http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/rethinking_palestine_2012.html In 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), failed to win U.N. acceptance of Palestine as an independent state1. This year, he lowered the bar to upgraded status within the U.N. In the intervening year, Palestinian finances have collapsed, Palestinians have taken to the street to denounce PA corruption rather than Israel, […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/obamas_freudian_slip_he_wants_to_export_jobs.html President Obama told a September 26 rally at Kent State University in Ohio, “I want to see us export more jobs.” Then he caught himself and continued, “Export more products — excuse me. I was channeling my opponent for a second.” According to Freud, such slips of the tongue reveal true intentions that a […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/911-families-say-obama-set-to-bring-gitmo-to-us-soi New York, NY, October, 2, 2012-9/11 families strongly object to the Obama administration’s plan to purchase Thomson Correctional Facility in Thomson, Illinois without Congressional approval. As stated in our July 27 letter, signed by more than 100 family members, to House Speaker John Boehner, 9/11 families believe this purchase is a back door effort […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-world-without-mohammad-and-islam?f=must_reads Daniel Greenfield’s “Imagine if Mohammed Had Never Existed” (FrontPage, 29 September) is an invitation to explore some alternative “what might have been” history. It is tempting, for example, to imagine recent history and the state of America had President Barack Obama never existed – if, say, Stanley Ann Dunham had decided to try out […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/10/03/obama-would-have-sent-bin-laden-to-civilian-court/
We have a clueless ideologue, or, more likely, a hopelessly dishonest ideologue, as commander-in-chief. There can’t be any other explanation.
The Hill reports that President Obama has said he would have had Osama bin Laden sent to a civilian U.S. court for a criminal trial if the Navy SEALs had captured him, as opposed to killing him. The report is based on a Vanity Fair article derived from Mark Bowden’s new book, The Finish. Using the constitutional term “Article III” as lawyers often do in referring to the civilian federal courts, the report quotes Obama as explaining,
We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III…. I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.
It is hard to know where to begin with anything this foolish. Let’s start with dishonesty. Thanks to the train wreck Obama’s demagoguery against Bush counterterrorism has made out of terrorist detention, our forces have killed in several situations — including the bin Laden raid — when it might well have been possible to capture terrorists. A president who actually believed the fantasy that Muslim populations are swayed by how much “due process and rule of law” we give to jihadist terrorists would never have adopted a kill-over-capture preference. For all his agitation against Bush’s war-paradigm for confronting our terrorist enemies, Obama has made liberal use of it in killing terrorists without any judicial warrants or trials. As he well knows, the law of war is the rule of law in wartime, and he has obviously not wasted much time fretting over due process.
http://times247.com/
THE BLAME GAME: IT’S ALL LEHRER’S FAULT!!!!!
Obama campaign hits Lehrer’s moderating
Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter …
Read more…
Debate rages on Obama’s downward glances
President Obama is getting lots of c…
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Maher: Obama does need a teleprompter
HBO host and comedian Bill Maher, wh…
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Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KCi2iwE
Barone: Coddling by media left Obama untested
Washington Examiner
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Commentary
Barone: Coddling by media left Obama untested
In this first debate President Obama paid the price for the hands-off treatment he has received from mainstream media. His talking points, advanced by his spokesmen in the confidence that they will not be seriously challenged, were refuted by a well-informed Mitt Romney. Read more…
Focus group: Undecideds shift strongly to Romney
Twitchy
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
News
Focus group: Undecideds shift strongly to Romney
Pollster Frank Luntz assembled a focus group consisting of undecided Colorado voters. By the end of tonight’s debate, the group had moved dramatically toward GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Read more…
Michael Moore goes on Twitter rant over debate
The Hill
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
News
Michael Moore goes on Twitter rant over debate
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore went on a Twitter rant over President Obama’s performance at the first presidential debate. “Fire all debate consultants now,” he tweeted, adding “This is what happens when [you] pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDDlma4
CNN poll: 67% say Romney won debate
CNN
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blogs
Two-thirds of people who watched the first presidential debate think that Mitt Romney won the showdown, according to a nationwide poll. No presidential candidate had topped 60% in that question since it was first asked in 1984. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDedS4y
Sullivan: Disaster for ‘effete, wonkish’ Obama
The Daily Beast
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blogs
The debate was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look. Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument. Read more…
Obama debate performance: Worst since Carter
The Washington Times
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Commentary
Bewildered and lost without his teleprompter, President Obama flailed all around the debate stage last night. He was stuttering, nervous and petulant. Not since Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan has the U.S. presidency been so embarrassingly represented in public. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDugrfy
What I Miss About America takes you on a tragicomic tour of what’s gone missing in America, during our Golden Age of Hope and Change. With a barrage of one-liners, it summons up the lost world of American greatness, and inventories the treasures that have been snatched from under our noses.
Readers are saying about What I Miss About America:
“Given that The Fates decided to condemn us to live in a Post-American America, at least we have Stella Paul who consistently reminds us that it is possible to laugh through the tears at what we’ve become. And not just laugh – shriek with recognition at her descriptions of how we’d say it if only we were insanely clever and insightful.”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, U.S. correspondent for The Jewish Press.
“Stella Paul works on the heart, mind, soul, and gut levels, all at once, letting us realize how much we are in the process of losing.”
Thomas Lifson, editor, American Thinker
What I Miss About America is attractively priced for the Obama economy at just $1.99. Buy one for yourself, and a dozen for your friends and family to spread the word about what we’re missing – and what we absolutely must get back.
http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/Piss-Christ—Art–and-Violence-6908
“Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination,” writes Camille Paglia, an atheist, in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. She is referring directly to Piss Christ. I interviewed Paglia last Thursday about her new book at the museum of art in Philadelphia, and she made the point that religion lies at the heart of all great art. One of the reasons why the art world is spiritually and intellectually hollow today, she said, is because it continues to “sneer” at religion and think, mistakenly, that doing so is still avant-garde. It’s not. It’s old news.
Serrano’s work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the light of sunlight?”
“Piss Christ” has been resurrected.
Or, at least, the controversy surrounding it has been raised from the dead, now that it is back in New York at the Edward Tyler Nahem gallery (through October 26) in an exhibit called “Body and Spirit” which celebrates the life and work of its creator, the artist Andres Serrano, whom we’ve written about before.
Over twenty years ago, in 1989, the hazy image of a crucified Christ, submerged in a jar of Serrano’s urine, created a public firestorm when conservative Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (NY) deplored it on the Senate floor as a “despicable display of vulgarity”—one that had, no less, been funded by taxpayers. Serrano was radical, but he wasn’t that radical: The so-called avant-garde artist received government support to the tune of $15,000 for the work.
Today, what’s astonishing about Piss Christ is not its vulgarity or shock-value; it is a completely mundane work of “art” which has aged as well as a cheap wine spritzer. The only merit it has is as a historical artifact of the culture wars. It is, to use the phrase of TNC art critic James Panero, a boring blasphemy.
No, what’s astonishing is that despite its third-rate stature, it continues, after all these years, to provoke its intended target to disturbing outbursts of anger and violence.
On Palm Sunday in 2011, for instance, a group of radical young Christians stormed a gallery in Avignon, France, which was displaying Piss Christ as part of an exhibit. They made their way past security, threatened a guard with a hammer, broke through the Plexiglas protecting the image, and slashed it with a sharp object. In 1997 at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, the work was also vandalized, and gallery officials received death threats for showing it. In 2007, a group of neo-Nazis attacked a Serrano show in Sweden (though Piss Christ was not on display there).
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem–math—anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446
A look at anti-Semitic university admissions in the USSR from the perspective of a leading mathematician.
Burke
was right!
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, I thought math was a stale, boring subject.1 I could solve all of the problems and ace all of the exams at school, but what we discussed in class seemed pointless, irrelevant. What really excited me was Quantum Physics. I devoured all the popular books on this subject I could get my hands on. But these books didn’t go far enough in answering deeper questions about the structure of the universe, so I wasn’t fully satisfied.
As luck would have it, I got help from a family friend. I grew up in a small industrial town called Kolomna, population 150 thousand, which was about seventy miles away from Moscow, or just over two hours by train. My parents worked as engineers at a large company, making heavy machinery. One of their friends was a mathematician by the name of Evgeny Evgenievich Petrov, who was a professor at a local college preparing school teachers. A meeting was arranged.
Then in his late forties, Evgeny Evgenievich was friendly and unassuming. Bespectacled and with beard stubble, he was just like what I imagined a mathematician would look like, and yet there was something captivating in the probing gaze of his big eyes. They exuded curiosity about everything. Knowing that I was fascinated with the quantum world, he convinced me that spectacular advances in this field were all based on hardcore mathematics.
“If you really want to understand it, you have to first learn math,” he said.
At school we studied things like quadratic equations, basic Euclidean geometry, and trigonometry. I had always assumed that all mathematics somehow revolved around these subjects: perhaps problems became more complicated, but they still remained within the same general framework with which I was familiar. But what Evgeny Evgenievich showed me were the glimpses of an entirely different world, an invisible parallel universe, whose existence I hadn’t even imagined. It was love at first sight.
I started meeting with Evgeny Evgenievich on a regular basis. He would give me books to read, and, at our meetings, I would tell him what I learned and ask follow-up questions. Evgeny Evgenievich played soccer, ice hockey, and volleyball with enthusiasm, but like many men in the Soviet Union in those days, he was also a chain smoker. For a long time afterwards, the smell of cigarettes was, in my mind, associated with doing mathematics.
I was learning quickly, and the deeper I delved into math, the more my fascination grew. Sometimes our meetings would last well into the night. Once, the auditorium we were in was locked by the custodian who couldn’t fathom that there would be someone inside at such a late hour. And we must have been so deep into conversation that we didn’t hear the turning of the key. Fortunately, the auditorium was on the ground floor, and we managed to escape through the window!
It was 1984, my senior year at high school. I had to decide which university to apply to. Moscow had many schools, but there was only one place to study pure math: Moscow State University, known by its Russian abbreviation MGU, Moskovskiy Gosudarstvenny Universitet. Its famous Mekh-Mat, the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, was the flagship mathematics program of the USSR. Since I wanted to study pure math, I had no choice but to apply there.
Unlike the U.S., there are entrance exams to colleges in Russia. At Mekh-Mat there were four: written math, oral math, an essay on literature, and oral physics. I had, by then, progressed far beyond high school math, so it looked like I would sail through these exams.
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5103/features/krav-maga/?print
The year was 1987 when the Intifada started. Just after few months after I had joined a Jerusalem judo club, our instructor, Dr. Yosi Lev, told us he was going to make a change in our practice sessions: we would now divide our classes between judo and krav maga (“contact combat”). “As a person who has gone through some wars in this country,” he explained, “I can tell you that these riots we are experiencing right now are not going to disappear quickly. The streets in Israel are going to be much less safe, and I want you to be equipped with a martial art more practical than judo.”
We all respected our instructor. Dr. Lev was a man who was struck with polio as a young child, a disease that left him paralyzed in both his legs. With a will of iron, he overcame his paralysis, studied judo, and became one of the founders of the sport in Israel. He holds a fifth dan in judo, a very high grade of black belt, and is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of martial arts for the disabled. Dr. Lev studied judo, Jujutsu, and street self-defense under Denis Hanover, one of the most important figures in the development of what is now known as krav maga.
I didn’t like krav maga. I didn’t like its brutality and violence. This was not my plan, I thought, when I chose judo as my sport. Indeed, I did not survive the practice of judo, either; when Yosi eventually decided that teaching judo was too demanding for him, and I left it for the study of aikido, which aims at self-defense without unnecessary harm to the attacker.
I did appreciate, though, having been taught krav maga as a modern martial art. Every martial art is limited by its martial culture. Every war culture, be it a war between armies or between street fighters, has its own ethical values, its own rules. Traditional martial arts are bound by what is permitted in the cultures that developed them and the arms that were used when the arts were developed. Thus, every traditional martial art contains anachronism: in the modern street, you will not be attacked in the same way you would have been in traditional Japan. Krav maga is known for its focus on real-world situations and efficient, brutal counter-attacks. It answers challenges that traditional martial arts do not.
Krav maga was derived from street-fighting skills developed by Hungarian-Israeli martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld, who made use of his training as a boxer and wrestler to defend the Jewish quarter against fascist groups in the then-Czechoslovakian city of Bratislava in the mid-to-late 1930s. In the late 1940s Lichtenfeld immigrated to Israel and began to provide combat training lessons to what would become the Israeli Defense Forces, which went on to develop the system now known as krav maga. It has since been refined for civilian, police, and military applications.
Krav maga is about tachles—translated, very imperfectly, as brass tacks. A key principle of krav maga is finishing a fight as quickly as possible; therefore, all attacks are aimed toward the most vulnerable parts of the body. In krav maga you will not find any of those elements of Zen that are so crucial in oriental martial arts. A krav maga practitioner is focused only on efficiency.
Since krav maga is taught in the IDF, most Israelis encounter it on one way or another; but only a few Israelis practice high-level krav maga, which is taught only in army special units. And most do not practice it after they leave the IDF, despite their military exposure to krav maga and despite the fact that martial arts are a fairly common sport in Israel. Few Israelis choose judo, either. In contrast, many practice karate, kung fu, tae kwan do, and—as I do—aikido.
