Thursday, June 10. 2010
What’s this Turkey hash with Erdogan’s fingers in it?
Many, including in Washington, don’t “get” how a NATO nation, since WWI on a Western-oriented course (at least until 2002), could be so complicit in the IHH thugs upon the Marvi Marmara and so palsy with Iran, Syria and other despots challenging regional peace and the US.
I turned to Gerald Robbins, the Turkish-speaking expert and Associate Scholar at Philadelphia’s Foreign Policy Research Institute, about what’s on the plate in Ankara.
Turkey’s internal politics are a mystery to most Americans. Robbins says, “The folks around President Obama have no sense of the nuances involved. Symbols far outweigh substance with them.” Robbins continues:
Their mindframe is Turkey should be elevated in regional importance since it is large, Muslim, and Western-oriented. Remember that Obama visited Turkey shortly after his inauguration to symbolize a new outlook in regional US diplomacy. Israel is seen as less important since it can’t serve as a “bridge” into the Muslim world.
Robbins asks, “I wonder if the US Jewish lobbies understand this mindframe?"
I asked Robbins to sketch out what Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan’s political environment is about.
Continue reading "Who “Gets” Turkey? Interview With An Expert"
Wednesday, June 9. 2010
Back in April I did a little bit of reminiscing about one of my Grandpas. At that time, I promised an open session for Grandpa reminiscing.
It is understood that Grandpas are or were not perfect, but each one is a story. A better story than those of parents, because the grandparent stories reach further into the past.
Sometimes I feel like I am an unsettled, unhomogenized mix of both of my Grandpas.
For example, my other Grandpa was the opposite of the warm, fun-loving one I posted about. This guy was a stern, dignified, laconic, unsociable, never smiling, morally-rigid GP and cardiologist who made house calls into his 80s. He totalled his car making a house call on one Christmas night in a blizzard. Cops took him to his house call with his big black leather bag, then back home, where he arrived bloodied but unbowed.
He worked 7 days/wk. Had zero tolerance for foolishness of any sort, and the only times I ever saw a smile was when he was holding a baby. He was not about "fun," and was a serious man who took life seriously. He had a dry Milton or Shakespeare quote for any occasion, and he liked a Scotch or two in the evening, neat. Smoked corn-cob pipes at work and at home. (It is only recently that one could not smoke in hospitals.) Osler was his hero, and he had nothing but contempt for FDR and Lyndon Johnson.
When he opened his medical practice, the scourges in CT were malaria, syphilis, puerperal fever, and TB and other infectious diseases - plus all the diseases we still have. Few people were "healthy," as we view it, in the 1920s and 30s: just imagine everybody today with a new hip or knee hobbling around painfully on canes, or stuck in chairs, or everybody today with a bypass or stent or heart meds, bedridden and slowly dying of heart failure. Not to mention untreatable Depression.
He grew up on a farm in northern CT in a hamlet named after his (and my) family name. Worked his way through college and medical school (in Baltimore), mostly as a cook during the summers at lumber camps in Maine and NH. (I never saw him even boil an egg - he always had a cook in the house. My Dad tells me that he did know how to cook pancakes.)
His first wife died of leukemia before she could have kids. He had been her doctor. He did not remarry until his 40s. Both of my grandpas lost young wives to illness. It wasn't rare at all, two generations ago.
Like most docs of the past, he was not much of a vacation-taker until his later 60s, but was known to enjoy fly fishing at his favorite getaway spot, Mohonk. He also liked the old resort hotels in Watch Hill, where he met his second wife. She was a summer hotel waitress there, but her main job was as a Brooklyn grammar school teacher, teaching new Jewish and Italian immigrant kids. Her parents were a farm family in Norwalk, CT., and I have no idea why or how she ended up in Brooklyn. She once told me she had to check the kids for lice daily.
Her Mom lived with them until she died aged 107. She had been a nurse while being a farm wife too. She did jigsaw puzzles, and looked like an Indian (she had plenty of Indian blood, I am told, but was not happy about that, I suspect).
Grandpa's garage shelves were piled with hearts and brains and kidneys in jars with formaldehyde or alcohol or whatever. Cool for a kid. As I recall, my Dad burned them - along with all of his old wooden file cabinets of medical records, when the old guy died at 86 or 87.
This is him at my aunt's wedding. My Dad's sister was a beauty and a Physical Therapist for the Army until she had kids, but she is now gone too:
His patients loved him but eventually he outlived most of them. Many paid him with farm produce, and the poor paid him with labor at his house - chopping wood, painting, cleaning up the grounds, etc. I remember stopping by and seeing a bushel basket of fresh-dug potatoes left on the back porch, and a basket of sweet corn another time. He had a good-sized vegetable garden down in the back, which he tended himself. Lots of wax beans, as I recall. I do like them too.
He had the first EKG machine in CT. We still have that German machine in its splendid mahogany case. It still works. I need to take a photo of it when I remember. I think my Dad intends to donate it to the Yale Medical School museum.
I'll welcome more Grandpa thumbnail sketches in the comments.
Tuesday, June 8. 2010
Fat union guy bussed in to Arkansas to make phone calls, from Powerline's Hey, union man: Another look:
From Am Thinker, How to Fight Back against Public Unions: A Primer. He begins:
We have reached a potential turning point in the relationship of public employee unions and the electorate they ostensibly serve. Over the past year, there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism focused on public unions and the havoc they have wrought on our public finances. Governments -- city, country, state, and federal -- are drowning in red ink Our taxes are flowing to ever-voracious government workers (whose own ranks are growing steadily while the private payrolls shrink); they are better compensated than private workers in comparable positions.
What is to be done?
In my view, public unions should be illegal due to conflict of interest.
I do not know how material poverty can be defined. I have an easier time defining poverty of spirit. Man can not live on bread alone, and material appurtenances are no measure of quality of life.
(I have mentioned before two "poor" people I have come to know well: a Maine Guide who lives with his family in an unelectrified log cabin built by his own hands and who home-schools, and a New Hampshire farmer who attends my church whose life is as spartan and spare as that of the Guide, but whose life is full of joy, accomplishment, friends, pride, and serenity - except when his equipment breaks.)
Few people get this as well as my fellow shrink Dr. Ted Dalrymple, a man who has seen it all both in the jails and government housing of England and around the world. Sympathy Deformed: Misguided compassion hurts the poor.
The examples from Africa are heartbreaking.
Given all that, I am grateful to be what I am, an American professional woman married to a Boston finance guy with money to spare. He still plays Rugby and hockey, and I never lacked for life spirit either. We lack neither the Holy sort nor the secular sort of spirit, I think, and Shame On You if you do not jump into the thick of life and grab it by the balls the ball. Our family motto is a Nike ad. I do not need much in material comforts, but I do like and desire other things, including a closer walk with Christ. There is something about having spare money that causes one to want less material stuff, at least for me.
As our Editor says, a new car is a used car after 24 hours. Thoreau would have said the same thing, but it was all hypothetical for him. He had a family business (always a good thing to have).
The so-called Cadillac excise tax in ObamaCare will force tens of millions of Americans into Yugos.
The 40% excise tax imposed by ObamaCare upon “Cadillac” medical insurance and related plans could actually increase costs to employers by up to 60%.
The Democrat Congress voted for it to penalize the supposedly well-to-do and to raise revenues. Some conservatives support it as well, to force more cost-consciousness in the choice of medical benefits and potentially restrain medical care usage and cost-inflation.
The effects will be drastic, well beyond what many are aware.
The Cadillac excise tax is paid by the administrator of the medical plan, whether the insurer or claims administrator, and will be passed on to the employer sponsoring the plan for its employees. The excise tax is not deductible from taxes. So, if in, say, a 35% federal tax bracket the 40% becomes an actual 54%. Most states conform to federal tax regs, so add in the state tax impact and the true cost of the Cadillac excise tax can be as much as 60% or more.
The excise tax will take effect in 2018. It impacts the excess of annual premium above $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family (including as of 2013 a restricted to a max of $2500 annual employee contribution to pre-tax flexible spending accounts to pay for out-of-pocket medical expenses), those thresholds then adjusted by CPI inflation which is far below medical cost inflation. (Some “dangerous” trades and some elders have slightly higher thresholds.)
Add that 40% to 60% on top of current and future premiums and the result will be a sharp increase in employers and employees’ costs, resulting in sharp decreases in benefits for medical care.
Now, let’s segue to a medical insurance client of mine in Southern California. Medical insurance premiums in Southern California are well-below those in many other states, NY, NJ or Mass. as prime examples of states that have much higher premiums due to community rating and guarantee-issue which are also parts of ObamaCare to be imposed on all states.
It’s a small firm. Neither the owners nor their employees are rich. Their earnings are middle-class. The owners are both married with two child dependents. An employee is married, his wife having had expensive life-saving treatments for cancer, an ongoing expense. Their medical insurance is with a major reputable carrier. The plan is a PPO, with in-network and out-of-network benefits. They have excellent in-network access to top doctors and hospitals, but to save his wife’s life the employee had to use the out-of-network benefits to go to another state at Mayo. The employer pays most of the employees’ premium.
The current monthly premium for a family is $3031 ($36,372 annually). (The benefits are below.)
At their last renewal, they could have cut a family’s monthly premium to $2597 ($31,164 annually), for an increase in out-of-network coinsurance (member responsibility to pay) from the present out-of-network 40% of negotiated (discounted) charges and 100% of the excess above that to 50%, an increase of $500 per member in-network and $4000 out-of-network in maximum annual out-of-pocket expense($1000 in-network and $8000 family), and a $5 brand Rx co-pay increase.
The business owners do not drive fancy cars, live in fancy houses, go to fancy restaurants or on fancy vacations. Their priority is on protecting their families and that of their employees, especially with an employee’s wife having a life-threatening disease needing special out-of-network care.
They chose to not cut benefits, now anyway.
In the future, they will have to cut benefits to far below even the currently available alternative.
Multiply that cut in benefits by millions of employers, and tens of millions of employees.
As Al Jolson famously said, “Ya ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Americans with medical insurance will be forced by ObamaCare to switch to Yugos.
(Current plan benefits: In-network, doctor visits are $20, hospital inpatient is 20% of the carrier’s negotiated discounted charges, and prescriptions are $10 for generic/$25 for brand on the formulary and $40 non-formulary brand. The annual out-of-pocket maximum is $3000 per member, with a two-member maximum of $6000 for a family. The lifetime covered charges is $5-million. Is that “Cadillac”? Oh, by the way, as Politico reports, the ObamaCare "Health law could ban low-cost plans" as well. American workers are screwed either way by ObamaCare.)
Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.
No kidding. You can't even try to discuss economic issues with them. I call it "Fairy-tale Economics." Exceptions to the rule? Plenty of them, mainly the Wall Streeter limousine Libs who dominate the upper levels of finance in America.
Monday, June 7. 2010
The problem with CPR is remembering what to do when your adrenaline begins surging because it looks like somebody is trying to die. (Some of the other problems are those of cracking some ribs of some guy who doesn't need it, or of keeping "alive" somebody whose brain is already dying or dead. Knowing when to use CPR is as important as knowing how.)
Coyote offers this useful reminder: Super Sexy CPR
Sunday, June 6. 2010
In 1973, Nixon and Kissinger used South Vietnam as a tool to widen the split between China and the Soviet Union. In 2010, Islamists, Iran and other Muslim states use the Obama administration as a tool to split the US from Israel.
Most of us who are still aghast at the Democrat controlled US Congress dooming South Vietnam to fall by cutting off promised arms and air support necessary to its survival also criticized Nixon and Kissinger for walking into the duplicitous trap of the Peace Accords of 1973. The North Vietnamese rulers had a long, documented history of promising one thing while doing another.
However, Nixon and Kissinger had a bigger game afoot, to reduce tensions with China for our purpose of widening its rift from the Soviet Union, which added pressure on the Soviet Union.
In effect, South Vietnam was a tool to what they had good reasons to believe was a bigger, more important end. Surely, neither Nixon nor Kissinger expected Nixon’s Watergate downfall and the left Democrats to sweep to Congressional power.
There’s a difference now.
Obama and Clinton may be thinking they are using Israel as a tool to cuddle up to long and continually intransigent Arab states. But they are actually tools themselves of those who seek nothing else than the downfall of Israel and the retreat of the US from confronting their clear goals of dominating the Middle East and, via its oil, Europe.
Obama and Clinton don’t deny the ongoing efforts of Iran in going nuclear or sending men and arms to those attacking US, Iraqi and Afghan troops, to Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. They just avoid the necessary countermeasures and march forward in repeatedly proven delusions of Iran changing its spots and of kumbaya as a replacement for reality.
Nixon and Kissinger had a world view realistically based on US interests furthering a world order of surer peace. Obama and Clinton, fully consciously or not, have a world view based on US interests being a barrier to a world order of peace, that ignores or excuses or refuses to confront the reality of foes’ unrelenting hate of the US and the West, encouraged by Obamanesque fecklessness.
Oh! Another bit of reality that Obama and apologists can try to ignore: "Iran Revolutionary Guards ready to escort Gaza ships"
- Thanks again, Insty. We appreciate your appreciation, and encourage Insty folks to peruse our eclectic site. You might like it. Or you might not.
P.S.: Hillary Clinton warns Iran not to pull a stunt. Wake up Hillary, "Iran called our bluff long ago."
Yesterday afternoon on Long Island Sound with a nice breeze, with some pics of pretty boats.
These folks are setting their sails:
This was a 12-meter race which we watched for a bit, mostly boats from the 60s:
An email with pics from our friend and occasional guest-poster Nathan, who is living in Jerusalem:
After watching Verdi's Nabuco performed at night at the foot of Matzada, I planned my ascent on Saturday.
Up at 415 a.m. and cabbed to Matzada from Ein Gedi Kibbutz facing the Dead Sea, two kilometers below sea level. Hiked up the 350 Meters during sunrise. First one up. Took the "snake path" on the east face of the mountain fortress built about thirty years before Christ by Herod, the son of Edomite Converts to Judaism, who was King under the Romans and fairly much despised by the Jews, even as he prevailed over some thirty years of stunnning prosperity and --- trained as an engineer/architect -- proliferative building including the entire port of Cesaria (named after Cesar), which included a hippodrome and perhaps more importantly a major port for the Romans.
The snake path
The history here is ironic and as twisty as the Snake Path, which was built by Herod so that supplies, including water from Ein Gedi oasis about 17 km north, could be brought up by donkeys. There is a western ramp built by Jewish slaves under the Romans to defeat the Jewish Sicari in 73 AD, but that in a moment.
The remarkable stillness (beyond quiet) on the 45 minute hike up gives time for reflection and occassional glances to sight the hints of sun's birth over the Dead Sea, even as the crescent moon and a star-like planet linger in the South East.
Sunrise over the Dead Sea
Herod built this fortress, designed by himself after his architects and engineers said that it could not be done. Built it to protect himself with the sheers on all sides. Protect himself from his Jews. Having been driven once from Jerusalem by angry Jews (a tough crowd to rule over, it seems), he decided he needed a few refuges to which to escape in the future. Built Herodian just south of Jerusalem, but Matzada was his star. Quarried in place, he imported the two-piece capitals for the columns. The quarries apparently became used for water storage. But, Josephus (the Jewish general turncoat who became a chronicler for the Romans) describes massive storehouses filled with wine amphoras (Greek for any container that can be lift from either side) for wine and olive oil, and supplies of corn, dates, pulse and other preserved foodstuffs, which Josephus said could supply the garrison for years. There are remaining frescos (apparently the artisans were familiar with Vitruvius multi-volume work on architecture) and elegant mosaic floors in place. The castle was built on three levels at the northern tip of the plateau, on three natural ledges. The castle faces towards the oasis of Ein Gedi, where David once took refuge from King Saul, who was jealous of DAvid's achievements. But that is another tale.
Below as one reaches the top, the Dead Sea has a heaviness to it, as if made of molten lead. Light appears before the Sun, which arises with its shifting colors until it attains that blinding glare of the Desert.
After Herod's death, the Jewish rebellion began against Rome: the Jews even minted their own shekels, labeling them for each year of the rebellion: one can eye these up to the fifth year in the new Museum at the end of the visit.
Jerusalem fell. (The Romans complained that there was so much blood from slaughtering Jews in the Old City that Roman horses had to wade through lakes of blood to their bellies.) A group of some seventy Sicari Jews (very fierce and named for the Sicar, double-edged curved knives) retreated to Matzada, which became the last refuge and last place defeated by the Romans. Coming out here, at the edge of a dead lake of salt, two kilometers below the world of sea level, surrounded by pastel-hued mountains which themselves once were ocean bottom, on the edge of the Syrian-African rift, one is impressed, amazed at the extent to which the Romans went to defeat this last 70-citizen outpost of the Jews.
They set a siege that lasted several years, the Romans building some eight permanent camps, the largest of which had a Cardo, the central commercial street of every major Roman town. The Sicari settled into the opulent palace and buildings of Herod, leaving evidence of their pottery, which measure poorly when compared to the simple, but elegant Edom-tinted, reddish pottery made for Herod (and each labelled by its artisan). The Jews wrote notes on pottery shards to use for dealing out each families portioin and so on.
Surrounding landscape
The Romans, as I said, used Jewish slaves to build the assault ramp. At first the Romans built, but the Sicari would dump scalding oil on the Roman laborers, so Jewish slaves were enlisted to solve that problem. To taunt and demoralize the Roman soldiers, whose water was carefully met out, the Jewish women would hang out their clothes to dry, as if to show that they had plenty of water in the underground cisterns (which are massive as one walks into them.)
The end of this story came quickly when it came. The Romans, upon completing the ramp, pushed a ram to the top to batter the wall. The Jews tried to reinforce with stone and dirt. I believe that at this point the Jewish set the ram afire, but winds blew this towards the wall and burned through what was not made of stone.
The rest we know from Josephus, a very literate turncoat, who in turn learned of the last moments of the Sicari from two surviving mothers and their five children who had hidden within the double-walled storage area so as not to be "suicided" by the Sicari. Ben ari, the leader of the Sicari Jews gave a speech, stating that their women would not be violated by Romans, nor their children ever taste slavery. They set all the stores afire to defeat the Romans in death. After the ten men killed the others, they had lots with their names written upon them. The leader cut the throats of the remaining nine, then his own. These lots -- with the names legible -- were found by Yigal Yadin in the 1960's excavation.
Ruins of Herod's castle
Matzada was mostly forgotten. Briefly used by some monks, then forgotten again. In the late 50's a Jewish archeologist, Shmarayu Guttman suggested excavation. but, not until 1963 did former General Yigal Yadin do the excavations as a Professor at the Hebrew U. Just a brief tale from Yadin. By reading Josephus (you know the reversible-coat part here already), Yadin was determined to find the castle on the northern lip. But, from above, it looked like nothing was there and colleagues doubted that anything could have been built on such a sheer, surfaced with shards and rubble. But Yadin tied a rope to a rock at the top, rappeled down with a brush and hand tool, and discovered the castle. When they got to the lowest level, the third terrace, they found the skeleton of a Roman soldier -- armor intact -- lying near a woman's skeleton, her hair braids intact.
That's the news from Matzada.
Friday, June 4. 2010
Arrogant idiot Derek Bok thinks government needs to provide us with happiness. More at Moonbattery.
Says I, just give me my freedom, and I'll figure out how to be as happy or unhappy as I chose to be - and I'll do it my way, and definitely not the way a Harvard President would do it for himself - or "for me."
Furthermore, I do not need any government Soma. I can handle unhappiness just fine and I can take my lumps like a man, when necessary. Life wasn't meant to be a bowl of cherries, nor did I ever expect it to be.
Hizbollah, Iran’s tool in Lebanon, is in virtual control of its government, armed with thousands of missiles from Iran directly and via Iran’s Syria conduit, the missiles able to reach all of Israel.
As US Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates said last month:
"Syria and Iran are providing Hezbollah with rockets and missiles of ever-increasing capability," he said at a joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak.
"And we're at a point now, where Hizbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world, and this is obviously destabilizing for the whole region and we're watching it very carefully."
Hizbollah is encouraged by the hamstringing of Israel by the Obama administration and Israel’s allowing it in dealing with the Gaza blockade runners, coupled with the hypocritical outcry of international abettors and appeasers of Hamas.
If Israel has its way and does what’s necessary, Hizbollah should think twice before attacking Israel, unless Washington again tries to hobble Israel and Israel allows it.
Israel is focused on dealing a severe blow to Hizbollah. Defense News, a leading authoritative US publication on military matters, reports “Israel’s New Hard Line on Hizbollah.” Letting Lebanon, Hizbollah and the world know what’s in store is called deterrence, or stand-by-for-an-ass-whipping.
The last time war broke out along the Lebanese border, Israel acted clumsily and lost its aura of invincibility. If there is a next time, Israel's military brass vows, things will be different.
Under a strategy honed since the 2006 Lebanon war and rehearsed in microcosm in the late-2008 Gaza incursion, a new fight against Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hizbollah would see an all-out assault on the party's arsenals, command centers, commercial assets and strongholds throughout the country.
But it also would include attacks on national infrastructure; a total maritime blockade; and interdiction strikes on bridges, highways and other smuggling routes along the Syrian border with Syria. Meanwhile, land forces would execute a ferocious land grab well beyond the Litani River that Israeli brigades belatedly hobbled toward yet failed to reach in the last war….
In a May 23 interview, Gantz [IDF General Staff] warned that it could take repeated rounds of high-intensity wars to remove the Iranian-trained and financed threat from the north. The aim, he said, is to prolong the periods of relative quiet between war fighting.
"Israel cannot exist with protracted peaks of warfare," he said. "Therefore, we have to reduce them to reasonable levels - similar to the way we drove down terror in the aftermath of Defensive Shield [the IDF's 2002 operation in the West Bank]. That way, we allow our people to live reasonably under a protracted emergency situation until we fix it, and then we go back to square one.
"I doubt there will be peace afterwards, but at least we'll be able to extend the time between peaks ... Through strategic attrition - one round and then another round - we'll create a situation where each new round brings worse results than the last. And that, in and of itself, brings a formidable deterrent."
Here’s a video of tank defense technology that Israel is rapidly implementing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jzAupr044
Hereabouts, it's time to yank out the Spring pansies. Many people have the nurseries fill their planters right about now, but people like Mrs. BD like to do them herself.
She says all you need to know is that a planter needs one thriller, a few spillers, and filler - with interesting foliage contrast and compatible color. It's a form of flower arranging. In a couple of weeks, these pots will be looking good:
Thursday, June 3. 2010
The US pressured Israel for, in effect, a cover-up demanded by Turkey of exactly who are all the blockade runners. No one even knows the names or the affiliations of many of the passengers on the ships that tried to run the blockade of Gaza. All, except a few Israeli-Arabs, have been released by Israel.
Why? The US persuaded Israel to release all quickly, to appease Turkey.
Gerald Seib writes in the Wall Street Journal on US “mediation” between Israeli and Turkish officials:
Ultimately, the mediation succeeded in ending what had emerged as the most immediate cause of rising tensions: the detention in Israel of hundreds of Turkish citizens who formed the bulk of the pro-Palestinian activists removed from the ships….
Meantime, Mr. Obama also called an angry Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The conversation showed that the Israeli-Turkish relationship was in bad shape, but also that the burning issue for Turkey was winning the rapid release of several hundred Turkish citizens who had been taken off the ships by Israeli soldiers. "The immediate tourniquet that could be put on this arterial bleed, if you want, had to do with getting the Turkish citizens home," Gen. Jones said….
Mr. Netanyahu's government agreed to quickly clear an internal legal hurdle that was standing in the way of an immediate release: It persuaded the country's supreme court to deny appeals by some Israeli groups calling for charges to be pressed against those taken off the ships.
The result:
UAE TV reports of those sent to Jordan: “…126 international activists arrived in Jordan….The International activists received an official and public welcome….”
Deutche Welle reports:
Three planes carrying nearly 500 activists from the Gaza aid flotilla arrived in Istanbul early on Thursday, and were welcomed by a crowd of supporters, many of whom waved Palestinian flags and shouted anti-Israel slogans....
Most of the activists were Turkish, but participants from at least 38 different nations were also involved, including Israelis, Palestinians and more than 100 Europeans….Turkey's deputy prime minister, Bulent Arinc [says] "Israel will be asked within the framework of laws to pay for the murders it has committed," [and] Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for Israel to be punished for what he called "state terrorism."
That’s the thanks Israel gets for acceding to Washington.
BTW, no not really by the way but central to understanding the whys of the snafu at sea, I’m still waiting for journalists or insiders to reveal, those who care enough and have the integrity to know and report, about the “explosive question” to find out exactly what the Obama administration told Israel "through multiple channels, many times" before the raid on the ships about being restrained, as the US State Department spokesman admitted to the Washington Post, and what exactly those in the Netanyahu administration did about it, that may have contributed to the snafu at sea.
There's shame deserved in Washingtom and Jerusalem for expecting thanks or constructive results for self-hobbling. Make the facts public. If citizens of Israel are expected to die in defense of their country, or be killed for just being in Israel, and if the US is expected to be useful for peace instead of a useful tool for enemies of the US and Israel, we all deserve to know, now.
PowerLine links to my earlier post, "EXPLOSIVE Question" (link to it above). There are now two instances known of Obama administration pressure on Israel to, in effect, commit "suicide." When will the major media start demanding to know all the facts, in Washington and in Jerusalem, of these and other instances and when will some brave soul come clean?
Turkey Hash: The Turkish Prime Minister says, “I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization." He also says "the Ten Commandments prohibits Jews from killing." Actually, it says "murder." Perhaps he should talk to his Hamas buddies, eh?
Wednesday, June 2. 2010
Do DSM psychiatric diagnoses have any validity? Or are they superficial descriptors on the order of "Patient has a fever" or "Patient is dehydrated," but with pseudo-scientific-sounding specificity?
What’s in a name? Genetic overlap between major psychiatric disorders
Readers know that I view a DSM diagnosis as just a little bit more than an insurance form entry item, most of the time. As a highly experienced colleague says, "I've read the DSM, and I have never found a patient of mine in there."
I plan to bore our readers by reposting my series on Psychiatric Diagnosis during vacation this summer.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs gathered senior Israeli generals to outline the basics of Israeli defense issues and policy, "Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace."
The link has several illuminating videos as well as the reports. I won’t use up bandwidth or delay it loading on your end by presenting the videos or reports. If any are interested in the hard facts, please go to the site and see for yourself, including why much of the commentary and suggestions offered by armchair generals and ignorant politicians are dangerous illusions and hogwash, indeed further the aims of Israel and the West's enemies. Security is the object of diplomacy, not to be compromised or sacrificed for "process" or photo-ops that avoid the core issues.
Goldberg: In a welfare state, how much is 'enough'?
A quote:
Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is "enough." What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There's no such thing as enough. That's what the Greeks thought.
That's what the Greeks thought until Mr. Reality in the form of the Bond Market appeared to them.
There is no such thing as "enough" as long as there is one more vote to be bought.
Tuesday, June 1. 2010
Five or six more months until duck season. A friend sent me these photos of a splendid, if surrealistically overblown, duck blind. It has to be in Arkansas.
Conservatives claim that government is incompetent, inefficient, and intrinsically corrupt (eg vote buying), and therefore can be trusted to do very little.
Libs and Lefties seem to believe that government is smarter and possessed of superior motives to those of the private sector.
When governments fail to demonstrate effectiveness (as in the IRS' failure to make money on a Nevada whorehouse, or the oil spill, or managing money, or border control, or Fannie and Freddie, or...), many Conservatives complain that government isn't doing its job with all our dough. Libs and Lefties complain that the failure will damage the notion of big government's omni-competence and virtue and thus their claim to our hard-earned dollars and pennies.
Readers know my view: Much of government is a legal racket, a special interest in itself devoted to its own interests of power and money and ego. Government has limited power against reality, and disproportionately more power over people's lives. Obama can no more control the oil spill than he can legislate the weather or the economy.
I am entirely in agreement with Steyn who we quoted this morning, "Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government."
I do not blame Obama for the oil (or the weather). I never rush to blame anybody for anything. Shit happens. However, government worshippers like Obama cannot say so because it would undermine the vision, which they market, of governmental godlike omnicompetence and virtue leading towards Progress and Worry-Free Life and General Wonderfulness. The Achilles' Heel of taking that position is that you must accept blame for almost anything that goes wrong.
Reality is relentless. Even if you control the media, reality wins in the end.
Monday, May 31. 2010
Let’s cut out the crap from the international sob-sisters and abetters of Gazan Hamas thugs. Let the UN Security Council show this video upon its big screen, and then choke on the hasty lies swallowed by puerile politicians of pusillanimity pontificating from far away, and the media that vomited the lies upon its viewers and readers. Those who say anything Israel did was disproportionate parrot the word on cue, without any sense of what it means, in definition or actuality.
There are only two things disproportionate: 1. Israelis were armed with paintball guns and did not use more force to quickly quell and control those violently prepared upon the Mavi Marmara. Instead, Israel, as usual restrained itself, while no such self-control was planned by or exerted upon those on the ship. 2. The usual crowd of sympathizers to terror and antagonists to self-defense knee-jerk echoing of clearly wrong, inane and antagonistic charges against Israel, even despite the clear evidence to the contrary.
The blockade of Gaza is to prevent war material from entering. It preserves the peace. The convoy was offered but refused to have its cargo inspected and if humanitarian transferred to Gaza.
The convoy was not humanitarian in intent or action. It was a blatant political propaganda ploy, intentionally belligerent in leadership, word and deed, to provoke in order to pressure Israel to commit suicide, opening Gaza’s borders to the type of infusion of deadly weapons and missiles for Hamas to attack Israel that flows unimpeded into Lebanon.
Any who defend the convoy or its passengers are actually furthering avoidable death and war.
P.S.: I'm just too angry to write more right now. My friend Bookie has a good roundup. She points us to this that if President Obama plays his usual games of currying favors, which are not returned by any to whom he has, he will speed and impel Israel to take its survival in its own hands. PowerLine also has proportionate sense to offer: don't "bring a toy gun to a knife fight." AllahPundit wonders about the immediate convening of the UN Security Council to condemn Israel, compared to it not meeting when North Korea torpedoed and sunk a South Korean ship. See Useful Idiots At Sea and other posts at Contentions.
Also known as Catmint (it is related to Catnip). It's a long-blooming front-of-the-border plant, and will re-bloom later if the exhausted blooms are cut off. It comes in a few cultivars of varying heights.
This was yesterday. Note the happy Digitalis on the left. Little Lamb's Ear Hydrangea in front.
Friday, May 28. 2010
At Oxford.
Maybe. I think the hardest exam in the world is working a job and keeping a job, but my pup says the hardest exams in the world are the (paperless) rapid-fire interviews at big NYC banks. "What's 18X17?" "What's the square root of 289?" "What's the annualized rate of whatever?" And the damn logic puzzles she told me about, which I have now forgotten. What's the one where they pour the salt and the pepper onto the table, and ask you to quickly separate the salt from the pepper?
Oh, now I remember that one...
Thursday, May 27. 2010
When I heard the story and saw the pics, it was clear to me that our Editor happily does the "jobs Americans won't do." Such as outdoor labor. Supposedly only illegal Mexicans will do that hard work.
Two months ago I posted a sign at the High School jobs bulletin board. It said "Yard, Garden, and Farm Work, through the season. $10/hr," and I gave my phone number. Unbelievably, given how hard it for kids to find jobs right now, I only received two replies, a guy and a gal. They have been doing chores for me on weekends, and will begin working 5 or 6 days/week until everything on my list is done. It will take at least into August. They are wonderful, do not mind heavy lifting or getting dirty, and tell me this job will get them buff and tan for their summer nights.
My list for them includes painting the shed and the barn and a garden fence, splitting wood for the fall (I won't let them do chain-sawing), weekly lawn mowing, clearing out some downed trees in the pasture, mucking the barn, putting up hay when it comes in, weeding the gardens, trimming hedges, edging borders, putting down mulch, re-setting a long slate walkway in stone dust, replacing some horse fence, cleaning the barn windows, rebuilding my garden compost bins, replacing or repairing a couple of gates and garden fences, etc. The Mrs. will give them lunch, and promises me that she will be demanding of them and will treat them formally, as employees and not like kids (which they do not seem to require thus far). It's much more work than I have time to do on weekends.
If they stick with it, it's worth $3-4,000 for each of them. A costly summer for me, but many of these jobs have been accumulating and need to get done now. Furthermore, it will give me more time for riding with the Mrs., which she very much appreciates even though I am no great fan of horses. Golf too.
Remind me to let you know how it works out, but so far, so good.
From a review of Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, by William Voegeli. One quote:
Liberalism's most acute critics such as University of Virginia political scientist James Ceaser emphasize the centrality of crises, real or manufactured, in expanding the size and reach of the liberal state (as in the recent case of the supposedly imminent global warming catastrophe). In Never Enough, Voegeli, a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center and a contributing editor of this journal, points to a complementary concept: liberalism, he argues, "lacks a limiting principle." This boundlessness, as it might be described, is familiar to Americans across the country who have watched, for instance, secondary school costs and college tuitions grow at roughly twice the rate of inflation for a quarter-century now. This boundlessness generates some of the apprehension that animates the Tea Parties. As a friend asked me rhetorically—referring to the fact that the failing schools in Washington, D.C., spend $28,000 a year per pupil while Harvard tuition costs $34,000 a year—"When will enough be enough?"
In my view, never. It's a vote-buying game built on the childish wish-fulfillment fantasies of voters. Long ago, when Mario Cuomo had a short-lived radio talk show, I called in and asked him what the end point was of Progressivism. The gabby Cuomo became instantly tongue-tied when I asked him about government auto insurance.
Another quote from this excellent review:
"Democracy," said liberalism's pre-eminent founding father Herbert Croly, "must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility." These were the words of a radical, not a reformer—a man who, like Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, saw himself as leading humanity to a higher and more refined stage of civilization. Croly wanted the collective power of society put "at the service of its ablest members," who would be given the lead roles in the social drama of Progress. Boundlessness is built into the DNA of American liberalism.
Liberalism was to be a new covenant in which the priests of Progress led the people into the promised land of a full blown European-style welfare state. But in the intervening century, two of the key building blocks of liberalism—namely the concept of Progress and the popular appeal of government—have become problematic, the first for liberals themselves and the second for much of the populace.
Well said. Funny how many folks do not wish to be perfected by their betters, and prefer to be left alone. I guess most Americans aren't Euroweenies at heart, and prefer to be citizens, not subjects.
Yer editor at work, editing the heck out of an overgrown 15-acre boulder-strewn meadow. Photo does not capture the height and density of the overgrowth, nor does it fully capture the Yankee red-neck elegance of the world-famous blog celeb Bird Dog.
We were happy to see that there were still struggling grasses underneath the growth, which will now have a chance to thrive again. I think we will need to mow again in September in an effort to thoroughly discourage the saplings and to give the grasses and wildflowers a good head start next Spring.
We carefully gave a wide berth to a huge Painted Turtle who decided to dig a hole and lay some eggs in the field while we were working. Got some photos. This is the meadow adjacent to the beaver marsh.
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