.jpg)
.jpg)
%20(1)%20(4)%20(1)%20(1).jpg)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Israel’s anti-terror strategy
From: Stephen M. Flatow
Israel is, once again, being criticized for its policy of sealing and/or demolishing the homes of terrorists. Those who do criticize seem to not understand that the US has a similar tool called "asset forfeiture" and may be surprised that the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a proponent.
Below is my column that appeared in the Jewish Journal.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Israel’s anti-terror strategy
Perhaps Israel should remind the critics that its counter-terror operations are consistent with the wise counsel of the late Justice Ginsburg and her colleagues.
By Stephen M. Flatow
The Biden administration has once again criticized Israel for dismantling the homes of Palestinian Arab terrorists. U.S. officials say the practice is unfair because, as State Department spokesman Ned Price has put it, “the home of an entire family shouldn’t be demolished for the action of one individual.”
It appears that the president of the United States and his spokesmen are not familiar with some fundamental aspects of the American judicial system. That’s where one can find plenty of models for Israel’s anti-terrorist tactics.
It’s called “civil asset forfeiture”—and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg played a key role in upholding it as the law of the land.
If somebody drives drunk, the authorities can seize their vehicle—even if that’s the car they use to drive the kids to school. The kids are innocent, but they inevitably suffer some of the consequences if their parents endanger other people’s lives by driving drunk.
It’s not just drunk driving. In many states, the police can impound the family’s primary mode of transportation if it was used in any one of a wide variety of driving infractions. Reckless driving. Evading the police. Participating—or even promoting!—an illegal drag race. Driving without registration, or insurance, or a valid license.
And it’s not just the family car. If a drug dealer runs his operation from a room in the family house, the authorities can seize the entire house, even if the other family members had nothing to do with the drug dealing, and even if they knew nothing about it.
And it’s not as if the criminal in these cases necessarily gets their car or house back later. If they’re convicted and the property was used somehow in the commission of the crime, that property is put up for auction and the money is kept by the local government. The criminal’s children remain homeless and without transportation—but that’s the law.
In fact, even if the property owner is never charged with a crime, as long as the police suspect the car or the house might have been used in connection with the crime, that property can be seized and held for the entire duration of the investigation, which in some cases can mean years.
Yes, the spouse can go to court to try to get the family’s car or house back. But that means paying lawyers and spending countless hours in a legal battle.
Consider the case of Tina Bennis. She decided to fight, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Mrs. Bennis’s husband was arrested in Detroit in 1988 for consorting with a prostitute in the family car. When he was arrested, the car was seized.
So she sued the State of Michigan to get her car back. During the trial, Bennis proved she had no knowledge of her husband’s illegal activity in the car. She testified that she, not her husband, provided most of the money to buy the car in the first place. She lost.
But she didn’t give up. She fought for eight years, through various appellate courts, all the way to the Supreme Court—which ruled against her.
In a five to four decision, the court upheld the right of the Michigan authorities to seize and keep her car. Four of the five who voted against Bennis had been nominated to the court by Republican presidents. But the fifth and deciding vote came from a liberal justice who joined the conservatives against Bennis—Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Then-Sen. Joe Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993. He presided over her confirmation hearings. In his opening remarks, Biden declared that Ginsburg “comes before the committee with her place already secured in history” for her role in various legal cases related to civil rights. “You have already helped to change the meaning of equality in our nation,” Biden said.
As it turned out, Ginsburg also ended up ensuring the right of the authorities to seize a criminal’s property, even if that seizure impacts innocent members of his family. A later Supreme Court ruling refined the application of the law just a bit, but the principle remains, and the practice continues.
So now the Biden administration is going to lecture Israel about “collective punishment”? U.S. officials are going to tell Israel to stop taking away the property of convicted terrorists, even though scholarly studies and multiple Israeli court decisions have upheld that practice as a deterrent to terrorism?
Perhaps Israel should remind the critics that its anti-terror actions are consistent with the wise counsel of the late Justice Ginsburg and her colleagues.
Stephen M. Flatow is an atorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.
Originally published by The Jewish Journal
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Ukraine War’s Prelude to What?
By Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson writes Russia’s war in Ukraine bears resemblance to the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, which he calls a “meat grinder,” that claimed 500,000 lives and served as a prelude for actions by some of the major belligerents of World War II. Similarly, he explains, Ukraine’s battlefields are scenes of immeasurable carnage and may potentially set the stage for a larger-scale conflict.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
This week has been particularly exciting. The Jerusalem Post has done a fabulous book review of NEXT: A Brief History of the Future (see below); and I have started selling the foreign language rights for this book as well, including: Kazakh, Spanish and Vietnamese.
I continue to do radio and television interviews and I'm thrilled the book is getting attention. Please continue to tell your friends and colleagues about the book, and spread the word through your various social media platforms. And if you have not already done so, please leave a review on Amazon - it really does make a difference.
Yours warmly,
Avi
'Next': Innovation bringing 20,000 years of change in just a century - review
By AARON LEIBEL
When it comes to the future, Avi Jorisch is optimism personified.
“What’s next for humanity is truly inspiring,” Jorisch said in an interview. “The world our children will inherit is far more complicated and more hopeful than the one we received.”
The author of Next: A Brief History of the Future continued: “The trajectory that we are on means that by the end of the century, we will experience 20,000 years of human change.”
How have people an innovations addressed challenges for humanity's future?
In Next, Jorisch looks at the people and their innovations that address the challenges in the 13 areas that the United Nations has pinpointed as crucial to mankind’s future – space, learning, shelter, the environment, hygiene, medicine, disaster resilience, energy, prosperity, food, water, governance and security.
“Interviewing the innovators in this book and diving deep into their stories fueled me with a tremendous sense of faith and optimism that we’ll be able to conquer the daunting obstacles that lie ahead,” he wrote.
He is especially upbeat about Israeli efforts in finding solutions to these global problems. If you look at the greatest challenges facing humanity, you’ll find someone in Israel trying to come up with solutions to all of them, he said.
He discusses two Israeli programs in the book. One is led by Sivan Ya’ari, whose nonprofit Innovations: Africa brings Israeli solar and water technology to poor villages of that continent.
After completing her military service in the IDF, Ya’ari got a job with the Jordache jeans factory in Madagascar.
When she arrived in Madagascar in 1998, she encountered great poverty, much of it spurred by lack of electricity and access to water. Later, she obtained a master’s degree in international energy management from Columbia University and set up her nonprofit.
Innovations: Africa brings two solar panels, a pump, a tank to store water and another tank for water for drip irrigation pipes (a system developed in Israel) for crops. A geologist determines where to dig, and local contractors dig the well and install the pump, water tanks and water taps. So far, the group has completed more than 300 solar/water projects.
Electricity, clean water and drip irrigation have revolutionized life in those villages. Jorisch wrote: “Children were able to bathe and receive an education; adults were able to use the water to start businesses.... Many started by selling the extra fruits and vegetables they produced; others made bricks or launched bakeries” (p. 29).
The author holds Ya’ari in high esteem. “She [Ya’ari] embodies the best of Israeli society and our most sublime hope as the Jewish people to bring more light to the world and truly make it a better place,” the author said.
He also points to Amir Peleg, whose company, TaKaDu, developed software to identify in real time leaks and burst pipes – a revolutionary fix for water utility infrastructure.
Using that system, Hagihon, Israel’s largest water utility, discovered that it was losing a significant amount of water to theft. In Britain, TaKaDu revealed that Thames Water was losing an astonishing 25% to 40% of its water due to leaky pipes.
The water-saving system is now being used in 13 countries, with their utilities reporting a 30% to 40% drop in water loss.
JORISCH’S TIES to Israel are considerable. Born in America in 1975, he, at the age of three and a half, joined his mother and sisters in making aliyah, following close behind his grandparents, Holocaust survivors who had fulfilled their dream of going to live in the Jewish state.
When he was 10, the family returned to live in the US. (Jorisch today maintains homes in both countries.)
He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Binghamton University and a master’s degree in Islamic history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also studied in Cairo at American University and Al-Azhar University, which he calls “the Sunni equivalent of the grand yeshiva of the Muslim world,” from which many members of al-Qaeda graduated.
Jorisch said his interest in the Arab world was piqued by living in the Jewish state. He remembers watching Egyptian movies on Friday afternoon on the country’s then lone TV channel. When Israel TV would go dark, he had access to Jordan TV, featuring readings from the Koran and sometimes footage of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
On Shabbat, when Jerusalem shut down, his mother often would take the family to the Islamic Museum for Art, which was open on Saturdays.
He began his career as a counterintelligence analyst, writing books on Hezbollah, terrorism financing and Iranian banking.
For the past 10 years, he said, he has concentrated on “Israel, technology, innovation, where the world is going, problems like climate change.”
He is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC, and runs a financial technology company in the US.
His previous book, Thou Shall Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World, has been translated into almost 40 languages.
That book was a look back at Israeli technology and innovations that have made the world better, the author explained.
“On the heels of that book’s success,” Jorisch noted, “I decided I wanted to look forward, rather than backward, at the grand challenges facing the world.... I started to get really interested in where the world is headed.”
While promoting his earlier book, he attended a conference sponsored by Singularity University on technologies and sciences for confronting future problems. A few of the conversations he had during that week “really turned my brain on.”
One was about Kahn Academy, which provides a free online education to anyone needing it – it’s the learning chapter in his book.
That program was one of the catalysts for the book, the author said. He also was reading a lot and became convinced that there are innovations helping us to solve some of these problems, and “I was so inspired about where humanity is headed that I felt compelled to write a book about that.”
His reading and interviews would lead to someone, “who leads to another person, who leads to another person who leads to an idea.” The author says he interviewed more than 150 people for the book.
Obviously, in an enterprise like this, some worthy groups get left on the proverbial “cutting room floor.” Jorisch said he intends to publicize the innovations in this book – and those he will find in the future – in op-eds, articles and speeches. But at this time, he is not thinking about another book (“Next 2”).
The most surprising discovery
The author was reluctant to single out any of the innovations featured in Next but did agree to point to the chapter “Space: Print Me Up, Scotty!” as the most surprising of his discoveries.
IT ALL began in 2014 when the American astronaut on the International Space Station lost a wrench in space and couldn’t find a replacement.
Fortunately, a few weeks earlier NASA had sent a 3D printer to the space station, perhaps for such an emergency.
NASA contacted Made in Space, a company trying to prove that 3D printing could work in space. After spending five days developing the software to create the wrench, the digital file was sent to the 3D printer in space, and the wrench was created in the space station.
Obviously, this innovation will help in space exploration. But it will also be a boon on Earth.
“They eventually learned that we can build some products much more efficiently in space than on Earth,” Jorisch said.
For example, one company has started to manufacture optical fiber in space. When these fibers, used to build high-speed Internet, medical devices and transoceanic telecommunications, are made in space, they are “10 to 100 times more efficient,” according to Next.
Despite his optimism, the author realizes that technological progress comes with risks. Sure, we can use genetic engineering to cure disease, but with that same tool, drug cartels can create new illegal drugs. Yes, the Internet has democratized education, but in the hands of criminals, it can be used to rob banks or steal information and demand payment from schools, hospitals, companies, etc., for the return of that data. The same ability for autonomous driving may allow terrorists to coordinate attacks remotely. Social media that promotes connections among people also allows for the spread of misinformation.
Jorisch concluded that “compared to the existential problems the Earth is facing, the downsides of technology are the least of our worries.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
++++++++++++++++++++
I have been warning about this for years:
+++
S.O.S for the U.S. Electric Grid
The Editorial Board
The PJM report forecasts power supply and demand through 2030 across the 13 eastern states in its territory covering 65 million people. Its top-line conclusion: Fossil-fuel power plants are retiring much faster than renewable sources are getting developed, which could lead to energy “imbalances.” That’s a delicate way of saying that you can expect shortages and blackouts.
PJM typically generates a surplus of power owing to its large fossil-fuel fleet, which it exports to neighboring grids in the Midwest and Northeast. When wind power plunged in the Midwest and central states late last week, PJM helped fill the gap between supply and demand and kept the lights on.
That’s why it’s especially worrisome that PJM is predicting a large decline in its power reserves as coal and natural-gas plants retire. The report forecasts that 40,000 megawatts (MW) of power generation—enough to light up 30 million households—are at risk of retiring by 2030, representing about 21% of PJM’s current generation capacity.
Most projected power-plant retirements are “policy-driven,” the report says. For example, the steep costs of complying with Environmental Protection Agency regulations, including a proposed “good neighbor rule” that is expected to be finalized next month, will force about 10,500 MW of fossil-fuel generation to shut down.
At the same time, utility-company ESG (environmental, social and governance) commitments are driving coal plants to close, the report notes. Illinois and New Jersey climate policies could reduce generation by 8,900 MW. Do these states plan to rely on their good neighbors for power?
Many states have established ambitious renewable goals, and the Inflation Reduction Act lavishes enormous subsidies on wind, solar and batteries. But the report says the “historical rate of completion for renewable projects has been approximately 5%,” in part because of permitting challenges. In an optimistic case, the report estimates 21,000 MW of wind, solar and battery storage capacity will be added to the grid by 2030—about half as much as the expected fossil-fuel retirements.
There’s another problem: Demand for electric power will increase amid the growth in data centers and the government’s push for the electrification of vehicles, heating and everything else. Loudoun County, Va., boasts “the largest concentration of data centers in the world,” the report notes.
The report doesn’t say this, no doubt owing to political reticence, but the conclusion is clear. The left’s green-energy transition is incompatible with a growing economy and improving living standards. Renewables don’t provide reliable power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the progressive campaign to shut down coal and gas plants that do will invariably result in outages.
During an arctic air blast this past December, PJM ordered some businesses to curtail power usage and urged households to do the same. PJM narrowly avoided rolling blackouts as some generators switched to burning oil. But what will happen when those power plants shut down? A power shortage at PJM has the potential to cascade across much of the U.S.
Government officials have been raising alarms about the risks of cyber and physical attacks on the grid. But what about the accelerating danger from climate policy?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Why Are the Red State Republicans So Soft?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
At this time this would be a throw away vote but a sound one. America is not currently serious enough to consider the likes of a Ramaswamy and/or Mike Pompeo.
+++
No comments:
Post a Comment