Thomas Friedman Insults the Chinese By Pretending That He Can Think Like Them I agree. Friedman likes autocratic China more than Chinese do. But he usually pivots and maybe he will write a column about the Chinese response to Liu's Nobel.

The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush There were nuclear, chemical and biological materials in Iraq. Why did W. remain silent?

Wired magazine's contributing editor Noah Shachtman -- a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution -- researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here's what he found:"By late 2003, even the Bush White House's staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks' newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). ... Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict -- and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq -- on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels -- what even The Associated Press called"the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program": 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized:"The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. ... To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam ... would have been too big a risk."

The Crisis of the American Intellectual by Walter Russell Mead

So there you have it. The foundational assumptions of American intellectuals as a group are firmly based on the assumptions of the progressive state and the Blue Social Model. Those who run our government agencies, our universities, our foundations, our mainstream media outlets and other key institutions cannot at this point look the future in the face. The world is moving in ways so opposed to their most hallowed assumptions that they simply cannot make sense of it. They resist blindly and uncreatively and, unable to appreciate the extraordinary prospects for human liberation that this change can bring, they are incapable of creative and innovative response.

For the sake of the country’s position in the world, for the sake of our economic development , for the sake of American democracy and for the sake of our intellectuals themselves, this needs to change.

NBC's Martin Fletcher:Israel is a much nicer place than people imagine and its problem is much more sever than he thought:

His conversations with Holocaust survivors, kibbutzniks, terror victims, Palestinian professionals and even a Zionist Arab revealed some new dimensions to the veteran journalist.

"Almost all the Israeli-Arabs I spoke to said 'something will happen,' meaning the Jews will be gone and we'll get our country back. I was surprised at the depth of that attitude even among loyal citizens who've reached a high level in society," Fletcher relates."That is very relevant to understand when one talks about the peace process. Yes, let's make peace, but understand it has to have totally unbreakable security guarantees. I knew that before but not nearly as much as now."

Although most of the world thinks of Israel in terms of war and peace, observes Fletcher,"I think Israelis are more focused on peace and quiet and stability in their personal lives. And most of them have been successful in achieving that. This reality is lost on outsiders till they come and visit and are surprised at what a pleasant place it is."

Jews in Europe are in real trouble when a Dutch politician urges Jews to 'emigrate to US or Israel'