Americans are fat and unhappy.

A full two-thirds of our country’s citizens are overweight, including the more than one-third of us who are obese. This has all kinds of negative implications: skyrocketing medical insurance; increased likelihood of disease; shortened life span; and decreased productivity. It even makes it a challenge to field enough soldiers because so many young adults fail the military fitness tests.

America suffers an array of problems: dependence on foreign oil, crumbling infrastructure, and a pro-longed, crippling financial crisis that’s keeping unemployment at a very high 9.5 percent (not counting the “under-employed” and those who have given up looking).

I look at Israel’s model for some solutions to these problems.

Israel currently requires military service for everyone (with the exception of the Haredi Orthodox and Israeli Arab communities). All young women serve for two years and all young men put in three years. That’s created a variety of benefits: one of the best militaries in the world; better college students who at 20 years old are more focused; and a steady stream of army alums with hands-on training as they enter the country’s dynamic high tech fields. That’s the not-so-secret reason Israel has some of the best performing cutting edge technology companies in the world: While in the army, soldiers learned and excelled in technical engineering and computer skills as they operated remarkably sophisticated equipment.

So what if the U.S. reinstituted the draft? 

For starters, it would mean our military and those fighting on the battle fields would be more representative of our nation, not just the disproportionate rates of lower income soldiers that we have today.

It would mean all Americans would be forced to do basic training and inevitably lose weight and learn how to exercise regularly.

It would mean that many of our college students would be more ready to learn than to party because, after all, they would know a thing or two about how serious life can be.

Of course, not everyone would be needed or forced into the military.  After a period of basic training, our young men and woman could join a civilian corps that would help build our infrastructure and transform us from the Information Age to a Green Technology based economy.

This is not a perfect or the only solution to America’s problems, and Israel is a lot smaller than the United States.  Still, given the many issues we face, adopting this Israeli model to the American scene would make a lot of needed improvements.

It should be permanently noted somewhere in the “record” that late yesterday afternoon/early evening (10/27/10) Andrew Buerger posted a new blog entry entitled “Islamic McCarthyism.”

Very quickly (for Jewish Times blogs, that is) it generated 1 comment, which pointed out Young Andrew’s cosmic stupidity in this nasty piece of politically-correct moral equivalence.

As of this morning (10/28/10) this blog entry has been scrubbed, in true Orwellian fashion, from the Jewish Times’s web site.

For a professional publisher to remove an already-published piece of writing from his web site in the dark of night and without acknowledgment seems like, at least, a transgression of professional etiquette.

After all, Young Andrew himself has recently complained of lesser publishing outfits that he claims aren’t as above-board as his own.

I, therefore, call on Young Andrew to restore this very revealing blog entry, unedited and as it appeared last night.

For this writing represents, in its most pristine and undiluted ugliness, what American Jews who have left Judaism and converted to the Church of Liberalism really think - about our country and anyone who dares to question their childish ideology, even if they do so out of obvious, adult common sense and their own personal safety.

It is not a pretty sight!!!