Utopia, you are standing in it!

Back in early August, Katy Grimes wrote in the Sacramento Citizen “Last year, as all Hell was breaking loose in California as residents were burned out of their homes, neighborhoods and businesses, Gov. Jerry Brown was jetting around the world spouting climate change propaganda. He’s been calling this California’s ‘new normal.’ Gov. Brown was in Paris to commiserate with other true believers about President Trump’s leaving the Paris Climate Accords.”

Grimes and Megan Barth reported that:

Supporting Obama-era regulations have resulted in the new normal: an endless and devastating fire season. Obama-era regulations introduced excessive layers of bureaucracy that blocked proper forest management and increased environmentalist litigation and costs– a result of far too many radical environmentalists, bureaucrats, Leftist politicians and judicial activists who would rather let forests burn, than let anyone thin out overgrown trees or let professional loggers harvest usable timber left from beetle infestation, or selectively…

A regular feature of this site are reports of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish men refusing to sit next to women, often involving kerfuffles and lawsuits.  The lawsuits have been successful, and this is one example of how religious customs that interfere with secular regulations should be put aside, especially during airline flights.

Now, however, according to the Times of Israel (click on screenshot below), there’s another version of the Flying Jew Tsouris:

Two El Al airliners took off from New York last Thursday, bound for Israel. Both, however, were late because of dire weather conditions, which got the Haredim very anxious, for Jewish law dictates that you can’t travel in cars and airplanes on the Sabbath, which happens to start at sundown on Friday.  The Haredim got aggressive, either yelling at or even hitting flight attendants, accusing the airlines of lying to them, and demanding to disembark after the plane was…

If you’re going to indict a country in the Middle East for being an “apartheid State”, the last one you’d say would be Israel. Palestine is far more apartheidish, though I don’t like to use a word specific for a period of South African history.  Jews can’t live in Palestine, although Muslims can live in Israel as citizens, there are of course no Jews governing Palestine, though there are Muslim Arabs in the Israeli Knesset, and the national media of Palestine constantly spews the most virulent hatred toward Jews and Israel. It’s not just criticism of the Israeli government, either, but demands for the extirpation of the country and its engulfment by Palestine.

What’s even worse is the propagandizing of Palestinian children in schools and on state media: making them from a very young age hate Israel and Jews, and turning them into potential “martyrs”. To quote the song…

Apparently desperate not to upset anyone, the Prime Minister announced on Sunday at the APEC summit that, along with Australia, the United States, and Japan, New Zealand would contribute to a grand electrification scheme in Papua New Guinea.   Presumably she thought not even the bullies in Beijing might object to that –  so deals and donations might be safe (the only “values” evident in her foreign policy) – and she could throw a (pretty modest) bone to the countries we used to be allied with.

But it disconcerts me on two fronts.  The first is the way that, looking across the Pacific, New Zealand and Australia (and perhaps Japan and even the US) seem to be wanting to play the game Beijing’s way.    Beijing flings cash around in a somewhat cavalier way, in some mix of decent and poor quality projects, some mix of the transparently obvious and…