The Rolland Golden Exhibition at the Morris Museum is scheduled for April 23 - July 24, 2016 - not this August as I previously stated!
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The Board of The Landings Friends of the Savannah Classical Academy (LFSCA) believe there are some important matters to which our nation must attend, including:
1) We must unshackle our nation's economic engine from government waste, control, rules and restrictions which serve only to cripple our productivity and retard employment. In this regard we need to make our tax laws simpler and stop favoring special interests.
2) We must rebuild our military posture and foreign policies to protect our borders so that we can defend ourselves and our friends as well as respond to calamities, all the while treating our Veterans with the dignity and care they deserve.
3) We must return schools to the communities in which they reside, re-introduce children to a tough course curriculum, which includes learning the history of this great nation and hold students accountable for their behavior, honor them for their achievements and provide them with a safe environment for learning from motivated tutors. An uneducated child cannot enjoy the fruits of American citizenship, nor earn a living and support themselves and possible future families.
4) Our nation rests upon many critical foundations and it is imperative the family structure be rebuilt. Too many children are born out of wedlock, raised by a single parent and no longer exposed to a value system which is positive and sets them on the right course for future success.
The under signed believe education plays a critical role in addressing these matters. This is why we actively support the need for better education and why we believe The Savannah Classical Academy, a Chatham County two year old, lottery-based charter school, is pointing the way under the amazing leadership of Headmaster Ben Couch Payne while offering a Core Knowledge curriculum with eight core values: Compassion, Courage, Diligence, Integrity, Perseverance, Respect, Responsibility and Temperance.
SCA's goal is "To provide every child with a classical and academically rigorous education while instilling a commitment to civic virtue and moral character." SCA is succeeding in its commitment and has an enrollment of over 400 students and a waiting list exceeding 600.
Yesterday (July 21) they broke ground for their adjoining high school. They are on the way to becoming what every school in the nation should strive to become.
At today’s ground breaking 200 or so attendees were led by some 30 students in the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in English and afterwards, these K-7 students re-pledged in Latin.
We think that says it all.
We urge you to consider making a contribution to The Landings Friends of SCA! Donations to this 501(c)(3) are tax deductible and can be sent to:
Mrs. Estela Anderson
Landings Friends of Savannah Classical Academy
705 E. Anderson Street
Savannah GA 31401
Dick Berkowitz
Charlie Bourland
Ruth McMullin
Russ Peterson
Guy Randolph
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I believe Daniel Pipe's assessment of Israel's options is correct both as to to method and order. Iran is not likely to undertake an act that would result in an Israeli nuclear response but their surrogates might cross the line and then who knows where that takes us.
Obama, the saint opposed to war and armaments, has assured the world that increased arming is about to occur and the consequence of his naivety could be another major world war. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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The '60's left an indelible stain on our nation's psyche, behaviour and values which we will never be able to erase. (See 2 below.)
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Hard to argue with the points the authoress makes! You decide! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
How Israel Might Destroy Iran's Nuclear Program
by Daniel Pipes
Israeli alternatives in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat
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The Vienna deal has been signed and likely will soon be ratified, which raises the question: Will any government intervene militarily to stop the nearly inevitable Iranian nuclear buildup?
Obviously it will not be the American or Russian governments or any of the other four signatories. Practically speaking, the question comes down to Israel, where a consensus holds that the Vienna deal makes an Israeli attack more likely. But no one outside the Israeli security apparatus, including myself, knows its intentions. That ignorance leaves me free to speculate as follows.
Three scenarios of attack seem possible:
Airplanes. Airplanes crossed international boundaries and dropped bombs in the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi nuclear installation and in the 2007 attack on a Syrian one, making this the default assumption for Iran. Studies show this to be difficult but attainable.
Special ops. These are already underway: computer virus attacks on Iranian systems unconnected to the Internet that should be immune, assassinations of top-ranking Iranian nuclear scientists, and explosions at nuclear installations.
Israel will likely intervene in some capacity to stop the Iranian nuclear buildup.
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Nuclear weapons. This doomsday weapon, which tends to be little discussed, would probably be launched from submarines. It hugely raises the stakes and so would only be resorted to, in the spirit of "Never Again," if the Israelis were desperate.
Of these alternatives, I predict the Netanyahu government will most likely opt for the second, which is also the most challenging to pull off (especially now that the great powers promised to help the Iranians protect their nuclear infrastructure). Were this unsuccessful, it will turn to planes, with nuclear weapons as a last resort.
1a)Deja vu again
By Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud
Serious pundits in the media and in politics say that President Barack Obama’s Iran deal is deja vu with President Bill Clinton’s North Korean nuclear deal. I humbly disagree. President Clinton made his decision based on strategic foreign policy analysis, and top secret national intelligence information, and yes, his desire for good intentions to save the people of North Korea from starvation that was self-induced by its leadership. It turned out that the strategic foreign policy analysis was wrong and there was a major intelligence failure, that if President Clinton knew it before he made his decision – I am absolutely confident he would not have made that decision.
President Obama made his decision to go ahead with the Iran nuclear deal fully aware that the strategic foreign policy analysis, the national intelligence information, and America’s allies in the regions intelligence all predict not only the same outcome of the North Korean nuclear deal but worse – with the billions of dollars that Iran will have access to. It will wreak havoc in the Middle East which is already living in a disastrous environment, whereby Iran is a major player in the destabilization of the region.
Therefore, the question to be asked is: Why President Obama will go ahead with such a deal, knowing what President Clinton didn’t know when he made his deal with North Korea?
It is definitely not because President Obama is not smart enough, because he is. I contend that the real reason is that President Obama is honest and at peace with himself, because ideologically he believes what he is doing is right. Everything else, that could be a disastrous result to his decision, I believe he thinks it is an acceptable collateral damage.
Who am I to make such a profound conclusion? Humbly, I am a man who worked directly with U.S. presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, and I am humbly a man who served representing his country in the great country of the United States of America for 23 years, and yes, I have spent 17 years of my life in my own country’s military. If all of that doesn’t qualify me to make well-informed comments on this situation, add to that the fact, that from 2005 until 2015, I served as national security adviser to my leaders and chief of intelligence, which gave me access first hand to my leaders’ dealing and analysis of President Obama.
For the sake of disclosure, I have to admit that I have never worked or met personally with President Obama before or after he became president, and the only information I base my assessment of the president on, is what the late King Abdullah, my boss, informed me of, or asked for my advice about when it came to handling issues with President Obama. All of which was transferred back and forth through our ambassador at the time and our foreign minister at the moment, Mr. Adel Al-Jabeir.
I have limited my comments only to the Iranian nuclear deal, but trust me, the president’s policy’s on the Middle East generally and Syria, Iraq and Yemen particularly, are eye-openers and there may be another time to discuss that. But definitely now, I am convinced more than any other time that my good friend the magnificent old fox Henry Kissinger was correct when he said “America’s enemies should fear America, but America’s friends should fear America more.” People in my region now are relying on God’s will, and consolidating their local capabilities and analysis with everybody else except our oldest and most powerful ally.
It breaks one’s heart to say that, but facts are stubborn things, and you cannot ignore them.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud is the former ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States of America (1981-2005)------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) Return of the '60's
And so, as the 1968 election draws nearer...
I know — some of you are thinking that I meant to write 2016 but fouled up my typing
Nope.
Though the calendar year we live in is 2015, in spirit the moment closely resembles the 1960s. Maybe it isthe ’60s. Maybe, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, we awaken each morning to find ourselves living in a long-gone decade, with Sonny and Cher providing musical accompaniment.
The notion took on more flesh over the weekend with the outbreak, in Phoenix, of a patented ’60s-style event — the shouting down of a presidential candidate by a mob of yahoos. I call the mobsters yahoos despite the pass they earn from many for “demonstrating while black.” The mobsters wanted tried and (I had supposed) bona fide lefty, ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, to join them in vowing to dismantle “structural racism.” So they took over the stage of a way, way left-wing gathering where O’Malley was speaking.
“We’re going to hold this space,” a spokesmobster said, representing the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. “We are going to acknowledge the names of black women who have died in police custody.” And what was O’Malley, a Democratic presidential candidate, going to do about it? He was going to dither, that’s what. After some harmless preliminaries, he picked up the trademark slogan, “Black lives matter,” to which he added, “White lives matter. All lives matter.” The mob wasn’t buying it. Shouting and chanting ensued.
Care for a chant sample? “If I die in police custody, burn everything down! That’s the only way,” and here I adopt CNN’s transliteration, “motherf——— like you listen!”
Even good old ultra-lefty Bernie Sanders, who followed O’Malley, encountered what a reporter called “sporadic shouting.” He took it in stride. Not so O’Malley, who unburdened himself to the digital news site This Week in Blackness. Dragging in “white lives” and “all lives” had been a huge mistake.
“I meant no disrespect,” he said. “I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”
No, of course not! But if this is the ’60s all over again, you have to expect disruptions of civic order. That’s the first thing. The second thing is: if you’re in O’Malley’s position, facing Authentic Protest, you apologize to the protesters. You apologize because you’re a wimp and a weakling and care less about free speech and civic processes than you do about being in sync with the times. We saw it all in the ’60s.
Bernie Sanders sure did. Being of that vintage himself, Bernie knew how far not to push the mobsters; how smilingly to hear out their “rage.” Everybody in the ’60s raged. Bernie, 26 years old in 1968, was no bad hand at it himself. To find the mobs gathering anew and carrying on as in the old days must bring nostalgic tears to his 73-year-old eyes.
These aren’t good times for un-Sanders, non-O’Malley types. But, oh, what great times for self-appointed warriors against an American order that is supposedly racist, homophobic, sexist, jingoistic — all that terrible stuff the ’60s worked to root out.
While American negotiators bend to the demands of Iranian mullahs, and demands go forth, uncontradicted, for junking the post-1865 reconciliation worked out by Yankees and ex-Confederates, free speech and free exercise of religion come under assault. Why? Because of the protections and immunities they supposedly afford un-Sanders, non-O’Malley — and non-mobster — types.
Everywhere today, it would seem, there is the stench of the 1960s, when reason and manners and tolerance took a backseat to anger and destructive impulses. The upcoming presidential campaign provides opportunity for improvement (if not recovery), but the O’Malley debacle and all the noxious Trumpery into which Republican aspirations have fallen in recent days do not, frankly, inspire confidence.
A bunch of nuts are on the loose in this historical moment — as they were in that nutty, emotionally ugly, fog-brained decade 40-odd years ago. I had hoped we’d left all that behind. Alas.
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3) Why America is Falling Behind the Rest of the World
12 signs of the decline of the U.S.A.
America is declining, in large and important measures, yet policymakers aren’t paying attention. So argues a new academic paper, pulling together previously published data.
Consider this:
- America’s child poverty levels are worse than in any developed country anywhere, including Greece, devastated by a euro crisis, and eastern European nations such as Poland, Lithuania and Estonia.
- Median adult wealth in the US ($39,000) is 27th globally, putting it behind Cyprus, Taiwan, and Ireland.
- Even when “life satisfaction” is measured, America ranks #12, behind Israel, Sweden and Australia.
Overall, America’s per capita wealth, health and education measures are mediocre for a highly industrialized nation. Well-being metrics, perceptions of corruption, quality and cost of basic services, are sliding, too. Healthcare and education spending are funding bloated administrations even while human outcomes sink, the authors say.
“We looked at very broad measures, and at individual measures, too,” said co-author Hershey H. Friedman, a business professor at Brooklyn College – City University of New York. The most dangerous sign they saw: rising income and wealth inequality, which slow growth and can spark instability, the authors say.
“Capitalism has been amazingly successful,” write Friedman and co-author Sarah Hertz of Empire State College. But it has grown so unfettered, predatory, so exclusionary, it’s become, in effect, crony capitalism. Now places like Qatar and Romania, “countries you wouldn’t expect to be, are doing better than us,” said Friedman.
“You can become a second-rate power very quickly,” added Hertz.
To be sure, the debate over whether America is on the decline has raged for years. The US National Intelligence Council said in its global trends reporta decade ago American power was on a downward trajectory. Others making the case say the US is overstretched militarily, ill-prepared technologically, at-risk financially, or lacking dynamism in the face of influential, new competitors.
Arguing decline has been exaggerated, others point to a rising US stock market, manufacturing strength, a growing population, and a domestic energy boom.
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