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Ruth King

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

DAVID’S SLINGSHOT….FROM D.P.S.

By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/290884/north-korean-israeli-shadow-war

The North Korean-Israeli Shadow War

Whenever nuclear weapons technology appears in the hands of Israel’s enemies, Pyongyang is usually involved

By Jay Solomon

Jay Solomon is an adjunct fellow at The Washington Institute. A veteran journalist whose career has included postings in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, in addition to Washington, he is the former chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Iran Wars (Random House, 2016).

It was largely by chance that Israel scored one of its greatest ever intelligence coups in 2007.

At the time, Mossad was running surveillance on the director general of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, a pudgy, bespectacled bureaucrat named Ibrahim Othman. Othman was visiting Vienna that winter to attend meetings of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Mossad sought to learn more about his secretive activities. The Israelis hacked the Syrian’s personal computer after he left his hotel for meetings in the Austrian capital.

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CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

By on September 15th, 2019

https://townhall.com/columnists/jamesgottry/2019/09/14/socialism-offers-security-of-state-control-but-demands-surrender-of-individual-responsibility-n2553010

Socialism Offers ‘Security’ of State Control But Demands Surrender of Individual Responsibility

James Gottrey

Throughout the United States, socialism is enjoying a fresh wind of popularity. An April 2019 Gallup survey found that 43% of Americans believe socialism would be “a good thing” for the country (up from 25% in 1942). A full 47% of Americans say they would vote for a socialist presidential candidate. With those numbers, it should come as no surprise that in 2016, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (America’s most popular “democratic socialist”) attracted more than 13 million votes during the Democratic primaries. More than 2 million of those voters were under the age of 30.

 

www.redstate.com/bonchie/2019/09/14/doj-files-devastating-brief-exposing-jerry-nadlers-impeachment-inquiry-scam/

DOJ Files A Devastating Brief Exposing Jerry Nadler’s Impeachment Inquiry Scam

RedState.com

Recently, I covered Jerry Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee passing rules for an “impeachment inquiry.” As some of us have speculated for months now, this was simply an attempt at stealth impeachment, i.e. getting to use the benefits of impeachment (grand jury access, increased subpoena power, etc.) without having too actually pass articles of impeachment.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR…DRAGGING THEM

By on September 15th, 2019

Drag Queen Story Hour returning to the Upstate Sept. 22

Matthew Ablon

SPARTANBURG, SC (FOX Carolina) – A local group that brought the first Drag Queen Story Hour to the Upstate in Fe…

https://www.foxcarolina.com/news/drag-queen-story-hour-returning-to-the-upstate-

Public Library Deletes Pictures Of Drag Queens Fondling Children

Parents complained about the event, showing the photos of children lounging atop of the costumed drag queens on …https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/22/public-library-deletes-pictures-drag-queens-fondling-children-story-hour/

From a local library in NYC…

Drag Queen Story Hour offers a different kind of page-turner

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/drag-queen-story-hour-offers-a-different-kind-

Drag Queen Story Hour offers a different kind of page-turner

Children’s story hours are intended to instill a love of reading in young kids. But one reading program also see…

PBS (What would Mr. Rogers say?)  It is the first segment on the video that is included with the link.  How warm and cuddly can it get?

Hate group targets American Library Association over Drag Queen Story Hour
“Drag Queen Story Hour [exists] solely to indoctrinate children into transgenderism and homosexuality.”
By Daniel Villarreal 
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/08/hate-group-targets-american-library-association

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GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on September 15th, 2019

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

3D printed implants to help two women walk. In an Israeli first, two women have each been given a 3D printed titanium alloy implant to replace a broken talus (the main connector between the foot and leg). Doctors at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva are confident that both women will soon be walking normally again.
www.nocamels.com/2019/08/3d-printed-ankle-bone-implants-walk-freely-again/

Skin cancer treatment discovery. Researchers at Tel Aviv University and Sheba Medical Center have linked metastatic melanoma progression to a patient’s lipid (fatty acid) metabolism. Skin cancer is more sensitive to immune T-cells if the lipid metabolism is high. The scientists say the discovery can lead to new therapies.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/study-finds-a-key-to-why-only-some-melanoma-patients-respond-to-immunotherapy/  https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(19)30900-6.pdf

Patients with Parkinson’s and Fibromyalgia. This is an example of how Israeli medical data helps research into diseases. Ben Gurion University’s Dr Yair Zlotnik has used the database of Israeli Health company Clalit to analyze patients with both Parkinson’s and fibromyalgia. The findings could lead to new treatment options.
https://parkinsonsnewstoday.com/2019/08/05/parkinsons-patients-with-fibromyalgia-are-mostly-women-with-depression-anxiety/  https://aabgu.org/parkinsons-and-fibromyalgia/

Liver cancer treatment available. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (see here) on the Namodenoson (CF102) liver cancer treatment from Israel’s Can-Fite. After Phase 2 testing, a supply of CF102 has been manufactured for “compassionate use” on critically ill patients at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva.
https://ir.canfite.com/press-releases/detail/862/can-fite-to-treat-advanced-liver-cancer-patients-with-namodenoson-under-compassionate-use-setting-in-israel

Intelligent ultrasound. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (Dec 2017) when GE Medical integrated the imaging analysis software from Israel’s DiA into its ultrasound devices. Now, DiA is to provide its artificially intelligent cardiac solutions for the point-of-care devices made by US ultrasound imaging company Terason.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/terason-partners-with-dia-imaging-analysis-to-bring-superior-ai-cardiac-solutions-to-point-of-care-ultrasound-300904250.html  https://www.dia-analysis.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKDcMJEiui8

Two-way texting to combat TB. Tuberculosis (TB) kills 1.6 million people a year. Israeli startup Keheala has developed a “low-tech” system whereby Keheala sends SMS reminders to patients in Kenya to take their meds. The patient must respond with an SMS otherwise a Keheala mentor gets involved. Trials were 96% successful.
http://nocamels.com/2019/09/keheala-behavioral-science-texting-tuberculosis/

More funds for cancer research. Every year (see here) the Israel Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) awards grants to Israeli researchers working to find cures and treatments for cancer. This year its 69 grants of $4.3 million focus on cancer genetics, targeted cancer therapies and immunotherapy. Read about some of the amazing work.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-cancer-researchers-receive-4-3-million-infusion/

Unlocking medical data for research. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s MDClone system generates anonymous medical research data from real medical records. Customers include Israeli health companies Maccabi and Clalit and (in the US) Washington University hospital and Intermountain. MDClone has just raised $26 million of funds.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3768811,00.html

Terror victim becomes MDA paramedic. Dvir Schnerb was released from hospital two weeks after being critically wounded by a terrorist bomb that killed his sister. A few hours later he received his certification as a volunteer EMT for Magen David Adom. He said he will honor his sister’s memory by working to save lives.
https://www.jns.org/israeli-teen-wounded-in-terror-attack-becomes-emt-for-magen-david-adom/

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The War on Common Sense Robert Curry *****

By on September 15th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/14/the-war-on-common-sense/

Faltering belief in common sense is behind the rejection of the Founders’ idea of America. More broadly, it is behind the astonishing rejection of Western civilization by its own people.

When Thomas Paine appealed to “common sense” to make the case for American independence, it probably never crossed his mind that there would ever be a need to make the case for common sense itself, at least not in America. But common-sense thinking has fallen out of favor. Because it has been under attack for a very long time, it no longer gets the respect it once commanded. Deep thinkers have discarded it, elites have learned to disdain it, and many of us have had our confidence in its value badly shaken.

The consequences are enormous. Faltering belief in common sense is behind the rejection of the Founders’ idea of America. More broadly, it is behind the astonishing rejection of Western civilization by its own people—a rejection that has reached what looks to be a civilization-ending crisis in Europe.

Examples of the war on common sense are now everywhere in public life. How about the denial of the plain fact that humans are either male or female?

Not long ago, a boy in a tutu and a tiara who claimed he was a girl would still be regarded as a boy. Today, academic and cultural elites, as well as government officials, insist that “gender identity” is more real than biology. They say there are many genders, and one website tells me there are 63. Elites tell us we had better get with the many-gender program, or else. And while we are at it, we had better get politically correct about marriage. We are told that marriage no longer means one thing, a union between a man and a woman. How long will it be until we have 63 varieties of marriage?

The war on moral common sense has reached new heights of absurdity. If we point out a need for common-sense steps to protect ourselves from Islamic terrorists, we are said to suffer a psychological condition called “Islamophobia.” But unlike other phobias, such as claustrophobia, this condition is said to make us victimizers rather than victims. Similarly, if we say that America needs to secure its borders, we are met by cries that “walls are immoral.” Evidently, the common-sense wisdom that good walls make good neighbors has been taken down by the masters of political correctness.

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TARGET NEW YORK: JUDITH MILLER

By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/islamist-terror-threat

Eighteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, many Americans believe that the threat of Islamist terror is played out—but that’s only because our counterterrorism efforts have been so successful. Attempted terror attacks no longer make front-page headlines, but the list of foiled plots to kill American citizens is long and chilling. This past summer saw arrests of potential terrorists who would have killed dozens or hundreds of people if successful. On September 3, for example, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, also known as Suleiman Al-Amriki, with providing material support to ISIS. Asainov is accused of having been an ISIS sniper and weapons instructor. A naturalized U.S. citizen (he was born in Kazakhstan) who lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years, Asainov traveled in late 2013 to Istanbul, a common entry point to Syria. There, he joined ISIS and rose through the ranks to become an “emir” in charge of weapons training. He tried to recruit other Americans to fight for ISIS in Syria. Asainov messaged a government informant, exclaiming in reference to ISIS, “We are the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed!” He still yearned to die on the battlefield for jihad, Asainov told the informant.

Last month, Awais Chudhary was charged with plotting to stab New Yorkers in Queens. A 19-year-old American citizen born in Pakistan and raised in a middle-class neighborhood, Chudhary planned to attack pedestrians on a bridge over the Grand Central Parkway to the Flushing Bay Promenade or at the World’s Fair Marina, both of which he had visited repeatedly to scout where he could kill the most people. He planned to record his attack to inspire others. He intended to use a knife, he told an agent, unless the agent could show him how to bomb a “mini-bridge over a busy road with many cars.” He was arrested en route to retrieve items he had ordered online for the assault—a tactical knife, a mask, gloves, and a cellphone with a chest and head strap to enable him to record his slaughter hands-free. 

Also last month, prosecutors charged two women from Queens with planning to build bombs similar to those used in earlier terrorist attacks. Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, both U.S. citizens and Queens residents, pleaded guilty to distributing information about how to make and use explosive devices and weapons of mass destruction. Between 2013 and 2015, the complaint states, they planned to build a bomb themselves, teaching each other chemistry and the electrical skills needed to create and detonate a deadly device. They also explored how to make plastic explosives and assemble a car bomb, bought and stored in their homes materials required for an explosive device—including  propane gas tanks, soldering tools, car-bomb instructions, machetes, and several knives—and discussed similar devices used in past terrorist incidents, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. They researched potential targets, focusing on law enforcement and military installations. Velentzas favored attacks on government targets. In terrorist attacks, she said, “You go for the head.”

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Black Lives Matter Comes to the Classroom Activists bring the movement’s spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary schools. Peter C. Myers

By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/black-lives-matter-in-the-classroom

Black Lives Matter, though less prominent in the headlines of late, continues to be quite a growth story. What began in 2013 as a hashtag propagated by a few activists and academics rapidly grew into a nationwide protest movement and then into an institutional establishment, with local chapters around the U.S. and even a few abroad. With lavish funding and generally supportive media attention, the BLM network has become the progressive Left’s primary organ of antiracism activism. Now it seeks to sustain and expand upon that success. In its most ambitious venture yet, the group has moved beyond the streets and into the nation’s public schools.

No one should be surprised. As BLM statements repeatedly make clear, the movement has always linked the charges of police misconduct that brought it into existence with a comprehensive critique of the American polity. “State violence” against blacks “takes many forms,” the BLM network’s “About us” statement declares. The first plank of a widely publicized platform issued in 2016 demands “an immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth,” including “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.” BLM founder Opal Tometi heads the list of signatories of a 2018 letter urging teachers to support a “new uprising for racial justice” in the nation’s schools.

Neither Tometi nor BLM’s other two founders, however, initiated the latest campaign. In keeping with activists’ pride in their network’s decentralization—a self-conscious departure from the top-down organizational model that they ascribe to the civil rights movement—the present venture is akin to a franchising operation, with local cells of teachers’ union activists as the operators. K–12 educators sympathetic with the movement have successfully promoted the “Black Lives Matter at School” program, bringing its activist spirit and ideology into a growing number of secondary and even elementary classrooms.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia: Dreaming of a Return to the West by Amir Taheri

By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14882/russia-solvophilia-occidentalists

Russia may be talking in Slavophile tones but deep in its heart, desires to be readmitted into the Western camp. This is seen in the way Russians dress, the kind of food they eat, the beverages they drink, the music they listen to, the TV shows and the films they watch, and the books they read. Queues in front of McDonald’s joints may be a vulgar sign of creeping Westernization.

The results of this month’s municipal elections, declared last week, show a clear setback for Putinism in its Slavophile version. The president’s United Russia party lost more than a third of its seats in Moscow that, as in other metro-centric countries, has set the tone for national politics at least since the 1920s.

Putin wants to fool the Western democracies into helping negotiate a bad patch before he returns to his old shenanigans. President Macron’s call for reintegrating Russia into the G7 summit last month was dismissed by other participants even before it made it onto the agenda.

If every nation, like every language, has its grammar, what is the grammar that might help us understand Russia today?

Even the least observant foreign visitors to Russia these days are likely quickly to discover the first rule of that metaphorical grammar: the unity of opposites. On one side, we have a Russia that is attached almost obsessively to its “otherness”. On the other, we have a Russia that craves after “sameness” as a member of the family of Western nations.

This “otherness-sameness” duality is not new in Russian history.

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A “Guide” to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by the United Church of Christ by Denis MacEoin

By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13563/ucc-israel-palestinian-conflict-guide

Titled, “Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel”, and sub-headed “A Guide for United Church of Christ Faith Leaders”, this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and counter-factual exercise in futile politics.

There is no room in it for a Jewish, Israeli or moderate Christian voice; just hatred of Israel and defence of the Palestinians who, time after time, have turned down generous offers of peace. The naïvety of the UCC is particularly striking in its choice to take at face value the Palestinian statement that if Israel ended its occupation, “Then they will see a new world in which there is no fear, no threat but rather security, justice and peace.” That is simply bunkum. Sadly, the Palestinians have a history of regarding every goodwill gesture by Israel as a retreat, as the triumph of aggression over diplomacy — as if to say: We shoot at Israelis and they leave; so, let’s keep shooting!

Palestinian terrorism against Israelis has continued up to 1967, right through the period of Israeli non-occupation. There were no “settlements” then. Rather, the Palestinians have always regarded all of Israel as one big “settlement”. Just look at any Palestinian maps; they cover both the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The UCC boasts that it is “a just peace church”, but instead of supporting peace and justice, it defends mass murderers. It complains about the defensive actions of the Jews but is knowingly silent about the horrors wrought by Palestinian wars and terrorism.

Welcome to yet another skewed guide on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. After a vote to support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel in 2015, an organization affiliated with the UCC, the UCC Palestine Israel Network (UCCPIN), published a guide to Israel-Palestine affairs. Titled, “Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel,” and sub-headed “A Guide for United Church of Christ Faith Leaders”, this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and counter-factual exercise in futile politics. Legally, UCCPIN operates under the aegis of one of the denomination’s local conferences. Its Guide is, therefore, not the direct work of the church’s leadership, but is clearly endorsed by a section of it.

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Can mainstream conservatism survive in the 21st century? By Taylor Lewis

By on September 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/can_mainstream_conservatism_survive_in_the_21st_century.html

Is it authoritarianism to ban Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries, with the explicit threat of violent prosecution?

That’s the question at the heart of the recent debate between author Sohrab Ahmari and National Review’s David French.  Moderated by columnist Ross Douthat at Catholic University, the disputation was the first public confrontation of fusion conservatism and a burgeoning but inchoate mix of nationalism and integralism.

The contest of ideas, sad to say, wasn’t an even-sided scrimmage.  The mainstream conservative side, represented by the hail-fellow-well-met writer David French, was dominant, aided by French’s attorney background and jujitsu-style argumentation.  Ahmari ping-ponged between decrying proceduralism’s fecklessness and offering his own thin-soupy proceduralist solutions.

For example, when pressed on how he’d combat crossdressers reading children stories in taxpayer-funded libraries, flaunting their sexual depravities, Ahmari could only recommend a congressional hearing and proscription via local ordinance.  Not exactly the Battle of Lepanto.

Ahmari lost the verbal battle, but the war over a proper right-wing philosophy in tune with the greater good continues.

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