Displaying posts published in

February 2016

MY SAY: AMAZING ISRAEL

Israel, object of libels, boycotts, nuclear threats, academic opprobrium, biased media…the list could go on forever…..is an amazing nation. Every week my e-pal Michael Ordman send me a list of their incredible achievements in medicine, science, economy, global outreach, humane project….again, the list goes on. What a country- from seedless papayas, to undercover teams to help in Syria, aid in California’s drought struggle, bird conservation, high tech and wireless technologies, radar…..the list goes on and on.

Please take a moment to peruse the good news from Israel blog: http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

It is the best antidote to all the horrible news from campuses, the State Department, the Eurotrash anti-Semitism, and the biased “calumnists.”
P.S. Read about Egypt’s new ambassador to Israel….‘Happy and proud’ to be here, Egypt’s first ambassador since 2012 presents credentials

http://www.timesofisrael.com/egypts-new-envoy-to-israel-im-very-happy-and-proud-to-be-here/

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL: MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Detecting the dangers in ICU. Israeli startup Intensix is trialing an Intensive Care Unit patient monitoring system at Tel Aviv Sourasky (Ichalov) hospital. Using data collected from 8,000 patients over the past 8 years, the system gives an early warning of impending sepsis and organ failure that kills 30% of ICU patients.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/has-an-israeli-start-up-solved-the-mystery-of-sepsis/

Control disease – deactivate genes. Scientists at Israel’s Technion have discovered how to use proteins to suppress unwanted gene activity. It could lead to a cure for cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia, as well as more common diseases that are caused by gene activity or mutations, such as many forms of cancer.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-new-way-to-keep-genes-down-could-lead-to-cancer-cure/

Protecting USA from radiation sickness. (TY The Tower) I previously reported (here) on the therapy from Israel’s Pluristem for treating patients exposed to lethal radiation doses. Pluristem is to join the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases program designed to protect people from catastrophic incidents.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/US-government-to-stocking-Israeli-bio-tech-cure-to-lethal-radiation-in-2017-445620

Keeping hip and spinal surgeons on target. Another great invention from the students of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s BioDesign Medical Innovation program. Their BendGuide system monitors and detects minute changes in guide-wire trajectory during hip and spinal surgery. Surgeons can correct drilling trajectories, prevent guide-wire breakage and significantly reduce operation time while increasing safety.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29354 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sco43bbo3Yk

Another test for Alzheimer’s. (TY Hazel) Researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Technion and Rambam Medical Center propose testing the blood biomarker ADNP for cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease. ADNP is essential for brain formation and cognitive function. I reported another blood test in January (here).
http://www.israel21c.org/alzheimers-could-be-diagnosed-with-common-blood-test/

Alzheimer’s therapy is available. (TY Hazel) I reported previously on the neuroAD transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and cognitive training from Israel’s Neuronix (see here). NeuroAD now has CE approval and is commercially available in Israel, Europe and Asia. US FDA approval is subject to results of latest trials.
http://www.israel21c.org/drug-free-alzheimers-treatment-to-seek-fda-approval/

Exercise and dance to reduce Parkinson’s symptoms. (TY Hazel) I reported previously (in August) that dancing can treat Parkinson’s. Now Israeli Alex Kerten has developed a mind-body therapy for Parkinson’s called Gyro-Kinetics. It includes breathing exercises, relaxation and dance.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-an-israeli-healer-treats-parkinsons-through-talk-and-dance/

An app to check your eyesight. Israeli startup 6over6’s GlassesOn smartphone app helps check your latest lens prescription without having to visit an optometrist. It can also help those buying spectacles on-line and in developing countries. The app won the startup contest at the mHealth Israel Conference in Tel Aviv.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-start-up-presents-the-optometrist-in-your-iphone/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Huge Israeli presence at Mobile World Congress. The largest mobile expo in the world – the annual GSMA Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona – showcased 2,100 companies, including a delegation of over 100 Israeli high-tech companies in the field of mobile solutions and apps.
http://nocamels.com/2016/02/gsma-mobile-world-congress-israeli-technologies/

Best mobile innovation. Israel’s Anagog, developer of the world’s largest crowdsourced parking network, won the ‘Best Mobile Innovation in Automotive Award’ at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Anagog can detect if a smarphone user is at home or at work, walking, driving, riding a bus, where he parked and more.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/anagog-announced-winner-best-mobile-140000405.html

Laying the foundations for 5G networks. One of the companies showcasing at the Mobile World Congress is Israel’s Ceragon and its 5G wireless backhaul technologies. Commercial 5G services are expected to begin by 2020, bringing increased capacity, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine to machine (M2M) solutions.
https://www.ceragon.com/about-us/media-center/news/item/1421-ceragon-showcases-5g-at-mwc-2016

A most innovative company. Fast Company magazine has included Glide – Israel’s mainstream video messaging app – in their Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Video list (#7). Glide was specifically recognized for its efforts to “provide a social communication tool for the deaf community.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/company/glide
http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/sectors/video

Trump, the Insult Comic Candidate Why Donald Trump’s political rhetoric will not go quietly into the night By Michael Taube

Donald Trump has run a nasty, vicious, and loathsome campaign. His views, ideas, and policies are, for the most part, the complete antithesis of what small-c conservatism represents, or should represent, in a modern democratic society.

There’s no denying, however, that he has been incredibly successful.

Trump’s personal appeal, tough stances, and populist positions have clearly resonated with voters. He’s won three states (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) and finished second in Iowa. If current poll numbers are accurate, he’s easily going to win most of the states on Super Tuesday.

Unless Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz get together before, say, March 1 — and bring John Kasich and Ben Carson along for the ride — this contest could almost be mathematically over within a few weeks’ time. (Just a thought, gentlemen.)

Win or lose, the brash billionaire businessman has certainly had a huge impact on modern-day American politics. In fact, his tactics could ultimately be emulated by like-minded political candidates down the road. Here’s something I firmly believe will survive well past Trump’s candidacy.

Trump has thrown out the traditional political playbook so many times on the campaign trail, it could make your head spin. At the same time, he has used ideas, concepts, and lines (both written and speaking) that are completely foreign to most political strategists, communicators, and speechwriters.

Cruz and Rubio Formed an Effective Tag Team as Trump Sputtered By Andrew C. McCarthy

Flashy plays better than methodical in prime time, so Marco Rubio was beaming like a big winner after Thursday night’s debate in Houston. In Ted Cruz, though, I’m happy to have the candidate who looks best the morning after.

The rival senators, both attractive, articulate and wicked smart, have been frequent conservative allies. Hostilities became inevitable when they fixed their eyes on the same prize. On Thursday night, though, they were frenemies. Finally, and hopefully not too late, the pair figured out that the only sensible target for their mutually assured destruction is the real MAD man, Donald Trump — not each other.

The tag team was effective. The Donald limped away revealed for what he is, a fraud — a liberal Democrat posing as the Republican savior. For example, his ballyhooed crackdown on illegal immigration is, in reality, an amnesty plan that conveniently goes unmentioned in the position paper touted by his campaign. The real plan — as implausible for law enforcement and gratuitously burdensome for aliens as it is Iraq-like expensive for taxpayers — is to hunt down and deport 12 million people, only to . . . yes . . . bring them back into the country legally – i.e., with amnesty.

How many aliens will be brought back? Like most fraudsters, Trump gives different answers to different audiences. When he (or one of his sons) speaks to groups sympathetic to illegals, we’re led to believe they’re all returning: essentially, Americans would provide paid vacations for several million illegals before Trump welcomes them back to compete for American jobs. But Thursday night, before a crowd of Texans who live with the damage illegal immigration does, we got stingy Trump: Only “the best of them will come back” (however many that may be), but rest assured it’s going to be “through a process.” Well, yes . . . the process is called amnesty.

How Tyrannies Implode By Richard Fernandez

“It’s becoming evident that the European elites failed to understand how explosive the migrant issue was until it detonated full in their face. Now it is in the midst of a crisis which could literally bring down the European Union. Why didn’t they see it coming? Because they believed their own Narrative, even when they should have suspected it was a lie of their own making. If the PC Western elites are overtaken by a cascade similar to that which collapsed the Soviet Union, the ultimate irony will be that the very migrants which they had counted on to create the Curley Effect will turn out to be the engine of their own destruction.”

This week marks the 30th anniversary of People’s Power Revolution in the Philippines that historians now regard as marking the start of the Color Revolutions that cumulatively crumbled the Soviet Union. The most astonishing aspect of the entire Color Revolution cycle was that it came largely as a surprise to pundits. As Leon Aron wrote in Foreign Policy, how and why they happened remains an enduring historical mystery. “In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin’s control over its domestic and Eastern European empires.”

Consider: the USSR’s vital signs gave no warning of failure. The Soviet Union in 1986 was as as big and populous as it had ever been. It had thousands of nuclear warheads. It’s economy was bad it’s true but no worse than at many points in its past. There was no significant opposition to the Politburo. “After 20 years of relentless suppression of political opposition, virtually all the prominent dissidents had been imprisoned, exiled … forced to emigrate, or had died in camps and jails. There did not seem to be any other signs of a pre-revolutionary crisis.”

How could such a giant system, which withstood the onslaught of Nazi Germany itself, fail?

Flash back to 1986 before we knew what was then the future. The same things might have been said of Ferdinand Marcos and Nikolae Ceaușescu (about more later) in 1989. They were outwardly strong yet both were doomed. Their regimes would collapse like a house of cards in ways we are still struggling to understand. One of the theories (hat tip commenter Edie_VA) put forward to explain the implosions was preference falsification.

In his book Private Truth, Public Lies, social scientist Timur Kuran argued that people, under pressure to conform by culture leaders often told public lies to get the pollsters and thought police off their backs, even as they nurtured a largely undetected private resentments inside them. Over time two divergent perceptions would emerge: the public lie would determine how the regime thought about itself while the private truth contained the real, but hidden data.

Islamic State Revives Historic Jihadi Tactics By Raymond Ibrahim

As Western politicians and other talking heads insist that the Islamic State (“ISIS”) has “nothing whatsoever to do with Islam,” not only does ISIS correctly implement Islamic law – whether by demanding jizya from subjugated Christians or by sexually enslaving “infidel” women – but even the “caliphate’s” arcane jihadi tactics belong to Islam.

Consider a recently exposed “recruitment” tactic of ISIS: abducting, indoctrinating, and beating young children in order to mold them into explosive vest-wearing “martyrs” who hurl themselves onto “infidels”:

The children who managed to escape describe how they were indoctrinated into the jihadi group’s radical brand of Islam and taught that they should execute their “unbeliever” [infidel] parents. … “We weren’t allowed to cry but I would think about my mother, think about her worrying about me and I’d try and cry quietly,” he [an escapee] said[.] … Some children who managed to escape ISIS and are now living in the refugee camps in northern Iraq, have also been left badly psychologically scarred. The repeated beatings and endless propaganda have meant that some of the escapees wake up in the night with nightmares while others suffer seizures.

The report goes on to say, “The growing trend for ISIS to use child soldiers as suicide bombers, particularly in Iraq, has been suggested as a sign of how stretched their resources are in the region.”

Or it could suggest that ISIS is simply following another page of the jihadi playbook. For centuries, Muslim caliphates seized Christian boys from their families, forcefully converted them and indoctrinated them in Islam, trained them to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed them back onto their former Christian kin to wreak havoc in the name of jihad on infidels. (Skanderberg was the exception.)

Double Games Of The UK Muslim Brotherhood by John Ware

The tone was plaintive, almost bewildered. “We work tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts,” Anas Altikriti protested before calling a press conference to refute the government’s charge that he and other like-minded Muslim leaders are doing the opposite.

A classified government review by two of Britain’s leading civil servants, expert in the Arab world and Islamist ideology, has concluded that organisations like the one Altikriti heads are, in effect, fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood — a charge they categorically deny.

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, as it is known in Arabic, was established in 1928 in Egypt and its goal was — and remains — the step-by-step Islamisation of Muslim communities with the ultimate aim of creating a global Caliphate ruled by holy law. “Allah is our objective” is the Brotherhood’s motto, “The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

With Altikriti on the platform was Omer El-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, and Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque, North London, where the press conference was held. “We are not enemies of the state,” said the gently-spoken Hamdoon. All three say they “totally reject the allegation” that they are “in any way linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Altikriti, in particular, has emphasised that he has “absolutely no links” and on its face his denial would seem to be consistent with the values of “tolerance” and “positive co-existence” which he says he is devoted to promoting. It’s certainly a vision a world away from the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who sought the moral purification of Muslims, because he regarded them as having been infected by Western decadence. That and his belief that Jews were a major source of the infection help explain why he was an admirer of Hitler and why he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, calling it My Jihad.

Roger Franklin: The Guardian of the Inane

Monocultures are prone to infirmity and disease, which perhaps explains The Guardian’s laughable attempt to characterise a journalist who believes in free speech as a witless promoter of anti-semitism. When everyone thinks the same, one fool’s braying is lost in the racket of the herd.
Like an elevator formerly occupied by a passenger afflicted with terminal flatulence, a visit to The Guardian Australia website serves as a sharp reminder that noxious emanations linger noisomely in small, tight, closed-off spaces. As Bertholt Brecht lamented of his contemporaries’ insistence on pouring their talents into the mundane when the workers’ paradise had yet to be realised, “They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes.” Pardon the irony in quoting a red-raggin’ propagandist and totalitarian publicist in regard to a red-raggin’ publication with a pronounced affection for greenish jackboots, but the agit-propping dramatist’s observation is too delicious to resist. Here we are, the left’s march through the institutions long ago complete, yet in The Guardian’s strange and sealed little eco-system the same old battle cries and campfire songs echo yet. Suggest that journalists of the modern breed are bitchily contemptuous of free speech and intolerant of any opinions but their own, as the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann did last week in The Australian, and the truth of that observation is immediately confirmed by something akin to an eruption of explosive peristalsis. The offence against leftist presumption to solely determine what can be discussed and how, having been duly digested, prompts an immediate rumbling in the literary bowel until, after a period of authorial grimacing and discomfort, it spurts noisily forth in a gaseous bum burp as short on substance as it is foully obnoxious. Here, the effusions of former journalism academic and current Guardian contributor Jason Wilson come immediately to mind.

It is quite the case study, Wilson’s excoriation of Uhlmann, but very much of a piece with his earlier and no less gassy gushers. Not long ago, for example, he displayed a unique talent for finding perfidy in the prosaic by denouncing the faddish paleo diet as an assault on women and feminism. That expose should not be missed, especially by those who find amusement in the bizarre, but do set aside more than what might normally be considered adequate time to absorb a few hundred words of the merely tendentious. Some will laugh until they cry, and those tears will blur the vision as thoroughly as does the author’s compulsion to make everything, even plates of offal, symptoms of the right’s cleverly concealed and ever-sinister intentions. As a former Canberra University academic, Wilson cannot have worked in close proximity to Professor Matthew Ricketson, co-author of the infamous Finkelstein review, without having what seems a congenital inclination to useful idiocy greatly enhanced. The Finkelstein opus, it should be remembered, recommended the jailing of recalcitrant editors (see below), so there is another alleged journalist opposed to unfiltered free speech.

France: Criticize Islam and Live under Police Protection by Giulio Meotti

“After a few moments of fear, I thought that if there are these threats it is because my fight foiled the plans of the Muslim Brothers by bringing them to light. I decided not to give up.” — Laurence Marchand-Taillade, Secretary of the Parti Radical de Gauche.

Muslim organizations tried to defame his work work and name [Éric Zemmour] by accusing him of “Islamophobia” to silence him.

In France, hunting season is still open for critics of Islam.

“You are sentenced to death. It’s just a matter of time.” This message, in Arabic, was sent by Islamists to Laurence Marchand-Taillade, National Secretary of the Parti Radical de Gauche (Radical Party of the Left). She now lives under the protection of the French police.

Marchand-Taillade forced the Muslim Brotherhood to withdraw, under pressure from France’s Interior Ministry, its invitation of three Islamic fundamentalists to a conference in Lille. The Islamists in question were the Syrian Mohamed Rateb al Nabulsi, the Moroccan Abouzaid al Mokrie and the Saudi Abdullah Salah Sana’an, who deem that the penalty for homosexuality is death, that the international coalition against the Islamic State is “infidel,” that Jews “destroy the nations” and that only religious music is permitted.

Laurence Marchand-Taillade published an article in Le Figaro in which she called for the ban of these Islamists with their “anti-Semitic and pro-jihadist message.”

In the magazine Marianne, Marchand-Taillade then penned, along with the French-Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, an article calling for the resignation of the leaders of the Observatory of Secularism.

“I am the president of an association that supports secularism in the Val-d’Oise” said Marchand-Taillade to me in an interview,

Turkey’s “Fall and Fall” by Burak Bekdil

In reality, Turkey’s “post-modern Islamist” leaders were just Islamists gift-wrapped in a nicer package.

In a span of only seven months, more than 170 people have lost their lives in bomb attacks in Turkey. This number excludes more than 300 security officials killed by Kurdish militants, and more than 1000 Kurdish militants killed by Turkish security forces.

Russia is in the process of encircling Turkey militarily– in Syria, the Crimea, Ukraine and Armenia.

Russia’s fight is not about defeating the Islamic State, but about expanding its sphere of influence in the eastern Mediterranean, including the mouth of the Suez Canal. In a way, Russia is challenging NATO through Syria — the same way Turkey is challenging the Shiites through Syria, or Iran is challenging the Sunnis through Syria.

Less than a decade ago, many Western statesmen and pundits were racing ahead to praise Turkey’s Islamist leaders as “post-modern, democratic, reformist, pro-European Union Islamists” who could play the role model for less democratic Muslim nations in the Middle East. It was “The Rise and Rise of Turkey,” as Patrick Seale put it in the New York Times in 2009.