Law

Biden enabled this infamy too: in The Telegraph, Richard Kemp skewers the ICC on Israel.

Our assessment was that the IDF was complying with international law. We pointed out that they have been making greater efforts and employing more sophisticated procedures than any other armies to mitigate harm to civilians.

I am grateful that The Telegraph at least is promoting such common sense views to the great British public and beyond.

In Mosaic Magazine, the redoubtable Evelyn Gordon lays out the issue of Israel’s judicial reform.

Prof. Nir Keidar, legal historian and President of Sapir College, appears on the predictably leftist podcast The Tel Aviv Review ostensibly to discuss his book David Ben Gurion and the Foundation of Israeli Democracy but the conversation is mostly about today’s judicial reform, and he is reasonable and helpful.

For the first time, Iranian protests are nationwide, multi-ethnic, political and non-clerical, so much so that this could finally be the end for the mad mullahs.

Elon Musks has said the problem with flying cars is the noise. (I think he’s also said he’d love to be working in the field.) Meanwhile Joby has just announced its eVTOL aircraft registered the equivalent of 45.2 A-weighted decibels (dBA) from an altitude of 1,640 feet (500 meters) at 100 knots airspeed. According to eVTOL.com’s article, “NASA said it also plans to conduct similar acoustic testing with Wisk Aero”.

Matt Stoller explains how one company, Varsity Brands (owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital), sucks life out of the American heartland with its grotesque monopoly on cheerleading.

The nine totally must-read lessons of Brexit by Ivan Rogers, who was fired as Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the European Union for stating some of these truths. Abject.

A German court has issues the first GDPR ruling, reports The National Law Review. It concerns ICANN, the American non-profit that oversees the global WHOIS database of registered internet domain names, and German registrar EPAG.

Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the opinion of the 2008 US Supreme Court case discussing the Second Amendment, Distric of Columbia v. Hehher. Surely required reading for being informed on the topic.

This 1-hour Smithsonian production is a history of America in the Roaring 20s, with amazing newly-colorized footage. Richly effortlessly narrated by Liev Schreiber, it remedies our black & white impression of this not-so-distant mirror. There are things I should have learned about in school but did not, particularly the Greenwood massacre.

This investigative piece by Josh Meyer in Politico depicts a DEA investigation into global Hezballah criminal activity undercut by an Obama Administration hell-bent on a deal with Iran.

InspireConversation is the parenting blog of, together with his wife, Jason Greenblatt. He is the presidential envoy who accompanied Israel’s Head of Security Services to Jordan to defuse the recent Israeli embassy crisis there.

Comma madness.

Articulating the obvious re the Facebook: it’s a menace.

Thank you, Evelyn Gordon, for providing some clarity for those now afar over why so many Israelis are supporting Elor Azaria, convicted of manslaughter for killing subdued terrorist Abed al-Fattah al-Sharif.

Francis Fukuyama coins and explains _vetocracy_. The intricacies are bamboozling ⁠— which is the point. Seems to me that fixing this is the first domino.

Some tentative optimism from The American Interest: If the new Administration can both push infrastructure and simplify the regulatory process, “it will have proven that the Trumpian earthquake can in fact break certain decades-long patterns of bipartisan paralysis…”

“The Kemalist era in Turkish history lasted for almost 100 years, but finally came to an end in the last 18 hours.” A great balance between up-to-the-minute reports and historical background, Walter Russell Mead live-blogs the failed Turkish Coup.

As part of a series of articles on Israel in Foreign Affairs, Aluf Benn worries from the center-Left about crumbling social and political norms while Martin Kramer expresses satisfaction about ever-strengthening strategic might [requires registration, only 1 free article].

The Weekly Standard again. Trump as Burr, and what Hamilton did.

So Bikram has lost the first of the many cases against him filed by women for various sexually-related offences. All I know is that his teachings are great and that he plays the guru, speaking in fanciful exaggerations, making mercurial observations. And it seems he was unable to switch off this character even in front of a jury.

Valuable first-hand account of contemporary Saudi Arabia by their special man in the West, Thomas L. Friedman.

The United States would be better off with a parliamentary system, argues Diane Francis.

Not only isn’t the Israel Broadcasting Association listing the names of the child fatalities from the Gaza bombings but refusing to let B’Tselem pay for an ad doing so. And the Attorney General has upheld the decision. This seems to me a mistake. We must fully own these deeds.

Devising tailor-made rules of international law for application only where Israel is concerned undermines international law and can have an insidious and corrosive effect on the rule of law in general.

Surely the definitive article about internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz. Only eating white or yellow food seems a glaring sign that not everything there was quite right.

Adam Garfinkle at The American Interest waxes catholic and sensible on the runaway American health care system ⁠— or, more accurately, disease repair system.

“Cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys” ⁠— apologies for giving away the most brilliant line, but Mark Steyn is back on form. I’d stopped reading because his doom and gloom about Europe just didn’t jibe with the reality I see living here. But here he expresses my misgivings just brilliantly: Americans are in many important ways less free than Europeans.

It’s not the economy, stupid. Much like the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, Daniel Bell, co-founder with Irving Kristol of The Public Interest, believed that the economic, the political and the social are separate realms and must be kept in healthy balance.

Today: a world where big stuff can never get done.

Text of David Cameron’s address to Parliament on the looting outbreak.

On forming a new software startup, how to allocate ownership fairly?

Theodore Dalrymple on J. G. Ballard and the socially isolating nature of modern architecture.