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November 2020

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Another week another compilation of Israel’s remarkable and outsize contributions to the health and welfare and quality of life of millions of people in the world, brought to us by Michael Ordman. rsk

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Retinal scanner for early Alzheimer’s test. Israeli-founded Canadian-based RetiSpec has developed the RS1, which uses hyperspectral retinal imaging and AI to examine the back of the eye. It can identify harmful amyloid proteins and other evidence that indicate Alzheimer’s Disease, even before the patient shows symptoms. 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-duos-early-alzheimers-detection-test-brings-cure-one-step-closer/

https://www.retispec.com/

Osteoporosis screening for Scotland. Israel’s Zebra Medical Vision (reported here previously) is to trial its technology at the National Health Service in Glasgow and Assuta Medical Centers in Israel. It will be used to detect people at risk of developing osteoporosis.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-uk-teams-to-use-ai-to-help-flag-patients-at-risk-for-osteoporosis/

Pacemaker for the brain. For the first time in Israel, surgeons at Israel’s Sourasky (Ichilov) medical center implanted a Medtronic Percept DBS pacemaker in an epileptic patient. It records brain activity in addition to performing electrical stimulation. Medtronic owns several Israeli companies and has an Israeli R&D center.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/first-epileptic-patient-in-israel-gets-innovative-pacemaker/

Clinical psychology on your phone. (TY Stuart Palmer) Israel’s GGTUDE (mentioned here previously) has 7 free apps in its digital mental-health platform. It has now added GG Self Care, which provides a research-backed, personalized digital intervention for Covid-19-related psychological difficulties. Just 3 minutes a day.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bt58YY0FI2f2oRNpl_IctNIFu2TnYQej/view  https://ggtude.com/

Crystal clear hearing. (TY Janglo) Tel Aviv University researchers have discovered that the hair cells in the inner ear, vital for hearing, develop before birth in the same way that crystals form. They proved this using new 3D time-lapse imaging technology and computational simulations of the development of atoms in the hair cells. 

https://english.m.tau.ac.il/news/ear-spiral

Use your phone to check your skin. Israel’s Derma Detect has developed an algorithm and AI applications for analyzing digital images to detect, treat, and manage non-pigmented skin lesions. The company’s platform analyzes images of the skin using deep learning and computer vision. Currently being trialed in Israel.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hillels-tech-corner-dermadetect-uses-phones-to-detect-skin-conditions-650413

https://www.dermadetect.com/  https://finder.startupnationcentral.org/company_page/derma-detect

German insurance gets Israeli vital signs. Israel’s Binah.ai (reported here previously) is partnering Europe’s largest insurance group, Generali Deutschland. The German company will integrate Binah’s health status vital signs monitoring technology in its new mobile application named VitalSigns&Care.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3876299,00.html

New reports about election manipulation read like a Tom Clancy novel By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/new_reports_about_election_manipulation_read_like_a_tom_clancy_novel.html

On Friday, a retired top Air Force intelligence analyst stated with certainty during an interview that special forces had secured a CIA-run facility in Germany that had computers showing election manipulation. If this report is real, we are witnessing the biggest coup attempt, sabotage, and treason in American history. No matter what, though, because this report is out there and comes from serious people, it deserves serious investigation.

I have no idea whether this raid happened. Its having taken place, however, is consistent with my ruminations about Trump’s peculiarly-timed shake-up at the Pentagon: Firing defense secretary Mark Esper and replace him with Christopher Miller, a special forces man; moving special forces into their own command, rather than having them function as subsets of other military branches; and firing potentially disloyal members of the civilian Defense Policy Board. These actions indicated that Trump was clearing the decks for something big.

In this post, I’ll sum up the most recent reports about events in Germany, although without taking any stand as to their veracity because I can’t take a stand. I don’t know enough.

For several days, rumors have swirled that there was a “military” raid in Germany, either against Scytl (the Spanish company that processes American voting data in a facility in Frankfurt, Germany) or against a CIA station that is also located in Germany. On Friday, those rumors coalesced into an affirmative report about the CIA station in Germany.

Anomalies in Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020 A Quantitative Analysis of Decisive Vote Updates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia on and after Election Night

https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020

“It is our belief that the extraordinarily anomalous nature of the studied vote updates here, combined with the staggering political implications, demands immediate and thorough investigation.”

Executive Summary

In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny. 

This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.

With this report, we rely only on publicly available data from the New York Times to identify and analyze statistical anomalies in key states. Looking at 8,954 individual vote updates (differences in vote totals for each candidate between successive changes to the running vote totals, colloquially also referred to as “dumps” or “batches”), we discover a remarkably consistent mathematical property: there is a clear inverse relationship between difference in candidates’ vote counts and and the ratio of the vote counts. (In other words, it’s not surprising to see vote updates with large margins, and it’s not surprising to see vote updates with very large ratios of support between the candidates, but it is surprising to see vote updates which are both). 

The significance of this property will be further explained in later sections of this report. Nearly every vote update, across states of all sizes and political leanings follow this statistical pattern. A very small number, however, are especially aberrant. Of the seven vote updates which follow the pattern the least, four individual vote updates — two in Michigan, one in Wisconsin, and one in Georgia — were particularly anomalous and influential  with respect to this property and all occurred within the same five hour window.

Bowing Down to Obama By Armond White

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/review-the-way-i-see-it-obama-dream-worshipful-documentaries/?utm_source=recirc-

Two new worshipful documentaries tie in to #44’s propagandizing memoir.

‘How can we miss you when you won’t go away?” political podcaster Yvette Carnell joked two years ago when Barack Obama began his comeback tour by making sideline pronouncements about the state of the nation after his brief retirement. Now the comeback is official, with two new Kool-Aid-drinker Obama hagiographies to prove it.

Obama Dream and The Way I See It are released in theaters and on streaming like promotional tie-ins to accompany the publication of Obama’s latest literary memoir, The Promised Land. Both films provide audiovisual aid to the 800-plus-page book. Reliance on pictorial persuasion in these docs brings to mind how friendly the media coverage of Obama has always been, in contrast to the media hostility aimed at George W. Bush and Donald Trump. It’s the B.O. and A.O. media — journalism Before Obama and After Obama.

Almost four years since the Obama administration walked from the White House to its Kalorama bunker near the White House, these documentaries remind us of what that media thrall from 2008 to 2016 was like. (Full disclosure: I had to devote a large section of my book Make Spielberg Great Again to Obama’s debilitating artistic influence.)

Obama Dream was made by Italian filmmaker Francesco Pavarati, who followed the 2008 campaign stops, traveling 20,000 miles from Denver through 14 states to Election Night, giving the perspective of an infatuated outsider. Pavarati is astounded by the candidate and aghast at America itself. He offers fever-dream imagery of a nation as bewitched and enraptured as he was and apparently still is.

Monumental Misdirection at the Mellon Foundation By Brian T. Allen

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/monumental-misdirection-at-the-mellon-foundation/

Hundreds of millions for woke public art aimed to stoke victimologies.

M ost monuments are boringly bad, aesthetically mediocre, and engaging mostly when pigeons, unimpressed by great causes or men, do what pigeons do to outdoor art. Their judgments are ecumenical and evacuational.

Pigeons also would probably disagree with me on one point. We have too many monuments. You’d think the tortured, 20-year path of the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington would put people off monuments for a while. It’s not as ugly as it might have been. Oddly, it’s best seen at night, when the big mesh screen makes sense, though who’s walking around the Washington Mall these days after dark?

The Mellon Foundation thinks we need new and improved monuments. Lost in the COVID catastrophe is last month’s big news that the Mellon Foundation has committed $250 million over five years to pay for new monuments or historic storytelling spaces, freshen existing ones with context relevant to today, and remove monuments no one wants because they are bad art or they no longer edify.

That’s a huge amount of money and the primary commitment of the country’s biggest arts and humanities foundation. It’s to be taken seriously and followed closely. This is the foundation’s first step in implementing a strategic shift announced in June. For years, it supported blue-chip arts-and-humanities projects. Now, it’s in the social-justice business. It’s focusing its money on “building just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.”

Natan Sharansky and the Meaning of Freedom By Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/columns/natan-sharansky-and-the-meaning-of-freedom/

Life lessons from the dissident, politician, and activist.

Natan Sharansky has been a computer scientist, a chess player, a refusenik, a dissident, a political prisoner, a party leader, a government minister, a nonprofit executive, and a bestselling author. He never expected to be a school counselor.

But the coronavirus dashes expectations. In early March, when the virus began to appear in Jewish communities outside New York City, Sharansky found himself online, in an unaccustomed position. He began to share with students and parents whose schools were closed how he had coped during years in confinement.“At first, it seemed absurd, even obscene,” Sharansky writes in his latest book, Never Alone, coauthored with the historian Gil Troy. “How could my experience of playing chess in my head in my punishment cell compare to being cooped up in gadget-filled homes wired to the internet — with computer chess — especially because this isolation is imposed to protect people, not break them?”

What Sharansky realized is that the costs of lockdowns do not depend on the reasons behind them. The sudden and seemingly arbitrary interruption of individual plans, movements, and relationships causes psychological harm. Sharansky recorded a brief YouTube video for the Jewish Agency — you can watch it here — offering his five tips for quarantine. Recognize the importance of your choices and behavior, Sharansky advised. Understand that some things are beyond your control. Keep laughing. Enjoy your hobbies. Consider yourself part of a larger cause.

“Surprisingly,” Sharansky writes, “this short clip went viral, reaching so many people all over the world within a few days that it made me wonder why even bother writing this book.” His reaction was another example of his droll and often self-deprecating wit. The video, however helpful it may be, does not match the power and wisdom of Never Alone. Part autobiography, part meditation on Jewish community, the book ties together the themes of Sharansky’s earlier work, from his prison memoir, Fear No Evil (1988), to his defense of cultural particularity, Defending Identity (2008). It is a moving story of emancipation and connection, of freedom and meaning.

Zuckerberg-Funded Group Comes Into Spotlight in Election-Related Court Cases By Zachary Stieber

https://www.theepochtimes.com/zuckerberg-funded-group-comes-into-spotlight-in-

A group that received hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is accused in post-election lawsuits of contributing to constitutional violations in key battleground states.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a national nonprofit based in Illinois, provided funding to over 2,500 election offices across the country to run elections amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Funds were used to pay poll workers, put up ballot drop boxes, and acquire mail-in ballot equipment and supplies.

More than $6 million was doled out to officials in Fulton County, Georgia, and to five cities in Wisconsin, according to lawsuits filed this month. The funds were sent to facilitate violations of state law, the lawsuits allege.

The money was sent through agreements that had municipalities run elections in contravention to state law, according to the lawsuits, which were filed by the Thomas More Foundation’s Amistad Project. Accepting funding from a private group like the center is barred by state and federal law, the lawsuits allege.

“There is nothing in Wisconsin state law that allows cities and counties to take in millions of dollars sourced to an incredibly wealthy, interested, and partisan actor (i.e., Zuckerberg) in order to ‘assist’ those cities and counties in administering the vote,” the Wisconsin court filing states. Wisconsin election officials said on Friday that filing was full of “meritless legal arguments.”

Joe Biden’s Path to the Presidency is Eroding With Each Revelation Of Massive Voter Fraud Mark Gray

https://canadafreepress.com/article/joe-bidens-path-to-the-presidency-is-eroding-with-each-revelation-of-massiv

As it stands, Joe Biden has not been elected to anything and can only be the president-elect once the Electoral College votes for him on December 14. Until then, he is the potential President-elect and nothing more.

The Electoral College vote can only happen if Trump concedes or all the legal challenges asserting that the election was stolen fail. As Trump won’t concede until all legal and constitutional options are tried and tested, the future of the Republic rests in the hands of judges.

The beauty of the US Constitution is that it is written to protect the Ruled from corrupt Rulers and it does contain a procedure, called a contingent election, to resolve presidential election disputes. Should the courts find that voter fraud did destroy the integrity of the election they can stop the certification of those results which could result in neither Biden nor Trump having the 270 Electoral College votes required to become President.

In such a case, the Constitution pushes the decision back to the State legislatures with each State being given 1 vote in the contingent election, meaning massive California and tiny Rhode Island are considered equals. A simple majority of 26 votes then determines the winner.

The Republicans run 31 of the 50 US States and have control of 26 House delegations so this process is likely to choose Trump simply based on party lines.

A POISONED NARRATIVE: MELANIE PHILLIPS *****

https://mailchi.mp/cb0ad6e61f1b/krd-news-a-poisoned-narrative?e=9365a7c638

When he was President of the United States, Barack Obama presided over an administration marked by unprecedented hostility to Israel. While he intoned the usual boiler-plate pieties of “candid friendship” deployed by the anti-Israel left and he maintained the security funding for Israel whose erosion would have outraged the American people, he persistently undermined its security and empowered those whose who were intent upon its extermination.

Only now, though, with the publication of his new memoir can we discover the depth of his malevolent ignorance about the history of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish people.

Dov Lipman has written an analysis of this poisonous account for the Jewish News Syndicate, which you can read here.

Here is a passage from [Obama’s] book which purports to provide the history of the origins of the modern State of Israel:

The conflict between Arabs and Jews had been an open sore on the region for almost a century, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British, who were then occupying Palestine, committed to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs. Over the next twenty or so years, Zionist leaders mobilised a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organised highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements.

This is a travesty. Here are some examples of Obama’s eye-watering errors:

* He says in 1917, when the British issued the Balfour Declaration, they were “occupying Palestine”.

They were not. It was then part of the Ottoman empire.  

* Obama writes instead that the British “committed to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs”.

He totally ignores the fact that the League of Nations, the world body of that time which was creating new states throughout the region after the defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War, mandated in a binding treaty the creation of the Jewish national homeland throughout Palestine. He ignores the fact that, under this agreement, the British accepted a mandate in 1922 to create that Jewish home in Palestine and to that end to settle Jews throughout that land (which consisted of what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza). He totally ignores that fact that the League stated:

Recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.

Pennsylvania Senator: ‘Mounting Evidence’ Shows Election Was Compromised BY Zachary Stieber

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-senator-mounting-evidence-shows-el

A growing body of evidence shows the presidential election in Pennsylvania was compromised, a state senator said Saturday.

“There is mounting evidence that the PA presidential election was compromised. If this is the case, under Article II, Section 1.2 of the U.S. Constitution, the state legislature has the sole authority to direct the manner of selecting delegates to the Electoral College,” state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, said on Twitter.

“This power was given to the state legislature for the purpose of safeguarding the appointment of our president, specifically contemplating corruption and ensuring that the people are not disenfranchised through a corrupt election process,” he added. “Therefore, we are introducing a resolution to exercise our obligation and authority to appoint delegates to the Electoral College.”

Mastriano and other state lawmakers announced Friday they will soon introduce a resolution to dispute the results of the election, alleging that “documented irregularities and improprieties associated with mail-in balloting, pre-canvassing, and canvassing have undermined our elector process and as a result we cannot accept certification of the results in statewide races.”

The resolution calls on the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to recognize the alleged irregularities and improprieties and disapprove of what lawmakers describe as the infringement on the General Assembly’s authority to regulate elections.