RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the presidential race Sunday to a stunning cold shoulder from Mayor de Blasio and few signs of genuine enthusiasm from other top New York Democrats, who want to see her espouse a far more liberal agenda.

The lack of enthusiasm for Clinton — made clear to the nation Sunday by de Blasio’s refusal to endorse on “Meet the Press” — ranges from far-leftist “progressives” allied with de Blasio, who prefer a Wall-Street-bashing populist like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to Jewish voters worried by President Obama’s Mideast policies, to union activists taking their lead from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who want Clinton to face a primary challenge to force her into stronger stands on issues vital to organized labor.

And the lack of passion for Clinton was also seen on the local level Saturday at the Ready For Hillary gathering in Manhattan, where a mere 200 people and virtually no “A-list” Democratic officials attended a final fund-raiser before Clinton’s announcement.

Opponents of campus affirmative action typically rest their case on the immorality of using racial or ethnic categories (more delicately called “diversity”) versus treating people as individuals. That objection is certainly valid but when it comes to hiring of faculty, the damage far exceeds just violating a principle. Racial preferences deeply corrupt and will inevitably undermine academic excellence in ways that campus outsiders seldom grasp.

To appreciate this damage, consider Brown University’s recent National Diversity Summit in which the school announced plans to double its “underrepresented” minority (i.e., black) faculty by 2025 — from the current 9% to 18% (women don’t count here since the proportion of female faculty is already more than 50% but the plan nevertheless calls for a substantial increase in women in science departments). Strategies included creating post-doctoral fellowships for black scholars to be mentored by Brown faculty and attracting young blacks to the Brown campus with conferences. More forceful measures will entail asking departments to develop a “diversity action plan” whose annual goals would be monitored and requiring faculty search committees to ensure a diverse pool of minority candidates. In numbers, 410 black professors will have to be recruited.

A year after it left Ukraine for Russia, the region is suffering. What ever happened to Crimea? In the year since the peninsula voted to leave Ukraine and become the Russian Federation’s newest holding, Western attention has shifted away from it toward eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists continue to wage an insurgency against Kyiv. But the case of Crimea is worth a second look, because in the past year, conditions there have deteriorated significantly.

As such, the region’s fate offers a telling glimpse into the harsh reality behind Russian rule. Crimea’s drift is unexpected, insofar as the Kremlin promised to reward the region handsomely for its pro-Russian trajectory. Indeed, the Russian government has worked hard to integrate Crimea into the rest of the country. It has launched an action plan to develop the peninsula and improve living conditions via investments in everything from water supply to power lines to new roads. But these plans have become a casualty of the wider Ukraine crisis. Russian aggression has prompted several rounds of Western sanctions to date. Cumulatively, these measures — coupled with the low price of world oil — have had a pronounced impact on the country’s economy. As a result, there simply isn’t enough money to go around, leading Moscow to reallocate funds from its own infrastructural needs just to keep Crimea afloat. In other words, to sustain its Crimea project, Russia is now depriving the rest of the country. Telltale signs of this constriction are everywhere. Moscow has frozen the pension savings of Russian citizens this year.

Clinton’s return is a recipe for disaster. Not being Tammy Wynette. Cattle futures, Red Bone, back-allocating trades. Madison Guaranty. Requested destruction of Madison files at the Rose Law Firm. Whitewater land development. Delinquent Whitewater tax filings. Resolution Trust Corporation criminal referral. Rose Law Firm shenanigans. Bimbo eruptions. Cookie recipes. FDIC inspector-general reports that Hillary “deceived” federal regulators. Travel Office: improper firings, false accusations, lies, cover-ups. Unethical behavior on the Watergate committee. “More ecstatic modes of living.” Alinsky disciple. Clerked for Communist lawyer. Defended child rapist, joked about it. Fulminations about a vast right-wing conspiracy.

“Vacuum Rose law files.” The Lippo Group and its principals and offshoots in the 1980s. Lippo Group in the 1990s. Lippo Group via visa waivers in 2010. John Huang. Charlie Trie. Coffee klatches. Rifling through, and hiding, poor Vince Foster’s files. Missing billing records. Snooping through FBI background checks, or at least surrounding herself with people who did. Improperly secret meetings on health-care reform. Secret desire for a government single-payer system, despite public denials. Profiting from short-sales of pharmaceuticals even as she attacked the pharmaceutical industry. Slandering (Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon”), and perhaps worse, the women with whom her husband had sexual relations.

“Ambitious” is an understatement, and the public is wary.
In the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement, a lot of commentators dismissed criticism of her or suggested it would boomerang against Republicans. Her former consultant James Carville accused MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of “scandalmongering.” On Sunday, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press, speaking to radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, expressed his skepticism of Republican efforts against the Clintons: “I look at sort of an obsession on the right of beating Obama and beating Bill Clinton over the years . . . is there a point where you do this too much?” But clearly many voters disagree.

A new Bloomberg poll finds approval of Hillary at 48 percent in the wake of her e-mail scandal. The poll finds 53 percent of Americans believe “she purposely withheld or deleted some relevant e-mails from a private account and home server she used while in office.” Just 29 percent of respondents think she is being truthful. “Voters do think she is a strong leader — a key metric — but unless she can change the honesty perception, running as a competent but dishonest candidate has serious potential problems,” concludes Quinnipiac’s assistant polling director Peter Brown.

As President Obama tries to sell the world his mysterious nuclear “framework agreement,” India’s defense establishment is just not buying it. The U.S. and Western commentators might be expecting “peace dividends” from Iran, but India cannot afford to harbor such illusions.

The Iranians have already announced that they plan to sell “enriched uranium” in the international marketplace, and will be “hopefully making some money” from it. To whom will they sell?

A nuclear Iran would be able to hold the world hostage by blocking one-third of the world’s oil supply at the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian proxies have also been trying to seize control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the maritime choke point of the Suez Canal.

The only question is whether the West would rather have an adversary such as Iran before it has nuclear weapons or after.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Natural chemicals that protect against cancer. Scientists working in the Technion laboratory of Israeli Nobel Prize winner Professor Aaron Ciechanover have discovered that high concentrations of the chemical KPC1 and protein p50 suppress malignant growth and protect healthy cells.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/breakthrough-in-cancer-research-300064078.html

Stop cell “spam” to prevent cancer. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have identified that cancer can be triggered by an overload of specific messages from the cell membrane to its nucleus. They have also found a molecule that can filter these messages, similar to the way spam emails are blocked.
http://nocamels.com/2015/04/blocking-information-stops-cancer-spread/

Pomegranate juice and dates for healthy arteries. Researchers at Israel’s Technion and Haifa’s Rambam hospital have discovered that combining pomegranate juice and dates (with their pits) provides maximum protection against the buildup of plaque on the endothelium of the arteries, and prevents heart attack or stroke.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Health/Technion-research-Pomegranate-date-combination-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away-396565 http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/fo/c4fo00998c#!divAbstract

Heart muscle re-grown after heart attack. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute working with Australian scientists have used the hormone neuregulin to re-grow heart tissue damaged by a heart attack or heart disease. See this rare positive report in the normally anti-Israel UK Guardian. Also published in Nature Cell Biology.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/07/heart-muscle-cells-regrown-in-medical-research-breakthrough http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ncb3149.html

Mobile app approved for hip-replacements. FDA approval has been given to the iPhone / iPad app TraumaCad by Israeli health-tech firm Voyant, which helps doctors plan hip replacement on mobile devices. It allows doctors to import digital implant images from secure hospital networks and visualize the operation.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-app-pushes-ipad-closer-to-medical-device-territory/

FDA approves Teva asthma treatment. Israel’s Teva has received FDA approval for ProAir RespiClick – the first and only breath-actuated, dry-powder rescue inhaler to be approved by the FDA for the treatment of acute asthma symptoms. ProAir RespiClick eliminates the need for hand-breath coordination during inhalation.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-teva-asthma-treatment-receives-fda-approval-1001025040

Auto-immunology – a new specialty of medicine. Professor Yehuda Shoenfeld of the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer has founded the field of auto-immunology and connected 81 different diseases through the immune system. The latest is narcolepsy from which sufferers fall asleep due to an autoimmune reaction.
http://nocamels.com/2015/04/narcolepsy-autoimmune-disease-research/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM5B6EAhc6I#t=103

AposTherapy marches on. (TY Myer) Good video showing how successful the remedial shoes of Israel’s AposTherapy have become in the US. Its new CEO stopped building clinics and now trains physiotherapists to use AposTherapy shoes on patients suffering back and ligament pain. (Stop the video after the Apos feature.)
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000368723

Diabetic technology goes global. Israeli medical tech firm DreaMed Diabetes has struck a deal with Medtronic, the world’s biggest medical device company, to use its MD-Logic Artificial Pancreas algorithm in Medtronic’s insulin pumps. The algorithm regulates the insulin released to the diabetic individual.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/diabetics-worldwide-to-benefit-from-artificial-pancreas/

Medical images for computer diagnosis. (TY Michelle) Israeli startup Zebra Medical Vision is building a database of medical images (X-rays, CT scans and MRI scans) of real patients but without names or IDs. The database provides research data, previously unavailable due to privacy laws.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/04/06/khosla-ventures-invests-in-israeli-medical-imaging-startup-zebra/

I am writing to you to express my support for Professor Andrew Pessin.

Prof. Pessin is being demonized by students with a very specific and incendiary agenda, the destruction of any person who defends the State of Israel. These students intentionally presented Prof. Pessin’s Facebook post from August 2014 during the Hamas-Israel war, in which he defended the Israeli defensive blockade on Hamas, out of context, to both local and global audiences. They then constructed lie upon lie to misrepresent it as a racist post against Palestinians, in an attempt to intimidate him, silence him, attack his character, and destroy his career. Their actions generated a wave of hate mail and threats directed toward him and his family.

Connecticut College’s Administration has succumbed to this intimidation and completely failed to take action to protect Prof. Pessin from these malicious attacks which violate the appropriate norms of free speech.

Fittingly, the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse fell on the sixth day of Passover, “the season of our freedom,” when Jews celebrate God’s eruption into human history to free them from Egyptian slavery. Appomattox denoted the end of the American Civil War, which claimed 750,000 lives. The equivalent number proportionate to today’s population would be 7 million. Understandably, Americans remain obsessed with the conflict, by far the bloodiest in our history.

The American Republic which the Civil War renewed, purged with blood of the stain of slavery, arose from a biblical vision of governance in the English Revolution of the 17th century, as Harvard’s Eric Nelson, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and others have shown.

The Cuban fiasco

In that simplistic jargon characterizing Pres. Barack Hussein Obama’s worldwide “transformation” of U.S. foreign policy, the chief argument for his Cuban shift has been “[T]hese 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked.”

In the facts of history, in this as in so many other instances, Obama is wrong.

The fact is that U.S. policy toward Cuba, with its ups and downs, has been generally successful.

First, of course, the outcome of the Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962 prevented the Soviet Union from obtaining an advanced offensive weapons base just off the U.S. southern coast. The confrontation was a turning point in the Cold War. Moscow’s victorious march through control of Central and Eastern Europe and its threat to Western Europe began to be reversed when JFK back off Nikita Khrushchev’s gamble.

Secondly, the Soviet Union’s Cold War effort, using the Castros’ regime, to infiltrate and create other Communist states in Latin America was beaten back – in Costa Rica, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Colombia. Indeed almost every Latin American government at one time or another was a target, if unsuccessfully.

That is not to say, of course, that American policy toward Havana was a string of unbroken successes, or that, in fact, it was always clear-headed.