ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Kerry: Goodbye, Good Riddance

Posted By on January 16th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/16/john-kerry-goodbye-good-riddance/

In a city overflowing with useless people, agencies and institutions, one of its most worthless figures is (finally) leaving his government post. While John Kerry is not quite going away, he is closer to the exit than the entrance. This is good for the country.

At some point this spring, Kerry will leave his billet as the administration’s climate envoy (see what we mean by “useless”?). He will reportedly join the re-election campaign of President Joe Biden, who was for decades useless but eventually became destructive, as the last three years have shown. If voters act rationally, Kerry, an insufferable hypocrite, will disappear from public life for good by the middle of November.

Ever an imperious scold, a male Karen before that term became widely used, Kerry has spent much of his adult life, more than four decades, implementing the Democratic Party dream, which is to convert our civil society to a political society. It’s a point we’ve made before that can’t be made enough:

The left, which has marched through our institutions, won’t rest until the civil society we have flourished in has been replaced with a political society. It craves a societal breakdown, to bury the political and social norms that stand in its path to unchallengeable power.

Most recently Kerry has served as the administration’s climate czar. It was the perfect post for a gasbag, providing its occupant endless opportunities to lecture climate crisis skeptics, whom Kerry surely regards as “stupid.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Federal Contracting Is the Next DEI Target Companies are required to meet strict hiring ‘goals’ that would be illegal anywhere else. By Michael Toth

Posted By on January 16th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-contracting-is-the-next-dei-target-race-affirmative-action-supreme-court-ca60eaf4?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Critics of diversity, equity and inclusion policies scored an important victory with last year’s Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and a symbolic one with Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president. But while some universities and businesses have pivoted from DEI to get in line with the high court’s ruling, Washington’s diversity-industrial complex marches on. It’s time for the federal government to play by the same antidiscrimination rules private companies have to follow.

Federal affirmative-action programs originated in the Nixon administration. In 1969 Labor Secretary George Shultz launched the Philadelphia Plan, which required companies bidding for federal construction projects in that city to commit to minority hiring goals. Within a year of announcing the plan, the administration extended it to cover all federal agencies. Fifty-five years later, those rules are still in place.

Federal regulations require prime contractors or subcontractors “with 50 or more employees and a contract of $50,000 or more” to submit “a written affirmative action program” for each of their locations. The rules dictate that a contractor’s workforce should “reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” Employing less than 80% of the local share of “any race, sex, or ethnic group” is categorized as an “adverse impact.” Failure to comply with these federal diversity mandates could mean the cancellation of existing contracts, and violators could be barred from doing future business with the federal government. It’s safest to hire by the numbers.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Ramaswamy Suspends Campaign after Poor Iowa Caucus Finish, Endorses Trump By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on January 16th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ramaswamy-drops-out-of-presidential-race-endorses-trump/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=article

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy announced Monday night that he is suspending his presidential campaign after a lackluster showing in the Iowa caucuses.

In a speech announcing his exit from the race, Ramaswamy endorsed former president Donald Trump, who was projected to have won the caucuses by a strong margin, according to the Associated Press and other media outlets.

With an estimated 95 percent of votes counted, Trump was winning with 51 percent of the vote, followed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in second at 21.2 percent and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in third with 19.1 percent. Ramaswamy was in a distant fourth at 7.7 percent.

“There’s no path for me to be the next president, absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country,” Ramaswamy told his supporters. “And I think that I am very worried for our country. I think we are skating on thin ice as a nation.” 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

The headlines have been full of specious accusations of “genocide” against Israel. Here is a pro-Israel argument from Spiked magazine in England: https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/13/these-accusations-of-genocide-bring-shame-on-humanity/

These accusations of ‘genocide’ bring shame on humanity South Africa’s case against Israel is the most absurd and sinister spectacle of the 21st century so far. Brendan O’Neill

Read it all: The last line is “I accuse you of dishonoring the values of Enlightenment, truth and reason by falsely accusing the survivors of genocide of being genocidal.”

As Michael Ordman details weekly, Israel contributes more to the life expectancy and to the better standard of life for billions of people than all the hypocritical and anti-Semitic participants of the kangaroo trials in South Africa. rsk

 

 

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR

US charity provides $7 million in supplies. (TY UWI) US non-profit Operation Israel has provided more than $7 million worth of supplies, medical equipment, and protective gear to IDF soldiers since Oct 7. 10,000 soldiers with a total of more than 50,000 items, including ceramic vests, ballistic goggles, and tactical gear.

https://www.jns.org/3pm-us-based-volunteers-helping-to-equip-idf-fighters/  

https://www.operationisrael.org/

https://www.livenowfox.com/video/1382593   https://www.operationisrael.org/donate

Free food for troops. (TY Yanky) Anyone in uniform can get a free pizza at Jerusalem’s La Piedra – the only Israeli pizzeria in the World’s Top 50 Pizza Guide. Also, free food (monthly) at Muffin Boutique; Friday buffet to lone soldiers at Piccolino; at Aroma Beit Kama soldiers eat free; and Hamal Hamatok (the sweet war room).

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-779932

Italian Jewish leader cooks for the IDF. (TY UWI & I24 News) Italian Jewish leader Riccardo Pacifici, the Vice President of the European Jewish Association, cooked for soldiers in Israel’s southern city of Sderot. He cooked pasta, sauces, and other foods to lift the spirits and hearts above the conflict.

Special delivery. At the IDF’s Emergency Logistics warehouse in Ramla, young soldiers of the “Special In Uniform” program join regular recruits to pack food and clothing, and prepare equipment to be delivered to IDF units across Israel. Their enthusiasm, diligence, and resilience contribute to a unique, positive atmosphere.

https://www.jns.org/soldiers-with-disabilities-contribute-to-israels-war-effort/

Operation Suitcase. (TY Yanky) Several members of UK’s Sussex Jewish Representative Council have just completed Operation Suitcase. They visited Israel with 13 suitcases, ten with supplies for the army units they visited, two with chocolate for children, and one filled with black wool for knitting woolly hats for soldiers.

https://www.thejc.com/community/sussex-group-extends-solidarity-to-israel-i0o3tekv

Kibbutz closed but the factory is open. Kibbutz Sasa near the Lebanese border has been evacuated to protect residents from Hezbollah attacks. But employees of the Plasan armor factory inside the Kibbutz are working around the clock producing body armor plates for bulletproof vests and bolt-on armor kits for military vehicles.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/shield-of-israel-at-evacuated-kibbutz-sasa-an-armor-factory-toils-to-protect-troops/

Green energy kept cellular networks running. The Oct 7 fighting crashed the Gaza border electricity grid and disrupted mobile communications. But networks supported by Israel’s Phinergy (see here previously) based on innovative “green” aluminum-air technology, kept going, providing essential connectivity.

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-phinergy-backup-prevented-collapse-of-cellular-networks-on-october-7-1001461554

Wounded soldier is treated at father’s hospital. Dr. Roni Eichel, head of neurology at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, was relieved when one of his IDF soldier sons woke up in SZMC’s intensive care unit. A bullet / shrapnel penetrated his ceramic vest but stopped short of the thorax and any permanent disability.

https://www.jns.org/a-wounded-soldier-ended-up-being-treated-at-his-fathers-hospital/

Book of Psalms found in Gaza. IDF soldiers have found a Book of Psalms dated 1986 in the home of a Hamas terrorist in Jabalia, Gaza. It contains a personal dedication to an Israeli Shmuel Goldring. The sender has been identified but at the time of writing, the recipient has not.

https://www.jns.org/israeli-soldiers-find-hebrew-book-of-psalms-in-gaza-home/

IDF soldier finds reporter’s house sign in Gaza. 19 years after Amiel Yarchi was evacuated from his home in Netzarim during the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, IDF soldiers in Gaza retrieved the name plaque that was on his house. Amiel reported the find on the Kipa News site that he works for. See the photos.

https://www.jns.org/19-years-on-idf-soldier-finds-gush-katif-evacuees-house-sign-in-gaza/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

A new way to treat Sleeping Sickness. Scientists at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University have been able to destroy the genetic code of the trypanosome parasite that the tsetse fly infects with, to cause trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). It opens the way for development of RNA-based therapies to prevent transmission of the disease.

https://www.israel21c.org/scientists-discover-new-way-to-tackle-sleeping-sickness/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43263-6

Battlefield medic simulation training.  IDF medics have been receiving training using computer-controlled, anatomically correct, mannequins to learn key lifesaving procedures for use on the front lines. The Israel Center for Medical Simulation (MSR) based at Sheba Medical Center also trains civilian and overseas medics.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-tech-medical-simulation-training-arrived-just-in-time-for-idf-medics/

Medicare pays for ReWalk exoskeleton. Medicare Administrative Contractor Noridian Healthcare Solutions has paid the first ever claim by an eligible Medicare patient for a personal exoskeleton from Israel’s ReWalk. ReWalk is now an authorized medically necessary device when prescribed for a patient with spinal cord injury.  

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/01/05/2804599/32993/en/First-ReWalk-Personal-Exoskeleton-Claim-Paid-by-Medicare.html

Award for pressure sores detection. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s IR-MED (see here previously) has been awarded the “Most Innovative Non-Invasive Diagnostics Technology Developer 2023 – Israel” by UK-based Corporate Vision Magazine for the company’s PressureSafe device and technology platform. 

https://www.ir-medical.com/about-us/#Awards  https://www.corporatevision-news.com/winners/ir-med/

PTSD device is Best Startup. Israel’s GrayMatters (see here previously) was named the Prix Galien USA Best Startup 2023 winner. Its technology uses an EEG headset device to read biomarker activity in the amygdala. AI software, including an Avatar, relaxes the part of the brain which is overactive in people suffering from PTSD.

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-graymatters-treats-ptsd-with-avatars-1001463926

EMT volunteer saves her own niece., United Hatzalah volunteer Adele had just left her mother’s Rehovot home when she was alerted that her niece was choking back at her mother’s apartment. She quickly returned and used Heimlich thrusts, plus back slaps to clear trapped food from her niece’s mouth.

https://israelrescue.org/stories/a-family-emergency-emt-saves-her-own-niece-from-choking/

The effect of missing genes. Williams syndrome is caused by 25 missing genes. Tel Aviv researchers have discovered the function of one of the deleted genes – Gtf2i. Its absence impairs the production and regulation of mitochondrial organelles in the brain’s neurons. Impacts include dental, cardiovascular, and visual problems,

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-781703

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Equity Grade Inflation Hurts Jews, Asians and Other Disfavored Minorities by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20303/equity-grade-inflation

Diversity equity and inclusion require that groups – rather than individuals – be treated “equitably”, and that preferred groups be advantaged in hiring, admissions and other benefits.

This is all part of the DEI attack on meritocracy. DEI demands that individuals be judged by the color of their skin and their identity rather than the content of their character — or their grades.

DEI now demands that schools begin with the goal of achieving equity grading by any means, including non-blind grading, grade inflation or grade abolition. Anything to undercut the equality of meritocratic blind grading that didn’t achieve the goals of DEI.

The negative impact of equity grading is incalculable. It stifles learning, hard work and creativity. It fails to prepare students for the competitive world they will inevitably face after they finish being coddled by universities. It will destroy the competitive advantages American universities used to have.

A recent study showed that grade inflation has become rampant at American universities. What used to be C+ has now become an A-, as more than 3/4 of students in elite universities get grades of A or A-.

This grade inflation is a direct result of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies and their twin concept of intersectionality. DEI requires that groups – rather than individuals – be treated “equitably”, and that preferred groups be advantaged in hiring, admissions and other benefits.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Directing America’s Future by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20304/directing-america-future

The historic freefall now taking place in the House of Representatives is a needless, self-inflicted political wound that only serves to distract our representatives and the nation at large from the extremely real crises facing America.

Rather than focus on the open borders that are transforming our nation’s cities into migrant camps, we are engaged in recriminations and intraparty personal feuds. Rather than tackle a crippling debt now more than $34 trillion, we witnessed a political drama selecting a new Speaker of the House. Rather than advance American energy independence, we heard claims that abandoning Ukraine — America’s forward base in Europe to protect us from battling on US soil — would somehow improve US national security. Instead of confronting anyone trying to steal the results of the next presidential election, we are engaged in recriminations and arguments about people forcing other people to have babies they do not want (for those women who do want babies, no one is stopping them). When did the government decide that a woman’s private parts, let alone a lifelong responsibility for another person, were part of its mandate?

Some topics are not the business of the republic. Squabbling will not protect the integrity of the ballot box. Chaos will not rescue a democracy that is under assault by foreign governments hostile to America’s role as the leader of the free world.

This is a calamity, a distraction from the genuine and challenges that will determine America’s standing in the world for the century.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Lawfare Against Trump Is Running Out of Gas Prosecutors are discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these proceedings, the more he rises in the polls. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/15/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/

We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by sizable margins in head-to-head polls. Moreover, had Trump not run for the presidency, or had he been of the same party as most of the four prosecutors, he would have never been indicted by any of them.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized first impeachment, trying ex-president Trump in the Senate as a private citizen, the laptop disinformation set-up, the Alfa bank ping caper, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

Some of the prosecutors have colluded with White House lawyers and congressional liaisons. Some had run for office, offering campaign promises to get Trump convicted for something or other.

Now, after years of delays and deadends, all four are rushing to synchronize their trial dates to ensure that the front-running Trump is on the docket daily and not out on the 2024 campaign trail.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Today’s Journalists Seek Power, Not Truth By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/todays_journalists_seek_power_not_truth.html

NPR, The New York Times, and other leftist propaganda organs parading as reliable news publications wrapped up 2023 by jeering House Republicans for passing only twenty-seven bills that became laws.  Hyperventilating like out-of-shape Chris Christie clones perpetually catching their breath, the Fourth Estate’s most prestigious windbags could not hide their priggish condescension: Republican legislators simply cannot legislate, they huffed in unison.  

I know the “Yes, Daddy, govern me harder!” crowd gets goosebumps every time the ignoramuses and perverts in D.C. create a new rule that comes with the threat of a good spanking, but it still amazes me how desperately today’s “journalists” desire for the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.  

The United States of America has been around for two and a half centuries.  During that time, tens of thousands of federal laws, rules, regulations, and executive orders have been created to squash and squeeze Americans’ natural liberties into smaller and smaller sanctioned containers suitable for TSA inspection.  It would be interesting to know just how many more decades of legislating and how many thousands of additional recorded laws it would take before the masochists at The New York Times finally feel as if they have been sufficiently governed!

Mr. Edward Holman commented recently that the creepy JournoList community of leftist “reporters” who collaborated to push narratives and news coverage favorable to Barack Obama during his rise to power crippled the profession permanently: “A free press cannot secretly conspire to rig elections by coordinating to destroy candidates, movements (TEA Party, MAGA, etc) they dislike with false accusations by anonymous sources.”  I heartily agree.  The propaganda “journalism” legitimized by the JournoList cabal was as loud of a death knell for objective reporting (and the enduring independence of the press) as they come.  

Equally demonstrative of journalism’s demise has been the corporate domestication of reporters and their lamentable transformation from an unruly gang of rebellious muckrakers and misfits who naturally despised the status quo into a docile pack of housebroken and primped-up poodles all desperate to service the “ruling class.”  You don’t get anything as noxious as a JournoList to eat through the body politic like a parasite through its host without first initiating a widespread campaign to spay and neuter those journalists in the profession packing cojones as well as brains.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is This The Beginning Of The End Of The $2 Trillion Administrative State?

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/15/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-2-trillion-administrative-state/

Last week, a federal appeals court overturned a Biden administration rule governing dishwashers. This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case involving the regulation of commercial fishing.

Both are seemingly minor regulatory scuffles that normally would attract little public attention.

But they could mark the beginning of the end of the bloated, unaccountable, extra-constitutional “administrative state” – which today imposes $2 trillion in costs on businesses and consumers and every day eats away at our freedom.

The dishwasher story began during the previous administration when President Donald Trump pushed regulators to allow consumers to buy dishwashers that, well, wash dishes.

As we noted in this space at the time, federal efficiency mandates had become so strict that it took more than three hours for a dishwasher to do (poorly) what older models did in an hour. Under Trump, the Energy Department allowed for a new class of appliance that could do the job in an hour.

The left freaked. It called Trump’s decision “senseless” and “appalling” and claimed it “hurts consumers.”

On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order calling on regulators to undo that Trump rule.

They did. And it’s the Biden rule that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump’s Resurgence Draws Parallels to Reagan’s 1980 Upset Victory Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/trumps-resurgence-draws-parallels-to-reagans-1980-upset-victory/

It’s hard to recapture the contempt with which Reagan was excoriated by the best and the brightest, but it was just as visceral and widespread as the animus against Trump in 2016 and today.

The 2024 presidential election is still more than 10 months away, but already there is a lot of déjà vu all over again about the festivity.

The smart money—which does not, I hasten to add, mean that it will turn out to be the most accurate money—has been telling us for months that wily Democrats have engineered Trump’s nomination because, clever chaps that they are, they know he cannot possibly win the election.

The main reason adduced is that Trump is not sufficiently popular to win.  How do said pundits know this?  Some point to the polls, though the polls have not been cooperating on that front of late. Trump is ahead in all or nearly all the swing states, and more and more polls put him ahead of Biden in the general election.  Some adduce Trump’s “character,” his behavior after the 2020 election, and the cornucopia of indictments he faces in four separate jurisdictions.  Back in December, Byron York summed up the state of play with this headline: “As Trump lead widens, prosecutors step up pursuit.”

What do you suppose most people think of that? What, I mean, do they think of a situation in which one political candidate is targeted by the opposing political party—which party, it may almost go without saying, totally controls the coercive instruments of state power?  I believe most people don’t like it.  They don’t like it because it reeks of basic unfairness and totalitarian overreach.

But that’s where we are now.  Who knows, perhaps Jack Smith, Fani Willis, or Letitia James will finally nab Trump on one charge or another.  After all, the net designed to capture the former president has been spread far and wide. But I would not be so sure.  Everywhere one looks, the cases against him have come more and more to resemble the House of Usher. Fani Willis put her boyfriend on the payroll and ordered him to get Trump. Unfortunately, that secret intimacy is making headlines everywhere. The news threatens to collapse the case against Trump in Georgia.

Prosecutors in New York and Washington can rely on biased judges and juries. But I suspect that even if Trump is convicted of something in one or both places, he will win on appeal. The cases against him long ago took on the slightly comical aspect of a vendetta.