Scientific Skepticism Under Attack in Global Warming Debate

Thank you for the kind words. You are certainly not alone in your view, and because I greatly respect your opinion, I will spell out my disagreement. I agree with you when it comes to official representatives of Israel and of Jewish organizations.

In my case, however, I tend to disagree.

First, I think that "Johnny One-Notes" are boring. That is why I could never stomach the Israeli right-wing news media for very long, depite generally agreeing with them. Here is an example of an extremely talented blogger who follows your advice, but unfortunately has very few readers: http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

If you could demonstrate that there is an audience eager to read a narrowly focused pro-Israel blog, I would follow your advice. I doubt, however, that there is even one widely-read blog in this category.

Secondly, this blog is primarily about ideas. Here is a good description, lifted from a review of a book that inspired it:

Herzl's famous phrase "No man is strong or wealthy enough to move a people, only an idea can do that," is a good one sentence summary of IRIS Blog's main theme. Ideas created modern Israel. Ideas have brought it to its current self-doubting impasse. What Israel needs now, more than anything else, are ideas big enough to "assist the Jewish people to again become a nation of grandeur and a blessing to all who befriend them, perhaps even to all the families of the earth."

(http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-State-Struggle-Israels-Soul/dp/0465029019)

I believe that the root cause of the troubles that Israel, the Jewish People and the West in general is our embrace of Leftism, despite consistently disastrous consequences.

That is a message that I believe in passionately, so how can I give it up? I believe that much misery could be spared if we would embrace ideas that work. Consider the impact of a single good idea: Milton Friedman's volunteer army, which singlehandedly enabled the West to defend itself after the Vietnam debacle. And I believe that the unity you so nobly desire is jeopardized by our flirtation with Leftist ideas.

These theoretical ideas are hard to appreciate without practical examples from the news, which is what I attempt to provide. For example, I once reported on Israel radio a story of parents on a hunger strike because of a zoning change that would have excluded their neighborhood from admission to a popular nature-oriented school. Under the free market, people choose to spend their money on things that provide happiness to the provider and to the recipient. The Leftist idea of government control of the schools brings misery to most everyone, as this news story demonstrated.

I reported on many such stories, such as a cross-country protest by an unemployed woman against a smaller-than-expected welfare raise. No reporter asked her if she could have more productively spent her time looking for work. There was a spate of "hospital rage" incidents where exhausted, mistreated patients would attack doctors with chairs as they waited in the emergency rooms of socialized medicine. A desert-rich nation faced a crisis shortage of sand for the government-dominated building industry. One day Ehud Barak fired half of the workers in the Labor party with no severance pay because of irresponsible accounting. Their response was to boobytrap their offices and their bodies with flammable gas balloons and to hold press conferences to repeat a rumor that Barak had left wounded soldiers on the battlefield. In a free market, workers routinely are treated to compassionate severance, COBRA and outplacement services.

At least my reporting is from a half-free society. I could have lived in a country that had the coincidental bad luck of experiencing a famine just as their Communist revolution was beginning.