RUTHFULLY YOURS

The infant undergrads of America hit another low last Monday when Emory students woke up and discovered that pro-Trump slogans had been written in chalk on some of the university’s sidewalks. According to the Emory student newspaper, about 40 Emorites responded to the chalking by assembling outside the university president’s office and demanding that he meet with them, because they were “in pain.” The paper quotes students saying the chalk slogans were “fear”-inducing; one said she didn’t “deserve to feel afraid at [her] school.”

Why do these kids need to be handled so very gently? According to one Emory undergrad, who echoes whining heard on campuses across the country, some students “are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community and focus on these issues” of student comfort.

What these kids need, besides a kick in the pants, is a look at university life in the good old days, when universities were just starting to revolutionize education and lay groundwork for the Enlightenment.

When you get right down to it, two men invented modern test-and-result science: Francis Bacon and William Harvey (who discovered blood circulation). They both got their start as undergrads at Cambridge in the late 16th century.

What was Cambridge like in the late 16th century? Not pleasant. Harvey, like all students too poor to afford private lodging, slept in a tiny attic room with three other students. The attic had a window, but the window had no glass, and the room had no fireplace. According to a 16th-century writer — quoted in Thomas Wright’s superb Harvey biography, A Life in Circulation — Cambridge students were known to “run up and down half an hour, to get heat in their feet,” before turning in at night.

At 4 in the morning, students were awakened by the college bell, which gave them time to dress and prepare themselves for chapel, which began at 5. Chapel was mandatory; missing morning prayers resulted in a fine of at least twopence (at a time when one penny was enough for a meal that four students could share).

After chapel, at 6:10, classes began. Like prayer, classes were mandatory, and missing one of your hour-long lectures would get you hit with another two-penny fine. With short breaks for lunch and dinner, classes continued — in unheated and badly ventilated rooms — until 7 in the evening, when students returned to chapel for evensong. After the evening prayers, studies resumed, until 9 or 10; then the students put a little heat in their feet, climbed into their attics, and managed five or six hours’ sleep before starting again at 4.

This was all rough on Harvey, who entered Cambridge at the tender age of 15. It was probably even rougher on Bacon, who started Cambridge at 12.

I spent part of the week speaking on several college campuses in Texas, and my subject was free speech and the threats against it on campus and beyond. The students were in the main shocked and dismayed at the revitalization of censorship as a political ideal and by the widespread support for censorship among so-called liberals. Most of them were genuinely unaware of just how far and wide the war against free expression currently ranges.

This is strange, because the war on free speech starts on campus.

In March of 2014, Professor Lawrence Torcello of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the seal of which appears alongside the definition of “second-rate” in many dictionaries, published a short article online calling for the criminalization of what he calls “climate denial,” meaning the holding, perpetuating, and, especially, the financial support of heretical ideas about global warming. A few articles were written criticizing the article, and the response was the expected one: “It’s just one crank nobody professor from some second-rate philosophy department publishing a blog post, don’t make such a big deal about it!” Professor Torcello subsequently denied that he had argued what he plainly does argue, namely that legal protections for free speech should not encircle those who dissent from the received dogma of global warming. “Misguided concern regarding free speech,” he wrote, should be no impediment to imposing criminal sanctions on those whose activism “remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action” on the issue.

We’ve taken this ride before: An obscure academic writes something loony. We withstood “feminist physics” and “queer algebra,” and we’ll get through this, too.

Unless we don’t.

Shortly after Professor Torcello’s tentative exploration of criminalizing political disagreement, Gawker published an article by Adam Weinstein bearing the straightforward headline: “Arrest climate-change deniers.” Building on Professor Torcello’s argument, Weinstein called explicitly for the imprisonment (“denialists should face jail”) of those working to further particular political goals (“quietist agenda posturing as skepticism”) on climate change. Never mind that protecting people and institutions attempting to further a political agenda is precisely the reason we have a First Amendment. Weinstein dismisses the First Amendment out of hand, with the expected dread cliché: “First Amendment rights have never been absolute. You still can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year, all saying the same thing.”

Yelling “balderdash” at the conventional wisdom has a very long and proud tradition. (Not that it should matter to this debate, but I suppose I should here note for the record that I hold more or less conventional views on climate change as a phenomenon but prefer mitigatory policies to preventative ones.) The name “Elsevier” is not beloved on college campuses (the modern company is a publisher of academic journals and sometimes is criticized for its pricing), but it is to that company’s spiritual ancestor, the Dutch printing house of Lodewijk Elzevir and his descendants, that we owe the publication of, among other articles of samizdat, the works of Galileo, at that time under Inquisitorial interdict. (The story of Elzevir’s 1636 covert mission to Arcetri to meet with Galileo and smuggle his manuscripts to Amsterdam, a city that was then as now a byword for liberality, would make a pretty good movie.) It isn’t that it’s likely that our contemporary global-warming critics are doing work as important as Galileo’s: It’s that no one knows or can predict, which is the practical case for free expression, which should be of some concern even to our modern progressives, self-styled empiricists and pragmatists who reject the moral case for free expression.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Two Israeli inventions can save the lives of stabbing victims.
Israeli ultrasound brain surgery has cured an Israeli of Parkinson’s.
An elite IDF unit is helping Arab-Israeli startups.
A Dubai woman named her son after the IDF officer that helped deliver him.
A new Israeli innovation keeps fruit and vegetables fresh.
Shh… an Israeli company helped the FBI unlock a terrorist’s iPhone.
A sale of $1.5 billion Israeli bonds was five times oversubscribed.
The BBC bought an Israeli story to base its new drama series about autism.
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Preventing lung collapse. (TY Dan) Another innovation from Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s BioDesign students. They developed ThoraXS – a one-handed thoracic portal opener that shortens the procedure time of chest-tube insertion from minutes to less than 30 seconds. It is timely for saving victims of terror stabbings.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29654 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ3fhZmgyiY

Stopping uncontrolled bleeding. Gallium is a bio-metal currently used to stop bone loss in cancer patients. Moshe Rogosnitzky, a researcher at Israel’s Ariel University, has discovered that Gallium in liquid form (known as gallium nitrate) can rapidly halt bleeding from deep wounds, without causing blood clots.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/209371#.Vv53uUfn95R

Leukemia trial results. Latest reports of Phase II trials of BL-8040 from Israel’s Bioline Rx (see Nov newsletter), show that 38% of patients with acute myeloid leukemia, went into complete remission after just two cycles of the treatment. All these patients had previously failed to recover from other leukemia treatments.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-biolinerx-reports-positive-phase-ii-leukemia-drug-results-1001113425

How bacteria escape their enemies. A joint team of scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from the Netherlands have discovered that the common E. coli bacteria plays “hide and seek” to avoid detection from the predatory B. bacteriovorus bacteria. It extends research into combating antibiotic resistant bacteria.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29284 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1824/20152154

Gene enhances insulin production. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that the gene p16 enhanced insulin secretion in beta cells of mice that suffer from diabetes, thereby partly reversing the disease and improving the health of the mice. Similar results in human cells are expected.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29587

Mending hearts again in Tanzania. Surgeons from Israel’s humanitarian organization Save A Child’s Heart returned to Tanzania in March to perform more life-saving operations on African children. (See July newsletter for previous mission) http://www.israel21c.org/healing-childrens-hearts-in-tanzania/

$25 million to fund new blood center. Israel’s emergency service Magen David Adom received its largest ever donation – $25 million – to build a new blood services center in Ramle. The Marcus National Blood Services Center will replace a facility in Tel Hashomer that is vulnerable to rocket attacks from Gaza.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/magen-david-adom-blood-center-gets-largest-donation-ever/

Exercise center for the brain. (TY Jacques) Swiss Ambassador to Israel Andreas Baum inaugurated Israel’s first BrainPath in Neve Eshkol, near Gaza. The fitness parlor, adjoined to the region’s largest senior citizen center, has eleven exercises that stimulate blood-flow to the brain. http://www.neveshkol.org.il/page_50511
http://israelbetweenthelines.com/index.php/2016/02/05/make-way-welcome-to-israels-first-real-brainpath/

China seeks Israeli remote health tech. Renming Zhu of China’s Truth Enterprises is seeking Israeli startups for its new incubator in Shanghai. Of particular interest are solutions to bring medical care out of the doctor’s office and into the field. China’s vast geography and aging population puts a huge strain on its healthcare costs.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-remote-health-tech-sought-for-chinas-healthcare-system/

Israeli woman cured of Parkinson’s. The focused ultrasound brain surgery of Israel’s Insightec has been used 500 times around the world. In its first procedure in Israel, surgeons at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center successfully cured an Israeli woman of her uncontrollable shaking. (Video had 570,000 views in 2 days).
http://www.onlysimchas.com/news/28445/first-in-israel-surgery-that-removes-shaking-due-to-parkinson-disease

John McAdams – a conservative university professor in Wisconsin – has been suspended indefinitely for criticizing a fellow professor for not allowing debate about same-sex marriage in her classroom. McAdams may return to Marquette University as professor in January of 2017, only if he admits that he was “guilty.”

It all started at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Catholic university in 2014 when a student recorded his encounter with his philosophy professor Cheryl Abbate regarding the issue of same-sex marriage. Abbate had told her class that the issue of “gay rights” was not up for debate, that “everybody agrees on this, and there is no need to discuss it.”

After class, the student discussed the issue with Abbate, but the professor eventually suggested to the student that he drop the course, adding that “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions…You don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.” She stated, “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

The conservative university professor John McAdams wrote a post on his blog Marquette Warrior in 2014 exposing the student-professor encounter and criticizing Abbate for her intolerance. He concluded, “Like the rest of academia, Marquette is less and less a real university. And when gay marriage cannot be discussed, certainly not a Catholic university.”