Year: 2002

Got kids in middle school or high school? Tomorrow: Vision Warrior!

Today . . .

YOU MENTION ONE LOUSY X-RAY . . .

. . . in passing, no less! I mean, I wasn’t even writing about X-rays, I was writing about mint Diet Coke; and suddenly, this becomes the History of Science. (And I must tell you: I love it.)

Mike Broderick: ‘The bit about Nikola Tesla discovering X-rays is an urban legend at best. Röntgen discovered the X-ray accidentally, published two papers on it, and never worked with X-rays again. Röntgen received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 (very first Nobel Prize for physics!). Don’t take my word for it, check it out! The simplest way is probably the Encyclopedia Britannica. A telling bit of evidence is that ‘Röntgen’ is still a well-known measure of radiation exposure to this day, whereas Tesla’s name is attached to an obscure measurement (I believe of magnetic fields) that even I, with a degree in physics can’t explain without looking it up!

“Nikola Tesla was a very brilliant man and outstanding scientist. He did most of the preliminary work leading to alternating electrical current before a guy named George Westinghouse marketed it and made ‘AC’ a household name. For some reason over the past twenty years or so, there has been a movement to give Nikola Tesla credit for inventing essentially everything but sliced bread. I’m not sure of the motivation behind this. In any case, for X-rays, it is Röntgen who deserves and receives credit, not Tesla.

“Some minor asides: Röntgen took a number of X-ray pictures, the most famous being of his wife’s hand, including a huge (wedding?) ring. You can see it on the internet here. Thomas Edison saw big bucks in inventions derived from X-rays, and put his ‘top assistant’ to experimenting with an X-ray machine. Because the hazards of radiation were not understood at the time, doses to X-ray machine users were massive. As a result, Edison’s assistant quickly got cancer and died. Edison was no dummy, and had all work with X-rays stopped in his research lab.

“Last bit of trivia: It is generally accepted that at least one researcher observed the effects of X-rays before Röntgen did (ten years or so ahead), but he didn’t realize he had anything new, didn’t do anything with it, and even he agreed Röntgen should receive credit. I forget the name of the fellow now, but he’s not well-known even to science history geeks like me!

“The reason I can spew out emails about all this stuff, and even care about correcting the record, is that I am an avid history buff who needs to make a living, so works in a technical field – which just happens to be radiation safety! I don’t have any beef with Nikola Tesla at all. But the historical record is solidly clear that he didn’t discover X-rays.”

☞ Thanks, Mike.

YOU MENTION ONE LOUSY FLAT TAX . . .

Eric Delph: “All concepts I have heard about a flat tax include a generous income deduction, like $30,000 for a single filer and $50,000 for a joint filer. No one making under those amounts would pay any taxes. So if the flat tax is 20%, than someone making $30,000 has an effective tax of 0%. Someone making $60,000 has an effective rate of 10% . . . $120,000 is 15% . . . $240,000 is 17.5% . . . $480,000 is 18.75% . . . and $1 million is 19.4%. This looks progressive to me. Unless your definition of progressive is different from mine.”

☞ You’re right. And for someone making $154 million (e.g., Cisco’s CEO last year), it’s 19.996%. I just don’t think the incline from 10% on $60,000 to 19.996% on $154 million is steep enough.

To me, the 39.6% top bracket established in 1993 (without a single Republican vote) struck a good balance. The best-off still saw their after-tax income rise faster than everybody else, yet we raised enough revenue to balance the budget, get interest rates down (a terrific “tax cut” for business and consumers), and do things like increase the earned-income credit for the working poor.

I do totally agree, however, that we should lean toward simplifying the tax code wherever possible. That’s why, for example, raising the floor on taxable estates from the current $1 million to perhaps $3.5 million (and then indexing that to inflation), is so appealing. It would exempt nearly everybody, yet still raise a lot of money from the few fortunate enough to have to deal with it. For them, I’d like to couple a modest reduction in today’s 50% top rate with a significant tightening of the loopholes designed to avoid it.

(Congress closed no loopholes that I know of, but did cut the old 55% rate to 50% this year and slated it to fall gradually to 45% in 2009, by which time the $1 million exemption is slated to hit $3.5 million. The law then drops the tax rate to zero in 2010 . . . and snaps it back up to 50% in 2011. Presumably, there will be some very hot debates in 2009 or else a most macabre Palm Beach social season in 2010.)

YOU MENTION FREQUENT FLYER MILES . . .

The push is on to have you pay your income tax by credit card, via an outfit called Official Payments (800-2PAYTAX), in order to get your card’s frequent flyer miles. The TV pitchman describes “his friend” who paid his $100,000 tax bill on his credit card and used the 100,000 miles it brought him for a business class ticket to Australia. Yes, there is a 2.5% “convenience fee” for doing it this way, but, the pitchman concludes, “My friend got a heck of a return on his taxes, I’d say.” A female voice-over drives the point home: “Official Payments. The proven way to make paying taxes pay.”

Well, yes and no. The 2.5% fee means you’re paying $2,500 for 100,000 frequent flyer miles. It’s true that you may be able to get a business class ticket to Australia for 100,000 miles, which is a lot less than the full fare. But a couple of things to think through first:

1. Do you really need the miles? You don’t have a lot already?

2. Will your card’s mileage program allow you to earn this many in a year? Check first to be sure you aren’t already near the limit of how many you can earn?

3. Could you suck it up and fly coach? If so, it costs a lot less than $2,500 to go anywhere in the world. Basically, give the choice of spending $600 in coach or $2,500 in business, which would you choose?

• (This is not a trick question. Those readers in the wealth-accumulation stage would be well advised to choose the $600 fare. Those relative few who have achieved financial security have only an opportunity cost in this – the opportunity to do something even more enjoyable, or even more meaningful with the extra money. I have one dear friend who was United Way’s Man of the Year not long ago – for the entire country, not some small town – and who has given away millions. He flies coach. Doesn’t bother him.)

4. Are the miles really worth 2.5 cents each to you? The basic award these days, a domestic round-trip in coach, is 25,000 miles. Paying 2.5 cents a mile, that works out to $625. If you normally pay less than that for a ticket, think twice about paying $625 to buy for 25,000 miles.

5. Will you have time to take the trip – and at a time when the miles will do you any good? If you think you’re going to use the miles around the holidays, forget it.

6. Would it be smarter to buy the miles direct from the airline, if and when you actually need them? American, for example, well sell you up to 15,000 miles per year for the same 2.5 cents.

7. Finally, is there any chance you have accidentally run a balance on your card? If so, in addition to the 2.5% fee, there’d be interest to pay as well.

I asked my brother, the scholar and anthropologist in our family, ‘Who is a Jew?’

He replied with many definitions (‘anyone whose mother was Jewish’ was only the first) and concluded with my favorite, which he said is attributed to Golda Meir: ‘A Jew is anyone who if you call him a Jew he doesn’t throw a chair at you.’

Would that they were only throwing chairs.

Do most of the teenagers enraged at the US and Israel – who want to kill the Jews – even know that less than 60 years ago 6 million were killed? My guess is that this detail doesn’t make it into the madrassas.

My guess is also that, like two schoolboys fighting (only horrendously worse), neither one wants to back down but both hope a teacher comes along to put a stop to it. In this case, that teacher would be us. And the Saudis. The bigger the coalition, the better. One hopes it could demand behind the scenes that Sharon and Arafat both step down in favor of more moderate leaders, and then, once they have agreed, demand it publicly and have them accede. And then have the coalition step in between the two sides – heavily armed (but also with lots of relief supplies) – while UN resolutions are being sensibly interpreted and agreed to. Add in $25,000 or $50,000 to each of a million Palestinian families paid half by the US and Europe, half by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – what’s $25 or $50 billion to avert World War III? – and maybe there’s a way to get the toothpaste back into the tube.

But what do I know?

Herewith three pieces I found particularly interesting. The first, by John Derbyshire, a Brit, I believe, comes from the National Review. It concludes by referring to the second, a column Peggy Noonan did for the Wall Street Journal. If you have any wind left after those two, the third is a letter to Nashville’s Jewish paper, the Observer. (Thank you, Peter and Pris, for bringing these to my attention.)

March 22, 2002
The National Review
Kill a Jew for Allah
By John Derbyshire

I recently got a long, carefully composed e-mail from a reader, who begged me to circulate it among “other opinion-formers.” It laid out a plan for peace in the Middle East. The writer, obviously an intelligent and well-informed person, had composed the e-mail with great care. With some passion, too – he really wants to find a solution to the Israel-Arab problem. Here was a public-spirited person doing his citizenly best to promote an idea that, he fervently believed, would put an end to the horrors.

And what was that idea? In a nutshell: The U.S. should lean hard on Israel to abandon the Jewish settlements in Arab land – i.e. beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders. These settlements (my reader argued) were the root cause of all the strife. Closing them down would remove the main casus belli; and the good faith shown by this act would open the eyes of the Arabs to the fact that peace with Israel is possible. The logjam would be broken.

I don’t know what to say to people like this. Obviously they are decent, good citizens. Obviously they are trying their best – trying to be constructive, to give some hope to the world. How do I tell them what I feel? Which is, that they are floating in orbit between Uranus and Neptune – inhabiting some place that does not touch the real world at any point.

Look: Possibly there would be some abstract justice in closing down the settlements, I don’t know. I don’t see it myself, I must admit. Why should Jews not live among Arabs? Lots of Arabs live in Israel, and do very well there. There are rich Israeli Arabs; there are Israeli-Arab pop stars and comedians; there are Israeli-Arab intellectuals, teachers, writers, businessmen, athletes. Why, when the whole thing gets sorted out, should there not be Jews living in Arab territory – as there were for centuries past? What, exactly, is wrong with the settlements? I don’t see it.

But, okay, let’s suppose there is some valid moral objection to the existence of the settlements; and let’s suppose my reader’s plan were to be carried out, and all the settlements were removed, their populations transferred back to metropolitan Israel, their buildings razed, their fields ploughed with salt. Does anybody think it would make a damn bit of difference? There was no such thing as settlements, no such thing as “occupied territories,” before the 1967 war. There were no such things in 1960, for example, when Adolf Eichmann was abducted from his hiding-hole in Buenos Aires by Israeli secret agents, an event recorded by Saudi Arabia’s principal government-controlled newspaper as: “ARREST OF EICHMANN, WHO HAD THE HONOR OF KILLING 6 MILLION JEWS”.

The problem of the Middle East is not the settlements. It is not this piece of land or that piece. It is not the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem or Temple Mount. It is not oil, or land, or water, or history, or geography, or metaphysics. The problem is in plain sight. You know what the problem is, and so do I. The problem is that the Middle East hates the Jews.

I say “the Middle East” because I don’t know any more precise way to say it. You can’t say “the Arabs” (though of course the Arabs hate the Jews more than anyone), because the Iranians and the Pakistanis and the Berbers of North Africa hate the Jews too, and they are not Arabs. You can’t say “the Muslims”. That is a lot closer, I think, and there surely cannot be much doubt that institutional Islam is riddled with Jew-hatred. Still, Malaysia is a Muslim country, and they don’t hate the Jews, except in a go-along, pro forma sort of way, to keep on good terms with the Saudis and Gulf Emirs.

And I am sure, before you write to tell me, that lots of people in the Middle East don’t hate the Jews. Lots of Arabs, millions probably, don’t hate the Jews. Probably lots of non-Arab Muslims don’t hate the Jews, either. Yet it’s hard to avoid the impression, from reading the MEMRI translations, from looking at the kinds of things taught in schools all over the Middle East (and in Islamic schools here in the U.S.A. – see below), from listening to the pronouncements of Middle East politicians (remember the Syrian foreign minister explaining to the Pope – to the Pope! – that: “When I see a Jew in front of me, I kill him”?) and from random conversations with New York cab drivers, that visceral, murderous Jew-hatred is awfully widespread among Arabs, Pakistanis, Iranians, and North Africans. Awfully widespread.

In between getting that e-mail and answering it, I did two unrelated things, by way of my daily work. One was to prepare an editorial snippet for the print National Review about Islamic schools here in the U.S., based on a long study in the Washington Post of February 25th. There are estimated to be between 200 and 600 private Islamic day schools in the U.S., with up to 30,000 students in attendance. They use textbooks imported from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. One in use at the Islamic Saudi Academy in suburban Virginia instructs readers that a sure sign of the Day of Judgment will be that Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind trees that say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him.” School authorities did some fast damage control when the Post confronted them (as the Saudis are doing over the now-famous Blood Libel article). The textbooks are in process of being replaced with special versions more suitable for American students, they assured us, with the kill-a-Jew-for-Allah stuff left out. Presumably that stuff remains untouched back home in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Libya,… Their kiddies will get the right message, you can be sure: “What do you mean, you don’t hate Jews? Look, even the blessed trees hate them!”

The other thing I did was read Jeffrey Goldberg’s article about Saddam Hussein in The New Yorker (titled “The Great Terror” in the 3/25/02 issue).

“Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction are focused on Israel. ‘Israel is the whole game,’ Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. …. “[Saddam] thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with biological weapons….’ Students of Iraq and its government generally agree that Saddam would like to project himself as leader of all the Arabs, and that the only sure way to do that is by confronting Israel.”

Seems to me, from what I read and hear, that those students are quite right: That by “confronting Israel” via killing a hundred thousand Israelis in a day, Saddam would win the hearts of the entire Arab world, and of the Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans and North Africans, too. (Does Hamid Karzai, Washington’s new darling, hate Jews? Has anyone asked him?) I am sure Saddam himself believes this to be the case, and he is, with all his endearing little character flaws, a man who knows something about the Arab mentality.

It is not too difficult to envisage a plan by which the spoken grievances of the Arabs against Israel could be addressed, and some compromise struck. The chancelleries of the world – including Israel’s – are in fact full of such plans, drawn up with loving care by legions of diplomats, experts, politicians, ambassadors, scholars and private do-gooders like my reader, across decades of time. In an atmosphere of goodwill, and genuine desire for a solution, the Palestine circle could be squared. You’d just have to pull one of those plans down from the shelf, blow the dust off it, and say: “Let’s take this for a starting point, shall we?” The circle is not going to be squared though – not by George W. Bush, not by my e-mail pal with his elaborate scheme to shut down the settlements, not by another round of “shuttle diplomacy,” not by any amount of work on a “peace process”. It isn’t going to be, because there is no goodwill, and no real desire on the part of Israel’s enemies for a solution. Or rather, there is a widespread desire for only one solution – the extinction of Israel and the driving out, or mass killing, of the Jews. That’s what they want, the Middle East; that’s all they want.

I don’t think we should be sending diplomats to the Middle East. I think we should be sending teams of psychiatrists. This is a diseased culture, a sick culture. Go back to that disgraceful recycling of the Blood Libel in the Saudi press. Do you think anyone in that newspaper’s readership thought there was anything odd about it, anything deplorable about it, anything untrue about it? I don’t think so. To the newspaper readers of Saudi Arabia, it was routine stuff, a statement of the obvious. If MEMRI hadn’t brought it to the attention of the civilized world, do you think the Saudi authorities would have bothered about it? Do you think, even now, they really have a clue what all the fuss is about? Of course the Jews use gentile blood to make their cookies. Doesn’t everyone know that? We’d best pretend to be shocked, though. Those Americans are so-o-o sensitive!

We are dealing here with people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, nuts. The Arabs, the Iranians, the Pakis, the Libyans: they are nuts, the great majority of them. Nuts. Not playing with a full deck. Not too tightly wrapped. One brick short of a load, one coupon short of a toaster. The smoke not going all the way up the chimney. Not quite 16 annas to the rupee. Nuts.

Is there anything we can do about it? Only what Peggy Noonan told us to do in her brilliant Wall Street Journal piece last week: Do what you do when you find yourself in a roomful of glittering-eyed lunatics down at the local funny farm. Keep smiling, talk softly, don’t make any sudden moves, keep nodding and smiling, and keep a tight hand on the stun gun in your pocket. The Middle East contains three hundred million people, and most of them are crazy as coots. Glad I don’t live there.

March 15, 2002
The Wall Street Journal
PEGGY NOONAN
Quiet, Please, on The Western Front
Some of our enemies are crazy. We don’t want to excite them.

I have a small thought. I would like to speak of it in a low-key manner. My thought is that we are all talking too much, or rather too dramatically–too colorfully, and carelessly–about things that are really quite dreadful. And we should stop it.

I will start with this: I have been thinking about hospitals for the psychologically and emotionally unwell, and how they run.

Now, there are many wicked people in the world, and some of them are stone evil, but some are also not at all sane. They are frighteningly obsessed or delusional; they have illusions of omnipotence, or no control over their impulses and desires; they hear voices, are unhinged by fantasies of rage and revenge, imagine that they are the reincarnation of Napoleon, or Saladin.

You can ponder whether Saddam Hussein is more evil than crazy or crazy than evil, but anyone who’s seen him on the news would likely conclude that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber who failed to blow himself and 400 other people out of the sky, is quite clearly unstable.

And there are of course many Richard Reids. The problem in this age of weapons of mass destruction is that we don’t have one Saddam to worry about but cells of Saddams, rings of Reids, scores, hundreds of independent operators, some of whom are trying to create their own weapons of mass destruction, their own obliterates aimed at obliterating life in this place or that.

And many of them are not fully sane. Which is a problem. Which is why I’m thinking about mental institutions.

If you have ever worked in one or visited a friend in one, you’ve probably observed some things about how the unwell are treated. For instance: It is always wise when speaking to the unstable to speak softly if you can, and soothingly if possible. It isn’t good to be loud or theatrical in your subject matter or usage. It is wise not to speak with heightened drama, because for the unstable things are quite dramatic enough. They have storms going on inside them. They don’t need your howling verbal gusts. So, a general rule: Never excite the unstable.

At the same time some of the unstable are dangerous or potentially so, and this cannot be ignored. So it’s always good to be planning ahead. It is wise to be preparing restraints, to have areas in which the dangerous can be segregated from the general population, to have security guards who speak softly but, as they say, carry a big stick. It is wise to have serious plans for treatment, wise to make sure that they cannot get their hands on, say, the ingredients to build a bomb.

Nurses and doctors in such hospitals know all this, especially the part about not bringing unneeded drama to their patients. They do not tell someone who may behave violently, “We hate you and plan to do terrible things to you. The next time you are bad we’re going to kick you, punch you, push you in a hole and put a large cover on it. Then we’re going to cover you with Italian dressing, let you marinate overnight, and cook you.” That kind of language would less likely discourage dramatic action than summon it.

And that’s what I think we all ought to be keeping in our minds these days, how not to summon dramatic action from the marginally stable.

We are at war. This is a grave time. And yet in some ways we are being quite careless in what we are saying and how it might be received. We are being too colorful, too vivid, and unnecessarily so. We are acting as if we are not fully aware of the gravity of the moment.

One gets the sense, reading the newspapers and columnists and Web sites, and listening to news conferences, that we are talking too much these days, saying too much and saying it too graphically.

We are being noisy and clamorous.

We are frightening the inmates. This is not good.

“Let’s Nuke Em All!” Britain’s Daily Mail headlined this week. The story was about the U.S. government review of its nuclear capabilities. Someone–Mary McGrory wondered in her column if it was “doomsday planners” or “a subversive showoff”–leaked the news that the U.S. may be re-evaluating its nuclear posture, strategy and potential targets with an eye to breaking the taboo on tactical nuclear weapons. The New York Times, one of the great newspapers of the world and received by some in the world as a voice of the West, ran an editorial in which it likened America to a “rogue state.” A columnist in the Boston Globe said President Bush is “as frightening as al Qaeda.”

All of this of course followed the previous week’s story of secret plans to invade Iraq.

On Wednesday, President Bush took to the airwaves in an informal news conference and refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in the war, explaining that his position was “a way to say to people who would harm America: Don’t do it. . . . There’s a consequence.”

Indeed there is, and it would no doubt be terrible. But one wonders if this subject is not better confined to a grave and formal speech to the nation from a somber president, and not served up along with teasing of the press–“That you, Stretch? Oh, it’s Superstretch”–and jokes about the length and complexity of follow-ups. Perhaps this is the White House’s way of showing the president is utterly unrattled by the facts of the new world. But there are other ways to show that he is unrattled, if that has to be shown.

Why are we being so careless and colorful, so offhand, at a time when what faces us is so somber? Maybe we in the media are not thinking of the impression we make en masse, all together, on the world. We think of the impression we make individually, not as part of a media wave that rolls over the globe each day.

And people, even the most sophisticated, tend to project some of their inner world on the outer world around them. The unstable see themselves surrounded by threats, or secret signs. But the stable have illusions too. People who are sane tend to project sanity onto others. Those who, like the writers at great Web sites and great newspapers, are fully stable, imagine that their thoughts and words are received by the stable. And of course that is true. Except when it isn’t.

What they think and write and say is also disseminated throughout the world of America’s enemies, and is not always received in a way that is sober and measured. Some of those who see, on the computer in their home outside Tehran, the headline “Let’s Nuke Em All!” will take it quite literally. They will receive it as yet another reason to get back to work packing the dirty nuke into the backpack. The man who leaked the nuclear review story perhaps thought he was making the world safer–that everyone would understand it as he did. But not everyone will.

“Children will listen,” the old song says. But so will the fragile and mad, and it’s not good to excite them. We should not be leaking that we are reviewing our nuclear capacity; we should be quietly reviewing it. We should not be reporting in hyperventilated tones the review of nuclear policy; we should remember that this only feeds the sickness of those who mean us harm. We should be very quietly debating in the offices of government what an appropriate response would be to the bombing of America; we should reach conclusions, create a plan, and very quietly tell the leaders of the real rogue nations exactly what will happen to them, and to the terrorists who slumber within their borders, if they should dare to bomb an American city. Our words should be blunt little bombs whispered in the ears of Arab leaders in a manner that leaves them with the kind of ringing headache you sometimes get when you’re told terrible news that is true.

But we should probably not be having chatty conversations about whether or not it would be a good idea to take out Mecca.

This is not censorship, it is using judgment in a time of war. It is awareness that projecting stability and sanity onto others, while polite and even touching, is not always warranted.

We should lower our voices, and be chary with words. As if we were well-meaning professionals in an asylum who want to keep everyone safe, and help the sick, and keep them safe as possible too.

Peggy’s new book: When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan.

March 10, 2002
A letter to
The Nashville Observer
LIBBY WERTHAN

Last night as I lay in my comfortable bed in my lovely home planning a pleasant night’s sleep, I could hear the guns in Gilo. And I couldn’t sleep; not because I was fearful for my safety but because I couldn’t help but think of all those people living in Gilo (two neighborhoods away from us) and how terrified they must be—especially the children. Thank G-d only three people were injured but fifty-two apartments were damaged by terrorist machine gun fire.

I would like to try to convey to you what life is like here right now. I have told you long before that I thought the “Peace Process” was just that, a process . . . that it wouldn’t lead to peace. And unfortunately, it has turned out that way. At best, it was a holding period, a badly needed respite. In the years following Oslo, we had a kind of freedom . . . a green light, if you will; we could travel almost anywhere, enjoy the country in relative safety.

After Arafat rejected the best deal he would ever get and the “Peace Process” came to a halt, we found ourselves under constant attack . . . suicide bombers (whom one expert said was a misnomer, that they should be called Islamakazes), mortar attacks, knifings, murders, and drive-by shootings. Every morning, we open our newspapers and tally up how many people were killed (about 350 to date) and how many more people were permanently damaged  . . .  losing limbs, being burned so badly that they will never leave home, seeing loved ones murdered  . . .  they and their families will never be the same. I am talking about thousands of people in the last 16 months, mostly children and young people under the age of thirty.

What happened in America on 9/11 was horrifying. Over 3000 people lost their lives in the World Trade Center. America has a population of 278 million. Israel has a population of 6 million. If you were to compare deaths per capita, Israel has experienced almost 5 World Trade Centers in the last year and a half. And that’s only the deaths, not the thousands permanently injured. The majority have been civilians going about their lives  . . .  mostly women and children. It’s pretty devastating when you think about it. You can imagine what this has done to the psyche of our country.

But what I find even more incredible is the response of Israel to this assault. The Israeli Army, has the power and ability to go in and take over the whole Palestinian entity in a matter of days. But they haven’t done it. Instead they have targeted the ringleaders, the bomb makers and their installations (and been criticized for it). They have isolated Arafat, the Father of Terrorism, (and been criticized for it). They have bombed the installations of the Palestinian Authority, but not without first telling them that they are going to do it. So when they do bomb buildings, they are empty. They make every attempt to avoid injuring any civilians. When the army entered the two refugee camps (which by the way are so vicious and independent that the Palestinian police won’t enter them), they gave the civilians three hours to leave the camp, to get out of harm’s way. In view of the horrors perpetrated against us, ours is the most measured of responses. And yet the media doesn’t report it that way  . . .  they can’t if they want to continue to have access to the Palestinians. So they talk about Israel’s heavy-handedness, they talk about occupation, when 98% of the territories are under Palestinian control, they highlight the Palestinian deaths and overlook many of ours. The media, when being even-handed, will interview both a Palestinian and an Israeli. But the Israelis they pick are either to the far Left or the far Right and are clearly not representative of mainstream Israel. Last week they ran a story about a Palestinian woman coming into Israel to give birth and being wounded in the shoulder when her car ran a roadblock. They don’t follow it up with the fact that she was taken quickly taken to hospital where she give birth to a healthy baby and recovered from her wound. Nor do they tell you that the very next day a pregnant Israeli woman was ambushed on the highway and shot in the abdomen as a “gift” to the Palestinian woman. We go after those who are killing us. We do not respond by targeting civilians.

I said earlier that for ten years we had a green light. We no longer have that green light. It has been replaced by a flashing yellow light. We still live our normal lives  . . .  go to work . . . go to the mall  . . .  go to the movies  . . .  make gourmet dinners  . . .  have weddings and bar mitzvahs  . . .  work out  . . .  plant gardens . . . go to lectures, concerts, and plays  . . .  all the normal things one does. Except that flashing yellow light makes us more aware of where we are and who’s around us.  When we hear more than one siren, as we did last night, we run and turn on the news  . . .  another suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded religious neighborhood. When we hear an explosion, it could be something on a construction site or a car backfire, but we think bomb. You might expect us to go around with long faces and sometimes we do, but mostly not. Nevertheless we are always hurting inside. We know so many are grieving. We see the pictures of the beautiful young people who have been killed and our hearts are breaking. The hardest part for me and, I think, others, is that there is no end in sight. How long can this go on? What will happen next?

The talk is always, “let’s achieve calm, let’s get back to the negotiating table.”  But with whom are we going to negotiate?  Arafat?  Arafat, the inventor of terrorism; the consummate liar! A man who prays for “the peace of the brave” on the New York Times Op Ed page and at the very same time shouts “jihad, a million martyrs on to Jerusalem” to his own people in Arabic. A man who has not only abused the opportunity offered him for peace but has brutally abused his own people by manipulation and lies. He is every bit as vicious as Bin Laden. Would America negotiate with Bin Laden? With whom then are we going to negotiate? And if we do find someone, how meaningful will a signed piece of paper be? There are three generations of Palestinians here who have learned to hate Jews from birth; who’s greatest mitzvah is to kill a Jew. How can that change with a piece of paper?

We are at a terrible impasse here. How do we protect ourselves and at the same time create a Palestinian entity that is self-sufficient and independent of us. This is it. This is what every Israeli wants.

And what about you? Where do you fit into this Jewish world of ours? I have told you about Israel, but what about Argentina where over half of the Jews there are now living under the poverty line, or France where Jews are experiencing a huge upsurge of anti-Semitism.

And what about America? I don’t know that much about America; but what I do know disturbs me. I hear very little raised in the way of protests against the biased media and little rallying in support of Israel coming from the Jewish communities in America. What I do know is that the Arab propaganda is so strong and effective in the US that on the college campuses your children and grandchildren have never been more distanced from Israel and are in fact ashamed of her. American Jewish visitors are so few here that we can practically thank each one personally for coming. Our hotels and restaurants are closing. Our tour guides and bus companies are out of work.

Where are you when we need you? Are you writing to the Congress to thank them for their support? Are you writing to the President? What about letters to the editor? Are you countering Palestinian propaganda on the college campuses? Are you writing to CNN and NPR when their reporting is clearly biased? Are you letting people here know that you care? Have you contributed to a victim relief fund? What’s happening, folks?

When I was in America last month, I saw a lot of hand-wringing and got a lot of sympathetic comments. Mostly, people wanted to know why I didn’t come back and live there.

And what did I answer? I told them that we have had the most fabulous twelve years of our lives here. Grant you the last months have been painful. But when I think about why I am here, what it boils down to is that living here is the most important statement that I can make with my life.

Since I began this letter, the situation has become increasingly worse. While we apprehend and thwart countless attackers, we cannot catch them all. Some slip through. On Thursday, I sent Moshe down to the grocery (here the grocery is so close you can walk) to pick up a few things I had forgotten. When he arrived, the whole area had been blocked off, all traffic stopped. And police everywhere. Just minutes before, a suicide bomber had entered a very popular outdoor cafe but had been noticed by a customer who alerted a waiter and together they pushed him out of the cafe and at the same time ripped out the wires of the bomb  . . .  and saved the lives of scores of people. These were just ordinary people, but they performed an extraordinary task. On Friday the cafe was again packed. Saturday night a bomber entering another packed cafe in the center of town was not detected in time  . . .  13 were killed and over 50 wounded.

In about an hour, Moshe and I and many of our neighbors are going to take a walk in the Jerusalem Peace Forest  . . .  a part of the Promenade that looks out over Jerusalem. Perhaps you have been there. It is a popular tourist spot. Some weeks ago in this place, a young Israeli college student, a girl, was attacked by a gang of Arab teenagers and stabbed to death. Our walk is symbolic. It’s our way of saying you can’t take our favorite places away from us. We won’t give in to your terror.

I could tell you many, many stories but I think you get the picture. This is a war that is difficult to win; if you defeat your enemy, you wind up with a captive hostile population and territories that you must occupy; if you make an accommodation with the enemy, it won’t assure you of safety or that attitudes will change. It will only put you in an even less secure situation.

If you believe in prayer, please pray for us. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian populations are victimized. We are going through a living hell.

☞ And this letter, sad to say, was written four weeks ago.  Since then, as you well, know, it’s gotten much worse.

Please come back tomorrow.

MANISCHEWITZ

Brooks Hilliard: ‘Speaking of wine, Happy Passover. I am convinced one of the major reasons Jews tend to be progressive or liberal is that we grew up with the story every year of how we, personally, were slaves in Egypt. It’s awful hard not to empathize with those who’ve emerged from slavery when you know you’re one of them.’

☞ Not to mention, fast-forwarding a few thousand years, the bullied, the oppressed, the discriminated against, and the massively exterminated. Which I wouldn’t mention, except that it sort of ties in with – leapfrogging this next item – what follows.

CHÂTEAU MANISCHEWITZ ’86

Jim Martona: “When ordering wine in restaurants, mustn’t all logic FLY OUT THE WINDOW if one is not to look like a no-class lout? I mean, isn’t ‘sommelier’ actually French for ‘I smell money?’  Logic/emotion is a balancing act.  Last week I ordered a $68 bottle of wine in the chi-chi Manhattan restaurant La Grenouille. I admit it was the most I’ve ever paid for wine. Imagine my shock when the waiter brought out a HALF-BOTTLE!  I guess my dinner companion and I didn’t read the menu closely enough.  We made damn sure to savor that wine!”

☞ Don’t feel bad, Jim – you’re young.  That same $68 invested at 10% in a Roth IRA and passed on to your grandchildren at your death, 50 years from now, when they’re 10, would have grown to throw off only $285,000 a year for them from ages 70 to 90, and by then, not only will you be long, long gone, $285,000 will be worth bupkis.

Well, that’s not entirely true: after 110 years of 3% inflation, $285,000 shrinks to the equivalent of $11,000.  But “invested at 10%” is an awfully aggressive assumption and, in any event, 110 years is a long time to wait.  What’s more, why shouldn’t your grandkids have to make it on their own, as you have?  Keeps life challenging. Drink up!

Indeed, at the rate we’re going, it’s not entirely clear anyone will be here 110 years from now, which is all the more reason to drink up – and to hope that good-hearted men and women (just getting more women involved would likely help) can find a way to live in peace.

Which I suppose brings us to this, which, having been unable to find a link to it, I have lifted from the Sunday, March 10, London Daily Mail):

The Daily Mail

THE ONLY PATH TO PEACE
By Peter Hitchens

Almost everything you think you know about the Middle East is untrue. For anyone who knows the region’s geography and history, the nightly news bulletins are a torture to watch, with their soppy editorialising about ‘peace’ and their depiction of Arab and Israeli as squabbling children in need of a clip round the ear from wise Western world statesman.

Those world statesmen are not much better. In normal life, it is a sign of being unhinged if you do the same thing over and over again and expect to get a different result. But in the business of Middle East diplomacy, such behaviour could earn you a Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1978, Israel has been urged to give up a little more land in return for a promise of peace, which always seems to evaporate. The land, however, has gone for good.

The whole logic of the argument is odd and hypocritical. America, a vast territorial empire with harmless neighbours to north and south and huge oceans to East and West, urges Israel, one third the size of the single State of Florida and with foes on every hand, to give up ‘land for peace’. So does Britain, a secure island entirely surrounded by deep water and with no obvious enemies in sight.

The phrase ‘land for peace’ is interesting in itself. It is actually another way of describing the appeasement forced on Czechoslovakia by her supposed friends in 1938. This was also supposed to promise peace, but actually made the country impossible to defend and opened the gates for an invasion a few months later. Those responsible for this cowardly stupidity are still reviled 60 years on. Those who urge it on Israel in the present day are praised.

Look at a map. Israel and the Occupied Territories fit comfortably inside the borders of England, with plenty of space to spare. Then look at the absurd shape of it.

Any general, asked to defend such a country, would groan with despair. At one point, between Qalqilya and the Mediterranean, it is so narrow that a tank could cross it in 18 minutes and a jet bomber in 18 seconds. Its only international airport is within easy rocket range of potentially hostile territory. So are its capital and its principal highway. It is worth mentioning that it is also within missile range of Iran and Iraq, not far over the eastern horizon, and that Iraq and Iran agree on only one thing – their loathing of Israel. Within living memory it has three times been the target of invasions from its neighbours, in 1948, 1967 and 1973. During the Gulf War it was bombarded with Iraqi Scud missiles. You might pardon its inhabitants for being a little nervous about their security.

The astonishing thing is that so many Israelis, despite this danger, have sought peace treaties with their neighbours based on a trust they have no reason to feel. Almost the entire Israeli media; the country’s largest political party; most of its authors, academics and artists, campaign constantly for their own state to make risky concessions to its enemies. Even its conservative leaders have made such concessions, especially by handing back the Sinai desert, with its valuable oil and strategically vital territory, to Egypt in 1978. The last left-wing premier, Ehud Barak, was prepared to hand over half of Jerusalem to Arab control two years ago. His offer was turned down.

He also sought to give back the Golan Heights to Syria, but was rebuffed. This militarily vital piece of ground was originally part of the League of Nations mandate of Palestine when its borders were fixed in 1920. It was then handed over by Britain in a deal with the French, who controlled Syria, in 1923. Israel captured it in bloody fighting in 1967.

In the same year Israel conquered the famous ‘Occupied Territories’ which are now supposed to be turned into a Palestinian state alongside Israel. You might think that Israel had seized them illegally from their rightful owner. In fact this is not true. They were grabbed by armed force, together with the eastern and holiest part of Jerusalem, by the country then known as Transjordan in 1948. Transjordan ethnically cleansed all Jews from this land and from its sector of Jerusalem, and promptly renamed itself ‘Jordan.’ During its 19 years of Jordanian rule, the area was never described as ‘occupied territory’.

At that time there were also no demands for independence from the Palestinian people. The Gaza strip was gobbled up by Egypt in the same year, to a chorus of silence from the world protest industry.

Israel has many blots on its past and is not a perfect society. Some of its founders were shameful terrorists as many British army veterans and others have reason to know. During the 1948 war there is little doubt that Israelis drove some Arabs from their homes, though the Arab radio stations were also urging them to flee to give Arab invading armies a clear run in their invasion.

But it is not some kind of crude oppressor. Would you know from the BBC that Israel had a million Arab citizens with full civil and voting rights, with the sole exception that they are not requiredto do military service? The arrangement is far from perfect, and in recent years relations have grown worse, but no Arab country gives such rights to Jews, if it even permits them to live within its borders.

Then there are the ‘refugees’ in their squalid townships. Why are they still there? About 650,000 Arabs fled from what is now Israel in 1948. There are now about five million officially classified refugees. More than £1.5 billion has been spent by the UN on housing and feeding them, mainly provided by Western nations. Most of the Arab states refuse to grant them citizenship or to pay towards their maintenance. They have a political interest in preventing this weeping sore from ever healing, since the refugees’ plight is excellent anti-Israel propaganda. They still promote the idea that they may one day return to their lost homes. For if they did so, Israel would cease to exist, its Jews a minority in an Arab state.

Compare the Palestinians with the 12 million Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Hungary and Romania after World War Two. All have long ago been absorbed into Germany, and few seriously dream of returning to their lost homes. This often bloody transfer of population was done with the approval of the great powers of the day, and is now largely forgotten. Or compare them with the 14 million people caught in the wrong place by the bloody India-Pakistan partition of 1947. Nearly 8 million Hindus fled from Pakistan and 6 million Muslims streamed out of India. None of them is still in a refugee camp. Nor are the 900,000 Jews driven – often with great savagery and persecution – from Arab countries after the foundation of Israel, most of whom settled in Israel.

Yet none of the supposed efforts for ‘peace’ have managed to achieve the civilised resettlement in Arab countries of these refugees. Why not, since they share a common religion, language and culture with the whole of the vast Arab world, and might surely have benefited from some of that Arab world’s huge oil wealth?

The reason is that most of the West has lazily accepted the TV news idea that this is just a squabble between people who are equally misguided.  It has swallowed the Palestinian claim that they are the oppressed. Yet Jewish Israel occupies a tiny part of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. They have all ignored the simple fact that, if Israel is to survive, it needs sensible borders. At the moment, it would rather have a frontier that is defensible and unrecognised, than one that is recognised but cannot be defended.

We are supposed to be engaged in a war against terrorism. Here is a great opportunity to defeat and finish terrorism in one of its greatest bases. If peace is what the Arab world wants, America is now in a unique position to arrange it. Her military and diplomatic power is at its zenith. Instead of asking Israel to give land for peace, why do we not ask the Arabs, who have so much more land, to give some of theirs, so that Israel’s borders are no longer an invitation to invasion?

At the same time we could end forever the grievance which has kept this useless conflict alive. A new Marshall plan could resettle the refugees in a matter of years, throughout the area in peace and comfort. Their politically impossible ‘right of return; could be bargained away forever. Joint unhindered access to Jerusalem’s holy places could be agreed by international treaty. So could the end of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda in Arab schools, newspapers and broadcast media, which frequently stain themselves with libels worthy of the German Nazis. But for this to happen, the Arab world needs to understand that no amount of terror, no amount of threats, will shift the Western world from its defence of Israel’s right to secure existence. It needs to understand that it must stop using anti-Israel sentiment as a safety valve for the discontent in its own ill-managed societies, whose despotism, squalor and brutality rarely if ever feature on the TV news bulletins. By similar resolve in the Cold War, the free nations of he world persuaded a mighty Communist power to reform itself and abandon its support for aggression and terror. It can be done, but only if we have the will and the understanding, and learn to see beyond the oversimplified mages of tank and slingshot, suicide bomber and soldier, to the real problem.

MORE REASON TO DIVERSIFY

Friday‘s column asked why you might want to put more than 20% of your 401(k) in your own company stock and offered four (very bad) reasons. Jonathan Levy read those four and added a fifth:

[ ] e) So that I can lose both my savings AND my salary at the same time if my company falls on bad times.

REASON ENOUGH TO DRINK MORE

Wenyu Pan: ‘I bought your book and the section called ‘A Penny Saved Is Two Pennies Earned’ was an eye-opener to me. The 177% you say is annualized return realized buying wine by the case at a 10% discount is even more intriguing. I tried to figure this 177% out myself, and found the return would be 211%! Here is my calculation:

week 1: Invest $98, earn $1, weekly return 1/98;
week 2: Invest $97, earn $1, weekly return 1/97; (you got $1 back in 1st week)
week 3: Invest $96, earn $1, weekly return 1/96;
…
week 52: Invest $47, earn $1, weekly return 1/47; (you’ve got $51 back already).
annual return = 1(1+1/98)(1+1/97)…(1+1/47) = 210%

My Basic program:
r = 1.0
for i = 47 to 98
r = r*(1 + 1/i)
next
print r
r= 2.106383 (211%)

☞ This may be basic to you but is, of course, way over my head. Will the smart kids in the class let us know where Wenyu has gone wrong, if he has? I was at first distressed I couldn’t figure this out myself until I read:

WHO NEEDS REASON?

Johnny Dicks, Jr. brought this profound ‘Salary Theorem’ to my attention:

The less you know, the more you make.
Proof:
Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.
As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time.
And since Knowledge = Power and Time = Money,
It is therefore true that Knowledge = Work / Money.
Solving for Money, we get:
Money = Work / Knowledge
Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work done.

☞ Works for me.

Tim Smith: ‘What stocks benefit from rising interest rates?’

☞ None?

This is not to say that the increased business activity often associated with rising rates may not lead to higher profits that could help some stocks if the economy takes off (though many stock prices, it seems to me, already discount significantly higher profits).

Nor is it to say that the expected inflation that also often underlies rising interest rates might not help stocks that are seen as inflation hedges, like gold stocks (never my favorite, on principle – why waste all this effort mining more of something whose value derives precisely from its scarcity?).

But rising interest rates, in and of themselves, are not good for corporate profits (it costs companies more to borrow). And they make stocks less attractive relative to interest-bearing alternatives (like bonds).

Ah, you say, well, higher interest rates must be good for lenders, no? But banks, by and large, seem to do better when rates are low. I guess their cost of attracting funds tends to rise at least as fast as their ability to raise the price at which they lend.

So stocks may rise when interest rates do (unless rates rise a lot). But it is a very rare stock indeed that will rise because interest rates rise.

*

How about them Oscars?! I love to think that a billion people saw it. I wish even more could. I think it makes us seem like the very decent people that, for the most part, we are.