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.

Israelis Who Support BDS Alex Grobman, Ph.D.

Those who believe no Israeli could possibly support the Boycott-Divestment-and Sanctions (BDS) movement, have not met Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency who was once considered a candidate for Prime Minister of Israel. Mr. Burg has made clear that he supports a world-wide boycott of Israeli goods and products manufactured across the so-called Green Line, the name given to the demarcation established in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria after the Jewish State’s 1948 War of Independence.

Although Mr. Burg insists his position does not call for a total boycott of Israel, it is clear that this scion of a once-proud Zionist family (his late father, Yosef Burg, served in the Israeli cabinet for almost four decades) has thrown his lot in with those who no longer accept the idea of a Jewish State.

Now a member of the Israeli communist party, Hadash, Mr. Burg says “Zionism has been successfully completed,” and he no longer defines himself as a Zionist.

“Zionism was the scaffolding that facilitated the transition from the Diaspora to sovereignty. This scaffolding is superfluous now,” he told Yediot Ahronot, the Jewish state’s most widely circulated newspaper, last year.

Ending the Law of Return

He insists Israel would be better off getting rid of its own Law of Return, which allows all Jews throughout the world to come to Israel and claim citizenship, and concentrate more on implementing the so-called Palestinian Right of Return, a Palestinian demand that all Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 and 1967—and their descendants—be allowed to flood back into Israel proper, thus demographically destroying the Jewish state.

Academic Drivel Report Confessing my sins and exposing my academic hoax. Peter Dreier See note please on this colossal academic hoax

Peter Dreier is a leftist professor who confesses a colossal academic hoax…..rsk
Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers—both American sociologists—accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.

I am not the first academic to engage in this kind of hoax. In 1996, in a well-known incident, NYU physicist Alan Sokal pulled the wool over the eyes of the editors of Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal. He submitted an article filled with gobbledygook to see if they would, in his words, “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” His article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue), shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder. Sokal’s intent was not simply to pull a fast-one on the editors, but to challenge the increasingly popular “post-modern” view that there are no real facts, just points-of-view. His paper made the bogus case that gravity, too, was a “social construction.” As soon as it was published, Sokal fessed up in another journal (Lingua Franca, May 1996), revealing that his article was a sham, describing it as “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense … structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics.”

Sokal’s ruse was more ambitious than mine. He wrote an entire article. I simply wrote a 368-word abstract. He submitted his for publication. I just submitted mine to a conference. Although his paper was filled with absurd statements, it actually reached a conclusion—however bogus—that gravity was still an idea open to serious debate. In doing so, Sokal actually had a serious point to make about the silliness of much “post-modern” thinking that viewed science as a version of the humanities where all views should be given equal weight.

MY SAY: NO HOPE FOR THE GOP IF THE CHANGELING BECOMES THE NOMINEE,

Rich Lowry sums it up best:http://www.nationalreview.com/node/431947/print
The Coming Anti-Trump Onslaught
“If Trump romps to the nomination by mid-March, non-Trump Republicans will have lost to him in part through a lack of trying. That will never be true of the Democrats, who will gleefully and maliciously do the Trump vetting that the GOP race has, so far, been missing. ”

The anti-Trump onslaught is coming. Perhaps within weeks. Just not necessarily from Republicans. Almost as soon as Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee — which may be as early as March 15 — Democrats will surely start to churn out their negative ads. They will attack Trump’s credentials as a tribune of the little guy by focusing on a money-grubbing venture like Trump University, designed to extract as much cash as possible from people who thought they would learn something from the shell of a school.They will dissect his business record. They will fasten on his failed casinos and the bankruptcies he used to stiff creditors while maintaining a lavish lifestyle.They will fry him for hypocrisy on immigration by pointing out that Trump Tower was built by illegal Polish immigrants worked to the bone and that, according to news reports, illegal immigrants are helping build his new hotel in Washington.They will make the cheap threats he throws at anyone who crosses him a character and temperament issue. They will hound him about his unreleased tax returns. And, of course, they will use decades-worth of controversial statements to portray him as racist and sexist.

This will all be in the tradition of the early Democratic ad campaigns that successfully knee-capped Republican nominees in 1996 and 2012 (Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, respectively). A Democratic campaign to disqualify Trump would seek to make his unfavorable rating (already 60 percent with the general public) not merely alarming, but completely radioactive.

How will Trump fare against such ads? Maybe he will prove impervious to all such criticism, or maybe he will wilt under the assault. Who knows?

In this sense, Republicans are outsourcing the vetting of their front-runner to the other party. At this rate, they will make Trump their de facto standard-bearer in a little less than three weeks, never having run him through the paces of the painful testing that is usually inherent to the process.

How to Stop Clinton and Trump By Deroy Murdock

Can Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump get knocked off their respective monorails to the Democrat and Republican nominations? These front-runners are not necessarily unstoppable.

Clinton’s rival needs to paint a picture. Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vt.) should ask Democrats and their media allies to imagine that it’s October 20. Clinton is locked in a competitive battle with Republican standard bearer Marco Rubio. Her campaign jet zips among Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other swing states. Early voting already has begun.

But Hillary cannot focus solely on the crowds that greet her. “What do you think Huma will say in court today?” one journalist shouts at her. Another yells: “Will the accusations against you disappear before Election Day?”

The next morning, Clinton herself is ordered to appear in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was named to the bench by none other than Clinton’s husband. She is scheduled to answer questions in Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. After Judge Sullivan granted discovery to the conservative watchdog group, and State’s inspector general subpoenaed the records of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, it’s no surprise when Clinton becomes ensnared in this burgeoning legal thicket.

Clinton suddenly vanishes from the hustings, huddles with criminal-defense attorneys, and calculates what to say in a federal courtroom on October 25 — a fortnight before Election Day.

Sanders should ask his massive crowds: “Is that how you want to spend the fall campaign?”

Why President Trump Would Be a Bigger Disaster Than President Clinton By David Harsanyi

There’s still time to turn it around, of course. But now that many conservatives are moving from the bargaining phase to the depression phase of the Kübler-Ross model, we can begin to grapple with the prospective reality of a Trump-versus-Hillary general election.

Whether you’re an ideological conservative, a proponent of limited government, or someone who believes that the president has too much power already, you shouldn’t think of this matchup as a contest between horrifying candidates. Rather, you should ask yourself which scenario would be more damaging. I’m pretty sure you’d find that Donald Trump is the form of the Destructor.

But Hillary Clinton is the worst, most evil liberal ever!

Yes. You can count on it. Clinton, as you may have noticed, does not have the charisma of Barack Obama. Not only would she be divisive and ethically compromised, but she would also galvanize the Right. Republicans would almost certainly unite against her agenda, which would be little more than codifying Obama’s legacy: a collection of policies that half the country still hates.

She won’t be able to pass anything substantial. The most likely outcome is another four to eight years of trench warfare in Washington, D.C., giving conservatives a pass for a number of winnable, state-level issues. There will probably be, if historical disposition of the electorate holds, a Republican Congress. (Who knows what happens to Congress if Trump is elected?) Hardly ideal. But unless you believe that an active Washington is the best Washington, gridlock is not the end of the world.

The myth that Democrats get everything will persist. But despite plenty of well-earned criticism, the GOP has been a more effective minority party than constituents give it credit for. People are frustrated, but the conservative idealists have been gaining ground since the tea party emerged. The tea party’s presence has put a stop to an array of progressive reform efforts that the pre-2010 GOP would surely have gone along with.

Yes, Trump University Was a Massive Scam By Ian Tuttle

Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump’s real-estate institution, was a de jure one.

First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the “school” was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. (The institution is now called, ahem, “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.”) Cue lawsuits.

Trump University is currently the defendant in three lawsuits — two class-action lawsuits filed in California, and one filed in New York by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who told CNN’s New Day in 2013: “We started looking at Trump University and discovered that it was a classic bait-and-switch scheme. It was a scam, starting with the fact that it was not a university.”

Trump U “students” say the same. In his affidavit, Richard Hewson reported that he and his wife “concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the [organization’s] free seminar and three-day workshop.” But “the whole thing was a scam.”

In fact, $20,000 is only a mid-range loss. The lead plaintiff in one of the California suits, yoga instructor Tarla Makaeff, says she was “scammed” out of $60,000 over the course of her time in Trump U.

How could that have happened? The New York suit offers a suggestion:

The free seminars were the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately one of respondents’ advanced seminars such as the “Gold Elite” program costing $35,000.

At the “free” 90-minute introductory seminars to which Trump University advertisements and solicitations invited prospective students, Trump University instructors engaged in a methodical, systematic series of misrepresentations designed to convince students to sign up for the Trump University three-day seminar at a cost of $1495.

The Atlantic, which got hold of a 41-page “Private & Confidential” playbook from Trump U, has attested to the same:

“UN COMMITTEES HAVE CROSSED THE LINE” BY SAMANTHA POWER

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

Remarks at the Israel Middle East Model United Nations Conference on “Building a More Model UN”POWER:

Before this speech, Power’s best line was “Hillary Clinton is a monster”and she has generally been perceived as hostile to Israel. Thanks to Tom Gross whose dispatches are essential reading we have this :….on a visit to Israel, she made very vocal remarks denouncing the UN for its anti-Israel bias. Power is, of course, now the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Remarks such as the ones below are rare not just from Power, but from any member of the Obama administration. –

“Thank you for the generous introduction, and for reading the book on Sergio. And a special thanks to all of the organizers who put this amazing conference together, particularly Aviva, who puts heart and soul and everything into this. [Applause.]

Before diving into the issues that have brought us here, let me start off by acknowledging the people without whom many of you would never have heard or thought about Model UN, much less known how to get a resolution through the Third Committee. And I’m speaking, of course, of your faculty advisors. One of the greatest diplomats my country has ever produced, Benjamin Franklin, once said: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Well, your faculty advisors have not only taught you, they have involved you in a way that will forever leave its mark on you and will make you engaged citizens of your communities and of the world. So please join me in giving those faculty advisors a huge round of applause. [Applause.]

Now, when I was your age, I never would have imagined that I would get to sit at the United Nations behind a placard that said “The United States of America”. I grew up in Ireland, and my mother brought me to the United States when I was nine years old. By the time I got to high school in Atlanta, Georgia, my dream was to play professional sports – preferably basketball. When it became abundantly clear that I was not going to play professional sports or break the gender barrier to the NBA, I decided to do the next best thing which was to try writing about sports.

That’s what I was doing the summer after my first year in college, when I took an internship at a local news station. And one day, I was sitting there at that news station taking notes on an Atlanta Braves game so I could help cut the sports highlights for the evening news, when footage from another screen caught my eye; and it was footage from Tiananmen Square, in China, where kids my age – and your age – were peacefully gathering to demand basic freedoms like the right to vote, and where they were being brutally beaten and mowed down as a result of having done so. It was raw and it was incredibly disturbing – and honestly, to this day I don’t know if I hadn’t been sitting where I was, when I was, that I would’ve seen it and focused on it in the way that I did. But once I did, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And that was when it hit me that this was what I really wanted to be focused on. I wanted to focus on what was happening in the world to real people. I wanted to focus on those young people and the dreams that they had and the aspirations they had, even though I had huge doubts whether I could ever do anything that would be helpful or supportive. This propelled me first to become a war reporter, which I did in the Balkans in the 1990s. Then I became a human rights advocate, trying to raise my voice about atrocities like the ones I had witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. And ultimately, all of this led me to go and work for a young Senator from the city of Chicago named Barack Obama. Now if there is a lesson to be learned from the path that I took, I don’t think it is to go and work your first year in college at a sports station, necessarily. It is just to keep your eyes open. Whatever you do, just look up. Especially those of you who are on your gadgets and your smartphones the entire time – you have to look up, just to see what will catch your imagination – what will inspire you.

The Pentagon plans to spend an additional $900 million in the coming year to boost cyber defense measures, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Thursday.

Reeling from massive breach of federal personnel records, defense department to budgets $900m. for more defensive measures

US officials are still reeling from last year’s revelation that personal data from some 20 million federal employees, contractors and others had been hacked in a massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management.

The military worries about being targeted by an array of hackers, including national adversaries such as North Korea and non-sovereign players like the Islamic State group.

“Given the increasing severity and sophistication of the threats and challenges we’re seeing in cyberspace — ranging from (IS’s) pervasive online presence to the data breaches at the Office of Personnel Management –- the budget puts a priority on funding our cyber strategy,” Carter said in a written statement to the House Appropriations Committee.

The Pentagon will spend a total of $6.7 billion in the 2017 budget — up 15.5 percent from the previous year. In all, the Pentagon is projected to spend $34.6 billion over the coming five years.

Heart patients — and hospitals — breathe easier with Israeli sleep tech David Shamah

Hospitals facing Obamacare penalties for high readmission rates should heed the results of a new study, says EarlySense

One of the tenets of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, is that hospitals must reduce costs, by reducing their 30-day readmission rate — the theory being that a hospital ought to be able to do a good-enough job on patients deemed well enough to be released to keep them out of the hospital for at least a month.

As a result, hospitals are scrambling to find ways to reduce their exposure to the problem. Otherwise, thanks to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program component of the ACA, they could find their Medicare payments cut by up to 3%. While it doesn’t sound like a lot overall, hospital administrators, armed with spreadsheets and horror stories, would disagree, claiming they need every penny, and then some.

A new study by Israeli medical technology start-up EarlySense could help allay the concerns of administrators — as well as patients, most of whom presumably would want to avoid going back to the hospital as well. In the first-ever test of the EarlySense system that followed heart-failure patients after hospital discharge, the start-up, working with two top US health institutes, discovered that monitoring the respiratory activity of the patients was “the most important risk-adjusted associate of readmission for heart failure,” according to Dalia Argaman, VP of clinical and regulatory affairs at EarlySense.

With “wearables” all the rage now in health monitoring, EarlySense has done things a bit differently: The company has developed the first “sleepable” in a device which, when placed under a mattress, keeps track of how a person sleeps, including whether they toss or turn, the different stages of sleep (REM, etc.), their breathing, and other important sleep data.