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November 2016

Why does Up-Chuck Schumer support Keith Ellison for DNC chairman? Because of Bernie Sanders. By Ed O’Keefe

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) says he’s backing a Minnesota congressman to lead the Democratic National Committee for a simple reason: because Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) likes him.

Schumer, in an interview Friday, said he’s supporting a bid by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to run the DNC because he comes with the support of Sanders, a key liberal voice in the Senate who also earned a spot this past week on Schumer’s new 10-senator leadership team.

Schumer is set to become the first New Yorker and first Jewish man to serve as a Senate leader and has been a staunch defender of Israel throughout his four decades in public service. But Ellison has been an outspoken critic of Israel and its relationship with Palestinians in the past.

Earlier in his career, Ellison apologized for or withdrew a number of controversial statements, including likening former president George W. Bush’s consolidation of power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to the rise of Adolf Hitler, to defending the leader of the Nation of Islam, to labeling his own 2012 reelection opponent a “lowlife scumbag.”

[Keith Ellison would be a bold pick for DNC chair — and a controversial one]

Some of those moves would seem to put him at odds with Schumer, his strong support for Israel and the strong support he enjoys from Jewish voters across New York.

“I’m not worried about the Israel stuff even though he and I disagree,” Schumer said Friday when asked about Ellison’s past statements.

Michael Kile Derailing the Marrakech Express

Another positive in the ascension of Donald Trump is the gloom his impending presidency has cast over the jet-setting catastropharians gathered to promote dire visions of the planet’s future and, of course, their careers, budgets and computer-modelled fabulism.
All aboard the United Nations “last chance” gravy train, COP22. Hurry, you hippies, hucksters and hallucinogenic fellow travellers, hurry. Be quick, if you want a free ride on the Marrakech Express.

Hallucinogen: A drug that causes profound distortions in a person’s perceptions of reality. People often see images, hear sounds, and feel sensations that seem real but do not exist. Some hallucinogens produce rapid and intense emotional swings, as seen last week in certain cohorts in North America, especially after passage (56 to 44 percent) of California Proposition 64 legalising adult use of recreational marijuana in that state.

Could there be a more appropriate location than this exotic Moroccan city — immortalised by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the 1960s — to celebrate the global ambitions of the UN’s Climate Caliphate? The intention is surely noble: two weeks getting high on self-congratulation, other people’s money, junk science and the eco-worrier’s favourite over-the-counter drug, DAGW (dangerous anthropogenic global warming), now rebranded as DACC (dangerous anthropogenic climate change) to entrench public credulity.

Climate-caliphate: 1. Entity led by a climate-caliph, generally an eco-zealot, ex-politician or career bureaucrat turned climate-control propagandist. 2. Global climate-caliphate: theocratic one-world government or de facto government. 3. Any ideology or aspiration promoted by a militant fossil fuel free sect, or ‘champion of the Earth’, such as UNEP. 4. Any radical group intending to behead, disembowel, or otherwise degrade Western economies with the two-edged sword of wealth redistribution (aka ‘climate reparations’) and ‘decarbonisation’, while reciting mantras about sustainability, slow-onset events and saving the planet. Also known as Agenda 21.

Last week’s unscheduled arrival of the US Great Again train has, however, upset the Programme. It was arguably a black swan event– “the biggest FU in human history”, according to Michael Moore (video here).

As the news reverberated around the world, the climate establishment was shocked to discover that not all swans are white and female. So perhaps it also could be the case that not all “extreme weather events”, or global temperature fluctuations, have much to do with a few hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if anything.

For many COP22 delegates, the clock of catastrophe suddenly shifted much closer to midnight. “A third of the people here are walking around like zombies, like the walking dead, not sure what to do,” said UC Berkeley Professor Daniel Kammen, speaking from Morocco. Many believe the honeymoon is over.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Regenerating liver function. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s BiolineRX in conjunction with Ben Gurion University, Hadassah Medical Center and Novartis has developed a novel treatment BL-1220 that can restore liver function in patients with liver disease and injury. http://www.biolinerx.com/default.asp?pageid=16&itemid=469

Success in trials of tardive dyskinesia treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) I highlighted (Dec 2015) Teva’s SD-809 (deutetrabenazine) treatment for tardive dyskinesia. The disease causes uncontrollable movements in around 500,000 US patients. The second Phase III trial of the treatment produced statistically significant results.
http://www.tevapharm.com/news/teva_announces_positive_top_line_data_from_second_phase_iii_study_of_sd_809_in_tardive_dyskinesia_td_09_16.aspx

New treatment for Alzheimer’s. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Neurim is conducting a Phase 2 trial of its Piromelatine treatment, for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The 26-week trial will compare once-daily oral doses of Piromelatine to placebo in approximately 500 patients diagnosed with mild AD.
http://www.neurim.com/news/2016-09-28/neurim-pharmaceuticals-announces-first-patients-enrollments-in-recognition-phase-ii-clinical-trial-of-piromelatine-for-mild-alzheimers-disease/

Diagnoses using molecular biomarkers. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s ImmunArray is developing blood-based tests that support the diagnosis and management of complex acute and chronic immune and neurodegenerative diseases, including brain injury. It has just received a major investment from America’s Quanterix Corporation.
http://www.immunarray.com/2016/09/28/quanterix-and-immunarray-teaming-up-to-address-neurodegenerative-disease/

Filling a gap in dental services. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s CephX provides dental and orthodontic practitioners with Cephalometric X-Ray analyses, image archiving and patient record management – all securely maintained on the cloud (rather in the dental surgery).
https://cephx.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfMyaTqGUx0

Pomegranate oil to protect the brain. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Granalix has launched GranaGard – a food supplement that prevented neurodegeneration diseases in clinical tests. GranaGard, is a submicron (nanodrops) Pomegranate Seed Oil emulsion with 80% Punicic acid – one of the strongest natural antioxidants.
https://granalix.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxYfRO2jPHE

Telehealth device gets FDA approval. I reported previously (Aug 2015) on Israel’s Tytocare and its handheld diagnostic device. The device has been enhanced and Tytocare has received US FDA clearance for its digital stethoscope that performs enhanced remote diagnosis of a patient without the physician being present.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161101005724/en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8rwFMW5VhI

GE’s new CT-scanner is a Revolution. GE’s Haifa engineering team was a major player in developing the Revolution CT (Computed Tomography) scanner. It exposes patients to only 20% of the radiation of previous models and the scan takes less than a second. The first Israeli Revolution has been installed at Sheba Medical Center, near Tel Aviv. http://www.timesofisrael.com/ge-israel-team-plays-key-role-in-new-ct-scanner/

Lifesaving solutions. Israel’s Inovytec develops solutions for out-of-hospital medical emergencies, to increase patient survivability. These include the world’s first and only automated oxygen defibrillator, a safe airway management collar and an ultralight ventilator. It has just received funds from Germany’s Rohn Innovations.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-rhon-klinikum-invests-in-israeli-co-inovytec-1001160844
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgiXN6EoOr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkFVYORL9Gw
http://www.inovytec.com/#

IDF field hospitals are the best in the world. Israel is the first country to earn the United Nations’ World Health Organization’s highest ranking for its IDF field hospital unit. It received “Type 3” designation, along with some additional “specialized care” recognitions, which technically made it a “Type 3 plus”.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-ranks-idf-emergency-medical-team-as-no-1-in-the-world/

More power to your hearing. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (May 29) on the rechargeable hearing aid technology from Israel’s Humavox. Now leading hearing technology firm Starkey will integrate Humavox’s wireless charging into Starkey’s advanced hearing devices. Simply put the hearing aid in its box to recharge it.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161018005824/en/Humavox-Partners-Starkey-Hearing-Technologies-Bring-Wireless

A Harvard student’s open letter to the delicate flowers of the Ivy League By Jacob Russell

So your candidate lost. You have a right to be upset, frustrated and angry, but you also have an obligation to be respectful to others and to the will of the American people. Intellectual hypocrisy continues every day on campuses, where opinions that are not the norm are vilified or silenced.

Imagine if you treated people of different races as you treat people with different opinions. There would be a tremendous outcry! But somehow it is fine to discriminate against those with different views.

Did it ever occur to you that this may be why people voted for Trump? That it might not have been the â€racist proclivities of the U.S. or the dangerous nationalism of the people, but that it was people who tell them not to think or speak the way they do.

Trump won, and he did not overthrow the government or kill people to silence them. He won in the standard fashion by gettinng 270 votes in the Electoral College. As I said, you have a right to be upset, but what we have on our hands now is an embarrassment.

And this does not lie only with the undergrads. Universities themselves are making all types of provisions to coddle those who have been traumatized by the will of the American people. At Harvard, the Introduction to Economics midterm was made optional; the reason provided was that the election results came in too late, but we all know it would have been mandatory if Clinton had won by 10 p.m., as expected.

If the faculty was worried about students not getting enough sleep the night before the exam, then the exam should have been scheduled for a different day. A note to all faculty: If you did not know, the election is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was going to go one way or the other, and the undergrads and faculty should have known that and been prepared for any result. The Economics Department’s decision to make the midterm optional has set a bad precedent. Does this mean that whenever someone is upset, he/she can opt out of taking an exam? If you had the hubris to make the midterm the day after the election, you should have stuck with your decision instead of capitulating to the hysteria of the Flowers.

Distorting the Iran-Deal Bill A pair of Corker apologists distort the record on Congress’s review of Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement By Andrew C. McCarthy

When a couple of lawyers lecture you about your “fundamental misunderstanding of our Constitution and the relative powers of Congress and the president in foreign policy,” ask yourself this: Have they cited the provisions of constitutional or statutory law they claim you’ve misunderstood? If not, if they’re hiding the ball, you’re probably being conned. Alas, that is the case with the disingenuous defense of Senator Bob Corker’s Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA), offered on Thursday by Lester Munson and Jamil Jaffer, two former staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Corker chairs.

The senator’s nose is out of joint over a National Review editorial this week. With his name among those being floated to be appointed secretary of state in the Trump administration, the editors observed that Corker “was last seen facilitating President Obama’s Iran-deal path through Congress, in one of the prime exhibits of GOP fecklessness in recent years.”

Truer words were never spoken. Professors Munson and Jaffer try in vain to paper over this fact, replaying the sleight-of-hand their former boss has spun since first proposing the woeful INARA. They misstate both the law and the position of INARA naysayers — of whom, I am proud to say, I was among the most ardent.

Let’s deal first with the matter of misrepresenting the naysayers. Contrary to the professors’ claim, it is not true that “many people think Congress ought to have ‘forced’ the president to submit the Iran deal as a treaty.” Nor do Corker’s detractors believe “Congress should have ‘made’ the Iran deal a treaty.” Congress has no power to coerce the president to comply with the Constitution’s treaty clause (art. II, sec. 2, cl. 2), a provision the authors take pains to avoid addressing.

What we in the opposition argued is that, if Congress does not undermine it, the Constitution is plenty strong enough to foil the ambitions of a rogue president. True, Congress cannot compel the president to execute our law faithfully. But if the president is derelict in his duty to submit an international agreement to the Senate for its approval, or to the full Congress for implementation as ordinary legislation, then the agreement will not have the force of American law. It remains a mere executive agreement between the president and other chiefs of state. That means it may be rescinded at any time, by either the president who entered it or a successor president.

Islamic Terrorists not Poor and Illiterate, but Rich and Educated by Giulio Meotti

“The better young people are integrated, the greater the chance is that they radicalize. This hypothesis is supported by a lot of evidence”. — From a report by researchers at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

“The proportions of [Islamic State] administrators but also of suicide fighters increase with education,” according to a World Bank report. “Moreover, those offering to become suicide bombers ranked on average in the more educated group.”

Britain’s MI5 revealed that “two-thirds of the British suspects have a middle-class profile and those who want to become suicide bombers are often the most educated”.

Researchers have discovered that “the richer the countries are the more likely will provide foreign recruits to the terrorist group [ISIS].”

The West seems to have trouble accepting that terrorists are not driven by inequality, but by hatred for Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian values of the West.

For the Nazis, the “inferior race” (the Jews) did not deserve to exist; for the Stalinists, the “enemies of the people” were not entitled to continue living; for the Islamists, it is the West itself that does not deserve to exist.

It is anti-Semitism, not poverty, that led the Palestinian Authority to name a school after Abu Daoud, mastermind of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

“There is a stereotype that young people from Europe who leave for Syria are victims of a society that does not accept them and does not offer them sufficient opportunities… Another common stereotype in the debate in Belgium is that, despite research which refutes this, radicalization is still far too often misunderstood as a process resulting from failed integration… I therefore dare say that the better young people are integrated, the greater the chance is that they radicalize. This hypothesis is supported by a lot of evidence.”

How Trump Can Completely Withdraw U.S. From UN ‘Climate’ Deals By Tom Harris

President-elect Donald Trump has said he will cancel American involvement in the Paris Agreement on climate change. Commentators have pointed out that, under the treaty’s rules, Trump would need to wait three years from the date on which it came into force, November 4, 2016, to officially notify the United Nations of U.S. cancellation. Even then, the withdrawal will not take effect until one year later.

However, there is a faster, more effective way for the U.S. to exit the Paris Agreement.

The above guidelines are indeed within the Paris Agreement — but UN climate agreements are actually based on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).

The FCCC was signed by President George H. W. Bush and other world leaders at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Per the FCCC, signatory countries are given the option of quitting provided they wait three years from the date on which the Convention came into force, March 21, 1994, with the withdrawal to take effect one year later.

So the U.S. could exit the FCCC one year after officially notifying the UN, which it can do at any time.

Most importantly, exiting the FCCC would remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement as well. Read the crucially important phrase from Article 25 of the FCCC:

Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having withdrawn from any protocol to which it is a Party.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS NOVEMBER 19, 1863

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Donald Trump Taps Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as CIA Director The congressman is one of the harshest critics of the Iran nuclear deal By Felicia Schwartz see note please

JUST FOR THE RECORD: This is where Mike Pompeo stands on Israel

Withhold UN funding until voluntary and program-specific. (Aug 2011)
Rated -5 by AAI, indicating an anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record(May 2012)
Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday he will nominate Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which would place the former Army officer and five-year member of Congress at the helm of the spy agency that has been heavily involved in global counterterrorism operations since the 2001 terror attacks.

Name: Mike Pompeo Age: 52Education: U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Law School

Background: After graduating from West Point, Mr. Pompeo served as a cavalry officer “patrolling the Iron Curtain” before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division, according to the biography on his congressional website. He went to Harvard after he left active duty, later returning home to Kansas to run two small businesses before he was elected to the House in 2010 as part of the tea-party wave. He is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and he was a member of the special committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Outlook: Mr. Pompeo would take the reins of the CIA as Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail he wanted to bring back the practice of harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse,” as well as refilling the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with prisoners.
Those views have prompted some concern among former military officers and intelligence officials. The current CIA director, John Brennan, in 2014 publicly distanced the agency from its use of the controversial interrogation techniques after a scathing Senate report found them to be ineffective.

While in Congress, Mr. Pompeo emerged as a staunch critic of the Obama administration’s pursuit of an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. After Republicans failed to scuttle the deal, Mr. Pompeo became active in the push to hold Iran to account for noncompliance and repeatedly has pledged to work to undo the deal. At the CIA, he would have more access to secret information about Iran’s activities since the deal took effect earlier this year. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Emerging Trump Cabinet The first three picks go to loyalists amid signs of political outreach.

Donald Trump’s transition seems to be emerging from its early turmoil, and on Friday he filled three important jobs with campaign loyalists. More encouraging is that he appears to be looking for figures of stature outside his inner circle.

The President-elect has a penchant for rewarding political loyalty, and that has paid off for Jeff Sessions as Mr. Trump’s choice for Attorney General. The Alabama Republican was the first sitting Senator to endorse Mr. Trump, and he and aide Stephen Miller refined the candidate’s populist message and defended him through the squalls.

If there’s any doubt that Mr. Trump will follow through on his immigration promises, the choice of Mr. Sessions puts that to rest. He opposes illegal and most legal immigration, including H-1B visas for high-skilled professionals. He’ll oversee the civil-rights division and immigration courts, and let’s hope Mr. Sessions’s governance will be more tolerant than his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Then again, Mr. Sessions is an accomplished lawyer who has served as a U.S. Attorney and state AG. His opposition to President Obama’s executive immigration orders were grounded in his separation-of-powers constitutionalism more than mere politics. He has also joined with Democrats in pursuing criminal-justice reform.

Progressives are nonetheless already smearing Mr. Sessions as a racist, but that’s what they say about every Southern Republican. In 1986 a Joe Biden-Ted Kennedy special derailed the young lawyer from Mobile for a federal judgeship with innuendo and hearsay. Modern liberals may be surprised to learn that Mr. Sessions helped to desegregate Alabama public schools as U.S. Attorney, and he won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial. The 1981 case broke the Klan in the heart of dixie.