THE OTHER SIDE. THERE IS ONE,YOU KNOW.
Penny doing fine after leg operation.
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"Totally agree on the "elites". Our democracy is in tatters, replaced by a fake structure ruled by the privileged who have no
concern for the populace. +++"
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Learn something new today:
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Flyover Country just got more flown over
BY Salena Zito
Experts say rising fuel costs made a lot of routes in places like Toledo unprofitable; aviation consultant Robert Mann said that the first goal for airlines was “to get rid of the losers.”
Last week, American Airlines announced it was ending daily passenger service from the Eugene F. Kranz Toledo Express Airport after Labor Day. It wasn’t just here, either. Dubuque, Iowa, and Islip and Ithaca, New York, have also lost passenger services from their regional airports.
In short, as Detroit newsman Gary Miles phrased so eloquently said on social media: “Flyover Country just got more flown over.”
American Airlines is not the bad guy in this story; the cuts are in response to a regional pilot shortage affecting the entire industry, which could last for a long time.
But as the very phrase "get rid of the losers" implies, many influential people in elite institutions just shrug off or ignore the economic and emotional effects that this kind of thing has on a small-to-medium-sized city. It is much like when they shrugged when manufacturing, opportunity, and stability left such cities between 30 and 50 years ago.
When an airport stops serving your city, it denies the region's industries (and travelers) the use of the aviation network, the common denominator that determines successful business and tourism across the country and the globe.
Click for the full story:
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I am having lunch with two dear friends when this presentation is being aired but will listen after it is rebroadcast:
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Upcoming Webinar
Produced in Partnership with JNS
Ever since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime has been increasingly propped up by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which remains firmly within the Russian constellation. Although many had thought that Russia would be exiting Syria to consolidate its troop buildup in Ukraine, Russia has actually been escalating its presence in Syria.
Despite recent elections, Hezbollah still controls the Lebanese infrastructure, and parts of Syria have now become sensitive touchstones between Russian, Iranian and US forces, while Hezbollah has threatened to blow up the Israeli Karish maritime gas rigs.
Israel has been conducting what is known as “The War Between the Wars” to reduce the Iranian presence in both Syria and Lebanon and has coordinated with the United States according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
And of course, the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, now has approximately 150,000 missiles on Israel’s northern border, and Iran has likely recently become a nuclear-threshold state.
Are these all of these rivalling powers on Israel’s northern border too close for comfort? How can Israel prevent an unintended explosion between these rivaling powers on her northern border?
Here to answer these questions and more is Lieutenant- Colonel (res.) Sarit Zehavi of the IDF and the Director of the Alma Research and Education Center.
About the speaker: Lt. Col. (Res.) Sarit Zehavi is the CEO and founder of Alma – a nonprofit and an independent research and education center specialized in Israel’s security challenges on its northern border. Sarit has briefed hundreds of groups and forums, ranging from US Congress members to journalists and visiting VIP groups in Israel and overseas. Sarit scripts numerous position papers and updates focusing on Lebanon, Syria and Israel’s national security challenges. She served for 15 years in the Israeli Defense Forces, specializing in military intelligence. Sarit holds an M.A. in Middle East Studies from Ben-Gurion University. Sarit Zehavi and her husband Yaron are raising their five children in Western Galilee
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EUROPE’S ENERGY HOLE
Europe is highly vulnerable to Putin's gas blackmail
By John Dizard
European leaders believe they are part of the rich world, with the power to determine their future. After they return from their sacrosanct holidays in late August, they may begin to realize that is no longer true. Russia is pulling the plug. And nobody, including America, is coming to their rescue at the last minute.
World financial markets have been attempting to put a price on their dread of some disastrous event. I think that event will come in July, with a near-complete Russian shutdown of energy exports to Europe. Ukrainian solidarity flags are cheap. War is expensive.
Of course, the European Union has a plan for the coming crisis. Or, rather, many plans. To start, there is the expectation that American or Qatari LNG can come quickly to replace Russian gas. Climate goals (supposedly frozen into law) can be temporarily set aside so coal powered electric plants can be restarted. Gas storage facilities will be filled in time for winter.
Rationing will be imposed on European industry’s use of natural gas. Renewable energy, grid upgrades, and EVs will take over, eventually. Any necessary sacrifices will be shared in a fair manner.
No. This is all a day late and a euro short. Europe was saved from energy disaster this year thanks to China’s lockdowns (which released some LNG supplies) and unusually warm weather. Without that compounded good luck, Europe would have already suffered major power blackouts and industrial shutdowns.
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But China’s LNG import terminals have re-opened with the end of its Covid lockdowns. And now that Europe has abandoned its climate goals to revive coal fired power plants, there is little, if any, non-Russian coal left to buy on international markets.
And Europe’s natural gas rationing plans are based on giving priority to household consumption, along with hospitals and other emergency services. The political leadership has yet to understand, for example, that if the EU’s fertilizer producers are not assigned priority access to available gas supplies then a cold, dark winter will be followed by food shortages next year.
Putin and his allies were slow to grasp the shortcomings of Russian military technology and leadership in the Ukraine campaign. But now they get it. Ukrainians can just be ground down by artillery storms while they’re cut off from Russian pipeline gas and access to their Black Sea ports. Their European allies can ultimately be bullied into accepting a humiliating strategic defeat and unfavorable terms for a temporary peace.
The Russian fossil fuel producers know that oil and gas reservoirs can be damaged by production shut-ins and restarts. This is more of a problem for oil wells than gas wells, but according to the reservoir engineering people I have spoken to, a three or four-month shut-in by Russian gas producers would not cause too much long term damage. For Europe, though, such an interruption of supplies would be catastrophic, particularly in winter.
The Americans are too politically divided and leaderless to spend much more public money on opposing Russia. If the Republicans succeed in retaking either the House or the Senate in November, they will insist on Europe’s providing a bigger share of allied support for Ukraine.
Even before then, American energy exports to Europe have been unexpectedly reduced. The giant Freeport LNG liquefaction plant on Quintana Island, Texas, will be shut down for months after an explosion in early June, shortly before Russia drastically cut back on its European gas exports. Nearly 70% of the Freeport plant’s production this year had been sent to Europe. There is now no spare capacity left in the US.
The Putin-verse has been shown just how clueless, divided and vulnerable Europe could be, even in the face of obvious threats. Germany has little military capacity and limited interest in expanding it, let alone projecting power beyond its borders. France now has a divided government or will when a cabinet is finally formed. Southern European countries show little conviction in confronting Russia. The Nordics can defend themselves, but can’t save the rest of Europe from political and strategic paralysis.
Even now, faced with Russian energy blackmail, European utilities and major industrial users cannot get approval for long term procurement contracts for additional fossil fuel supplies. And it’s true that such deals would be contrary to Europe’s clean energy policy commitments.
But you can see how this makes foreign fossil fuel suppliers reluctant to make huge capital investments in export capacity to meet European demand, given that that Europe is committed to dumping their business as soon as possible. There is already a global shortage of qualified workers such as pipeline welders, oil field workers and coal mine equipment operators. Why should they be committed to projects serving only a short-term demand spike? Those people can’t be moved around like inconvenient paragraphs in party platforms.
American national energy policy is equally incoherent. But there is more “project on project” risk for investments intended to supply European markets than there is in America. The fossil fuel production facilities (mines and drilling rigs) need to be matched with more expensive transport facilities (LNG liquefaction terminals, LNG carriers and shore terminals) with correspondingly longer payout periods.
Planning permissions have, historically, been easier to obtain in the US. The US has made much softer commitments to reductions in fossil fuel use. Maybe that was morally wrong, but then we see how Europe’s “firm” commitments to decarbonization can be dropped when they become inconvenient.
All this is not to say America will be insulated from a European-centered energy crisis. Apart from the epic financial costs for American investors, banks and corporations, the US industrial base is closely integrated with Europe’s. Americans have close family and personal friendship ties with Europe.
One way or another, though, America will survive the European energy catastrophe. Political and economic freedom in Europe may not.
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Marvin was a personal client and his sister, Lena, and brother in law, Dr. Bill Rottersman, were our children's God parents.
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The Two Jewish Brothers who Defied Segregation in Atlanta
by Rivka Ronda
And paved the way for Atlanta to join the Major Leagues in the 1960s.
In 1962, in many states African Americans could not book a room unless it was in a segregated hotel. Two Jewish brothers defied the culture of their times and opened Atlanta’s first integrated downtown hotel. Thanks to the vision of these civil rights leaders, Drs. Irving and Marvin Goldstein, the city was able to bring visiting baseball teams and host all players, regardless of their skin color, under the same roof at the Americana Hotel.
Four years later, the Milwaukee Braves relocated to Atlanta—a move that may not have happened without the courage of the Americana’s owners.
Due to dwindling attendance and financial problems, the Milwaukee Braves had been scouting for a new home. Meanwhile, Atlanta was yearning to become a major-league city. A group of investors who owned the Braves saw a potential match and began petitioning Major League Baseball to relocate the Braves to Atlanta.
Skeptics wondered how welcoming the Peach State would be to a team with black ballplayers. Athletes would face separate water fountains, restaurants and hotels, not to mention the Ku Klux Klan. Because of the Jim Crow laws, many American states in the South had enforced racial segregation from the post-Civil War era into the 1960s.
“Oh, but we do have an integrated hotel. The Americana,” Bill Bartholomay told his committee of fellow owners of the Milwaukee Braves. Before pulling up stakes and heading south, the committee wanted to make sure Atlanta would be hospitable to the players and their families.
Decades later, Bartholomay, then chairman emeritus of the Braves, reflected: “That hotel helped us move the team here. It was a must. We were approved in October 1964.” The Atlanta Braves were born.
We’ll Just Cut Out Water Fountains Altogether
The Goldstein brothers would never have stood for segregated facilities, according to Irving’s son Ronald, an 88-year-old Atlantan. “When my Uncle Marvin went in for a building permit, he was told the hotel had to have separate water fountains for blacks and whites. He said, ‘Well, we’ll just cut out water fountains altogether.’”
Dr. Ronald Goldstein, International President of Alpha Omega International Dental Fraternity; Prof. Hans Selye, Past International Presidents Drs. Irving and Marvin Goldstein
Marvin had chutzpah. He and Irving were forced to change the name of the Americana in 1966, when the owner of the Americana hotels in New York, Puerto Rico and Miami Beach sued them.
“Fine,” said Marvin. He had a worker climb a ladder and take the last “a” off the marquee, quickly transforming the Americana into the American.
Dentists Uproot Segregation Uptown and Downtown
Ronald Goldstein notes that Irving and Marvin were among the first white dentists in Georgia to integrate their offices and care for black patients on an equal basis. In the late 1940s, the Goldstein brothers bought their first hotel, the Peachtree Manor. It later became the first integrated uptown hotel in Atlanta. A number of black celebrities, including James Brown, stayed there.
Irving was president of the Peachtree Manor, and Marvin was president of their second endeavor, the American, the city’s first integrated downtown hotel.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote of the Goldsteins: “Their imprimatur was woven throughout the political and social landscape of Atlanta in the 1960s, which included providing meeting space in the hotel for civil rights activists.
“Coretta Scott King gave the eulogy at Marvin Goldstein’s funeral. That’s how connected the brothers Goldstein were with the movement.”
Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, were guests at the American, along with President Richard Nixon, Elvis Presley, Pearl Bailey, Carol Channing and other luminaries.
In recent years the American hotel has been revived and branded a Doubletree by Hilton that’s steeped in retro style. While memory may have overlaid the period with a patina of nostalgia, the early years were anything but romantic.
Holding Firm Despite Death Threats
The Ku Klux Klan picketed the uptown Peachtree Manor when it became integrated, and later the downtown Americana when it was built and integrated. Hooded Klansmen burned a cross on Irving Goldstein’s front lawn on Pinetree Drive.
“It was extremely volatile. Dad had death threats,” recalls Ronald Goldstein. “It was a very, very difficult time. As a result, they lost all the white business at the Peachtree Manor Hotel. It was a financial disaster.”
People often questioned the Goldsteins on why they integrated their hotels and dental practices in the 1950s and 1960s. Irving always held firm. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” he would declare.
A white patient once told Marvin she did not want to sit in the same waiting room as black patients, to which Marvin replied that he would help her find another dentist.
African-American and white passengers on an Atlanta Transit Company trolley on April 23, 1956, shortly after the outlawing of segregation on all public buses. Horace Cort, via Associated Press
In addition to members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family, Marvin treated other African Americans from around the South who traveled to Atlanta for special orthodontics service they could not receive elsewhere.
Irving started the family dental practice in 1929. “We’ve got one of the oldest ongoing practices in the country,” his son proudly notes.
Over the years Irving was joined by Marvin and their cousin Theodore Levitas. Ronald rounded out the team in 1959. Irving’s son was the first official team dentist of the Atlanta Braves. His all-star roster of patients included Hank Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s homerun record on April 8, 1974, hitting his 715th homerun. Ronald says, “Hank was humble, friendly and appreciative of others. As great an athlete as he was, he was equally great as a human being.”
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Abortion Goes Back to the People
In Dobbs, the Supreme Court finally corrects its historic mistake in Roe v. Wade.
By The Editorial Board
Can America still settle its political conflicts democratically, and peacefully? We’re about to find out after the Supreme Court Friday overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the profound moral issue of abortion to the states and democratic assent, where it has always belonged.
Critics say the Court’s 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is rule by unelected judges. But Roe was the real “exercise of raw judicial power,” as Justice Byron White put it in dissent in 1973. That’s when seven Justices claimed to find a constitutional right to abortion that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution and had no history in American common law. The Court on Friday finally corrected its mistake, which has damaged the legitimacy of the Court and inflamed our politics for 49 years.
The Justices in the majority deserve credit for sticking with their convictions despite the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in May. The leak was probably intended to create a furor to pressure the Justices to change their mind, and it has led to protests in front of their homes and even an apparent assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. By holding firm, they showed the Court can’t be intimidated.
Justice Alito’s majority opinion hews closely to his draft, and it is a careful, thoughtful survey of abortion law and its history in the constitutional order. His opinion takes apart, brick by logical brick, the reasoning of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the other main abortion precedent the Court overrules in Dobbs.
The central point, underscored by Justice Kavanaugh in his concurrence, is that abortion can be found nowhere in the Constitution. The parchment is neutral on the issue. The supporters of an abortion right claim to have found it in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. But until the latter part of the 20th century, the idea of a right to abortion could be found nowhere in American law. No state constitutions included it, and until shortly before Roe no court had recognized such a right. Justice Harry Blackmun ignored that history and invented the right in Roe.
Casey entrenched Roe in 1992, yet it did so without considering that history, while asserting that abortion was part of a gauzy right to privacy that includes “intimate and personal choices.” The three controlling Justices in Casey sought to balance that right against the “potential life” of a baby in the womb.
But their judgment of how to strike that balance supplanted the moral choices of millions of Americans. “Our Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated,” writes Justice Alito.
The three dissenting Justices claim the majority has steamrolled the doctrine of stare decisis, or respect for precedent. But Justice Alito’s opinion deals step by step with the Court’s traditional stare decisis analysis, and his most telling point is that Roe and Casey haven’t come close to settling the issue.
The controlling Justices in Casey went so far as to make an essentially political plea that Americans let their ruling settle the abortion issue. It was a futile attempt to end debate on a question that touches people at their deepest moral convictions. Abortion continues to roil American politics, and states continue to pass laws challenging the logic of both opinions. When a ruling is still controversial and unworkable after five decades, that is compelling evidence it was wrongly decided.
Chief Justice John Roberts writes in a concurrence that the Court did not have to overturn Roe to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks in this case. He says this would have been more judicially modest and less jolting to the public.
We agree on his point about upholding the Mississippi law, but such a halfway ruling would only have been a legal holding action. More states would have written more laws that would have challenged Roe and Casey, and sooner or later the Court would have had to overrule both or uphold some remnant of them as settled law. Better to take this opportunity to return the issue to the states sooner rather than later.
The political left is making much of Justice Clarence Thomas’s argument in a concurrence that the Court should revisit all of its precedents that are based on the use of substantive due process to find rights in the Constitution. That includes precedents on contraception and gay marriage.
Substantive due process is a long-time preoccupation of Justice Thomas, and we respect him for it. But the doctrine is also deeply embedded in countless Court precedents that have far better stare decisis claims than does Roe. Overturning the Obergefell ruling on gay marriage, for example, would jeopardize hundreds of thousands of legal marriage contracts. That’s the definition of a reliance-interest justification for upholding a precedent. Justice Thomas also acknowledges in his concurrence that abortion is different from these cases, and note that no other Justice joined his opinion.
Which brings us back to the politics of abortion and democracy. The debate will now shift from courts to the political branches, which should be healthy for the judiciary. Democrats made clear on Friday that they will make abortion rights a major campaign theme in the midterm elections, and President Biden declared that “this is not over.”
Fair enough. Both sides of the abortion debate will now have to achieve their policy goal the old-fashioned way—through persuasion, not judicial fiat. Some in the pro-life movement want Congress to ban abortion nationwide. But that will strike many Americans as hypocritical after decades of Republican claims that repealing Roe would return the issue to the states.
A national ban may also be an unconstitutional intrusion on state police powers and federalism. Imposing the abortion values of Mississippi or Texas on all 50 states could prove to be as unpopular as New York or California trying to do the same for abortion rights.
One tragedy of Roe is that it pre-empted an abortion debate that was moving in the states a half century ago. That debate can now resume. Some states will ban it in most cases, while others like California may seek to pay for the abortions of women from other states.
It will take awhile, and more than one election, but we hope that eventually the public through its legislators will find a tolerable consensus, if not exactly common ground. That’s the best we can ask for in our imperfect republic, if we can keep it.
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Why has America chosen to hide behind Israel these dys when it comes to Iran?
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Someone in Washington is Scared of Iran
Someone in Washington is Scared of Iran
JNS.org – It is unclear why, every time an explosion is reported at an Iranian nuclear facility, anonymous senior U.S. officials let it be known that the U.S. was not responsible, and insinuate that responsibility lies with—and vengeance should be directed at—Israel.
This has happened repeatedly in recent years when pro-Iranian militias were targeted in Iraq. Senior American officials, concerned someone would attack their forces in the country— something the Iranians do regardless—rushed to leak that Israel was behind these attacks. The same thing happened last week, when Pentagon officials—anonymously, of course—announced that Israel had ramped up its activities against Iran without asking for U.S. authorization or even informing Washington.
There was only one instance in which the Americans broke their habit: when they themselves took out “the head of the snake,” then-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, in January 2020. Generally, however, the Americans usually conduct themselves vis-Ã -vis Iran with hesitation and compromise. And so, when the Iranians attacked Saudi and Emirati oil facilities in the summer of 2019, the Americans did not respond at all, despite these two countries being close U.S. allies.
Even when U.S. bases were attacked by Iran’s emissaries in the region, the response was minor.
The United States is Israel’s most important ally, and a few anonymous officials must not be allowed to place the American friendship and commitment to Israel’s security in question. After all, this is not 1948, when both the Pentagon and the State Department enlisted in the effort to prevent the State of Israel’s establishment out of concern it would become a Russian satellite state, or draw the United States into a war in the region.
Nevertheless, there is something both unclear and unhealthy about these repeated leaks that insinuate Israel is behind regional tensions.
As the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said, Israel is not an American vassal state and does not need U.S. approval for any move. It has its own interests, that do not always perfectly align with those of the Americans and according to which it must act.
Moreover, American concerns over Iran are neither understandable nor justified. Iran is a large and important country, and there is no need to unnecessarily start a war with it. But at the same time, there is no need to exaggerate its power. After all, Iran is in a state of serious financial crisis, and its military is not as powerful as Tehran would have us believe.
Israel has proven over the last decade that one can set red lines for the Iranians and thwart their activity. It has also proven that Tehran is limited in its ability to retaliate and is deterred from conflict. While this understanding is being put to the test in light of what has been seen as increased activity attributed to Israel on Iranian soil, we nevertheless live in the Middle East. In this region, those who turn the other cheek are guaranteed to get struck again. The Iranians understand the language of force, and we therefore must not hesitate to act. It is inappropriate for officials in Washington to try to hide behind Israel’s apron strings and place the blame on us.
Eyal Zisser is a lecturer in the Middle East History Department at Tel Aviv University.
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Maher reveals the real reason for the J 6th hearings at the end of his monologue:
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As i thought they would: Supreme Court sides with praying coach
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What we are witnessing, as a result of the demise of Roe V Wade, is a pathetic demonstration by progressive radicals, liberals and hypocrite Democrats of how immature they really are.SCOTUS Justices who voted in favor of Roe V Wade acted beyond their legal reach/legal authority because they wanted to accomplish a certain goal even though there was no legal basis for their decision/action. What the current court has done is allow states to decide because that is what the Constitution calls for.
That is a reasonable decision and what the founders intended so that the federal government would not become an all encompassing, intrusive monster, as it has.
Once again, we learn and are witnessing when liberals, and their emotionally childish adherents, do not get their way they cannot accept decisions made in a lawful manner and within the dictates of our constitution.
Bless their pitiful souls.
And:
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Europe's need for energy enriches Russia. Biden's decision not to drill enriches Russia. Ironically, when has an innocently attacked nation been defended by allies who finance the enemy who attacked them?
It is as if a city's police defends a bank against robbers while the police simultaneously supply the robbers with ammunition.
Though logic may be one of my strengths it no longer seems a commodity much in use these days.
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China Deploys Aircraft Carrier
(JustPatriots.com)- A critical military development for China was the Friday launch of the Asian powerhouse’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier.
This comes amid rising hostilities between China and the US over Beijing’s belligerent rhetoric toward Taiwan, which it sees as a renegade province that should be annexed by force if necessary.
President Xi Jinping has pledged to establish a “fully modern” force to compete with the US military by 2027, and his People’s Liberation Army has undergone a significant revamp.
According to CCTV, the new carrier, Fujian, is the first catapult aircraft carrier entirely conceived and built in China.
As water jets arced over the enormous ship to commemorate its launch, rows of sailors wearing white uniforms cheered beneath colorful smoke clouds.
Its flight deck was decorated with colorful streamers and enormous banners that read, “Strive for the comprehensive building of a first-class navy.”
The carrier’s debut represents a significant turning point for the Chinese military.
The official Xinhua news agency said it had substantially more sophisticated technology than China’s two existing carriers, including electromagnetic catapults to propel planes off its deck.
The Liaoning and the Shandong, the other carriers, take off from a ramp that resembles a ski jump.
Additionally, it is comparable in size to the supercarriers of the US Navy, according to Xinhua, with a displacement of more than 80,000 tonnes.
It might be a “game-changer,” according to Collin Koh, a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
According to him, the carrier can launch aircraft faster and with greater payloads, which are crucial considerations in warfare. This is possible with the conventional flight deck’s electromagnetic catapults.
The modern carrier “marks the strategic maturation of a blue-water PLA Navy.”
Blue-water navies may travel great distances and conduct operations all over the world.
However, it will be years before the Fujian is put into use. When it starts operating, the authorities have not specified.
According to the defense journal Janes, the United States has the most active aircraft carriers with 11, followed by China and Britain with two each.
The Fujian uses conventional propulsion as opposed to the nuclear-powered supercarriers of the US Navy. Because they can operate for extended periods without docking and refueling, nuclear ships have many benefits over conventional ships.
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