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January 2022

Throwback Thursday: U.S. Spent $112,000 to Study If Different Personalities Prefer Different Foods By Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/01/27/throwback_thursday_us_spent_112000_to_study_if_different_personalities_prefer_different_foods_813172.html

“The study apparently broke in Psychology Today magazine, in an article titled “Profiles in Eating – Sexy Vegetarians and other Diet Based Social Stereotypes.”

We’ve all seen those clickbait quizzes offering to decipher what type of personality we have based on our favorite foods. A few of us may have even taken them, but nobody actually believes preferring pizza over pasta has any meaningful interpretation for our personality.

Nobody, except some scientists in 1982, to whom the government paid $40,000 to conduct scientific research on the matter. Today, adjusted for inflation, the government spent the equivalent of $112,500 on the study.

Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) highlighted this as his “Golden Fleece Award” for the month of January 1982. The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $40,000 on a yearlong study called “Food Preferences and Social Identity” to test the claim that people with a certain personality prefer certain types of food.

Sen. Proxmire had the right response when said in a press release, “SO WHAT? Who cares what it means whether you eat carrots or caviar? Here’s a $40,000 study calculated to make the American taxpayer eat his heart out.”

The tragic kingdom of Anthony Fauci Stephen L. Miller

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-tragic-kingdom-of-anthony-fauci/

Before reading this piece, take into account that even though this is a crushing critique of Guru Fauci,  Spectator World doesn’t like Trumpers or Fox Cable News. C.B.

Neither the political left nor the political right understands Anthony Fauci. To the left, Fauci is a patron saint to be thanked and worshipped. They fashion candles, hymns and magazine covers after him. They canonize him much the same way they canonized Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though I suspect that if you stopped them on the street and asked for details of a Ginsburg opinion, they would come up empty beyond screaming “Notorious RBG.” Anthony Fauci is venerated much the same way.

The right has compared Fauci to Nazi ministers of information, a Luciferian demigod drunk on pandemic power, a liar and hypnotist willing to do anything to retain his newfound celebrity and near-total grip on pandemic messaging — a grip that only solidified after Joe Biden’s presidential election. This Fauci is the subject of sloppy Fox News talking points that are meant to outrage. – [Utterly unnecessary dig at FNC.]

The truth is slightly more nuanced but it’s also a bit more terrifying. Fauci does not believe himself to be doing the work of either the left or the right. He lives on a completely different plane of understanding, and he knows it. Anthony Fauci is a man of science. He believes himself to be the spokesperson for “science itself,” as he states when he is attacked by people like Senator Rand Paul. Fauci responds to these attacks incredulously and rather defensively — not because he’s insulted on an emotional level, but because he genuinely believes he is the science, which can never be questioned and can never be wrong. Even when the science kills sixteen million people worldwide.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

Israel is approximately the size of New Jersey, but unlike our Garden State, threatened daily with terrorism and blood curdling threats and libels. Every day research and development in medicine, science, technology, agronomy, proceeds apace, enriching the lives of millions on every continent. Here is this week’s dazzling compilation from Michel Ordman.  rsk

 

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
The next booster could be Israeli. The CEO of NRx – the US company in charge of trials of Israel’s BriLife coronavirus vaccine – said NRx is designing a Phase II study of BriLife as a booster to protect against COVID-19 variants. The study will be led by the research heads of Israel’s Hadassah and Sourasky (Ichilov) hospitals.
https://www.jns.org/israel-aims-to-test-brilife-vaccine-candidate-as-booster-dose/  
 
92% recovery after 3 days. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Maccabi Healthcare has treated 850 of its high-risk coronavirus-infected customers with the new Pfizer Paxlovid pills. 60% significantly improved on the first day, rising to 92% within 3 days.  All recovered.  https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-692757
 
Pancreatic cancer breakthrough. (TY UWI) Researchers at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center studied the data of 17,000 pancreatic cancer patients. They discovered that a mutation resulting in the absence of two proteins P15 and P16 allows the cancer to spread to the liver. The findings can help treat such patients.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2022/01/23/israeli-researchers-reveal-achilles-heel-of-pancreatic-cancer/
 
Non-invasive test for IBD. Israel’s Weizmann Institute, working together with Israel’s Sheba Medical Center can detect inflammation in the intestines by analyzing a fecal sample for the genes expressed in the cells. It can help diagnose gastric disorders such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis and monitor their treatment.
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/noninvasive-test-gut-inflammation
https://gut.bmj.com/content/early/2022/01/18/gutjnl-2021-325516?rss=1
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/320979
 
Look into my eyes.  A great article about Israel’s Neurolight (see here previously) and its amazing ocular technology that extracts microscopic eye movement measurements to help diagnose neurological disorders. The platform aims to help developers of treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis patients.
https://www.israel21c.org/the-answer-to-parkinsons-and-alzheimers-is-all-in-your-eyes/
 
AI management approved for type 2 diabetes. Israel’s DreaMed (see here previously) has now received US FDA approval for use with Type 2 diabetes sufferers as well as Type 1. It will relieve the strain on endocrinologist who each have on average some 46,000 patients.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/spotlight/israeli-startup-offers-hope-in-global-diabetes-crisis/
 
Israelis live longer. The latest report of life expectancy for Israeli men is 81 years – 8th in the OECD. For Israeli women it’s 84.8 – 11th in the OECD (see here for previous years). Both exceed the OECD average. Israel’s birth rate is by far the highest in the OECD and infant mortality is well below the OECD average.
https://www.jns.org/report-israelis-live-longer-lives-than-most-despite-major-deficits-in-health-care/

WOKE TERRORISM-THANE ROSENBAUM

https://whiterosemagazine.com/woke-terrorism/

JEWS around the world can all count their Hebrew blessings that an attack on a Texas synagogue on Shabbat, in an 11-hour standoff with a maniacal Muslim gunman on January 15, did not result in the kind of gruesome catastrophe Jewish people have grown accustomed to for well 2,000 years. Maybe the Lone Star State is lucky for those who wear the Star of David. 

This hostage crisis targeting Jews, miraculously, did not escalate into a bloodbath. Indeed, the four worshippers, which included the rabbi, resourcefully fled the sanctuary shortly before the FBI stormed the shul and shot the terrorist.

It should lead to a reckoning among Americans that no matter how many Black Lives Matter marches one joins, there will always be far more hate crimes committed against Jews than any other ethnic or racial group—by a wide margin. But expect no such reckoning.

It goes without saying that other planned attacks—in an astounding number of different nations—have not gone so well. The law of averages when it comes to Jews confronted with those who wish them harm, generally, results in more harrowing crime scenes. Hostages rarely escape. 

It was true of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and a wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, killed and tossed overboard on the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985; two elderly women in Paris, Mireille Knoll stabbed and then torched in her apartment in 2018, and Sarah Halimi, thrown from her balcony in 2017; also in Paris, the slaughter of four Jews in a kosher market in 2015; and in 2006, the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi by an Islamist group properly named the Gang of Barbarians; the murder of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish day school in Toulouse in 2012; the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994 leaving 300 wounded and 85 dead; and, of course, closer to home, the murder of 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and, a year later, the killing of one woman and serious injuries to three others in a synagogue in Poway, California.

That’s how it usually ends up, and that’s only a partial list of Jewish targets and death tolls. In each case, except for the attacks in the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, the assailants were Islamists and Palestinian terrorists.

That raises some interesting questions about the way in which this most recent incident of terrorism—against Jews worshipping in Colleyville, Texas, in their Beth Israel Synagogue—has been regarded and reported. And it should lead to a reckoning among Americans that no matter how many Black Lives Matter marches one joins, there will always be far more hate crimes committed against Jews than any other ethnic or racial group—by a wide margin.

But expect no such reckoning.

Istanbul’s Mayor: Erdoğan’s Worst Nightmare by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18143/turkey-istanbul-mayor-erdogan

“If we lose Istanbul, we lose Turkey.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

It appears that [Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu’s] “terrorists” are actually people who are being probed for links with illegal organizations but who have not been prosecuted — let alone being found guilty by courts.

This kind of intimidation, further victimizing Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in the eyes of the voters, will simply boost his popularity — and at a time when Erdoğan’s ratings are plummeting.

Erdoğan, it seems, did not want opposition mayors to gain further popularity by helping the poor.

It would be premature to conclude that there will be a historic shift in Turkish politics in 2023. All the same, the reports are real, and so are Erdoğan’s fears, panic and increasingly reckless governance.

Turkey’s secular state establishment was shocked when a young militant Islamist won the mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city, Istanbul, in 1994. “Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey,” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at that time Istanbul’s mayor, would often say. History would prove him right.

JAMES O’KEEFE: AMERICAN MUCKRAKER

This seminal work of nonfiction recounts the new journalistic mass movement of today. Compiled from over a decade of investigative reporting coupled with a vast reference of philosophical research, American Muckraker is the definitive guide of truth-telling in the video age.

ON POWER
They do have tremendous power. But in part it is because we give it to them. We are nothing, but we are not alone. Awe cannot live in fear. The moment you stop caring about what the media establishment thinks of you, is the moment you become truly free.

ON INSIDERS
The USPS whistleblower, a Marine Corps combat veteran said, “I would rather be back in Afghanistan, getting shot at by Afghans, honest to God,” than be interrogated by federal agent Russell Strasser—who coerced him by saying, “I am trying to twist you a little bit because your mind will kick in…. I am not scaring you, but I am scaring you.”

ON PRIVACY
The right to record is closely tied to the right to speak or even to take contemporaneous notes about what one sees and hears. As 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quipped, “People committing malfeasance don’t have any right to privacy…. What are we saying—that Upton Sinclair shouldn’t have smuggled his pencil in?”

ON MEANS & ENDS
Whereas the novelist Ernest Hemingway said, “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” Thomas B. Morgan of the 1960s New Journalism contends, “Morally defensible journalism is rarely what you feel good about afterward; it is only that which makes you feel better than you would otherwise.”

ON LITIGATION
“Polling does not decide the truth nor speak to evidence…. The New York Times have not met their burden to prove that Veritas is deceptive…claiming protections from an upstart competitor armed with a cell phone and a website. There is a substantial basis in law to proceed, to permit Project Veritas, to conduct discovery into The New York Times.” —Project Veritas v. New York Times Company; New York Supreme Court, March 18, 2021

Will We Ever Eradicate the Cancer of Identity Politics? Regardless of who replaces Justice Breyer, one hopes the Supreme Court next term will take us closer to a society that is race-blind by gutting affirmative action in America. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/28/will-we-ever-eradicate-the-cancer-of-identity-politics/

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally granted a writ of certiorari in two now-consolidated affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The cases will be argued jointly during the next Supreme Court term, and they place directly in their crosshairs the court’s noxious precedents in the thorny area of race-conscious university admission policies. As presented to the court, the leading question the justices will consider is “whether the Supreme Court should . . . hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions.”

The court should of course do so posthaste. The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling “systemic racism” is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism. Fortunately, there is reason for optimism that the justices will do their job. It was the mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts himself who, in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, Monday’s propitious step forward toward an America no longer obsessed with race and identity politics was abruptly undermined by a severe step backward toward a race-centric polity.

Justice Stephen Breyer, an octogenarian Jewish male and the senior statesman of the court’s liberal bloc, announced his retirement, effective at the end of this court term and contingent upon the successful confirmation of his successor. The announcement was hardly surprising; given Breyer’s long-standing Democratic ties, his liberal jurisprudence, and the fact that Republicans are poised to retake control of the U.S. Senate this fall, it would have been more surprising if Breyer had not retired this year.

Widow of Fallen NYPD Officer Slams Woke Manhattan DA in Powerful Eulogy Spencer Brown

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/01/28/watch-widow-of-fallen-nypd-officer-slams-woke-manhattan-da-in-powerful-eulogy-n2602509

As first responders, family, friends, and New Yorkers gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to say goodbye to fallen NYPD Officer Jason Rivera on Friday, his young widow delivered a heart-wrenching and powerful tribute to her 22-year-old husband who was shot and killed — along with his partner Wilbert Mora — in the line of duty last week. 

“I would say good morning to you all, but in fact it’s the worst morning ever,” Dominique Luzuriaga began. “All of this seems so unreal, like I’m having one of those nightmares you never thought you’d have,” she remarked.

“Jason is so happy right now that all of you are here, through pain and sorrow, this is exactly how he would have wanted to be remembered: like a true hero — or like I used to call him, ‘Big P.O. Rivera.'” his widow told the packed cathedral and overflow crowd standing outside in the snow. 

“You have the whole nation on gridlock,” Luzuriaga said of her late husband. “And although you won’t be here anymore, I want you to live through me,” she said. “The system continues to fail us. We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA,” Rivera’s widow said of new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now,” she said to thunderous applause as those gathered to remember Rivera stood in solidarity against District Attorney Bragg’s new policies. 

The elites’ morally obscene response to the Canadian trucker convoy By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_elites_morally_obscene_response_to_the_canadian_trucker_convoy.html

Something big is happening in Canada and it’s happening in a typically Canadian way. After two years of draconian lockdowns and mandates, truckers are pushing back with a 70 km long convoy that pulled into Ottawa yesterday. It’s exciting and inspiring. It’s also drawing the elites out from cover, as they abandon any pretense of supporting the people they applauded so vigorously almost two years ago when they hid in their offices while “the little people” kept the world working.

The Canadians have been renowned for being an obedient, peaceable people. But perhaps we’ve forgotten that there’s a warrior strain in them. During both WWI and WWII, some of the British Empire’s most ferocious fighters came from Canada. That blend of warrior and peaceful soul seems to have come together with the massive Freedom Convoy that Canadian (and some American) truckers have driven from Vancouver to Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

I wrote about the convoy on Friday, along with lots of videos. It’s incredibly inspiring to see these cheerful truckers driving along Canada’s frozen lands, cheered on by hundreds and thousands of people wherever they go. Tucker interviewed another trucker on Friday night and it’s moving to see his good spirits and optimism as he and his fellow truckers push back against the effort to make them bow down to the technocracy for which COVID has provided a glide path.

How Universities Will Sidestep SCOTUS on Affirmative Action .By Charles Lipson –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/28/how_universities_will_sidestep_scotus_on_affirmative_action_147107.html

Embracing affirmative action is virtually a job qualification for university administrators. The same is true, alas, for faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences. They march in lockstep toward a society permanently categorized by race, all with the best of intentions but not the best of outcomes.

They aren’t just woke. Their eyelids are sewn open. They have no intention of snoozing if the Supreme Court rules their current admission policies are illegal. They will stand proudly in the schoolhouse door, protecting policies they believe promote “social justice” and “equity.”

Their tactics to evade the court are surprisingly simple. Since admissions tests leave traces of discrimination, they’ll drop them. Having ditched these useful standards, university bureaucrats can sit behind closed doors, choose the applicants they favor, reject those they don’t, and leave no pesky evidence they are violating the law. Asian Americans, Jews, and other disfavored groups won’t have a record to show their test scores are systematically higher than favored groups, who are now being admitted despite their scores. To misquote Martin Luther King, universities are looking at the color of applicants’ skin, not the content of their academic qualifications.

Universities aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether affirmative action is constitutional. They already taking preemptive steps, designed to keep their current practices in place, this time without leaving fingerprints. Some 1,700 colleges and universities have already made SAT and ACT test scores optional for admission.

Why have universities dropped standardized tests? Not because these tests are biased or because they fail to predict academic performance (their primary purpose). Quite the contrary. The tests have been assiduously scrubbed to prevent cultural or racial bias, as they should be, and they are recognized as valuable tools to match students with the colleges where they are most likely to thrive academically.