ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on July 7th, 2019

Gaza thugs throw incendiary balloons and rocks, the media and academics continue their libels, ignorant cretins continue their street theater demonstrations, and in spite of it all Israel makes outsize contributions in medicine, science, technology and cybersecurity which benefit the citizens of every nation on every continent. Amazing indeed! My friend and e-pal Michael Ordman compiles this list almost every week. rsk

http://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Hadassah surgeons realign baby’s organs. In a first-of-its-kind operation, a team of doctors at Hadassah Medical Center repaired the hernia (muscle between chest and abdomen) of a new-born baby.  Then using low-invasive thoracoscopic surgery, they pushed the baby’s small intestine and spleen back into the abdomen.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/265335

Positive autism treatment results. (TY Stuart) Professor Lidia Gabis of Sheba Medical Center has published two important research articles on the treatment of autistic children. One showed that combined Donepezil and Choline improved their language skills. The other highlighted the benefits of medical clowning.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-019-03415-7 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31230222

The protein that weakens the immune system. Researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, working in an international team, have identified that the protein known as TOX represses T-cells within the immune system. By neutralizing TOX, scientists could restore the immune system to fight cancer and chronic or viral diseases.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/study-identifies-protein-that-causes-exhaustion-of-immune-system-cells/

Device for treating ADHD. I mentioned previously (Feb 2017) about Israeli-Arab startup InnoSphere, which was developing a wearable device for treating ADHD. This article describes in detail InnoSphere’s electrode-embedded cap that stimulates neurons in the brains of ADHD sufferers to make new connections.

https://www.israel21c.org/high-hopes-for-new-adhd-treatment-device/

New way to unblock arteries.  (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Transseptal Solutions announced the first TSP Crosser transseptal puncture procedure in the US. Transseptal’s innovative device helps surgeons to insert diagnostic and therapeutic devices into the left atrium with control, speed and precision. It is FDA and CE approved.

https://www.transseptalsolutions.com/

Generic treatment for hypertension. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Teva has launched a generic version of Tracleer tablets in the US. The treatment allows sufferers of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) to exercise better and slows progression of the disease.  PAH is high blood pressure in the blood vessels of the lungs.

https://ir.tevapharm.com/investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2019/Teva-Announces-Launch-of-a-Generic-Version-of-Tracleer-bosentan-Tablets-in-the-United-States/default.aspx

Europe approves diabetes support system. (TY Atid-EDI) I’ve reported previously (see here) on Israel’s GlucoMe diabetes monitors. GlucoMe’s new Decision Support System (“DSS”) has just received the CE Mark. The DSS’s algorithm-based, clinical decision support software helps doctors monitor type 2 diabetes patients.

https://www.glucome.com/about-us/news/GlucoMe-now-has-CE-Mark-for-Diabetes-Decision-Support-Technology

Anyone can save a life. Ezer Mizion’s data processor found she was a DNA match on the Israeli NGO’s bone marrow registry for a woman suffering from Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). She flew halfway around the world to donate some of her stem cells. She tells both her story, and of those still needing a transplant.

http://www.ezermizion.org/blog/what-was-it-like/

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Boris Johnson: British Jews Among Immigrant Groups Who Have ‘Helped to Make Our National Culture’

Posted By on July 7th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/05/boris-johnson-british-jews-among-immigrant-groups-who-have-helped-to-make-our-national-culture/

In remarks at a Conservative Party hustings on Friday, Boris Johnson hailed British Jews as one of the immigrant groups who “adapted and they have made their lives and they have helped to make our national culture.”

“That’s what I want for our country, I want everybody who comes here and makes their lives here to be and to feel British,” he said.

Johnson — a former London mayor and foreign secretary — is battling current Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt to succeed Prime Minister Theresa May, who announced her resignation in May over her failure to handle the Brexit issue. The winner will be declared later this month.

Watch Friday’s event below (via The Guardian). Johnson’s comment about Jews occurs at around the 40:30 mark:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Rabid French Antisemite Dieudonné Sentenced by Paris Court for Money Laundering, Tax Evasion by Ben Cohen

Posted By on July 7th, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/05/rabid-french-antisemite-dieudonne-sentenced-by-paris-court-for-money-laundering-tax-evasion/

The rabidly antisemitic French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was sentenced to two years in prison by the Paris Criminal Court on Friday, which convicted him of tax evasion and money laundering.

However, the comedian — who has built his reputation in France by mocking the Nazi Holocaust and promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories — is unlikely to serve actual jail time and will perform “community service” instead, Radio France International reported. He has also been ordered to pay a fine of 200,000 euros (approximately $225,000).

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ROD LIDDLE ON ANTI-SEMITISM IN 2018

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
Roderick E. Liddle is an English journalist, and an associate editor of The Spectator.

‘This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it…. Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place…. Time and again the same tropes emerged, the same sort of stuff that Streicher and Goebbels would have commended – and uttered…. And from that a whole bunch of other stuff emerged: the old blood libel business (a favourite of the repulsive Jenny Tonge)….

Nice, avuncular, Jeremy Corbyn, with his peace badges, happily laying a wreath at the graveside of Palestinian terrorists who murdered innocent Jewish athletes, oh, and much much more…. It is the same antisemitism, exactly the same: the obsession with Israel to the exclusion of everything else, the conspiracy theory paranoias, the derangement…. Here’s the test – if you cannot see the flagrant racism in the BDS movement, and if you are obsessed with the perfidy of the Middle East’s only democracy to the exclusion of all else, you are an antisemite. That means a good proportion of the Labour Party, including the leader, and almost all of Momentum: no brown shirts, no marching bands, but the same old filth, dressed in the clothes of a polytechnic geography lecturer.’
Rod Liddle (2018)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Russian Oligarch Scoffed at FBI’s Collusion Theory By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/

Oleg Deripaska did not exculpate Paul Manafort, but he raises more questions about Christopher Steele.

John Solomon is a terrific reporter, and he has done excellent work on the Trump-Russia investigation. Nevertheless, legal analysis is not his specialty. That is evident in his otherwise intriguing report at The Hill about Oleg Deripaska’s dealings with the FBI.

Deripaska is an aluminum magnate who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s oligarch” thanks to his close relationship with the Russian strongman. He was also Paul Manafort’s business partner.

Manafort, of course, was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman for about four months in mid 2016. He has paid dearly for entering Trump World.

In 2014, an investigation of Manafort’s work for the deposed Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych was closed. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in early 2016. The FBI and the Obama Justice Department reopened the Manafort case, helped along by pro-Clinton officials in Ukraine’s government. In August 2016, the latter leaked a ledger of questionable provenance, purporting to show over $12 million in cash payments to Manafort. The leak of the ledger led to Manafort’s dismissal from the Trump campaign. He was eventually indicted and convicted in the Mueller investigation for tax evasion and other financial-fraud charges. He is serving a 90-month prison sentence. (Manafort has never denied being paid by Yanukovych and his Party of Regions; he has maintained that he was paid by wire, not in cash. As Solomon has reported, the current Ukrainian government does not vouch for the authenticity of the ledger.)

Deripaska has credibly accused Manafort of swindling him in connection with an investment in a grossly overvalued Ukrainian telecom firm. He has sued the political consultant in various jurisdictions for over $25 million.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Grandstanding at the Border Democrats finally admit there’s a problem. How about helping to solve it?

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/grandstanding-at-the-border-11562367921

Ironic good news in the immigration wars: Democrats are finally admitting there’s a crisis at the southern U.S. border, judging by their visits the last two weeks with reporters and TV cameras in tow. Now will they help to stop it?

Nearly every presidential candidate has posed for a border photo op, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as always took it to the limit by claiming migrants were forced to drink from toilets and the U.S. is now heading toward fascism. There’s no confirming evidence about the toilet charge, and the Congresswoman has no standing to complain after she voted against the funding bill last week to get more humanitarian money to the border.

***

And, by the way, where has she been? The “breaking point has arrived this week at our border,” then commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Kevin McAleenan warned way back on March 27. “CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border.”

He was ignored. But suddenly Democrats and their media friends are flogging a pair of new inspector general reports, including one on May 30 that documents the “dangerous overcrowding” at a border control station in El Paso. It describes how one “cell with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155 detainees,” and how migrants were “standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space.”

At a CBP facility in the Rio Grande Valley, says a July 2 IG report, “some single adults were held in standing room only conditions for a week.” Some migrants were desperate enough to clog the “toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance.”

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How to Put Citizenship Back in the Census The 14th Amendment gives the Trump administration the justification it needs. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Gilson B. Gray

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-put-citizenship-back-in-the-census-11562264430

The Trump administration said Wednesday it will attempt to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census while complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Department of Commerce v. New York. Five justices held that the Census Act allows the question, but a separate five-justice majority found the rulemaking that added the question was procedurally deficient. There is a way forward. The Constitution itself requires the collection of citizenship information.

Section 2 of the 14th Amendment provides that if a state denies the franchise to anyone eligible to vote, its allotment of House seats shall be “reduced in the proportion which the number of such . . . citizens shall bear to the whole number of . . . citizens . . . in such state.” This language is absolute and mandatory. Compliance is impossible without counting how many citizens live in each state.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, and this provision meant to secure the voting rights of newly freed slaves. But it wasn’t limited to that purpose. An earlier version of Section 2, introduced in 1865, specifically referred to limits on suffrage based on “race or color,” but the Senate rejected that limitation. The amendment forbids state interference with the rights of all eligible voters (then limited to males over 21).

Section 2 also applies to every state, a point Rep. John Bingham, the amendment’s principal drafter, emphasized during the floor debate: “The second section . . . simply provides for the equalization of representation among all the States in the Union, North, South, East, and West. It makes no discrimination.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Cultural Casualties of Life in the Fast Lane Patrick Morgan

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07

Milan Kundera observed in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

In times when history moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip … No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

The present time and the public realm have upended the past and the private. Give us this day our daily drama of the news cycle. Life on the iPad, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter take up a good deal of each day, not to mention reading newspapers, watching television and answering the day’s emails, letters and recorded messages. Longer-term projects are postponed in the face of pressing, but passing, matter. (On the positive side, the internet provides an enormous library at our instant disposal.) You may get a lot of “likes”, but this merely reinforces your own views at the expense of more challenging inputs. T.S. Eliot said he didn’t read the newspapers because they were too exciting. We become vicarious actors, expert media sleuths in a continuing global drama, fulfilled by being in touch with vital contemporary currents. The spheres of our inner world and the world conversation happily align. The personal moves to the public sphere.

The ancients juggled carpe diem (living for the day) with vanitas vanitatum (the futility of human endeavour), but for us it’s a no-brainer. In the past, delayed gratification and instinctual renunciation were the ways to achieve long-term goals, but large swathes of our culture have settled for hedonism, stroking of the ego, and instant entertainment. The Bible taught the Jewish and Christian peoples there was nothing new under the sun, but since the 1960s we have been propelled by the shock of the new. This has come about because a unidirectional tendency has overtaken contemporary thought, moving discussion into ever narrower channels and towards the present. Unlikely notions, sometimes originating in the academies, filter down to the media where they are given wider credence by public opinion-formers who act as gatekeepers to the wider community. A sign of coming times was the fad of brainstorming which threw people with limited knowledge together in a room, and provided a wonderful impression that something was going to eventuate, but was futile, as the process lacked any shared pool of information and any criteria of judgment. Ideas don’t appear out of nothing.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

US and Iran: What is NOT a Smart Policy by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14498/trump-iran-policy

Rooting for President Trump to fail in his policy with Iran means calling for empowering and emboldening a theocratic regime that has consistently threatened “Death to America” — with nukes, presumably, if it had the capability, which it is busy acquiring.

The core revolutionary pillars of this Iranian government are anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. This country, which some people say they would like to see prevail over President Trump, has also been named, several times, the leading executioner of children. It has killed thousands of Americans, including in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, and has committed — and continues to commit — the most unspeakable human rights abuses, including flogging and executing minors….That documentation is just a limited accounting of the horrors it has committed; the list goes on.

During President Obama’s eight-year administration, Obama and Kerry made unprecedented concessions, fully respected the Iranian leaders, lifted sanctions, offered them a fast-track to legitimate deliverable nuclear capability and showered the regime with $150 billion — all in an attempt to appease the ruling mullahs. How did that turn out?

Iran gained legitimacy, directed the billions of dollars to Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as Iran’s militias and terror groups, and, through its proxies, has been deepening its foothold in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and strengthening its hold on Hezbollah in Lebanon, Venezuela and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

There are policy analysts, scholars or politicians I have come across who say, “I hope Trump fails.” One area particularly focused on is the president’s policy on Iran. The statement “I hope Trump fails,” however, is not a sound strategy.

Those who hold this view would apparently rather see the country fail than see President Trump do well. Rooting for President Trump to fail in his policy with Iran means calling for empowering and emboldening a theocratic regime that has consistently threatened “Death to America” — with nukes, presumably, if it had the capability, which it is busy acquiring.

The core revolutionary pillars of this Iranian government are anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. This country, which some people say they would like to see prevail over President Trump, has also been named, several times, the leading executioner of children. It has killed thousands of Americans, including in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, and has committed — and continues to commit — the most unspeakable human rights abuses, including flogging and executing minors.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

More Independence Day celebrations: June jobs report up, up, and up! By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/more_independence_day_celebrations_june_jobs_report_up_up_and_up.html

President Donald J. Trump (R)’s Independence Day celebrations honoring the freedoms of America continued Friday morning as the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its June 2019 jobs report.  It was a definite cause for celebration…but not for Democrats, who strive to keep people dependent on a government ruled by Democrats in secure jobs.  

In dry bureaucratese, the BLS stated:

THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION — JUNE 2019

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 224,000 in June, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in professional and business services, in health care, and in transportation and warehousing. …

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.3 percent), adult women (3.3 percent), teenagers (12.7 percent), Whites (3.3 percent), Blacks (6.0 percent), Asians (2.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.3 percent) showed little or no change in June. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 1.4 million in June and accounted for 23.7 percent of the unemployed. (See table A-12.)

The labor force participation rate, at 62.9 percent, was little changed over the month and unchanged over the year.  In June, the employment- population ratio was 60.6 percent for the fourth month in a row. (See table A-1.) …

Construction employment continued to trend up in June (+21,000), in line with its average monthly gain over the prior 12 months.

Manufacturing employment edged up in June (+17,000), following 4 months of little change.  So far this year, job growth in the industry has averaged 8,000 per month, compared with an average of 22,000 per month in 2018. In June, employment rose in computer and electronic products (+7,000) and in plastics and rubber products (+4,000).

Employment in other major industries, including mining, wholesale trade, retail trade, information, financial activities, leisure and hospitality, and government, showed little change over the month.

In June, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 6 cents to $27.90, following a 9-cent gain in May.  Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.1 percent. Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees increased by 4 cents to $23.43 in June. (See tables B-3 and B-8.)

The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.4 hours in June. In manufacturing, the average workweek edged up 0.1 hour to 40.7 hours, while overtime was unchanged at 3.4 hours. The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls held at 33.6 hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)

In real life, this means that the increase of 224,000 jobs was well above the 165,000 jobs the Labor Department expected.