RUTHFULLY YOURS

You wonder why rape has become a malady in Turkey? Ask your government deputy and he will explain: Popular Turkish soap operas!

Last November, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tasked shop owners with “protecting their neighborhoods and the country themselves.” A shopkeeper in Istanbul stabbed a journalist in the chest and killed him because a snowball had hit his window. A few hours earlier, the journalist had bought cat food from the shop.

Imagine a country where taking public transport or merely going to school (especially for young women) or playing with snowballs in the street can be categorized as sports of extreme danger.

If Turkey were a person instead of a country, law enforcement authorities would probably require it to have psychiatric therapy. Pundits are asking: “What has become of us?” Good question. No one has offered a good answer.

Earlier this month about 70 members of parliament spoke at a special parliamentary session. Each speaker, from government or opposition seats, condemned the widespread violence against women in the country. The audience applauded every speaker, from government or opposition seats. There was peace in the house. Three hours after the session closed, the deputies gathered to debate a controversial security bill. Chaos ensued as a brawl broke out. The session ended after five MPs were hospitalized.

The message from a dozen prominent black pastors this week to the Congressional Black Caucus was loud and clear: Don’t skip out on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyuhu’s speech.

About two dozen House and Senate Democrats, most of them black caucus members, have said they will not attend Mr. Netanyahu’s speech Tuesday before a joint session of Congress, which one pastor described as a “slap in the face to the people of Israel.”

“The thing to me that makes no sense is why the Congressional Black Caucus has teamed up with this current administration against Israel,” said Pastor Dexter D. Sanders of the Rock Center for Transformation in Orlando, Florida.

Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/obama-killed-the-pipeline-seized-the-internet-is-cutting-off-your-ammo-in-just-one-week/#ZW1k734g8TLGJpxQ.99

President Obama on Tuesday vetoed legislation authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, rebuffing the new Republican-led Congress amid a furious battle over Homeland Security funding.

The veto — just the third of Obama’s presidency and his first of major legislation — was made in private and without fanfare, reflecting tensions in the Democratic Party over whether the controversial pipeline should be approved.

“Through this bill the United States Congress attempts to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest,” Obama said in his veto statement. [READ OBAMA’S VETO STATEMENT.]

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

A virus that kills resistant bacteria infections. Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have isolated (from Jerusalem sewage) a “safe” virus EFDG1, which can kill the bacteria infections associated with up to 33% of root canal treatments. EFDG1 eradicates even antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/25479

BrainTech 2015. The international conference BrainTech 2015 in Tel Aviv, beginning 11th March, features neuroscientists, entrepreneurs, senior executives, investors, startups and decision-makers who will explore challenges, discover promising projects, create partnerships and accelerate innovation in brain technology.
http://itrade.gov.il/us-dc/2015/02/16/startup-nation-brain-nation/ http://conference.israelbrain.org/

Monitoring mental illness by smartphone. Israel’s LifeGraph has developed a smartphone-based platform for monitoring mental illness. LifeGraph detects changes in a patient’s sleep, social communication, mobility and speech. It provides psychiatrists with innovative insight into the behavioral patterns of the patient.
http://lifegraph.net/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSgljEBcOH0

The nose-to-brain express route. A major problem in treating mental illness is in overcoming the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) with effective medication. Israel’s SipNose has developed an innovative nasal delivery device platform that can penetrate the BBB and provide fast, non-invasive treatment to patients.
http://www.sipnose.com/

Opening up the inner workings of the brain. As Tel Aviv prepares to host the 2015 BrainTech conference, Professor Henry Markram (formerly of Israel’s Weizmann Institute) outlined the goals and activities of the Human Brain Project, of which he is co-director.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/alzheimers-to-meet-its-match-in-brain-map-project-researcher-claims/

Fooling the malaria parasite. Back in Dec 2012 I reported how Dr Ron Dzikowski at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had discovered the genetic reason why malaria was so difficult to treat. Now Professor Dzikowski and other HUJ scientists have used the discovery to disrupt the parasite’s defense mechanism.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/25531

‘The world will appreciate our determination’

Nobel laureate Professor Robert (Yisrael) Aumann says Israel can learn from Iran how to stand its ground and get its way • Aumann supports Netanyahu’s Congress address: “If you chase peace it only eludes you. That’s not game theory; that’s history.”

Nadav Shragai

Nobel laureate Professor Robert (Yisrael) Aumann is convinced that both Iran and North Korea are making a mockery of the international community.

“Iran in mocking the entire world and it is still getting its way. North Korea is also mocking the entire world and it too is getting its way,” says Aumann, 84, who in 2005 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

“The world aligns itself with those who are strong, even if they are the embodiment of evil. That is why [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s insistence on addressing Congress in an effort to prevent a deal between the United States and Iran is vital,” Aumann says.

The characterization of Islamist jihadist attacks as “spontaneous” or committed by “self-radicalized Lone Wolves” seems inaccurate and misleading. All attackers we

have seen in recent years were radicalized in mosques or Muslim schools they attended, online, in chatrooms and by social media they share with others.
While sometimes only one shooter, or stabber, was caught, they have relied on associates and networks for financial and tactical support. Moreover, they have chosen their targets and victims to “send a message.” The tight-knit Muslim communities supply a rich diet oh hatred to infidels and the Jews, and serve as a fertile ground for nurturing martyrs. Instead of pointing the finger at those who invite youngsters to join then train and support them, we seem to be overtaken by political correctness thus refusing to blame entire communities, which have done nothing to curb jihadist incitement, and from which the jihadists are setting out to attack us. Instead we parented that they are just a small group of misfits. This attitude will do little to stop such attacks – Rachel Ehrenfeld

The director of the Military and Strategic Affairs Program and Cyber Security Program at INSS, Gabi Siboni, has his own scholarly take on “Confronting Spontaneous Terrorist Attacks”:
“A prominent feature of many terrorist attacks in recent months by Islamic radicals is their independent, spontaneous, unplanned nature – sometimes called the work of lone wolves. The phenomenon presents a serious challenge to the security establishments in the nations where there has been a rise in the scope of spontaneous attacks, the West in general and Israel in particular. A critical review of the spontaneous attacks and some of the perpetrators points to two key characteristics that could help formulate a current doctrine of preventing attacks. The first is the basic profile of the attacker; the second is the behavior of the attacker just before the attack. Based on the combination of both factors, it is possible to construct a profile of the potential attacker and assign him/her a risk threshold that if crossed would indicate the intention to act. This in turn would raise the level of the risk to one that must be foiled….

There are two models for fighting terrorism. We can see the terrorists as an external invading force that has to be destroyed or as an internal element in our society to be managed.

In the War on Terror, Bush saw terrorists as an external force that had to be fought while Obama sees them as an internal element to be managed. And while both men signed off on some of the same tactics, their view of the conflict at the big picture level was fundamentally different.

The differences express themselves in such things as detaining terrorists at Guantanamo Bay or backing Islamist democracy. If Muslim terrorists are an alien force, then detaining them without trial is no more of a problem than detaining Nazi saboteurs was during WW2. And if Islamic terrorism is driven by alien impulses, then it has nothing in common with us and attempting to accommodate it cannot succeed.

Obama and the Europeans see Islamic terrorism as a social problem whose root causes need to be resolved rather than defeated. It’s the old model used for the radical left which was “fought” by mainstream parties adopting elements of its program to compete with it… with disastrous results.

“We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey!
Nothing’ll stop the U.S. Air Force!”

General Norton Schwartz (Ret.) He was the first Jewish Chief of Staff of the Air Force and was a member of the U.S. Air Force Academy Jewish choir before his 1973 graduation. In 2004 he was awarded the Jewish Community Center’s Military Leadership Award. In accepting the award, he said he was “proud to be identified as Jewish as well as an American military leader.” In 2008 Press TV, an Iranian English language media outlet, published a column titled “U.S. Names Jew as Air Force Chief.”

General Norton Schwartz served as the 19th Chief of Staff of the Air Force from August 12, 2008, until his retirement in 2012. As Chief of Staff, he served as the senior uniformed Air Force officer responsible for the organization, training and equipping of nearly 700,000 active-duty, Guard, Reserve and civilian forces serving in the United States and overseas. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Schwartz functioned as a military adviser to the Secretary of Defense, National Security Council and the President. He previously served as Commander, United States Transportation Command from September 2005 to August 2008. Schwartz is a command pilot with more than 4,400 flying hours in a variety of aircraft.

He has won twenty nine medals and badges.

When my family first came to New York, in the aftermath of World War 11 ,we went to nightclubs….my parents, my brother Hilel and I. I have the photographs with their covers from the Copacabana and the Latin Quarter and others. They had great brass bands, and Latin American music and dancing, which my parents loved while my brother and I sat embarrassed by their fancy steps. They also had shows and in a hokey example we often heard a Chinese man singing a song in Yiddish. “Wo Soll Ich Geh’n. ” Translation: “Tell Me Where Shall I Go?”

“Where Shall I Go?” was written before WWII by S. Kortnayer & Oscar Strock. Kortnayer, a Yiddish actor and the song’s lyricist, died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. There were devastating words.

“Where to go, where to go, Every door is closed to me. To the left, to the right It’s the same in every land. There is nowhere to go And it’s me who should know Won’t you please understand.”

A second verse was added by Lazarus ‘Leo’ Fuld a popular Dutch singer who specialized in Yiddish songs in 1948.

“Now I know where to go. Where my folks proudly stand. Where to go, where to go. To that precious promised land.I am proud, can’t you see. For at last I am free.No more wandering for me.”

“I would like to think he was “a normal bloke”. But I worry these days that your “normal bloke” is fretting about micro-agressions in the safe space at Wesleyan University. The gulf between those who fight and those they fight for has never seemed wider.”

The Victoria Cross is the Commonwealth’s highest decoration for valour on the battlefield. Yesterday it was awarded to the first living Briton for action in the Afghan war (if memory serves, three living Aussies have been so honoured). Lance-Corporal Joshua Leakey was with the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment on a joint UK/US operation in Helmand when it all went pear-shaped, and he found himself having to rescue a fallen American Marine captain while fending off 20 Taliban single-handed:

L/Cpl Leakey, a member of the elite Paratrooper regiment first broke cover to give first aid to a fallen United States Marine, and continued to expose himself to fire as he recovered and fired from two machine guns, running up and down a hill in the high heat of the Afghan summer. Although he ran through machine gun fire and exploding grenades three times, he survived and was able to engage 20 Taliban fighters and save the life of the American officer.