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March 2023

ISRAEL Comments turned off

False depictions of Israeli reforms and the fall of SVB By Ruthie Blum

By on March 15th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/opinion/false-depictions-of-israeli-reforms-and-the-fall-of-svb/

You’ve heard about the guy who killed his parents and then wailed about being an orphan, right? Well, what’s going on in Israel right now is even more astounding, with the anti-government protest movement taking the metaphor to a whole new level.
Its masterminds—along with gullible, genuinely scared fellow travelers—are not only premeditating the demise of the very institutions they’re claiming to cherish. They’re staging mass dress rehearsals, replete with costumes from the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” for an I-told-you-so funeral of their own making.

But don’t take my word for it. Radio broadcaster and social activist Aybee Binyamin, a member of opposition leader Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party and a founder of the previous hate-fests against Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, proudly articulates the plot.

“The protest is progressing on several axes,” he tweeted on March 6. “The central axis is the Saturday-night demonstrations. The sub-axis is the ‘days of disruption’ and daily demonstrations. The second axis is the crushing of the economy. The third axis is the crushing of the [Israel Defense Forces] reserves. The fourth axis and the one that will deal the knockout blow is international isolation from democratic countries in general and European Union and United States sanctions in particular! Together we will win!”

Under this manifesto is a photo of a giant banner reading: “The government of the destruction of the Third Temple.” This is intentional projection—with the cynical abuse by secularists of ancient Jewish history to engage in it—at its finest.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America Its great cities are on the path to decay BY Joel Kotkin

By on March 15th, 2023

https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-ghost-of-ancient-rome-haunts-america/

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands of cities have been built. And yet, as Rome’s greatest chronicler Edward Gibbon warned in 1776, a similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times‘s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

Yet even before the current downturn, the data defied the bravado. For decades, the ultra-tall towers that once symbolised urban greatness have been as anachronistic as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, along with the construction of new space. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.

More serious still has been the movement of people. Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

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