;
I guess eagles are rare and humans are a dime a dozen.
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Why I constantly talk about Sav. Classical Academy, Hillsdale and St John's. (See 1 below.)
And:
AMAZING FLAGPOLE
Acuity Insurance President and CEO takes a walk daily with his wife and came up with an idea about building what is now the Tallest Flag Pole in North America flying the Largest AMERICAN FLAG which was constructed at the company's headquarters in Sheboygan, Wi.
"President and CEO, Ben Salzmann, said that we proudly fly this flag because we are blessed to live and work in the United States of America."
Erecting a flagpole of such height 400 feet in a location where temperatures frequently fall below zero required a team of experts to ensure structural integrity and maintainability. The pole supports a 7200 sq. foot 4 story tall 70 - by 140-foot American Flag which is the largest American Flag.
Click below to watch the construction of the pole.
Very interesting...
Finally and oldie but still good:
Chutzpah
Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning gall,
brazen nerve, effrontery, sheer guts and
arrogance.
It's Yiddish and, as Leo Rosten writes,
"No other word and no other language
can do it justice."
Read the story below and you will understand.
THE ESSENCE OF CHUTZPAH:
A little old lady sold pretzels on a street corner for 25 cents each.
Every day a young man would leave his office building at lunch time
and as he passed the pretzel stand, he would leave her a quarter, but
never take a pretzel.
This went on for more than three years. The two of them never spoke.
One day, as the young man passed the old lady's stand and left his
quarter as usual, the pretzel lady spoke to him.
Without blinking an eye she said: "They're 35 cents now."
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Would you provide money for your neighbor to kill members of your family? The P.A siphons money sent to them by both Israel, Europe and America to do just that. Why? You decide.(See 2 below.) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Will Trump's approach prevail or will it end in another ruse? (See 3 below.) Meanwhile, our State Department never learns. (See 3a below.) Finally, we are drilling our way off the Islamic hook. Trump understood the merit of this, Obama did not. (See 3b below.) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Trump has not released his Peace Plan but this seems to be a rough outline of the proposals. (See 4 below.) ++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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1) If You Want Your Child to Succeed, Don’t Sell Liberal Arts Short
Critical-thinking skills are useful in any profession, and not all classes are obscurantist or politicized.
It’s college admissions season, and every parent is mulling the perennial question: “What major will help my child get a good job?”
Standard answers today invariably center on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, often referred to as STEM. Given the skyrocketing costs of higher education, parents and students alike can be forgiven for viewing a college degree as a passport into the professional world, and STEM majors are seen as the best route to professional success.
But my advice is to let your child know that a liberal-arts degree can be a great launching pad for a career in just about any industry. Majoring in philosophy, history or English literature will not consign a graduate to a fate of perpetual unemployment. Far from it. I say this as a trained classicist—yes, you can still study ancient Greek and Latin—who decided to make a transition into the tech world.
I am far from alone. There are plenty of entrepreneurs, techies and private-equity managers with liberal-arts degrees. Damon Horowitz, a cofounder of the search engine Aardvark, holds a doctorate in philosophy. Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman both earned master’s degrees in philosophy. The startup where I work employs computer programmers who studied musical composition and philosophy as undergraduates.
Throughout history it has been common for people to study subjects with no immediate relationship to their intended professions. In antiquity, education was intended to enrich students’ lives. Pragmatic benefits such as rhetorical ability, logical reasoning and business skills were welcome byproducts of a good education. The phrase “liberal arts” comes from the Latin word liberalis, meaning “worthy of a free person.” A liberal-arts education gives someone the freedom to participate fully in civic life.
Standard answers today invariably center on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, often referred to as STEM. Given the skyrocketing costs of higher education, parents and students alike can be forgiven for viewing a college degree as a passport into the professional world, and STEM majors are seen as the best route to professional success.
But my advice is to let your child know that a liberal-arts degree can be a great launching pad for a career in just about any industry. Majoring in philosophy, history or English literature will not consign a graduate to a fate of perpetual unemployment. Far from it. I say this as a trained classicist—yes, you can still study ancient Greek and Latin—who decided to make a transition into the tech world.
I am far from alone. There are plenty of entrepreneurs, techies and private-equity managers with liberal-arts degrees. Damon Horowitz, a cofounder of the search engine Aardvark, holds a doctorate in philosophy. Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman both earned master’s degrees in philosophy. The startup where I work employs computer programmers who studied musical composition and philosophy as undergraduates.
Throughout history it has been common for people to study subjects with no immediate relationship to their intended professions. In antiquity, education was intended to enrich students’ lives. Pragmatic benefits such as rhetorical ability, logical reasoning and business skills were welcome byproducts of a good education. The phrase “liberal arts” comes from the Latin word liberalis, meaning “worthy of a free person.” A liberal-arts education gives someone the freedom to participate fully in civic life.
The liberal arts are not the purview of a particular ideology or political interest group. Though the liberal arts have cultivated a reputation as a home for radical professors and “woke” students, rest assured that plenty of liberal-arts teachers and majors are anything but activists. The radicals get the headlines simply because their voices are the loudest. I taught undergraduates while I was in graduate school. My students came in every ideological and political stripe imaginable. Some were left-wing organizers while others were staunch conservatives. I am happy to report that students of all political persuasions were able to offer sharp insights on Virgil’s poetry.
Fields of study centered on philosophy, history, literature, art and music help us appreciate the ambiguity of the world, which in turn exercises our creative muscles. Liberal-arts courses don’t offer clearly defined answers to questions. Rather, they nurture disagreement among students and help them develop the ability to marshal cogent arguments in support of defensible positions. The ability to express a viewpoint verbally and then articulate it in writing is a skill that will serve graduates whether they are pitching a business plan to a venture-capital firm or writing a report to shareholders explaining why their portfolios took a hit last quarter.
We should update the liberal arts to take into consideration the realities of the modern world. Software permeates nearly everything. All students, no matter their major, should develop a basic familiarity with coding tool sets such as true-false statements, also called “Booleans,” and if-then or conditional statements.
But coders gain, too, from studying the liberal arts. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college,” said Albert Einstein, “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” Constructing arguments based on historical evidence or studying rhetoric to improve one’s ability to persuade an audience has obvious applications. Interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems are crucial to addressing modern challenges such as cultivating relationships in an increasingly digital world and creatively integrating new technologies into different sectors of the economy.
So when parents ask themselves “What course of study will help my child get a job?” they shouldn’t think only about how the workforce operates today but how it will operate 10 or 20 years down the road. Though no one knows for sure exactly what the landscape will look like, we can be certain that critical thinking will still have value. And in that world, so will a liberal-arts degree.
Mr. Zimm is a creative strategist at Digital Surgeons, an experience design company.
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2)PALESTINIANS INCREASE PAYMENTS TO TERRORISTS TO
$403 MILLION
2)PALESTINIANS INCREASE PAYMENTS TO TERRORISTS TO
$403 MILLION
The Palestinian Authority paid terrorists and their families over $347 million in 2017.
BY LAHAV HARKOV
Palestinians Increase Payments to Terrorists to $403 Million, March 6, 2018
The Palestinian Authority increased its payments to terrorists and their families in 2018 by nearly $56 million, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter (Likud) said overnight Monday, when a bill to discourage the practice passed a first reading.
Dichter pointed out that President Mahmoud Abbas authorized the 2018 PA budget on Sunday, and that there is a PA law that says 7% of each budget must go to paying terrorists, or to their families, if they’re killed in the act.
The increase “means that the PA will employ more terrorists as PA workers,” Dichter said. “Except that the terrorists who work for the PA have a special quality – they are employed both as dead and living terrorists.
“Murderers like the ones who killed the Fogel family” – two Palestinians killed five out of eight members of the family in Itamar, including a three-month-old, in 2011 – “are heroes to the PA. This is not a whim. It’s in the PA’s constitution,” Dichter added.
The PA paid terrorists and their families more than $347m. in 2017. Terrorists who have been sentenced to three to five years in Israeli prisons receive the average income of a Palestinian, about $580 per month. The families of those who committed more severe crimes and were involved in killing Israelis receive five times that each month for the rest of their lives.
Terrorists receive more from the PA if they are married, for each child they have, if they live in Jerusalem or if they’re an Israeli citizen.
The bill that passed a first reading on Monday, proposed by Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern and Dichter, would require the government to deduct the amount the PA paid to terrorists and their families from the taxes and tariffs Israel collects for the PA. The proposal was inspired by the Taylor Force Act, a US bill named after an American victim of Palestinian terrorism, which would cut all US aid to the PA until the terrorist payments are stopped.
Stern said when he presented the bill to the Knesset that “there is no opposition or coalition” on the matter.
“In the current situation, there is an incentive for terrorism, which only pushes away peace,” Stern said. “This bill is not only meant to promote the security of citizens and residents of the State of Israel, but to promote peace.”
According to Stern, “Palestinians have said when they were interrogated that they continued terrorism in order to go to jail and get more money.
“We can pay back money, but we can’t bring back human lives taken by terrorism,” he added.
Likud MK Amir Ohana wondered: “How did this absurd situation continue until now, with the State of Israel transferring money to the PA, which engages in glorification and pays families of terrorists. This bill is part of the fight against terrorism, and the economic arena is also a place for this fight.”
Joint List MK Youssef Jabareen said the bill is “colonialist legislation at its best... The bill is collective punishment for the Palestinian population... This is how the occupation is perpetuated.”
According to Jabareen, the payments to terrorists and their families are similar to National Insurance payments: “Their goal is to help the families so they don’t starve.”
MK Aida Touma-Sliman, also of the Joint List, called the bill theft.
“The proposal says to ‘deduct,’ but really it means to steal,” she said. “This is the condescending attitude which suits occupiers who think they can continue lashing out at another nation and not admit that the occupation is the source of all injustice.”
MK Mossi Raz of Meretz argued that the bill would be a violation of the Oslo Accords, in which Israel agreed to collect the tax money for the PA.
The bill passed 52-10. There is a second version of the legislation, drafted by the Defense Ministry, which the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is holding up, because it opposes an article in the proposal that would grant the security cabinet the option of not deducting the funds.
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3) CNN Admits Trump Did What No One Else Could to do North Korea
Remember when the media was attacking President Trump for being the mad man with his finger on the nuclear button? In fact, they were characterizing President Trump the way that they should have characterized North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un.
President Trump took a tough stance with North Korea, and it paid off. CNN gave a passing mention to his achievement, while crediting South Korean Prime Minister Moon with the success because North Korea is discussing the possibility of giving up their nuclear weapons.
CNN praised Moon for accepting North Korean overtures on the Olympic team, as if that event occurred in a vacuum. In one line, CNN admitted the truth, but didn't give it top billing: "The Trump administration has said it's willing to negotiate with North Korea if it puts denuclearization on the table."
If President Trump had not taken a hard line, the North Koreans would still be saber-rattling to get a deal from us through nuclear blackmail; the president helped them realize that they weren't getting anywhere with that strategy. The Fake News Network can gloss over Trump's role in this achievement, but we all know better.
3a) State Department Backs Lebanese Land Grab against Israel
By Evelyn Gordon - Commentary
State Department officials have spent a lot of time in Lebanon recently. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited the country two weeks ago, and Acting Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield made an appearance last week. Among other issues, they are trying to mediate two Lebanese-Israeli disputes. The problem is that only one of these is a quasi-legitimate conflict; the other is a patently illegitimate Lebanese land grab. By treating that claim as legitimate, the State Department is not only encouraging aggression but proving, once again, that international guarantees to Israel are worthless.
The fracking revolution happened under Barack Obama, in spite of regulatory efforts to stop it; with the regulatory rollback that has taken place under President Trump, now America can compete and succeed rather than remaining beholden to the Middle East.
The quasi-legitimate dispute relates to where the maritime border between Israel and Lebanon runs. As I noted back in 2011, Beirut is currently claiming maritime territory that it didn’t consider Lebanese as recently as 2007, when it signed (but ultimately didn’t ratify) a deal demarcating its maritime border with Cyprus. That makes the State Department’s proposal to award Lebanon 75 percent of this territory outrageous. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Israel and Lebanon have no agreed maritime border, and international law doesn’t provide an unequivocal answer as to where it should run. So State’s mediation is justifiable, even if its proposal isn’t.
The second dispute, however, is over Lebanon’s claim that Israel’s planned new border wall encroaches on Lebanese territory in 13 places. And on this, there should be no question whatsoever, because a recognized international border, known as the Blue Line, already exists and the UN has twice affirmed that Israel isn’t violating it.
The first time the UN affirmed realities on the ground was after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Then, the UN Security Council unanimously confirmed that all the areas Beirut now claims were, in fact, on Israel’s side of the border. The second was earlier this month when the UN Interim Force in Lebanon reaffirmed that all the new construction is on Israel’s side of the border.
The latter, incidentally, is particularly noteworthy because UNIFIL usually sides with Beirut in any Lebanese-Israeli dispute, for the simple reason that its peacekeepers are located on Lebanese soil and therefore vulnerable to reprisals if it ruffles Lebanese feathers. Indeed, as reported by the Jerusalem Post just last week, members of UNIFIL’s French contingent recently told a French paper that they routinely refrain from doing the job they’re officially there to do—ensuring that Hezbollah conducts no military activity in southern Lebanon, as mandated by Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006—for fear of clashes with the Lebanese Army.
Given the existence of both a recognized international border and unequivocal UN confirmation that Israel hasn’t violated it, the only proper response to Beirut’s protest over a new fence would be to politely tell it that it has no case whatsoever. The territory in question is unarguably Israel’s, and Israel is free to build whatever it pleases there. Instead, the State Department has treated Lebanon’s claim as legitimate. Tillerson demanded that Israel halt construction until it reaches an agreement with Lebanon on the border, while Satterfield proposed land swaps to satisfy Lebanon’s claims. In other words, State is asking Israel to cede land which the Security Council unanimously recognized as sovereign Israeli territory just because a thuggish neighbor covets it and has threatened war if its demands aren’t satisfied.
Needless to say, this is an excellent way to encourage aggression. If Lebanon can get Washington to pressure Israel to cede internationally recognized Israeli territory merely by claiming land to which it lacks any vestige of right and then threatening war if its demands aren’t met, why wouldn’t Lebanon—or any other country interested in grabbing Israeli land—keep repeating this tactic?
But it also makes a mockery of the international guarantee contained in that Security Council resolution from 2000. After all, it’s hard to imagine a stronger guarantee of the validity of Israel’s northern border than a unanimous Security Council resolution affirming it. Yet ever since that resolution was passed, Lebanon has made repeated demands for territory on the Israeli side of the border. Every single time, the State Department and the rest of the international community has treated Beirut’s demands as valid and pressed Israel to offer concessions to assuage them.
This began almost immediately when Lebanon laid claim to the Shaba Farms region in the early 2000s. The Blue Line border actually assigns Shaba to Syria, meaning it isn’t Lebanon’s to claim; any dispute over it would have to be resolved between Israel and Syria. But instead of telling Beirut to get lost, the Security Council asserted, in that same Resolution 1701 of 2006, that parts of the Lebanese border it unanimously affirmed just six years earlier were now “disputed or uncertain” and thus required a new UN demarcation. The Bush Administration subsequently pressured Israel (unsuccessfully) to turn Shaba over to Lebanon.
Today’s State Department has gone even further. Instead of demanding that Israel give Lebanon territory which the UN previously deemed Syrian, it’s now demanding that Israel give Lebanon territory which the UN previously affirmed as Israel’s own. In other words, it’s telling Israel that international affirmation of its borders is no protection against future demands by other countries for chunks of its territory; the U.S. government—and also, naturally, the rest of the international community—will support any claim whatsoever against Israel, even if it lacks any shred of validity.
Admittedly, it’s not news that international guarantees are useless; Israel has learned this lesson many times before. But you still have to wonder what State Department officials are thinking. After all, they’ve been trying for years to mediate peace deals between Israel and its neighbors, and all their proposals are based on Israel ceding strategically important land in exchange for international recognition of its borders and guarantees of their validity. Yet at the same time, they’ve been doing their utmost to prove that international recognition and guarantees are worthless. And then they wonder why Israelis don’t think the international guarantees they’re being offered are a good substitute for the defensible borders they would lose.
3b)
Did Trump Just Make American Oil
Great Again?
America has been in the grip of the OPEC cartel for far too long. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, America will become the world's leading oil exporter in the next five years.
"The U.S. will overtake Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2023, accounting for most of the global growth in petroleum supplies...U.S. crude production is expected to reach a record of 12.1 million barrels a day in 2023, up about 2 million barrels a day from this year, said the International Energy Agency, which advises governments and corporations on industry trends. American oil output will surge past Russia, currently the world’s largest crude producer at about 11 million barrels a day.
'The No. 1 overall message, non-OPEC supply growth is very, very strong, which could change the parameters for the oil markets in the years to come, led by the United States, but also Brazil, Canada and Norway,' IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said Monday during the CERAWeek by IHS Markit energy conference in Houston.
...
Of the 6.4 million new barrels of oil that will be pumped every day between now and 2023, almost 60% will come from the U.S., the IEA said. 'And I can tell you our expectations may well need to be revised upwards if prices are higher,' Mr. Birol said."
The fracking revolution happened under Barack Obama, in spite of regulatory efforts to stop it; with the regulatory rollback that has taken place under President Trump, now America can compete and succeed rather than remaining beholden to the Middle East.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)
12 Points the Palestinians Claim Are inside Trump’s Mideast Peace Plan
While the Trump administration has kept its forthcoming proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian deal tightly guarded, a policy paper made public on Friday by a top Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official claims to reveal the contents of the U.S. deal framework.
This even though the White House last week said that the Israeli-Palestinian plan is not yet finalized and that “nobody knows what it is.”
Still, PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat circulated a paper to Fatah officials titled, “Dictations of President [Donald] Trump for the new phase: imposing a solution, June 2017 – March 2018.” The document, published on Friday by several Palestinian media outlets, outlines what Erekat claims is in the U.S.-conceived deal.
Erekat did not write how he allegedly obtained the purported draft U.S. plan. He previously served as chief Palestinian negotiator and has extensive diplomatic relationships.
“We must not wait until the outlines and content of this liquidation and dictation plan are announced,” Erekat claimed, clearly miffed by the supposed peace proposal details.
Here are the 12 main points that Erekat claims make up the Trump administration’s plan:
1 – Recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
2 – A Palestinian capital in the peripheral suburbs of Jerusalem.
While Erekat did not single out which areas would ostensibly be given to the Palestinians, numerous past Israeli-Palestinian peace proposals have designated specific peripheral Jerusalem areas as future Palestinian territory due to the large concentrations of Palestinians living in them.
This reporter previously documented the largely untold story of Palestinians building entirely illegally on Jewish-owned property in those areas. The illegal Palestinian construction has worked to generate facts on the ground, creating de facto Palestinian neighborhoods inside peripheral Jerusalem that are virtual no-go zones for Israeli civilians.
3 – Israeli annexation of a small portion of the West Bank. Erekat claims that the White House is proposing 10% of the strategic territory be annexed by Israel, while Erekat writes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants 15%, including some major settlement blocs. The supposed annexation would take place after a period of three months.
The West Bank contains historic Jewish communities and some of the holiest sites in Judaism, including the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, and Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, or biblical Shechem. The Palestinians never had a state in either the West Bank or eastern Jerusalem and they are not legally recognized as the authorities in those areas.
4 – The contours of a Palestinian state would be established.
The Times of Israel summarized that section thusly:
The Trump administration would then announce a joint security concept for Israel and the Palestinian state as peace partners. The concept would include the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state with a strong police force; bilateral, regional and international security collaboration with the participation of Jordan, Egypt and the US, while leaving the door open for other countries to join in; the presence of Israeli forces along the Jordan River and “central hills” in the West Bank to protect the two states; and giving Israel overriding security responsibility for emergency cases.
5 – Territory would be gradually handed over to full Palestinian control.
As the Times of Israel reported:
An Israeli withdrawal and gradual redeployment outside Areas A (currently under full Palestinian control) and B (currently under joint control) of the West Bank, while handing over control of new territories from Area C (currently under Israeli control) to Palestinians, based on the performance of the PA (no timetable set), after which a Palestinian state would be announced within these borders.
The PA, which would ostensibly take over the territory, supports terrorism, incites against Israel, celebrates the killers of Jews, and pays monthly stipends to those who murderer Israelis. PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces have participated in scores of deadly attacks against Israelis.
6 – The world would recognize Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people, and the newly formed Palestinian state would be recognized as the homeland for Palestinians.
7 – Israel would guarantee freedom of worship at all religious holy sites.
Israel already guarantees freedom of worship, while some sites under Palestinian or Muslim control openly ban Jews and Christians from worshiping and the Palestinians have desecrated some of Judaism’s holiest sites, including the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs and Joseph’s Tomb. Under joint PA and Jordanian control, the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount currently ban all Jewish prayer and only allow non-Muslims to visit under strict conditions and for a few hours per day but not on holidays. Erekat’s outline did not mention any requirement for the Palestinians to ensure freedom of worship.
8 – The PA would be allocated sections for use at the Ashdod and Haifa ports and at Ben Gurion International Airport, while Israel would retain security responsibility.
9 – Israel would retain overriding security control at international border crossings, but the Palestinians would be granted a presence.
10 – Israeli would control territorial waters, airspace and electromagnetic waves, but would ensure Palestinian needs are met.
11 – A safe passageway under Israeli sovereignty would be created to ensure contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Erekat’s report did not specify the nature of this passageway, although previous proposalshave called for infrastructure that would build encompass a new road, railway system, and means for installing utilities.
12 – A just solution for Palestinian “refugees” for settlement in a future Palestinian state.
This reporter previously documented significant issues with the Palestinian “refugee” claim, including how the Palestinians have distorted history and made disproven claims about actual “refugee” numbers. Also, the United Nations defines a Palestinian “refugee” in a manner that is different from all other refugees, and does so in a way that sustains the “refugee” crisis instead of solving the problem.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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