It cost me four thousand dollars, but it's state of the art.. It's perfect.'
'Really,' answered the neighbor . 'What kind is it?'
' Twelve thirty..'
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Morris , an 82 year-old man, went to the doctor to get a physical.
A few days later, the doctor saw Morris walking down the street with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.
A couple of days later, the doctor spoke to Morris and said, 'You're really doing great, aren't you?'
Morris replied, 'Just doing what you said, Doc: 'Get a hot mamma and be cheerful.''
The doctor said, 'I didn't say that.. I said, 'You've got a heart murmur; be careful.'
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Lapid is a damn fool to believe he can charm Biden. Biden is not in control of his own thoughts and he has always been a back stabber. Ask Justice Thomas.
Will Lapid’s charm offensive work better than Netanyahu’s realpolitik?
The foreign minister believes that his government must prioritize the sort of diplomacy his predecessor rejected. But relations with the world won’t be improved by getting warm and fuzzy.
JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(July 27, 2021 / JNS) Like all new governments determined to show that it is an improvement over its predecessor, the unlikely coalition cobbled together by Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid—though formally led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett—is determined to show that it will succeed where former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed.
Thus, it was hardly surprising that Lapid would use one of his first public briefings at his new office to blame the country’s woes on Netanyahu. The narrative was a familiar one. According to Lapid, Netanyahu had de-emphasized diplomacy and alienated old friends.
He acknowledged that the Likud-led government had forged strong ties with Republicans and evangelical Christians in the United States and had, with the help of the Trump administration, made historic breakthroughs with normalization agreements with four Arab and Muslim countries. But he pointed out that as much as Netanyahu had won new friends for his country in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, he believes that he was responsible for the difficult relations it has with Western Europe and among Democrats in the United States. Not satisfied with tying Netanyahu to problems that long predated his time in power, Lapid also went so far as to link the surge in anti-Semitism around the world, and in particular, in the United States in the aftermath of the most recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, to a lack of diplomatic effort on the part of Netanyahu.
Rather than seek to engage his country’s critics, Lapid thinks Netanyahu and his envoys “insulted them and made speeches against them.” But now he says this will all change. Lapid says he will “work with them in a different fashion” that will emphasize “dialogue.” In doing so, he will make plain that “not everyone who doesn’t agree with us is an anti-Semite and Israel-hater.”
That this is both hyperbole and a caricature of Netanyahu’s actual policies almost goes without saying. And it is particularly hypocritical on Lapid’s part to have said that.
Far from being slow to cast aspersions on Israel’s detractors, he was quick to label the Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream company’s boycott of Jerusalem and the territories as an act of anti-Semitism, much to the dismay of so-called “progressives” in the Jewish community who are supporting this legitimization of BDS campaigns against the Jewish state.
Even more absurd, Lapid was willing to blame the surge in anti-Semitism in the United States on Netanyahu’s decision to transfer most of the responsibility for diplomacy to his own office from the foreign ministry and for the cuts he made to its budget. While the ministry has many hard-working diplomats who deserve their country’s support, Lapid was demonstrating his utter lack of knowledge about what has driven that increase in anti-Semitic activity. It wasn’t the lack of outreach on the part of consular or embassy officials that led to members of the Democratic Party’s left wing and its radical “Squad’s” demonization of Israel. Nor is there anything that even the most competent or well-funded diplomats could have done in the last decade to halt the rise of critical race theory and intersectionality—first on college campuses and then in America’s public square.
Part of the problem is that Lapid is being disingenuous about having a fundamentally different approach to these issues. As he has acknowledged, although he supports a two-state solution in principle, he has already told the European diplomats that he thinks he can connect with better than Netanyahu that it isn’t feasible for the foreseeable future. What’s more, he insists that if a Palestinian state happens “eventually,” then it can only be a peaceful democratic nation. He knows that is more or less impossible under any conceivable scenario imaginable. So that is morally equivalent to telling an international community and the Democratic Party that still clings to the delusion that the main obstacle to a two-state solution is Israeli intransigence to get lost.
Despite rightly labeling BDS as anti-Semitism, Lapid has made some moves towards his country’s detractors.
Part of this is a matter of empty gestures. His claim after his first meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he can restore the old bipartisan consensus on Israel in the United States is a fantasy, but it is probably a good idea for him to at least pretend that he can reach the half of the Democratic Party that is increasingly hostile to Zionism because of ideological reasons.
Even less helpful was his embrace of a more universalist approach to anti-Semitism at a recent conference after which he was rightly criticized for blurring the difference between Jew-hatred and any other kind of prejudice. But rather than double down on a stand that may have been applauded by his country’s foes rather than its supporters, he backed away from it this week in an op-ed published in Haaretz in which he embraced the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism that rightly focuses in part on anti-Zionism, which won’t win him any friends in London, Paris, Berlin or in the left-wing of the Democratic Party.
While those who represent the Jewish state need to be flexible and resourceful while competing on a diplomatic playing field that is most often stacked against their country, the idea that Israel thrives when being more accommodating is a myth. On the contrary, in the last 28 years since the Oslo Accords, to the extent that Israel accepted the false premise that it was a thief in possession of “occupied Palestinian land” rather than a country with an excellent case to make for its own right to hold onto the territories, it lost ground diplomatically. If anti-Zionism has been allowed to become acceptable discourse in mainstream American discussions, it is because Israel has made so many vain concessions for the sake of peace like Oslo and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, not because it didn’t make enough of them. Such concessions validated the case being made by those who falsely accused it of practicing “apartheid” and other slurs.
By contrast, in recent years, as Netanyahu increasingly discarded even lip service to the idea of a two-state solution, it was able to greatly expand the ranks of its friends throughout the world, including in the heretofore uniformly hostile Middle East.
Just as important, whoever is in charge at the foreign ministry needs to keep a close watch on staffers who have at times in the past failed to understand that their priority should be to make the case for the justice of Israel’s cause and not be diverted into foolish digressions like its tragicomic embrace of an effort to “rebrand” Israel as a country known for beautiful scenery, attractive people and smart scientists. It has all three in abundance; however, that won’t matter if its representatives are too busy trying to be liked to label its critics as anti-Semites, and the lies about apartheid and oppression go unrefuted.
Charm offensives may have their uses. But as Netanyahu demonstrated, alliances based on common interests and realpolitik are more reliable than attempts to be warm and fuzzy in settings where pop-culture influencers are already prejudiced against the idea of a Jewish state more than they are critical of its policies.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate.
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Dear Reader,
Freedom in America is under attack.
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Two in three are scared to speak their mind in public.
And almost three out of four Americans fear they will never be able to retire.
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Former Wall Street insider Teeka Tiwari is convinced...
Elite "gatekeepers" are systematically undermining our constitution... and destroying our liberties.
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So we urge you to see the facts for yourself, immediately.
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Sincerely,
Kyle Warnke
Managing Editor, Palm Beach Research Group
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Dear friends,
Since defeating Donald Trump back in 2020, President Joe Biden has routinely trumpeted his administration’s earnest commitment to safeguarding and promoting democracy the world over. He insists that under his leadership, America “is back.” But whether it’s over Hong Kong, China, Afghanistan, or Cuba, Biden has shown that while he can say the right things, he has yet to prove that he will actually do anything to defend the values he purports to hold dear. In my latest piece for The Dispatch, I argue that while the rhetoric of the Biden administration is surely welcome after four years of Trump, the former President’s policies in support of Ukraine, China’s Uyghurs, Hong Kong, the people of Cuba, and many more, were often laudable. With Biden, it seems the reverse is true. With already half a year in office, Biden needs to demonstrate that he can not only talk the talk on democracy, he can also walk the walk.
I’m also sharing our latest podcast, a dive into the Delta variant; to mask or not to mask (that is indeed the question); and the foul politics of COVID. Dr. Marty Makary joined Marc and me for our last pod of the season; we’ll be back in September! Listen here.
I’d love any feedback, and do let us know if you’d like off this small mailing list.
Best,
 | Danielle Pletka Senior Fellow, Foreign & Defense Policy aei.org | @dpletka ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
Reducing reason to net zero
Climate change policy is dead in the water, along with scientific integrity
The British government continues to display an intelligent, informed and above all powerfully effective approach to arresting “climate change”.
Its climate change spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, has said people should do their bit to stop anthropogenic global warming (AGW) by freezing leftover bread, ordering shampoo in cardboard packaging and not rinsing plates before putting them in the dishwasher.
Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it.
But what’s this? As the Mail on Sunday reported, the government’s flagship green policy of reducing carbon emissions to “net zero” by 2050 has been thrown into disarray. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is objecting to the cost which is currently estimated at more than £1.4 trillion. The Mail writes:
As part of the net zero plan –which would decarbonise the economy by 2050 – No 10 had been expected to publish in the spring details of the strategy for moving away from gas boilers ahead of Glasgow's COP26 climate change conference in November. But this has been delayed until the autumn amid mounting alarm about the bill.
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) calculated the cost of making buildings net zero at £400 billion, while the bill for vehicles would be £330 billion, plus £500 billion to clean up power generation and a further £46 billion for industry.After energy savings across the economy, this would leave a £400 billion bill for the Treasury. The OBR also warned that the Government would need to impose carbon taxes to make up for the loss of fuel duty and other taxes.
Moreover, the government is now panicking over its proposal to ban gas boilers by 2035, so much so that it’s pushed this date back to 2040. This is also hardly surprising. As Fraser Myers wrote in the Telegraph:
But the truth is, the sacrifices being demanded of us in the name of net zero are incompatible with democracy, and the PM knows it. The boiler ban was a key plank of the government’s net zero strategy. Gas boilers were to be replaced with heat pumps. These heat pumps are not what anyone could call a reasonable alternative to boilers. While a boiler can heat your house fairly quickly at the flick of a switch, a heat pump can take around 24 hours to heat your home to between 17 to 19 degrees celsius - i.e., not-quite room temperature.
For the pleasure of living in your not-quite warm house, you will have to fork out around £10,000 for the unit and installation. Then, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), you can expect to spend an additional £100 per year on your energy bills.
If you want to own a heat pump and have a house that’s more than lukewarm, you’ll need lots of extra insulation. This means yet more tens of thousands of pounds in renovation costs. The Energy Technologies Institute estimates that a ‘deep retrofit’ could cost as much as building a home from scratch. This is not money that any ordinary person has down the back of the sofa - or that the taxpayer can reasonably cover for millions of households.
Getting used to this reduced lifestyle ‘will take an attitudinal shift’, says Chris Stark, CEO of the CCC. This is quite the understatement. It means abandoning what was once a completely normal expectation in a developed country: having a warm home in winter.
In our net zero future, we can also forget having a stable and affordable supply of electricity. Boris says he wants to make the UK the “Saudi Arabia of wind power”. But we should be wary of green energy experiments. Places like California that have rushed to swap nuclear and fossil fuels with renewable energy are regularly faced with rolling blackouts. Since Germany embarked on its Energiewende (energy transition), its electricity prices are now among the highest in the world, though, ironically, this hasn’t done much to lower CO2 emissions.
As Myers observed, the government’s net zero policy is effectively dead in the water. This is a trifle embarrassing, since Britain is hosting the COP summit in Glasgow which is expected to bring together more than 100 world leaders to commit themselves to reach global net zero and limit global warming to 1.5C.
Ye gods — are they all quite, quite mad?
It’s hard to to get one’s head round the fact that virtually the entire world has lost its marbles over this “climate change” agenda.
It’s not just that net zero carbon emissions is patently undoable without returning to a pre-industrial way of life — and unless fascist measures are used to force the population to do so.
It’s not just that the idea that humanity can change the course of a system as complex, chaotic and non-linear as climate is in the same league as Jonathan Swift’s satirical fantasy of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.
Most astounding of all, the foundational premise of catastrophic warming caused by disastrous levels of carbon dioxide produced by human activity is just that: a mere premise, a theory, an idea, a hypothesis — but one for which the evidence is assembled to fit it, the precise reverse of the scientific method of examining the evidence to arrive at a conclusion.
As I wrote here for my premium subscribers, AGW is a perfectly circular theory which repudiates the key aspect of scientific inquiry — that it is always open to conflicting argument and thus can never be “settled,” as zealots insist is the case with AGW. Predicted by dodgy computer modelling, the premise of catastrophic “climate change” is fed into further modelling of events such as flooding, hurricanes, rising seas, starving polar bears and so on.
And so — amazing to relate — out comes yet another prediction of yet another dire outcome of catastrophic “climate change”. Yet away from the modelling, scientifically observable reality over time simply doesn’t support the claim that the rate of global warming is beyond the normal fluctuations of the climate over the centuries — nor that these catastrophic outcomes are happening, nor that if some of these developments are taking place at any level that this is mostly or entirely the result of human activity.
Actual observable evidence that the predicted climate apocalypse just doesn’t stack up is being produced all the time — and yet it’s airbrushed out of political and mainstream media discourse.
For example, for decades we’ve been told that AGW is destroying the Great Barrier Reef. But on Watts Up With That Peter Ridd now writes:
The annual data on coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, was released on Monday showing the amount of coral on the reef is at record high levels. Record high, despite all the doom stories by our reef science and management institutions.
Like all other data on the reef, this shows it is in robust health. For example, coral growth rates have, if anything, increased over the past 100 years, and measurements of farm pesticides reaching the reef show levels so low that they cannot be detected with the most ultra-sensitive equipment.
This data is good news. It could hardly be better. But somehow, our science organisations have convinced the world that the reef is on its last legs. How has this happened?
How indeed. Next, a new study has found that East and West Antarctica have profoundly cooled by -2.8°C and -1.68°C since 1979.
Next, we learn that everything climate catastrophists have said about Atlantic hurricanes and AGW is wrong. On phys.org, Bob Yirka writes:
Researchers affiliated with several institutions in the United States has determined that the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic over the past several years is not related to global warming. They suggest instead, in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, that it is simply reflective of natural variable weather patterns.
Fancy!
And so on and on.
Back in 2005, the eminent MIT meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen, who is scathing about AGW theory and the corruption of science in its service, wrote:
The primary implication would be that for over 25 years, we have based not only our worst case scenarios but even our best case scenarios on model exaggeration...
The public discourse on global warming has little in common with the standards of scientific discourse. Rather, it is part of political discourse where comments are made to secure the political base and frighten the opposition rather than to illuminate issues. In political discourse, information is to be “spun” to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, and to discourage opposition. The chief example of the latter is the perpetual claim of universal scientific agreement. This claim was part of the media treatment of global cooling (in the 1970’s) and has been part of the treatment of global warming since 1988 (well before most climate change institutes were created). The consensus preceded the research.
That media discourse on climate change is political rather than scientific should, in fact, come as no surprise. However, even scientific literature and institutions have become politicised. Some scientists issue meaningless remarks in what I believe to be the full expectation that the media and the environmental movement will provide the “spin”. Since the societal response to alarm has, so far, been to increase scientific funding, there has been little reason for scientists to complain.
All around us, the cultural institutions of the west are repudiating reason and evidence in the service of numerous ideologies which permit no challenge whatever to their driving idea and its control over peoples’ lives. Our supposed age of reason is based on science. To understand how reason is currently being destroyed, look no further than the terrible corruption of science by the politicized ideology of anthropogenic global warming.
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Keep shooting Schumer:
In fact, it never ends with this party. All they can do is point to the Republicans and whine. We wish that we were exaggerating this point.
Schumer does not have anything to say that will actually help anyone.
This little diatribe sums up the Democrats in a nutshell at the moment.
Find out more about what Chuck had to say about the “deplorables” this time!
Fighting for Freedom,
Jenny Davis
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Henninger and I are in agreement but this is not one of his best written op eds. Yes, Biden is sinking and he is also sinking the Ship of State.
Is Joe Biden Sinking?
How long will the president’s old pals, the moderate Democrats, hang on for the descent?
By Daniel Henninger
Wonder Land: With the Democratic Party's relentless leftward lurch, how long will the president’s old pals, the moderate Democrats, continue with its 'progressive' formula for success? Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images
The country’s partisan polarization has intensified every year since George W. Bush won the presidency in the 2000 hanging-chad election. From Capitol Hill to Main Street, Republicans and Democrats don’t even bother discussing anything of political substance. What’s the point if 90% of the opposition is against whatever you’ve got? That leaves “independents” as the only thing that moves, and the bad news for Mr. Biden and his party’s immovable 90 percenters is the indies are in motion.
In mid-June, Mr. Biden’s approval rating in the Gallup poll was a decent 56%. It’s now 50%. Among independents, he’s at 48%, down 7 points. If you were in a plane that lost altitude that fast, you’d be white-knuckling both armrests.
Presidential approval as a leading indicator of party fortunes carries weight among political analysts. My other preferred metric is “direction of the country,” a one-stop consideration of everything in play. When that sentiment heads south, the party holding the bag of power is in trouble.
The ABC News-Ipsos poll released this week shows 55% of respondents pessimistic about the country’s direction, a 20-point drop since May. Among independents, the downdraft hit 26 points. As Joe Biden might say, “Gee, what happened?”
If all you are tracking is Mr. Biden himself, the answer is, not much. The president routinely shows up, does a competent job of reading something in the teleprompter, and turns over the fill-in-the-blanks job to Jen Psaki.
The White House used to say the $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus bill had saved the country, but it looks as if voters have pocketed that and yet are somehow out of sorts with the Biden presidency.
The answer to the Biden decline is deeper than first-term summer doldrums. It’s this: The most significantly defining political event of the past year was Mr. Biden’s pivot from moderate centrist Democratic candidate to become Bernie Sanders’s most progressive president since FDR. For months after his inauguration, one arcane progressive issue dominated the public Biden agenda: voting access. And more specifically, passage of H.R.1, the grandiosely titled For the People Act.
This political offensive ran on and on, expanding into high-profile assaults on Republican voting-process legislation in many states. It reached a rhetorical apotheosis in July with Mr. Biden giving a speech calling the Republican state bills “21st century Jim Crow” and the “most significant threat to our democracy since the Civil War.” Only from the progressive fever swamps could such hyperbolic nonsense emerge.
The issue and H.R.1 died. Mr. Biden and the Democrats wasted tremendous political capital on this windmill, which had minimal public resonance.
Despite reports Wednesday of a negotiators’ deal on infrastructure, progressives insist a pothole bill can only pass in tandem with all their legislative goals. Which are what?
I think the general public is by turns bored, confused or shocked at the rest of the sprawling Biden legislative agenda. If you asked people to identify what’s in the American Families Plan they’d say they aren’t sure, though they hear it’ll cost something like $3 trillion or $4 trillion, which seems like “a lot of spending.”
BidenCare could have been about one big thing—child care. Instead it’s about everything—and so ultimately nothing. There’s no there there. It’s Elizabeth Warren’s endless “plans.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, what’s going on in the rest of the country is no overdue day at the beach that would let him survive the summer until some legislative victories arrive, such as a Democrats-only vote on the cats-and-dogs reconciliation bill.
In the here and now, this is what the average American sees: unpoliced urban crime, a nonexistent southern border, rampant homelessness, the Delta variant and vaccination hesitancy, federal confusion about who should wear masks when or where, store owners telling customers that workers prefer the Biden stay-at-home federal payments, and prices going up. Even for FDR, that would be a heavy lift.
On foreign policy, Mr. Biden keeps kicking issues like Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline out of sight, and hopefully out of the public mind. But the implications of his decisions persist in public debate, such as the likelihood that his total U.S. pullout from Afghanistan will produce the unhappy visuals of a Taliban bloodbath.
Hey, let’s watch the Olympics! What Olympics?
I almost forgot: There’s Joe Biden himself. He’ll always be the 46th U.S. president, but Mr. Biden turns out to be an unfixably imperfect messenger for a message that on any given day is half-baked (the border, Covid masks) or overbaked (“human” infrastructure).
Mr. Biden is a lifetime practitioner of legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s adage that “if you want to get along, you have to go along.” Instinctively, Mr. Biden chose to go along with the Washington-based takeover of his party by the arriviste left. Result: He has fallen fast to 50% approval. He is sinking. How long will his old pals, the moderate Democrats, hang on for the descent?
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