A miracle a little smaller than New Jersey
Over at National Review, Clifford May looks at Start-Up Nation, a new book exploring how and why tiny Israel has become such an economic power-house — in spite of the daunting existential crises it faces. Authors Saul Singer and Dan Senor argues that traditional stereotypes about Jews being smart and hard-working are insufficient explanations, and offer some intriguing ones of their own:
An overlooked and key contributing factor, they theorize, is that virtually all Israelis serve in the military where a specific set of skills and values are pounded into them. They learn for example, “that you must complete your mission, but that the only way to do that is as a team. The battle cry is ‘After me’: there is no leadership without personal example and without inspiring your team to charge together and with you. There is no leaving anyone behind. You have minimal guidance from the top and are expected to improvise.” The Israeli military encourages a kind of entrepreneurship: the assumption of both responsibility and risk at a young age, coupled with on-the-job experience making life-and-death decisions.
How much of a surprise can it be? The Bible promises the nation of Israel that following God’s will would ensure that “it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you.” (Deuteronomy 6:3)
He just didn’t mention the part about silicon…
Comments (0) »Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 4:29 PM | Stand For Israel
Land of milk and honey… and hippos?
Move over Jaffa oranges, here come hippos!
Many lovers of Israel know that the Jewish state was long a top exporter of citrus (remember the Jaffa orange?) and now it produces more high-tech companies, let alone high-tech gadgets, than anywhere else, per capita. Ever innovative, Israel has now become a leading exporter of… hippopotamuses.
Yup, the Ramat Gan Safari, an animal park outside of Tel Aviv, explained to AFP that they stumbled into exporting the massive beasts when their population of 40 became fruitful and multiplied a little too much.
“We reached the point where we had nothing to do with so many of them,” Spokeswoman Sagit Horowitz told AFP. So far, the zoo has sent 14 hippos abroad, including to Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam. And she said that there’s a long list of zoos that wish to purchase others. But this is a no simple export: You try catching and mailing something that weights up to 3 1/2 tons!
She explained that the animals need to be sedated while sleeping:
“If you shoot a tranquiliser at them when they are awake, they run into the pond and there is no chance of catching them there.”
Once the animal is knocked out, he is lifted with a bulldozer and put into a crate.
The safari’s latest exports are two hippos that are due to leave Israel on Tuesday on their way to their new home in Ukrainian zoos, she said.
Comments (0) »Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 3:29 PM | Stand For Israel
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