Lasting peace for Israel.

 

Lasting peace is possible.  To motivate a people to make a preemptive strike those people must first feel they have been wronged.  Three large groups lay claim to the Holy land and to varying degrees feel slighted or wronged that another group possess it.  I propose to remove this basis for continuing the struggle. I propose that the Israeli government acting in good faith carve out a tract of land encompassing all religious sites in Jerusalem of significant interest to the Christians, Muslims, and Jews. I propose the ownership of this tract be ceded to a neutral party. 

 

This neutral party will provide access to all who come in peace and unarmed.  The U.N. may superficially seem the logical choice to both own and secure this area.  The U.N. is too political for long-term success.  The U.N. at different times has been friend and foe to the interested parties.  The highest ranks in the U.N. have proven not once but many times to be corruptible.  The U.N. should not be part or party to any solution.

 

There is only one nation that has demonstrated neutrality.  There is only one nation that has preformed this type of service before and continues to do so today.  I propose that the Swiss be given ownership of the holy sites to hold in trust for humankind.  There should be established a point of entry and exit in Israel and a corridor for Swiss operated busses to enter from Jordan and convey people safely to and from Jerusalem.

 

For the balance of modern day Jerusalem that is not to be included in the partitioned area, a new name should be chosen.  No official maps should indicate an area as Jerusalem other than the area ceded to the Swiss.

 

Since the treaty of Versailles, the Swiss have provided security for the Vatican City.  For over a century the Swiss have demonstrated neither a desire for territorial expansion nor for military conquest. 

 

Musicals Gone Flat

Musicals now sound like parodies of musicals
“I’d be delighted” “ayyyyyye’d beeeeee deeeeee lighted” What dribble.  Musicals never were much to begin with but seem stuck in an era long since past.  The only reason people go to these silly things is because they feel in some way it makes them come off as sophisticated.  Musicals are some of the worst entertainment ever staged.  The lines are very contrived.  The plots are more simplistic than a 1st grade reader. Even the holiest of all musicals “Fiddler on the Roof” is garbage.  Why do people line up around the block for this crap?  If you’ve seen one Jerry Lewis movie then you’ve seen every musical.  I pity the audiences of both.  For the most part a musical is centered on one song.  In rare cases there are two songs in a musical.  The other numbers simply are there as padding.  95% of the writing goes into one song the other 5% is divided among the others.  Now that one song that has all the effort in it has only one hook or catchy phrase and it’s repeated to death.  There is so little of the dead horse left after the beating it takes by show’s end it’s only a red stain.  The real comedy in musicals has to be the “creative talent”.  I just know that they are sitting around somewhere watching the idiots travel to the big city and plunk down $100 per seat to see this crap.  And they are laughing their asses off. If I were going to make a parody of musicals I could not do a better job of it than this latest effort “Little Women”.

There were two movie musicals that didn’t suck.  “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Chicago”
Little Shop was carried on the back of Steve Martin’s evil Elvis.  Chicago had a single very good number I forget the name but the women in the prison were explaining why they had killed men.  I had to suppress the “men bad women good” ala Thelma and Louise sentiment that was being hammered but I was able to enjoy the performance of the tier two stars.

In summary, I would recommend that if you feel the need to improve your image by attending a musical, that you simply save the money and time, read an online review, and go back into the office the next day telling all of your water cooler buddies how hip you are and drop a few lines that the critics wrote.

   There is an ancient saying “Match your strength to their weakness and you shall be assured of victory.” What is our American society good at? What is our biggest strength? First what it isn’t. It isn’t diversity, inclusion, compassion, nationalism, patriotism or anything else that you might hear from either a right-wing ideologue or a left-wing aged hippie ___. The strength of America is commerce. The business of America is business. What is the biggest weakness of America? Above all others including Chinese missiles pointed at us (Thanks Bill Clinton, I hope you enjoyed that smoothie) the lack of education provided for the next generation of Americans. Therefore the solution is obvious. Match our strength to our weakness and put business in schools. You would not be surprised at all to find a course in a school on women’s rights. You would not be surprised to find your child came home from school after a day of civil rights and diversity indoctrination. I bet you would be shocked to find that your child spent the day learning about free enterprise though. Children should be taught at an early age how businesses work. However, teaching kids about business is not what I was speaking about at all. What we should do to restore government paid for education to something worthwhile is hand over the entire process to private business as much as possible. In Fulton county Georgia over $11,000 is spent per child per year. That ponderous sum is near the highest amount that any school system spends yet they are near the worst in performance so it does not follow that more money makes better education. What I propose are the following changes. Schools already test the kids several times each year with both state and federal batteries. I propose taking 75% of the money that would normally be spent on educating a child in a government school and giving that as a voucher to the parents to take to the school of their choice be it another government school or a private one. The very same tests that the students take now would be used to measure the success of the private schools. With the profit motive assigned to the success of the children, private enterprise will find the proper method to teach the children. There is not enough space in private schools to close down the government schools and simply move the students over to the private ones now. But with the money being available there will spring forth new private schools as the invisible hand of free enterprise moves in to fill the need of education and to claim the economic profit. Ask yourself this question: “Could I take 10 kids and teach them for 180 days a year for $100,000 and do a better job than the public schools are doing now?”

What about the children left behind in the public schools? As the parents who care take their kids out of the failing schools the only kids left behind will be the special needs kids or kids from families that are content to sit on their asses and watch Oprah while the world goes by. The public schools will go from bad to worse as the stabilizing influence of the good kids is removed from the at risk children.

All that is very true but you must consider that under my proposal, when a child is removed from government schools only 75% of the money goes with the child. The other 25% is left so that the schools can offer higher teacher salaries and therefore attract better teacher or hire more teachers and facilitators and therefore greatly reduce the student to teacher ratio. This reduced ratio will provide the additional attention that the at risk kids needed in the first place.

In conclusion, children leaving the shackles of government indoctrination centers labeled schools will find better opportunities in the private sector. Children left in the care of the government will have smaller classes and better teachers. So everyone wins.