The Essence of the French and Norwegians

I had to record the old but best description of the French from The Simpsons via Wikipedia as spoken by Willie the groundskeeper.

cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys

I found it because I thought he was the one that called the Norwegians

salmon-eating, international busybodies

but apparently it was an aide to the president of Sri Lanka Chandrika Kumaratunga, a Mr. Samaraweera. See here and here.

Just as apropos.

Irish Eddie versus Benny Leonard

A story of old Jewish boxers. Pebble to Small Beer blog.

Boxing was also the first sport to give Jews an equal chance to compete (if not dominate): between 1910 and 1940, there were 26 Jewish world boxing champions. Some of these fighters fought under non-Jewish names, often Irish. This was partly because Irish boxers were very popular with the public, and partly because their families disapproved of their career choice. (It was said that, "They fear no man in the ring, but they're scared of their mothers.") An oft-told story concerned Benny Leonard (real name: Benjamin Leiner), one great Jewish fighter who never masked his heritage. Leonard was touring, and in a grimy Pennsylvania mill/mining town was matched up against the local pride and joy, one Irish Eddie Finnegan. The crowd was out for blood, and even before the fight started was chanting, "Kill the Jew. Kill the Jew." This so infuriated Leonard that he let out all the stops and pounded his opponent mercilessly. He might actually have killed him, except at one point "Irish Eddie" was able to engage Leonard in a clinch and gasp, in Yiddish, that his name was really Seymour Rosenbaum.

Newsweek's America's Top 50 Rabbis

America's Top 50 Rabbis

Compilers:
Sony Pictures CEO and Chairman Michael Lynton
Gary Ginsberg, Newscorp
Jay Sanderson, JTN Productions

Scoring:
Are the rabbis known nationally/internationally? (20 points.)
Do they have a media presence? (10 points.)
Are they leaders within their communities? (10 points.)
Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements? (10 points.)
Size of their constituency? (10 points.) Do they have political/social influence? (20 points.)
Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career? (10 points.) Have they made a "greater" impact? (10 points.)

Of Special Note
36. Nachum Braverman (Orthordox)
Braverman is Aish Hatorah’s leading American leader.

Orthodox: 15
Chassidic: 1
Lubavitch: 1
Total: 17

Others:
Conservative: 10
Reconstructionist: 3
Reform: 18
Renewal: 2

Israeli-Arab opinion statistics

Israeli-Arab opinion statistics -- where should this lead Israeli planning?!

University of Haifa poll showing that 76 percent of Arab Israelis believe that Zionism of a form of racism and that 28 percent of Arab Israelis deny the Holocaust.

George Soros: Nazi Collaborator

Carolyn Glick tells something about George Soros I hadn't heard before.

...by his own admission in interviews with 60 Minutes in 1998 and PBS in 1993, [the anti-Zionist (but Jewish) George]Soros collaborated with the Nazis in seizing Jewish property in Budapest in 1944.

Author Serge Trifkovic, who is currently researching a biography of Soros tells of a Holocaust survivor in Hungary who claims that the reason Soros was allowed to remain free was "the boy's special knowledge of the Jewish community and its attempts to protect its property from confiscation."

Limousine Liberal Hypocrisy

Charles Krauthammer reveals the hypocrisy of the "Limosine" liberal left. [Hypocrisy means that they don't believe that the rules should actually apply to themselves, not that they made a mistake.]

Goldman Sachs has been one of the most aggressive firms on Wall Street about taking action on climate change; the company sends its bankers home at night in hybrid limousines.

--The New York Times, Feb. 25

Written without a hint of irony--if only your neighborhood dry cleaner sent his employees home by hybrid limousine--this front-page dispatch captured perfectly the eco-pretensions of the rich and the stupefying gullibility with which they are received.

Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore global-warming pitch at the Academy Awards? Before they spoke, the screen at the back of the stage flashed not-so-subliminal messages about how to save the planet. My personal favorite was "Ride mass transit." This to a conclave of Hollywood plutocrats who have not seen the inside of a subway since the moon landing and for whom mass transit means a stretch limo seating no fewer than 10.

Leo and Al then portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening's "carbon footprint" by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a "carbon broker," who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

A very few of the very rich have some awareness of the emptiness--if not the medieval corruption--of ransoming one's sins. Sergey Brin, zillionaire founder of Google, buys carbon credits to offset the ghastly amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Google's private Boeing 767 but confesses he's not sure if it really does anything.

Which puts him one step ahead of most other eco-preeners who actually pretend that it does--the Goracle himself, for example. His Tennessee mansion consumes 20 times the electricity used by the average American home. Last August alone it consumed twice as much power as the average home consumes in a year. Gore buys absolution, however. He spends pocket change on carbon credits, which then allow him to pollute conscience-free.

What is wrong with this scam? First, purchasing carbon credits is an incentive to burn even more fossil fuels, since now it is done under the illusion that it's really cost-free to the atmosphere.

Second, it is a way for the rich to export the real costs and sacrifices of pollution control to the poorer segments of humanity in the Third World. (Apparently, Hollywood's plan is to make up for that by adopting every last one of their children.) For example, GreenSeat, a Dutch carbon-trading outfit, buys offsets from a foundation that plants trees in Uganda's Mount Elgon National Park to soak up the carbon emissions of its rich Western patrons. Small problem: expanding the park encroaches on land traditionally used by local farmers. As a result, reports the New York Times, "villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, and their livestock has been confiscated by armed park rangers." All this so that swimming pools can be heated and Maseratis driven with a clear conscience in the fattest parts of the world.

The other form of carbon trading is to get Third World companies to cut their emissions to offset Western pollution. The reason this doesn't work--and why the carbon racket is a farce--is that you need a cap for cap-and-trade to work. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S. were capped, and the trading system succeeded in reducing acid rain by half. But even the Kyoto treaty doesn't put any cap on greenhouse gases in China and India, where billions of these carbon credits are traded. Sure, you can pretend you're offsetting Western greenhouse pollution by supposedly cleaning up a dirty coal plant in China. But China is adding a new coal plant every week. You could build a particularly dirty "uncapped" power plant, then sell hundreds of millions in carbon credits to reduce it to a normal rate of pollution. The result? The polluter gets very rich. The planet continues to cook. And the Gores of the world can feel virtuous as they burn up the local power grid.

If Gore really wants to save the planet, he can try this: Turn off the lights. Ditch the heated pool. Ride the subway. And spare us the carbon-trading piety.

QOTD: Mean Mister Mustard

Mean Mister Mustard on the limits of waiting for Islamic reform.

If you listen to [Dennis] Prager on the radio with any frequency, the tone and general thrust of his remarks would be fairly familiar to you: Israel cannot make peace with a population that is so overwhelmingly focused on death in general and Israel's destruction in particular.

Which is certainly true enough, but Prager, though I respect him, is constantly frustrating on questions like these in that he seems to refuse following the implications of his beliefs to their logical conclusions. [Michael] Berenbaum [in a debate with Prager] actually went farther in explicitly advocating separation between Israel and the Palestinians. Prager's rhetoric is still useful as a corrective to the vague and unreal suggestions about the peace process and moral equivalence that still litter the media landscape, but the fact that he doesn't speak beyond the present means that he can't offer any strategy or goal beyond an aggressive holding pattern modeled on the current situation, wherein Israel will presumably continue to kill Palestinians it considers threatening, but not do anything more ambitious or long-term. The underlying assumption that makes this at all tenable is that the Palestinians will eventually change and become acceptable neighbors.

This goes to the more basic problem that liberals like Prager have in discussing the wider problem of Islam: they are, for ideological reasons, unable to extrapolate a conclusion that Islam is inevitably (or nearly so) unreconcilable to the western world, no matter what the evidence says. On this point, Prager likes to say, "I don't judge religions, I judge practitioners," and he's quite willing to say that a huge proportion of Muslims are actively dangerous or at least hostile to us. But he categorically will not say that the belief system of Islam itself is such, holding always to the assumption that anything can happen in the future and that Islam will be whatever Muslims want it to be.

Which is true, up to a limited point. I suppose Muslims could tomorrow decide that the mandatory imposition of Sharia over the world is not one of Allah's commandments. But it fails to take Islam seriously as a religion. Indeed, it fails to take the entire idea of religion seriously. Either the Koran is the words of an all-powerful Creator or it itsn't. If it is, then by its own clear and unambiguous terms, it's impossible for a sincere Muslim to not "fight those who do not believe in Allah ... until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection." It would be like telling a Christian that they can continue to be Christians, just so long as they drop this whole "Jesus is the son of God" stuff. I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility that you could convince Christians to do that, but let's at least be honest enough to say that what you're really asking is for them to stop being Christians and become something else.

One of Prager's more frequent complaints about Jews is that most of them are only Jews in the ethnic sense, including those who profess to be believers. It's difficult, for instance, to find a (non-Orthodox) Jew who will express agreement with the statement that homosexual sex is an abomination. But he's essentially asking the same thing of Muslims, and in an even more egregious way, since there are some creative (but unconvincing) ways that one could try to abrogate Leviticus' banning of homosexual acts, but the Koran's orders to spread Sharia and politically subvert the non-Muslim world seem obvious and unquestionable in comparison.