RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli agricultural tech has proven itself, says top Indian official Davendra Fadnavis

The business of government is politics, but there’s a time to put politics on the shelf, according to Davendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister of the State of Maharashtra in India. “Everybody has to eat,” Fadnavis told The Times of Israel in an exclusive interview. “Israel’s agricultural and water technology is helping to satisfy global hunger. Who could disagree with that?”

India’s strategy in the past has been to keep Israel at arm’s length so as not to aggravate its relationship with the Arab world and its large Muslim minority. But that strategy goes out the window when it comes to engaging with Israel for its agricultural technology. Israel and India have extensive ag-tech ties, with government-level projects to improve growing techniques for a wide variety of crops, to dozens of business collaborations between private companies.

JTA — Plenty of mobile apps help consumers order meals for delivery or offer recipes.

But a new app developed by Israeli entrepreneurs will actually prepare the food for you on your kitchen counter.

While not quite as fantastical as it sounds — to use the app you also need a coffeemaker-sized appliance called The Genie — the invention promises to prepare mess-free, all-natural, healthy food in just seconds.

Described by one writer as “like a Keurig [coffeemaker] for food,” the device, which looks sort of like a fancy rice cooker, uses Keurig-like single-serving, disposable (but in this case recyclable) pods.

Genie creators Ayelet Carasso and Doron Marco told Reuters the food in the pods will be nutritious and free of preservatives, the ingredients kept fresh simply through freeze-drying technology.

“The dish can be anything, it can be a meal like chicken with rice, like couscous with vegetable or an amazing Ramen or even a chocolate soufflé or any other desert that you want,” Carasso told Reuters. (The product does not appear to have its own website yet, nor is it featured on the site of Marco and Carasso’s White Innovation company.)

‘Finally, neural networks that actually work.” So reads the headline in Wired, and, really, haven’t we all been waiting? (Yes, we have, even if we do not know it.) The article concerns artificial-intelligence innovator Jeff Dean, who as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota 25 years ago created a rudimentary “neural network” — a computer system sophisticated enough to learn — but was hobbled by the available computing power of the time. Now working at Google, he’s helping to create vastly powerful and subtle networks that recognize faces and spoken language.

A few pages over, there’s a wonderful if unintended counterpoint: a profile of Megan Smith, an ex-Googler whose official title these days is “chief technology officer” . . . of the United States government. She is the third person to hold that post, which was created under the Obama administration. “Why can’t the federal government have websites and digital services that are awesome?” she asks.

Why, indeed?

The Obama administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East and parts of North Africa has been a series of disasters – at times spectacular disasters – almost since day one. It is ironic that a man who claims to respect the dignity of every human being should have such an egregious record of abandoning people in need of his help, up to and including those specifically looking to him for aid. One needs only to point to a Middle Eastern country to find an example of his international incompetence.

No such discussion is complete without mentioning the site of some of Obama’s most flagrant failures to act: Iran. In 2009, arguably millions of Iranian protesters took to the streets demanding freedom, democracy, and human rights in what has come to be known as “The Green Movement.” Angered by the highly suspicious re-election of then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this overwhelmingly peaceful outburst of popular demonstrations has taken on a life of its own, standing for the fundamental dignity of a people and their right to self-govern. Rightly idolizing the United States for the principles of liberty and justice that are so basic as to be taken for granted by most Americans, the Iranian protesters began emulating their Western counterparts, dressing in jeans and other modern U.S. apparel. They even specifically sought help from President Barack Obama, chanting, “Obama, Obama, ya ba oona ya bama” (Farsi for “Obama, you are either with them or with us”) in the streets.

Many savvy political analysts believe the Democrats have a built in advantage in the Electoral College. Democrats have won four of the last six Presidential elections, and in all six races, they have won a collection of 18 states plus the District of Columbia, now totaling 242 Electoral College votes. These states include all of the New England states except New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 Presidential contests in New Hampshire, Iowa, and New Mexico, three states with 15 Electoral College votes. Since 270 Electoral College votes are needed for victory, if history is a guide, Democrats start off with a collection of states that puts them very close to victory. The blue wall is not mythology.

President Obama is concerned with burnishing his legacy during this second term of his presidency. One major part of his legacy will be the way his “divider and conqueror” political tactics have highlighted the many pathologies plaguing black urban culture in this country, and have brought about a massive deterioration in “race relations.”

These pathologies did not originate with Obama. They have been half a century in the making, and may be traced to the mid-1960s when the legitimate civil rights movement was co-opted by the Left under the twin rubrics of the “War on Poverty” and the “Great Society.” If indeed we have been engaged in a “war on poverty,” it is long past time for us to acknowledge that poverty has been winning.

The most recent manifestations of this to shock the nation are the riots in Baltimore, and the multifarious excuses for them made by Baltimore Mayor (and secretary of the Democratic National Committee) Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Yet, despite her posturings and those of other Democratic apologists, the one thing clear beyond doubt in the case of the Baltimore disturbances is that “white racism” has little or nothing to do with the problem.

Despite warnings by moral conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive technology have created the conditions for a consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Like it or not, science is about to pose a slather of moral, ethical and societal dilemmas.

A legal, social and biological revolution is taking place worldwide without much serious thinking of the consequences. Consider this: in Britain the House of Commons recently approved the use of “three-parent IVF” to remove defective mitochondrial DNA from babies.[1]

Each year in Britain about 100 children are born with mutated mitochondrial DNA, resulting in about ten cases of fatal disease to the liver, nerves or heart. A new in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technique developed at the University of Newcastle allows doctors to replace a mother’s defective mitochondrial DNA with that of a healthy donor, presumably using pre-implantation sequencing and microscopic operation on the zygote. Mitochondrial DNA does not affect appearance, personality or intelligence, and it reduces kinship—genetic similarity—by only about 1 per cent. Still, the resulting child, though its nuclear DNA would come from its main parents, would have three parents.

Critics warned that this would set society off down a slippery slope to eugenics and “designer babies”. A government official, the “British Fertility Regulator”, replied to this warning with the observation that most people support the therapy. This was intended to assuage the concerns expressed. In fact it would seem to confirm them, since widespread support for a product or service indicates a readiness to adopt it. Sure enough, though there had been little public discussion in advance of the Commons debate, the new techniques were nonetheless approved by a large parliamentary majority. Australian scientists have since called for the British policy to be emulated.[2]
Despite half a century of warnings by moral conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive technology have created the conditions for a consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Here is the Oxford dictionary definition of “Eugenics”: “the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics”. It has a bad historical reputation because authoritarian governments have denied civil liberties in the name of eugenics. But as we shall see, both the definition and the reputation of eugenics have been overtaken by advances in science, medicine and marketing. Eugenics has since reappeared in many countries in the form of voluntary genetics counselling—a medical service provided to help parents avoid genetic disorders in their children[3]; and IVF has become a sizeable industry that offers parents the genetic screening of embryos and other eugenic choices.

I left Israel last week just before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new coalition with the Bayit Yehudi (“Jewish Home”) and religious parties, with the slimmest of parliamentary. The response from the punditeska was a predictable as the emergence of a gumball after one introduces a quarter and turns the knob: Netanyahu and the ogres from the settlements are the supposed obstacle to peace. Inside Israel, the matter looks otherwise. I don’t meddle in Israeli politics, but the reason Israelis support a tough government should be obvious to the casual observer.

Writing in the May 7 Financial Times, former Obama Middle East aide Philip Gordon warns Netanyahu against “expanding settlements, punishing the Palestinian Authority for its quest for international recognition, [and] insisting on an indefinite presence of Israeli forces on the West Bank and intervening militarily in Gaza. The risk is that this could ultimately lead to the collapse of the PA, Israeli reoccupation of West Bank cities and expanded global efforts to isolate Israel.”

M.K.Bhadrakumar writes off-line: “Interesting! How could the international community have got Israel so hopelessly wrong? Anti-Semitism?” There is enough of that, particularly among Europeans (who will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz), but it is ridiculous to think that Chancellor Angela Merkel, by far the most poweful European leader, is anti-Semitic. Nor for that matter is Indian Prime Minister Modi, who congratulated Prime Minister Netanyahu on his re-elction in a Hebrew-language message, and who in any case may abandon support for a Palestinian state at the UN. The League of Nations did not betray China in 1931 out prejudice towards Chinese, but out of cynicism.

David Archibald, a visiting fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014)

Humans, we’re a strange species — not least for the peculiar inherited traits and propensities that so often seem innate as the colour of eyes and hair. Social engineers advocate legislation as the great leveller, but stubborn genes just aren’t listening.

So, if there are far more deleterious mutations than beneficial ones in each generation, how did we get a far as we did? How that happened is detailed in Gregory Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms”. Human society has traditionally been run as a meritocracy with assortative mating amongst the more productive members of society. Pre-contraception, more productive members of society had larger families than less productive people, who barely scraped by. So, while everyone suffered from the same mutational load, the effects of assortative mating could overcome that and the genetic makeup improved. The replacement fertility rate to keep population steady is considered to be 2.3 children per woman. That is purely in terms of numbers. Including the mutational load, the number might be 2.5 or higher.