Why we want to be here — a Tisha Be’av message for the Jewish People from Battalion 969

Tisha B'Av is regarded as the saddest day in the Jewish calendar so it is sadly fitting to find Jews fighting for their people against a relentless enemy on its occasion this year.  Ari Abramowitz has below an uplifting message from the warzone.  He is a sharpshooter when called up and a media personality in civilian life.  His message is for Jews but I think we can all learn from it.  I will never apologize for it but while war rages in the Holy Land I cannot help posting rather a lot about Israel

Upon learning that we would be released next week – a month after our emergency call-up to fight this war – my reserve unit drafted a petition expressing our willingness and desire to continue in this war effort and defeat those who have been murdering and terrorizing our nation.

As a soldier in Battalion 969 allow me to share why we drafted this petition and why we want to be here.

We want to continue fighting not because we love war, but because we love you.

On a personal level, the paradox of the past month is that in the face of heartbreaking pain and the violence of war, my experience has been one of unparalleled love.

The Hebrew word for “love” is “ahava” – the root of which is “hav,” which means “to give.” When you love someone you desire to give to them – and when you give enough to someone you come to love them.

The love I have felt for my fellow soldiers during this war has transcended anything I have experienced before.

While the bond of “brothers in arms” is a universal phenomenon, I find the love I feel for my fellow soldiers overtaking me like a wave. It is hard to explain as I don’t fully understand it myself. All I know is that I would happily give my life for any one of my fellow soldiers and I don’t doubt for a moment that they would do the same for me. Together we would not hesitate to give our lives for you.

Throughout this war we have felt the love you have showered upon us – you have given us so much. I have never felt so much love from so many. Jews from both Israel and the Diaspora have flooded us with more care packages, clean underwear, dry socks, candy, potato chips and toothpaste then we can use. Jewish communities, federations, missions and individuals have not let the dangers of this war stop them from coming and volunteering. Hospitals have had to issue statements requesting that people refrain from visiting the wounded, for the lines to visit them were clogging the hallways and stairwells.

Tens of thousands comfort the families of the soldiers slain and communities around the world hold solidarity and memorial rallies.

We hang up your children’s letters next to our beds. I know a couple of them by heart. We read the articles, videos and Facebook posts with which you defend us and support us as we fight this just and moral war.

While there will always be exceptions, from here it seems that this wave of solidarity spans the entirety of the religious, ideological and political spectrum. From the Gaza border the unity behind us feels unprecedented.

But why? Why do we love each other so much? Today is Tisha Be’av, the darkest day on the Jewish calendar. It is the day our Temple was destroyed.

Our sages explain that the Temple was destroyed not because we were weak but because there was “baseless hatred” among us. Yet in those times there was rampant corruption and existential ideological rifts within the nation. Nonetheless, our sages have made it clear that regardless of how compelling an argument one can make, hatred within our nation is fatally destructive and never justified.

We love each other because we love Israel. I am not referring merely to the state or the land. Israel was the name of Jacob, the father of the 12 tribes from which we are all descended. We are not a race or a religion – we are a family. We share a home, a father, a future and a fate.

The reason that I and my fellow soldiers want to continue putting our lives in jeopardy, sleeping night after night in the dirt under mortar fire, rocket attacks and the perpetual danger of terrorist attacks via tunnels is because this war is not yet over. Israel is in danger and when Israel is in danger every member of the Jewish family is in danger.

Today Jews around the world are experiencing the greatest fear and insecurity since the Holocaust.

The masks are coming off and it is increasingly clear that this is not a war against Israel, but a war against the Jewish People. This week’s cover of Newsweek was titled “Why Europe’s Jews are fleeing once again.” Scarcely a day goes by when there is not another horrific act of anti-Semitism somewhere in the world. A poll this week indicates that a vast majority of Jews in France are considering leaving. A friend in the army told me that there is not a family in Holland that is not considering leaving. We have seen how quickly the winds can change and we are here fighting this war to protect your home for when you should want – or need – to return.

So to our Jewish brothers and sisters around the world, we are grateful for your love, and we are grateful for the privilege of serving in the IDF and expressing our love for you.

To our Jewish brothers and sisters around the world – thank you for feeling our pain – for crying as we cry.

In the poetic words of King David “He who sows with tears reaps with joy.”

As we cry together this Tisha Be’av as one loving family, may we soon merit the opportunity to laugh together and celebrate with love and joy.

SOURCE

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ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG mocks the Left for their love of Muslims and their hatred of Israel

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Wisconsin anti-union law: state Supreme Court ruling probably the final say

Act 10 essentially ended collective bargaining for most public workers, sparking court challenges and protests. But a ruling Thursday by the Wisconsin Supreme Court leaves opponents with little choice but to move on.

Ever since it became law in 2011, Act 10 in Wisconsin – which essentially ended collective bargaining for most public workers – has sparked countless court challenges, generated angry protests at the State Capitol, and fueled a recall campaign of the governor.

A ruling Thursday by the state Supreme Court indicates the law will stand, leaving opponents with little choice but to move on.

“This is the end of the pending challenges and is unlikely to be replaced by some persuasive new challenge that hasn’t already been attempted,” says Charles Franklin, a law professor and polling director at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

The 5-to-2 decision found that Act 10 does not violate the First Amendment, because collective bargaining powers by labor organizations are a benefit, not an enshrined constitutional right at the federal or state level.

“No matter the limitations or ‘burdens’ a legislative enactment places on the collective bargaining process, collective bargaining remains a creation of legislative grace and not constitutional obligation. The First Amendment cannot be used as a vehicle to expand the parameters of a benefit that it does not itself protect,” Justice Michael Gableman wrote in the ruling.

Act 10 survived multiple legal challenges. One decision late last year overturned a contempt-of-court order by a Dane County circuit judge who had ruled that the law was unconstitutional. A federal court struck down parts of the bill in March 2012, but was overturned by a federal appeals court last year after the state sued.

The issue also catapulted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) into the national spotlight, making him a pariah to Democrats and a hero to Republicans. He survived a 2012 recall election, which emboldened his message that Act 10 will benefit the state economy.

Governor Walker released a statement Thursday saying Act 10 saved taxpayers “more than $3 billion,” calling it “a victory for those hard-working taxpayers.” The majority of savings cited by Walker are accurate, local media report, although they say that morale among state workers has been damaged and recruitment may be difficult.

Act 10 is not necessarily threatened by the upcoming gubernatorial election, either. Mary Burke, a former state secretary of Commerce and Walker’s Democratic opponent in November, has backed away from pledging to overturn the law, even though she says she supports the ability of public workers to collectively bargain. One reason for her position, according to Professor Franklin: Public opinion polls show that most voters agree with elements of the law requiring public workers to contribute more to their retirement and health-care benefits.

Another reason is practical: Ms. Burke would have no power to overturn the law with both legislative chambers expected to remain under Republican control.

“Without Democratic control of both houses, the governor’s prospect of repealing Act 10 is extremely limited,” Franklin says. “We’re looking at more years and more election cycles before it can be plausible to see a substantial change in the law.”

Act 10’s passage has emboldened Republican governors in nearby states like Indiana and Michigan to successfully push through similar bills, although Franklin says those efforts will be sustained only if Republicans have a lock on all branches of government.

“At this point, [collective bargaining] is not an area that lends itself to compromise between Republican governors and Democratic legislatures. Both sides are too influenced by interest groups and core supporters that would make it very unlikely for states to go halfway on this issue,” he says.

SOURCE

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Raymond Blanc praises McDonald's and gives the organic movement a roasting

He has long been known as a fierce critic of factory farming and fast food, and a champion of “le correct” way of cooking – all delivered in a heavy French accent, of course.

But now Raymond Blanc has turned the tables and accused the organic movement of being “elitist”, while at the same time praising McDonald’s – so long regarded as the bête noire of the restaurant world – for its commitment to quality ingredients.

The restaurateur says that while organic is preferable, it is not always practical or realistic, and that the freshness of ingredients is more important to their nutritional value than whether chemicals have been used in their production.

“Organic should be best, but the reality of the world may be different,” he said.

“I used to hate compromise – compromise was evil because it’s the start of devaluing what you’re doing – but sometimes it is the only way. You can compromise without selling out.”

He added: “Freshness is more important. It is a mistake to say organic always tastes better. It depends on parentage. Some organics are simply terrible.”

Blanc, who runs Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire, says that while the original aim of the organic movement was to make good food available to all, it has now become the preserve of the well-off.  “It has shot itself in the foot by creating a movement that has become elitist by being so expensive,” he said.

Blanc now prefers the principles of Linking Environment and Farming (Leaf), a charity founded in a 1991 to promote “sustainable food and farming”.

Leaf gives its marque to growers and farmers who “maintain high standards of food production with minimum environmental impact”. A fifth of agricultural produce in Britain now carries its seal of approval, including fruit and vegetables sold in Waitrose. Leaf methods involve using minimal chemicals, and only when “absolutely necessary”.

Blanc told The Telegraph: “Normally my heart is organic. All of Le Manoir is totally organic. The moment I came in, there were no chemicals.  “But it’s easier on vegetables than it is for fruit. Organic uses lots of copper and sulphates and I don’t like that. I will abandon my principles, and the orchard won’t be organic but Leaf.”

If that might be considered a dramatic turn-around in Blanc’s methods, then his new-found admiration for McDonald’s will come as an even bigger surprise. As he says in the interview, he once felt of their food that “I could break down the chemicals and colourings in my mouth. I felt they killed people by encouraging obesity.”

But he says he has come to recognise the fast-food chain has made huge strides.

Earlier this year, Blanc, president of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, presented McDonald’s UK with a Sustainability Hero award, recognising the chain’s contribution to improving food. He said: “I was amazed. All their eggs are free-range; all their pork is free-range; all their beef is free-range.

“[They show that] the fast-food business could change for the better. They’re supporting thousands of British farms, and saving energy and waste by doing so.  “I was as excited as if you had told me there were 20 new three-star Michelin restaurants in London or Manchester.”

But Blanc warns that Britain still has a long way to go, and that unless we get a grip on our dietary habits, we are heading for disaster.  He said: “We’re still number one in Europe for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. We have a health service that is already so strained, under so much pressure that we cannot go on to create more ill health. It’s an epidemic.”

To help tackle the problem, Blanc’s eldest son, Olivier, 38, has launched a community garden in south-east London with Chris Collins, the former Blue Peter gardener. Local schools will have a plot each, and will use the gardens for science and cooking lessons.

He said: “Gardening will, I hope, be the next thing to go on to the curriculum.”

Blanc said: “We are the spoilt generation who grew up with everything put into our mouths … and didn’t ask a simple question, where our food came from. The biggest revolution is the revolution in the hands of our children.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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"We are all living in Israel"

Prominent atheist, Sam Harris, recognizes the huge and dangerous evil in Muslim practice.  Below is an annotated version of a podcast

The question I’ve now received in many forms goes something like this: Why is it that you never criticize Israel? Why is it that you never criticize Judaism? Why is it that you always take the side of the Israelis over that of the Palestinians?

Now, this is an incredibly boring and depressing question for a variety of reasons. The first, is that I have criticized both Israel and Judaism. What seems to have upset many people is that I’ve kept some sense of proportion. There are something like 15 million Jews on earth at this moment; there are a hundred times as many Muslims.  I’ve debated rabbis who, when I have assumed that they believe in a God that can hear our prayers, they stop me mid-sentence and say, ‘Why would you think that I believe in a God who can hear prayers?’ So there are rabbis—conservative rabbis—who believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him—and therefore, nearly every concrete demand upon human behavior. And there are millions of Jews, literally millions among the few million who exist, for whom Judaism is very important, and yet they are atheists. They don’t believe in God at all. This is actually a position you can hold in Judaism, but it’s a total non sequitur in Islam or Christianity.

So, when we’re talking about the consequences of irrational beliefs based on scripture, the Jews are the least of the least offenders. But I have said many critical things about Judaism. Let me remind you that parts of Hebrew Bible—books like Leviticus and Exodus and Deuteronomy—are the most repellent, the most sickeningly unethical documents to be found in any religion. They’re worse than the Koran. They’re worse than any part of the New Testament. But the truth is, most Jews recognize this and don’t take these texts seriously. It’s simply a fact that most Jews and most Israelis are not guided by scripture—and that’s a very good thing.

Of course, there are some who are. There are religious extremists among Jews. Now, I consider these people to be truly dangerous, and their religious beliefs are as divisive and as unwarranted as the beliefs of devout Muslims. But there are far fewer such people.

For those of you who worry that I never say anything critical about Israel:  My position on Israel is somewhat paradoxical. There are questions about which I’m genuinely undecided. And there’s something in my position, I think, to offend everyone. So, acknowledging how reckless it is to say anything on this topic, I’m nevertheless going to think out loud about it for a few minutes.

I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So I don’t celebrate the idea that there’s a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. I certainly don’t support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible. [Note: Read this paragraph again.]

Though I just said that I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, the justification for such a state is rather easy to find. We need look no further than the fact that the rest of the world has shown itself eager to murder the Jews at almost every opportunity. So, if there were going to be a state organized around protecting members of a single religion, it certainly should be a Jewish state. Now, friends of Israel might consider this a rather tepid defense, but it’s the strongest one I’ve got. I think the idea of a religious state is ultimately untenable. [Note: It is worth observing, however, that Israel isn’t ‘Jewish’ in the sense that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are ‘Muslim.’ As my friend Jerry Coyne points out, Israel is actually less religious than the U.S., and it guarantees freedom of religion to its citizens. Israel is not a theocracy, and one could easily argue that its Jewish identity is more cultural than religious. However, if we ask why the Jews wouldn’t move to British Columbia if offered a home there, we can see the role that religion still plays in their thinking.]

Needless to say, in defending its territory as a Jewish state, the Israeli government and Israelis themselves have had to do terrible things. They have, as they are now, fought wars against the Palestinians that have caused massive losses of innocent life. More civilians have been killed in Gaza in the last few weeks than militants. That’s not a surprise because Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Occupying it, fighting wars in it, is guaranteed to get woman and children and other noncombatants killed. And there’s probably little question over the course of fighting multiple wars that the Israelis have done things that amount to war crimes. They have been brutalized by this process—that is, made brutal by it. But that is largely the due to the character of their enemies. [Note: I was not giving Israel a pass to commit war crimes. I was making a point about the realities of living under the continuous threat of terrorism and of fighting multiple wars in a confined space.]

Whatever terrible things the Israelis have done, it is also true to say that they have used more restraint in their fighting against the Palestinians than we—the Americans, or Western Europeans—have used in any of our wars. They have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any other society has ever had to while defending itself against aggressors. The Israelis simply are held to a different standard. And the condemnation leveled at them by the rest of the world is completely out of proportion to what they have actually done. [Note: I was not saying that because they are more careful than we have been at our most careless, the Israelis are above criticism. War crimes are war crimes.]

It is clear that Israel is losing the PR war and has been for years now.  One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its population in a defensive war? I don’t think so. [Note: I was not suggesting that the deaths of Palestinian noncombatants are anything less than tragic. But if retaliating against Hamas is bound to get innocents killed, and the Israelis manage to protect their own civilians in the meantime, the loss of innocent life on the Palestinian side is guaranteed to be disproportionate.]

But there is no way to look at the images coming out Gaza—especially of infants and toddlers riddled by shrapnel—and think that this is anything other than a monstrous evil. Insofar as the Israelis are the agents of this evil, it seems impossible to support them. And there is no question that the Palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation. This is where most critics of Israel appear to be stuck. They see these images, and they blame Israel for killing and maiming babies. They see the occupation, and they blame Israel for making Gaza a prison camp. I would argue that this is a kind of moral illusion, borne of a failure to look at the actual causes of this conflict, as well as of a failure to understand the intentions of the people on either side of it. [Note: I was not saying that the horror of slain children is a moral illusion; nor was I minimizing the suffering of the Palestinians under the occupation. I was claiming that Israel is not primarily to blame for all this suffering.]

The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say ‘O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.’ This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians. [Note: Yes, I know that not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but enough do to have brought them to power. Hamas is not a fringe group.]

The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.

And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it.

What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants.  [Note: The word ‘so’ in the previous sentence was regrettable and misleading. I didn’t mean to suggest that safeguarding its reputation abroad would be the only (or even primary) reason for Israel to avoid killing children. However, the point stands: Even if you want to attribute the basest motives to Israel, it is clearly in her self-interest not to kill Palestinian children.]

Now, is it possible that some Israeli soldiers go berserk under pressure and wind up shooting into crowds of rock-throwing children? Of course. You will always find some soldiers acting this way in the middle of a war. But we know that this isn’t the general intent of Israel. We know the Israelis do not want to kill non-combatants, because they could kill as many as they want, and they’re not doing it.

What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere. [Note: Again, I realize that not all Palestinians support Hamas. Nor am I discounting the degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war, has fueled Palestinian rage. But Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible.]

The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies.

Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be. It is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It’s certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is. And understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants. [Note: The term ‘Muslims’ in this paragraph means ‘Muslim combatants’ of the sort that Western forces have encountered in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The term ‘jihadists’ would have been too narrow, but I was not suggesting that all Muslims support the use of human shields or are anti-Semitic, at war with the West, etc.]

Now imagine reversing the roles here. Imagine how fatuous—indeed comical it would be—for the Israelis to attempt to use human shields to deter the Palestinians. Some claim that they have already done this. There are reports that Israeli soldiers have occasionally put Palestinian civilians in front of them as they’ve advanced into dangerous areas. That’s not the use of human shields we’re talking about. It’s egregious behavior. No doubt it constitutes a war crime. But Imagine the Israelis holding up their own women and children as human shields. Of course, that would be ridiculous. The Palestinians are trying to kill everyone. Killing women and children is part of the plan. Reversing the roles here produces a grotesque Monty Python skit.

If you’re going to talk about the conflict in the Middle East, you have to acknowledge this difference. I don’t think there’s any ethical disparity to be found anywhere that is more shocking or consequential than this.

And the truth is, this isn’t even the worst that jihadists do. Hamas is practically a moderate organization, compared to other jihadist groups. There are Muslims who have blown themselves up in crowds of children—again, Muslim children—just to get at the American soldiers who were handing out candy to them. They have committed suicide bombings, only to send another bomber to the hospital to await the casualities—where they then blow up all the injured along with the doctors and nurses trying to save their lives.

Every day that you could read about an Israeli rocket gone astray or Israeli soldiers beating up an innocent teenager, you could have read about ISIS in Iraq crucifying people on the side of the road, Christians and Muslims. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world and on the Left over these crimes? Where are the demonstrations, 10,000 or 100,000 deep, in the capitals of Europe against ISIS?  If Israel kills a dozen Palestinians by accident, the entire Muslim world is inflamed. God forbid you burn a Koran, or write a novel vaguely critical of the faith. And yet Muslims can destroy their own societies—and seek to destroy the West—and you don’t hear a peep. [Note: Of course, I’m aware that many Muslims condemn groups like ISIS. My point is that we don’t see massive protests against global jihadism—even though it targets Muslims more than anyone else—and we do see such protests over things like the Danish cartoons.]

So, it seems to me, that you have to side with Israel here. You have one side which if it really could accomplish its aims would simply live peacefully with its neighbors, and you have another side which is seeking to implement a seventh century theocracy in the Holy Land. There’s no peace to be found between those incompatible ideas.  That doesn’t mean you can’t condemn specific actions on the part of the Israelis. And, of course, acknowledging the moral disparity between Israel and her enemies doesn’t give us any solution to the problem of Israel’s existence in the Middle East. [Note: I was not suggesting that Israel’s actions are above criticism or that their recent incursion into Gaza was necessarily justified. Nor was I saying that the status quo, wherein the Palestinians remain stateless, should be maintained. And I certainly wasn’t expressing support for the building of settlements on contested land (as I made clear below). By ‘siding with Israel,’ I am simply recognizing that they are not the primary aggressors in this conflict. They are, rather, responding to aggression—and at a terrible cost.]

Again, granted, there’s some percentage of Jews who are animated by their own religious hysteria and their own prophesies. Some are awaiting the Messiah on contested land. Yes, these people are willing to sacrifice the blood of their own children for the glory of God. But, for the most part, they are not representative of the current state of Judaism or the actions of the Israeli government. And it is how Israel deals with these people—their own religious lunatics—that will determine whether they can truly hold the moral high ground. And Israel can do a lot more than it has to disempower them. It can cease to subsidize the delusions of the Ultra-Orthodox, and it can stop building settlements on contested land.  [Note: Read that again. And, yes, I understand that not all settlers are Ultra-Orthodox.]

These incompatible religious attachments to this land have made it impossible for Muslims and Jews to negotiate like rational human beings, and they have made it impossible for them to live in peace. But the onus is still more on the side of the Muslims here. Even on their worst day, the Israelis act with greater care and compassion and self-criticism than Muslim combatants have anywhere, ever.

And again, you have to ask yourself, what do these groups want? What would they accomplish if they could accomplish anything? What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors, if they had neighbors who would live in peace with them. They would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. [Note: Some might argue that they would do more than this—e.g. steal more Palestinian land. But apart from the influence of Jewish extremism (which I condemn), Israel’s continued appropriation of land has more than a little to do with her security concerns. Absent Palestinian terrorism and Muslim anti-Semitism, we could be talking about a ‘one-state solution,’ and the settlements would be moot.]

What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way.

This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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In defence of Zionists

by Michael Oren

Israelis stand ready to defend their nation. They risk their lives for an idea.

The idea is Zionism. It is the belief that the Jewish people should have their own sovereign state in the Land of Israel. Though founded less than 150 years ago, the Zionist movement sprung from a 4,000-year-long bond between the Jewish people and its historic homeland, an attachment sustained throughout 20 centuries of exile. This is why Zionism achieved its goals and remains relevant and rigorous today. It is why citizens of Israel—the state that Zionism created—willingly take up arms. They believe their idea is worth fighting for.

Yet Zionism, arguably more than any other contemporary ideology, is demonized. "All Zionists are legitimate targets everywhere in the world!" declared a banner recently paraded by anti-Israel protesters in Denmark. "Dogs are allowed in this establishment but Zionists are not under any circumstances," warned a sign in the window of a Belgian cafe. A Jewish demonstrator in Iceland was accosted and told, "You Zionist pig, I'm going to behead you."

In certain academic and media circles, Zionism is synonymous with colonialism and imperialism. Critics on the radical right and left have likened it to racism or, worse, Nazism. And that is in the West. In the Middle East, Zionism is the ultimate abomination—the product of a Holocaust that many in the region deny ever happened while maintaining nevertheless that the Zionists deserved it.

What is it about Zionism that elicits such loathing? After all, the longing of a dispersed people for a state of their own cannot possibly be so repugnant, especially after that people endured centuries of massacres and expulsions, culminating in history's largest mass murder. Perhaps revulsion toward Zionism stems from its unusual blend of national identity, religion and loyalty to a land. Japan offers the closest parallel, but despite its rapacious past, Japanese nationalism doesn't evoke the abhorrence aroused by Zionism.

Clearly anti-Semitism, of both the European and Muslim varieties, plays a role. Cabals, money grubbing, plots to take over the world and murder babies—all the libels historically leveled at Jews are regularly hurled at Zionists. And like the anti-Semitic capitalists who saw all Jews as communists and the communists who painted capitalism as inherently Jewish, the opponents of Zionism portray it as the abominable Other.

But not all of Zionism's critics are bigoted, and not a few of them are Jewish. For a growing number of progressive Jews, Zionism is too militantly nationalist, while for many ultra-Orthodox Jews, the movement is insufficiently pious—even heretical. How can an idea so universally reviled retain its legitimacy, much less lay claim to success?

The answer is simple: Zionism worked. The chances were infinitesimal that a scattered national group could be assembled from some 70 countries into a sliver-sized territory shorn of resources and rich in adversaries and somehow survive, much less prosper. The odds that those immigrants would forge a national identity capable of producing a vibrant literature, pace-setting arts and six of the world's leading universities approximated zero.

Elsewhere in the world, indigenous languages are dying out, forests are being decimated, and the populations of industrialized nations are plummeting. Yet Zionism revived the Hebrew language, which is now more widely spoken than Danish and Finnish and will soon surpass Swedish. Zionist organizations planted hundreds of forests, enabling the land of Israel to enter the 21st century with more trees than it had at the end of the 19th. And the family values that Zionism fostered have produced the fastest natural growth rate in the modernized world and history's largest Jewish community. The average secular couple in Israel has at least three children, each a reaffirmation of confidence in Zionism's future.

Indeed, by just about any international criteria, Israel is not only successful but flourishing. The population is annually rated among the happiest, healthiest and most educated in the world. Life expectancy in Israel, reflecting its superb universal health-care system, significantly exceeds America's and that of most European countries. Unemployment is low, the economy robust. A global leader in innovation, Israel is home to R&D centers of some 300 high-tech companies, including Apple, Intel and Motorola. The beaches are teeming, the rock music is awesome, and the food is off the Zagat charts.

The democratic ideals integral to Zionist thought have withstood pressures that have precipitated coups and revolutions in numerous other nations. Today, Israel is one of the few states—along with Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S.—that has never known a second of nondemocratic governance.

These accomplishments would be sufficiently astonishing if attained in North America or Northern Europe. But Zionism has prospered in the supremely inhospitable—indeed, lethal—environment of the Middle East. Two hours' drive east of the bustling nightclubs of Tel Aviv—less than the distance between New York and Philadelphia—is Jordan, home to more than a half million refugees from Syria's civil war. Traveling north from Tel Aviv for four hours would bring that driver to war-ravaged Damascus or, heading east, to the carnage in western Iraq. Turning south, in the time it takes to reach San Francisco from Los Angeles, the traveler would find himself in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

In a region reeling with ethnic strife and religious bloodshed, Zionism has engendered a multiethnic, multiracial and religiously diverse society. Arabs serve in the Israel Defense Forces, in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court. While Christian communities of the Middle East are steadily eradicated, Israel's continues to grow. Israeli Arab Christians are, in fact, on average better educated and more affluent than Israeli Jews.

In view of these monumental achievements, one might think that Zionism would be admired rather than deplored. But Zionism stands accused of thwarting the national aspirations of Palestine's indigenous inhabitants, of oppressing and dispossessing them.

Never mind that the Jews were natives of the land—its Arabic place names reveal Hebrew palimpsests—millennia before the Palestinians or the rise of Palestinian nationalism. Never mind that in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, the Palestinians received offers to divide the land and rejected them, usually with violence. And never mind that the majority of Zionism's adherents today still stand ready to share their patrimony in return for recognition of Jewish statehood and peace.

The response to date has been, at best, a refusal to remain at the negotiating table or, at worst, war. But Israelis refuse to relinquish the hope of resuming negotiations with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. To live in peace and security with our Palestinian neighbors remains the Zionist dream.

Still, for all of its triumphs, its resilience and openness to peace, Zionism fell short of some of its original goals. The agrarian, egalitarian society created by Zionist pioneers has been replaced by a dynamic, largely capitalist economy with yawning gaps between rich and poor. Mostly secular at its inception, Zionism has also spawned a rapidly expanding religious sector, some elements of which eschew the Jewish state.

About a fifth of Israel's population is non-Jewish, and though some communities (such as the Druse) are intensely patriotic and often serve in the army, others are much less so, and some even call for Israel's dissolution. And there is the issue of Judea and Samaria—what most of the world calls the West Bank—an area twice used to launch wars of national destruction against Israel but which, since its capture in 1967, has proved painfully divisive.

Many Zionists insist that these territories represent the cradle of Jewish civilization and must, by right, be settled. But others warn that continued rule over the West Bank's Palestinian population erodes Israel's moral foundation and will eventually force it to choose between being Jewish and remaining democratic.

Yet the most searing of Zionism's unfulfilled visions was that of a state in which Jews could be free from the fear of annihilation. The army imagined by Theodor Herzl, Zionism's founding father, marched in parades and saluted flag-waving crowds. The Israel Defense Forces, by contrast, with no time for marching, much less saluting, has remained in active combat mode since its founding in 1948. With the exception of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideological forebear of today's Likud Party, none of Zionism's early thinkers anticipated circumstances in which Jews would be permanently at arms. Few envisaged a state that would face multiple existential threats on a daily basis just because it is Jewish.

Confronted with such monumental threats, Israelis might be expected to flee abroad and prospective immigrants discouraged. But Israel has one of the lower emigration rates among developed countries while Jews continue to make aliyah—literally, in Hebrew, "to ascend"—to Israel. Surveys show that Israelis remain stubbornly optimistic about their country's future. And Jews keep on arriving, especially from Europe, where their security is swiftly eroding. Last week, thousands of Parisians went on an anti-Semitic rant, looting Jewish shops and attempting to ransack synagogues.

American Jews face no comparable threat, and yet numbers of them continue to make aliyah. They come not in search of refuge but to take up the Zionist challenge—to be, as the Israeli national anthem pledges, "a free people in our land, the Land of Zion and Jerusalem." American Jews have held every high office, from prime minister to Supreme Court chief justice to head of Israel's equivalent of the Fed, and are disproportionately prominent in Israel's civil society.

Hundreds of young Americans serve as "Lone Soldiers," without families in the country, and volunteer for front-line combat units. One of them, Max Steinberg from Los Angeles, fell in the first days of the current Gaza fighting. His funeral, on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, was attended by 30,000 people, most of them strangers, who came out of respect for this intrepid and selfless Zionist.

I also paid my respects to Max, whose Zionist journey was much like mine. After working on a kibbutz—a communal farm—I made aliyah and trained as a paratrooper. I participated in several wars, and my children have served as well, sometimes in battle. Our family has taken shelter from Iraqi Scuds and Hamas M-75s, and a suicide bomber killed one of our closest relatives.

Despite these trials, my Zionist life has been immensely fulfilling. And the reason wasn't Zionism's successes—not the Nobel Prizes gleaned by Israeli scholars, not the Israeli cures for chronic diseases or the breakthroughs in alternative energy. The reason—paradoxically, perhaps—was Zionism's failures.

Failure is the price of sovereignty. Statehood means making hard and often agonizing choices—whether to attack Hamas in Palestinian neighborhoods, for example, or to suffer rocket strikes on our own territory. It requires reconciling our desire to be enlightened with our longing to remain alive. Most onerously, sovereignty involves assuming responsibility. Zionism, in my definition, means Jewish responsibility. It means taking responsibility for our infrastructure, our defense, our society and the soul of our state. It is easy to claim responsibility for victories; setbacks are far harder to embrace.

But that is precisely the lure of Zionism. Growing up in America, I felt grateful to be born in a time when Jews could assume sovereign responsibilities. Statehood is messy, but I regarded that mess as a blessing denied to my forefathers for 2,000 years. I still feel privileged today, even as Israel grapples with circumstances that are at once perilous, painful and unjust. Fighting terrorists who shoot at us from behind their own children, our children in uniform continue to be killed and wounded while much of the world brands them as war criminals.

Zionism, nevertheless, will prevail. Deriving its energy from a people that refuses to disappear and its ethos from historically tested ideas, the Zionist project will thrive. We will be vilified, we will find ourselves increasingly alone, but we will defend the homes that Zionism inspired us to build.

The Israeli media have just reported the call-up of an additional 16,000 reservists. Even as I write, they too are mobilizing for active duty—aware of the dangers, grateful for the honor and ready to bear responsibility.

SOURCE

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Hey, Liberals Who Oppose Israel: You’re All Right-Wingers Now

Imagine a politician ascending to the governorship of a small southern state. Having campaigned on a platform of extreme patriotic fervor and religious zeal—in his stump speech, he thundered that by the grace of God, America will last as long as there exist Heaven and Earth—the governor wasted no time translating his beliefs into law. Because the governor believed that homosexuals were “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,” he outlawed them, instructing his police officers to seek, capture, beat up, and imprison every gay individual in the state. Similarly, women were deemed better off tending to their families than wasting their time with such corrupting pursuits as jobs. A special educational program was devised and approved to teach young girls the fundamentals. These future wives and mothers, read the governor’s statement, “must be fully capable of being aware and of grasping the ways to manage their households. Economy and avoiding waste in household expenditures are prerequisites to our ability to pursue our cause in the difficult circumstances surrounding us.” The men of the state reveled in this new way of life, asserting themselves as lords of their manors; before too long, nearly half of them took to regularly battering their wives.

How many of those who define themselves as liberals would support the governor? Very few, if any. More likely, our hypothetical politician would have galvanized the left into action: The cleverly worded emails from progressive organizations, the fiery segments on The Daily Show, the pledges from celebrities to stop the menace—all would have been upon us before too long. And yet when the same politician appears halfway across the world, sporting a beard and proceeding far beyond the relatively tame scenario described above—sacrificing his own nation’s children and eager to murder innocent civilians across the border—all clarity seems to dissipate. All the homicidal zealot has to do is mumble something about justice and disproportionality and self-determination, and he’s transformed into a respectable, not to say sympathetic, figure.

Which boggles the mind. Never mind that Hamas’ charter specifically states that its goal is the utter destruction of Israel—“Israel,” it reads, “by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims”—and never mind that fundamentalist Islamic organizations like it have sprouted from different terrains and under different historical and political circumstances: For Hamas’ liberal apologists, it’s all still about the Israeli occupation. Israel withdrew nearly a decade ago? Please, that’s too confusing—as long as any conflict involving Israel anywhere is unresolved, any and all violence against Israelis, liberals now seem to believe, is justified.

Enthusiasts of nuance may argue that criticizing Israel isn’t the same as supporting Hamas. That is nominally true. It’s also largely irrelevant. Let’s indulge in one more thought exercise and assume for one moment that Israel accepted all the liberal critiques of its behaviors and acted accordingly. The force it was using was disproportionate? It withdrew most of its soldiers, curbed its artillery, and pulled back the deeply unfair advantage of the Iron Dome missile defense system. Gaza is an open-air prison, the responsibility for which lies solely with Israel and not with Gaza’s other neighbor, Egypt? Israel removed its naval and aerial blockade and opened wide its borders. You don’t have to be a three-star General to realize the outcome of such moves. Which leads us back to a terrible observation: wars are so ghastly in part because they crush so much of the ambiguity and nuance that permeates everyday life in times of peace. They’re so awful because often they force us to make stark choices that are scary and absolute, and annihilate so much of the space that exists in between polar opposites. War requires us to choose.

To my former friends on the left who see themselves as champions of progressive values while criticizing Israel’s attempts at self-defense I have this to say: You have already chosen. You’re all right-wingers now. You would probably want to cancel that monthly contribution to Planned Parenthood; the Gazan maniacs you tolerate don’t really go for that kind of stuff. And go ahead and give the membership department of the National Rifle Association a call, as you are now putting up with an organization whose passion for bearing arms at all costs far exceeds even that of the most fervent American survivalist. So please: Stop whining about the Koch brothers or the Tea Party or the Hobby Lobby ruling. In making excuses for Hamas, you’re endorsing a force of religious intolerance and a purveyor of oppression far, far more demonic than those benign forces at home you characterize as the destroyers of civil liberties and human rights.

If this terrifies you, it’s not too late to repent. All you have to do is look at your friends on what was formerly known as the right. They’re busy defending the right of a democratic nation to protect its civilians against mayhem. Like all democratic nations, the one they support is imperfect. The ongoing conflict led some Israelis to make unacceptably hateful statements; but then nearly 10,000 others joined in on a Facebook group called “Racists Who Oppress Me,” publicly shaming the bigots and calling for a civilized discourse even as the fighting continues. And despite substantial efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Palestinian non-combatants were killed; but then Israel set up a military hospital near the border crossing to make sure anyone who needed it received immediate and excellent treatment.

These, dear liberals, are the values you claim to espouse. Before you say one more thing about this conflict, ask yourself which side is fighting for a society most like the one in which you’re likely to want to live, and then support that side passionately and vigorously. And understand, please, that we’re at war, and that philosophical inquiries, existential ponderings, and musings about identity are all welcomed and valued in free societies, but that to entertain such soulful pursuits said free societies must first survive the attacks of their enemies. Unless you’re willing to embrace everything you claim to despise, we’d love to see you joining us in this war; Lord knows we could use all the help we can get.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Something to think about



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Labor Unions Are Anti-Labor

Many Americans, perhaps a substantial majority, still believe that, irrespective of any problems they may have caused, labor unions are fundamentally an institution that exists in the vital self-interest of wage earners. Indeed, many believe that it is labor unions that stand between the average wage earner and a life of subsistence wages, exhausting hours of work, and horrific working conditions.

Labor unions and the general public almost totally ignore the essential role played by falling prices in achieving rising real wages. They see only the rise in money wages as worthy of consideration. Indeed, in our environment of chronic inflation, prices that actually do fall are relatively rare.

Nevertheless, the only thing that can explain a rise in real wages throughout the economic system is a fall in prices relative to wages. And the only thing that achieves this is an increase in production per worker. More production per worker — a higher productivity of labor — serves to increase the supply of goods and services produced relative to the supply of labor that produces them. In this way, it reduces prices relative to wages and thereby raises real wages and the general standard of living.

What raises money wages throughout the economic system is not what is responsible for the rise in real wages. Increases in money wages are essentially the result just of the increase in the quantity of money and resulting increase in the overall volume of spending in the economic system. In the absence of a rising productivity of labor, the increase in money and spending would operate to raise prices by as much or more than it raised wages. This outcome is prevented only by the fact that at the same time that the quantity of money and volume of spending are increasing, the output per worker is also increasing, with the result that prices rise by less than wages. A fall in prices is still present in the form of prices being lower than they would have been had only an increase in the quantity of money and volume of spending been operative.

With relatively minor exceptions, real wages throughout the economic system simply do not rise from the side of higher money wages. Essentially, they rise only from the side of a greater supply of goods and services relative to the supply of labor and thus from prices being lower relative to wages. The truth is that the means by which the standard of living of the individual wage earner and the individual businessman and capitalist is increased, and the means by which that of the average wage earner in the economic system is increased, are very different. For the individual, it is the earning of more money. For the average wage earner in the economic system, it is the payment of lower prices.

What this discussion shows is that the increase in money wages that labor unions seek is not at all the source of rising real wages and that the source of rising real wages is in fact a rising productivity of labor, which always operates from the side of falling prices, not rising money wages.

Indeed, the efforts of labor unions to raise money wages are profoundly opposed to the goal of raising real wages and the standard of living. When the unions seek to raise the standard of living of their members by means of raising their money wages, their policy inevitably comes down to an attempt to make the labor of their members artificially scarce. That is their only means of raising the wages of their members. The unions do not have much actual power over the demand for labor. But they often achieve considerable power over the supply of labor. And their actual technique for raising wages is to make the supply of labor, at least in the particular industry or occupation that a given union is concerned with, as scarce as possible.

Thus, whenever they can, unions attempt to gain control over entry into the labor market. They seek to impose apprenticeship programs, or to have licensing requirements imposed by the government. Such measures are for the purpose of holding down the supply of labor in the field and thereby enabling those fortunate enough to be admitted to it, to earn higher incomes. Even when the unions do not succeed in directly reducing the supply of labor, the imposition of their above-market wage demands still has the effect of reducing the number of jobs offered in the field and thus the supply of labor in the field that is able to find work.

The artificial wage increases imposed by the labor unions result in unemployment when above-market wages are imposed throughout the economic system. This situation exists when it is possible for unions to be formed easily. If, as in the present-day United States, all that is required is for a majority of workers in an establishment to decide that they wish to be represented by a union, then the wages imposed by the unions will be effective even in the nonunion fields.

Employers in the nonunion fields will feel compelled to offer their workers wages comparable to what the union workers are receiving — indeed, possibly even still higher wages — in order to ensure that they do not unionize.

Widespread wage increases closing large numbers of workers out of numerous occupations put extreme pressure on the wage rates of whatever areas of the economic system may still remain open. These limited areas could absorb the overflow of workers from other lines at low enough wage rates. But minimum-wage laws prevent wage rates in these remaining lines from going low enough to absorb these workers.

From the perspective of most of those lucky enough to keep their jobs, the most serious consequence of the unions is the holding down or outright reduction of the productivity of labor. With few exceptions, the labor unions openly combat the rise in the productivity of labor. They do so virtually as a matter of principle. They oppose the introduction of labor-saving machinery on the grounds that it causes unemployment. They oppose competition among workers. As Henry Hazlitt pointed out, they force employers to tolerate featherbedding practices, such as the classic requirement that firemen, whose function was to shovel coal on steam locomotives, be retained on diesel locomotives. They impose make-work schemes, such as requiring that pipe delivered to construction sites with screw thread already on it, have its ends cut off and new screw thread cut on the site. They impose narrow work classifications, and require that specialists be employed at a day’s pay to perform work that others could easily do — for example, requiring the employment of a plasterer to repair the incidental damage done to a wall by an electrician, which the electrician himself could easily repair.

To anyone who understands the role of the productivity of labor in raising real wages, it should be obvious that the unions’ policy of combating the rise in the productivity of labor renders them in fact a leading enemy of the rise in real wages. However radical this conclusion may seem, however much at odds it is with the prevailing view of the unions as the leading source of the rise in real wages over the last hundred and fifty years or more, the fact is that in combating the rise in the productivity of labor, the unions actively combat the rise in real wages!

Far from being responsible for improvements in the standard of living of the average worker, labor unions operate in more or less total ignorance of what actually raises the average worker’s standard of living. In consequence of their ignorance, they are responsible for artificial inequalities in wage rates, for unemployment, and for holding down real wages and the average worker’s standard of living.

All of these destructive, antisocial consequences derive from the fact that while individuals increase the money they earn through increasing production and the overall supply of goods and services, thereby reducing prices and raising real wages throughout the economic system, labor unions increase the money paid to their members by exactly the opposite means. They reduce the supply and productivity of labor and so reduce the supply and raise the prices of the goods and services their members help to produce, thereby reducing real wages throughout the economic system.

SOURCE

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More US Firms Will Flee America's 'Anti-Business' Corporate Tax Regime

Unless the US slashes its corporate tax rates, more firms will quit to countries such as the UK and Luxembourg to sniff out lower bills from the government, according to the boss of deVere Group.

Nigel Green, the founder and chief executive of global financial advisory firm deVere, made the claim days after US pharmaceutical firm AbbVie merged with its Dublin-based counterpart Shire in a move that will reportedly slash its tax bill.

And two failed mergers between US firms Omnicom and Pfizer and British companies were allegedly motivated by a desire to lower tax bills by rebasing in the UK. Such mergers are known as "inversions".

In the US, the standard corporate tax rate on profits is 40%. In the UK, it has been steadily slashed to 21% in 2014 – and another 1% will come off next year. In 2010, when Chancellor George Osborne took his Treasury seat, it was 28%.

"Unless the current corporation tax is slashed, it is highly likely that an increasing number of America's multinationals will relocate to overseas jurisdictions with lower tax rates," said Green, whose deVere Group operates across 100 countries and advises 80,000 clients on $10bn (£5.88bn €7.4bn) worth of investments.

"The current US rates are widely perceived in the corporate world as uncompetitive and therefore comparatively anti-business. This is evidenced by the fact that a growing number of American firms are considering such a move out of the US.

"It is our experience that the vast majority of American companies do want to remain headquartered in America but with the tax code as it stands, and with obligations to shareholders, there is mounting pressure to consider overseas, lower tax destinations."

SOURCE

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Centralisation is a bad idea

Centralisation is a bad idea. Its disadvantages include a reduction in choices, quality, and opportunity, an increase in arbitrary order, and a concentration of power. Given its various disadvantages, why has it been so frequently adopted? Centralisation generates benefits to those at the centre of power.

So, why centralise? Did the Scottish clans benefit from centralisation after 1707? Judging by their attitude in fighting for further independence as late as 1744, presumably not. Certainly their being cleared off the Highland territories by British soldiers did not indicate a benefit to them. Certain land owners definitely gained a benefit in grabbing lands that were "vacant" after having been "cleared" though these euphemisms make as little sense in Scotland as similar sayings like "manifest destiny" make in the United States. When people are forced off their land, killed, beaten, robbed, sentenced to "transportation" for alleged crimes on scant evidence, and end up in North America against their will, where they are sometimes conscripted into an army to force Native Americans off their lands, to be killed, beaten, robbed, and sentenced to a Trail of Tears, one does begin to wonder where the imaginary benefits of centralisation are to be found. Those who gained by these exercises in racism and brutality should probably raise their hands and step forward to be identified.

Do you imagine, then, that the centralisation of economic power in, say, an electric power utility that has a monopoly to distribute power into a metropolitan area makes any sense for the consumer of electric power? Are you better off with one electric company, or would you be better off with ten to choose from? Wouldn't you be even better off still if you were to buy solar panels and harvest your own electricity?

Yes, there are definitely economies of scale from making a big power plant, burning a large amount of coal, oil, natural gas, or diesel fuel, or generating electricity from nuclear materials. But who profits from these economies? Do the consumers of residential electricity benefit? Do the companies operating malls, office buildings, and factories benefit? One can be sure that the agencies which regulate power consumption and power distribution come into existence and benefit from the monopoly since that monopoly cannot exist without government sanction. The company which holds the monopoly power gets monopoly pricing advantages, subject to approval from the regulators, and they probably buy off those regulators in various ways in a well-known process called "regulatory capture." It is very doubtful that the people in general benefit in any way. Given the lack of disaster preparedness at sites like Fukushima, we can also wonder whether the long term consequences might be even more negative for the people living around these power plants.

For some time, the idea that we are all better off with more centralisation, more single points of failure, and more agglomeration of power, has been questioned. In the period of empire building, roughly the 15th to early 20th Centuries, the number of "countries" in the world was reduced again and again as more territory was grabbed by imperial powers. Since World War Two, the number of countries has been on the rise, roughly tripling in about 70 years. That trend seems destined to continue, with South Sudan being a recent example of a new country being formed out of one of the giant swaths of territory claimed by a former imperial power.

About 1969, the United States military recognised that a devastating nuclear attack by Russia might wipe out a large amount of computing power, but the remaining computer systems might want to communicate through some sort of inter-networking protocol. So they had some very intelligent people develop the Internet. As a result, the protocol developed for that communications system is extremely decentralised. There are reasons to think that the future of computer communications is going to involve continuing decentralisation, the elimination of more and more single points of failure, and the ability for "routers" to automatically route around damaged nodes.

You now find information very widely distributed, stored on an enormous number of computers, and available for download to your own computer any time you need it. So you can access nearly every book ever published, a great many news sources, images, videos, music, art, and other information wherever you are, about as close to instantly as your communications nodes can manage.

Since the 1970s, a trend has emerged to change the way that software is developed. Software is the code used to operate your computer and make applications available to you. The code that operates the hardware of your computer and tells it, for example, what parts of the screen to illuminate with different colours, or how to send a signal to the printer, is called the operating system or OS. You may have heard of "Windows," and "Apple OS" which are fairly common, and Linux, which is an open source operating system. It turns out that having a software company in control over the development, upgrading, and release of an operating system has inherent disadvantages to the users. Since a great many computer users are also skilled software developers, they collaborated on open source development of Linux. There are now a great number of open source operating systems.

Similarly, the software which runs under a given operating system that makes it possible to, say, process words into a text file, or format them into a document, is an application. There are thousands of applications for all kinds of purposes. And, again, people have begun developing them as open source projects. Open source simply means that the source code, or actual logical operations that are performed by the application, is available for scrutiny. That turns out to have advantages in cost, in distribution, in development speed, in error identification, in error correction, and in other ways.

Very recently, the giant central government of the United States decided to crap all over the open source movement. In particular, its Internal Revenue "Service" has decided to attack applications for tax-exempt status from groups developing open source software. So, equality for everyone, but some are more equal than others (to paraphrase Orwell).

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Why is the West declaring a new cold war on Russia?

It seems a thin excuse that  Ukrainian independence fighters misused Russian-made weapons!  This can't end well.  Economic sanctions are always ineffective so tend to lead to escalation.  There is a view that Western leaders want to stop Ukrainian oil and gas from falling under Russian control.  A war for oil?

Spurred to action by the downing of the Malaysian airliner, the European Union approved dramatically tougher economic sanctions Tuesday against Russia, including an arms embargo and restrictions on state-owned banks. President Barack Obama swiftly followed with an expansion of U.S. penalties targeting key sectors of the Russian economy.

The coordinated sanctions were aimed at increasing pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his country's support for separatists in eastern Ukraine whom the West blames for taking down the passenger jet nearly two weeks ago. Obama and U.S. allies also warned that Russia was building up troops and weaponry along its border with Ukraine.

"Today Russia is once again isolating itself from the international community, setting back decades of genuine progress," Obama said. "It does not have to be this way. This a choice Russia and President Putin has made."

Tuesday's announcements followed an intense lobbying effort from Obama aimed at getting European leaders to toughen their penalties on Russia and match earlier U.S. actions. Europe has a far stronger economic relationship with Russian than the U.S., but EU leaders have been reluctant to impose harsh penalties in part out of concern about a negative impact on their own economies.

However, Europe's calculus shifted sharply after a surface-to-air missile brought down the passenger jet, killing nearly 300 people including more than 200 Europeans. Obama and his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy finalized plans to announce the broader sanctions Monday in an unusual joint video conference.

European Union President Herman Van Rompuy and the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said the sanctions sent a "strong warning" that Russia's destabilization of Ukraine cannot be tolerated.

"When the violence created spirals out of control and leads to the killing of almost 300 innocent civilians in their flight from the Netherlands to Malaysia, the situation requires urgent and determined response," the two top EU officials said in a statement.

Obama, responding to a question after his announcement at the White House, said, "No, it's not a new cold war."

The new European penalties include an arms embargo on Moscow and a ban on the unapproved sale to the Russians of technology that has dual military and civilian uses or is particularly sensitive, such as advanced equipment used in deep-sea and Arctic oil drilling.

To restrict Russia's access to Europe's money markets, EU citizens and banks will be barred from purchasing certain bonds or stocks issued by state-owned Russian banks, according to EU officials.

SOURCE

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A dissident comment from Australia

Julie Bishop [Australia's foreign minister] is choosing her words more carefully in Kiev and starting to doubt the motives of President Poroshenko who is systematically murdering thousands of his own Ukrainian citizens. He has little interest in MH17, his interest is genocide.

The Ukrainian military is bombing its own undefended eastern cities, razing schools, hospitals, suburban infrastructure, water and electricity supplies. It is showering mortars indiscriminately on rural nationals who are fleeing as refugees from their own country in numbers approaching a quarter million.

Yet, if Putin dares to assist in stemming the genocide he is labelled a supporter of separatists and rebels by the West.

Poroshenko is feigning co-operation with the Dutch and Australians in order to precipitate further Western sanctions on Russia. It’s working. Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott are now hoping they have backed the right horse in Poroshenko. Clearly they haven't.

They are trusting this tyrant to secure the MH17 site when his sole interest is to ethnically cleanse the East of all Russian sympathisers. The problem is that Putin will now be forced to meet the Poroshenko behemoth head on, leaving MH17 irrecoverable in the midst of an escalating white hot warzone.

SOURCE

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Unconstitutional Obamacare legislation defended by Leftist judges

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit that sought to invalidate the president’s health-care reform law on grounds that the massive piece of legislation did not originate in the House of Representatives as required by the Constitution.

A three-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the lawsuit filed on behalf of an Iowa artist and part-time National Guardsman.

The artist, Matt Sissel, pays for medical expenses out of pocket and does not want to be forced to purchase a required level of health insurance or pay a tax to the government.
Recommended: How much do you know about health-care reform? Take our quiz!

He challenged the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, charging, in part, that Congress followed improper procedure by initiating the health-care law in the Senate rather than the House.

The Constitution’s Origination Clause says: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.”

The provision is intended to ensure that any effort by Congress to raise money from the American people must first receive the approval of those lawmakers closest to the people – and presumably more receptive to the wishes and concerns of voters.

The ACA’s journey from debate to bill to law was somewhat unusual. What would become the ACA was actually drafted in the Senate. Senate Democrats then gutted a bill that passed the House – offering tax credits to military veterans buying a first home – jettisoning every provision of that measure. All that remained was the designation – HR 3590.

Into that empty shell the Senate poured the full contents of what became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The approved Senate version was then sent to the House for approval.

Sissel’s lawyers noted that in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate on the grounds that it was enacted under Congress’s taxing authority.

They argued that if the ACA is a tax, it had to have been passed by Congress in compliance with the Origination Clause.

In rejecting that argument, the appeals court panel said the ACA is not subject to the terms of the Origination Clause because the ACA is not a “bill for raising revenue.”

As such, the court said it had no reason to conduct a detailed examination of how the ACA was passed in Congress.

In dismissing the lawsuit, the appeals court said the purpose of the underlying bill was critical to determine whether the Origination Clause would apply.

“After the Supreme Court decision [upholding the ACA], it is beyond dispute that the paramount aim of the Affordable Care Act is to increase the number of Americans covered by health insurance and decrease the cost of health care, not to raise revenue by means of the shared responsibility payment,” Judge Judith Rogers wrote for the court.

Judge Rogers acknowledged that although the ACA’s individual mandate might raise up to $4 billion a year by 2017, “it is plainly designed to expand health insurance coverage,” rather than to raise revenue.

The upshot of the appeals court’s ruling is that the ACA’s required payment for failing to purchase health insurance is a “tax” significant enough to support Congress’s authority to pass such a measure, according to the US Supreme Court. But the required payment does not qualify as “tax” for constitutional provisions dictating how Congress passes such legislation, according to the DC Circuit court.

Two of the judges on the appeals court panel were appointed by President Obama. Rogers was appointed by President Clinton.

“The mere fact that [the individual insurance mandate] may have been enacted solely pursuant to Congress’s taxing power does not compel the conclusion that the entire Affordable Care Act is a bill for raising revenue subject to the Origination Clause,” Rogers wrote.

“Where, as here, the Supreme Court has concluded that a provision’s revenue-raising function is incidental to its primary purpose, the Origination Clause does not apply,” she said.

One of Sissel’s lawyers, Timothy Sandefur of the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, said the court’s decision was “disappointing.” He suggested they were considering filing an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Mr. Sandefur said the appeals court relied on “a new and unprecedented distinction to exempt the Obamacare tax from the Constitution’s rules for enacting taxes.”

“The Constitution makes no such distinction, and neither does Supreme Court precedent,” Sandefur said in a statement.

“The precedents say that the only kinds of taxes that don’t have to originate in the House are penalties and fines,” he said. “But the Supreme Court itself ruled in 2012 that Obamacare’s individual mandate is not a penalty or a fine. So the Origination Clause should therefore apply.”

Sandefur added: “The DC Circuit for the first time holds that judges can decide for themselves what the ‘main object or aim’ of a tax is, and then pick and choose whether the constitutional rules on the enactment of new taxation should apply. We think that’s wrong, and that’s what we’ll be taking to the Supreme Court if necessary.”

SOURCE

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Obama to the rescue – of Hamas

by CAROLINE GLICK

Operation Protective Edge is now two weeks old. Since the ground offensive began Thursday night, we have begun to get a better picture of just how dangerous Hamas has become in the nine years since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. And what we have learned is that the time has come to take care of this problem. It cannot be allowed to fester or grow anymore.

We have known for years that tunnels were a central component of Hamas's logistical infrastructure.

What began as the primary means of smuggling weapons, trainers and other war material from Hamas's sponsors abroad developed rapidly into a strategic tool of offensive warfare against Israel.

As we have seen from the heavily armed Hamas commando squads that have infiltrated into Israel from tunnels since the start of the current round of warfare, the first goal of these offensive tunnels is to deploy terrorists into Israel to massacre Israelis.

But the tunnels facilitate other terror missions as well.

Israel has found tunnels with shafts rigged with bombs located directly under Israeli kindergartens.

If the bombs had gone off, the buildings above would have been destroyed, taking the children down with them.

Other exposed shafts showed Hamas's continued intense interest in hostage taking. In 2006 the terrorists who kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Schalit entered Israel and returned to Gaza through such a tunnel.

Today the presence of sedatives and multiple sets of handcuffs for neutralizing hostages found in tunnel after tunnel indicate that Hamas intends to abduct several Israelis at once and spirit them back to Gaza.

These tunnels must be found and destroyed not merely because they constitute a physical danger to thousands of Israelis. They must be located and destroyed, and Hamas's capacity to rebuild them must be eliminated because the very idea that they exist makes a normal life impossible for those immediately threatened.

Hamas's tunnels are also the key component of their command and control infrastructure inside Gaza.  Hamas's political and military commanders are hiding in them. The reinforced bunkers and tunnel complexes enable Hamas's senior leadership to move with relative freedom and continue planning and ordering attacks....

By Tuesday morning, IDF forces in Gaza had destroyed 23 tunnels. The number of additional tunnels is still unknown.

While Israel had killed 183 terrorists, it appeared that most of the terrorists killed were in the low to middle ranks of Hamas's leadership hierarchy.

As Israel has uncovered the scope of Hamas's infrastructure of murder and terror, the US has acted with the UN, Turkey and Qatar to pressure Israel (and Egypt) to agree to a cease-fire and so end IDF operations against Hamas before the mission is completed.

To advance this goal, US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Cairo on Monday night with an aggressive plan to force on Israel a cease-fire Hamas and its state sponsors will accept.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The TV Cameras Responsible For Civilian Deaths In Gaza
   
I write this as a member of the press. I’m proud to be a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. I’m a member of the Foreign Press Association in Israel, and the co-recipient of this year’s Edward R. Murrow Award from the American Overseas Press Club. I say this off the top because I’m not an outsider pointing my finger at the media. Every year, journalists sacrifice their lives in war zones so as to keep us informed and protect freedom of the press, a cornerstone of democracy.

But the fact is that when it comes to Israel, the media has acted irresponsibly. Good journalism has been replaced by politically correct misreporting, and one of the net results is that Palestinian civilians, including children, are paying with their lives. How so?

There is no group that can be more evil, in the narrowest sense of the word, than the rulers of the Gaza strip, Hamas. They are openly anti-democratic, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-Israel, anti-American and anti-Western. The list continues. These are the people who distributed candies, danced in the street and openly celebrated after 9/11.

I simply don’t know what else they could do to make Westerners dislike them. For good measure, they are anti-Palestinian nationalism. They don’t believe in a Palestinian state. They believe that “statehood” is a Western invention. They also believe in the destruction of the Jewish state as a step toward an international Islamic Republic. And yet, despite all of this, they are portrayed as freedom fighters by much of the international media.

The Western press has taught them that if they turn their children into props, they will win the propaganda war against Israel. In today’s media war, you need a good prop. Israeli Cabinet minister Naftali Bennett understood this when he faced CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. When she repeatedly used the term “occupied territories” to refer to parts of the ancient land of Israel, Bennett was ready. He pulled out a 2000-year-old coin that says “Zion” on it.

He held it to the camera and asked something like, “I’m a Jew. How can I be ‘occupying’ Zion? How can I occupy my own land?” His point was “I’m not an occupier, I’m indigenous”, and he used an ancient coin as a prop for an audience with a limited attention span. It worked.

Turkish prime-minister Erdogan also understands that in today’s media war you need props. In 2010, the boat called the “Mavi Marmara” was just such a prop. From a PR point of view, it was a relatively cheap trick. You get a boat, you fill it with what Lenin called “useful idiots”, i.e. well-meaning politically-correct members of the bourgeoisie, espousing half-baked ideas. Then into the mix you insert a dozen jihadists ready to kill and be killed – and you’ve got yourself a media circus of incredible proportions.

The Mavi Marmara incident involved a “ship of fools” which tried to run Israel’s sea blockade around Gaza. Ostensibly they were bringing humanitarian aid, but humanitarian aid can be delivered without any problems. It’s missiles that are a problem. So when Israeli commandos armed with paintball guns so as not to hurt anyone boarded the ship, they were attacked by jihadists wielding axes and knives. The commandos called for help. The jihadists were killed.

But they had won the prop war. My fellow journalists portrayed the jihadists as victims and the Israelis as oppressors. The anti-Israel forces got billions of dollars worth of free publicity, and Turkish-Israeli relations were damaged almost beyond repair. None of this would’ve happened if there hadn’t been a prop that the cameramen could point their cameras at. The boat was the prop. Now it’s the children.

Hamas has understood what the ideology of terror has clearly espoused for over a hundred years. When attacking a democracy, the terrorist has to put it in a quandary. The way to do that is to force the democracy to kill civilians. So if you set up your terror-base under a school or a hospital, you’ve got it made in the shade. You launch missiles, for example, against Israel. Now the Israelis have a choice. Either they don’t respond, in which case the terror mounts in the face of ongoing impotence, or they do respond, in which case you’re going to have civilian deaths and dramatic pictures for the West’s nightly news.

Basically, the Western media has taught Hamas that it doesn’t matter how downright evil you are. It doesn’t matter if you launch two thousand missiles at civilian targets, including the airport. It doesn’t matter if you use your own children as human shields. You’ll get the coverage you want if CNN, BBC et al. have props to point their cameras at. Our form of news-gathering has taught Hamas to turn their children into those props, and to sacrifice them on the altar of Jihad. By misreporting, our media has encouraged the bad guys to kill their own children, and has dragged Israel into a war it did not want.

Nissim Sean Carmeli was a 21 year old soldier in Golani, Israel’s marines. He emigrated here from Texas. Until a few years ago, he went to the high school around the corner from my house. He had plans to go to university, meet a girl, start a family. When a few weeks ago Hamas started raining hundreds of rockets down on Israeli civilians, nobody wanted to send Sean and his friends into Gaza. As in Afghanistan, that would involve house to house fighting with a ruthless enemy who knows the terrain and has booby trapped every passage.

It would have been very easy for the Israeli Air Force to simply level entire blocks of Hamas dominated neighborhoods. Americans have done this with impunity in Iraq and Afghanistan. But since Hamas plants its terror network beneath schools, hospitals and mosques, such a bombing mission would have involved high Palestinian casualties. So Israel decided not to level Gaza and send Sean in. He died so as to minimize Palestinian losses.

I just came back from where his family is sitting Shiva, the Jewish custom of mourning. There were no anti-Arab speeches, no signs of militarism, just the tremendous grief of parents burying a child. As a journalist, I sat there and hung my head in shame, overwhelmed by the simple truth that while journalists feign concern for Palestinian kids, they are actually creating the environment for their deaths. In the meantime, Israelis like Sean are paying with their lives to avoid the very deaths they are being blamed for.

SOURCE

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Kerry Undermines Israel

Secretary of State John Kerry, presumably pursuing the wishes of his boss, has badly flubbed dealings between Israel and Hamas. The main reason for his failure is an assumption that both sides want peace and that all it requires is some magic words from the Obama administration. They’re dead wrong.

Over the weekend, Kerry pushed for a cease-fire negotiated in Paris with Israel’s enemies, Qatar and Turkey, and it contained practically every Hamas demand. We’re shocked – shocked – that it failed. The White House has pushed for a cease-fire only since Israel began its ground incursion into Gaza to clear out Hamas' tunnel networks (built with forced child labor) and destroy its missile caches. In other words, once Israel started truly succeeding, the Obama administration sought to stop that progress.

A White House statement describing a call between Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The President … reiterated the United States' serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza.” Furthermore, the statement read, “[T]he President made clear the strategic imperative of instituting an immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire that ends hostilities now.”

Worse, the administration even turned on Israel at the UN, pushing a Security Council-enforced cease-fire.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Fatah (the other Palestinian faction that controls the West Bank) all want Hamas rule ended in Gaza. And the Obama Justice Department still classifies Hamas as a terrorist group. So why would the Obama State Department expect a good result from working for Hamas against all other interested parties?

Israel would love nothing more than to live in peace, but that’s difficult when its immediate neighbors want its total destruction. That’s why the “peace process” has yielded so little regardless of decades of trying, and that’s why Israel’s objective now is to cripple Hamas. Netanyahu warned Israelis to prepare for a “prolonged” war because Israel has no interest in quitting before its objectives are achieved, especially in the face of betrayal by the U.S.

The bumbling over the cease-fire isn’t the only thing the Obama administration is doing to enrage Israel. Nuclear talks with Iran continue to grant both time and concessions to the mullahs – who also happen to want Israel wiped off the map and support Hamas' efforts to do so. Iran is not just a thorn in Israel’s side like Hamas; it’s an existential threat.

Perhaps much of the problem is that Kerry is the wrong man for the job. In 1971, he testified before the Senate against American troops, saying, “They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

If the man could so outrageously slander his own countrymen, why should the Israelis trust him to have their best interests in mind? Clearly he doesn’t (remember his apartheid state comments), and therefore they don’t trust him.

 SOURCE

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THE DRUG WAR IS FINISHED

The drug war is finished. Kaput.  It’s now just a matter of time when the federal government calls an end to this evil, immoral, destructive, and racist government program.

Yesterday, the New York Times became the latest addition to those calling for an end to the drug war, with an editorial entitled “Repeal Prohibition, Again.” That was followed by two more editorials written by members of the NYT editorial board, one entitled “Let States Decide on Marijuana” by David Firestone and the other “The Public Lightens Up About Weed” by Juliet Lapidos.

That’s about as mainstream as one can get.

Comparing drug laws to Prohibition, the Times wrote:

"It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.

The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana."

While the Times unfortunately limits its call to marijuana instead of expanding it to all drugs, once people see the benefits that come from ending the criminality of marijuana, the rest of the federal drug-war apparatus will soon fall as well.

The federal government never should have enacted drug laws in the first place. For one thing, there is no authorization in the Constitution for such power. That’s why, in fact, Americans amended the Constitution to make the possession of booze illegal — and then repealed that amendment. The same thing needed to be done with drugs.

Second, governments have no business punishing people for what they put into their mouths. Freedom means the right to live your life the way you want, so long as your conduct is peaceful. That obviously encompasses what you put into your mouth. Other people might object to what you ingest for health concerns or any reasons, but such objections should never have been translated into having the state incarcerate and fine people for ingesting what they want. Drug addiction and drug usage are none of the state’s business.

Third, look at the consequences of the drug war: gangs, cartels, drug lords, gang wars, robberies, muggings, thefts, burglaries, illegal searches, ruination of lives, years of incarceration, enormous fines, asset forfeiture laws, military-type raids, infringements on civil liberties and privacy, racist enforcement, bribery, corruption, murders, assassinations, and the militarization of the police.

All that is about as far from a peaceful and harmonious society that one can get. And it’s all because of the prohibition of drugs.

In fact, try to think of one legitimate reason to keep the drug war going. You can’t do it.

Get the U.S. military involved? It already is involved, heavily. Just ask the people of Latin America, where the Pentagon has played a heavy role in waging the war on drugs in that part of the world, which has done nothing more than convert Latin American countries into cauldrons of violence. Ask the people of Mexico, where some 60,000 people have died in the last 7 years owing to a massive, military-style crackdown in the war on drugs.

Increase jail sentences for drug-law violators? It’s been done. In fact, the feds are now granting early release to many of the people whose lives they are ruined. The feds are recognizing that those long jail sentences didn’t do the trick.

Asset-forfeiture laws? They’ve been tried. In fact, they’ve been converted into a convenient way for law-enforcement people to steal cash and other valuable property from poor people. They’ve accomplished nothing else.

They’ve tried everything, and everything has failed. The drug warriors have nothing left in their arsenal.

So why the  delay in ending the drug war? One reason: jobs. There is an enormous segment of society that has become dependent on the war on drugs, a segment that not only depends of things like bribes but also on legitimate income streams like salaries.

These are the drug-war addicts. We’re talking about assistant U.S. Attorneys, DEA agents, deputy sheriffs, Border Patrol, policemen, assistant district attorneys, clerks, state and federal judges, and so many others. This segment is now the principal obstacle to ending the drug war.

I can just picture a big protest in Washington against ending the drug war. There would be two groups of people all rallying together and sharing the same signs saying “Keep the Drug War Going!” The two segments would be (1) U.S. drug-war law-enforcement agents and (2) the drug lords and drug dealers. Both segments know that drug legalization would put them both out of a job immediately.

That’s what happened when Prohibition was ended. No more booze gangs, no more gang wars over turf, and no more booze bribery of prosecutors and judges. That’s because there wasn’t a black market anymore.

The same thing will happen with drug legalization. In fact, that’s one of the ironies of the drug war. It purports to go after drug lords, cartels, and gangs but in fact is the cause of their existence. The more the drug laws are enforced, the stronger the black-market sector becomes. With drug legalization, the goal of smashing the drug dealers is achieved, not by arrest and incarceration but instead by putting them out of business through the restoration of a legal free market.

The question now is: Who will be the last person punished in the war on drugs?

 SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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