Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (61965)	1/31/2013 7:18:11 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Under Fire Cliff May Jan 31, 2013 Click if you like this column! SDEROT, ISRAEL – This small, working-class Israeli city on the edge of the Negev Desert, home to refugees from Muslim lands, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere, is world-famous for one thing only: The missiles that have rained down on it for years, fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza just a mile away. Behind the police station, the best preserved rockets are kept in a metal-and-glass case, the kind you might use to store odds and ends in your garage. The mangled and rusted remains of scores more rest in a separate metal rack unprotected from the elements. More than twenty types of missiles have been identified. Hamas colors its missile red and green, which gives them an almost Christmassy look. The plain red ones are courtesy of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Yellow and red indicate the Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades. The black ones are from al Qaeda which also maintains a presence in Gaza. These weapons are often called Qassams but that’s a generic name that can refer to any improvised missile. The people of Sderot have been under intermittent attack for 13 years. More than 15,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza at Israeli targets – 12,000 of those since Israel withdrew from the territory in September 2005. Those Israelis who believed that giving up all claims to Gaza would bring peace -- or at least contribute to the “peace process” -- have been proven wrong. Israelis are often advised by foreign friends not to “over-react” to the missile attacks. Imagine if Vancouver were lobbing missiles into Seattle. How might Russians respond if Poles were shooting rockets at Moscow suburbs? Sderot is quiet for now. The most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel ended in a ceasefire last November after the Israelis came to the conclusion that most of Hamas’ longer-range rockets, in particular the Iranian-made Fajr-5s and the Iranian-designed M-75s, had been either deployed or destroyed. The current Hamas-Israel ceasefire is the 4th in the last six years. How long it will last is anyone’s guess, though an educated guess might be that it will last until Hamas and other groups have replenished their missile stockpiles. Because Sderot is so close to Gaza, missile defense systems such as Iron Dome, which in November knocked out about 85 percent of the longer-range rockets aimed at population centers, cannot be used to protect the city. Instead, there are bomb shelters in apartment buildings, schools, even bus stops. When a missile launch has been detected, an alarm sounds and everyone has no more than 15 seconds to find a safe place.

To: sandintoes who wrote (61965)	1/31/2013 7:20:13 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 71588

Of Sermons and Soda Water Paul Greenberg Jan 31, 2013 Click if you like this column! John Cardinal Newman once set down a list of seven rules for writing sermons. His rules apply not just to sermons but to rhetoric in general. Simple and direct as his rules were in the 19th century, naturally they have fallen into neglect in our era of flash and fizz. . . American rhetoric circa 2013 has come to have all the eloquence and permanence of your average television commercial. Our politicians' speeches now have the staying power of fleeting images in the background. Then they are gone. Like last week's inaugural address. Whatever the state of the Union, the state of American rhetoric is not only poor but poor in the worst, that is, showiest way. In place of eloquence, which is rare enough in any age, we get tendentious talking points. Maybe that's because the basis of any eloquence seems to have disappeared in our public rhetoric: thought. . . Last week's Inaugural address, if anyone was listening then or bothers to remember it now, systematically ignored all of Newman's rules. It was as if our newly re-inaugurated president had gone down the cardinal's list and violated them one by one -- if he has ever heard of them. It was a safe assumption, judging by his speech, that his speechwriters hadn't. Maybe somebody should post a copy of Newman's Seven Commandments in their office: 1. A man should be in earnest, by which I mean he should write, not for the sake of writing, but to bring out his thoughts. The only evidently earnest thing about this president's Second Inaugural, which will be remembered, if at all, as a parody of Lincoln's, was its earnest desire to please every special-interest group he had already pleased during his campaign -- from the gun-control lobby to the greener-than-thou crowd. And so many more. Their various grievances may or may not be justified, their profuse proposals sound or unsound, but that didn't seem to be the point of the president's speech. He seemed interested only in echoing his supporters' demands, and in so doing, bind them even closer to him. That is not leadership or thought; it is just low cunning. Political ambition so often is. 2. He should never aim to be eloquent. To judge by his text, the president aimed for little else. Last week's inaugural address seemed but a collection of applause lines, which were duly applauded by his more-than-admiring followers. For it was their fondest desires he sought to condense into the series of slogans that constituted his speech.