QOTD: Mitt Romney

Pebble to Hugh Hewitt

"'What Jimmy Carter fails to understand is what so many fail to understand: Whether it is Hamas or Hezbollah or al Qaeda, there is an overarching goal among the violent jihadists that transcends borders and boundaries. That goal is to replace all modern Islamic states with a caliphate, to destroy Israel, to cause the collapse of the West and the United States, and to conquer the world.'"

Kollel by the Numbers

Joe Settler provides some numeric analysis of the "cost" of kollel and the benefit. Good work as it presents the issue from a perspective I had not thought of.

Today is Yom HaShoah in Israel – the day we remember the massacre and attempted genocide of our nation a mere 60 years ago by Germany and her allies. Not so different than today when Iran wants to wipe us out while Germany supplies them with the tools and means to build nuclear weapons.

On the jblogsphere we often see a lot of riling against full time Yeshiva/Kollel students who sit and learn all day instead of working.

I won’t deny that I too see a problem with it, particularly when after having a discussion with some of these full-time learners, I sometimes walk away unimpressed or uninspired by the limited scope of their learning or knowledge.

On the other hand there are others who impress me highly with their learning and acumen.

Over Shabbat someone (whose sons all decided to "turn black" and become full time learners) put it into perspective for me (not her first choice for their lifetime profession, but she is proud that they are serious and real learners).

6 million Jews were wiped out.

We have perhaps 14 million Jews left in the world.

In the US, of the ~6 million Jews around 7% are Orthodox (400,000). In Israel of the ~6 million Jews, around 20% are Orthodox (1,200,000). Let’s throw in another 100,000 for the rest of the world. That gives us 1,700,000 Orthodox Jews in the world to carry on our heritage and message. (If someone thinks they have better numbers I’d love to hear them).

Of that 1.7 million let’s say nearly 10% learn (at whatever level) full time at any given time (150,000) (and that doesn’t mean that their wives don’t work).

(We know that 50,000 in Israel receive draft exemptions for full-time Torah learning, so I tripled that number to account for those that aren’t affected by the draft exemption and for those living in Chul – perhaps far too large a number, but let’s go with it for the sake of the discussion.)

So out of 14 million Jews in the world, just 150,000 Jews learn Torah full time – that’s a mere 1% of our nation ensuring that Torah is studied full time.

And (I’m just guessing), perhaps from those 150,000 perhaps 1% (1500) produces truly unique geniuses and outstanding Torah scholars that advance us (while the rest provide a solid base of continuity).

So let’s think about it, is the production of 1500 exceptional scholars really such a large number and huge drain for our nation of 14 million Jews. Is 1% of our nation learning full time such a drag on our national resources?

Is Kollel then really such a bad thing in the larger perspective?

I might ask at first, "Is that not worth the price?", but the real question is, "Is this not the minimum we should be doing as a Holy Nation of Priests, and not to mention, to reverse the destruction the Shoah and the Assimilation has and is doing to our nation?"

QOTD: James Lileks on Appeasers

QOTD:James Lileks

That's the predictable thing about appeasers: They're so intent on moving forward they don't care which body they have to step over.

Islamic View of the West

James Lileks puts it very succinctly.

Iran ... thinks the West is weak and exhausted, that Europe is a continent full of sixth-century Roman sodomy-besotted elites dining on larks' brains while its civilization rots from within.

Are they really that far off?

An iPod for every kid? Are they !#$!ing idiots?

The Detroit News carries a great editorial. Even liberals can get fed up...

We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark, House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every school child in Michigan.

No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to "invest" in education. Details, we are promised, will follow.

The Democrats, led by their increasingly erratic speaker Andy Dillon of Redford Township, also pledge $100 million to make better downtowns.

Their plan goes beyond cluelessness. Democrats are either entirely indifferent to the idea that extreme hard times demand extreme belt tightening, or they are bone stupid. We lean toward the latter.

We say that because the House plan also keeps alive, again without specifics, the promise of tax hikes.

The range of options, according to Rep. Steve Tobocman, D-Detroit, includes raising the income tax, levying a 6 percent tax on some services, and taxing junk food and soda.

We wonder how financially strained Michigan residents will feel about paying higher taxes to buy someone else's kid an iPod.

That they would include such frivolity in a crisis budget plan indicates how tough it will be to bring real spending reform to Michigan.

Senate Republicans issued a plan a week ago that eliminates the deficit with hard spending cuts. Now their leader, Mike Bishop of Rochester Hills, is sounding wobbly, suggesting he might compromise on a tax hike.

We hope Bishop is reading the polls that say three-quarters of Michigan residents oppose higher taxes.

There are few things in the House budget outline from which to forge a compromise.

For example, Dillon says he would shift the burden of business taxes to companies that operate in Michigan, but don't have a facility here. The certain outcome of that plan is to drive even more businesses out of Michigan.

About all we see of merit is a call for government consolidation and a demand that state employees contribute more to their retirement benefits -- which is no more than House Democrats suggested for future state lawmakers a few weeks ago.

We find it ironic that the Democrats are proposing floating $5 billion in revenue bonds to pay for retiree health care, when Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed a nearly identical plan by Oakland County because it would cost the state money.

Instead of advocating cost-saving changes in public school teacher pension and health plans, Dillon suggests more study. There have been plenty of studies of the issue, with the conclusion being that hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved through reforms. Michigan needs action, not more study committees.

Dillon also proposes that the state cover 50 percent of the cost of catastrophic health insurance for everyone in the place, but once again doesn't specify a funding source.

Stop the stupidity. Michigan can't tax or spend its way out of this economic catastrophe.

The only responsible option is to bring spending in line with current revenues. The mission must be to expand the tax base, rather than to expand taxes, by crafting a budget that encourages growth.

We won't get there by wasting money on early Christmas presents for Michigan kids.

A War of Narratives

Emphasis all mine...

A War of Narratives
By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
April 8, 2007

On the Dead Sea, Jordan

I just attended a conference that was both illuminating and depressing. It was co-sponsored by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the American Enterprise Institute, and the idea was to get Americans and moderate Arab reformers together to talk about Iraq, Iran, and any remaining prospects for democracy in the Middle East.

As it happened, though, the Arab speakers mainly wanted to talk about the Israel lobby. One described a book edited in the mid-1990s by the Jewish policy analyst David Wurmser as the secret blueprint for American foreign policy over the past decade. A pollster showed that large majorities in Arab countries believe that the Israel lobby has more influence over American policy than the Bush administration. Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter [Gee, Thanks Mr. Worst Ex-President Ever] as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government.

The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies.

As for problems in the Middle East itself, these speakers added, they have a common source, Israel. One elderly statesman noted that the four most pressing issues in the Middle East are the Arab-Israeli dispute, instability in Lebanon, chaos in Iraq and the confrontation with Iran. They are all interconnected, he said, and Israel is at the root of each of them.

We Americans tried to press our Arab friends to talk more about the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran, but they seemed uninterested. They mimicked a speech King Abdullah of Jordan recently delivered before Congress, in which he scarcely mentioned the Iraqi chaos on his border. It was all Israel, all the time.

The Americans, needless to say, had a different narrative. We tended to argue that problems like Muslim fundamentalism, extremism and autocracy could not be blamed on Israel or Paul Wolfowitz but had deeper historical roots. We tended to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue not as the root of all fundamentalism, but as a problem made intractable by fundamentalism.

In other words, they had their narrative and we had ours, and the two passed each other without touching. But the striking thing about this meeting was the emotional tone. There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization.

But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis’s question, “What Went Wrong?” their answer seemed to be: Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?

The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in AIPAC. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.

And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives. The Arabs will nurture this Zionist-centric mythology, which is as self-flattering as it is self-destructive. They will demand that the U.S. and Israel adopt their narrative and admit historical guilt. Failing politically, militarily and economically, they will fight a battle for moral superiority, the kind of battle that does not allow for compromises or truces.

Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the U.S. to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. Faced with an arc of conspiracy-mongering, most Americans will get sick of the whole cesspool, and will support any energy policy or anything else that will enable them to cut ties with the region.

What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.

QOTD: On Elitists

Bob Murray, founder and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation

Some wealthy elitists in our country who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived "global goofiness" campaigns.

QOTD: Steyn

QOTD: Mark Steyn

Ask the folks in Darfur what they've got to show for years of the U.N.'s "grave concerns" — heavy on the graves, less so on the concern.

Needed: More Churchills, Less Chamberlains

Pebble to Jeff Jacoby:

Bernard Lewis, the renowned scholar of Islam and the Middle East, was recently quoted as saying that too many political leaders today exemplify "the spirit of Munich — a refusal to acknowledge the danger we face and a belief that through accommodation we can avoid conflict." He added, sadly: "I look around and I see more Chamberlains than Churchills."

But that may be unfair to the British prime minister whose name is a synonym for 1930s-era appeasement. Once Neville Chamberlain realized that Adolf Hitler was unappeasable, he declared war on Nazi Germany.

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.

QOTD: The New Math of Alternative Energy

The New Math of Alternative Energy - WSJ.com

One reason there's relatively little solar electricity is that traditional solar panels aren't very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. So most solar electricity is made and consumed at a single site -- and in many cases isn't even enough to meet the needs of a single house. A recent study by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities found that it cost about $77,500 to install a 10 kilowatt-capacity system on a house. Without subsidies, it would take 50 years to pay for itself [emphasis mine]. With subsidies, it dropped to 9.6 years.

In all, the cost of generating electricity with solar panels is 35 cents to 45 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the International Energy Agency. In the U.S., costs are typically less -- 26 cents to 35 cents -- because there's better sun, says the U.S. Solar Energy Industry Association.

QOTD: Mark Steyn

QOTD:Mark Steyn

...one should never underestimate the seductiveness of complacency.

QOTD: Daniel Pipes - Islamic Capabilities

Daniel Pipes

Islamists deploy formidable capabilities, however, that go far beyond small-scale terrorism:

A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

An impressively conceptualized, funded, and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill, and electoral success.

An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians. The movement almost defies sociological definition.

A non-violent approach -- what I call 'lawful Islamism' -- that pursues Islamification through educational, political, and religious means, without recourse to illegality or terrorism. Lawful Islamism is proving successful in Muslim-majority countries like Algeria and Muslim-minority ones like the United Kingdom.

A huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10% to 15% of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.

QOTD: Dennis Prager

QOTD: Dennis Prager on the cultural divide in America.

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? ("Divinity" does not necessarily mean "literalism.")

I do not ask this about "the Bible" as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the Christian Bible and generally confine divine revelation even within the Hebrew Bible to the Torah and to verses where G-d is cited by the prophets, for example. But "Bible-believing" Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

Name the issue: same-sex marriage; the morality of medically unnecessary abortions; capital punishment for murder; the willingness to label certain actions, regimes, even people "evil"; skepticism regarding the United Nations and the World Court; strong support for Israel. While there are exceptions — there are, for example, secular conservatives who share the Bible-believers' social views — belief in a G-d-based authority of the Torah is as close to a predictable dividing line as exists.