Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Driving, Real Estate, and Genocide



Quote of the day:
“Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas; take your next trip in kilometers.”
--George Carlin

Quote of the day most in need of qualification:
“[Real estate] prices are going to go down and stay down for a while. It will take at least a couple of years to work off the excesses of the last decade.”
--Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s website, economy.com

Qualifications needed: 1) The most-important words in the quote are “at least,” 2) Predictions from economists are usually wrong (I’m not just saying this, it’s a fact), 3) Although we think we’re good at it, and some of us are paid handsomely for it, human beings are terrible at recognizing and forecasting trends--see my entry "Trend, We Hardly Knew Ye."

Disturbing quote of the day:
“What connects Sunni Hamas and Shi’ite Hezbollah is the theology of genocide, which sees the Jews as a satanic people and the destruction of the Jewish state as a divine imperative.”
--Yossi Klein Halevi

Mr. Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research institute. In a piece in the September 19th Christian Century, he goes back to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations President Clinton held just before he left office.

In those talks, Israel agreed to cede to the Palestinians almost all the West Bank, all of Gaza and three-quarters of Jerusalem’s Old City. Halevi says, “Israel became the first country in history to voluntarily offer shared sovereignty over its capital city. The Palestinian counteroffer was four years of suicide bombings.”

He says, “Many Westerners have failed to notice that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been transformed into a holy war against the existence of a Jewish state.” When Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah calls for the destruction of Jews, there is a yawn.

And, he says, “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel’s destruction so often that it barely makes the news anymore.”

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