Redistributing Wealth

Insightful letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune yesterday. It's easier to identify the problem when it is happening to you.

On my way to lunch recently, I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama; I need the money." I laughed. In a restaurant my server had on an "Obama 08" tie. Again I laughed. Just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came, I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Barack-Obama-redistribution-of-wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need—the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful. At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment, I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more. I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.

—A. Hart, Forest Park

Gore Urges Civil Disobedience But Emits Lots of Hot Air

Is anything on earth as gaseous as Al Gore blathering?

Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.

The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis."

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.

"I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact," he said. "I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that."

The government says about 28 coal plants are under construction in the United States. Another 20 projects have permits or are near the start of construction.

Scientists say carbon gases from burning fossil fuel for power and transport are a key factor in global warming.

Carbon capture and storage could give coal power an extended lease on life by keeping power plants' greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere and easing climate change.

But no commercial-scale project exists anywhere to demonstrate the technology, partly because it is expected to increase up-front capital costs by an additional 50 percent.

So-called geo-sequestration of carbon sees carbon dioxide liquefied and pumped into underground rock layers for long term storage.

(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Christine Kearney and Xavier Briand)
© Thomson Reuters 2008

Green Hypocrites Fail to Make Grade

The Guardian has an article on the hypocritical behavior of rich greenies.

People who believe they have the greenest lifestyles can be seen as some of the main culprits behind global warming, says a team of researchers, who claim that many ideas about sustainable living are a myth.

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: "Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights."

Some people even said they deserved such flights as a reward for their green efforts, he added.

Only a very small number of citizens matched their eco-friendly behaviour at home by refusing to fly abroad, Barr told a climate change conference at Exeter University yesterday.

The research team questioned 200 people on their environmental attitudes and split them into three groups, based on a commitment to green living.

They found the longest and the most frequent flights were taken by those who were most aware of environmental issues, including the threat posed by climate change.

Questioned on their heavy use of flying, one respondent said: "I recycle 100% of what I can, there's not one piece of paper goes in my bin, so that makes me feel less guilty about flying as much as I do."

Barr said "green" lifestyles at home and frequent flying were linked to income, with wealthier people more likely to be engaged in both activities.

He said: "The findings indicate that even those people who appear to be very committed to environmental action find it difficult to transfer these behaviours into more problematic contexts."

The team says the research is one of the first attempts to analyse how green intentions alter depending on context. It says the results reveal the scale of the challenge faced by policymakers who are trying to alter public behaviour to help tackle global warming.

The study concludes: "The notion that we can treat what we do in the home differently from what we do on holiday denies the existence of clearly related and complex lifestyle choices and practices. Yet even a focus on lifestyle groups who may be most likely to change their views will require both time and political will. The addiction to cheap flights and holidays will be very difficult to break."

The frequent flyers said they expected new technology to make aviation greener, echoing comments made by Tony Blair last year, who said it was "impractical" to expect people to take holidays closer to home. He said the solution was "to look at how you make air travel more energy-efficient, how you develop the new fuels that will allow us to burn less energy and emit less."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Acceleration of Islamization Post-9/11

Diane West has an excellent article on the West's sleep post-9/11 on the gathering storm.

As a society, we appear to have decided to remember 9/11 as something akin to a natural disaster that came and went rather than as a part of a diffuse but discernable push to advance the law of Islam.

Hypocrisy of financial patriotism

Patriotism Starts at the Top, Sen. Biden
By Arnold Ahlert

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden thinks paying more taxes is "patriotic." You wanna talk patriotism, Mr. Biden? Here we go…

First and foremost, let's talk about why Joe thinks people should pay more taxes: to fund a government run with no concept of fiscal responsibility. Zero. This year's budget is close to three trillion dollars. That’s a number so large it's almost meaningless, so let me put some meaning behind it: Since the population of the entire country is 300 million, every single American is getting charged an average of TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS apiece by our "patriots" in Congress.

Here's some of the things those patriots get just for themselves: staffs of 14 assistants for each member of the House and 34 for each Senator, on average. Top-notch health care and insurance plans. Pension benefits two to three times more than those paid in the private sector on similar incomes. Limousines, and special parking spaces on Capitol Hill and at Washington's two major airports. First-class travel all over the world. Their own private health clubs, one for the House, one for the Senate. Their own doctor's office on premises. And last, but not least, a work schedule with numerous holidays and a full month off in August.

All of it paid for by us.

You wanna be a patriot, Joe? Here's a few suggestions: Get you and your colleagues to stop taking earmarks. Cut down on your staffs. Pay for your own health and life insurance. Travel coach. Stop pretending you're "one of us" when nothing could be further from the truth. Oh, and one more thing:

Stop spending us into economic ruin–even as you have the gall to tell us it's for our own good!

Spending other peoples' hard-earned money isn't patriotic, Joe, especially when most Americans know that billions of dollars are wasted on out-of-date and ineffective programs. Programs whose primary functions are to bribe certain constituencies–or to make guys like you look good. Take a gander at Congressional poll numbers, Joe. Most of us don't think you guys look good at all. Most of us think Congress stinks to high heaven.

I do want to thank you for one thing however, and that's letting the cat out of the bag on what you and Barack Obama consider "change." Who could imagine such "revolutionary" ideas as taking even more money out the private sector and giving it to government to "redistribute"–in the middle of an economic downturn, no less? Higher taxes on the "rich," aka small business owners, is also pure genius. Why? They'll fire "little people" employees to make up the difference. And what can possibly compare with the "brilliance" of putting us all in even deeper hock than the NINE TRILLION DOLLARS of debt that you and your cronies have already amassed with years of irresponsible spending?

That's 35 years in the Senate just for you, Joe. 35 years of insinuating government deeper and deeper into the lives of every American. 35 years of ever-increasing amounts of waste, fraud, corruption and out-of-control spending by a bunch of self-interested, self-aggrandizing egotists.

Egotists whose concept of patriotism begins and ends with one idea: getting re-elected.

And you have the nerve to tell us WE should be more patriotic?

Take your "patriotism" and shove it, Senator Biden.

atahlert@comcast.net

(for the record: my annual income isn’t even sniffing $250K)

Want real change? Quit nominating lawyers!

Victor Davis Hanson on how to have real change in politics. Pebble to JWR.

The 2008 presidential campaign is supposed to be a referendum on "change" — who brings it and who doesn't.

Real change, however, hasn't yet proven to mean new politics.

The "hope and change" Barack Obama sounds like a traditional Northern liberal who always wants to raise taxes on the upper classes and businesses, expand government services and provide more state assistance to the middle class and poor.

"Maverick" John McCain talks like a conventional Western or Southern conservative in favor of spending cuts, across-the-board lower taxes and smaller government.

This year the media seem to think change means race and sex — whether Barack Obama's background of mixed racial ancestry or the gender of Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

It's certainly true that either the next president or next vice president will not be a white male. But does that mean de facto that the country will be run any differently?

There is, however, one area where we might have seen real change. The Democrats could have not nominated another lawyer. This may partly explain why former military officer John McCain and working-mom Sarah Palin are polling near even with Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, in a year that otherwise favors the Democrats.

A snowmobiling, fishing and hunting mom of five who was trained as a journalist seems like a breath of fresh air — and accentuates the nontraditional background of former naval officer John McCain. If the Republicans win, it may well be that, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, or Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, they weren't members of the legal culture.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama got out of Harvard Law School, worked for a firm, offered his legal expertise as a community organizer and went into politics. Joe Biden graduated from law school and almost immediately ran for office.

In the Democratic primary, winner Obama, runner-up Hillary Clinton and third-place finisher John Edwards were all lawyers. In 2004, both Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Edwards, were lawyers. Al Gore, who ran in 2000, left law school without a degree and went into politics. His running mate, Joe Lieberman, was a Yale-trained lawyer. Mike Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, was a Harvard-trained lawyer and ran with lawyer Lloyd Bentsen.

In fact, every Democratic presidential nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections — except Gore who dropped out of law school to run for Congress — has been a lawyer.

What saved Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 was the presence in the race of third-party conservative candidate Ross Perot — and the image of Clinton as a Southern moderate, which seemed to reassure voters that this particular Yale-trained lawyer was nevertheless not quite another Democratic nominee like Walter Mondale or Dukakis.

Of course, there have been Republican nominees and presidents who were lawyers — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Bob Dole — but recently far less so than the Democrats, as the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes attest.

So, what's wrong with the Democratic nominee once again being a lawyer? After all, legal minds are trained to think precisely and evaluate both sides of an issue.

The problem is that lawyers usually do not run companies, defend the country, lead people, build things, grow food or create capital.

If this year Democrats were looking for populist candidates from diverse backgrounds and training who talked and thought differently from those of the past, then why didn't they nominate someone who was not trained in writing legalese and working the government legal labyrinth?

Instead, they needed different sorts, candidates who might have sounded a little rougher, a little less condescending and a little more like most voters. Most Americans have never been in — and never want to be in — a courtroom.

In the past, law school has not necessarily been considered ideal presidential training. Harry Truman was audacious perhaps because he had tried and failed as a haberdasher. Dwight Eisenhower learned about leadership from his years as a general. George H.W. Bush was a businessman and Ronald Reagan an actor. Even unpopular presidents like Jimmy Carter (farmer) and George W. Bush (businessman) brought different perspectives to the job.

Change for Democrats this year was not a new strain of liberal politics or a different race or gender. Instead, they needed to have run candidates who talked, thought and acted differently from their usual run-of-the-mill sorts.

And that meant someone other than the same old, same old legal eagles who appear glib — but so often manage to lose in November.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

Religion of Peace?

From the Assyrian International News Agency

West Bengal, India (AINA) -- A mob of nearly 7000 Muslims attacked a group of Hindu pilgrims in West Bengal, a state in Eastern India that borders Bangladesh on the west. According to a Hindu blog, a sacred Hindu site frequented by Hindu pilgrims, including women and children, has experienced a sustained attack since Thursday evening. Muslims have thrown gas cylinders and Molotov cocktails at the pilgrims, burning down the camp building and trapping 180 men, women and children, along with fifteen police officers, within the confines of the compound.

The Muslims attempted to breach the wall of the compound by exploding gas cylinders against it. The fifteen police officers have not been able to disperse the mob, even afer firing several rounds.

Fifteen people have been injured; seven of them are not critically injured and are not expected to survive. The names of the critically wounded include are Subodh Kundu, Bivas Mondal, Gopinath Biswas, Prasenjit Sardar and Gautam Halder. Two victims could not be identified because of serious facial burns. Nine victims are missing and are believed to have been kidnapped by the Muslims. Their names are: Gautam Mondal, Kartick Biswas, Ram Shil, Palash Roy, Gopal Dolui, Piyush Senapati, Ashok Das, Shankar Nandi and Subhash Roy.

Two police officers have been injured.

The police have issued an arrest warrant against the Hindu leader, Sri Tapan Kumar Ghosh, and 15 other Hindus. They are charged with "Incitement and Instigation for Rioting" and "Disruption of Communal Harmony."

No arrest warrants have been issued against Muslims.

This is the "Religion of Peace"? This is it.

Don't Know Much About Their Own Religion

It seems that Christian students at universities do not know a lot about how Christianity developed as well as Christian beliefs and church history. The Christian Century has an article by Barbara Brown Taylor who teaches a class on world religions at Piedmont College.

Students who complete the class say they feel more at home in the world. They are less easily frightened by religious difference. They are more informed neighbors, better equipped to wage peace instead of war.

The only place the course backfires is in the unit on Christianity. Students who have spent every Sunday of their lives in church may be able to name the books of the Bible in order, but they rarely have any idea how those books were assembled. They know they belong to Victory Baptist Church, but they do not know that this makes them Protestants, or that the Christian tree has two other major branches more ancient than their own. Very few have heard of the Nicene Creed. Most are surprised to learn that baptism is supposed to be a one-time thing.

With only five class sessions for each religion, I cover the basics quickly: early Christian history, composition and content of the New Testament, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation, central Christian doctrines and common religious practices. Faced with so much new information, students often have a hard time formulating their questions.

“If Paul wasn’t one of the 12 disciples, where did he get his stuff?”

“Do Catholics really think saints answer their prayers?”

As often as I have answered such questions, my sinking feeling never goes away. The things I tell students are so different from the things they have heard in church that I can hear their brains straining against the waves. They never noticed that Matthew and Luke tell different stories of Jesus’ birth, or that Mark and John tell no such stories at all. They never imagined that the first Christians did not walk around with New Testaments in their pockets. No one ever told them about Constantine, Augustine, Benedict or Martin Luther. They never thought about what happened during the centuries between Jesus’ resurrection and their own professions of faith. In their minds, they fell in line behind the disciples, picking up the proclamation of the gospel where those simple fishermen left off.

Even as they are turning in their quizzes, the students know that something has just gone badly wrong. “I think I just did the worst on my own religion,” one says.

They also find it difficult to reconcile the knowledge they gain with their pre-class beliefs.

"I couldn't hold onto what I was learning," one capable student said. "I loved it, but I couldn't make it stay in my head. It was too different from what I had already learned, so my brain just kept switching back to default."

I am not surprised to learn this, nor would I be surprised to read the same thing regarding non-observant Jews. But in this case, the Christians are actually the involved church-goers.

George Will on Colbert: Conservatives versus Liberals

Colbert: What do you think are the differences between conservatives and liberals?

Will: The difference between truth and confusion, basically... A slightly longer answer is that the competing values are freedom and equality at all times. Conservatives tend to favor freedom and are willing to accept inequalities of outcome in the free market. Liberals tend to favor equality of outcome and are willing to sacrifice and circumscribe freedom in order to get it.

QOTD: Motti Berger and Henry Kissinger

One of my favorites: Rabbi Motti Berger roughly quoted Kissinger on hearing about the 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

"People that have been spending the last 50 years trying to kill you -- don't you think they'd lie to you, also?"

QOTD: Victor Davis Hansen

Is merely talking with our enemies appeasement? Not necessarily, but we need a good definition of appeasement to avoid it. My emphasis below.

Most define appeasement not by the mere willingness on occasion to negotiate with enemies (i.e., the heads of nation states rather than criminal terrorist cliques). Rather, appeasement is an overriding desire to avoid war or confrontation to such a degree so as to engage in a serial pattern of behavior that results in an accommodation of an enemy's demands — and ultimately the inadvertent enhancement of its agendas...

Talking with an Iranian theocrat like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad per se might not necessarily constitute appeasement. But continuing such talks without preconditions that made no progress in curbing Iranian nuclear agendas, or support for Hezbollah terrorists and Shiite militias in Iraq would not only be futile, but encourage further Iranian adventurism — by the assurance that negotiations were infinite and there would be few lines in the sand and little chance of military opposition to follow...

Bush in his Knesset address may have acknowledged that expansive notion of appeasement when he elaborated on his "negotiate with terrorists and radicals" line, with the proviso of futility — namely that such talking assumed an "ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." In addition, Bush's example — that when "Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided' — suggests that his reference to appeasement meant not just one-time talking, but delusional and persistent engagement that is oblivious to facts on the ground.

Medved: Declaration Against Islam Would Be Counterproductive

Michael Medved asks in his article Is Islam Itself the Enemy?, "Is America’s 'war on terror' in reality a war on Islam itself?".

He seems to analyze the impact of making such a declaration but not look at the veracity of the statement itself. As a quick analysis of the impact of announcing a war with Islam, he has a very good analysis.

Nevertheless, any public proclamation of overall enmity toward Islam would harm America’s cause in the world at large and undermine our security at home. This approach damages our interest in five ways--

1) It confirms the anti-American propaganda of terrorist leaders.
Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and their associates have argued for years that the United States, "the Great Satan," is the leader of a global conspiracy to destroy Islam and oppress Muslims...

2) It alienates our allies.
Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations may be far from perfect as allies, but they would each be profoundly dangerous as adversaries...

3) It puts the societies of Western Europe at profound risk.
With growing and powerful Muslim populations in France, the United Kingdom, Germany and most other European powers, an American declaration of hostility to Islam would force those societies into an impossible choice: either disassociate yourself completely from your necessary American ally, or prepare to suppress the well-established Islamic communities in your midst...

4) It destroys our tradition of religious pluralism. If we proclaim Islam (or any other religion) as an "enemy of the state," then we’ve clearly abandoned our cherished First Amendment tradition of neutrality among religious faiths...

5) It pushes us toward a never-ending war with no exit strategy.
Even those of us who have always supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars wish that the government had learned one of the key lessons of Vietnam which once comprised a key element of the "Powell Doctrine": never go to war without a clear, practical plan for victory and a reliable exit strategy. If we define Islam as our enemy, then what, exactly, is our feasible strategy for wiping out a resilient religious faith that’s proven disturbingly durable for more than 1,400 years?

As can be read in his insightful article, he never addresses whether Islam itself is the source of the problem, whether Jihad is so deeply rooted in Islam it can never be removed. He solely addresses the perception issue.

I will need to read more...

I wonder if we should have refrained from saying anything about the philosophy of Communism for the same reason?

Study: 3 in 4 U.S. mosques preach anti-West extremism

WND reports on a study of mosques in America and their anti-American rhetoric and/or actions.

An undercover survey of more than 100 mosques and Islamic schools in America has exposed widespread radicalism, including the alarming finding that 3 in 4 Islamic centers are hotbeds of anti-Western extremism, WND has learned.

The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has trained former counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents from the FBI, CIA and U.S. military, who are skilled in Arabic and Urdu, to conduct undercover reconnaissance at some 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers and schools across the country.

"So far of 100 mapped, 75 should be on a watchlist," an official familiar with the project said.

Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian government and U.S. front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt.

Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official who runs the Center for Security Policy, says the results of the survey have not yet been published. But he confirmed that "the vast majority" are inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons by Saudi-trained imams and anti-Western literature, videos and textbooks.

The project, headed by David Yerushalmi, a lawyer and expert on sharia law, has finished collecting data from the first cohort of 102 mosques and schools. Preliminary findings indicate that almost 80 percent of the group exhibit a high level of sharia-compliance and jihadi threat, including:

* Ultra-orthodox worship in which women are separated from men in the prayer hall and must enter the mosque from a separate, usually back, entrance; and are required to wear hijabs.
* Sermons that preach women are inferior to men and can be beaten for disobedience; that non-Muslims, particularly Jews, are infidels and inferior to Muslims; that jihad or support of jihad is not only a Muslim's duty but the noblest way, and suicide bombers and other so-called "martyrs" are worthy of the highest praise; and that an Islamic caliphate should one day encompass the U.S.
* Solicitation of financial support for jihad.
* Bookstores that sell books, CDs and DVDs promoting jihad and glorifying martyrdom.

Though not all mosques in America are radicalized, many have tended to serve as safe havens and meeting points for Islamic terrorist groups. Experts say there are at least 40 episodes of extremists and terrorists being connected to mosques in the past decade alone.

Some of the 9/11 hijackers, in fact, received aid and counsel from one of the largest mosques in the Washington, D.C., area. Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is one of the mosques indentified by undercover investigators as a hive of terrorist activity and other extremism.

It was founded and is currently run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams there preach what is called "jihad qital," which means physical jihad, and incite violence and hatred against the U.S.

Dar al-Hijrah's ultimate goal, investigators say, is to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state governed by sharia law.

Another D.C.-area mosque, the ADAMS Center, was founded and financed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and has been one of the top distributors of Wahhabist anti-Semitic and anti-Christian dogma.

Even with such radical mosques operating in its backyard, the U.S. government has not undertaken its own systematic investigation of U.S. mosques.

In contrast, European Union security officials are analyzing member-state mosques, examining the training and funding sources of imams, in a large-scale project.

Some U.S. lawmakers want the U.S. to conduct its own investigation.

"We have too many mosques in this country," said Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y. "There are too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully."

Myth of Islamic Tolerance: History Upside Down?

Insightful post on the Gates of Vienna which quotes from another blog.

Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has asked in her book The Trouble with Islam what caused the earlier “golden age” of Islam, and concludes, with a few reservations, that “tolerance served as the best way to build and maintain the Islamic empire.” In light of the evidence quoted above I disagree with her, and even more so with David Levering Lewis. Islam’s much-vaunted “golden age” was in reality the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed. The brief cultural blossoming during the first centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the pre-Islamic heritage in a region that was still, for a while, majority non-Muslim.

I’ve recently been re-reading some of the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, including Guns, Germs, and Steel. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the global lingua franca.

His most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a center of civilization to being a center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Yet is striking to notice how Diamond totally ignores the influence of Islam. This demonstrates clearly that any historical explanation that places too much emphasis on material issues and too little on the impact of human ideas is bound to end up with false or misleading conclusions.

Read the whole thing.

Solar Power a "Loser"

The Renewable Energy blog covers a new report on solar photovotaic (PV) cells indicating that solar is more expensive than fossil fuels, and even more expensive than other renewables.

The photovoltaic panels now in popular use for solar power generation are not worth their cost, according to a U.C. Berkeley report.

Severin Borenstein, director of the U.C. Energy Institute and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s business school, called existing technology “a loser” in a research paper. “We are throwing money away by installing the current solar PV technology,” he said.

...In his analysis, Borenstein found that a typical PV system costs between $86,000 and $91,000 to install, while the value of its power over its lifetime ranges from $19,000 to $51,000. Even assuming a 5 percent annual increase in electric costs and a 1 percent interest rate, the cost of a PV system is 80 percent greater than the value of the electricity it will produce. In his paper, Borenstein also factored in the value of greenhouse gas reductions into his calculations, and found that at current prices the PV technology still doesn’t deliver.

PV also cannot take full advantage of Moore's Law to "perpetually" shrink and deliver more/better/faster/cheaper. Increased use can bring down the price through manufacturing scale and experience, but solar may have a tough road to hoe for the foreseeable future.

Of course, this does not take into account potential foreign policy benefits of non-oil energy sources. And that does not take into account all the side effects of that thought either -- more efficient usage generally results to lower prices leading to increased overall usage. Higher prices tend to generate competitive replacements.

See also this SJ Mercury News article.

Political Mavens » Islam=La Ism

Something to think about from Julia Gorin regarding Islam:

More and more people — at least in Europe, which is more intimately acquainted with Islam than Americans are — have been calling a spade a spade, and figuring out that Islam is not a religion, but an alternative political ideology and system that uses religion as a cover while it spreads. In short, they've figured out that Islam is just like any other "ism".

She brings in this quote from Europe:

"Unlike other religions," [Swiss People’s party MP Ulrich Schluer] argues, "Islam is not only a religion. It's an ideology aiming to create a different legal system. That's sharia. That's a big problem and in a proper democracy it has to be tackled. If the politicians don't, the people will."

The Real Meaning of Chanukah

Michael Medved on Chanukah:

The brutal truth about the holiday of Hanukah, which begins this year on December 5th, is that it is intensely and incurably politically incorrect. The heroes of the Hanukah story—the Maccabees—were uncompromising zealots and fundamentalists, vigorous representatives of the Judean "religious right" of the Second Century B.C.

There was nothing tolerant or relativistic about them: they risked their lives to take back the Holy Temple in Jerusalem from the Hellenistic multi-culturalists who had installed a variety of idols and pagan gods to provide worship alternatives. The very name Hanukah comes from the Hebrew for "dedication" or "consecration": it's about purification and re-commitment on a national and personal level, and standing up to misguided alien cultures, no matter how popular, seductive and powerful.

This year, when the Jewish holiday arrives nearly three weeks before Christmas, there’s a good chance to keep its bracing and challenging themes appropriately distinct from the generalized seasonal cheer.

How many people actually know this?!

The Great American Jewish Placebo

George D. Hanus, the chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, admits that Reform and Conservative Judaism have only contributed to the assimilation and intermarriage of a huge swath of America's Jews.

The word "placebo" is derived from the Latin for "I shall please" and denotes a medical treatment whose only benefit is in the mind of the patient.

Throughout medical history and even as late as the late 1940's, sugar pills were prescribed by physicians in the hope that taking a pill would mobilize patients' internal powers to combat illness. It is the nature of a placebo that it works better for minor maladies than terminal diseases. A competent doctor would never administer an inert placebo when a genuine treatment was available.

The United States, as we all know, is a country of immigrants. For centuries, wave after wave arrived on these shores, fleeing persecution, hoping to better their economic condition and merge into the mainstream of American society

Jews are no exception to this pattern. Immigrant Jews rapidly learned English, adopted American dress styles and sent their children to colleges and graduate schools as they became respectable members of society. It is no accident that American Jews quickly moved out of poor urban neighborhoods into the suburbs and have become the most successful ethnic group in the United States.

Even while we were moving up the ladder, most Jews did not forget the Torah injunctions to remember our heritage. So we Jews set up neighborhood synagogues, spent our free time involved with Federations and Jewish fraternal organizations and built museums to remember destroyed Jewish communities. We collected money, attended meetings and ate chicken at fundraising dinners. And to religiously educate our children, we invented the Great American Jewish Placebo: Hebrew and Sunday school.

Imagine our surprise and shock, several generations later, when the placebo turned out to be a sugar pill. Our grown children did not follow in our Jewish footsteps. Today, a majority are intermarrying and assimilating. They are walking away from 4,000 years of Jewish history and we are shocked. After all, didn’t we do everything that our rabbinic and philanthropic leadership told us to do?

We provided good homes, sent them to top colleges, gave our annual charity pledges and even ensured their Jewish education in Hebrew and Sunday schools until bar mitzvah. When our children bitterly complained that they hated Hebrew school, while their friends were having fun in other after-school activities, we told them to hush because it was a rite of passage to suffer through Hebrew school just as we parents did. When they didn’t want to continue Hebrew school after the age of 13, we didn’t insist.

But we never imagined we would end up having grandchildren who have abandoned their heritage, know very little about Judaism and don’t believe in God. We never expected to visit their homes in December only to see a giant Christmas tree in the living room.

We are fortunate to live in a country that has allowed us to excel in every field of American endeavor without fear of persecution. But why have we not been equally successful at preserving our Jewish identity?

Part of the problem is the failed model of Hebrew and Sunday school. We delude ourselves that it will ensure the next generation of committed Jews. The great tragedy is that, by now, everybody knows it doesn’t work, yet we continue to go about business as usual. It is the Great American Jewish Placebo.

As documented by WJD's Mindy Schiller in last month’s cover story, "What’s Wrong With Hebrew School?" according to a new study by noted Jewish American sociologist Steven M. Cohen, the likelihood of intermarriage actually increases among students who attend once-a-week Sunday schools, and attending congregational school—two or more times a week, for less than seven years— hardly decreases that percentage. [Emphasis mine.]

"A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote the poet Alexander Pope in the 18th century, and this seems to apply to Hebrew and Sunday schools today. In fact, at a recent conference of Jewish educators, Joel Hoffman, a language expert and congregational teacher, told The Jerusalem Post, "Our Hebrew schools aren't teaching Hebrew, the kids are miserable and are making the teachers miserable in the process."

So why do Hebrew schools still exist? Because they are funding mechanisms for synagogues, which depend on the dues of families paying for their children's bar/bat mitzvah and confirmation ceremonies to survive. If it weren't for Hebrew and Sunday schools, synagogues would have a lot of families show up from time to time without becoming members. The discontinuation of the Hebrew school model would disrupt the financial structure of congregational Jewish life in this country.

So if the dismal performance of Hebrew schools is one of the biggest open secrets in the Jewish world, why do they remain in place? Like all placebos, Jewish leaders and parents believe they have a benefit. Also, they are relatively inexpensive to administer. We have treated Jewish education as a communal joke by allocating laughable, paltry financial resources to our children's spiritual development.

It is time to declare Hebrew and Sunday school a placebo that is failing our community. After many decades of experience, few academics or rabbis would assert that our current Hebrew school structure is generating spiritually engaged, Torah knowledgeable and truly happy children, who are proud of being Jewish.

It is very troubling that American rabbis and Federation leadership seem oblivious to the obvious. In the United States, there are approximately 1.2 million Jewish children between the ages of 4 and 19. If the current trajectory continues, approximately 55 percent of these children will intermarry over the next 17 years and create 660,000 intermarried units. The 540,000 remaining Jewish children will marry other Jews and create 270,000 Jewish homes. The enormity of this trend is devastating.

Just as no doctor would prescribe a placebo when a truly effective remedy was available, so too our Jewish leadership is aware that there is a potent way of keeping kids Jewish. If day school were free and available to all Jewish children regardless of their stream of affiliation or family finances, the problems of intermarriage and assimilation in America would be significantly diminished. If our children felt connected spiritually with God and our heritage, they would become enthusiastic links for the next 4,000 years.

Can anyone imagine the outrage that would occur if a doctor administered a placebo to a patient, while an effective but more expensive treatment was available?

All parents must decide for their families how they want to Jewishly educate their children. It is a very personal decision. However, there are tens of thousands of young Jewish families who want to attend Jewish day schools, but the tuition costs are economic barriers to entry. This is outrageous. Torah education was never meant to be only for the rich.

It is time that the Jewish community demand an adoption of policies that constitute an effective resolution of the crisis. We must clearly articulate that it is each Jewish community's absolute responsibility to fund universal Jewish day school education for all of our children, irrespective of a child's stream of religious affiliation or family's financial resources. If the existing Federations are unable or unwilling to adopt and implement this policy, then it is incumbent on each Jewish community to start independent fundraising initiatives that focus entirely on Jewish day school education.

We are the guardians of our children's Jewish identity and the custodians of the Jewish future. We are failing miserably in both areas. Massive funding of Jewish education is the remedy required to strengthen and heal our American Jewish community. Everything else is a placebo.

George D. Hanus is chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, the Jewish Broadcasting Network and the World Jewish Digest.

It's the Irreconcilable Differences, Stupid

Hillel Halkin in the New York Sun makes the case that the wishful thinking and self-delusion of Rice, the US State Department, and other peaceniks will not change the basic facts on the ground. [Emphasis mine]:

The once much-vaunted Annapolis conference has been reduced, a few days before its convening, to the dimensions of a birthday party for an unpopular child at school.

Everyone now agrees that the parents were foolish to think they could improve their child's social standing by staging an event in its honor with lots of food, fun, games, and a special magic show, but the invitations have already gone out and it's too late to call the party off.

All that can be hoped for now is that enough children will turn up to prevent a fiasco and that the party will be gotten through quickly without fights, broken dishes, or other embarrassments.

The day after Annapolis there will be a post-mortem. It will not tell us anything that a pre-mortem could not have told us just as well, which is that this Annapolis represented the kind of mistaken thinking that has characterized every American or international attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 1991 Madrid Conference: Namely, the belief that there is something in the world of diplomacy called "process" that has an intrinsically positive momentum of its own capable of overcoming deep disagreements on substance between two sides to a dispute.

Just get these two sides to sit down and start talking, the reasoning goes, and little by little they will find points of agreement that will increase trust between them and lead to an overall settlement.

This is of course nonsense. There is nothing intrinsically positive about any diplomatic process. Such processes work when potential points of agreement already exist and can be focused on. When they don't exist, all the processes in the world can't conjure them up. On the contrary, they simply create frustration, disappointment, and rancor.

And in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, such points of agreement do not exist. This is not, as international diplomacy and public opinion go on wishfully thinking, because the two sides are behaving like stubborn children who need to have some common sense cajoled or spanked into them rather than like rational adults.

It is because each side has perfectly rational interests and ambitions that are not compatible with the rational interests and ambitions of the other side. The only way to achieve an agreement between them, paradoxically, would be for one of them to start behaving irrationally.

What are Israel's interests and ambitions? They are to emerge from the conflict as a state that is military secure; that has a safe Jewish majority that will be maintainable in the future; and that is not asked to uproot more settlers from their homes than can be politically or economically managed.

Military security means expanding the 1967 borders in key sectors and ensuring that any Palestinian state will be demilitarized. A safe Jewish majority means that no Palestinian refugee families will be readmitted to Israel. A manageable settler policy means that Israel will retain the large "settlement blocs" near and around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

And what are the Palestinians' interests and ambitions? They are to create a state for themselves that, however tiny and unsatisfactory, will in its initial stage be as large and territorially contiguous as possible; that will have half of Jerusalem as its capital; and that can dream of eventually regaining more or all of historic Palestine by pressing irredentist claims as the Arab population of Israel grows and destabilizes Israel's demographic status quo. A maximally large and territorially contiguous state means near total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. A capital in Jerusalem means Israel's yielding much of that city. An irredentist dream means standing firm on the refugee's "right of return" while refusing to accept Israel's definition of itself as a Jewish state – a definition, among other things, that includes Israel's right to have an immigration policy that favor Jews over non-Jews.

These interests and ambitions are not mutually compatible. No amount of diplomatic "process" will make them so. Nor is it the case, as the conventional wisdom has it, that the problem in Palestinian-Israeli relations is that both peoples currently have weak governments that makes it impossible for them to compromise. Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon ran stronger governments and did not make peace either. The strength or weakness of a people's government has nothing to do with its strategic interests.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may not be exactly a zero-sum game, but neither is it a potentially win-win situation. If one side wins by achieving its goals, the other side will have lost. If neither side achieves its goals, both will have lost. At this point, either's capacity to compromise is extremely limited.

Like many conflicts in history, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not come to an end by means of a negotiated settlement. A viable Jewish state and a viable Palestinian state west of the Jordan River are not both possible.

The conflict will come to an end because the case for a viable Jewish state is the stronger of the two, the Jewish people having no other country and the Palestinians having Jordan, which will sooner or later re-unite with the 90% of the West Bank that Israel will withdraw from. How and when this will happen is impossible to predict. That it will happen is a near certainty. Annapolis will be quickly forgotten, even quicker than the Madrid Conference was. The dire prophecies of what will happen if it fails ("A catastrophe!" Israel's president Shimon Peres, the chief engineer of the catastrophic Oslo Agreement, has predicted) will not come true.

The Palestinian people is not in the mood for a new intifada and Hamas is not on the verge of taking over the West Bank. The broken dishes, if there are any, will be cleaned up and the real processes in the Middle East, which are not the diplomatic ones, will continue to take place.

QOTD: Henry Kissinger

Bret Stevens in the WSJ:

Henry Kissinger once observed that "when enough prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than abandon it."