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September 2022

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s ‘Peace Partner’ Is Slaughtering Israelis by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on September 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18941/israel-palestinians-peace-partner

These two bodies [Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling faction, Fatah] are headed by one man: Mahmoud Abbas, who has zero compunction about his loyalists murdering and wounding Israelis. On the contrary, he encourages it and pays generously for it — with money from Europe and the United States.

Despite [an extremely long list of terrorist attacks against Israel], Fatah is also often mystifyingly referred to by some Israelis and Westerners as a “moderate” Palestinian faction as opposed to the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Fatah, however, has proved over the years that its actions and rhetoric are actually no different from those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the terror groups that openly call for the elimination of Israel.

In 1993, Yasser Arafat, then leader of Fatah and the PLO, committed “to a peaceful resolution of the conflict” with Israel and claimed that the PLO “renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence.” His loyalists, however, continued to murder and wound Israelis even after making these commitments, signing the Oslo Accords and supposedly beginning an Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.”

The groups are so proud of their terrorism that they have started filming their gunmen preparing and carrying out the attacks. They are, in addition, calling on Palestinians to escalate the fight against Israel, while enthusiastically and warmly endorsing the terrorists.

The growing involvement of Fatah and PA members in terrorism is one of the direct results of the Palestinian leadership’s extreme incitement against Israel. Abbas and his aides continue to level the worst charges and libels against Israel. It is this kind of rhetoric, as well as generous payments, that encourage Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis. The fact that Abbas and his entourage do not even bother to rein in or denounce the terrorists is apparently seen by many Palestinians as a green light to continue the attacks.

The international community, for its part, is so preoccupied with bashing Israel that no one is calling out these putative Palestinian “peace partners” over their role in terrorism. This silence is also encouraging these Palestinian “peace partners” to continue their attacks.

That is why the Fatah-affiliated Lions’ Den group has felt confident enough to publish a new threat: “O Jews, The Countdown For Your Demise Has Begun; Stabbings, Car-Rammings, Clashes.”

This is the “peace partner” that the Biden administration is hoping to assist in establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel. With a partner like this, it is easy to imagine what the situation in the Middle East will look like — more violence, terrorism and bloodshed. Israel’s “peace partners” are doing everything in their power to confirm the fears of Israelis about the presence of a Palestinian state just a handful of kilometers from their homes.

In the past few months, there has been a rise in the number of terrorist attacks against Israelis carried out by gunmen belonging to, or associated with, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling faction, Fatah. These two bodies are headed by one man: Mahmoud Abbas, who has zero compunction about his loyalists murdering and wounding Israelis. On the contrary, he encourages it and pays generously for it — with money from Europe and the United States.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on September 26th, 2022

The very first newsletter from Israel in 5783 is Michael Ordman’s weekly compilation of Israel’s dazzling contributions to the health and welfare of the entire world in science, medicine, technology and rescue institutions. This adds considerably to wishes for a sweet new year. Rsk

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Israeli-led European cancer consortium. Professors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Hadassah Cancer Research Institute are leading CanceRNA – a European consortium working to develop novel immunotherapy treatments for cancer. The consortium will initially focus on treating acute myeloid leukemia.

https://www.jns.org/israelis-lead-intl-hunt-for-innovative-cancer-treatments/   

Turning cancer into a chronic disease. Ofer Shalev, Founder & CEO at Israel’s New Phase (see here previously) spoke at CTech’s Mind the Tech NY Conference.  New Phase’s hyperthermic therapy reduces cancer from Stage 4 to Stage 2 so patients can live with a better quality of life. Clinical trials have started.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bjux3bn11j  https://newphase.co.il/clinical-trials/

The full picture of cancer diagnosis. (TY UWI) The death of his mother led Dean Bitan to found Israel’s Imagene (see here previously). The startup has developed tech that can conduct a full molecular analysis on a digitized biopsy image in real time and give a result in minutes, instead of the current situation of a few weeks.

https://www.israel21c.org/diagnosing-cancer-from-biopsies-in-minutes-not-weeks/

Finding the right antidepressant. Israel’s Genetika+ is developing a precision tool to determine if a particular antidepressant will work for an individual. It will also apparently highlight any side effects. (See also Taliaz.)

https://nocamels.com/2022/09/brain-in-a-dish-tech-antidepressant/  https://www.genetikaplus.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oovQR2j1M8

Algae for mind and body. A recent clinical study has shown that AstaPure Arava® by Israel’s Solabia- Algatech Nutrition benefits the immune system and lowers stress. It boosts the gut microbiome while lowering the stress hormone cortisol. The result is a much better resistance to infections.

https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/astapure-arava-microalgae-astaxanthin-shows-beneficial-mind-body-effects-301624135.html

A new center for neuroscience. Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is partnering with Thomas Jefferson University in the USA, to promote neuroscience research and clinical treatment at both institutions. It includes construction of a cutting-edge neuroscience center on Sheba’s Tel HaShomer campus, targeted to open in late 2024.

https://www.jns.org/sheba-medical-center-thomas-jefferson-university-to-build-neuroscience-center/

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Nowhere Mann It’s beyond time to get the government out of education. By Larry Sand

By on September 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/25/nowhere-mann/

In a recent New York Times column, “School Is for Everyone,” Anya Kamenetz lavished praise on 19th-century education reformer Horace Mann, who saw public schools as a “crucible of democracy.” His goal was to have the state take over schools and increase taxes to pay for it all.

Mann and his acolytes insisted that shifting the reins of educational power from private to public hands would “yield better teaching methods and materials, greater efficiency, superior service to the poor, and a stronger, more cohesive nation.” He even ventured to predict that if public schooling were widely adopted and given enough time to work, “nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete,” and “the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.”

On the macro level, Mann was dead wrong. Our nation, with its massive education bureaucracy, is more divided than ever, crime is skyrocketing, and we have more “human ills” than we can handle.

On the micro level, he also misses the boat. In a rebuttal to Kamenetz, former National Review writer Kevin Williamson asks why “some abstract egalitarian ideal should be given predominance over the real-world interests of actual children and young adults whose lives would be improved—not in every case, but in many cases—by access to different kinds of education better suited to their own needs and interests.”

Williamson gets to the heart of the matter. What is the primary purpose of a school? To make good citizens? To teach children how to earn a living eventually? To foster creativity?

The correct answer is that parents should be able to send their kid to a school that shares their own vision and values. The government’s vision—with bureaucrats and teacher union honchos running the show—may be very different than theirs.

In fact, Mann’s vision, nearly 200 years old now, has been fully exposed. Due to the extended COVID-related lockdowns, parents are fleeing the government education plantation in unprecedented numbers for private schools, microschools, homeschools, etc. But Kamenetz bemoans this development, claiming:

This country has seemingly never had a harder time embracing a shared reality or believing in common values. The parents who are showing up at school boards yelling about ‘critical race theory’ and pronouns are trying to get public schools to bend history, reality and values to their liking. I disagree with them vehemently, but I also want them to stay in the argument. It would be far worse if these parents went home and created their own schools. Because their children would then grow up with one set of unchallenged beliefs, while my children and the children of like-minded people would grow up with another—emerging as adults who have no hope of understanding one another, much less living together peacefully.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Remembering Hate Speech What we used to know as “hate speech” is now presidentially acceptable speech, and what has followed from it is no surprise. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/25/remembering-hate-speech/

It has been a canard of the Left that “words matter.” We are lectured that “hate speech” leads inevitably to street violence.

So how ironic that the Left defames nearly half of America as dangerous “semi-fascist” extremists, white-raged and privileged, ultra MAGA, and guilty of all sorts of thought crimes from secession to civil insurrection? And what is the result?

Does this constant demonization matter? And what are the bitter fruits of such labors? After all, what did Barack Obama long ago mean by “clingers” or once Hillary Clinton by “deplorables”  and “irredeemables”?

What did Joe Biden imply by “dregs” and “chumps” and “semi-fascists”? Or what did the FBI lovebirds really mean by smelly Walmart goers and “hillbillies”? After a point, did not America get this monotonous message?

And what does Joe Biden really mean when he recycles his academic advisors’ tired tropes of right-wing insurrectionists threatening the republic?

MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. . . . MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards—backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love . . . They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country . . . MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

When the president fuels the now familiar old narrative by claiming that 75 million who voted for Donald Trump do not live in the “light of truth” but in the “shadow of lies,” and they do not follow “the rule of law,” some questions naturally arise.

First, what evidence does the president adduce to prove that 75 million Morlocks in the shadows are liars and avoid the “light of truth” of the Eloi? By what criteria does he use to judge them “semi-fascists”?

Is his proof the 120 days of violent looting, arson, violence, and death in the summer of 2020—virtually green-lighted by mayors, the media, and, yes, the current vice president? Who “fanned the flames of political violence” and were a “threat to the rule of law”?

Does Biden mean half the country is not respecting the Constitution by its systematic attack on our long-standing constitutional precepts, from the Electoral College and the rights of states to set voting laws? Are the “semi-fascists” trying to pack the Supreme Court? End the filibuster? Bring in two states solely to elect four left-wing senators?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Slow-Motion Trans Wreck: Neera Deshpande

By on September 26th, 2022

https://americanmind.org/salvo/slow-motion-trans-wreck/

The ghastly fad of genital mutilation will end when the lawsuits begin.

In January of 2022, the San Francisco-based law firm Girard Sharp, which specializes in class action lawsuits, announced its investigation into the adverse effects of puberty blockers on transgender-identified children. These adverse effects can include low bone density, psychological problems, and potentially, per a July 2022 FDA warning label, pseudotumor cerebri, a condition which can cause brain swelling, headaches, nausea, double vision, and permanent loss of vision.

Across the Atlantic, as of August 2022, the U.K.’s Tavistock Centre, a gender transition clinic, is expecting a class-action lawsuit from at least 1,000 families of children who were prescribed puberty blockers. Meanwhile, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare released in February of 2022 new guidelines on transgender medicine, recommending that doctors not prescribe puberty blockers outside of “exceptional cases,” as their use is built on “uncertain science.” The reality that so-called “gender-affirming” medicine is not safe is now becoming too obvious to deny, and its implications could not be clearer: we are entering the long-overdue lawsuit phase of the transgender movement, and it is in lawsuits that this movement ends. 

That we have reached a turning point on the issue of gender ideology is beyond question, especially seeing the increasing numbers of detransitioners—those formerly identified as transgender who have now returned to identifying with their sex—publicly speak out against the medical repercussions of gender ideology and transgender healthcare. Chloe Cole was put on puberty blockers when she was just 13 years old after identifying as transgender when she was 12. At 15 she was given a double mastectomy; at 16, she became filled with regret. “I was failed by the system,” she told the New York Post in June of 2022. “I literally lost organs.” In 2019, there were over 5,000 members on the subreddit r/detrans; today, in 2022, there are over 37,000, nearly an eightfold increase in just three years. 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Trudeau Dynasty: A Political Reset in the Making By David Solway

By on September 26th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/09/25/the-trudeau-dynasty-a-political-reset-in-the-making-n1632016

Political dynasties are inherently problematic and ambiguous. When politics becomes a family business, enabling bloodline clans and generational households to occupy the seat of power, we have what will often amount to the very antithesis of responsible political function. Indeed, countries like Indonesia have passed laws prohibiting relatives from immediately succeeding each other in public office.

As Siddhartha George argues in a paper on the descendant effects of political dynasties, employing “regression discontinuity design” (RDD), if political capital is heritable, that is, deriving from a prominent name or a powerful network, “dynastic politics may render elections less effective at selecting good leaders and disciplining them in office.” One of the factors involved in the likelihood of negative effects is, in his term, “moral hazard.” Descendants face moral hazard, he explains, “because they inherit voters loyal to their family predecessor (typically a father), dampening incentives to exert effort and perform well in office”—the common problem of the epigone. 

This is especially true in the economic realm. Dynastic politics tend to issue in a “reversal of fortune,” that is, “a standard deviation decrease in wealth percentile rank.” Inherited political capital, George concludes, “allows descendants to persist in power even when they underperform,” as well as weakens “the ability of elections to select talented leaders.”

Dynastic families are a predictable feature of despotic regimes, such as the Kims in North Korea. They can be prominent in secular patristic regimes, such as the Peróns in Argentina or the Abes in Japan. Dynastic families readily assume office in democratic countries through name recognition and the accumulation of powerful resources, consisting of politically acquired wealth, long-haul expertise and extensive influence. One thinks of the Pitt family in Britain, the Adams and Roosevelt families in the U.S., and the Papandreous in Greece, each having produced two national leaders. One notes three generations of Nehru/Ghandi relations in India and the Bush family in the U.S. that enjoyed three terms in the White House, with indifferent results. The Clintons, for their part, almost achieved a regime by marriage. 

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Republican Teenager Murdered, Media Yawn They don’t want this in the “political violence” category. by Tim Graham

By on September 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/republican-teenager-murdered-media-yawn/

A long time ago, when Air Supply and Toto were in heavy rotation on the radio, I was an 18-year-old Midwestern Republican kid in braces. So, I was especially outraged when news emerged from tiny McHenry, North Dakota, that 18-year-old Republican kid in braces Cayler Ellingson was run over and killed for his political views.

Shannon Brandt, 41, struck and killed the teenager with his Ford Explorer SUV early Sunday in an alley. His mother said Cayler called and asked her if she knew Brandt (she did). The boy called again a short time later and said that “‘he’ or ‘they’ were chasing him.” The mother could no longer reach him after that.

Court documents said, “Brandt admitted to striking the pedestrian with his car because he had a political argument with the pedestrian and believed the pedestrian was calling people “to come get him.” He claimed the teen was part of an unspecified Republican “extremist group.” Brandt was released on bail.

While the Fox News Channel and Newsmax both started reporting this story on the evening of Sept. 20, NewsBusters found zero coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN or MSNBC. How about our taxpayer-funded PBS and NPR? Zero coverage. The New York Times and The Washington Post had nothing.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Hostages No More Betsy DeVos shares her inspiring fight for education freedom – and for the future of the American child. Bruce Bawer

By on September 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hostages-no-more/

I wasn’t happy with all of Donald Trump’s original cabinet choices, but I cheered his appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. The daughter-in-law of Amway founder Richard DeVos and the sister of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, she’s a philanthropist who developed over a period of decades into a deeply serious education expert and a leader of several major organizations promoting substantial education reform. With her husband, Dick, she awarded scholarships, was involved in mentoring, fought for school choice, and, in the year 2000, supported a school-choice initiative in their home state of Michigan. When it went down to defeat in a referendum, Dick, with Betsy’ encouragement, started his own highly regarded private high school, the West Michigan Aviation Academy. Then, in 2016, came Trump’s victory and a phone call from Jeb Bush, of all people, who asked whether she’d be interested in a Trump administration post.

DeVos was on the fence. All her activity as an education reformer had taken place at the state and local level. She believed in grassroots control, because she believed in the importance of diversity and experimentation, in different kinds of schools for kids with different needs, and fiercely opposed one-size-fits-all remedies imposed by clueless federal bureaucrats on kids who lived thousands of miles away from them.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

GOP Holds Largest Lead on Major Issues in More than 30 Years as Midterm Looms Large for Nation in Crisis By Jim Hoft

By on September 26th, 2022

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/gop-holds-largest-lead-major-issues-30-years-midterm-looms-large-nation-crisis/

The Republican Party holds its largest lead in decades on major issues as the midterm election looms large for America.

The new, typically biased ABC News poll, finds Joe Biden with a generous 39 percent approval rating.

The poll also puts Republicans up by 3% overall in the poll.

Despite their bias the Democrats won’t be able to stop what’s coming – If cheating is kept at a minimum.

FOX News reported:

Crime has surpassed abortion among concerns for Americans, who also said they trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle it, giving them the highest lead on the issue in more than 30 years, according to a recent ABC/WaPo poll released Sunday.

According to the survey produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates in New York City, the economy (89%), education (77%) and inflation (76%) topped out the issues voters consider “highly important” as midterms loom, but those issues were followed closely by crime at 69%, which beat out abortion at 62%.

Immigration and climate change brought up the rear at 61% and 50%, respectively.

Asked which political party they trust to do a better job handling key issues, respondents answered 52% in favor of the Republican Party when it comes to crime, compared to 38% for Democrats.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Week Is Over, But The Warming Cranks Are Still Out There

By on September 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/26/climate-week-is-over-but-the-warming-cranks-are-still-out-there/

Doughnut Day makes more sense.

Another Climate Week has come and gone, with Earth no cooler than it was before. But there is plenty to celebrate. Opportunities for virtue signaling, graft, prostituting science, and burning down capitalism have never been so vast.

Launched in New York City in 2009, and now aligned with the execrable United Nations, Climate Week, according to organizers’ telling, is “​​an ambitious platform for our mission to drive climate action,” and “fast.” It’s such a wonderful moment, that a particularly dim fellow set himself on fire Friday at the Laver Cup tennis tournament in London to protest the use of private jets in the United Kingdom. The Sun reported that “​​it’s believed the yob” who was momentarily aflame “was a climate change protester.”

Virtue signaling is generally a “luxury belief” that holds no cost. In this case, it came with some pain, and probably some regret. But virtue signaling is an important activity in the fight against global warming, even if it means that self-flambeing is in order.

The man was eventually dragged off the court. But the cameras got a good look at him, and what was seen, says author Michael Shellenberger, “​​is the face of climate narcissism.”

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