RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few weeks ago, the California education department did a peculiar thing: It scrubbed historical data about standardized-test scores from its public DataQuest website. This being a government agency, it immediately began to lie to the public about why it had done this.

California law forbids using comparisons between different tests to set policy or evaluate programs. This makes sense: If last year 40 percent of students received 85th-percentile ratings on a standardized test and then this year 70 percent of students received 85th-percentile ratings on a different standardized test, it is likely that the radical difference is in the test, not in students’ performance. The law, however, says not one word about making historical test-score data available to the public or suppressing that data.

Naturally, California then cooked up a new lie: The data hadn’t been deleted at all, the education department said, simply moved to another part of the website. That might be technically true, inasmuch as the data was no longer available on the section of the website where — get this — historical data about test scores is published; the department says it was still made available to researchers. That’s one definition of public service: making it more difficult for citizens to access information about their government, obstructing informed democracy, and being a general pain in the Trump.

That a serious Christian can place political agreement with an intransigent enemy before the simple morality of calling for an immediate end to terrorism beggars belief.

Given that the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel or the rights of the Jewish people, the Pope’s recognizing a state of Palestine seems a contradictory gesture. By making this badly-thought-out choice, the Vatican simply encourages the Palestinians in their conviction that their tactics of violence, rejection of peace offers and glorification of terrorists and suicide bombers across their towns and villages is, regardless of all morality and prudent policy, the right course of action.

If morality is at stake, it will also enthuse them to continue with the lies about Jews, hate videos, hate preaching, false historicism, and school textbooks and TV shows that teach children to despise Jews as “sons of apes and pigs.” Is that what the Vatican really wants? Is that a goal remotely in keeping with the wishes of Pope Francis?

“Christian children are massacred, and everything is done in plain sight. Islamists proclaim on a daily basis that they will not stop until Christianity is wiped off the face of the earth. So are the world Christian bodies denouncing the Islamic forces for the ethnic cleansing, genocide and historic demographic-religious revolution their brethren is [sic] suffering? No. Christians these days are busy targeting the Israeli Jews. The Pope, who should represent the voice of one billion Catholics around the world, was not busy these days in writing an encyclical against the Islamic persecution of Christians. No, the Catholic Church was very busy in signing a historic agreement with the “State of Palestine,” a non-existent entity which, if it (God forbid) should be created, would be the first state after the Nazi Germany to officially ban the Jews and expel the remnant of its Christians.” – Giulio Meotti, journalist.

One might safely assume that Jesus would never have approved of Palestinian anti-Semitism, the preaching of bilious hatred, or the infliction of violence on innocent followers of the community to which he himself and his mother belonged.

English crusaders turned to Jewish moneylenders to raise funds. In 1149, one decided to kill his creditor.

Of all the calumnies leveled at the Jews down the centuries, none has been as lethal as the blood libel. This infamia, which “branded the Jews as bloodthirsty ‘others’ who deserved to be killed,” as the late, revered historian Robert Wistrich explained it, has appeared in a dizzying range of locations. From the 12th-century kingdoms of England and France, the blood libel, which accused entire Jewish communities of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes, spread to other territories and cultures, among them Poland and Lithuania in the 17th century, Damascus in the 19th century, and Kiev as recently as 1913.

“The Murder of William of Norwich,” by the Princeton academic E.M. Rose, is a landmark of historical research into the grotesque 800-year history of blood-libel accusations. The book traces in forensic detail—Ms. Rose calls it microhistory—the circumstances around the emergence of the first recorded blood libel in history and in so doing demonstrates how the libel was used as a tool in wider Christian struggles over power, money and territory, in which the Jews became all too convenient pawns.

The story of an apprentice boy named William, who would eventually be canonized as St. William of Norwich, begins in eastern England in 1144, less than a century after the Norman Conquest. As Ms. Rose demonstrates in her mesmerizing study, it was a dark time for England. Violent civil war raged between King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror, and his cousin Matilda, who challenged him to the throne. The situation was considered so dire that, in the words of one chronicler of the time, it was as if “Christ and his saints were asleep.”

For years we’ve warned readers about the burgeoning calamity known as student loans, and the latest news is that the debt bomb is hurting the economy as well as the federal fisc. New evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia illustrates how subsidized student loans sap small business creation.

Student loans have ballooned tenfold since 1999 to more than $1 trillion, the authors note in a July report. Other consumer debt—mortgages, car loans, credit cards—dipped during the 2008 financial crisis, but student debt doubled from $547 billion in 2007, nearly all of it on Education Department books. The Philly Fed is the first to examine how mortgaging an education influences entrepreneurship.

MINNEAPOLIS – On the third floor of a downtown Hilton hotel, Democratic officials are spending the next few days debating arcane rules and passing resolutions.

In a hotel suite 20 floors up, a clique of ardent Joe Biden supporters have set up a command center with a different mission in mind: Finding recruits for a possible Biden presidential bid.

The Draft Biden super PAC has descended on the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, hoping to sign up the fundraisers and grassroots activists the vice president will need if he chooses to mount a presidential campaign.

“Mr. Walker also slammed his GOP presidential rivals who have been less strident than he in opposing Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Mr. Walker has said, if elected, he would terminate the Iran deal on his first day in office. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich have each said doing so would be implausible. Unlike others, I don’t need months or years to mull this over,” Mr. Walker said. “I don’t need to appoint a cabinet or consult a committee. Anybody who doesn’t know today the Iran deal is a bad deal is not ready to be commander-in-chief. I am ready to be the commander-in-chief on day one.”

Islamic terrorists are “most likely” smuggling themselves across the Mexican border, Scott Walker said Friday.

The Wisconsin governor’s campaign billed his speech at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., as a major foreign-policy address, but Mr. Walker’s remarks represented little new in the way of policy proposals. Instead he blasted President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and his GOP presidential rivals while also arguing for his strident immigration policy.

“We need to admit that our southern border is riddled with holes,” Mr. Walker said. “You see, Islamic extremists and other terrorists are most likely using the same trails into our homeland as the drug cartels, the weapons smugglers and the human traffickers.”

President Obama argued for the Iran nuclear deal in a webcast to the Jewish community today, saying that Iran won’t be spending their sanctions-relief windfall on anything nefarious that they haven’t already been doing. The event was hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and The Jewish Federations of North America, which earlier in the month heard from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Iran is a regional power; it’s not a superpower. The money that they’re obtaining is money that has been frozen under sanctions. They will get about $56 billion back, but they’re going to have to spend that to prop up an economy that’s been crushed by our sanctions,” Obama said. “Their economy will improve modestly, but there’s no analysis that’s been done by our experts that suggest that they are going to have a qualitatively different capacity to engage in some of the nefarious activities that they’ve done before.”

Obama took questions, and the first one posed to him was about opponents of the deal being called warmongers. “At no point have I ever suggested, for example, that somebody is a warmonger, meaning they want war,” he claimed.

One of the parlor games being played in Washington these days revolves around the question, “How much legal trouble is Hillary really in?” Clinton partisans point to the investigations as not concentrating exclusively on Hillary. That may be, but now it is emerging that the FBI is not going to soft-pedal the investigation, as many expected, and is going full bore after whoever is responsible for allowing classified information to flow through a private server.

Fox News:

An FBI “A-team” is leading the “extremely serious” investigation into Hillary Clinton’s server and the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” an intelligence source told Fox News.

The U.S. Congress is presently reviewing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)*, a deal concluded on July 14, 2015 by Iran and the major world powers. It is likely that Congress will reject the Deal in September; but it may not be able to override the inevitable presidential veto later. Here we speculate also on what is likely to happen to oil prices, on reactions of Iran, Arab oil producers, and on Israeli pre-emption against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The September Congressional Vote

Congress has sixty days to consider the Deal, based on what the White House reveals to them about the details. The outcome of the vote is not certain; it depends on the vote of a few Democratic Senators who are divided on the issue and may wish to examine also any secret side agreements. However, it’s likely that a coalition will form between senators who are skeptical about the Deal and senators who have other reasons to vote against the Administration. Specifically, many senators from states between the Rockies and the Appalachians are likely to vote against the so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) – really part of the White House’ “War on Coal” — which is being forced upon the nation by the EPA. There is also likely to be a protest vote from Senators who oppose the United Nations and some of its policies; there is much resentment that Obama submitted the Deal first to the UN Security Council (UNSC) for its approval in an obvious ploy to circumvent Congress; UNSC Resolution 2231 now enshrines the JCPOA nuclear agreement.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Treatment slows onset of Alzheimer’s. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Avraham Pharmaceuticals announced successful interim results in a Phase 2b clinical trial of ladostigil, for the treatment of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Fewer MCI patients using ladostigil for 2 years progressed to Alzheimer’s than those using the placebo.
http://www.avphar.com/avraham-pharmaceuticals-announces-successful-second-interim-results-in-phase-2b-study-of-ladostigil-for-the-treatment-of-mild-cognitive-impairment/

Detecting lung cancer mutations in the genes. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rosetta Genomics has just had approval from the New Jersey Department of Health, for its OncoGxSelect diagnostic test for lung cancer. The test detects genetic mutations responsible for the tumors and help clinicians make relevant treatment decisions.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rosetta-genomics-expands-high-value-120000987.html

A device to treat Peripheral Artery Disease. (TY Atid-EDI) Eximo has developed a patented hybrid catheter, which is connected to a pulsed laser system, for the treatment of blocked arteries associated with Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD). PAD affects 8-12 million Americans. Eximo has just received $1.6 million of funding.
http://www.eximomedical.com/technology

Restoring eyesight in Kyrgyzstan. A group of Israeli doctors restored the eyesight of 90 adults and children in Kyrgyzstan thanks to Israeli-Jewish Eye from Zion volunteer organization. The doctors performed cornea surgery, plastic surgery and removed tumors and cataracts. Many patients had been blind for years.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=27859

How to check if your baby is healthy. Israel Technion Professor Eli Ben-Sasson and his wife Ayelet have developed an online community (CROINC (CROwd-based INteractive Clustering)) where parents can share information about their child’s development – and compare it to actual scientific and medical facts.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/is-your-baby-healthy-israeli-profs-site-has-answers-based-on-fact-not-rumor/
https://baby.croinc.org/landing.html#/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=14&v=WO7vBpf16nA

HIV is six times less in Israel. (TY Nevet) Due to circumcision, the annual incidence of HIV infection in Israeli men is on average six times lower than that of the Netherlands and France and for women it is ten times lower. The Health Ministry study was published in the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Israeli-study-shows-circumcision-reduces-risk-of-HIV-infection-412743 http://www.ijhpr.org/content/4/1/40