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Ruth King

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Independents Hold Key To 2022 GOP ‘Red Wave’: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

By on October 24th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/24/independents-hold-key-to-2022-gop-red-wave-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite both major parties claiming they have an advantage, the race for control of Congress appears to be a dead heat, the most recent I&I/TIPP data show. But there’s a big potential surprise element that could tilt the balance sharply: Nearly one out of every seven registered voters, or 15%, are “not sure” whom they’ll vote for.

The online poll of 1,158 voters across the country was taken from October 5-7, with a margin of error of +/- 2.9 points.

The poll asked those responding: “What is your preference for the outcome of this November’s congressional elections?”

Answers showed the sharp division among the electorate, with 42% saying they would prefer “a Congress controlled by Republicans,” and 43% saying they preferred “a Congress controlled by Democrats.” The results are within the poll’s margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The revenge of the technocrats Liz Truss’s spectacular downfall has emboldened our equally hopeless expert class. Tom Slater

By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/22/the-revenge-of-the-technocrats/

Watching prime minister Liz Truss’s short resignation speech yesterday, I couldn’t help feeling that she was selling herself short. She managed to summon up just two achievements to boast about from her 44 days in office: the energy price guarantee and the cut to national insurance contributions. But we all know she’s achieved much more than that. She’s tanked her party in spectacular fashion, for a start. Right now, the only thing in Westminster more unpopular than the Tory Party (a poll today put it at 14 per cent) is Truss herself – she is only slightly more popular than Vladimir Putin among the UK population.

Her history-making achievements don’t stop there. Her premiership was the mother of all political cock-ups, in an era in which they have hardly been in short supply. She may even have succeeded in partially rehabilitating her predecessor, Boris Johnson, who has emerged as a strangely plausible candidate to replace her. (At least he has a democratic mandate.) And beyond the party and personality politics, what makes the end of Truss so tragic is that, ideologically speaking, her premiership has managed to achieve the precise opposite of its goals. Whatever Trussonomics was – the underlying logic was never entirely clear – it is now utterly discredited. Indeed, Truss was only able to limp on for a few more days as PM by getting Jeremy Hunt to rip up her mini-budget in the Commons, while she looked on with a kind of lobotomised zen.

More positively, Truss set out to challenge ‘the orthodoxy’, ‘the Treasury view’, ‘the consensus’ preached by various unelected and unaccountable institutions. She even had the gall to suggest that maybe the Bank of England – whose galaxy-brained governor said in August last year that inflation would be ‘temporary’ – wasn’t working as it should. Her chancellor’s first act in office was to sack Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar, a man no one had ever heard of but whose expertise was apparently all that stood between us and barbarism, in an act that our hysterical media seemed to equate with regicide. Her refusal of a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – another apparently unassailable institution, despite its stellar record of getting things wrong – was seen as another awful heresy.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The ‘settler violence’ narrative and Knesset elections By Ruthie Blum

By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-settler-violence-narrative-and-knesset-elections/

The current spike in Palestinian terrorism, marked by dozens of rock-throwing, firebombing, stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks each day, was upstaged last week by what the local press and certain politicians were highlighting as an intolerable “surge in settler violence.”

It’s hard to describe the fervor with which news outlets and the “anybody but Bibi” camp—the parties on the left side of the spectrum vying to prevent former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from returning to power after the Nov. 1 Knesset elections—jump on stories of “settlers” assaulting Israel Defense Forces troops and Palestinians.

Take Thursday’s clash in the town of Huwara, near Nablus, for example.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid promptly labeled the thugs who threw stones at Palestinian vehicles and pepper-sprayed members of the IDF’s 202nd Paratrooper Battalion, wounding the commander and a soldier, “dangerous criminals who must be denounced and brought to justice without hesitation and with all severity.”

They “endanger the lives of our soldiers and harm the State of Israel,” he added.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz took it a step further and attributed the incident to the behavior of his right-wing rivals in the Religious Zionist Party.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on October 23rd, 2022

Why don’t admirers and supporters of Israel show that B.D.S., the invidious movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel can cut both ways? Our B.D.S. would boycott, divest from and sanction the media, companies, and organizations that routinely slander Israel and distort its democracy, history and legitimacy.

The first step would be to support and circulate Michael Ordman’s compilations of Israel’s outsize contributions to the science and technology that bring health and hope and a better life to billions of people throughout the globe.  rsk

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Diagnosing irregular heart rates in high-risk patients. Prof Mahmoud Saliman of Rambam Health Care Campus is the first in Israel to insert an ultrasound device through a vein (without anesthesia) to safely diagnose a patient suffering from atrial fibrillation (AFib). High-risk patients cannot have anesthesia or blood thinners.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-718736
 
The secret to a healthy heart. Scientists at Israel’s Assuta Ashdod Medical Center found why patients with a high-risk of coronary heart disease (e.g., some diabetics and smokers) have healthy arteries. Their endothelial progenitor cells have longer telomeres and greater function. It can help in developing preventative medicines.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-719269  https://journals.lww.com/coronary-artery/Abstract/2022/11000/Identification_of_protective_biologic_factors_in.4.aspx
 
OrCam for dyslexics. OrCam Learn (see here previously) is a voice-activated, interactive handheld device designed for people with learning challenges. It combines AI with a high-resolution visual sensor, and laser capture. It reads text aloud from any surface, listens to the reader and provides feedback. And much more.
https://learn.orcam.com/en/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuNvoQGB4VU  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JeNTpAUDE
 
European approval for bone augmentation material. (TY Atid-EDI) The Ivory Dentin Graft™ dentin graft material from Israel’s Ivory Graft has just received the European CE Mark for use in the repair or augmentation of bone defects. Its similarity to bone makes it an ideal grafting material, e.g., in dental procedures.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/ivory-dentin-graft-the-first-and-only-dentin-graft-receives-ce-mark-301629353.html   https://ivorygraft.com/
 
Animal Assisted Therapy – a win-win. HAMA (see here previously) is among the pioneering organizations in AAI – Animal Assisted Intervention in Therapy and Education in Israel. Many of the animals are rescued from abuse and neglect, and have in turn enriched humans suffering from trauma, deep loss, and abandonment.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/mind-and-spirit/article-719815   http://hama-israel.org/
 
Detecting fetal anomalies. (TY UWI) More details about Israel’s IdentifAI Genetics (see here previously) and its Hoobari blood test invented by Tel Aviv University’s Professor Noam Shomron. The test separates the DNA of a 10-week fetus from that of its mother and then checks it for mutations. Much safer than amniocentesis.
https://www.israel21c.org/new-blood-test-may-detect-fetal-abnormalities-at-week-10/
 
Miracle baby. (TY UWI) Before aggressive chemo, Tzvia had ovarian tissue frozen. 20 years later, doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital defrosted and re-transplanted some of the tissue. It reversed her menopause and Tzvia has now given birth to a healthy baby girl – the longest ever time for a successful post-cancer transplant.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-gives-birth-after-menopause-reversed-with-transplant-of-20-year-frozen-ovary/  

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Not Consensus, But Truth Thoughts on some senses of the word “steal” (with a brief excursus on “consensus”). By Roger Kimball

By on October 23rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/22/not-consensus-but-truth/

We use the word “steal,” as we use many words, in several distinct but related senses. Here is an illustration of the core meaning. Joe goes into a candy store, looks around furtively (from the Latin fūr, “thief”) and then, when he sees that the shopkeeper is distracted, pockets some M&M’s and walks out. Joe just stole the M&M’s. 

That act of theft is simple. There are plenty of more complex and nuanced ones, but the element of assuming as one’s own something that rightfully belongs to another is key. 

Our elaborate and often convoluted financial system is replete with examples. So is our political life. 

Perhaps the most popular meme floating about in polite society today is the contention that any hint of the 2020 presidential election being tainted is a “Big Lie.” It is so popular, in fact, that some journalists and politicians appear to present themselves to the Office of Acceptable Propaganda each day before setting off on their rounds. They collect their allotted quota of different ways of ridiculing and dismissing those imprudent enough to suggest that, as a matter of fact, there were lots of problems with the 2020 elections. 

It is important that these approved scribes and politicians engage in this ritual because there are many different ways in which this rhetorical epithet needs to be expressed if it is to achieve its goal: to silence debate by intimidating people. 

To this end, a number of different rhetorical registers must be sounded. Some are blunt and angry, as for example this tweet from a writer for The Bulwark, a marginal NeverTrump site supported by leftist billionaires: “Chris Sununu, Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, and Glenn Youngkin . . . every single one of them is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic.”

The obloquy is directed not simply against certain ideas, but also against the people who express, or might express, them. Thus we find Michael Steele, an anti-Trump Republican and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, castigating supporters of the former president as “lice, fleas, and blood sucking ticks.” The formula does have the advantage of clarity: I mean, partly because of its unsavory historical echoes, you know where you stand with Steele. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The road to mediocrity By J.A. Frascino

By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/the_road_to_mediocrity.html

Woke progressivism seeks to strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

We are told that the MAGA cult, Trump voters, and Republicans in general are a threat to democracy, who, if not neutralized, will lead the nation into fascism.  In theory, a politically divided nation such as ours could evolve into fascism or socialism, should a political faction gain autocratic control.  In reality, however, we are confronted with the threat of evolving into a much more unique political structure – a Mediocracy.

A Mediocracy is a social structure in which mediocrity prevails.  Those who would change America pursue mediocrity under the banner of our moral obligation to elevate the status of the underachievers, marginalized, and minorities in our society.  The basic ploy is to lump such individuals into groups and to define them as victims of oppression.  They suffer solely from the oppressive social structure of patriarchal white supremacy, which must be dismantled.  

To entertain other reasons for the obstacles they might face is hateful, immoral, and racist.  White underachievers are dispensed with as irredeemable deplorables and deserve no further attention.  Our society, based in racism and xenophobia, is deemed illegitimate.  The fact that it has grown to become the most honored and respected on earth does not redeem it.  We must throw out the baby with the bath water and restructure society.

This message is delivered to the masses via mediocracy, the utilization of the media to control, mislead, and manipulate public thought through ambiguous and deceptive language, analogous to Orwellian newspeak.  Those not adhering to the mediocracy are debased as deniers, haters, or purveyors of disinformation, and need to be silenced.  

(Cancel culture is a natural extension of political correctness; from “you shouldn’t say that” to “you can’t say that”.)

To elevate the status of those defined as oppressed, we must embark upon a program of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  “Diversity is our strength!”  Is it?  The strength of our society lies in its ability to achieve its constitutional purpose, requiring it to align its forces with sufficient magnitude and direction so as to achieve its goals.  In physics, this thrust is referred to as a primary vector.  Diverse forces flying off in all directions only serve to weaken the vector forces.  

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance During World War II By Janet Levy

By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/a_story_of_jewish_partisan_resistance_during_world_war_ii.html

When the Nazis were gunning down Jews of the Eastern Polish town of Lenin into trenches, an officer pulled 17-year-old Faye Schulman (then called Faigel Lazebnik) aside. He’d seen her working at a studio earlier. So, he ordered her to take vanity pictures of him and other Nazis; he also told her to develop the negatives of the photos the Nazis had taken of the massacre. Almost 2,000 Jews were shot dead in Lenin. Several others were beaten, stripped naked, and sent to “work” camps in boxcars. Despite being terrified, the teenager secretly made extra copies of the photos to document the war crimes for future testimony.

Camera in hand, she later escaped to the forests and joined a group of Russian resistance fighters to avenge the death of her parents and six brothers and sisters. The group made her the resident “nurse”, hoping she may have picked up some skills from a brother-in-law who was a doctor. She assisted the group’s ‘doctor,’ actually a veterinarian. They’d dress wounds with cloth sterilized by boiling. But she was also an unemotional fighter who learned to use a rifle and stalk the forests in her leopard-fur coat. During a raid for food and weapons, she urged fellow fighters to burn her childhood home so that the Nazis wouldn’t be able to use it.

Her focus, though, remained on building evidence. She was so resolute about documenting Nazi atrocities and the partisans’ activities that she learned to develop photographs under a blanket. “I want people to know there was resistance. Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter,” Schulman, who died last year in Toronto, aged 101, would say. Her more than 100 photographs of the massacre and her partisan years – and her life itself – are proof of that.

Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2, a documentary film written, produced, and directed by Julia Mintz, presents Schulman’s story, along with that of seven other teenaged fighters like her who lived in the forests of Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, waging guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. It took Mintz over a decade to track down these fighters – in their 80s and 90s – for interviews and gather photographs and film footage.

The film intersperses photos of their youth with intimate present-day conversations about their exploits as resistance fighters. In the documentary, they speak of their transformation from innocents to ruthless partisans fighting the Nazis who murdered their families. Their singular focus was on seeing the Nazis defeated and staying alive. It’s a remarkable tale of the courage and diehard persistence of ad hoc resistance regiments that badgered the Nazi killing machine.

From 1941, when Germany violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invaded Poland, to the very end of the war, some 25,000 Jews escaped ghettos and death camps to fight the Nazis. Some joined non-Jewish resistance fighters, some joined or formed all-Jewish groups. They learned to shoot, survive in the woods, withstand constant hunger, and handle medical problems.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Western World’s Energy Folly in a New York Nutshell Why should Europe have all the fun? The Empire State tries to sabotage its grid with renewables.By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/western-worlds-energy-folly-in-a-new-york-nutshell-europe-renewables-grid-reliability-green-fossil-fuels-emissions-wind-solar-11666374183?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The latest report from New York state’s grid operator is a master class in everything wrong with the Western world’s approach to climate change.

That is: everything wrong with an approach that consists of throwing money at green business interests in defiance of any practical consideration. If you think something else is going on, such as abating climate change, think again.

To meet a legislated goal of emissions-free electricity by 2040, New York will need up to 45 gigawatts of what it delicately calls DEFRs, or dispatchable emissions-free resources. Not only is that more than the state’s total current generating capacity of 37 gigawatts, these DEFRs, which are carbon-free like wind and solar yet not interruptible like wind and solar, don’t exist and have no prospect of existing in the next decade. Starting very much sooner than 2040, New York’s real choice will be Third World electricity reliability vs. paying fossil-fuel operators large fees to keep their plants up and running in a highly inefficient part-time fashion.

Many involved in the state’s energy “transition” might question whether purging the last 10% or 5% of fossil fuels from the system is worth the exorbitant cost. Don’t expect anyone to admit the bigger problem: The transition won’t likely do much to reduce global emissions.

This is the great unmentionable. When New Yorkers use less coal, oil or gasoline because of environmental mandates, the market price transmits the benefit to other global users, who then use more. Even more unspeakable is the corollary: Emission-spewing activities simply relocate from one part of the world to another. China’s emissions growth, from half the U.S.’s to almost 300% of the U.S.’s in 30 years, is partly the product of a transplant of emissions from the U.S. and Europe.

If pressed, Biden officials will privately revert to gobbledygook about carbon taxes that appear immaculately without anyone having to advocate them. The media fill the gap with wishful thinking and Soviet econometrics, confusing inputs with outputs. Yes, world-wide investment in renewables in the past two years has exceeded investment in fossil fuels. Supposedly this proves fossil fuels are on their way out. No, it proves fossil fuels are a better deal, consuming less investment to meet their share of the world’s growing power needs.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The West Turns Back on Persecuted Christians, Embraces Radical Muslims by Raymond Ibrahim

By on October 23rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19010/persecuted-christians-radical-muslims

Although the U.S. government had acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians in Syria due solely to their religious identity, it took in only those who by definition were not in any way being targeted by ISIS — Sunni Muslims, with whom ISIS, a Sunni organization, identifies and does not attack.

“You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been ‘genocided,’ they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in and laugh at you and mock you and even threaten you…. [saying] ‘You shouldn’t have converted. You’re an idiot for converting. You get what you get,’ words to that effect.” — Paul Diamond, British human rights lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019.

[The UK Home Office] ridiculed an Iranian female asylum seeker in her rejection letter by writing, “You affirmed in your AIR [Asylum Interview Record] that Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that he would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime. It is therefore considered that you have no conviction in your faith and your belief in Jesus is half-hearted.”

She later said… her Home Office interviewer, “was either chuckling or maybe just kind of mocking when he was talking to me…. [H]e asked me why Jesus didn’t help you from the Iranian regime or Iranian authorities.”

Meanwhile, as the few Christians who seek asylum are highly scrutinized and presented with obstacles, millions of Muslim asylum seekers are taken into the West without any difficulties, and most without even being vetted.

Once Pakistanis in Britain learned that the UK was going to offer asylum to Asia Bibi, they rioted en masse. As a result, then-Prime Minister Theresa May personally blocked Bibi’s asylum application, “despite UK playing host to [Muslim] hijackers, extremists and rapists,” to quote from one headline.

Meanwhile, as usual, the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician because he had defended Bibi — a cleric deemed so extreme as to be banned from his native Pakistan — to enter and lecture in British mosques.

“It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the UK is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians.” — Dr. Martin Parsons, human rights activist, The Express, December 4, 2016.

Western authorities appear committed to discriminating against Christian asylum seekers, while welcoming Muslims ones.

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MEDIA, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

What has happened to journalism, volume one zillion I just provided hard evidence that a board member at a drug company that has made $70 billion selling vaccines tried to censor me; NO major non-conservative media outlet has reported this news Alex Berenson

By on October 22nd, 2022

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/what-has-happened-to-journalism-volume

Before Covid hysteria and hatred for Donald Trump broke his brain, Adam Feuerstein was a pretty good reporter.

Feuerstein has covered Big Pharma for many years, since 2017 for an pharmaceutical and healthcare-focused Website called STAT. Among biotechnology investors, he’s widely read and sometimes feared. He has a long memory for the hyperbole (if not outright scams) that many biotech executives engage in as they struggle to develop new drugs.

So when Pfizer announced Dr. Scott Gottlieb – who had resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration just months earlier – would be joining its board, Feuerstein’s salty take was not surprising:—

These days, though, Feuerstein has a somewhat different attitude towards Gottlieb, as a reverential interview from September 2021 reveals. It’s full of hardball questions like:

You have this unique position now – you were in government, you’re no longer in government. You sit on many different seats of power and access. Do you ever think about going back in?

(However do you do it all, Dr. G? And how do you look so good in that suit?)—

The irony here could not be thicker, as you have probably already realized. Because Feuerstein’s joking prediction of three years ago has turned out to be right. In August the FDA approved the bivalent boosters from Pfizer based on data from eight mice.

Can’t make it up.

One might think the fact the federal government has essentially become a promotional partner of the mRNA vaccine companies would encourage drug industry and investigative reporters like Feuerstein to ask hard questions about the vaccines.

One would be wrong.

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