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In the London Times, Sheera Frenkel recounts the story of a homeless Holocaust survivor in Israel. There is government ineptness involved, but the story has a happy ending for Yevgeny Bistrizky.
More than 50,000 Holocaust survivors live below the poverty line in Israel. Mr Bistrizky’s is the only known case of a survivor who became homeless.
The Latet organisation, which provides aid to the needy, discovered him after concerned residents contacted the group. They were astonished to learn that he had been living in the dog park for eight months, cleaning himself with a garden hose inside the rubbish room of a building, and hoping that the faeces-littered park would deter people from trying to attack him in his sleep.
Latet was unable to find him a suitable flat and contacted a newspaper to publish his story. Since then it has received hundreds of calls from people offering food, clothing and rooms in their homes.
One company offered a flat in a building for the elderly. The room is sparse but clean. The only homely touch is two Ukrainian calendars with photographs of kittens above his single bed.
Mr Bistrizky said: “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll wake up and it will all be gone. That I’ll be back on the park bench and this will all be a dream”.
Small but wiry, he moves gingerly around the room. His blue eyes light up as he points out the items people have donated: a microwave, stereo, gas burner and refrigerator.
His hands linger over the objects, stopping at an armchair that he placed by the window. In the afternoon a breeze wafts in: “It’s my favourite thing, my favourite time — this wind,” he says, using the Hebrew word for breeze with a brief, but proud smile. “I am so happy, so thankful to be given all this.”
Michael Potemra, in The Corner, comments on an interesting new book.
When you pick up a book titled The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible Is Scientifically Accurate, you expect a fundamentalist attack on the theory of evolution, or at least a plea for Intelligent Design theory. In fact, the author, Andrew Parker, believes in evolution. A scientist based at Oxford University and the Natural History Museum in London, Parker is not a Bible literalist, and he dismisses Intelligent Design as a “concocted theory” characterized by “flawed logic” and “forced” theorizing. The book describes the remarkable similarity between the order of events described in the first chapter of Genesis and the scientifically known series of macro-evolutionary steps in the history of life on earth. Parker asks how a text written some 2,500 years before the development of modern science could have captured this order of events, and says it was either a lucky guess or a matter of inspiration.
The book is an interesting attempt to make sense of this ancient text: the creation account of Genesis 1 as a combination of divine inspiration with the limited thought- and language-forms of a particular (in this case, scientifically backward) culture. It makes a persuasive case for a deep wisdom behind the words.
David Warren listed some of Obama’s “shadow cabinet” of czars in an article for the Ottawa Citizen that Pickings posted on August 16th. He gave a quick rundown of some of the more colorful characters that are pulling government salaries without clear oversight or accountability.
…Tell you the candid truth, I don’t like “nice” people. Conversely, I have a sneaking regard for real political enemies who are prepared to state candidly what they are about. Which is why I mentioned Obama’s long list of policy czars, above — people like John Holdren (1970s advocate of forced abortions and mass sterilization) the new science czar, Van Jones (declared Communist) the new green jobs czar, Vivek Kundra (convicted shoplifter) the new infotech czar, Adolfo Carrion (pay-for-play scandals) the new urban subsidies czar, Nancy DePerle (lobbyist-to-regulator) the new health czar, Cass Sunstein (behaviourist and animal rights wacko) the new regulatory czar, and so on.
There are dozens of these, altogether. They are Obama’s “shadow cabinet,” with the advantage over his more presentable official cabinet that they can avoid congressional scrutiny in almost everything they do. They didn’t need to face the Senate confirmation revelations that lost Obama so many of his earliest cabinet appointments. A mere Internet search for quotes reveals that many of them are capable of great candour, at least in the radical leftist environments from which most of them came.
The mainstream media focus is nevertheless not on them — rich and easy pickings had they been Republican appointments…
Warren gave us the prologue, and now the first chapter of czar-gate has been written.
Roger Simon wonders if there are constitutional issues that need to be addressed.
…Barack Obama’s Czar System – which has recently come under scrutiny for some repellent, even paranoid, statements by his “Green Czar” Van Jones, a onetime “9-11 truther” who calls Republicans “assholes” on television – is an entirely different matter. This is directly an affair of state and seemingly an end run around the Separation of Powers. According to an article recently published at Examiner.com by Patrick McMahon, there are now thirty-one of these czars, covering areas from terrorism to domestic violence. Congress has not vetted a single one of them, as far as I know. Indeed, with only a couple of exceptions (Dennis Ross, etc.), we know who few of them are. Are others as extreme as Mr. Jones? Who knows? All we know is that they are there and that Obama (or someone) approved them. We don’t know exactly what their authority is and what they are supposed to do ultimately. They are a completely new part of our Executive Branch, invented by the President and/or his advisors. Was this what the Framers intended when they created the three branches of our government with all the checks and balances?
Unlike Mr. Jones, I am no lawyer, and obviously not a Constitutional one, but it strikes me there is a problem here. And it could be very embarrassing to Mr. Obama. No doubt this is why, as Byron York points out, the mainstream media has been so reluctant to cover this story, only the WaPo and CBS chiming in at this point, although they were late to the party and relatively perfunctory. The former Newspaper of Record has yet to log in. Had Bush appointed thirty-one czars outside the normal Congressional approval system the MSM would have been all over it like the proverbial wet suit, declaring a coup d’etat in the making. But, as of now, the MSM has imposed omerta. It is Labor Day weekend. We shall see what happens next week.
Eugene Volokh ponders the word choice of “czar”.
Others have pointed out that having offices called “czars” is an odd naming choice for a democracy. But czars weren’t just authoritarians. They were ultimately authoritarians who left their country far poorer than their more democratic counterparts, lost a world war, and of course paved the way for an even worse system of government. The label “czar” thus doesn’t historically connect to a model of strongman effectiveness — it connects to a model of strongman failure.
(Of course, I recognize that czars in the federal government don’t have even a fraction of the truly dictatorial power of their namesakes. But the label was used for a reason, presumably to evoke the positive connotation of strong authority that Gets The Job Done. Yet the specific strong authority that the label evokes proved to be unable to get the job done, at least under anything approaching modern conditions — under any sensible definition of “job,” possibly with the significant but narrow exception of the job of defeating Napoleon — and unable in a way that culminated with a disaster of historic proportions.)
Ilya Somin comments on the resignation of Van Jones in Volokh Conspiracy.
The Obama Administration has appointed more czars than Romanov dynasty ever had. Now, however, one of those czars has been forced to resign. “Green jobs” czar Van Jones has resigned as a result of the controversy that arose after the discovery that he signed a 9/11 “Truther” petition back in 2004. Jones’ dubious excuse that he had not read the petition carefully before signing and that it didn’t reflect his real views failed to mollify the critics, especially given other inflammatory statements he has made.
Jones’ ridiculous beliefs probably aren’t typical of those of the administration’s many other czars. However, the fact that a person like him could be appointed to an important czar position does highlight one of the weaknesses of the czar system: by circumventing the normal appointment and confirmation process, it makes it more likely that a poorly qualified person or one with ridiculous policy views will be put in charge of important issues. Unfortunately, not all such dubious czars can be as easily exposed as Jones was. And that is just one of several flaws of the czar system. …
Jennifer Rubin explains that there are several stories here.
Not since Bob Irsay packed up the Baltimore Colts in the dead of night has a high-profile retreat in darkness gotten so much attention. Van Jones was shoved under the Obama bus, as everyone knew would occur, with an announcement coming at midnight. The Wall Street Journal enumerates his baggage, enough to fill a small commuter plane:
Mr. Jones has been in the center of a maelstrom on conservative radio and television talk shows since a video surfaced last week showing him calling Republicans a vulgar epithet. Since then, other controversies have emerged, such as Mr. Jones saying black students would have never committed a massacre such as the one at Colorado’s Columbine High School. His name also appeared on a 2004 petition calling for the government to investigate its own culpability in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. None of those issues happened after Mr. Jones joined the administration.
There are a number of story lines percolating here: the mainstream media’s refusal to report on the incident until he left; the mystery as to how such a figure wound up in the White House; the ham-fisted performance of late by an administration that allowed a story to build and its critics to claim victory; and the substantive issue concerning the proliferation of czars who evade congressional confirmation and oversight – and apparently get a lesser level of vetting. And then there is the familiar White House reaction — no apology, no explanation, and no remorse.
Some of the punditocracy — Juan Williams, for example – are peeved we are spending any time on this. And true enough, if the White House had a near perfect vetting record, or if the president did not have a reputation for hanging out with the likes of Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, whose worldview bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Jones, this might be a nonstory. …
Charles Krauthammer recounts the hole that Obama has dug for himself, and ends with these thoughts.
…After a disastrous summer — mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing — Obama is in trouble.
Let’s be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He’s not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.
But what has occurred — irreversibly — is this: He’s become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He’s regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.
For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform — and his own standing — with yet another prime-time speech.
But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises — mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.
In this article, David Warren writes “nature notes” about trees, environmentalists, natural history, and field guides.
…Trees, as I am just reminded, occupy three entire divisions of the plant kingdom: the Pinophyta (conifers, roughly), the Magnoliophyta (the broadleafs), and the Ginkgophyta.
This last has only one surviving member, the Ginkgo tree, seemingly related more closely to ferns and mosses and algae and cycads than to other trees, especially in their means of reproduction.
According to the fossil record, our Ginkgo went extinct two million years ago. (Ha!) There were other Ginkgo species, farther back in the planet’s history, all long gone. Yet the tree we have is as old as dragonflies and paddlefish: hundreds of millions of years. It was not found wild, but only as a relic of ancient Chinese scholars’ gardens. Where they found it, we don’t know.
The Ginkgo is a tree that positively flourishes in highly polluted, inner urban environments, and seems to benefit from irradiation (four of them famously survived Hiroshima). It stands, as Sibley’s guide somehow does, at the very intersection of the utterly alien, and the utterly familiar. One could almost hug it.
In Slate, Daniel Gross gives us a preview of the coming crisis in commercial real estate investment.
For most of its 34-year life, the Hancock Tower, which looms above its brick neighbors in Boston’s Back Bay, has been the sort of place where money comes to be managed and protected. Its tenants include Ernst & Young and the investment firm Highfields Capital. The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn’t seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months.
But that’s exactly what happened at the 62-story building, now under its fourth owner in six years. In January, an aggressive young wheeler-dealer defaulted on a portion of the building’s $1.3 billion mortgage just 24 months after buying it. In March, two firms that had purchased chunks of the tower’s second mortgage for pennies on the dollar assumed control, essentially rendering up to $400 million of debt worthless. The Hancock’s market value is now about $700 million—half what it appraised for less than two years ago.
Scott Lawlor, the entrepreneur who was forced to concede control of the Hancock Tower, could be called a “poster boy for everything that went wrong,” as one well-placed real estate expert put it. But the trim, straightforward executive is more like a whipping boy. For the tale of the Hancock Tower isn’t a morality play or an example of a bubble-era rise and fall. Rather, it’s an omen. During the credit boom, the same forces that led to $600,000 subprime loans on tract houses in Modesto, Calif., spurred billions of dollars of reckless lending on urban office towers and suburban strip malls. As a result, the nation’s offices, hotels, and malls now carry about $3.5 trillion in debt. Three years after the housing market peaked, falling rents and rising defaults—no surprise given the economy has lost 7 million jobs since December 2007—are posing a new threat to the still-fragile banking system and could inflict billions of dollars in fresh losses. The Hancock Tower was one of the first high-profile deals to go sour—but it won’t be the last. The Blackstone Group, one of the nation’s leading private-equity firms, has written down the value of its mammoth real estate portfolio by an average of 45 percent from the original cost. General Growth Properties, a pioneer of the shopping mall that carried $27 billion in debt, filed for Chapter 11 in April. …
J. Hoberman reviews Mike Judge’s new movie, Extract, for the Village Voice.
Here for Labor Day—a comedy about the hilarity and heartbreak of running a small business. A decade after his succès d’estime Office Space (and a few months following the termination of his long-running animated series King of the Hill), Mike Judge returns with a complementary social satire: Extract.
Where Office Space was a comedy of employee disaffection, Extract looks at the struggle between labor and capital from the other side of the desk. Named for flavorings produced by protagonist Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) in his small factory, Extract is sweeter than Judge’s scabrous and, in most markets unreleased, Idiocracy. It’s hardly less concerned with putting a frame around stupidity—opening with an apparently ditzy babe (Mila Kunis) fleecing two music-store dudes for a pricey electric guitar—but where Idiocracy held up a grotesque mirror to American mass culture and politics, Extract seems to be designed to give capitalism a human face. …
Dana Stevens reviews the movie for Slate.
The tag line for Extract (Miramax), the fourth feature film from Mike Judge, promises “a comedy with a flavor of its own.” That’s certainly true. Judge cultists will recognize the Beavis and Butt-Head auteur’s signature blend of social satire, broad physical comedy, and lovingly observed middle-American stupidity. But Extract’s particular flavor profile may strike some Judge-heads as overly sweet—it’s the sunniest and least angry of his films—while viewers less disposed to love his work may find it simply bland. Personally, I found Extract to be Judge’s best nonanimated work yet. For all of Office Space‘s comic invention, that movie had a hole at its center: Ron Livingston’s protagonist was an uninteresting guy played by (sorry, Ron) an uninteresting actor. And though Idiocracy was brilliant at extrapolating current trends into a dystopic American future (one day, we will water our crops with sports drinks!), it ultimately fell victim to its own high concept.
Extract is more modest in its ambitions, a 98-minute goof with little more on its mind than cracking us up. After the past few years of comedies in the Apatow mold, it’s refreshing to find a movie that doesn’t combine that simple goal with a secondary agenda to gross us out (babies crowning! naked fat guys with flaccid penises!), or to make us cry, or to teach us life lessons. For all of Judge’s comic absurdity, his universe is as familiar as an Arby’s drive-through—I grew up in the suburb of a Southern city much like the unnamed town where Extract is set. The hotel-chain sports bars and pretentiously named subdivisions where the action unfolds are both cartoonish versions of American alienation and sociologically precise portraits of places we’ve all been. …