http://theettingerreport.com/israels-brain-power-hightech-features-a-grand-decade/
Now we’re really pumping. Israel is commencing production from Leviathan’s 22 trillion cubic feet of natural gas field, formally turning the Jewish state into an energy powerhouse. The milestone for the country will pave its way to “energy independence” and, via exports, to stronger ties with its neighbors.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/start-of-leviathan-natural-gas-production-seen-as-major-milestone-for-israel/
Another multi-million fund for Israeli startups. Israel’s Aleph Venture Capital has raised a $200 million fund, for investing in Israeli startups. It previously raised a $180 million fund in 2016 and $150 million in 2013. It aims to support ambitious Israeli entrepreneurs who want to build global brands from Israel.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3775993,00.htmlhttps://aleph.vc/aleph-iii-71819670289e
Third intake for TAU and Shin Bet accelerator. Tel Aviv University and Israel’s Shin Bet Security Agency have announced the 3rd cohort (intake) of its accelerator program Xcelerator. Its six new startups work in fields including speech recognition, real-time video analysis, and cybersecurity.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3776316,00.html
New IAI accelerator. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has opened an innovation center in Tel Aviv, in partnership with US-based accelerator Starburst Ventures. The Israeli teams chosen for the first class of the accelerator develop radar, robotics, and autonomous driving technologies.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3776416,00.html
Via to open second Israeli R&D center. Israeli-founded ride-sharing company Via (reported here previously) already has one Research & Development center in Tel Aviv, with 250 employees. It has just announced it will be opening a second R&D center in Jerusalem, employing another 50 staff.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3776251,00.html
https://www.city-journal.org/anti-semitism-paris-new-york
Anti-Semitism seems to be as ancient as the Jewish people themselves. Hellenistic texts from 300 BC exude stereotypes regarding Jews’ physical traits and supposed love for money. Anti-Semitism, however, comes in many shades, depending on the local culture, just as being Jewish in the diaspora is a varied experience. Living in Paris and New York, I see this difference explicitly. When I first rented a place in Manhattan, I was flabbergasted by the mezuzahs attached at so many entrances, including of commercial establishments. Despite the recent outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks in New York, Jews are not a tiny minority in the city and have no reason to hide. In Paris, we tend to be more discreet; if we have a mezuzah, we will usually place it inside.
In New York, Jews are divided into distinct communities—Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Reform, ultra-Orthodox—not familiar in France. In Paris, where Jews are scattered around the city, the main distinction is between Ashkenazim—Jews with an Eastern European background—and Jews who came to France in the 1960s from Algeria and other North African colonies, following independence. This second group now constitutes a majority and doesn’t always see eye-to-eye politically and culturally with the Ashkenazim, especially on the question of Israel. French society, however, which promotes active laicization as a positive value much more vigorously than does America, has largely secularized all of us. The French generally do not attend religious services, except for weddings and funerals: on Sunday morning, churches stay mostly empty, and the same goes with most synagogues on Saturday. Paris’s Orthodox Jewish community is rather small and concentrated in specific neighborhoods of Paris and its suburbs.
https://babylonbee.com/news/castros-campaign-fails-when-democrats-realize-his-first-name-isnt-fidel
U.S.—Julian Castro was forced to pull out of the Democratic primaries after Democrats suddenly realized his first name wasn’t Fidel.
Many Dems had thrown their support behind Castro, excited that the legendary human rights activist and Commie was running for president. They were much less enthused to learn it was actually Julian Castro who was running, a guy they’d never heard of, and presumably not quite as far left as Fidel.
“Castro seemed to be running on the star power of his last name alone,” said one commentator. “Faking Democrats into believing you’re a Communist dictator can jumpstart a campaign, but it just isn’t enough to carry you over the finish line. As soon as Democrats realize you’re not the guy who brought Cuba into its golden age of being a communist utopia, they’re going to move onto another candidate.”
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/banning-alternatives-to-child-gender-experiments/
“It is important to look more closely at the effects of ‘puberty blockers’ and cross-sex hormones because their use is fundamental to medical intervention in childhood gender dysphoria. Proponents maintain they are ‘safe and entirely reversible’ when they are nothing of the kind.
The Labor government of Victoria is in the process of drafting legislation to ban so-called “conversion therapy”, which it defines as “any practice or treatment that seeks to change, suppress or eliminate an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity”.
On the face of it, this would appear to be a good thing, given the effect of the so-called “Safe Schools” program, and other initiatives, which, under the camouflage of anti-bullying, have planted seeds of primordial confusion in the minds of many children with their doctrine of gender fluidity, which preaches there is no such binary entity as a boy or a girl. The ideology asserts that everyone is somewhere on the intervening rainbow, depending on their feelings at the time.
The Victorian government could have been applauded had it decided its Education Department was no longer permitted to promote the ideology that has caused hundreds of Victorian children to be submitted to attempts by members of the Health Department to eliminate gender identity determined by chromosomes, and to change bodies to suit mental orientations.
But no: the Andrews government has no intention of stopping the evangelism and practices of the new ideology. To the contrary, with Orwellian Newspeak, it intends to ban any attempt to “convert” or re-orientate a confused child back to a gender identity congruent with its chromosomes.
Failure to comply with the ban will be punished by criminal or civil law, or both, whether committed by omission or commission. Omission will comprise failure of a therapist or teacher to refer a confused child to the Gender Service at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne where it may undergo “affirmation” of a new gender by means of hormones and surgery. Commission comprises attempts to “make the child comfortable in the skin in which it was born” by means of family and individual psychotherapy: the former mode of therapy that was associated with success, but is now derided as “abhorrent”, and is to be banned as “conversion therapy”.
amgreatness.com/2020/01/04/there-are-great-books/
Those classics that are called the Great Books are most closely associated with Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Hutchins.1 When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, he hired Adler to teach philosophy in the law school and the psychology department. Upon arriving, Adler, rather brashly he admits, recommended to Hutchins a program of study for undergraduates using classic texts. Adler had taught in the General Honors program at Columbia University begun in 1921 by professor John Erskine. Hutchins asked him for a list of books to be read in such a program. When Hutchins saw the list, he told Adler that he had not encountered most of them during his student years at Oberlin College and Yale University. Hutchins later wrote that unless Adler “did something drastic he [Hutchins, referring to himself] would close his educational career a wholly uneducated man.”2 Hutchins remained president for 16 years before serving as chancellor until 1951, and the following year, they did something drastic.
In 1952, Adler and Hutchins published the Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes.3 Adler and Hutchins included the 714 authors they considered most important to the development of Western Civilization.4 The influence of their Great Books movement on American culture for several decades was considerable and continues to this day.
Their selection of books from over a half-century ago has held up rather well. For example, I compared them to the 2007 list published by journalist and cultural critic J. Peder Zane. Zane asked 125 leading writers to list their favorite works of fiction.5 Zane found that the 20 most common titles listed by the writers were:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/1619-project-top-historians-criticize-new-york-times-slavery-feature/
The dissenting historians are performing an important public service by making the dishonesty of The New York Times Magazine’s feature a matter of record.
The reviews of the 1619 Project are in.
It is “a very unbalanced, one-sided account.” It is “wrong in so many ways.” It is “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.” It is “a tendentious and partial reading of American history.”
This is what top historians have said of the splashy New York Times feature on slavery in the U.S. that aspires to fundamentally reorient our understanding of American history and change what students are taught in the schools.
Given that the Times can’t necessarily be trusted to give a straight account in its news pages of Mitch McConnell’s latest tactical maneuver, it wouldn’t seem a natural source for objective truth on sensitive historical matters, and sure enough, the 1619 Project is shot through with an ideological radicalism that leads to rank distortions and laughable overreach.
The project has been controversial since it was first published in The New York Times Magazine last year, but its architects sneered at the critics as troglodyte conservatives (or “white historians”) unwilling to grapple with the country’s racial sins. Then the World Socialist Web Site — of all things — begin publishing interviews with eminent historians slamming the project.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/history-without-heroes-villains-incomplete/
Academic history scorns them, but you can’t keep a great man down
It is a strange irony that heroes and villains have retreated from the classroom just as they’ve become ubiquitous in popular culture. Outsized personalities may be disappearing from social-studies textbooks and college history departments, but they live on in airport bookstores and bestseller lists. On YouTube, amateur historians dissect great battles and famous generals with an enthusiasm usually reserved for secondary Game of Thrones characters. Half-forgotten dynasties populate obscure Twitter feeds. Eccentric historical figures are now fodder for rambling podcast episodes.
Great-man theory has long been out of favor with universities, where structural explanations — class, race, geography, gender, and the like — put Hannibal and Napoleon to flight decades ago. Ron Chernow and Robert Caro, two authors who still produce decidedly old-fashioned historical biographies, are notable for both their success and the fact that they have backgrounds in journalism, not academia. Slowly but surely, a pedagogical approach that emphasizes structural factors over individuals is marching through our institutions. California’s proposed new high-school history curriculum is awash in race, gender, and class buzzwords. The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a monomaniacal reinterpretation of American history through the lens of slavery, comes complete with a high-school teaching guide.
Yet banishing biography and personal drama from the classroom hasn’t suppressed our collective fascination with the great figures of the past. It has merely displaced their study to the Internet, where unfashionable, disreputable, and downright offensive ideas live on forever. Far outside the realm of respectability lies the alt-right, which has enthusiastically appropriated the iconography and heroic pose of various historical figures, from Crusaders to Victorians to the statesmen and generals of classical antiquity.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iranian-analytics/
For all the current furor over the death of Qasem Soleimani, it is Iran, not the U.S. and the Trump administration, that is in a dilemma. Given the death and destruction wrought by Soleimani, and his agendas to come, he will not be missed.
Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.
To retain domestic and foreign credibility, Iran would now like to escalate in hopes of creating some sort of U.S. quagmire comparable to Afghanistan, or, more germanely, to a long Serbian-like bombing campaign mess, or the ennui that eventually overtook the endless no-fly zones over Iraq, or the creepy misadventure in Libya, or even something like an enervating 1979-80 hostage situation. The history of the strategies of our Middle East opponents has always been to lure us into situations that have no strategic endgame, do not play to U.S. strengths in firepower, are costly without a time limit, and create Vietnam War–like tensions at home.
But those wished-for landscapes are not what Iran has got itself into. Trump, after showing patience and restraint to prior Iranian escalations, can respond to Iranian tit-for-tat without getting near Iran, without commitments to any formal campaign, and without seeming to be a provocateur itching for war, but in theory doing a lot more damage to an already damaged Iranian economy either through drones, missiles, and bombing, or even more sanctions and boycotts to come. If Iran turns to terrorism and cyber-attacks, it would likely only lose more political support and risk airborne responses to its infrastructure at home.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/when-the-author-of-the-constitution-denounced-the-curse-of-slavery/
We need to rediscover America. America isn’t the largest country in the world. We don’t have the most people or the most homogeneous culture. So why have there been more American Nobel Prize winners than from any other country? Why do Americans consistently lead in medical innovation? Why is our entertainment culture so dominant worldwide? Why did we get to the Moon first, and why did we build the Hubble and the other Great Observatories?
Americans led because we’re free to think and create. But we’re in danger of losing this freedom by losing our history. The consequences of forgetting where we came from and how we got here could be catastrophic. It’s leaving too many Americans skeptical of or even disliking our own country — and not understanding or even believing in the freedom that empowers Americans to lead the world.
Misinformation about slavery is the most conspicuous case in point at the moment. The broadly defined left, misinformed by Howard Zinn and Marxists in academia, now believes that the United States was wickedly founded not on the noble ideals of individual freedom written down in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution, but on slavery, white supremacy, and exploitation. They distrust the Constitution and figuratively spit on the founders’ flag. The New York Times’ 1619 Project is intended to make more Americans believe this lie.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/1/the-idea-of-an-american-nation
“These developments leave the United States without any strong foundations to keep itself together as a political enterprise—in a circumstance when its increasing diversity requires some kind of unifying thread. What will that be? No one now knows. But unless it is somehow found, the United States will be at risk of blowing itself apart in the twenty-first century, as it did once before in the middle of the nineteenth.”
I begin with a conclusion: the United States of America is nearing a point at which it can no longer be described as a nation-state, in the sense that term is generally used, and is evolving into a different kind of enterprise—one lacking the underpinnings of a common culture, language, religion, or nationality that we commonly associate with modern nation-states.
This is due to several intersecting causes: destructive ideas (identity politics); significant and apparently irresistible developments in the world (globalism and large-scale migration); benign conditions that erode national loyalties (peace and prosperity); and the unique character of the American nation (a nation-state built upon universal principles). These have brought into being new lines of conflict in the United States, with some rallying to preserve an inherited idea of the American nation while others promote the forces that are eroding it. Indeed, America’s two political parties seem to be organizing themselves around this fundamental line of disagreement.
If nationalism is bad, then so are nations and nation-states.
Many say that nationalism is a bad thing—that it is a cause of wars, group hatreds, irrational conflicts, and the like—and that we will live better without it. There is some truth to this. But if nationalism is bad, then so are nations and nation-states. Can we have nations without nationalism? Can we have an American nation absent some sense of American nationalism? Obviously not. While nationalism is sometimes taken too far, it is easy to recognize the vices of nationalism without appreciating its virtues. The United States, with its diversity of geography, conditions, and peoples, would have fallen apart long ago without the idea of a nation to hold it together. As a matter of history, nationalism was held up as the antidote to the tendency of the American union to split up and break apart. As the idea of an American nation retreats, the possibilities for break-up will advance at a similar rate.
