In February 1930 Freud was asked, as a distinguished Jew, to contribute to a petition condemning Arab riots of 1929, in which over a hundred Jewish settlers were killed. This was his reply:

Letter to the Keren Hajessod (Dr. Chaim Koffler)

Vienna: 26 February 1930

Dear Sir,

I cannot do as you wish. I am unable to overcome my aversion to burdening the public with my name, and even the present critical time does not seem to me to warrant it. Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgement of Zionism does not permit this. I certainly sympathise with its goals, am proud of our University in Jerusalem and am delighted with our settlement’s prosperity. But, on the other hand, I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.

1. Talk about absurdity. How is Mark Penn spending his gigantic haul? is answered by Arlen at the Daily Background:

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pit-bull pollster and chief strategist Mark Penn has his Washington, DC, neighborhood in an uproar. He recently started multimillion-dollar renovations on his house on O Street in Georgetown, but didn’t alert anyone beforehand, said one local. “It includes an underground garage and home office. His yard is an ugly, huge gaping hole that looks like the descent into hell.”

…It’s the talk of Georgetown: Why is Mark Penn, pollster and strategist to Sen. Hillary Clinton, building a tunnel underneath the lot between his two houses on O Street NW? Perhaps he wants to avoid prying eyes, or a 30-foot walk in wintry weather.

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As emerging countries move into long-term economic growth and industrialization, their formative transitions typically display a corresponding shift from high mortality and death rates to low mortality and death rates. However, this demographic transition notably has not accompanied the economic development of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Instead, a glacial movement towards demographic stability has occurred in MENA, with only the past two decades witnessing substantive decreases in total fertility rates. With these decreases in fertility have come considerable changes, including a population bulge of youth. Those in this grouping find themselves increasingly disenfranchised politically and unable to attain long-term economic opportunities. Iran, a country of explicitly ‘Revolutionary Islamic’ politics, may provide insight into the demographic policies that could serve in the future as a model for practical natal strategies within the MENA and emerging Islamic framework. The absence of a significant demographic shift and corresponding source of economic growth within MENA must be evaluated from the social, cultural, and economic institutional impediments to successful progress.

While the majority of the developing world moved towards demographic transition in the 1960’s, only in the 1980’s did the MENA region began to experience sustained demographic declines. Up until the 1970’s, many considered MENA demographics isolated and outside the normal trends of population transition, ‘a self-proclaimed bastion of resistance to family change and natural fertilities’ (Courbage 1). Gradually, the ‘homogenous, high-fertility’ MENA region of the 1950’s with a total fertility rate around 7.0 was replaced by a ‘varied, dynamic region experiencing appreciable fertility change’ (Rashad 37). Later marriages, modern contraceptive practices, and inclusion of female rights and participation have been harbingers of a more widespread modernization of attitudes and economic outlooks (Courbage 4). Changes in marriage patterns also contributed to the fertility decline in the early 1980’s and 1990’s (Rashad 5). While the process succeeded on the economic and political fronts, Courbage warns the increasing and emergent influence of Islam on MENA societies may swing these cultures back to more pro-natal attitudes (17). The demographic transition in MENA represents an ‘interrupted process’, experiencing variations due to cyclical economic adjustments, government intervention in natal policy, and the region wide effects of oil shocks and unemployment rates.

“I mean, people have access to health care in America. They can just go to the emergency room.”

- President Bush in a 2007 White House Briefing

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Reminds me of the story of the 60 year old man that got a 25 year old to marry him. When his friends asked how he did it, he replied, “I told her I was 90.”

Warren Buffet is pretty interesting:
http://undergroundvalue.blogspot.com/2008/02/notes-from-buffett-meeting-2152008_23.html

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America

In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville wrote of the New World and its burgeoning democratic order. Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through America (both in the United States and Canada) in the early 19th century when the market revolution, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy were radically transforming the fabric of American life. He saw democracy as an equation that balanced liberty and equality, concern for the individual as well as the community. A critic of individualism, Tocqueville thought that association, the coming together of people for common purpose, would bind Americans to an idea of nation larger than selfish desires, thus making a civil society which wasn’t exclusively dependent on the state.