Sadly anti-semitism, in many of its usual manifestations, is once again rearing its ugly head around the world. Whether the "trigger" for that is the current Israel-Palestinian conflict, or the wider anti-Muslim fervour gripping the world or the whole situation in the Middle East, is another issue. Whatever the underlying reason [s] it is deplorable that a small group of people [now, after 6 million Jews were "lost" in the Holocaust, probably something like 13 million in the whole world!] continues to attract such enmity. Jews do not control the media, financial centres, etc etc. - contrary to the myth peddled far and wide. Jews have, it is true, made a significant contribution to medicine, technology, music and the arts generally. The London Review of Books has just published an article Benefits of Diaspora by one Eric Hobsbawn. It makes for interesting reading.
Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend. Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
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