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December 2018

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Brain-Gain; No Brain-Drain Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on December 28th, 2018

https://bit.ly/2VfFw89

1.. According to Adam Reuter, Chairman of “Financial Immunities” and author of the 2018 Israel – Island of Success (Globes Business Daily, Dec. 19, 2018): Israel is not afflicted by brain-drain, but benefits from brain-gain.

While Israel’s establishment documents net-migration of higher-education Israelis, it fails to document the massive influx of higher-education Olim (Jewish immigrants). About 2/3 of the Olim – 18-years-old and older – have gone through higher education. For instance, in 2015, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported a brain-drain of 1,360 higher-education Israelis, ignoring the 14,870 higher-education Olim, who arrived in 2015, 48% of whom possessed graduate degrees and PhDs.

While the ratio of higher-education Israelis (compared to the entire population) ranks third in the world, following Japan and Canada, the ratio of higher-education Olim is significantly higher than the rest of Israel’s population. Over 25% of the Olim are experienced in the critical areas of hightech, engineering, computer science, medicine and health.

From 1980-2010, 30,000 higher-education Israelis emigrated (the total of exiting, minus returning Israelis), while 290,000 higher-education Olim arrived from the USSR, France, the USA, etc.. Considering the 25,000 higher-education Olim who emigrated, there was a net brain-gain of 235,000 from 1980-2010.

From 2010-2018, some 105,000 higher-education Olim arrived (out of a total of about 198,000 Olim), while 22,000 higher-education Israelis emigrated – a net brain-gain of 83,000; an annual net brain-grain of 9,000.

From 1980-2018, there has been a net brain-gain of 315,000 higher-education people!

Moreover, from 2010-2016, 4,000 PhD Israelis returned to Israel with enhanced experience and networking, providing tailwind to economic growth.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Yuval Noah Harari Is Worried About Our Souls The big-data makeover of humanity could be a recipe for disaster. By Steve Paulson

By on December 28th, 2018

http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/yuval-noah-harari-is-worried-about-our-souls

Just a few years ago Yuval Noah Harari was an obscure Israeli historian with a knack for playing with big ideas. Then he wrote Sapiens, a sweeping, cross-disciplinary account of human history that landed on the bestseller list and remains there four years later. Like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Sapiens proposed a dazzling historical synthesis, and Harari’s own quirky pronouncements—“modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history”— made for compulsive reading. The book also won him a slew of high-profile admirers, including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

In his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari offers a grab bag of prognostications on everything from new technology to politics and religion. Although he’s become a darling of Silicon Valley, Harari is openly critical of how Facebook and other tech companies exploit our personal data, and he worries that online interactions are replacing actual face-to-face encounters. Much of the book speculates on the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence. If computer algorithms can know you better than you know yourself, is there any room left for free will? And where does that leave our politics?

Harari is a rapid-fire conversationalist who seems to have an opinion about everything. He’s remarkably self-assured and clearly enjoys the role of provocateur. We began by agreeing that something feels very different about this moment in history. We are on the precipice of a revolution that will change humanity for either our everlasting benefit or destruction—it’s not clear which. “For the first time in history,” Harari said, “we have absolutely no idea how the world will look in 30 years.”
HOMO MACHINA: We are no longer afraid of the machine, Harari says, we have become it: “We no longer search for information. We Google. We trust the Google algorithm and we lose the ability to search for information independently.”Daniel Naber / Wikimedia

What’s different about this moment in history?

What’s different is the pace of technological change, especially the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. They make it possible to hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer them and create new life forms.

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MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump Works While NeverTrump Predicts Doom—Again By Julie Kelly

By on December 28th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/27/trump-works

While the president worked during the holidays—including surprise trips with the first lady to greet U.S. troops in Iraq and Germany—anti-Trump “conservatives” worked hard on their laptops to warn Americans of impending doom for Trump’s presidency.

Again.

In an uncharitable Christmas Day screed, National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg served up some flashbacks from his NeverTrump past to yet again warn that Trump’s presidency will “end poorly.” Goldberg again condemned Trump for his lack of character; again blasted Trump supporters for emulating his bellicose style; and again unleashed a litany of alleged offenses—such as the president’s “rants against the 1st Amendment”—as evidence of why Donald Trump is, like, the worst president ever.

Goldberg is lashing out lately: From his borderline-misogynistic diatribe against a female journalist who outed National Review for accepting donations from Google while possibly suppressing negative stories about the tech giant, to an attack on his NR colleague Andrew McCarthy (which eventually elicited an apology from Goldberg), he seems more unhinged than usual.

Which makes his lazy harangue about Trump’s name-calling and mean-spiritedness all the more ironic. Please, Jonah, tell us more about character and manners just days after you called a woman reporter an “idiot,” a “McCarthyite,” a “failed-actress-turned-faux journalist,” and a “MAGA infomercial hostess.”

Goldberg isn’t alone. His fellow NeverTrump travelers are certain it’s really over for Trump this time.

“We should be deeply troubled,” insisted Goldberg’s sidekick, David French, after the December 20 resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis. “Now is the time for Republicans in Congress to declare their independence from the Republican in the White House and refuse once and for all to rubber-stamp Donald Trump’s whims and desires.”

Tom Nichols—who seizes on every real or imagined scandal du jour to warn his fellow Americans that the end is (again near—fumed over Mattis’s resignation.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Pallywood Rears Its Ugly Head Again How a girl from Deir ez-Zor, Syria was miraculously beamed into Gaza. Ari Lieberman

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272369/pallywood-rears-its-ugly-head-again-ari-lieberman

Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, who identify as “Palestinians,” and those who shill for them have a penchant for fabricating and staging photos and videos in an effort to advance a pernicious and false narrative depicting Palestinians as innocent victims of brutal Israeli occupiers. Photos are often photoshopped or simply lifted from other war zones with no nexus to Israel. Sometimes, videos are the product of elaborate staging events geared specifically for the cameras; where alleged dead and wounded make miraculous off-camera recoveries. Often, this tactic is employed for the express purpose of soliciting donations. This disgraceful and dishonest practice has been dubbed “Pallywood.”

Last week, I was provided with a fascinating, firsthand look into the makings of a Pallywood production. A Twitter account called Free Gaza Team inexplicably followed me on the social media platform. I took a look at the account and saw multiple graphic photos of a young girl whose arm had been sheared off. The injury appears raw, exposing bone and tissue. The account referred to the Girl as “Noor from Gaza” and provided a link to an online crowd funding site called “Social.fund.” Once at the site, the viewer is again exposed to the disturbing image as well as the following brief narrative;

“Help Noor from Gaza get an artificial limb.

Free Gaza Team visits people in Gaza to help people get their needs, some days ago, we visit Noor’s family, after the mother invited us to visit them, we find this little beauty girl, but unfortunately, she is without left limb, it’s due a shrapnel of Israeli rockets in the last war on Gaza, shee [Sic] needs some essential medications before the gangrene happens then we will help her to get an artificial limb, we should work together to restore her smile.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Michael Cutler :Pitfalls of the Visa Waiver Program A serious threat to U.S. national security and public safety.

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272370/pitfalls-visa-waiver-program-michael-cutler

Immigration is a major factor in ever so many of the issues confronting America and Americans, but all too frequently the media neglects to identify or acknowledge the nexus between those issues and immigration. Consequently, many folks fail to recognize just how significant and pervasive the immigration issue is in their lives and why failures of the immigration system have the potential to profoundly impact them and our nation.

On December 23, 2018 the CBS News program, 60 Minutes aired a report, Inside The Corruption Allegations Plaguing Malta.

At first glance, it would be hard to imagine that Malta’s alleged corruption could have relevance to the immigration issue or that Americans should be concerned about the alleged corruption in Malta. Malta is a small, indeed, tiny nation located on an archipelago in the central Mediterranean between Sicily and the North African coast with a population of fewer than a half-million citizens (460,297 in 2017 according to Eurostat).

However, diminutive as it might be, Malta presents a serious threat to U.S. national security and public safety because of an ill-conceived program known as the Visa Waiver Program that was first implemented as a pilot program by the Reagan administration.

Over the years this program became a permanent program and the number of countries that participate in this program, which enables the citizens of participating countries to enter the United States as tourists for up to 90 days. Malta is one of those countries that participates in the Visa Waiver Program.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Jobless Claims Stabilize, Signaling Strong Labor Market By Mairead McArdle

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-jobless-claims-stabilize-signaling-strong-labor-market/

As the public’s confidence in the markets continues to wobble, the labor market has showed signs of strength in recent weeks after a brief spike in unemployment claims.

New claims for state unemployment benefits sank to the seasonally adjusted 216,000 during the week that ended December 22, a 1,000 drop from the previous week, according to data released Thursday by the Labor Department.

Initial claims have dropped for most of the last month, but sparked concern between September and December when they began climbing again after steadily dropping for years.

In mid September, initial unemployment claims hit 202,000, the lowest level since 1969. Continuing claims also dropped by 4,000 to 1.7 million for the week ending December 15.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Student Found to Have Violated Title IX by Asking Another Student on a Date By Katherine Timpf

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/student-found-to-have-violated-title-ix-by-asking-another-student-on-a-date/
Dating can be awkward enough without adding legal hazards to the mix.

A student at the University of Missouri was found to be in violation of Title IX because he asked another student out on a date and is physically larger than she is.

According to a deposition about the case, the male student was deemed to have violated civil-rights law — and was guilty of sexual harassment — because he asked a female student out on a date that she did not want. Why? Because he was bigger than her, and his “physical size” meant that “he was perceived as having power over her.”

The deposition gained some attention after it was shared by KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College professor, on Twitter. It’s not clear from the documents what kind of punishment, if any, the student faced for his violation — but the fact that an official even deemed what he did to be a violation is scary enough.

Sexual harassment and discrimination are both very serious issues, and it’s important to have policies in place to protect people from them. This, however, is quite clearly a total abuse and misuse of Title IX.

It would be one thing if this student were a teacher or other type of authority figure. Then I could certainly understand how that would be sexual harassment. But this was not the case. This was simply one student asking another student out on a date, which, believe it or not, is completely normal and appropriate human behavior. So what if he was bigger than her? Spoiler alert: Most men are bigger than most women. If it’s a violation to ask out a woman who is smaller than you, then both men and women are going to have a lot fewer options in their romantic lives.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump ‘Ethics’ Resistance An army of nonprofits may be a foe more formidable than the Democratic House. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-ethics-resistance-11545955715

The Trump ‘Ethics’ Resistance An army of nonprofits may be a foe more formidable than the Democratic House. By Kimberley A. Strassel
Powerful House Democrats are about to blitz the Trump administration with subpoenas and investigations. Pay attention to their nonprofit helpers, many of which are new.
For nearly a decade, the left has decried the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which restored speech freedoms and enabled hundreds of tea-party groups. For just as long, they have bitterly criticized conservative watchdogs such as Judicial Watch, which they accuse of using litigation to hound the Obama administration. Various liberals have called Judicial Watch a “smear sausage” factory, identified it as the epicenter of “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” and accused it of “weaponizing the Freedom of Information Act for political purposes.”

But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Judicial Watch has many great admirers. Progressive nonprofits are popping up all over Washington, shepherded by powerful liberal political players, funded by sources unknown, modeled on conservative groups and united in burying the Trump administration under a mountain of scandal. The White House would do well to understand that in some ways these groups are its most potent threat.
Consider Democracy Forward, which launched last year with a mission of “fighting government corruption in court.” Sound familiar? The board includes Marc Elias, the Democratic lawyer behind the infamous Steele dossier, and John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. It’s a big operation as these things go, with a staff composed largely of Obama administration lawyers and advisers. And it’s already touting a packet of FOIA demands and lawsuits against the administration.
American Oversight, also created last year, bills itself as “the top Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump Administration.” It’s chief counsel, John Bies, served eight years in the Obama Justice Department, and its website already lists 19 team members, mostly lawyers. In addition to a flood of FOIA demands, the group helped lead opposition to Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That included filing a lawsuit on behalf of yet another new nonprofit, Fix the Court, demanding all Kavanaugh documents from the Justice Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

MARK STEYN ON “LONE WOLF” PLURAL

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/9111/lone-but-motley

A week before Christmas two young ladies from Scandinavia vacationing in Morocco – Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway – were brutally stabbed and decapitated and then had the final moments of their lives uploaded as triumphal snuff videos to Facebook, Twitter, 4Chan and Reddit, the Four Horsemen of the Social-Media Apocalypse.

Fortunately, if you were thinking of getting a little nervous about your next holiday in the Maghreb, this bloody double-murder was the work of merely another “lone wolf”:

In a press conference in Rabat yesterday, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sabik labelled the suspects “lone wolves”…

Wait a minute: “lone wolves” plural? You mean, the wolf wasn’t lone? No, indeed:

What ‘lone wolf’ gang did before Scandinavian tourist beheadings

There’s a whole gang of lone wolves?

A motley crew of “lone wolves”, including two street vendors, a plumber and a carpenter, hunted backpackers to kill in the Moroccan mountains.

At last count, nineteen “lone wolves” have been arrested for the double-murder. That’s a rugby team plus bridge four of lone wolves. They’re the least lonesome lone wolves in town.

And are they really that “motley”? (See photo above for representative three-nineteenths of the lone wolf pack.)

For almost a decade, I have made mocking reference to Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. But there’s no point to jokes, is there? Because, as absurd as they are, you wait a year or two and everybody’s doing them entirely straight-faced. The phrase “lone wolf” was created by the Pansy Media to ward off the suggestion that all these lone wolves might have something in common. Just as “all politics is local”, all jihad is lone. And, if you use the phrase often enough, it has such a pleasing anesthetizing effect you don’t even notice that you’re sitting there typing, perfectly seriously, about a gang of nineteen lone wolves.

Same number as the 9/11 hijackers, by coincidence. But we hadn’t yet taken refuge in such halfwit evasions.

Needless to say, the decapitation video went “viral”. Among those who were “spammed” with pictures of the severed heads were the mums of the girls, whose first Christmas without their beloved daughters was further enlivened by social-media enthusiasts posting snaps of the decapitated women to their mothers’ Facebook pages. But Big Social Brother knows its priorities: It was too busy banning Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch website is one of the few remaining outlets that doesn’t take refuge in platitudinous drivel about “lone wolves”.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Ill-boding for Israel’s enemies

By on December 27th, 2018

https://www.jns.org/opinion/ill-boding-for-israels-enemies/

Fortunately for Israel and the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu possesses an uncanny ability to function on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed this week “to act vigorously and continuously against the Iranian military entrenchment in Syria.”

Addressing graduates of the Israel Air Force cadets’ pilot course on Wednesday, he said, “You have one mission: to defend the homeland and be victorious in war. [This] starts with eradicating major hostile threats.”

Netanyahu went on to assert that U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw American troops from Syria “will not change our policy.”

The speech was eerily fitting, as it came mere hours after the IAF conducted massive strikes on Iranian targets near Damascus. Referring to the operation, which was condemned by Russia as “provocative,” IAF Commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin said that “in several arenas and over a wide scope, our jets protected [our positions] and attacked [those of the enemy]. With exceptional cooperation from the Intelligence branch, we prevented the establishment of an Iranian military capability on [Israel’s] northern front. It is not the end of the story, and if called on to do so [again], we will act on the ground and from the air.”

Netanyahu’s and Norkin’s words were not only directed at the new group of fighter pilots tasked with keeping Iran and its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, from attempting to annihilate the Jewish state. The joint message was also aimed at Tehran, Damascus, Beirut and Moscow.

The verbal warning was as clear as Tuesday night’s military one: that Trump’s exit from the region does not signal the onset of Israeli defeatism. If anything, it bodes even more ill for Israel’s enemies.

One indication that those enemies are getting the picture is Syria’s response to the airstrikes. This took the form of a letter of lament to the United Nations, stating that “Israel’s continuous aggressive policy is possible due to the unlimited and consistent support of the American administration.”

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