RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel outpaces all other countries for London IPOs

Last year was a banner one for Israeli exits – and especially for IPOs, according to the IVC Research Center and Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal law firm. Altogether, some two dozen Israeli companies went public in 2014, accounting for $2.1 billion of the nearly $7 billion raised in 99 Israeli tech exits.

Most of those IPOs were on the NASDAQ, but London turned out to be a close second. Nine Israeli firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, two on the Main Market (for well established companies) and seven on the AIM, the international Alternative Investment Market for smaller start-ups. More Israeli firms went public in London than from any other country, other than the UK itself.

To celebrate, some 30 CEOs and CFOs of Israeli companies took part last week in an event with representatives of the London Stock Exchange, organized by UK Trade & Investment at the British Embassy in Israel. The British Embassy, as the representative of the London Stock Exchange in Israel, assists Israeli companies in raising funds in London.

Jewish, Arab vendors in New York turf war Sides trade accusations of land-grabbing, terrorism in spat over sidewalk space outside Rockefeller Center

It seems even the US isn’t free of territorial disputes between Jews and Arabs.

Under the headline “Intifooda,” The New York Post reported Sunday that the operators of a kosher food cart in Manhattan have been involved in a bitter turf war with the Egyptian owners of a rival establishment.

According to the report, the Holy Rollers kosher cart, operated by vendors Yisroel Mordowitz and Yosef Salzbank, settled near Rockefeller Center last Monday after wandering the streets of the city in search of a prime spot.

After the first day, Holy Rollers was rolling in money — some $2,000 — from selling its deli fare.

You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up

But then most of us aren’t “climate scientists”, who have once again granted themselves permission to assemble a cavalcade of conjecture and omission and parade it as “evidence”, courtesy of the Australian Academy of Science. They do, however, care deeply about puppies and kittens

The Australian Academy of Science has hitched its wagon to the “climate change will kill kittens and puppies” school of science. This kittens-and-puppies theme was dreamed up by Harvard University’s Naomi Oreskes and endorsed by Academician and ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams — a device quite deliberately intended to make householders sit up, take notice and believe in the scariness of computer-model forecasts.

The Australian Academy of Science leadership on Monday (Feb. 16) rolled out its much-delayed booklet “Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers”, updating its 2010 version. Its website includes a three-minute video (below) of Academy luminaries such as astronomer Nobel winner Brian Schmidt saying scary stuff.

The Academy has patched onto this video another clip called “Why people don’t believe in climate science” featuring a youthful Dr Joe Hanson — the geeky guy (pictured at right) who appears toward the end of the clip, borrowed from Public Broadcasting Service channel, the US near-equivalent of our own ABC. In Hanson’s full video (below), he psychoanalyses why ‘deniers’ stubbornly refuse to go along with climate religion, and how psychologists’ arsenal of brainwashing tricks can ensure the public gets an effective message. His advice comes at the 1.35 mark of the video below

But that hasn’t kept him from turning Wisconsin around and winning election after election.

Approximately 100 percent of the people I know graduated college. Many of them also have master’s degrees, J.D.s, and MBAs. In my world, those without such credentials are almost exotic.

But my world is unusual. As a Manhattan-based political commentor and think-tank scholar, I work and play with other members of the chattering classes who occupy newsrooms, TV studios, research institutions, and university classrooms in the so-called Bos-Wash corridor. This coastal strip, between the Charles and Potomac rivers, houses the Eastern elite. In this habitat, my Georgetown A.B. and NYU MBA are rather unremarkable. The bankers, consultants, and publicists who are my neighbors also festoon their offices with framed diplomas.

To some in this small but influential cohort, the notion of a president of the United States without such distinctions seems unusual, if not unthinkable.

Now comes Scott Walker, arguably the front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Wisconsin’s recently reelected governor attended Marquette University. However, during the spring of his senior year, he withdrew “in good standing,” according to school officials. Walker went to work full-time for the American Red Cross. He never finished his degree and, thus, is not a college graduate.

This is more than some members of the elite can bear.

President Obama claims he inherited a mess in the Middle East. Not so.

Fracking and horizontal drilling on private lands in the U.S. had taken off in the last years of the Bush administration and by 2009 were set to revolutionize America’s energy future. By 2011, the U.S. had cut way back its dependence on Middle Eastern gas and oil imports, which in turn gave American diplomats a measure of immunity from petro-blackmail, and therefore far more clout in the region. Iraq was mostly stable; in Anbar Province tens of thousands of jihadists had been killed by U.S. troops and their tribal allies. Iran’s scope was limited by a new moderate axis of Sunni states, Israel, and the United States. A bruised Hezbollah faced a huge rebuilding tab in southern Lebanon. Libya was beginning to shed at least some of its bizarre past. The Palestinians had no desire for another Intifada. The Middle East was looking to the U.S. for leadership, inasmuch as the surge in Iraq had regained respect for American arms and determination.

All that now is ancient history. In five critical areas, the U.S. blew it.

If one relies on recent accounts in the news, we are all post-structuralists now. Post structuralism was a response to the structural intellectual movement that human culture can be understood in logic and language. Post structuralists are skeptical of human science accepting relativism and obscure phenomenology as its method. As post structuralists see it, objective conditions only reveal the superficial dimensions of human behavior.

Several years ago it was revealed that the conditions described in Rigoberta Menchu’s work, which resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize, was fraudulent. The condition she described didn’t exist. One might assume an embarrassed Ms. Manchu would apologize. However, in the post structuralist world, she said that even if the report was inaccurate, these are events that might have occurred.

by Dick Morris, former political advisor to President Bill Clinton, January, 2014

If you happen to see the Bill Clinton five minute TV ad for Hillary in which he introduces the commercial by saying … he wants to share some things we may not know about Hillary’s background. Beware as I was there for most of their presidency and know them better than just about anyone, I offer a few corrections;

Bill says: “In law school Hillary worked on legal services for the poor.”

The facts are: Hillary’s main extra-curricular activity in law school was helping the Black Panthers, on trial in Connecticut for torturing and killing a federal agent. She went to court every day as part of a law student monitoring committed to trying to spot civil rights violations and develop grounds for appeal.

Bill says: “Hillary spent a year after graduation working on a children’s rights project for poor kids.”

The facts are: Hillary interned with Bob Truehaft, the head of the California Communist Party. She met Bob when he represented the Panthers and traveled all the way to San Francisco to take an internship with him.

Bill says:”Hillary could have written her own job ticket, but she turned down all the lucrative job offers.”

The facts are: She flunked the DC bar exam, yes, flunked, it is a matter of record, and only passed the Arkansas bar. She had no job offers in Arkansas , none, and only got hired by the University of Arkansas Law School at Fayetteville because Bill was already teaching there. She did not join the prestigious Rose Law Firm until Bill became Arkansas Attorney General and was made a partner only after he was elected Arkansas Governor.

Iran’s imminent nuclear breakout capability will, of course, come with insufficient notice for anyone to stop it.

With its new intercontinental ballistic missiles, Iran can deliver these nuclear warheads to every capital of Europe. It does not even have to do that. It need only threaten to, while spelling out what it wants.

Doubtless, Iran has also put the “Great Satan,” the U.S., high at the top of its list.

Such a history, which reveals why most Jews of Iranian ancestry live abroad, can only intensify Israel’s suspicion of any agreement reached with the current Iranian regime, which has pledged often to eliminate “the Zionist entity,” the “Little Satan.”

Christians and Jews are familiar with the biblical narrative of how the ancient ruler of the Persian Empire, Cyrus, granted the Jewish people their freedom after his conquest of the Babylonia in 538 B.C. His proclamation launched the most meaningful “aliyah” [going up to Israel] until modern times.[1]

Now that North Korea is no longer interfering with the release of a Hollywood comedy, Pyongyang’s capers have dropped low in the news — eclipsed by Islamist shootings in Europe, ISIS beheadings and the immolation of a Jordanian pilot, Russian-sponsored carnage in Ukraine and the U.S. administration’s desperate quest for an Iran nuclear deal.

But North Korea has not gone away. The totalitarians of Pyongyang are busy testing more missiles, committing their regime-sustaining human rights atrocities, and issuing more threats to launch nuclear strikes on the U.S. — including, in case you missed it, the threat released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Feb. 4, under the headline “U.S. Imperialists Will Face Final Doom.” [1]

This threat was spelled out in a paragraph devoted to assorted specifics of North Korea’s arsenal, including, along with cyber warfare, North Korea’s claim to have miniaturized nuclear warheads, which would allow for delivery with ballistic missiles. The language is bit convoluted, but that is what they are talking about (boldface is mine):

One of the low points of the 2012 presidential campaign came from a spate of news stories about Mitt Romney’s alleged bullying of a college roommate. The Left would not allow the allegation to die, and Romney was finally forced to issue a public apology for what he rightly termed “high school pranks that may have hurt others,” as though this had any relevance or bearing on his fitness to serve as president of the United States.

At least in Romney’s case, they waited until there was actually a campaign.

It is now February of 2015. No one is officially a candidate for the highest office in the land, but Scott Walker has made no secret that he is seriously considering the run. He has been visiting early caucus and primary states, and has already leased office space in Iowa, preparatory to running in the Iowa caucus. Worse, from the point of view of his opponents, polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as Drudge’s admittedly unscientific online poll, all show him doing quite well against the putative field of Republican hopefuls.