RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sometimes, the truth of a situation appears in small details before the big picture emerges. Poker players learn to scrutinize their opponents for their “tell,” the reflexive movement or twitch that an individual isn’t even aware of making. So, Disgraced, the Pulitzer prize-winning play now on Broadway, opens onto a set of an expensive, upper-east side penthouse apartment with French doors leading to the terrace, a coffered ceiling with expensive lighting and a corridor leading to the rooms beyond. This is clearly a classic Park Avenue apartment yet everyone who comes to visit knocks on the door as if this were Jerry Seinfeld’s apt on the upper west side. What, no doorbell? Even in a building with a doorman buzzing upstairs to announce a visitor? Even dinner guests dressed for a formal evening? Knocking?

This tiny detail is emblematic of everything else that is wrong with both this play and its casting. Hari Dhillon as the lead, Amir, looks less like a “brown” man than a white homosexual who is still in the closet. Karen Pittman as the black lawyer who has just made partner in a prestigious firm is outfitted as if she were getting ready to perform a gig at the Carlyle, not come to a casual dinner for four at her colleague’s home. Yet this same over-glammed woman wearing stiletto heels, a clingy black cocktail dress and sophisticated jewelry has brought a dessert from a cupcake store as a house gift. Both couples call their spouses honey, a dated term of endearment more associated with early tv sitcoms than millenial achievers who are all professionals. All the little things are wrong and then there are the big things.

We learn that Amir has been passed over for partner because of his support for a jailed imam that sent his Jewish partner into a tailspin. We are meant to believe that Muslims in America have experienced discrimination yet at the time this play was written, Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish mayor of New York and Charles Schumer, Jewish senator and photo-opportunist were staunchly defending the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero. Huma Abeddin, the Muslim wife of Anthony Weiner was assistant to our Secretary of State and many other Muslims occupied positions of power in the Obama administration. Middle-Eastern studies in Ivy league colleges were full of Muslim professors and their ideology and Mehmet Oz was (and still is) one of the biggest draws on daytime t.v. Billionaire Muslim potentates had contributed wings to American museums, huge endowments to our universities and contributions to some of our presidential libraries. Missing from the history that the playwright recites about our plunder of Muslim lands and our dis-respect for their culture are the horrifying truths of Muslim massacres and barbarity – most recently ranging from 9/11 to the decapitations, clitorectomies, stonings, kidnappings,, suicide bombings and an ongoing series of wars and coups d’etat throughout the middle east, Indonesia and Africa as well as murders and mayhem in Europe and the western hemisphere.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Universal Flu vaccine gets EU and Japanese patents. The European Union and Japan have granted patents to the universal flu vaccine Multimeric-001 (M-001) developed by Israel’s BiondVax. The ex-Weizmann Institute technology already has patents in the United States, Hong Kong, Australia, China, Russia and Mexico.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-universal-flu-vaccine-heads-for-universal-acceptance/

US approval for Israeli ECG system. The US FDA has approved the innovative ECG system HyperQ Analyzer Rest developed by Israeli biotech BSP. HyperQ can test patients at rest, diagnosing early-stage heart disease without putting the patient under stress. It is less risky than alternative invasive and radioactivity tests.
http://news.nocamels.com/2014/10/29/bsp-receives-fda-approval-for-hyperq-rest-system/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2xANqegvOg

Boost for GVHD treatment. The US FDA has given orphan status to Glassia from Israel’s Kamada, to treat Graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD). Preliminary studies indicate that Glassia may be able to treat and reduce the severity of GVHD, a key life-threatening complication of stem cell transplantation from another person.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-kamada-awarded-fda-orphan-drug-status-for-gvhd-1000982117

Success with new treatment for Parkinson’s. Phase II trials of liquid levodopa/carbidopa (LD/CD) (ND0612L) by Israeli biotech NeuroDerm have shown improvements in patients with moderate to severe Parkinson’s disease.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/10/30/israeli-neuroderm-announces-success-in-new-parkinsons-treatment/

App improves eyesight of Israeli pilots. The Israeli app GlassesOff has been tested successfully on 32 Israeli Air Force pilots. On average, a 35% improvement in visual acuity (sharpness and clarity) was achieved after 3 months of exercises for just 12-15 minutes, three times a week. GlassesOff improves the brain, not the eyes.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-eye-exercise-app-lets-iaf-pilots-dump-glasses/

Move your clocks back one hour today.

This is Kerry on daylight on November 24, 2013

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/11/sec-john-kerry-no-daylight-between-israel-and-united-states/

Sec. John Kerry: ‘No Daylight’ Between Israel, U.S. on Goal for Iran Nuclear Program

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/turkeys-treachery-undercuts-logic-of-membership/88904/

Turkey’s Treachery Belies Logic of Membership In the NATO Alliance
“What Turkey should do is join with other civilized countries against all the terrorists, effectively establish a protectorate over Syria, and cooperate with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even Iran, if that country can be induced to abandon its nuclear military program, in stabilizing Iraq. The world should recognize an independent Kurdistan, one that would pledge not to disturb Turkey if Turkey stops its support or even toleration of Islamist terrorism; the Muslim powers should recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state (as Egypt, Jordan, and even, in theory, Turkey have); and a viable state can be crafted for Palestine involving a narrowed West Bank but a thickened Gaza, with a connection between them.”

Got that ?
a “narrowed West Bank but a thickened Gaza, with a connection between them” ????

We can applaud health workers and take the prudent steps at the same time.

President Barack Obama and Kaci Hickox, a nurse who returned from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone on October 24, are attacking states’ efforts to keep returning health-care workers away from the public for 21 days. Governors in New Jersey, Illinois, Maine, Connecticut, and other states say it’s a wise precaution to prevent the virus from possibly spreading. But Obama claims that these regulations are based on fear, not science. And Hickox has successfully defied Maine’s effort to restrict her to her home, bashing the quarantine as “unnecessary” and “not evidence-based.” Judge Charles C. LaVerdiere ruled on Friday that Hickox is free to travel without restrictions.

But, in fact, science is against Obama, Hickox, and the judge. Evidence shows that to protect the public, travelers from Ebola-plagued West Africa, especially doctors and nurses who battled the virus, should be quarantined for 21 days.

FEVER MONITORING Is UNRELIABLE
At least 100 people, including about five health-care workers, enter the U.S. each day from Ebola-infected countries in West Africa. At departure from there and arrival here, their temperatures are checked by airport workers. But data from over 4,000 Ebola cases (the most complete analysis ever) published October 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine show that 13 percent of patients don’t develop a fever early on.

Thomas Duncan, who brought Ebola to Texas and infected two nurses, was able to get through fever screening. It also failed to identify Craig Spencer, the physician with Doctors without Borders, who returned home to New York infected with Ebola and then went bowling, dined out, and took the subway. Now he is fighting for his life in Bellevue Hospital, and public-health officials are scrambling to identify the people who may have been exposed to him.

Spiking temperatures eventually alerted Duncan and Spencer. But the research shows that in 13 percent of Ebola cases, the patient is already quite ill and diagnosed with the virus but still does not have a fever.

ARE AMERICANS AT RISK OF CATCHING EBOLA?
For most Americans, the known risk of catching Ebola is currently small. Ebola is most contagious in the later stages of illness, when victims here presumably would be in a hospital, putting hospital workers at severe risk but not the rest of us. Better sanitation facilities here than in Africa make it less likely that Americans will be exposed to infectious bodily fluids.

There is no “stigma,” and comparisons to criminal imprisonment are absurd.

The first responsibility of the president of the United States is national security. In the absence of presidential leadership as Ebola makes inroads in our country, state officials such as New Jersey governor Chris Christie have stepped into the security breach, taking commonsense steps to protect their citizens from the deadly virus. One of those measures is to quarantine those who have been exposed to Ebola, including health-care professionals who have risked their own lives to fight the disease.

As a public-health precaution, it is entirely reasonable for states to impose a 21-day quarantine that (a) reflects the virus’s incubation period according to scientific research and (b) applies regardless of whether the exposed person is manifesting symptoms. The objections to quarantine, rooted in a skewed construction of the Constitution and the make-it-up-as-you-go-along corpus of international “human rights” law, are frivolous. Yet, they have gotten traction, for at least three reasons.

The first, of course, is the president. What an American president thinks is always a big deal, even if — especially if — it is nonsense. On Ebola as on much else, we deal with our citizen-of-the-world president’s apathy — if not antipathy — when it comes to American national interests. Once again, the responsibilities of his office are subordinated to Obama’s post-American ideological agenda, this time by expending our funds, deploying our troops, and gratuitously endangering our homeland to burnish his legacy as an international humanitarian.

A second reason is Kaci Hickox. She is the nurse and global-altruist-turned-domestic-diva who has very publicly opposed the efforts of New Jersey and, now, Maine to quarantine her after her return from working with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. On Friday, she found a likeminded judge, Charles C. LaVerdiere, who blithely ordered the quarantine lifted over the objection of the state officials responsible for the security of Maine’s citizens. Third, there is legal commentary, particularly of the libertarian-hedonist stripe, that portrays quarantine confinement as if it were criminal prosecution.

Last Tuesday, the 28th, was the 100th anniversary of Jonas Salk’s birth. Salk’s polio vaccine turned the tide against a particularly vicious and destructive disease; because of Salk’s work, polio exists today only in a few Third World enclaves. If the new anti-vaccine fetish is brought under control, polio will be completely eradicated in the next few years.
Salk was a very great man, and — through a trick of fate — was a very great man who is very well known. Everyone knows Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin; almost no one remembers Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. People know Pasteur but not Harvey, Patton but not Bradley, Feynman but not Pauli. Some men are remembered, some aren’t. It’s just one of those things. Jonas Salk was born in 1914; the Jonas Salk of the 19th century was born in 1860, and was named Waldemar Haffkine.

Like Salk, Haffkine was a Russian Jew. Unlike Salk, he had the great misfortune of actually living in Russia. In 1879, Haffkine was a brilliant young biologist; he was also a member of the Odessa League of Self-Defense. During a pogrom, he tried to stop a group of Russian army cadets from destroying a Jew’s home; he was injured, arrested, and imprisoned. Future Nobel laureate Élie Metchnikoff, who counted Haffkine as a protégé, intervened on his behalf; Haffkine was released and allowed to travel west. In 1889, he settled in Paris and began to work on vaccines under the aegis of Louis Pasteur.

The 19th century was punctuated by cholera outbreaks that killed tens of millions of people. That was where Haffkine directed his work. By 1892, he had a working cholera vaccine; he knew it worked because he performed the first human test on himself. The cholera situation was especially bad in India — about 30 million Indians had died — so Haffkine moved his lab to the subcontinent. A local Muslim group decided that India didn’t need help from Jewish doctors and tried to murder him; nonetheless, Haffkine succeeded in performing 55,000 vaccinations and stanching the epidemic.

According to Dr. William Derek Foster, Haffkine produced “the first vaccinations for bacterial disease in man the utility of which seemed reasonably certain” — that is, Haffkine’s cholera vaccine was the first vaccine that worked. It paved the way for Salk and every other great preventive-medicine man. The great surgeon and surgical innovator Sir Joseph Lister described Waldemar Haffkine as “a savior of humanity.” But the cholera vaccine was only Haffkine’s opening act.

Since he assumed office nearly six years ago, US President Barack Hussein Obama has been dogged by allegations of managerial incompetence. Obama, his critics allege, had no managerial experience before he was elected. His lack of such experience, they claim, is reflected in what they see as his incompetent handling of the challenges of the presidency.

In everything from dealing with the Congress, to reining in radical ideologues at the IRS, to handling the chaos at the Mexican border, to putting together coordinated strategies for dealing with everything from Ebola to Islamic State (IS), Obama’s critics claim that he is out of his league. That he is incompetent.

But if Israel’s experience with him is any guide, then his critics are the ones who are out to sea. Because at least in his handling of US relations with the Jewish state, Obama has exhibited a mastery of the tools of the executive branch unmatched by most of his predecessors.

Obama is a master of mendacity, a virtuoso of malciousness. Consider two recent news stories.

First, in an article published in Comment: How the US first agreed and then refused to help locate a missing IDF soldier (10/17), terrorism analyst and investigative reporter Steven Emerson revealed how the highest echelons of the administration blocked the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office from assisting Israel in finding the remains of IDF soldier Oron Shaul.

Shaul was one of seven soldiers from the Golani Infantry Brigade killed July 20 when Hamas terrorists fired a rocket at their armored personnel carrier in Gaza’s Shejeia neighborhood.

As Emerson related, after stealing his remains, Hamas terrorists hacked into Shaul’s Facebook page and posted announcements that he was being held by Hamas.

Among other things it did to locate Shaul and ascertain whether or not he was still alive, the IDF formally requested that the FBI intervene with Facebook to get the IP address of the persons who posted on Oron’s page. If such information was acquired quickly, the IDF might be able to locate Oron, or at least find people with knowledge of his whereabouts.

Doctors and patients get burned by the world’s worst middleman.

In the first circle of Dante’s Hell, things aren’t so bad: The unbaptized and the virtuous pagans get to kick back, forever, with Homer and Ovid, watch Julius Caesar and Saladin do the limbo, etc. But things take a pretty sharp turn for the worse thereafter: Paris, Tristan, and Cleopatra get buffeted about by the winds of lust in the second circle, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti suffers a ghastly punishment for his heresy in the sixth, and soon enough you’ve got Satan himself gnawing on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. But even with Virgil to guide him, Dante never looked into the little-known tenth circle of Hell, the joint headquarters of the federal health-care bureaucracies, i.e., Satan’s outhouse.

And if you think spending eternity submerged in a river of excrement sounds bad, try getting an appointment with a dermatologist. Dante had “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here,” but we have “Please hold and your call will be answered in the order it was received.”

Researchers at JAMA Dermatology decided to do a little investigative journalism and cracked open the physicians’ directories for Medicare Advantage in twelve metropolitan areas. They invented a father with a suspicious itch, and started trying to make appointments. (Reuters provides an excellent summary of their findings here.) With 4,754 dermatologists to choose from, you’d think that would be pretty easy — and it’s lucky for you that there’s not a level of Hell for the naïve.

That population of 4,754 dermatologists turns out to have been decimated — about a tenth of them had moved on to one of the three sections of The Divine Comedy, or, short of that, had retired or were no longer practicing medicine. But the headcount has to be reduced further, and drastically: About half of the physicians were double-listed; unsurprisingly, the federal government is a much more attentive bookkeeper when it comes to your tax liabilities than it is when it comes to your health care. Another 18 percent were simply unreachable, and 9 percent were not taking new patients. Of those 4,754 theoretical dermatologists, there turned out to be 1,266 actual dermatologists still among the living, practicing medicine, and willing to make an appointment. But not for everybody: In some cases, there was not one dermatologist willing to see patients with certain Medicare Advantage plans. That’s what happens when you put politicians in charge of health care: You get a great deal on an insurance policy that no one accepts.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-bds-movement-an-orwellian-campaign-to-destroy-israel

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/the-bds-movement-an-orwellian-campaign-to-destroy-israel-ruth-king.html

In 2010 the British writer Howard Jacobson won the prestigious Man Booker prize for his book The Finkler Question which satirizes writers, artists and academics who belong to a Jewish group named “ASH-amed.” The title refers to their shame and sorrow that the Jews of Israel stoop to the venal sin of defending their nation against its enemies.

While ASHamed was a parody, the BDS movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel has become a powerful threat to the economy and existence of Israel.

Far more insidious than the hazy, hypocritical, ignorant and selective preaching and preening of leftists who moan and groan about settlements and occupation in Israel, are celebrities, performers and academics who level destructive libels of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, using Nazi metaphors to delegitimize the only real democracy in the entire region.

Much has been written on the subject, but The London Center for Policy Research, a think tank founded and headed by Herbert London has produced a first and essential book The BDS War Against Israel-The Orwellian Campaign to Destroy Israel Through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. It exposes the radical agenda and willing participation of companies, organizations, charities, academics, and a motley group of useful Jewish idiots who demonize Israel under the pretense of “humanitarian” concerns.

How did it start and how did it gain such traction?

The authors, Jed Babbin and Herbert London, meticulously expose the founding, the funding, the participating groups, the tactics and the underlying anti-Semitism of the BDS movement, which sells itself under the disguise of the pursuit of “social justice.” It uses propaganda, disinformation, and outright libel to shift world opinion by depicting Israel as a rogue nation that routinely oppresses and disenfranchises a beleaguered minority of hapless Arabs. Thus, is Israel placed among nations ruled by despots and barbarians such as North Korea and Cuba, and, ironically, its surrounding Arab enemies.
The success of the movement is staggering. In nine years the BDS movement has persuaded a gullible left, both internationally and in the United States to 1. create global boycotts of Israeli universities and industries (purportedly only those that do business in the “occupied” West Bank) 2. to persuade nations, banks, companies and industries to divest themselves of investments in banks, companies and industries in Israel 3.to obtain international sanctions against Israel, its economy, and its people.