AT LAST LIVNI STRUTS HER STUFF

After several years of shilly shallying (otherwise known as beating around the Bush), the final boundaries have been announced. Ynetnews.com explains.

PA negotiators furious over Israeli proposal
Worrying strife breaks out between top Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia and Israeli counterpart after latter presents proposal of regional division in which Israel maintains claim to large settlement blocs, Jordan River Valley and Jerusalem

Roni Sofer and Ali Waked
Published: 04.29.08, 18:04 / Israel News

Those in Washington pushing for an Israeli-Palestinian deal by the end of President Bush's term may have to scale down their expectation as the gaps between the two sides only seem to be growing larger.

A new bout of discord arose after a blowout between the Palestinian Authority's head negotiator, Ahmed Qureia, and Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni. Qureia angrily rejected a proposed map presented by Livni in which any future agreement would see Israel retaining control of the larger settlement blocs in the West Bank as well as the Jordan River Valley and Jerusalem.

Qureia grabbed the map spread out on the table and pushed it away with both hands. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3537537,00.html

It is so refreshing to see that another graduate of the Yasser Arafat School of Political Negotiation hard at work in Ramallah. I think, however, that Qureia would have been far more effective pounding the table with his shoe screaming "We will bury you." He could also have spat on the ground and walked out.

There is no surprise here at all, except that Qureia stuck around. On what planet or historical epoch does this guy live? It is simply the way the PA and Israel has been doing business for the last forty years. It is a straight forward statement of reality. A simple flyby of the land in question will show anyone not color blind where the border really is--those parts that are green are Israeli and those that are dirt color are Palestinian. In the last forty years, Israelis have invested in their land, its cultivation, and its ecological restoration. In the same forty years, the Palestinians have extorted money from their citizenry investing in weapons and war.

Most Israelis believe that this is what Sharon intended with the disengagement in 2005—return Gaza and pull back to the real borders between Palestinians and Israelis. Given the level of good faith that characterizes the authorities in Hamas and the PA, I would say this is the take it or leave it deal of the final round. This is the Two State Solution already in place.

For most Israelis, past and present, Israel is not about real estate. It is about The Land, written in title case. The Festival of Passover is intimately tied into this concept as is the entire ediface of the Jewish Faith. The miracles associated with The Land, to say nothing of the manifest reality of the miracle of return, in our historical age, is tied up into the period of time and praxis of the Festival of Passover.

Secular or Religious, Jewish or Christian or Muslim, Israelis know what the Passover means and most Israelis find some way to observe it. In the Western Galilee, Israelis of Morrocan descent celebrate the end of Passover by going to see their Muslim neighbors to buy flour to bake leavened cakes and party the night away--everyone is invited. Mimuna, as it is called, emerged in the Jewish communities of North Africa, where Jews have lived for over 2000 years, and is widely practiced throughout Israel. Like most folks who live in farm counties the world around, Galileans of all stripes know that fences good neighbors make but a cup of flour across that fence means more than any property rights.

So the image of another member of Arafat's cabal, refusing to end this killing nonsense, simply adds to the Passover drama. Last week, Jimmy The Redeemer was in town telling us that "they" were willing to talk. Everyone here talks--but do they listen?

So, Tzipi simply stated what already is. Here's the deal. Take it and we can end the occupation tomorrow, shake hands, and get down to the business of making the rest of The Land green.

It is the fitting conclusion to this year’s Passover. Perhaps this is the year where the Seder dinner’s concluding prayer will be answered—Next Year in Jerusalem.

Hey, Qureia! Are you listening?

News of the weird

Timing is everything: man falls down elevator shaft, survives by landing on top of unconscious woman who fell down the shaft the day before. He escapes, gets help, woman lives. Link.

Gnome terrorizes Argentine town, police launch investigation. And they even have video!

"How to live with an embarrassing middle name"

Heh, as someone famous once said.

My sentiments exactly

This entry will stay on top the rest of the day. Scroll down for the rest of today's content.

Dying to drive

The UK's Telegraph has a short piece entitled, "Global warming rage lets global hunger grow."

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

A demonstrator eats grass in front of a U.N. peacekeeping soldier during a protest against the high cost of living in Port-au-Prince.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said. ...

Mr Diouf says world grain stocks have fallen to a quarter-century low of 5m tonnes, rations for eight to 12 weeks. America - the world's food superpower - will divert 18pc of its grain output for ethanol this year, chiefly to break dependency on oil imports. It has a 45pc biofuel target for corn by 2015.

Getting ethanol from crop plants is morally wrong, indeed actually murderous. Global petroleum reserves are at an all-time high, while global food reserves are at one of their lowest levels in the modern era, yet we're reducing the amount of food we grow in order to use less oil. And it's not even working. More here.

"Every writer needs an editor."

That was one of the first things I learned in journalism school. As evidence, this photo and verbatim caption from Mother Earth News:


Captioned:

While this season's weather is not totally unreliable, you can caount on the same consterllation every year.

The prosecution rests.

Global warming, we're waiting...

On the heels of the coldest winter in the country since 2001 (and one of the coldest since national record-keeping began in 1895), we are more than three weeks into a spring that is little warmer. Here in Clarksville, Tenn., temps dropped below freezing last night and in some counties south. Some headlines around the country:

Cold Temperatures Freeze Gardening Season, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

It’s been a cold Spring Break, from Guld Shores, Ala. "But instead of soaking up the sun, these girls are bundling up."

Cold weather may hit Utah County Tuesday, with highs for tghe rest of the week only in the 40s or 50s.

Frost could harm spring plants, Charlotte, NC.

Mother Nature takes a frigid spring fling in Columbus, Miss.

A Switch in Seasons - "Just as everyone began to savor the taste of Spring, Old Man Winter will be serving up a second helping of cold to Middle Georgia today."

Well, you get the idea.

Will Britain succumb?

IN a post earlier today I cited Abe Greenwald's essay on the decreasing influence of Islamism in Muslim countries and its strengthening in European countries. Coincidentally, Douglas Farah informs us that Britain's Home Secretary says that the UK's law-enforcement agencies "are being overwhelmed by the growing threat of radical Islam."

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told an interviewer that there are 30 current terror threats being monitored and investigated.

"We now face a threat level that is severe. It's actually growing.

"There are 2,000 individuals who are being monitored. There are 200 networks involved and 30 active plots."

And she warned the menace of Islamic fanatics is mounting so fast that police will be unable to cope within a year—unless they are given new powers to lock up terror suspects for longer.

At present cops can hold suspects for up to 28 days, but the Home Office wants that increased to 42 days.

"We can't wait for an attack to succeed and then rush in new powers," said Mrs Smith. "We have got to stay ahead."

So radicalized have so many of ritain's Muslims become that the UK has struck a deal with Pakistan's government for

... respected moderate Islamic clerics to be brought over from Pakistan to help British imams combat extremism in the Islamic communities.

Mrs Smith explained: "The vast majority of British Muslims have a Pakistani heritage. If we work with the government there we can win the arguments.

"We need to do more to tackle those places where radicalisation is developing—in prisons, schools, higher education—so that people are getting the right messages about what it means to be a British Muslim."

Higher education? Back to Mr. Farah:

... the Daily Telegraph today reports a new study showing that Saudi Arabia and Muslim organizations operating from there have donated 233.5 pounds (about $460 million) to eight British universities since 1995. That is almost $40 million a year.

The author of the report, Anthony Glees, warned that this will lead to “the wrong sort of education by the wrong sort of people, funded by the wrong sorts of donor” because the money is used to fund study centers that are implacably hostile to the West.

Could there be any connection between these two developments? And wouldn’t it be interesting to see how much money the same countries and organizations have put into U.S. universities, and other institutions of higher education in Europe.

Indeed it would.

GPS makers slumping

BizWeek explains why major GPS makers TomTom and Garmin are sucking wind these days and Nokia is the looming threat for them.

I just bought a TomTom Go 920 from Amazon. It will arrive later this week. I'll write a review after I've used it for a decent interval.

Catholic churches coming to Saudi Arabia?

In a medium-long article about the delayed but still arriving "Arab Spring," Abe Greenwald notes,

[T]he Vatican has confirmed that it’s in negotiations with Saudi Arabia to establish the first Catholic Church inside the Kingdom.

Well, zing! As you know, it is presently against Saudi law for any non-Muslim congregation to meet in the kingdom. Even house churches there are illegal, and the penalties can be quite severe. (In fact, mere possession of a Bible is illegal.)

Abe documents how Islamism in in retreat almost everywhere in the Muslim world, being steadily rejected by the ummah every opportunity they get to do so. I remember reading (I think on Michael Yon's site) of an Anbar sheik who said the Sunnis in Iraq had become so lethally oppressed by al Qaeda that even the shephers in the desert hated al Qaeda. "And the shepherds a hundred years from now will still hate al Qaeda."

But back to the church in Saudi Arabia. The Telegraph reports:

Archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, the papal envoy to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates said talks had started a few weeks ago, in the wake of King Abdullah’s visit to Pope Benedict last November.

Currently, all Saudi citizens are required by law to be Muslim, and the Mutaween, or religious police, strictly prohibits the public practice of non-Muslim religions.

The last Christian priest was expelled from the kingdom in 1985.

However, the Vatican’s relationship with the Muslim world is improving rapidly, and Qatar opened its first Catholic church on Sunday.

Mgr El-Hachem said a church in Saudi Arabia would be an important sign of “reciprocity” between the faiths.

The Times OnLine site has this:

Not by chance, the disclosure came just after the first Catholic church in Qatar, Our Lady of the Rosary, was inaugurated at a mass in the seaside capital of Doha attended by 15,000 people and held by Cardinal Ivan Dias, head of the Congregation for Evangelisation, who presented a chalice sent by Pope Benedict XVI. ...

This would involve negotiations for the "authorisation of the building of Catholic churches" in Saudi Arabia, he said. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said he could not confirm that the two sides were "in negotiations" but added: "If, as we hope, we reach an agreement authorising the construction of the first church in Saudi Arabia, it will be a step of historic importance."

The way was paved not only by King Abdullah's talks with the Pope but also more recently by the setting up of a permanent Catholic-Muslim Forum to repair relations between the two faiths after the Pope's controversial remarks on Islam at Regensburg University in 2006.

The Pope said his apparent reference to Islam as inherently violent and inhumane had been "misunderstood," and he made amends by praying at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul shortly afterwards. He has called however for "reciprocal" gestures by the Muslim side, such as greater tolerance for Christian minorities in Muslim countries.

Vatican Radio said the opening of the church in Qatar was "an event of historical importance after 14 centuries". The church, which bears no crosses or bells, stands on land donated to the Church by Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who favours interreligious dialogue.

Yet, as Abe Greenwald points out, the West is decidedly behind when it comes to whose religion is waxing, and where.

The only places we’re faced with renewed Islamic radicalization are in the Muslim enclaves of the West. The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks about the inevitability of sharia in England; France is at a semi-permanent boil of ghettoized Islamic discontent; last month a week of cartoon-inspired riots in Denmark was capped off by a (shockingly unpublicized) bomb in Copenhagen; Canada’s courts are clotted either by alleged terrorists or by “human rights” violators who dare criticize the alleged terrorists; and in Lodi, California more and more Muslim families are home schooling their daughters so that they may “clean and cook for [their] male relatives” and also “to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.”

As Qur’anic government has been a demonstrable failure everywhere it’s arisen, the West is becoming one of the last places in which fanatical Muslims are safe enough and comfortable enough to indulge in the decadence of their caliphate fantasies.

Read the whole thing.

Blizzard watch for second weekend of April

The Weather Channel reports, "A dangerous severe weather outbreak is expected to begin late tonight in the Southern Plains and expand into the Lower and Mississippi Valley tomorrow."

On the cold side of this system, winter storm watches extend from the Rockies to the western Great Lakes due to the potential of heavy snow and strong winds blowing that snow around.

Near Duluth, Minnesota, a blizzard watch has been posted. The heaviest snows are expected on Thursday from the Central Rockies to the Northern Plains, and Thursday night from the Northern Plains into the Upper Mississippi Valley.

A blizzard watch in April? I can't claim authority on "normal" weather for the area concerned - is a blizzard watch this time of year unusual? Uncommon though not unheard of? Or is it unsurprising?

Remember, though, that this winter has already been one of the coldest on record.

Internet now obsolete

The Internet is now obsolete, merely awaiting replacement: "Super-fast 'grid' could make internet obsolete.

Scientists have designed a super-fast information network capable of downloading data at 10,000 times the speed of a typical broadband connection.

Particle physics research centre CERN has designed the network, dubbed "the grid", to cope with the staggering amount of data its new particle accelerator will produce, The Times reports.

CERN's particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has been built to shed light on the origins of the universe and will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs.

The scope of the task meant scientists at CERN needed to create a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data.

The grid is a kind of parallel internet, consisting of 55,000 servers connected to each other using fibre optic cables and modern routers. The internet, in comparison, relies on technology originally designed for telephony, which slows the transfer of data.

Fibre optic cables run from CERN to 11 other research institutes around the world. Each of these centres connects to existing high-speed academic networks.

Computers on the grid are able to send entire movies to personal computers in seconds, rather than minutes or hours, and could enable holographic video calls and online gaming involving hundreds of thousands of people.

The Times quoted David Britton, a physics professor at Glasgow University, as saying the grid technologies could "revolutionise society".

"With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot imagine".

And it will be here sooner than you think.

High school senior or grad? Need a high-paying job?

A Worker Shortage in the Nuclear Industry.

[I]n the next five years, just as the industry hopes to launch a renaissance, up to 19,600 nuclear workers—35 percent of the workforce—will reach retirement age.

Don Surber reports,

Two nuke plants will be built in Georgia and two in South Carolina as part of a $13.7 billion deal.

Now, read this: Naval Nuclear Power School.

So as the nuclear-power industry's workforce is reaching retirement age just as the industry starts to expand. So there you go.

Just remember that the Navy's nuke school is reputed to have the most challenging academic curriculum in the entire world.

It kind of stinks . . .

... to have to get a permit to exercise a Constitutionally-guaranteed right. Who just discovered that? The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, that's who.

If Jews don't vote for Obama . . .

On an Obama-campaign sponsored "community" blog, a sub-site of my.barackobama.com, we learn that Jews are indebted to Africans and that if American Jews don't show some respect and gratitude by voting for Obama, the consequences will be severe. (Note - this page has been removed from Obama site. Keep reading, then see the screen captures I made, below.)

However, if Jews betray Obama and he loses, Africans worldwide would consider it a betrayal to the whole African people and will never forgive world Jewry. In retaliation, (eye for eye, remember!) Africa would consider expelling all Jews from Africa who have been mining African Gold and Diamond and enriching themselves for many centuries. ...

Jews must support Obama or face grave consequences. You cannot afford not to.

Africans have been nice and helped Jews for more than 2000 yrs.

Now, I say to Jews all over the world, it is time to show your gratitude.

Absolutely unbelievable. And no doubt the pseudonymous writer thinks he is doing Jews a favor by helping them understand how they survive only by the gracious forebearance of "Africans worldwide." In fact, the blogger spends no little time delineating the history of Jews' dependence on Africans throughout the millennia:

Thousands of years ago, when Jews were starving and nearly perished in Palestine, they took refuge in Egypt, Africa.

If Egypt and Africa did not feed the Jews, perhaps there would be no Jews today.

So because of something that happened 3,500 years ago, modern-day, American Jews owe a vote to Barack Obama. Set aside that in the day, "Palestine" didn't exist in anyw ay. The lands of modern Israel, southern Syria and the Transjordan were called Canaan back then, and its inhabitants Canaanites, not Palestinians. Also, I seem to remember that the Hebrew people spent something like 400 years in slavery to the African Egyptians, held in bondage so severely that it took God's personal intervention to free them. But whatever.

Jews owe Africa and Africans everything they have today because if Africa did not shelter them when they were homeless and starving, they would not be here today.

This is almost exactly the same "reasoning" as was used in the antebellum South to justify slavery both during its years and, post facto, after the Civil War: that if the Africans brought to America had been left in Africa, they and their America-born decendants would never have received the benefits of Western civilization and the Christian religion. So the two centuries of slavery and its suffering in America actually served a hidden good.

I've know for a long time that the Left is severely anti-Semitic. In fact, anti-Judaism of one stripe or another is pretty much all that the far Left and the far Right can agree on.

Update: The post referenced has been removed. But fear not, I made screen captures:

Capture 1

Capture 2

Capture 3

Capture 4

Capture 5

Capture 6

More on the biofuel hoax

M. Simon reports on how biofuel production is destroying the Amazon basin's rain forest. He is right: this is exactly the result of government mandates for increased use of ethanol.

BTW, it takes 560 pounds of corn to fill a Chevy Suburban's tank one time with E85 ethanol. See also here, here, and here.

"Pure ludicrousness"

So says Gizmodo about the Jump Bike, uh, trike.

Yep.

If only. . .

If only I had known that buying the domain name pizza.com in 1994 would have made me a multi-millionaire today.

Credit where credit is due

Bill and Hillary Clinton have released their tax returns for 2000-2006, as well as preliminary figures for 2007. TaxProf has the breakdown. Since the end of 1999, the Clintons' combined income has topped $109,000,000.

What caught my eye was this graph he made from the data. For every year, the Clintons' charitable contributions have been multiples more, percentage-wise, than the average Americans'. Generous Giving states,

Percentage Given: “The IRS reports that those who itemize deductions on their income tax returns have claimed, since 1975, that between 1.6 percent and 2.16 percent of their income went to charitable concerns. Gallup polls taken every two years for the organization Independent Sector have found charitable donations to run between 1.5 percent and 2 percent of income. Giving USA, a definitive report published by American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel, says that giving has ranged between 1.7 percent and 1.95 percent of personal income over the last 20 years.”11

So, except for 2002, the Clinton's charitable giving has been roughly twice to seven times as great, proportionally, as the average American.

So I say good on them!

What about Hillary's arch-rival, Barack Obama? Arthur Brooks:

After Mr. and Mrs. Obama released their tax returns, the press quickly noticed that, between 2000 and 2004, they gave less than one percent of their income to charity, far lower than the national average. Their giving rose to a laudable five percent in 2005 and six percent in 2006, with the explosion of their annual income to near $1 million, and the advent of Mr. Obama’s national political aspirations (representing a rare case in which political ambition apparently led to social benefit).

According to an Obama spokesman, the couple’s miserly charity until 2005 “was as generous as they could be at the time,” given their personal expenses. In other words, despite an annual average income over the period of about $244,000, they simply could not afford to give anything meaningful.

TaxProf has that graph, too:



Mr. Brooks notes also(make of it what you will in relation to these sets of figures):

In 1996, the General Social Survey asked a large sample of Americans whether they agreed that, “The government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality.” Those who “disagreed strongly” with this statement gave an amazing twelve times more money to charity per year, on average, than those who “agreed strongly.” People disagreeing strongly also gave nine times more to secular causes than those agreeing strongly, and even gave more to traditionally progressive causes, such as the environment and the arts.

TaxProf also notes that during the years of Bill Clinton's presidency, they gave half their income to charity during 1996 and 1997.

BTW, it's been well known for decades among economists that the more money people make, the less they give away proportional to their income. The Clintons, whatever else you may think of them, buck this trend and seem plenty generous. So I say for this matter, give credit where credit is due.

Linkagery

• Pirates seize French commecial yacht off Somalia, French navy prepares for action. The French probably won't mess around with this - piracy in the region is a real problem, and as the story points out, the US Navy has fired on pirates, too.
  
  
• Medical miracles - so defined by medical scientists - are getting more academic attention in Britain. But the story of the carp that started speaking Hebrew? No way. Latin, yeah, maybe. But Hebrew would be too difficult for a carp.
  
  
• The patches of the defense department's stealth world - do they reveal or conceal what's going on with $32 billion of our money per year?
  
  

“These symbols,” Mr. Paglen wrote, “were a language. If you could begin to learn its grammar, you could get a glimpse into the secret world itself.”

The cloud around the silver lining

Bad News U: Colleges Reject Record Numbers, reports the WSJ. Before looking at the piece itself, let's ask ourselves in what ways would all-time high numbers of rejected students be bad?

1. Universities have decided that their student bodies are too large, and are therefore rejecting more applicants in order to reduce the number of students attending the school.

Yeah, right.

2. The number of matriculations remains the same or even rises, but there are proportionally more applicants to the school, so even if admissions remain stable to rise, the ratio of acceptances to rejections falls.

But wait, that's not bad.

But it is what the WSJ reports as "bad news:"

The college-admissions season set records this year -- both in the number of students who applied, as well as the number of students who were rejected.

In fact, applications are way up, but admissions remains about the same at the schools cited. Therefore, the overall rejection rate falls, but there is no difference in the number of students accepted. Just how is this bad?

This is bad, as far as a school would be concerned: admission rates rise because the number of applications drops. That means that the school would be seen as less desirable to attend than before, and this statistic would send shivers throughout the school's administration. You can bet that no one is panicking because there are more applications than before, though.

What's driving the higher apps?

First, both Harvard and Princeton universities eliminated their early-applicant programs this year. That means students who otherwise would have secured a spot at one of these schools in the fall also applied to other schools. Second, moves by highly selective schools to increase financial aid for middle- to upper-income students put the high tuition bills within reach of more families.

In early-admissions processes, there is an "apply by" date, usually in late spring to mid-summer, in which universities will accept "early admission" applicants if they make a binding agreement to attend if accepted. A lot of students do that, but it fills spaces in the freshman class, leaving fewer spaces for students who don't decide to whom to apply until later in the year.

Second, how is it a bad thing that more financial-aid money is being made available, especially to applicants who would previously have received little or none?

Surprising for the Wall Street Journal to proclaim this trend as "bad news." Of all papers, it should have realized that this trend is good news, not bad.

The Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin School of Political Dialog

Way back in the Dark Ages, when I was a very young college student, campus politics on the late 1960’s were full of earnest young men and women eager to discuss the political issues of the day. There was the plight of the migrant workers, minority students, majority students, the oppressed Vietnamese (of all persuasions), the Palestinians, union workers, and sometimes even the people who did not attend college.

It was de rigueur for there to be a [celebrity] speaker to discuss the pressing issues of the day, such as the draft or the laws criminalizing consumption of mood altering compounds. Tim Leary was a perennial favorite at my small college in central Pennsylvania. At the bigger schools, student activist groups could get the really big [celebrities] activists like Jerry Rubin or Abby Hoffman.

Such speakers were especially gifted in whipping up the crowd into the appropriate pitch to express student outrage of the repressive system, man, in the politically correct form of activist sentiment of the day—demonstrations.

Such expressions of social rage were highly scripted and well timed. Generally, the beginning of the demonstration followed the speeches by a predictable delay defined by the amount of time it took the celebrity activist speaker to leave town. [In Philadelphia or New York, for example, the personage could not only leave town but leave the state.]

Why was this so important? Because the [celebrity] political activist would then be able to say, truthfully, that their speech had nothing to do with the riot that followed the demonstration. They were not in town. “Hey, man,” they would demure, “We were not even in the state when the riot took place.”

So, it appears that those lessons, so well acquired at the larger and more prestigious college/university campuses across the land, has become the preferred foreign policy paradigm at the US Department of State. The Stanford University Professor was in town last weekend; insisted that the security barriers be taken down by the [pigs] IDF; announced that the Professor would be evaluating how well the [pigs] IDF followed the homework assignment; and then departed for the Great Faculty Room in nether realms of the foggy bottoms.

Debka.com reports:

Before the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice ended her visit to Israel this week, defense minister Ehud Barak responded to her demand for “meaningful” Israeli steps to ease Palestinians’ lives, by promising to remove 50 West Bank “dirt roadblocks" and one checkpoint outside Jericho.

Israel military sources warned Thursday, April 3, after the removal of the first 10, that their elimination will provide Palestinian terrorists with unimpeded escape routes.

Rice thought this was a “good start” in her bid for progress before US President George W. Bush’s May visit to the region. She announced that the American general William Fraser would monitor the implementation of Israeli concessions.

Oooh. So how did the downtrodden, peace loving Palestinians react?

Internal security minister Avi Dichter was escorting a group of Canadian Jews on a tour of communities living under Palestinian missile fire outside Gaza Friday, April 4, when a Palestinian marksman opened cross-border fire on his party near Kibbutz Yad Mordecai. His senior aide was injured and taken to hospital.

Israeli troops returned the fire and entered the Gaza Strip to chase the shooters. The party was evacuated to a nearby army base. The shooting began as Dichter took the visitors up to the Mari’i Lookout (named for Col. Nevi Mari'i who was killed in action in Gaza) for a sight of northern Gaza, source of most of the missile attacks.

Just how did authorities in Hamastan react to the news of such criminal behavior?

Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas' military wing, has said that Minister Avi Dichter was the target of Friday morning's sniper fire directed at Kibbutz Nir Am in southern Israel. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3527614,00.html

How can you not love these guys, huh? They freely admit their mistakes and we can rest assured that the wayward sniper will be severely chastised — for missing.

Earlier in the week, on April Fool’s Day to be exact, a similar incident was reported in the area immediately adjacent to the historical site of the ancient Tabernacle, where road blocks were removed. As IMRA reports:

Erez Bar-On, 30, of the West Bank settlement of Ofra, became a hero Monday after shooting a terrorist to death as the latter attempted to stab him and a teenager at a hitchhikers' station near the settlement of Shilo.

"This is a foolish policy which directly acts against us," he said.

After reenacting the incident before police officers, Bar-On said that what was important to him at the moment was that the lessons would be learned.

According to him, the central and important message from the incident was that "the Palestinians cannot be allowed to roam freely. If the situation had been slightly different, and I wouldn't have kept cool, it could have ended with the death of two citizens, rather than the terrorist."

Two knives were found on the body of the 20-year-old Palestinian, a Birzeit University student.

Recounting the dramatic incident, Bar-On said, "I got off a car with another guy and stood at the hitchhikers' station at the direction of Jerusalem. A few second after we arrived, someone crossed the road towards us. We could tell that he was not Jewish.

"He tried to shake our hands, but something was suspicious. He asked us in broken English where he could catch a bus to the Birzeit University. I told him in English, 'No, and waved at him with my hand to move away. I was afraid, and so was the student who was with me.

"The terrorist said that he was from America, and kept his hand inside his shirt. Suddenly, he pulled out a knife and shouted, 'Allah Akbar' (God is great). I took two steps backwards and shot him." http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=38773

Isn't that special--the attempted murderer said he was American so he would be seen as more believable to his Jewish victims.

Now, of course there can be no causal connection between Doctor Rice’s political speech making last weekend. After all, she merely delivered her opinion, which she has every right to do in a democratic country, and then departed. Why she was not even in the country when these violent demonstrations occurred.

Corn ethanol not so economical after all

The price of corn has reached $6 per bushel for the first time ever. And the USDA predicts that for some reason American farmers are going to plant less of it.

Corn prices have shot up nearly 30 percent this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels including ethanol. Prices are poised to go even higher after the U.S. government this week predicted that American farmers -- the world's biggest corn producers -- will plant sharply less of the crop in 2008 compared to last year.

Needless to say, that will drive prices up even more. It also means that grocery prices for meat and poultry - and many other food categories - will rise even higher. Corn is either feedstock for other food animals or a processed component for a large number of other foods.

But that's not all. Consider corn ethanol used for fuel. Ethanol is a gasoline replacement. When petroleum prices rise, it's good news for oil companies because their profits rise, too. But when corn prices rise, the economics of producing a gasoline replacement from corn don't work so well.

Another loser in higher corn costs is ethanol producers, who are struggling to squeeze out gains as corn's record-setting run outpaces the price of ethanol, currently at around $2.50 a gallon.

"For years, corn was cheap and fermentation processes for ethanol production came to completely dominate the biofuel industry in North America," Michael Jackson, president and chairman of Vancouver-based ethanol maker Syntec Biofuel, said this week. "Now, with corn prices well over $5 a bushel, corn ethanol economics have gone out the window." ...

"Bottom line earnings are near break-even or modestly below break-even," he said.

I've been arguing against corn ethanol for a long time.

What bad energy policy gets you

Gene Redlin explains:

WASHINGTON – From India to Africa to North Korea to Pakistan and even in New York City, higher grain prices, fertilizer shortages and rising energy costs are combining to spell hunger for millions in what is being characterized as a global "silent famine."

Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the last year, escalating a trend that began in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent.

Last year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent.

"This is the new face of hunger," said Josetta Sheeran, director of the World Food Program, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. "People are simply being priced out of food markets. ... We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach."

The WFP launched a public appeal weeks ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had risen by 55 percent since last June. By the time the appeal began last week, prices had risen a further 20 percent. That means WFP needs $700 million to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's prices. The numbers are expected to continue to rise.

Read the whole thing. See also, "The great biofuel hoax - and the evil resulting."

The soft side of Simon Cowell

Gerard Van Der Leun says that this is the best five minutes you'll spend today. Righto, that.


Amazing SIX-Year-Old Singer - The best video clips are right here

The Vietnam Memorial

I posted yesterday about my visit with my father-in-law to the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. My daughter and I also stopped at the Vietnam War Memorial, near the Lincoln Memorial, walking there while my wife and her dad took the Tourmobile to the WW2 site.

There is one Sensing whose name is engraved on the wall, Capt. John L. Sensing, US Army. I never knew him, but we are some ordinal of cousin, since all Sensings (in the South, anyway) descend from one Jakob Sensing, who immigrated to North Carolina in the 1730s. One of his sons, a Revolutionary War veteran, took his veteran's land grant in Tennessee. So here we are.

Capt. Sensing was a helicopter pilot, flying an OH-6 Cayuse aircraft in the Thua Thien Province when his bird was hit by an RPG near Firebase Ripchord, April 30, 1970. He was serving in B Troop, 2/17 Air Cavalry.

Also killed on the helicopter were SP5 Robert E. Masseth and SP4 David W. Staton.

The World War II Memorial

Spring break was last week here in Clarksville, Tenn. So my wife, daughter and I hopped in the Camry and went to Washington, D.C. We went first to Durham, N.C., to pick up my father-in-law, Col. (ret.) George Stephens, USAR. George was drafted into the Army in the summer of 1941 for one year. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in December, all service terms were extended, basically, indefinitely. ("Stop loss" is no new concept.) Massive inductions of both draftees and volunteers began immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. George said that before his original year's service was up, he discovered he was already an "old soldier." We went to DC to take George to the National World War II Memorial, which opened in 2004 (IIRC) and which he had never seen. George, a widower, will turn 89 in June. It was a quick trip - up to Ft. Belvoir, Va., on Wednesday to stay the night, then into DC all day Thursday and back to Durham that night. The Memorial is located at the end of the reflecting pool, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It is a large memorial, befitting a big war. This is a pic from the memorial's web site.

The north end is dedicated to the Atlantic-area campaigns and the south end to the Pacific area. George served exclusively in the Pacific, continuously overseas for 39 months, taking part in eight combat amphibious assaults and the ensuing campaigns. Though a member of the Medical Service Corps, he personally saw heavy combat but was never wounded. I am reminded of Bill Mauldin's classic cartoon of frontline medical personnel:

Caption: "The reason ya don't git combat pay is 'cause ya don't fight."

George was not a medic, but served in aid stations close to the fighting lines and routinely went into the fighting to evacuate the wounded. He has spoken movingly to me of the men who died of their wounds on the way back to the aid station and of a few who were shot to death by the Japanese as George was carrying them to (presumed) safety. There was one occasion (or only one that he told me of) when his position was strafed by Japanese Zero fighters. He said it so provoked his ire that he jumped up with his Garand rifle and shot a couple of clips back at them. Didn't hit them, of course, and later he said he wondered why he did something so foolish, since he had left the nominal safety of his foxhole to stand up to shoot his rifle.

A passerby agreed to take this photo of the four of us standing under the Pacific campaign memorial tower. George was a staff sergeant when fighting in the Luzon campaign. During the campaign, he was commissioned a second lieutenant by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

As you might imagine, there are a number of World War II vets and their family members at the memorial on any given day. The gentleman below, left, is from Seattle. I regret that I did not write down his name. He was a B-17 pilot in Europe. He told us he had two bombers shot out from under him, one by flak and the other by the German jet fighter, Messerschmitt 262, armed with 30mm cannon. He said that the Messerschmitt completely wrecked his B-17 in only five seconds of shooting. He was able to land the plane at a US air base in Belgium, but so severe was the damage that the ground crew simply bulldozed it off the runway and scavenged it for what undamaged parts they could get. He also landed the flak-hit bomber, but it was unrepairable, too. His son-in-law, who was with him last week, told me that he went on after the war to become a nuclear physicist.



Here is a view looking from the World War II Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial. The waterfall in the foreground is part of the war memorial, it is not connected to the reflecting pool that lies beyond it.

My father-in-law was called to active duty for two years in the Korean War, serving the entire time at the base hospital at Fort Benning, Ga. Here he stands at the Korean War Memorial, a couple of hundred yards to the southeast of the Lincoln Memorial. The Korean War Memorial is neither as large nor as inspiring as the World War II Memorial. I will say, though, that it seems to be visited devotedly by Koreans who come to DC. There were many Koreans there when we were there. Having served in Korea, I recognized the language even though I cannot speak it.



We stopped to see the cherry blossoms along the tidal basin. I snapped this picture of George standing across from the Jefferson Memorial. I am proud, and awed, too, to say that he is one of the Americans who saved the world from fascism and tyranny when everything dear to civilization was threatened with destruction. It was by his efforts and those of his comrades (never to forget those who gave their lives!) that Jefferson's ideals survived. He helped preserve what he there surveyed.



Below is a video I took of George narrating his service record in the Pacific, walking along the campaign pool under the Pacific tower. Of the 20 campaign locations engraved into the stones, George fought or served at 10 of them. The ambient noise at the memorial is very high from all the waterworks, so you'll have to listen closely to hear George's voice.

Sunset at Jaffa

I had some time on my hands yesterday afternoon waiting for a chaplain buddy to arrive from points east, so I drove into Tel Aviv to look at the sea. After several weeks of dusty air, it was nice to feel the evening sea breeze. The last of the sun caught the old city of Jaffa and I just couldn't resist.