David Foster

Two Items…and Two Questions

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1) A Palestinian man has been sentenced to death by hanging for the “crime” of selling land to Jews.

Will the people who endlessly denounce Israel for its supposed interference with “Palestinian rights” have anything to say about the rights of this Palestinian man?

I think you know the answer.

2) Palestinian military forces are now being trained–at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to American taxpayers–by United States personnel.

Why on earth should we assist the development of a military which shields a regime under which atrocities such as the one above are a matter of policy?

Note also: The Obama administration is requesting changes to U.S. law which would permit aid to continue flowing to the Palestinian Authority even if officials backed by Hamas become part of a unified Palestinian government. (Since Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization, aid would not be permitted under U.S. law as it stands.)

Obama and the Dictators

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Daniel Henninger:

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”

He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

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Seriously Pathetic

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From a letter to the editor in today’s WSJ:

A few years after retirement I had a chat with an eager young fellow a month away from his MBA in finance at the Wharton School. I asked what appealed to him about finance. “It is so scientific,” he replied. I then asked him what he thought about Long-Term Capital Management. “Never heard of it,” was his answer.

Cool Retrotech

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At this blog we have lots of smart Chicago Boyz and Chicago Grrlz and Readerz…but is anyone here as smart as a certain Chinese official from 1000 BC…or maybe even earlier?

Imagine that you are the official in charge of caravans and messengers. Some of these travelers need to cross an unmarked plain, which is subject to sandstorms, thick cloud layers, and heavy fogs…and they have frequently been getting lost. You need something that will aways point south. Problem: the magnetic compass has not yet been invented.

Can you think of a way–without using magnetic principles or other technology that wasn’t likely to be available in 1000 BC…to solve this problem? Think about it for a few minutes before reading further.

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