Fur is warm, soft, and cozy. Spending an entire lifetime in a cage and being killed for your skin is unpleasant, but if there are painless ways of growing beef, there must be painless ways of growing fur.

There are a lot of things nobody 'needs', but it's hardly a command economy, is it? If there are things anybody wants and can be acquired without undue pain to an animal, I don't see why not.

Fur has simply become a taboo, and like all taboos, it's more a matter of a knee-jerk reaction than any considered view of the situation (you know, the type that is supposed to be modded 'insightful'). A society that freely consumes leather, milk, eggs, fish and meat can hardly afford to act holy about fur.

And furniture. Matthew 5:35.

They're only partly fighting about resources, but a great deal of it is pride. With enough money you can buy desalination, irrigation and even some land from Saudi Arabia to give the Palestinians extra land, but when two (three, if you count Christians) religions believe they have the God-given exclusive right to a very specific, very small area of land, how do you convince them otherwise? Even if we had all the resources we wanted from asteroids mined by our Asimovian robots running on cold fusion from here to Andromeda, Jerusalem would still be a scarce resource.

It might be worth it in book sales and late-night TV interviews alone.

So is yours. Comparing the behaviour of the Israeli guards to the policy in Arab countries is hardly an objective benchmark. Just because someone else 'does worse' is a playground argument, not a moral one for a modern state to base its policies on.

I don't think this reflects badly on Israel as a whole. Border guards are individuals with some latitude in enforcing the law without always clearing it with a lawyer. It's one action, not a national policy. However, that does not mean that it is acceptable for Israel to condone the destruction of harmless private property 'since it's not as bad' as being imprisoned, any more than it is acceptable for America to torture in Guantanamo Bay 'since it's not as bad' as being beheaded.

That's one way to avoid paying that debt to China....

Instead of bravely bombing from on high. I don't support one side or the other in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but we must accept that war is no longer men on horses charging at each other with lances. It's hardly cowardly to use what resources (and resourcefulness) you have. Israel has aircraft, Palestine has improvised explosives. Neither's choice of weapon (and 'choice' is partly forced by necessity and resources, or lack thereof) is noble or cowardly per se, and the same applies to tactics.