Memo to Washington: Kick the spending habit http://www.jeffjacoby.com/10733/memo-to-washington-kick-the-spending-habit THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT reported last week that the national debt had surpassed $15 trillion, clocking in at precisely $15,033,607,255,920.32 as of the close of business Tuesday. Since President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, the amount owed by the federal government to its lenders has soared more than […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/israels_divided_soul.html At the end of the Six-Day War, a tearfully triumphant Israeli soldier, standing at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, realized that he was “facing two thousand years of exile, the whole history of the Jewish people[.]” Suddenly and unexpectedly, the biblical homeland — east and west from Jericho to Jerusalem and north and south […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The assorted “Occupations” may be drawing to a close as even liberal mayors have lost patience with the occupation of public space and the budget drain created by aging radicals, wannabe hippies and random homeless people, hucksters, scammers and professional activists, but it isn’t over because it never really began.
To the left protest is an identity, which is also why the Occupations never seemed to have much of a coherent message. The purpose of their protests is to protest, the romance of the protest is all the justification that it really needs. Creating permanent protest encampments turned protests from an occasional activity into a theme park, and that was what Zuccotti Park really was, a protest theme park for overgrown children too old to go to Disneyland, who instead tried to go back to the seventies.
The left is one long permanent protest by useful idiots whose dissatisfaction makes them seek out alternative societies in the guise of denouncing this one. Zuccotti Park was Neverland, as it would be in the real world, complete with disease, rapes and a rising body count. Peter Pan had a bong, Wendy had body piercings, the Lost Boys had game consoles and no desire to go to work tomorrow. Together they recreated the same old narrative of Woodstock to Altamont.
Today’s Peter Pans and Wendys are as likely to be successful professionals as the old stereotype of dropouts who couldn’t hack it. They have degrees, often more than one, many of them have jobs that the actual 99 percent would kill for, and family backgrounds in the upper and upper middle-class. What they aren’t is adults. And that is an indictment of a culture whose top 9 percent sees no reason to keep going.
Generations of the left have produced children who are trained for success, who have the right tools and the right background, but who have also imbibed the idea that hard work is drudgery and that the only thing worth doing well is trying to overthrow society centered around some incompatible combination of the pleasure principle and social welfare for everyone. Those brats aren’t just squatting in dirty tents, many of them are lawyers, public officials and cabinet members.
The history of the left is of childishly naive ideals fought for with ugly tactics and implemented as totalitarian dystopias. “Everyone should have things and no one should feel bad” quickly morphs into “Off the pigs” and finishes as “Starve the Kulaks” and “Bring on the Gulags”. What begins with flowers ends with bombs and bullets, and depending on the outcome, sobs and bitter recollections of how the revolution was crushed, or revisionist history that denies everything that happened since the revolution succeeded.
The modern left’s strange combination of lotus eaters and fire breathers, freeloaders and fanatics, isn’t a split personality, it’s the identity of people who have been deprived of every other form of identity, who romanticize alienation even when they are actually insiders, because they are no longer members of a nation, a nationality, a religion or even a professional class. They are the lost boys and girls still looking for happiness long after their grandparents failed to find in drugs and communes, and their great-grandparents failed to find it in psychoanalysis and decadence, and their great-great-grandparents failed to find it in spirit rapping and unstructured poetry.
Those for whom happiness is escape briefly found it in a cluster of dirty tents, volunteerism, drugs, communal sleeping arrangements and the collapse of societal boundaries as the edge of a new world. Neverland with drugs, casual sex and a feeling of self-satisfaction at one’s own self-righteousness. It wasn’t a new discovery. The Lotus was known for thousands of years along with its bitter aftertaste. What follows after all the rules are broken is the discovery of how bad life can be without them.
At Zuccotti Park, the professional activist, working for unions and community groups, encountered the professional protester, who goes to a bewildering mix of rallies to spew his hate at his favorite targets, and together they ran into the lost boys and girls who confused anti-capitalism with utopia, and they all met the homeless and the huckster– the men and women living in actual poverty on the edge of their shining societies out of view of their parents’ mansions.
How to Reform Primary Education Posted By Roger Kimball URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2011/11/19/how-to-reform-primary-education/ Call Mr. Jackson. Who? Mr. Jackson. He was the critic Michael Dirda’s fifth-grade teacher. Judging from Dirda’s sketch of his activities in his new book On Conan Doyle [1] (modest subtitle: Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling), Mr. Jackson understood a couple […]
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/149829
“There were also visitors from Europe, and of course the U.S. – and if you looked hard, you could see visitors from places like Indonesia, India – even Pakistan and, believe it or not, Dubai! When it comes to water, politics step aside – and at WaTec, Israel generously opened the door to its sophisticated water technology to any and all who need help.”
Israel has emerged as a world leader in water technology, and that technology was on display at the 6th WaTec conference this week.
While Israeli technology has had an enormous impact on dozens, if not hundreds, of fields, perhaps the impact Israeli innovations have had on saving water is the most important.
Israel more or less invented drip irrigation, a more effective way to water plants and crops while saving water, and has continued innovating since – today it is the world’s technological leader in areas such as desalination and water recycling.
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=246202
“The four other mayors on the trip were Houston’s Annise Parker, St. Paul, Minnesota’s Christopher Coleman, Provo, Utah’s John Curtis, and Mark Mallory of Cincinnati, Ohio.The trip also included five other top municipal officials from those cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Miami, Florida and Portland, Oregon.”
Carlos Gimenez says Israeli reality is short-shrifted in 30-second sound bites; correct description is “developments.”
Israel should be describing Jewish communities beyond the Green Line as developments, not settlements, Carlos Gimenez, the recently elected mayor of Miami-Dade County, said on Friday. Gimenez, on a six-day visit to Israel with four other mayors of large US cities as part of Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee, said the reality of the settlements – as opposed to the stereotype that the word invokes – was what surprised him most during his first visit to the country.
“When you conjure up the word ‘settlement,’ you think about the Old West, pioneers and all that,” he said in an interview just after visiting Efrat in the West Bank.
“It is really more like a development, that is all it is,” he said. “Settlement is the wrong word to use. If you want to describe it to Americans, it is really a development.
“We spoke to someone who lived in a settlement. Just a normal person. Basically just someone who wants to live in a suburb. That’s it. Is there conflict there? Obviously. But [Efrat] is not what I thought it was going to be.”
With some 2.5 million people living in Miami-Dade country, Gimenez, 57, elected in June, is mayor of the eighth most populous county in the US. It is also the metropolitan area with one of America’s largest Jewish populations, one of the reasons he said he was keen on visiting Israel.
Hezbollah Waits and Prepares
With new tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, the militant group stands ready to retaliate against Israel
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203699404577044150277949624.html?KEYWORDS=NICHOLAS+BLANFORD
On a recent Saturday afternoon, a radar operated by French United Nations peacekeepers picked up a pilotless Israeli reconnaissance drone crossing into south Lebanon. It was given no more attention than any of the dozens of other surveillance missions flown by the Israelis in Lebanese airspace each month.
But when the drone passed above Wadi Hojeir, a yawning valley with steep, brush-covered slopes, it abruptly vanished from the radar screen. The startled peacekeepers contacted the Lebanese army, and a search of the rugged valley was conducted in the early-evening gloom. Nothing was found.
No one can recall the last time that an Israeli drone malfunctioned over Lebanon and crashed, and there were no reports of antiaircraft fire. The Israelis have said nothing. Neither has Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and arch foe of Israel. The peacekeeping force is now abuzz with speculation that Hezbollah may have found a way of electronically disabling drones.
It is food for thought as tensions escalate once more between the West and Iran, Hezbollah’s ideological patron, over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency released last week claimed that Iran has been engaged in “activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” It was the IAEA’s toughest report yet on Iran, and it was preceded by a flurry of articles in the Israeli press saying that the Israeli government was seriously considering a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/17/john-bolton-argues-the-u-s-has-the-wrong-president-for-a-syrian-intervention.html
John Bolton Argues the U.S. Has the Wrong President for a Syrian Intervention
The Arab League’s decision to suspend Syria is a serious blow to President Bashar al-Assad’s highly unpopular regime, and has led many to believe that its end is nigh. We can all certainly hope for Assad’s fall, but the real import of the Arab League’s tough stance is the escalation it represents in the Sunni Arab world’s growing confrontation against Shia Iran.
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What should America do? Why, after decades of Syria supporting international terrorists, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and brutalizing its citizens (using chemical weapons under Assad’s father), do we not pursue regime change?
While we should have long since been pursuing regime change against the Assad family tyranny, the unhappy reality today is that ousting Assad—or even aiding the dissidents with U.S. military force—is not something we should entrust to Barack Obama. The stakes are too high, the opposition too formidable, and the risks too great to allow him to exercise the commander-in-chief responsibilities in a possible confrontation with Iran. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we go to war with the president we have, and the incumbent is not fit for duty in the Syrian theater.
No Man’s Land Penn State’s moral adolescents http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/283557 There is a famous if apocryphal tale of a Fleet Street theater critic covering the first night of a new play in the West End of London. At the end of the evening, he went to a public telephone and dictated his review. The following morning, a […]
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/11/18/panetta-to-warn-israel-on-consequences-iran-military-strike/#ixzz1e7CWVJ8x Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said ahead of a meeting Friday with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak that he would warn his Israeli counterpart about the global economic consequences of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, adding that he still favors sanctions and diplomacy over a strike. “To go beyond (sanctions and diplomacy) raises […]
