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January 2019

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Arming white blood cells to fight cancer. Scientists at Tel Aviv University have discovered that the white blood cells called Eosinophils secrete powerfully destructive proteins that can kill tumors. When activated by the protein IFN-gamma, they induced an even greater immunotherapy response and a new anti-cancer pathway.
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/science-and-tech/israeli-research-white-blood-cells-related-to-allergies-asthma-may-also-destroy-cancer-cells/2019/01/22/

New biomarker helps detect high risk of cancer. Researchers from Tel Aviv University and others have found that high levels of the protein ubiquilin-4 cause cells to become prone to genome instability and more likely to develop into tumors. Once discovered, these cells can be treated with other forms of cancer therapy.
https://www.israel21c.org/israelis-find-biomarker-linking-genome-instability-cancer/
https://www.aftau.org/weblog-medicine–health?&storyid4704=2430&ncs4704=3

Successful trials of treatment for severe burns. I reported previously (see here) on the innovative NexoBrid treatment for severe burns from Israel’s MediWound. MediWound has just announced positive top line results of its pivotal U.S. Phase 3 clinical study. Dead skin was completely removed from 93% of trial patients.
http://ir.mediwound.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mediwound-announces-positive-top-line-results-its-pivotal-phase

US approval for groundbreaking inhaler. (TY Atid-EDI) The US FDA has approved the ProAir Digihaler made by Israel’s Teva. It is the first and only digital inhaler with built-in sensors that connects to a companion mobile app and provides relevant information to people with asthma and COPD.
https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/teva-announces-fda-approval-of-first-and-only-digital-inhaler-with-built-in-sensors-proair-digihalertm-albuterol-sulfate-117-mcg-inhalation-powder-2018-12-21

The neurons that recognize a face. Researchers at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and in Paris have identified neurons in the human visual cortex that can selectively respond to faces. The discovery came while studying an epileptic patient that had micro-electrodes implanted in the vicinity of the Fusiform Face Area.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/i-see-you-in-first-israeli-french-team-finds-neurons-that-respond-to-all-faces/
http://n.neurology.org/content/92/4/197

Breakthrough cancer treatment available to Israelis. (TY I24 News) The Israeli-developed CAR-T cancer treatment is one of NIS 460 million worth of new treatments added to Israel’s 2019 Health Basket. CAR-T has over 80% success rate, even in terminal cases. The new treatments will benefit an estimated 70,000 Israelis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UtUXNF4_U
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/257940
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-over-half-israels-2019-drug-basket-budget-goes-to-cancer-1001267676

That Face The urge to smash a teenager’s face represents a new iconoclasm against masculinity. Bruce Bawer

https://www.city-journal.org/covington-nick-sandmann-masculinity

For centuries, people have stared at the Mona Lisa, pondering, quizzical, trying to make sense of the expression on her face. In the last few days, millions of people around the world have similarly scrutinized the image of Nick Sandmann, a now-famous junior at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, as he encountered Nathan Phillips in front of the Lincoln Memorial on January 18.

The story that first went around was that Sandmann and his fellow students, who had attended the March for Life last Friday and were waiting for their bus back home, had encircled, threatened, and insulted Phillips, a Native American activist who had served in the military.

The Covington students, all boys, many of them wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, were instantly demonized. But video evidence later showed that the boys were innocent—quite remarkably and impressively innocent, in fact. Over the course of more than an hour, they were confronted, first, by a fanatical group of religious bigots, the Black Hebrew Israelites (who claim to be the real Jews), who pelted them with racist and homophobic abuse, to which the Kentucky boys, quite admirably, refused to reply; and, second, by Phillips, who, accompanied by a handful of hangers-on, got in their faces, chanting, banging a drum, and telling them to go back to Europe because they had no business in America, which belonged to Native Americans. As Phillips marched through the crowd of boys, all parted except for Sandmann, who silently met Phillips’s gaze.

Reactions to Sandmann’s expression poured out from every corner. Many people described him as sneering. Rosie O’Donnell was one of several who called him “smug.” Since he is white, his expression was interpreted, by the kind of people who are determined to interpret such things in such ways, as the condescending reaction of a privileged young straight white male toward a much older representative of a minority group, who was supposedly carrying out a sacred ritual.

Ocasio-Cortez: Socialism can cure ringworm, and also everything else By Deborah C. Tyler

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/ocasiocortez_socialism_can_cure_ringworm_and_also_everything_else.html

Ringworm is a minor, superficial fungal infection easily cured with over-the-counter medication. My husband’s donkey is a demanding wench, and if she doesn’t get her apples and hugs every day, she brays loud enough to wake the dead in nearby Bear Grass Cemetery. From time to time, he gets a little ringworm from meeting her emotional needs.

On MLK day, the noted race impresario Ta-Nehisi Coates interviewed Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (aka Occasional-Cortex). They spoke on various topics organized around the underlying theme of resentment toward white and/or rich people. Our Occasional-Cortex again displayed her iridescent stupidity in proclaiming the scourge of ringworm in Alabama and imparting that the solution is not Tinactin, but socialism.

Occasional-Cortex’s yakking has ceased to be amusing. It is becoming dangerous. For the first time in my life, I am genuinely afraid for my country. I see dreadful happenings if things don’t change.

I had a great education. But at this point, every opinion I hold is based not on academic training, but on what I have seen with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, and felt in my heart. My ears hear the big lie. It brays all day, like our donkey The Viscountess, that we are a hateful people. It whinnies and whines about nonexistent racism and imaginary persecution of “Bisexual-Lesbian-Gay-Etc.” (pronounced “bilge”). The claptrap about “white male” privilege and “gender” oppression has replaced real learning and filled the minds, especially of young people, with a paralyzing sense of resentment and victimization.

A Better Guide than Elite Opinion Is Public Revulsion at It By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/26/a-better-guide

Some expert in Bayesian probability ought to come up with an algorithm that would enable us to determine which of the multifarious daily outrages are going to catch on and, as the internet has taught us to say, “go viral.” Remember that hysterical (I do not mean “funny”) Yale student who was videoed screaming at the (as the title then was) master of her college at Yale because his wife had suggested the college had no business policing students’ Halloween costumes? That was an instant sensation and (I am happy to say) helped popularize the term “crybullies,” meaning the timid yet vicious creatures who, nurturing a hyperactive sense of grievance, seek to weaponize their coveted if generally make-believe status as victims.

But why that episode? Every day, or at least every week or two, there are equally outrageous examples of moralistic hysteria that, even if they are widely reported, die a quiet death as the news cycle buries every yesterday beneath the importunate clamoring of now, now, now . . .

I do not have an answer to this question. I merely note the puzzling fact and repeat my wish for the haruspex who can plumb the entrails of this beast and tell us if it is slouching towards notoriety.

Kavanaughesque In Its Viciousness
When I wrote about the now-infamous Covington Boys incident last Sunday, I had no idea that it would become the most sensational story of the week. I wrote before seeing the longer video of the incident but, even so, thought that the cataract of abuse that the boys were subjected to was way over the top. I acknowledged, “of all human passions, the passion of moral self-righteousness is the most delicious,” but went on to observe that “the problem is, the people who are the objects of our indignation often present a more complicated reality than we first assume.”

So, of course, it turned out to be with the boys from Covington Catholic. The boys did not approach or taunt the drum-beating fake-Vietnam-vet creep of an Indian activist Nathan Phillips. On the contrary, he waded in among them, obnoxiously taunting them while my new favorite group of wackos, the Black Hebrew Israelites, hurled a variety of racist and sexual slurs at the high school students as they waited for a bus to whisk them back to Kentucky after their participation in the annual pro-life March for Life.

Trump: In Third Year with Three Charges by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13629/trump-third-year

Those who opposed the creation of the US as an independent nation claimed there was collusion between the Founding Fathers and the French, who wished to prevent the English from extending their empire to the whole of North America.

The second charge brought against Donald Trump by is arrogance. Have we forgotten Barack Obama, who claimed that the start of his presidency meant “oceans receding ” to end climate change? Or his boast that he would solve the Israel-Palestine problem in one year?

The claim that “foreign interests”, including European, Latin American, Arab and Iranian (during the Shah’s time) have tried to buy influence in the US by financing candidacies up to the presidency has been a routine part of the political war in America for decades.

Theoretically, we have another year before the next American presidential campaign gets underway. And yet those who follow US policies more closely know that the 2020 presidential campaign has already started. In a sense, at least as far as the two main political parties are concerned, the campaign started the day Donald Trump took the oath of office.

In his first two years in office, Trump has attended at least 30 rallies across the United States that could best be described as campaign sorties. Add to that more than two dozen media interviews, not to mention thousands of tweets designed to create the image of a successful president running for a second term. For their part, Trump’s Democrat rivals have campaigned against him in a guerrilla-style, hoping to kill his hope of a second term with a thousand cuts.

New Year, Same Old Turkey by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13598/new-year-old-turkey

The joke goes: One day a political prisoner asks his guard if he could borrow from the prison library a certain work of fiction written by a certain author. The guard answers: We don’t have that book in our library. But if you want, I can bring you its author. He is here.”

HSBC Turkey’s Chief Executive Officer, Selim Kervancı, is being investigated by the prosecutor’s office over a video he retweeted during the Gezi protests five years ago. Kervancı is being charged with insulting Erdoğan for retweeting a video clip from the 2004 German movie “Downfall,” set during Adolf Hitler’s last days and depicting the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Recently, Erdoğan claimed that the Turkish businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala, currently detained and awaiting trial, was working for “the famous Hungarian Jew George Soros.” By adding the “famous Hungarian Jew” to his conspiracy theories, Erdoğan apparently wanted to demonize Kavala and remind the judges that the suspect has a Jewish connection.

Democratic anomaly became the new Turkish normal several years ago. The anomaly, sometimes, offers entertaining moments, too. Take, for instance, Parliament Speaker Binali Yıldırım, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s most important political confidant (and former prime minister), who became the joke of the day when he declared: “Animals, too, are living beings”. Someone teased him on social media: “He is right. And I am adding: Plants, too, are living beings.” A few days later Yıldırım, under fire from the opposition because he refuses to resign as parliament speaker although he would run for mayor of Istanbul in nationwide local elections on March 31 (they cite the constitution which bans the impartial parliament speaker from engaging in any political activity), amused a whole nation when he said: “Elections are not political activity”. Not all Turkish anomalies are as entertaining as this one.

“We Will Teach You a Lesson”: Extremist Persecution of Christians, November 2018 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13578/christian-persecution-november

After it was announced that Asia Bibi — a Christian women who had spent nearly a decade on death row for allegedly “blaspheming” against Islam — had been acquitted, Muslims rioted throughout early November; in one march, more than 11,000 Muslims demanded her instant and public hanging. A leading Muslim party announced that the judges who had acquitted her deserved death. The lawyer who represented her fled the nation due to many death threats. — Pakistan.

While under arrest, he asked police to allow him to “kill the infidels… otherwise you will become infidels like them.” Authorities later said the man had mental problems and was under the influence of drugs. The Christians replied that the media always present such Muslims who attack churches and Christians as suffering from mental illnesses. — Egypt.

“[A]t least 350 Christian owned properties have illegally been seized. The government has stopped only 50 of these properties from being sold… Iraqi Christians have long complained about the disproportionate targeting of their properties for illegal seizures. These seizures often occur in waves which follow violent incidents of persecution.” — Iraq.

“[T]he government… protect the aggressors and leave the victims mercilessly helpless… The devastation in terms of massacre of lives and destruction of property is unimaginable.” — Rev. Dacholom Datiri, President of the Church of Christ in Nigeria.

President Trump, Day After Shutdown Ends, Says ‘We Will Build the Wall’ Mr. Trump hews to a hard-line stance, insisting on a physical barrier with Mexico By Peter Nicholas

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-trump-day-after-shutdown-ends-says-we-will-build-the-wall-11548538067?mod=hp_lead_pos1

President Trump showed no sign Saturday he was prepared to give up his insistence on a border wall, as negotiators prepare to begin talks aimed at keeping the government open and resolving a bitter impasse over funding for the wall.

On the day after Mr. Trump and congressional leaders reached a deal reopening the government for three weeks, Mr. Trump tweeted, “We will build the Wall!”

He also suggested underlying partisan divisions that set off the monthlong government shutdown remain in place, writing on Twitter, “both parties very dug in.”

Under the deal struck Friday, House and Senate negotiators appointed by congressional leadership will use the next three weeks to see if they can settle the dispute over funding for a wall along the Mexican border.

The president made the wall a central campaign promise and he insists that a physical barrier is essential to stopping illegal immigration and crimes that result from a porous border. Democrats hold that a wall is an ineffective solution and that any answer to illegal border crossings should be driven by evidence and expert evaluation.

Reject the ‘Wrong on Both Sides’ Dodge By Dennis Saffran

https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/01/26/reject

Now that the media, the Left, and their usual conservative allies have failed to destroy young Nick Sandmann and the other Covington Catholic High School boys who attended the March for Life last weekend, they seem to be falling back on the old “wrong on both sides” standby.

Activist Nathan Phillips, the 64-year-old Native-American “elder,” may have lied when he claimed the students surrounded him, blocked his way, and yelled “Build the Wall”—and lied for good measure about being a Vietnam veteran. (In fact, he marched, cameras in tow, into their group while they were waiting for their bus, beating a drum within inches of Sandmann’s face.) But, as the story now goes, the boys—or “many” of them, or maybe just a “few” of them—were “mocking” or “disrespectful.” There were even some “tomahawk chops,” like at sports events, and maybe a few of what may have been “war whoops” or at least mimicry of his chants in a less than adulatory tone.

Even commentators who have supported the students, such as Robby Soave in his otherwise excellent reportage at Reason, have criticized them for this behavior.

Two points need to be made about all this.

The first and less important one is about whether anyone was actually mocking or acting disrespectfully toward Phillips. As usual in these situations, the evidence is ambiguous. From everything I’ve watched and read, the predominant reaction of the boys seemed to be confusion amidst all the racket, with some even thinking at first that Phillips was on their side against the Black Hebrew Israelites who had been harassing them with obscenities. (On some of the videos, a few students can be heard saying things like “What’s going on here?”) There appeared to be some Tomahawk chopping, but also some kids who just seemed to be dancing to the beat and trying to join in the chants.

AUSTRALIA DAY: JANUARY 26- A JEWEL IN THE ANGLOSPHERE

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/australia-day-matters/
Why Australia Day Matters by Leo Maglen

The heroes of our nationhood were not resistance leaders or freedom fighters, but politicians and statesmen, most now forgotten or only half-remembered. Their creation is an achievement worth celebrating.

An amazing, but little remarked, fact in the current concern about securing Australia’s borders – cue ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ – is that they are entirely maritime. We have no land borders, and Australia is the largest country in the world not to have any any. According to Geoscience Australia, we have a coastline of almost sixty thousand kilometres (mainland plus islands). The perimeter of our territorial waters is probably longer, and the outer edge of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) longer again. Back on shore we have, of course, state borders, and we once built a rabbit-proof fence over thousands of kilometres of outback, but only at sea do we share international borders with other countries (PNG Indonesia and East Timor).

Australia is the only inhabited continent that is not criss-crossed with international boundaries and a patchwork of nation states. Not for us razor-wire fences, concrete barriers, guard-posts, check-points, manned border-crossings, heavily armed border patrols, disputed terrain. We are one country, one nation, spanning an entire continent and its offshore islands. The shape is so iconic, so much the image of our country, that we take it for granted.

It is pertinent to ask how this happy situation came about. It was not, it must be said, anything to do with the first inhabitants, the Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders. Whilst they had spread across the entire continent and adjacent islands, and shared a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, they were divided into around 250 separate tribal groups, each with its own traditions, customs, language and territory, with which it had a strong and deep affinity. Whilst there was, of course, contact between adjacent groups, it is doubtful whether there was any knowledge of, or affinity with, groups beyond this range of contacts, with those living on the other side of the continent. Nor is it likely that the first inhabitants had any concept of the country, of the continent, of Australia, in its entirety. This awareness could only come in the modern era.