RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/number-one/?print=1

There is a pastime among liberal pundits — the latest is Nicholas Kristof [1]— to quote a new center left global ranking (with unbiased titles such as “The Social Progress Imperative”) and then to decry that the United States is behind its major industrial competitors in things like “Internet Access” and “Ecosystem sustainability.” The subtext of these rants is that an illiberal, reactionary U.S. does not spend enough on government entitlements to promote parity, equality and social justice among its citizenry. These pessimistic rankings increase the angst about the American condition when viewed from scowling perches in Washington or New York.

Not surprisingly, the winners in these periodic gloomy assessments are usually smaller or intermediate quasi-socialist nations, with mostly homogeneous ethnic and religious populations (e.g., Switzerland, New Zealand, Iceland, Denmark, etc.). And the result is that Americans are scolded to tone down their pride [2] at being exceptional and to begin to emulate such supposedly more livable societies.

Yet I suppose that if you were to assess, say, the mostly 5.6 million homogenously well off Californians, who lived within 10 miles of the coast, from San Diego to Berkeley, they would compare quite nicely with Denmark. Or for that matter, should the Danish system be applied to 300 million in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, I also think that they would sink a bit in terms of social progress.

The criteria by which America is to be judged are often both biased and historically ignorant. Why not rank the United States in comparison with other similarly huge countries that span three time zones, and include in their enormous populations radically different ethnic and religious groups?

The latest U.N. report tones down the alarmism but ramps up the bad economics.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579477222157281450?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest mammoth report last week, and the effort marks an improvement over the IPCC’s last such effort in 2007. That may not be saying much, but on climate change intellectual progress of any sort is worth commending.

The IPCC’s “Fifth Assessment Report,” or AR5, is generating the usual alarmist headlines: “Impacts on All Continents, Worse to Come” was typical. That’s partly a function of what the IPCC frontloads into the 28-page “summary for policymakers,” the only portion of the report that most politicians or journalists ever bother reading, and that is sexed up for mass media consumption.

So it’s worth diving deeper into the report, where a much more cautious picture of the state of climate science comes into view. Gone are some of the false alarmist claims from the last report, such as the forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035 or that hurricanes are becoming more intense. “Current data sets,” the report admits, “indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century.” Recall the false claims of climate cause and storm effect last year after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579481402659166832?mg=reno64-wsj

Testimony by the former acting head of the CIA makes clear that Congress’s current approach isn’t sufficient.

Last week’s encounter between former acting CIA Director Michael Morell and the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence may have brought us a bit closer to the truth of how four Americans came to be killed at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, and how their countrymen came to be lied to about it. But the progress toward truth was probably not made in a way that Mr. Morell intended. The encounter on Capitol Hill also made clear that the forum that will take us all the way to the truth must be something other than a congressional hearing.

Mr. Morell announced at the start of the hearing that he was there to refute claims that he had “inappropriately altered CIA’s classified analysis and its unclassified talking points . . . for the political benefit of President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton.” Critics of the government’s performance on Benghazi have charged that Mr. Morell’s revisions principally although not exclusively involved changing the description of the violence and its perpetrators, and removing the suggestion that they might have had ties to a terrorist organization. These changes, it is argued, enabled Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, to promote the discredited and since abandoned narrative that the violence was a reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube video produced by a probationer in Los Angeles.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Surviving heart failure. Cardiologist Prof. Ilan Goldenberg from Israel’s Sheba Medical Center led an international study into cardiac insufficiency – also known as heart failure. It reported that an automatic cardiac pacemaker/defibrillator implanted at an early stage of common heart failure could extend life significantly.

http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Sheba-Medical-Center-team-heads-important-heart-failure-research-346957

Calcium absorption trial successful. Israel’s Amorphical has successfully completed a clinical trial of its amorphous calcium. The trial found that the patients’ absorption of amorphous calcium was double the average absorption of crystalline calcium. Amorphical aims to develop a product as a nutritional supplement.

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-amorphical-calcium-absorption-trial-successful-1000925022

Sleep Apnea treatment for US citizens. Israel’s Itamar Medical has signed an exclusive marketing agreement with Medtronic Corporation to market the company’s sleep apnea diagnostic product to a select segment of the US market – patients with atrial fibrillation..

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-itamar-signs-medtronic-distribution-deal-for-sleep-device–1000925010

Innovative endoscope gets USA approval. The US FDA has just approved the MUSE system from Israel’s Medigus. MUSE is a unique medical device that allows doctors to examine the stomach and esophagus with a tiny camera. The same device can then be used to stop acid reflux.

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-medigus-gets-fda-nod-for-upgraded-muse-system-1000926318

How bacteria is controlled in the gut. Scientists from Israel’s Weizmann Institute have revealed the sophisticated mechanism that the digestive system uses to balance good and bad bacteria. A protein cluster called inflammasome monitors the bacterial population and signals the secretion of antibiotic proteins.

http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/goblet-cells-get-their-germs#.Uy8V286oVey

US patent for Israeli stem cell technology. Israeli biotech Brainstorm has received a US patent for its autologous stem cell technology for the treatment of neuro-degenerative diseases. Brainstorm is preparing for its US upcoming multi-center Phase II trial with its proprietary NurOwn stem cell therapy.

http://www.brainstorm-cell.com/index.php/news-a-events/291-march-24-2014

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/29-muslim-terrorists-accidentally-blow-themselves-up/print/

March was a month packed with Muslims accidentally blowing themselves up, but it looks like April will have an even higher unintentional suicide rate.

At least 29 rebels died in a blast Sunday in the central Syrian city of Homs as they primed a car bomb for an attack, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said at least 29 people were killed, most or all of them believed to be rebels, in the besieged Old City of Homs when a car bomb exploded.

State news agency SANA also reported the blast, saying a car had exploded while being loaded with explosives.

The car bomb would probably have killed less people offensively, than it did its own team. Muslims have been having a lot of bad luck with car bombs back in March.

Three Al Qaeda operatives accidentally blew themselves up while outfitting a car with explosives. A member of a Sinai based jihadist movement who led a deadly attack in Israel in 2011 died last week when a car accident he was involved in exploded a bomb that he was carrying.

An intending car bomber in Somalia, thought to be part of the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab jihadist organization, accidentally detonated his explosives prematurely.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/enza-ferreri/taqiyya-and-blasphemy-law-in-the-uk/print/

n British law, race and religion are increasingly becoming deliberately confused for the purpose of accusing critics of Islam of racism.

A soccer fan was recently arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after allegedly ripping up pages of the Qur’an and throwing them at a match. While on bail, he was also banned from attending any football games, visiting St Andrew’s – the stadium of the incident -, and going to any city where his team Middlesbrough was playing.

Insults against Islam are taken very seriously in Britain, and the world of soccer is particularly sensitive to them. After the incident, Middlesbrough Football Club suspended six more people, and vowed to ban anyone convicted of the “crime” from the Riverside Stadium, its home ground, for life.

A Middlesbrough club spokesman said it operates a “zero tolerance policy” towards all forms of discrimination, and supports football’s pledge to “eradicate racism in all its forms”.

Nobody could answer the question of what race Islam is. Muslims belong to all races, including white. But we know that the word “racism” has lost its original sense, and indeed any sense.

Originally the concept of racism had a place and an important role in both ethical and political discourses.

Now it’s best avoided because it’s lost its positive characteristics, its usefulness, and has instead become a tool for intolerance, intimidation, restriction of freedom of speech and other freedoms, in short a means of oppression.

The 19th-century German philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of modern logic, distinguished between the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning (or reference) and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by the concept.

The sense or connotation is the concept’s descriptive qualities.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-left-isnt-pro-gay-its-pro-power-2/print/

Libertarians and liberal Republicans have been proposing a truce on social issues in order to be able to concentrate on fiscal issues, but there is no such thing as a truce on any issue with the left.

Brendan Eich offered the left a truce on gay marriage. He talked about tolerance and diversity and he got his head handed to him. His forced departure from the Mozilla Foundation, which is behind the Firefox browser, should be a wake up call to anyone on the right who still thinks that social issues can be taken off the table and that we can all agree to disagree.

Those on the right who insist that conservatism should be reduced to fiscal issues imagine that the culture war is a fight that the right picked with the left. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The left does not care about gay marriage. In most left-wing regimes, homosexuality was persecuted. It was illegal in the USSR. Gay men were locked up in Cuba and are still targeted in China. Nicolas Maduro, the current hero of the left, openly uses homophobic language without any criticism from his Western admirers. It goes without saying that homosexuality is criminalized throughout the Muslim world.

Engels viewed homosexuality as a perversion born out of the bourgeois way of life that would be eliminated under socialism. The Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States stated that homosexuality “is a product of the decay of capitalism” and vowed that once the revolution took place, a “struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals.”

How Arabic Stifles Individualism and Freedom — on The Glazov Gang
Nonie Darwish discusses how the Arabic language impedes psychological growth and sabotages the path to democracy.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/how-arabic-stifles-individualism-and-freedom-on-the-glazov-gang/

Lee Smith: Walter Benjamin in Jerusalem
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/one-most-beautiful-pieces-literary-journalism_786494.html?nopager=1

In Mosaic Magazine, Walter Laqueur reviews the recently published Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Laqueur tries to explain how a German writer (literary critic, essayist, philosopher) virtually unknown in his own day (1892-1940) has become one of the touchstones of post-modernist thought. In the precincts of “cultural studies and its various academic subdisciplines,” writes Laqueur, Benjamin’s gnomic style may well count as a plus, an outward sign of inward profundity that, simultaneously, invites the most fanciful flights of interpretive ingenuity. Likewise contributing powerfully to his allure is the sorry story of his life.”

Benjamin left Berlin in 1932 and eventually wound up in Paris, where he had a very difficult time scraping together a living, though it was here that he would embark upon what would become what many consider his masterpiece, The Arcades Project. The work, left unfinished at his death, was inspired in part by Benjamin’s obsession with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. “The arcades in question,” writes Laqueur, “were the glass-enclosed passages in central Paris when that city was, in Benjamin’s terms, the capital of the 19th century. A central emblematic figure for Benjamin was that of the flâneur, the stroller or urban explorer who habituated these environs. Having gathered a mountain of materials, Baudelaire’s poetic masterwork Les Fleurs du Mal being prominent among them, Benjamin wanted to show how urbanization had revolutionized not only culture, as evidenced in art and architecture, urban planning, and new ideas of beauty, but life in general.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14794#.U0E1rVeCUtU

The gloves are off. Israel has had enough. Or so it surely seems.

When Israel’s left of center Justice Minister Tzipi Livni bails out in disgust it can only mean that the entire nation has finally awakened to the truth about Mahmoud Abbas. He is a terrorist. Time for Israel to say so and declare him an outlaw. All that remains is to make it official, give him a head start, and send him into the woods along with the rest of his Palestinian Authority.

A late breaking development comes close to designating Abbas persona non grata.

As of the other day, Israel has suspended all top-level contacts with the PA. That is a step in the right direction.

Abbas spoiled Secretary of State John Kerry’s magnificent obsession when he, Abbas, scuttled “peace talks” by turning in self-pity to the United Nations. This, after Israel saw no benefit in releasing yet another batch of murderers…26 of them. Seeing that this time he won’t be able to dance in the streets with his brother terrorists, Abbas submitted applications for membership in 15 UN organizations.