WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump and the Deceiving of Mullahs by Amir Taheri

Posted By on September 1st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14788/trump-iran-deceiving-mullahs

Both President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair told me at different times that they had identified “men with whom we can work” in Tehran and that the key to success was getting rid of Khamenei and his “hardliners.”

[W]hether we like it or not, it is Khamenei, and not Rafsanjani, Khatami or Rouhani, who set the tune in the Islamic Republic.

Thus if Trump, or anyone else, wish to make a deal with the present regime in Tehran, the man they should talk to is Khamenei, not Rouhani, an actor playing the president.

[T]he two are, in fact, just one creature in two disguises, a witch bent on doing mischief.

Trump has been warned!

For a few hours last weekend, political circles in Tehran were seized with speculative fever regarding a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and the Islamic Republic’s President Hassan Rouhani. Trump had announced in Biarritz, where the G7’s farcical summit was held, that he would be prepared to meet the Iranian mullah and believed that could happen soon. For his part, Rouhani went on TV to declare readiness to meet “anyone”, with no ifs and buts.

One “reformist” analyst phoned me in the middle of night Paris time to “inform” me that, with help from Trump, his faction was about to win a decisive victory over the “hardline” faction led by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei.

In his narrative, Rouhani would meet Trump in September when both are to attend the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York. They would establish a “roadmap” leading to an agreement incorporating the Obama “nuke deal” plus additional demands by Trump. That, in turn, would lead to a lifting of US sanctions, saving the Iranian economy from a meltdown.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

Posted By on September 1st, 2019

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

Dear E-pals, I always post Michael Ordman’s good news from Israel separately. In spite of the libels and bashing this amazing democracy gets from the media and academia and the “ignoranti” of various boycott movements, Israel whose life is constantly endangered by well-armed enemies, works overtime to improve and save lives all over the world. What an accomplishment! rsk

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Preventing secondary brain tumors. (TY UWI) Up to 40% of cancer patients develop secondary brain tumors shortly after surgery to remove a primary tumor elsewhere in the body. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have shown that an intravenous injection of CpG-C (synthetic DNA material) can prevent these metastases forming.
https://www.israel21c.org/novel-immunotherapy-may-prevent-brain-metastases/
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006859
 
New research into age-related immune failure. In lab tests on aging and the immune system, biologists at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have profiled over 24,000 T-Cells. They identified that 30% deteriorate during the aging process and could establish new areas of medical intervention to prevent age-related illnesses.
https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/pages/news/t_cells.aspx
 
Software to monitor cancer patients at home. I reported previously (see here) on Israeli startup Telesofia when it developed personalized medical videos. Now Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is to pilot Telesofia’s tele-medicine software for cancer patients at home to communicate with doctors about chemotherapy side effects.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/oncologist-startup-develop-software-that-monitors-cancer-patients-at-home/
 
Alzheimer’s treatment also benefits autistic children. Israeli researchers at Sheba Medical Center have found that a medication used to treat Alzheimer’s patients also has strong therapeutic effects on autistic children. 60 such children were given Donepezil and Cholin for six months and their language skills improved significantly.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/22/israeli-researchers-find-alzheimer-medications-may-help-treat-autistic-children/
 
US approval for blood pressure wristband monitor. Israel’s Biobeat develops wireless products (wristwatch and patch) to measure blood pressure, oxygenation, pulse, stroke volume and more. Both items sync data to the cloud, enabling remote monitoring. The US FDA has just given clearance to the combined products.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3769057,00.html   https://www.biobeat.cloud/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58_XlpvyfEs
 
A stable vaccine for malaria. Malaria kills half-a-million people annually. In this “Weizmann in Focus” video, Dave Doneson explains that current anti-malaria vaccines break down in hot climates. However, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute redesigned the protein RH5 to enable the vaccine to be stored at room temperature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfcjyr94GM0
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/students/adi-goldenzweig
 
Hope for multiple myeloma patients. Thanks to Israeli discoveries and research, patients with the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma are leading longer, better lives.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/267943
 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ignoring anti-Semitic assaults signals that Jewish blood doesn’t matter when it can’t easily be politically exploited by Philip Klein |

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ignoring-anti-semitic-assaults-signals-that-jewish-blood-doesnt-matter-when-it-cant-easily-be-politically-exploited

Last month, Tablet’s Armin Rosen wrote a disturbing piece on the rise of hate crimes against identifiable Jewish New Yorkers, writing, “Jews are routinely being attacked in the streets of New York City. So why is no one acting like it’s a big deal?”

Rosen detailed many of the crimes directed at Jews, noting that more hate crimes were committed against Jews in the first half of 2019 than in all of 2017.

On Aug. 12, just a few weeks after Rosen published his piece, three Hasidic Jews were violently mugged within an hour in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This Tuesday, another Hasidic Jew in his 60s was bloodily beaten with a brick in Crown Heights. Then this Thursday in Crown Heights, a Hasidic Jew was in a truck when a group of youths threw a stone through the window, giving the man a laceration in the head.

The attacks are happening in broad daylight and at night and, in some cases, have been captured on video.

They range from harassment and attempted intimidation:

AJC✔@AJCGlobal

-WARNING – this video is horrifying. An Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted in broad daylight in Brooklyn, New York. We thank @NYPD66Pct for swiftly apprehending the assaulter and extend our best wishes to the victim and his family.

Councilman Deutsch
✔@ChaimDeutsch A 64 year old Jewish man was violently assaulted in Rochester Park in Crown Heights. THIS is the weapon that was used against him.Has it become too dangerous for openly religious Jewish men to walk the streets of NYC?@NYPDHateCrimes is currently investigating this attack. https://twitter.com/chabadlubavitch/status/1166340519095623680 …

New York City has the largest Jewish population in the United States, and Jewish roots there are long and deep. And yet, the situation for observant Jews is quickly devolving into that of Europe, where Jews cannot safely walk to synagogue or through the streets while wearing a yarmulke without being attacked verbally or physically. This is a disgrace.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Don’t tell me your pronouns — I can guess! By E.M. Cadwaladr

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/dont_tell_me_your_pronouns__i_can_guess.html

“There are now sixtyish new pronoun sets, just as we are told there are sixtyish new genders. ”

A leftist shtick that been going on for some time in universities, government offices, and other haunts of the chronically offended is the idea of choosing one’s own personal pronouns — and expecting the world to actually use them.  Under this scheme, it would be politically correct for me to self-identify as:

e.m. cadwaladr
he/him/his

The main point of this bold new level of wokeness is that a man who wants to entertain an essentially psychotic delusion that he’s a woman may now style himself:

Higgly-Piggly Doe
she/her/hers

If someone does not go along with such a man’s mentally aberrant state and address him according to his delusional identity, the offending person can be prosecuted in some localities.  Nor is this game limited to mere conventional gender dysphoria sufferers.  There are now sixtyish new pronoun sets, just as we are told there are sixtyish new genders.  I do not know what genders “zie/zim/zir” or “ey/em/eir” denote.  These words sound vaguely Yiddish to me — though they lack the Yiddish language’s quirky charm.  The new pronouns are always uttered with a certain peevish militancy that precludes them having charm of any kind.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

35 Obama Gaffes To Make Joe Biden Feel Better About Himself By Matt Margolis

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/35-obama-gaffes-to-make-joe-biden-feel-better-about-himself/

Lately, it seems we can’t go a day without a new gaffe from Joe Biden. When you have to tell your supporters “I’m not going nuts,” it’s clear things aren’t exactly going well for you. So, to make Joe Biden feel better I thought it would be nice to compile the top thirty-five gaffes from Barack Obama, the man whose coattails Joe Biden is so desperately trying to ride.

35. Obama doesn’t know what committee he’s on.

While speaking in Israel during his first presidential campaign, Obama claimed to be on a committee that he was not on. “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee — which is my committee — a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

34. Plagiarizing his campaign speech

We all know that Biden’s first presidential campaign was thwarted by revelations of plagiarism. Obama was also discovered to have plagiarized a campaign speech. Perhaps that’s really why he picked Biden as his running mate, they had that in common.

In 2006, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said the following in a campaign speech:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’-just words. Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’-just words. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’-just words. ‘I have a dream’-just words,”

In 2008, Obama said these words in his own campaign speech:

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words, just speeches,”

Obama obviously survived the scandal, unlike Joe Biden.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire The students who demand her firing, Camille Paglia argues, take prosperity for granted, are socially undeveloped, and know little about Western history. Who’s Moses? By Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511

When Camille Paglia was an “obnoxious adolescent” of 15, she had what she describes as “this huge fight with a nun” in upstate New York. Ms. Paglia, 72, remembers the incident with a clarity that suggests a lifetime of unresolved umbrage.

“We were released from school for religious instruction on Thursday afternoons,” and teen Camille posed a question: “If God is infinitely forgiving, I asked the nun, is it possible that at some point in the future he’ll forgive Satan?” The nun—a doctrinaire Irish Catholic without any of the “pagan residue” of Ms. Paglia’s Italian culture—“turned beet red. She was so enraged that she condemned me in front of everybody for even asking that question.”

That was the day Ms. Paglia left the Catholic Church. It was not the last time she asked an awkward, even incendiary, question. Such provocations are the stock-in-trade of this most free-spirited of America’s public intellectuals.

Ms. Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a tenured—and occasionally embattled—faculty member since 1984. This April, mutinous students demanded her firing over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.” That denunciation, with its indignant dogmatism, is particularly slapstick, since Ms. Paglia describes herself as “transgender.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Famine of Fact at U.N. Climate Panel The IPCC sounds an alarm about food production, but another U.N. agency’s data show it’s a false one. By James Taylo

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-famine-of-fact-at-u-n-climate-panel-11567201352

Global crop production sets new records virtually every year. That didn’t stop the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from publishing an alarmist report Aug. 8 that suggests global warming has devastated crop production and threatens food shortages.

“Climate change . . . has adversely impacted food security and terrestrial ecosystems as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions,” the report asserts. “Warming compounded by drying has caused yield declines in parts of Southern Europe. Based on indigenous and local knowledge, climate change is affecting food security in drylands, particularly those in Africa, and high mountain regions of Asia and South America.”

At the same time, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that new records were set for global corn, wheat and rice production five years running through 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. How is that possible?

The IPCC report parses words and engages in semantic tricks to give readers a false impression of declining global crop production. Note the reference to declining yields in “parts” of Southern Europe. The report doesn’t mention that yields are increasing in Southern Europe as a whole. What sense does it make to blame declining yields in a small portion of the world on global warming without crediting global warming for global gains?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tehran Threatens a Think Tank The regime targets a U.S. group for opposing the 2015 nuclear deal.

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tehran-threatens-a-think-tank-11567205715

As Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif negotiates with Europe to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive, he sells the Islamic Republic as a normal government wronged by a rogue Trump Administration. This is a sham, and Tehran has proved it again by targeting an American think tank for retribution.

Last week the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO Mark Dubowitz of “economic terrorism” and “actively trying to harm the Iranian people’s security and vital interests.” Tehran claimed that the independent think tank “is in fact the designing and executing arm of the U.S. administration.”

As Mr. Dubowitz wrote Friday on these pages, “according to the law cited against us, Mr. Zarif has already coordinated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] and Iran’s Intelligence Ministry in developing sanctions against FDD.”

The regime’s apologists draw a false equivalence between these sanctions and U.S. restrictions placed against Iranian officials and the IRGC. But producing research, lobbying lawmakers and educating the public is not the same as spreading terrorism around the Middle East. FDD has been an important critic of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but the group’s only influence is with ideas.

MEDIA Comments turned off

24 Hours of Media Malpractice . By Mark Hemingway

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/30/24_hours_of_media_malpractice.html

In the Trump era, it increasingly appears that journalistic standards are on life support. Consider, if you will, what a day in the life of contemporary journalism now looks like.

Late Tuesday afternoon, some conservatives on Twitter started grumbling about an article the Washington Post published that morning. The op-ed in question accused best-selling conservative author J.D. Vance of being racist, and otherwise tried dubiously to connect the dots between mainstream pro-life advocates and white supremacists. At a speech in July, Vance said the following: “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.” Washington Post contributor Marissa Brostoff characterized the remark by saying, “Vance did not spell out exactly who was included in the word ‘our.’ He didn’t need to.” Her clear implication was that Vance was referring to the fact he only wanted to have white children. This would be news to Vance, since he’s married to a woman of color, and his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” ­– a movie version, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, is in post-production – is a very critical look at the mores of poor white Americans.

And Vance did, in fact, spell out exactly what his pronoun referred to. A couple of sentences earlier in his remarks, which Brostoff didn’t bother to read closely, he makes it clear he’s referring to all Americans. Low birth rates are a serious concern in Western countries for many reasons, including the need to sustain liberal welfare policies, which have nothing to do with racism.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dangerous Stalinism of the “Woke” Hard-Left by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be
expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the “wokers” is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof.

For Stalinist and “wokers,” there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.

That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the “woke” hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.

We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.

Civil liberties are in greater danger today from the intolerant hard-left than from the bigoted hard-right. This may seem counterintuitive: There has been far more violence — mass shootings in malls, synagogues and other soft targets — from extremists who identify more with the hard-right than with the hard-left. But the influence of the hard-left on our future leaders is far more pervasive, insidious and dangerous than the influence of the hard-right.

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.