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May 25, 2012

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Thinking About Faith
Mark Clayton: Is Hillary's State Dept. hacking Al Qaeda? Not quite
David G. Savage: Supreme Court limits protection against double jeopardy
Ashley Powers: A nightmare, then conviction is tossed
Erika Bolstad: Temple cancels Wasserman Schultz speech
Deroy Murdock: WWII hero Karski to receive U.S. Medal of Freedom
Kimberly Lankford: Health Coverage for College Grads
The Kosher Gourmet by Ethel G. Hofman: The former president of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, whose members included the likes of Julia Child, is back with contemporary Shavous cuisine: Ruby Fruit Soup, Sweet Noodle Kugel with Cheese, Key Lime Curd, Calsone Casserole Frittata with Wild Mushrooms, Sun-dried tomatoes and Olives, Baked Tilapia with Pepper Cheese Cream and Brown Sugar Shortbread
May 24, 2012
Jeff Jacoby: The peace process battered Israel's reputation
Clifford D. May: What Iran's Rulers Want
Michael Muskal: 'Pro-choice' position hits record low, according to poll
Chris Farrell: Are We in a Tech Bubble?
Kimberly Lankford: Switching Medicare Advantage Plans Mid-Year
Bryan McIver, M.B., Ch.B., Ph.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Understanding hyperthyroidism and its variety of treatment options
The Kosher Gourmet by Penelope Wall: PHILLY CHEESE STEAKS --- hold the steak!
May 23, 2012
Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: Baghdad talks highlight Western naivete
Tony Pugh: More private colleges offering tuition discounts
Lisa Gerstner: 4 Money-Etiquette Questions Answered
Mary Beth Franklin: How to Choose the Right Annuity for You
Art Markman, Ph.D.: Get smart: How to bulk up your creativity muscles
Tina Susman: The wig wasn't enough: Man gets 13 years for posing as his dead mom
The Kosher Gourmet by Emma Christensen:A simple way to do fish right
May 22, 2012
David S. Cloud and Kathleen Hennessey: Obama changes mind on Pakistan invite to NATO summit --- and then gets dissed by country's president
Warren Richey: Can US group challenge overseas surveillance act? Supreme Court to decide
Thomas M. Anderson: Walking Away From a Mortgage
Environmental Nutrition editors: The lowdown on a low-acid diet
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon: Enjoy a celebration of the most rich and layered flavors: Black bean, sweet potato and quinoa chili
May 21, 2012
Mark Clayton: Cybersecurity: How US utilities passed up chance to protect their networks
Howard LaFranchi: NATO summit: Who will foot the bill for long-term Afghanistan security?
Chris Farrell : Earn Dividends in Emerging Markets with This WisdomTree ETF
James K. Glassman: 5 Stock Picks Among Online Retailers
Stephen Whiteside, Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Social anxiety disorder --- or just shy?
Guy Jackson : Victim's father regrets death of Lockerbie bomber
The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali: Famed chef's veal shoulder farsumagru: A festive meat course for late spring
May 18, 2012
Rabbi Berel Wein: Striving: The People of the Book's Book for (All of) the People
Caroline B. Glick: Embracing dangerous delusions and not our friends
Steven Goldberg: 5 Great Stock Picks and the Exchange-Traded Fund that Owns Them
Janet Bodnar: How to Teach Kids to Handle Credit Cards
Mary Pickett, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Don't be forced into gluten-free lifestyle based merely on a doctor's false-positive test
The Kosher Gourmet by Carolyn Malcoun: DIY healthy lunchbox treats: HOMEMADE FRUIT BARS for kids and brown-bagging adults alike
May 17, 2012
Warren Richey: Teacher fired for being unwed and pregnant can sue religious school, court rules
Josh Mitnick: Netanyahu's 'centrist' coalition is already proving it's anything but
Steven Goldberg: Earn Dividends in Emerging Markets with This WisdomTree ETF
Mary Beth Franklin: Retirement Savings Tips for New Grads
Amina Khan: Research links coffee to lower death rates
Chelsea Sheasley: Social media: Is it too feminine?
The Kosher Gourmet by Faith Duran : Cheesy Potato Breakfast Casserole with Cheddar and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
May 16, 2012
Jackson Holahan: The Aleppo Codex
Jonathan Tobin : Iran Declares Victory in Nuclear Talks
Anne Kates Smith: 7 Stocks That Let You Sleep Tight
Carmen Terzic, M.D., Ph.D. : Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: A variety of exercises can help improve balance
Melissa Healy: National strategy on Alzheimer's disease aims to halt it by 2025
The Kosher Gourmet by Joyce White : GOODNESS GRACIOUS: GREENS! 4 winning recipes that are no longer just for down-home folks (Includes expert tips & techniques)
May 15, 2012
Dennis Prager: God and Man at (and for) Liberty
Kristen Chick: Obama administration resumes arms sales to Bahrain despite serious unresolved human rights issues. Activists feel abandoned
Pat Mertz Esswein: Homes are now affordable again and mortgage rates are low. What you need to know before you buy
Kathy Kristof: Our Practical Investor Fights Inflation with These 6 Investments
Sue Hubbard, M.D.: The Kid's Doctor: Lactose intolerant young child? Check again
Environmental Nutrition Editors: Get the facts on palm sugar sweetening
The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Hunt: Spread a Little Excitement with EXOTIC CONDIMENTS (4 RECIPES)
May 14, 2012
Richard Simon: Purple Hearts for domestic terror victims?
Nando Pelusi, Ph.D.: The privacy paradox: Surrounded by strangers, we risk isolation, anxiety
Chris Farrell: Investing Lessons from the Great Recession
Lisa Gerstner: How to Protect Your Identity, Finances If You Lose Your Phone
Harvard Health Letters: Heart disease and dementia
Tiffany O'Callaghan: New hormone mimics effects of exercise without the sweat
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon: MANGO COCONUT OAT MORNING MUFFINS are a bright but hearty delight
May 11, 2012
Rabbi B. Shafier: Why happiness will always be elusive
Charles Krauthammer: Echoes of '67: Israel unites
Howard LaFranchi: With G8 snub, US-Putin 'reset' off to stumbling start
Jeremy J. Siegel: Investors, Relax About Rising Interest Rates
Jessica L. Anderson: Get the Best Deal on a Used Car
Jett Stone: Forget face-lifts and fake knees. Scientists have seen the fountain of youth --- and it's broccoli
The Kosher Gourmet by Chef Mario Batali: The famed chef's vegetable dish that tastes true to the season: FAVAS AND SUGAR SNAP PEAS WITH POTATOES AND TARRAGON
May 10, 2012
Clifford D. May: The Real Palestinian Refugee Problem
Sergei L. Loiko: Putin sends warning to U.S., NATO in Victory Day speech at Red Square
Mary Rourke: How being a 'mentch' got Vidal Sasoon his start and fighting in Israel's War of Independence provided him with confidence and a strong sense of his own identity
Harvard Health Letters: Palliative care: Underused therapy yields surprising benefits
Jeff Bertolucci: Get Home Phone Service for Less Than $10 a Month
Rachel L. Sheedy and Susan B. Garland : Make the Right Moves to Boost Benefits
The Kosher Gourmet by Betty Rosbottom: Gleaming with its golden, crimson, and snowy white hues, this silken smooth and creamy STRAWBERRY ORANGE TRIFLE looks impressive, but is easy to prepare
May 9, 2012
John Rosemond: Parents, stop destroying the American male
Valerie J. Nelson: Maurice Sendak, author of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' dies at 83
Bob Frick: Angst Over Annuities
Sharon Palmer, R.D. How you can reduce your risk -- or delay -- chronic diseases associated with aging
Howard LeWine, M.D.: Ask the Harvard Experts: Why did my blood pressure suddenly shoot up?
Lisa Gerstner: Lower the Rate on All Your Loans
The Kosher Gourmet by Emily Ho : Springtime soba with miso sauce offers a coloful mix of fresh textures and flavors
May 8, 2012
Edmund Sanders: Netanyahu suddenly cancels new elections, forms unity government
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: Farewell to European superstate
Anne Kates Smith: 4 Stocks That Mimic Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
Gaia Vince and Clare Wilson The Rise of Miniature Medical Robots: Fantasy Fast Becoming Reality
Paul Takahashi, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: Never suffer night leg cramps
Jessica L. Anderson: Extended-Warranty Warning
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Day with the Best Cookie Ever (Includes techniques)
May 7, 2012
Mark Clayton: Homeland Security warns major cyber attack aimed at gas pipeline industry underway
Angus Roxburgh: Putin Decoded: World view of a Russian feeling dissed
Kimberly Lankford: Navigate a Course for Long-Term Care
Kevin McCormally How to Adjust Your Tax Withholding
Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D.: Harvard Health Letters: How do you treat a Baker's cyst?
Joanne Capano: Healthy Snacks for Children: The Choices May Surprise You
The Kosher Gourmet by Penelope Wall: Classic Creamy Spinach Dip with a Fraction of the Calories and Fat
May 4, 2012
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Holy 'trivialities'
Jonathan Tobin: Bibi v. Barak will be no contest this time around
Steven Goldberg: Blue Chip Stocks On Sale Worldwide
Art Pine Slow Productivity Growth a Blessing --- For Now
Sue Hubbard, M.D. : The Kid's Doctor: Are Kids Too Wired?
Kerri-Ann Jennings, M.S., R.D: Foods that are good for your smile
Amy Paturel, M.S., M.P.H.: Eating Well: Foods that are good for your smile
The Kosher Gourmet by Betty Rosbottom: Strawberry rhubarb parfaits are elegant yet simple to assemble
May 3, 2012
Michael Freund: Who's Afraid of the Messiah?
Clifford D. May: The Foggiest War
Susan B. Garland: Insurance to Cover Old Old Age
Steven Goldberg 6 Reasons to Bet on a Big Bull Market
Harvard Health Letters: Treating prostate cancer --- no rush to judgment
Larry Gordon: Harvard, MIT partner to offer free online courses
Naomi Nix : Man gets free trip to Chicago after postcard sent by mother in 1957 finally reaches him
The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: Intensely Italian vegetable frittata is a seriously simple standby


Jewish World Review Oct 7, 2011 / 9 Tishrei, 5772

Jobs and Us

By Paul Greenberg


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | This era has lost its Edison. Maybe its Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller combined.

As an inventor, Steve Jobs kept coming up with Next Big Things that changed the world before rendering them obsolete by inventing their successors. He began with the personal computer and went on to churn out the iPad, iPhone, iTunes, and all the apps that changed and still change the world -- not just technologically and economically but politically and culturally -- for good, bad and in-between.

Today's Internet, with all the accesses to it that Steve Jobs provided, the Arab Spring and more springs surely to come across the world, the ways we communicate and interconnect and wi-fi … it would all be unimaginable without that one person named Steve Jobs. If you're looking for still more justification for a system of free enterprise, he's it.

Here was a one-man proof of supply-side economics. Who knew we needed all his inventions till he invented them?

Then they became as much a part of our lives and the world's as Thomas Edison's and Henry Ford's. He both changed the species and represented its essence: Homo Faber, Man the Toolmaker, the species that invents, and in the end invents man, for our mental selves become like our technologies as Gutenberg gives way to wi-fi.

The ultimate techie, Steve Jobs was also the consummate and consuming executive, more than ready to fail so he could learn still more. He was an entrepreneur of entrepreneurs, rising only to fall, falling only to rise again. Much like Thomas Edison. And like Edison at Menlo Park, he created an assembly line and laboratory full of other inventors, including rivals and critics. He took his motto from "The Whole Earth Catalogue" of the Sixties and Seventies -- "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." He did.

Where do such world-changers come from? America, usually. Why is that? They rise here because the American system doesn't tell them what to do and not do, how to do it and how not to, but mainly gets out of their way. And lets them reap the rewards of their enterprise. So far.

A free country leaves free men alone -- to think, invent, organize, design and change. Everything, including our lives. So long as these innovators are free to invent and organize and buy and sell, the rest of us can ride the crest of the waves they create, much like a great river putting dynamos into motion.

"Capitalism," wrote one of its foremost students, Joseph Schumpeter, "is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary." Which is something those of us in the newspaper business, and every other, might keep in mind in these woe-is-us times when we would all do better to think on the opportunities opening up all around us.

Inventors didn't stop inventing or builders building even in the depths of the Great Depression, a period of as much innovation as despair. This can be, too, unless we settle for the deceptive safety of mediocrity. Thought knows no recession.

At a time when jobs grow scarce, capital is hoarded, and all kinds of economic panaceas are being promoted (The American Jobs Act! Quantitative Easing! 9-9-9! You Name It!), the real source and strength and hope of the American economy -- and society -- may be overlooked: America still lets talent rise to the top no matter how hard the levelers keep trying to stifle it.

Everybody seems to be talking about the need for more jobs but ignoring the lesson Steve Jobs' life and times and revolutionary talents teach. He was well named, Steve Jobs.

At his death at a much too young 56, Steve Jobs is being lauded by all of us, except maybe the occasional surviving Luddites, and even they are probably delivering their dissents via iPhone.

Amid the tributes, the society he so pervasively changed, and whose entrepreneurs will continue to change many another society, whether in the Arab world or on the Chinese mainland, might pause, as he did, to think. And ask: How assure that more Steve Jobses will be given their chance to change and improve the future for all of us?

By staying out of their way. How strange that, even while the air is full of eulogies for Steve Jobs, the debate in Congress, removed as ever from the economic, social and cultural realities, is how the land of the Thomas Edisons and Steve Jobses can be remodeled as a nice, safe, declining social democracy in the static European style.

We seem to have forgotten the real source of our strength: the freedom we give our most inventive and enterprising to unleash the creative destruction that is capitalism. Schumpeter called capitalism a "perennial gale of creative destruction," and only those who yearn for decline will try to fight it rather than encourage the rise of more Steve Jobses.

Steve Jobs' credo in a complicated world he did much to simplify might be summed up as: Invent it and they will use it. And we did. If staid old IBM didn't realize that the essence of capitalism is creative destruction, it surely learned as much after Steve Jobs' Apple made it the wave of the past.

Steve Jobs not only invented but would come to discover what all the great faiths understand: "Death is very likely the best invention of life," he said in a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. "All pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."

His whole life was a kind of commencement, an ever new beginning, an act of faith in the individually customized future he would create. What an unbounded faith the man had not only in his own inventiveness but in our ability to use it to further our own. He was a kind of poet of technology.

What a pity if the vision of such men were to die with them, and we came to be reading not just obituaries for such as Steve Jobs but for the wide-open society of opportunity that let them flourish.

Paul Greenberg Archives

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