'Israel Alone': What The Economist unwittingly gets right about the Jewish state
ON THE cover of the current issue of The Economist is an Israeli flag, covered in grime, being whipped by a sandstorm in a deserted land. The flag tilts precariously, and could fall over at any time. Above it, in heavy capital letters, are two ominous words: "Israel Alone."
The Economist has long been sharply critical of Israel, and its lead essay contains familiar fare. If Israel doesn't replace its government, the magazine warns, it could be facing "the bleakest trajectory of its 75-year existence." It acknowledges that Israel was justified in going to war against Hamas in October but scorns the "dire leadership" of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It concedes that there is no Palestinian partner with whom Israel could make peace, yet it urges Israel to do so anyway, by accepting a cease-fire and pursuing that tired old chimera, a two-state solution. The Economist admits Washington shouldn't try "to force Israel out of Gaza while Hamas could still regroup." It is sure that "a struggle for Israel's future awaits," of which "the battle in Gaza is just the start."
But is Israel alone?
If "alone" means Israel has no allies in the world, then it certainly is not alone.
Some officials who expressed strong solidarity with Israel immediately after the ghastly killings and abductions of Oct. 7 — President Biden and Senate majority leader Charles Schumer, for example — have, it is true, cooled their support in recent weeks, mostly under pressure from the political left, where anti-Israel animus runs deep. The United States refused to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution Monday calling for a temporary cease-fire in Gaza. The Canadian government announced that it would halt all arms sales to Israel.
Nevertheless, Israel retains plenty of defenders. Grass-roots support for the Jewish state in the United States remains solid. Among large swaths of the population — Republicans, evangelical Christians, and Americans 65 and older — it runs especially strong. Foreign leaders, such as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have been at pains to emphasize that their endorsement of a Gaza cease-fire does not lessen their solidarity with Israel as it fights a ruthless enemy. "In these dark hours my country stands by the people of Israel," Scholz said in Jerusalem this month. "Israel has the right to defend itself against the terror of Hamas."
Yet at a more profound level, The Economist's cover message is indisputably true. Israel has loyal friends of inestimable value. But ultimately the Jewish state stands alone because ultimately the Jewish people stand alone. For more than 3,000 years, almost everywhere Jews lived, they sooner or later found themselves isolated, demonized, ghettoized, dispossessed, or exterminated. Again and again they were compelled to wear symbols identifying them as Jewish. Again and again they were expelled en masse from countries where they had lived for generations. Again and again they were persecuted as heretics, barred from joining guilds, and forbidden to own land.
The pioneers of modern Zionism were convinced that only in a country of their own could Jews finally achieve the normality denied them for so long — the normality other peoples take for granted.
But they were wrong.
Israel has never been regarded as a "normal" country. Alone among the 193 members of the United Nations, it is the only one whose very right to exist is under constant assault. Jerusalem is the only capital city in the world where the vast majority of governments refuse to locate their embassies. Every other nation belongs to larger blocs of countries with which it shares historic, ethnic, linguistic, or religious bonds — they are Nordic, Francophone, Muslim, Slavic, African, Arabic, Latino, Buddhist. Only Israel stands alone.
In territory and population, the Jewish state is tiny, yet the passions it arouses — bottomless hatred from some, heartfelt admiration from others — are of an intensity worthy of a superpower. The same has always been true of the Jewish people. Their numbers are minuscule, just two-10ths of 1 percent of the human race. "Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of," wrote Mark Twain in a famous essay, "but he is heard of, has always been heard of."
What The Economist proclaims on its cover, the Biblical prophet Balaam, a non-Jew, proclaimed in the Book of Numbers. Attempting to execrate the Israelites, he intoned: "Lo, it is a people that dwells alone / And shall not be reckoned among the nations." In that singular description — a people that dwells alone — is encapsulated an essential reality of the long, long history of the Jews. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, the Jewish people — and the reborn Jewish state — are fundamentally alone, unlike the "normal" peoples and nations with whom they share the planet. Israel can never be just another country, like Belgium or Thailand. The Jewish state is alone; and that is both its blessing and its curse.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27658/israel-alone
***********************************************Psychologist who turned the investing world on its head
I had never heared of Kahneman before I read the article below but my investing followed very simiar precepts to his. I looked for a good track record and modest dividends. And I not only made a lot of money on the stockmarket but I actually hung onto it as well -- which is much rarer. But I too am a psychologist
Daniel Kahneman explained investors to themselves. A psychologist at Princeton University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Kahneman died on March 27, age 90.
Before the pioneering work done by Kahneman and his research partner, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, economists had assumed that people were “rational,” meaning we are self-interested, use all available information to make unbiased decisions, and our preferences are consistent.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that’s nonsense. Their findings, directly or indirectly, inspired change across the business world, including the redesign of organ-donation programs and improvements in planning for multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
Kahneman was a pioneer of what became known as behavioural economics, although he always saw himself as a psychologist. Investors who take Kahneman and Tversky’s lessons to heart can minimise fees, losses and regrets. Kahneman may well have had more influence on investing than anyone else who wasn’t a professional investor.
I first met Danny, as everyone called him, at a conference on behavioural economics in 1996. For years, as an investing journalist, I had wondered: Why are smart people so stupid about money?
About five minutes into Danny’s presentation, I realised he had the answers – not only to that question, but to nearly every mystery of financial behaviour.
Why do we sell our winners too soon and hang onto our losers too long? Why don’t we realise that most hot streaks are just luck? Why do we say we have a high tolerance for risk and then suffer the torments of the damned when the market falls? Why do we ignore the odds when we know they’re stacked against us?
Danny paced softly back and forth at the front of the room, his blue-green eyes sparkling with amusement as he documented these behaviours and demolished conventional economic theory.
For decades, he and Tversky had conducted experiments, almost childlike in their simplicity, to see how people really think and behave.
No, Danny said, money lost isn’t the same as money gained. Losses are more than twice as painful as gains. He asked the conference attendees: If you’d lose $100 on a coin toss if it came up tails, how much would you have to win on heads before you’d take the bet? Most of us said $200 or more.
No, people don’t incorporate all available information. We think short streaks in a random process enable us to predict what comes next. We think jackpots happen more often than they do, making us overconfident. We think disasters are more common than they are, making us suckers for schemes that purport to protect us.
Ask people if they want to take a risk with an 80% chance of success, and most say yes. Ask instead if they’d incur the same risk with a 20% chance of failure, and many say no.
Noting that the stocks people sell outperform the ones they buy, Danny joked that “the cost of having an idea is 4%.” I wasn’t just struck by his insights; I was stricken by them. I immediately bought all three of the books he had edited. For days, I sat in a windowless room, reading feverishly, red pen in hand, scribbling notes, underlining entire paragraphs, peppering the margins with arrows and exclamation points.
In 2001, a year before Danny won the Nobel, I wrote a long profile of him. “The most important question to ask before making a decision,” he told me, “is ‘What is the base rate?’” He meant you should begin every major decision by figuring out the objective odds of success, given the historical range of outcomes in similar situations.
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As Federal Government Collapses, States Offer Solutions
The increasingly obvious incompetence of President Joe Biden is clearly a serious problem, yet many people see it as a one-off, easily solved if the Democrats can find a way to jettison him and run somebody else this fall, or if the Republicans can defeat him and win control of both houses of Congress.
Unfortunately, the rolling disaster that is our current federal government is much more than that. It is the inevitable outcome of a widespread, thorough rejection of the plain meaning of the nation’s founding documents. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s complaint that adhering to the First Amendment would “hamstring” the federal government is emblematic of this mentality.
The inexorable rise of Progressive politics since the end of the nineteenth century has steadily intensified the centralization of power in the federal government and a small class of people not subject to popular elections, authorized by a political Uniparty devoted to continual expansion of executive rule. This has created a regime that asserts a right to infinite authority.
The nation’s founding documents, by contrast, established the principle of federalism, in which authority over all matters not explicitly assigned to the federal government belongs to the states and the people. Progressivism reversed this, and now here we are. More than a century of unconstitutional actions in Washington, DC has evoked increasing opposition not only in public opinion but also, significantly, from state governments.
Among the most vivid examples of this reaction against the central government is the increasing interest in nullification of federal laws and regulations, in which states declare that federal decisions will not be enforced within their borders.
The states began this movement in recent years by ignoring federal marijuana laws. This was an insufficiently appreciated change in attitudes.
If there is one thing nearly every political faction in the United States has agreed on for the past two centuries, it is that nullification threatens the credibility and stability of the national government by undermining its authority. Chasing votes, campaign money, and potential tax revenue from cannabis sales, however, numerous states legalized or decriminalized possession, and then sales, of marijuana. The federal government stood aside and let it happen. The Obama administration, in particular, cooperated in this nullification of federal law.
Since then, states have become increasingly bold, culminating in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s moves to guard the state’s border with Mexico in defiance of the president’s complaints and direct interference.
Now a bill before the Tennessee legislature, SB 2775, the Restoring State Sovereignty Through Nullification Act, would establish an explicit process for nullification. The legislation would allow a federal law or policy to be declared null and void by the governor, by any state court, or by a legislative vote triggered automatically by any individual member, a petition of the executive or legislative branches of any 10 local governing authorities, or any group of 2,000 registered voters, as columnist Daniel Horowitz notes at The Blaze.
Horowitz makes the case for this process by pointing out that federal supremacy applies only to laws that fit within the enumerated powers of the federal government, which is precisely what is under debate in questions of nullification, and that judicial supremacy is a “dangerous myth” because “an elected state or federal official cannot promulgate, fund, or enforce an edict of a court that violates the Constitution” without violating his or her oath to uphold the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson summed up the case for nullification in his Kentucky Resolution of 1798, writing, “The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers,” Horowitz notes.
Nullification is in fact central to the conception of the U.S. government, which I have described previously as veto power for everyone. Under the Constitution, each branch of the national government has veto power over the actions of the other branches, through votes in Congress, presidential veto authority, and judicial review. In addition, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments extend that veto power to the states and the people, respectively.
The Constitution explicitly limits the power of the federal government and gives all three branches, plus the states and the people through the Bill of Rights, the authority and responsibility to see that the government stays within those boundaries.
Veto power over actions taken by the federal government belongs to each branch of that government, and to the states, and to the people. Unless all agree on any action by the federal government, that action does not have rightful force of law according to the Constitution.
Under the doctrines of unbridled federal and judicial supremacy, the U.S. government has taken on so much power that it can no longer perform its basic functions, let alone do all that it has promised. History shows that an excessive concentration of power leads to the decline of civilizations. The Congressional Budget Office just released a report stating the federal debt will soon reach record levels as a percentage of national economic output, undermining the economy and severely limiting policy choices. We are accelerating down the road to government collapse.
Now, duly elected state governments are rightly pushing for decentralization and a return to rule of law, asserting their prerogatives under the nation’s founding documents. This is the one positive outcome of all the destruction wrought by the current regime thus far.
https://heartland.org/opinion/as-federal-government-collapses-states-offer-solutions/
***********************************************LGBTQI+ intolerance prevalent among Australian air force chaplains, inquiry told
Hardly surprising in view of what the Bible says about homosexuality. Are Christian chaplains allowed to believe their Bibles when their Bibles tell them that homosexuality is an abomination to God? (Leviticus 20:13). Asking them to deny the word of God is a bit heavy
Some religious chaplains in the air force hold “unacceptable views about minority groups, women [and] LGBTQI+ persons”, posing a mental health risk to members, the royal commission into defence and veteran suicide has heard.
And part of a review commissioned by the defence department into the air force chaplaincy unit – quietly tabled as evidence to the royal commission – found tension between theology and values, “notably in relation to gender and LGBTI inclusion”.
“Some chaplains perceived other chaplains to be intolerant towards LGBTI people, women and those chaplains who express differing theological views,” the review found.
Collin Acton, a former director general of chaplaincy for the navy, said chaplains were members’ first port of call for mental health help, with other forms of help off base or harder to access.
The “vast majority [of ADF members] are ticking the ‘no religion’ box” and would be reluctant to seek support from chaplains, many of whom were ordained ministers, Acton said.
“A large portion of our workforce would prefer not to speak to a minister as their first port of call when they’re going through difficult times,” he said.
“They might be well-equipped to look after members of their own flock, but they’re under-equipped to look after the rest of the personnel.
“Religious ministers don’t sit down and have a conversation with someone about their worldview, they come with an agenda.”
Guardian Australia revealed last year that the Australian defence force as a whole has a disproportionately high number of pentecostal and evangelical chaplains. For example, there are 13 Australian Christian Churches (formerly known as Assemblies of God) chaplains for the 13 members that identify with that denomination.
Chaplains are also ADF members, so the ratio could be anywhere from one-to-one to 13-to-none, depending on how individuals identified themselves.
Meanwhile, there are five non-denominational Christian chaplains and 4,217 serving members who identify that way, a ratio of one-to-843.
In a commission hearing, the air force chief, Air Marshal Robert Chipman, said the review found there were “deep-rooted cultural challenges” within air force chaplaincy.
“And there was an unhealthy mix of theological beliefs … of a view that things that happen between chaplains should stay within chaplains,” he said.
“Both of those created conditions for an unhealthy culture to develop within chaplaincy branch and that had very significant impacts on the welfare of some of our chaplains.”
Commissioner Erin Longbottom put to Chipman that the review found “there was a conflict between faith-based values of chaplains within that branch and the requirements of a modern defence force”. Chipman agreed.
“We did find chaplains … from certain theological schools that had concerns with female chaplains or LGBTIQA chaplains and so those … beliefs that they bring as chaplains into our organisation did intersect unevenly with our Defence values,” he said.
Chipman also agreed that the review found “unacceptable views about minority groups, women, LGBTQI+ persons”.
“If there are chaplains practising in Defence that cannot abide by our values and behaviours, then they need to find somewhere else to be employed,” he said.
But Chipman said that in general the chaplains did a “phenomenal job” and “save lives every day”.
Guardian Australia has sought the air force chaplaincy review under freedom of information laws since September. The request was initially rejected because it would cause an unreasonable workload. Defence sought an extension to the deadline for a revised request to November. In February the request for “any reports or directives produced from the air force chaplaincy review” returned a directive about the implementation of the review but not the report itself.
But an executive summary of the report was provided to the royal commission.
It found there was “tension” reconciling “strong theological beliefs with Defence values”.
Chaplains dealt “‘in-house’ with unacceptable behaviour complaints within the branch” instead of through Defence processes, it found. Some complaints went without action or resolution.
“Others identified inappropriate behaviour which appeared to them to be condoned within the branch”, it found, while some chaplains said that “unacceptable or undesirable behaviour or comments falling short of unacceptable behaviour was excused within the branch where they were associated with views supported by a chaplain’s faith group but not otherwise consistent with Defence values and behaviour”.
In its submission to the royal commission, the Rationalist Society of Australia pointed to research that found almost 64% of ADF members – and 80% of new recruits – were not religious.
The society claimed chaplains viewed the position as missionary in nature and were “unable to provide non-judgmental care”, which the organisation said could stop personnel getting appropriate support.
“The religious-based nature of the capability opens the door to chaplains identifying problems as ‘sin’ and the solutions as requiring ‘repentance’.”
Acton was pivotal in a push to get a non-religious chaplains into the navy and has since pushed for secular reform despite a significant backlash from some opponents.
“I’m not saying get rid of religious chaplains, but they should be in proportion to the religious portion of our workforce,” he said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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