!” he instructed the writer Meyer Levin in 1952, when Levin was trying to bring it to the stage.) And sometimes the diary is so wrenched from history that it can hardly be recognized; the Anne Frank House has long used Anne’s history and hiding place to champion causes including opposition to the Vietnam War or “the ugly face of nationalism” in the Balkan conflict.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/14/cmon-man Obama wants a debt ceillng default so he can blame Republicans. But they can turn this game around. Before October 1, one of the highlights of my family’s week was the “C’mon, Man!” segment of Monday Night Football. The blown plays, missed calls by blind refs, and part-time stupidity of some football players is […]

Explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, Italy. His first voyage into the Atlantic Ocean in 1476 nearly cost him his life. Columbus participated in several other expeditions to Africa. 1492, Columbus left Spain in the Santa Maria, with the Pinta and the Niña along side. He opened up the Americas to European colonization.
A YIDDISH SONG IN TRIBUTE TO COLUMBUS

THERE WAS AN OLD YIDDISH SONG NAMED “LEBEN SOL COLUMBUS” TRANSLATED TO MEAN “COLUMBUS SHOULD LIVE” A TRIBUTE TO THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA WHICH BECAME A HAVEN FOR MILLIONS SEEKING FREEDOM AND OPPORTUNITY. FOR JEWS IT BECAME THE ONLY NATION IN THE ENTIRE DIASPORA WHERE JEWS COULD FIND SECURITY, PROTECTION BY LAW AND THE FREEDOM TO WORSHIP IN PEACE.

ABRAHAM ROSENSTEIN WAS THE VOCALIST IN 1916. HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!!!

http://victor.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/700002432/B-17402-Leben_sol_Columbus_Leyben_zol_Columbus