RUTHFULLY YOURS

Greg Abbott’s Spine of Steel- The Texas gubernatorial candidate talks about his disability. By Daniel Allott

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375171/print

Greg Abbott is attorney general of Texas and the Republican nominee for governor. He spoke with Daniel Allott about his life as a politician with a disability.

ALLOTT: Can you talk about how you sustained your injury, and how it affected your choice of profession? Were you planning a career in politics? If so, did you think that you’d have to change those plans in the immediate aftermath of your injury?

ABBOTT: Twenty-nine years ago, I faced a challenge that made it highly improbable that I would be running for governor today. While I was jogging, a huge oak tree suddenly crashed down on me, crushing my spinal cord and leaving me unable to walk.

The immediate aftermath of my accident was, naturally, a very painful and difficult time — both physically and spiritually. I was extremely blessed to have faith, family, and friends — especially the steadfast support of my wife, Cecilia — to help me through this tough time and help me come out of it a stronger person.

A lot of candidates say they have a spine of steel, but I like to point out that I’m the only one out there who actually has a spine of steel!

ALLOTT: You’ve mentioned before that being paralyzed makes you more empathetic toward others, especially people who use wheelchairs. Does it inform your policy positions or political priorities?

ABBOTT: The accident that put me in this wheelchair has helped me to understand the challenges that people in Texas and across this country face every day. After my accident, I realized our lives aren’t defined by how we’re challenged. Instead, we define our lives by how we respond to challenges. I believe that the best way to help all Texans is to fight for policies that ensure greater prosperity and economic freedom. Everyone deserves the opportunity to overcome adversity and achieve success.

Not all GOP incumbents and challengers have cold feet…and there are some in all states who are opposed to blanket amnesty….and the issue remains a priority in the nation. ….rsk

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375167/print

It’s tiresome and, frankly, lazy to blame racism for GOP reluctance to reform immigration anytime soon. The more plausible explanation is that Republicans do not trust Obama to enforce any new legislation. As it is, Obama is not exactly Mr. Enforcement on immigration.

As with Obamacare, Obama selectively executes immigration laws. The result is chaos.

• Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials freed 67,879 illegal-alien criminal convicts, rather than detain or deport them. The Center for Immigration Studies calls this policy “Catch and Release.”

“The release of so many convicted criminals back into U.S. communities, when they could be removed to their home countries, is a large-scale abuse of authority that inevitably leads to public harm,” states a CIS paper. “This phenomenon was quantified in 2012 in a report commissioned by the House Judiciary Committee. This analysis found that 26,000 illegal aliens who were released instead of removed went on to commit another 58,000 crimes soon after release. These additional crimes included 59 murders, 21 attempted murders, more than 4,000 major felonies, and 1,000 other violent crimes.” The last category included carjacking, child molestation, and lynching.

Now that Obama has liberated twice as many illegal-alien convicts as the House analyzed, Americans should brace for brand-new felonies and homicides. As these victims pile up, their blood will drip from Obama’s fingers.

• The U.S. Border Patrol last month issued new orders to its 21,000 officers. They now must retreat even if physically attacked by violent illegal aliens who have breached America’s southern frontier.

“Agents shall not discharge firearms in response to thrown or hurled projectiles,” says the March 7 directive from Border Patrol chief Michael Fisher. “Agents should obtain a tactical advantage in these situations, such as seeking cover or distancing themselves.” As Fisher’s memorandum states:

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375138/print

The word “liberal” has taken a beating over the last few days: A Mozilla executive was hounded out of his position at the firm he co-founded by left-wing campaigners resolved to punish him for having made a donation to a successful California ballot initiative that defined marriage in traditional terms; Adam Weinstein, whose downwardly mobile credibility has taken him from ABC to Gawker, called for literally imprisoning people with the wrong views about global warming, writing, “Those malcontents must be punished and stopped”; Mr. Weinstein himself was simply forwarding a dumbed-down-enough-for-Gawker version of the arguments of philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello; Katherine Timpf, a reporter for Campus Reform, faced a human barricade to keep her from asking questions of those attending a feminist leadership conference, whose organizers informed her that the group was “inclusive” and therefore she was “not welcome here”; Charles Murray, one of the most important social scientists of his generation, was denounced as a “known white supremacist” by Texas Democrats for holding heterodox views about education policy; national Democrats spent the week arguing for the anti-free-speech side of a landmark First Amendment case and the anti-religious-freedom side of a case involving the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Lois Lerner, the Left’s best friend at the IRS, faces contempt charges related to her role in the Democrats’ coopting the IRS as a weapon against their political enemies; Harry Reid, a liberal champion of campaign-finance reform, was caught channeling tens of thousands of dollars to his granddaughter while conspicuously omitting her surname, which is also his surname, from official documents, cloaking the transaction, while one of his California colleagues, a liberal champion of gun control, was indicted on charges of running guns to an organized-crime syndicate.

The convocation of clowns on the left screeched with one semi-literate and inchoate voice when my colleague Jonah Goldberg, borrowing the precise words of one of their own, titled a book Liberal Fascism. Most of them didn’t read it, but the ones who did apparently took what was intended as criticism and read it as a blueprint for political action.

Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.

Eich and others who opposed same-sex marriage, even years ago, are being punished.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375159/print

Let’s face it. Brendan Eich is large, white, and rich, and a computer geek — not the kind of profile that automatically elicited sympathy last week when the CEO of Mozilla was forced to step down for contributing $1,000 in support of Proposition 8, a 2008 measure stipulating that marriage in California could be only between a man and a woman.

But all of us should care about the political orthodoxy that forced out Eich and that is taking hold in our country. “I don’t believe this is a question of suppressing free speech,” Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign, a key gay-rights group, told the Associated Press. The AP quoted Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, as saying, “It seems to me when a society makes a determination that something is wrong, for example racial hatred, then somehow it’s not intolerant to insist upon that understanding.” Good-bye to tolerance for diverse opinions.

Eric Dezenhall, who heads a prominent crisis-communications firm in Washington, D.C., told Forbes magazine: “There is a very specific narrative today on certain issues, and if you step an inch out of bounds, you’re going to get fouled or worse. [Eich] stepped on one of the three great land mines: gay rights, race, and the environment. You don’t have to have made flagrantly terrible statements to get into trouble now.”

Indeed. Consider the case of Angela McCaskill, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a school for the deaf and hard of hearing. In 2012, she was one of 200,000 people to sign a petition in support of a referendum challenging a law that recognizes gay marriage in Maryland, where she lived. The anti-same-sex referendum made the ballot and lost 52 percent to 48 percent that November. But 54 percent of African Americans in Maryland opposed same-sex marriage, according to an exit poll conducted by the Associated Press.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/number-one/?print=1

There is a pastime among liberal pundits — the latest is Nicholas Kristof [1]— to quote a new center left global ranking (with unbiased titles such as “The Social Progress Imperative”) and then to decry that the United States is behind its major industrial competitors in things like “Internet Access” and “Ecosystem sustainability.” The subtext of these rants is that an illiberal, reactionary U.S. does not spend enough on government entitlements to promote parity, equality and social justice among its citizenry. These pessimistic rankings increase the angst about the American condition when viewed from scowling perches in Washington or New York.

Not surprisingly, the winners in these periodic gloomy assessments are usually smaller or intermediate quasi-socialist nations, with mostly homogeneous ethnic and religious populations (e.g., Switzerland, New Zealand, Iceland, Denmark, etc.). And the result is that Americans are scolded to tone down their pride [2] at being exceptional and to begin to emulate such supposedly more livable societies.

Yet I suppose that if you were to assess, say, the mostly 5.6 million homogenously well off Californians, who lived within 10 miles of the coast, from San Diego to Berkeley, they would compare quite nicely with Denmark. Or for that matter, should the Danish system be applied to 300 million in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, I also think that they would sink a bit in terms of social progress.

The criteria by which America is to be judged are often both biased and historically ignorant. Why not rank the United States in comparison with other similarly huge countries that span three time zones, and include in their enormous populations radically different ethnic and religious groups?

The latest U.N. report tones down the alarmism but ramps up the bad economics.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579477222157281450?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest mammoth report last week, and the effort marks an improvement over the IPCC’s last such effort in 2007. That may not be saying much, but on climate change intellectual progress of any sort is worth commending.

The IPCC’s “Fifth Assessment Report,” or AR5, is generating the usual alarmist headlines: “Impacts on All Continents, Worse to Come” was typical. That’s partly a function of what the IPCC frontloads into the 28-page “summary for policymakers,” the only portion of the report that most politicians or journalists ever bother reading, and that is sexed up for mass media consumption.

So it’s worth diving deeper into the report, where a much more cautious picture of the state of climate science comes into view. Gone are some of the false alarmist claims from the last report, such as the forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035 or that hurricanes are becoming more intense. “Current data sets,” the report admits, “indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century.” Recall the false claims of climate cause and storm effect last year after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579481402659166832?mg=reno64-wsj

Testimony by the former acting head of the CIA makes clear that Congress’s current approach isn’t sufficient.

Last week’s encounter between former acting CIA Director Michael Morell and the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence may have brought us a bit closer to the truth of how four Americans came to be killed at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, and how their countrymen came to be lied to about it. But the progress toward truth was probably not made in a way that Mr. Morell intended. The encounter on Capitol Hill also made clear that the forum that will take us all the way to the truth must be something other than a congressional hearing.

Mr. Morell announced at the start of the hearing that he was there to refute claims that he had “inappropriately altered CIA’s classified analysis and its unclassified talking points . . . for the political benefit of President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton.” Critics of the government’s performance on Benghazi have charged that Mr. Morell’s revisions principally although not exclusively involved changing the description of the violence and its perpetrators, and removing the suggestion that they might have had ties to a terrorist organization. These changes, it is argued, enabled Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, to promote the discredited and since abandoned narrative that the violence was a reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube video produced by a probationer in Los Angeles.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

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

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Surviving heart failure. Cardiologist Prof. Ilan Goldenberg from Israel’s Sheba Medical Center led an international study into cardiac insufficiency – also known as heart failure. It reported that an automatic cardiac pacemaker/defibrillator implanted at an early stage of common heart failure could extend life significantly.

http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Sheba-Medical-Center-team-heads-important-heart-failure-research-346957

Calcium absorption trial successful. Israel’s Amorphical has successfully completed a clinical trial of its amorphous calcium. The trial found that the patients’ absorption of amorphous calcium was double the average absorption of crystalline calcium. Amorphical aims to develop a product as a nutritional supplement.

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-amorphical-calcium-absorption-trial-successful-1000925022

Sleep Apnea treatment for US citizens. Israel’s Itamar Medical has signed an exclusive marketing agreement with Medtronic Corporation to market the company’s sleep apnea diagnostic product to a select segment of the US market – patients with atrial fibrillation..

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-itamar-signs-medtronic-distribution-deal-for-sleep-device–1000925010

Innovative endoscope gets USA approval. The US FDA has just approved the MUSE system from Israel’s Medigus. MUSE is a unique medical device that allows doctors to examine the stomach and esophagus with a tiny camera. The same device can then be used to stop acid reflux.

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-medigus-gets-fda-nod-for-upgraded-muse-system-1000926318

How bacteria is controlled in the gut. Scientists from Israel’s Weizmann Institute have revealed the sophisticated mechanism that the digestive system uses to balance good and bad bacteria. A protein cluster called inflammasome monitors the bacterial population and signals the secretion of antibiotic proteins.

http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/goblet-cells-get-their-germs#.Uy8V286oVey

US patent for Israeli stem cell technology. Israeli biotech Brainstorm has received a US patent for its autologous stem cell technology for the treatment of neuro-degenerative diseases. Brainstorm is preparing for its US upcoming multi-center Phase II trial with its proprietary NurOwn stem cell therapy.

http://www.brainstorm-cell.com/index.php/news-a-events/291-march-24-2014

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/29-muslim-terrorists-accidentally-blow-themselves-up/print/

March was a month packed with Muslims accidentally blowing themselves up, but it looks like April will have an even higher unintentional suicide rate.

At least 29 rebels died in a blast Sunday in the central Syrian city of Homs as they primed a car bomb for an attack, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said at least 29 people were killed, most or all of them believed to be rebels, in the besieged Old City of Homs when a car bomb exploded.

State news agency SANA also reported the blast, saying a car had exploded while being loaded with explosives.

The car bomb would probably have killed less people offensively, than it did its own team. Muslims have been having a lot of bad luck with car bombs back in March.

Three Al Qaeda operatives accidentally blew themselves up while outfitting a car with explosives. A member of a Sinai based jihadist movement who led a deadly attack in Israel in 2011 died last week when a car accident he was involved in exploded a bomb that he was carrying.

An intending car bomber in Somalia, thought to be part of the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab jihadist organization, accidentally detonated his explosives prematurely.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/enza-ferreri/taqiyya-and-blasphemy-law-in-the-uk/print/

n British law, race and religion are increasingly becoming deliberately confused for the purpose of accusing critics of Islam of racism.

A soccer fan was recently arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after allegedly ripping up pages of the Qur’an and throwing them at a match. While on bail, he was also banned from attending any football games, visiting St Andrew’s – the stadium of the incident -, and going to any city where his team Middlesbrough was playing.

Insults against Islam are taken very seriously in Britain, and the world of soccer is particularly sensitive to them. After the incident, Middlesbrough Football Club suspended six more people, and vowed to ban anyone convicted of the “crime” from the Riverside Stadium, its home ground, for life.

A Middlesbrough club spokesman said it operates a “zero tolerance policy” towards all forms of discrimination, and supports football’s pledge to “eradicate racism in all its forms”.

Nobody could answer the question of what race Islam is. Muslims belong to all races, including white. But we know that the word “racism” has lost its original sense, and indeed any sense.

Originally the concept of racism had a place and an important role in both ethical and political discourses.

Now it’s best avoided because it’s lost its positive characteristics, its usefulness, and has instead become a tool for intolerance, intimidation, restriction of freedom of speech and other freedoms, in short a means of oppression.

The 19th-century German philosopher Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of modern logic, distinguished between the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning (or reference) and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by the concept.

The sense or connotation is the concept’s descriptive qualities.