NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

INFLATION HAS NOW DEVOURED ALL BIDEN’S COVID RESCUE CHECKS

Posted By on July 18th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/18/inflation-has-now-eaten-up-all-of-bidens-covid-rescue-checks/

When he signed the “American Rescue Plan” into law in March 2021, President Joe Biden bragged about how it would put “$1,400 checks into the pockets of millions of Americans; help to keep folks in their homes; help to put food on the table.” A family of four was in line to get $5,600, he said.

What he didn’t tell the public was that the rampant inflation his “rescue” plan would unleash would cost Americans more than the $1,400 Biden was handing out. Much more.

Biden’s $2 trillion “rescue” came after the Trump administration had already rushed through two massive COVID relief bills and at a time when the economy was already roaring back from the COVID lockdowns. Which is why many economists, including liberal economists like Larry Summers, warned that Biden’s “rescue” would spark runaway inflation. 

And, despite repeated promises from the White House that such a thing would never happen, the Consumer Price Index shot up 8.3% in the first half of this year. (Going back to 1986, the average inflation rate for the first half of the year is 2.6%.) June’s reading had year-over-year inflation at 9.1%.

Under Biden, prices have been climbing much faster than wages, which means that Americans started losing ground almost the moment Biden signed his “rescue” plan into law. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Israel here and Israel there Israel shines everywhere. Michael Ordman’s weekly compilation details the nation’s dazzling contributions to the world  from  building national and international vertical farms, hospitals, sports and entertainment complexes, contributing research and development of technology and medicines for curing cancer, immunologic diseases, and adult-onset chronic illnesses.

Even hostile journalists who bash Israel in their daily screeds love being posted there. There are cultural and religious events, myriad cuisines and restaurants, cafes, monuments and beaches and parks for leisure and entertainment. Furthermore, the national sport is debate on every subject without fear of intimidation or harassment in a freewheeling and diverse democratic society.  

And here is an interesting nugget from President Biden’s recent visit:

One of the security staff accompanying US President Biden on his Israel trip is Anne Neuberger. She is an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn New York. Granddaughter of Shoah survivors, she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and Yiddish (and English!). Her parents were rescued by Israelis at Entebbe in 1976 – the year she was born!

Read it all….. rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Chronic disease breakthrough. Researchers from Haifa’s Bnai Zion Medical Center and Israel’s Technion Institute have developed semaphorin 3A – a molecule that maintains the balance of the immune system. It can help treat autoimmune or inflammatory diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, MS, and IBD.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-711301  
https://www.gov.il/he/departments/b-zion-health-center/govil-landing-page
 
Bionic bacteria. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute have engineered nano-sized hybrid biological components at room temperature. These fast-growing proteins, enzymes, and other biological compounds can be used to develop new, safer medicines and improved fuels that do not exist in nature.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2022/05/bionic-bacteria-novel-platform/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.202202457
 
How do the astronauts feel? Another experiment conducted by astronauts on the Axiom One Rakia mission to the International Space Station was the helmet of Israel’s Brain.Space (see here previously). Here is a detailed description of the experiment and the implications for future space travel.
https://nocamels.com/2022/07/brain-space-helmet-space/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do2U-4xGs_Q
 
Early warning of patient problems. Israel’s Sheba Medical Center has just completed a clinical study of patients using the wearable vital signs monitor from Israel’s BioBeat (see here previously). It shows that the telehealth device can detect patient deterioration 38 hours before clinical deterioration, in 75% of patients.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/356032
 
An alternative to psychiatric hospitals. An interesting report and separate analysis of the performance of three of Israel’s 13 Soteria Houses for psychiatric patients. Their compassion and supportive environments contrast with alternative psychiatric hospitals that focus on anti-psychotic drugs and more invasive therapies.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychiatry-through-the-looking-glass/202206/alternative-psychiatric-hospitals   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17522439.2022.2057578
 
Superfood is even better than mother’s milk. Israel’s Maolac (see here previously) has progressed from just producing an alternative to mother’s milk for babies. It is now using one ingredient for an anti-inflammatory product to help athletes recover after exercise. And another, to make a probiotic that reduces stress in the gut.
https://nocamels.com/2022/07/superfood-breast-milk-proteins/
 
The future is in HealthTech. “The Future is in HealthTech” was one of a new series of meetings sponsored by Calcalist and Start-Up Nation Central. It highlighted the pandemic-induced rise of telemedicine, Zoom meetings, and virtual reality. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjzeu0gj9
https://newmedia.calcalist.co.il/conferences/2022/preseed/healthtech.html
 
More medical innovation partners. RISE is the innovation arm of Assuta – Israel’s leading private chain of hospitals. RISE already partners with 30 Israeli startups and has just added five more. Ibex Medical, Senseera, Theator, Magentiq Eye and MaveriQx – the only startup not previously reported in this newsletter.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/u25zmzuig   https://www.maveriqx.com/
 
Paralyzed man is now back on his feet. A mystery illness caused 41-year-old Nir’s muscles to deteriorate and eventually Nir collapsed, paralyzed. At Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, Nir was quickly diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome. A transfusion and plasma replacement restored Nir’s life.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/356063

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek:While President Biden and his Democrat colleagues push to spend hundreds of billions of dollars (more) for windmills and electric vehicle charging stations, Americans are going hungry.

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/article/in-tilting-windmills-biden-gets-it-wrong

Remember Mr. Biden shouting — literally — about food lines under President Trump? Here’s his outcry: “My God, this is the United States of America. The idea that people would have to wait in line an hour or an hour-and-a-half to get a box of food in their trunk — it’s just unbelievable.”

Guess what?

ABC News reports those food lines are back, “as working Americans overwhelmed by inflation increasingly seek handouts to feed their families.”

The broadcaster recounts that a main food distribution center in Phoenix delivered food packages to more than 4,000 families in June, a 78 percent increase over the prior year. Reports from other states indicate the surge is nation-wide.

Sadly, about 10 percent of the people seeking assistance are first-timers. Also, many have jobs. Even so, with real wages down 3.8 percent over the past year and food prices up 12 percent, millions of Americans are struggling.

The country-wide food bank network Feeding America reports being caught off guard by the rise in demand; the economy was doing so well, the management says, Feeding America did not expect so many people to need their help. They didn’t expect inflation to hit families so hard.

Neither, apparently, did Mr. Biden, who otherwise might have been a little more judicious in blasting the emergency that occurred under Mr. Trump. And, whose policy priorities in this time of need are all wrong.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

At Least 21 Confirmed Illegalities Prove Election Fraud in 2020 By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/15/at-least-21-confirmed-illegalities-prove-election-fraud-in-2020/

Despite the Democrats, the mainstream media, and Big Tech rushing to declare that any claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election constitute a “big lie,” there are now nearly two dozen confirmed cases of illegalities and irregularities in how the election was carried out in multiple states across the country.

Just The News has compiled a comprehensive list of 21 confirmed instances of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, with many of them coming from the handful of key swing states that ultimately determined the outcome of the race.

Wisconsin in particular has seen numerous developments in recent days, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling that ballot drop boxes are illegal, forbidding their use in future elections, after they were implemented unilaterally by the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) in 2020. Another investigation carried out by a former state Supreme Court justice, on the orders of the state legislature, determined that millions of dollars donated to heavily Democratic areas by billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, ostensibly for the purpose of improving election procedures and voting technology, ultimately violated the state’s anti-bribery laws.

Also in Wisconsin, mass ballot-harvesting – the illegal practice of third parties collecting, delivering, and sometimes even filling out ballots for someone else – was carried out through nursing homes, which also led to suspiciously high turnout rates and many ineligible nursing home residents casting ballots. In addition, many noncitizens were found on state voter rolls, in violation of state and federal law.

Similar practices have been uncovered in Georgia, another key state that decided control of the U.S. Senate with its two concurrent elections. In addition to a criminal investigation that is currently being carried out by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger looking into the possibility of ballot-harvesting, election watchdog group True the Vote has said that it has assembled cell phone location data on as many as 240 ballot-harvesting activists. Another audit carried out by Raffensperger’s office determined that over 2,000 foreigners tried to register in the state, although none succeeded. Raffensperger has also ordered an investigation into the handling of ballot drop boxes in the heavily Democratic DeKalb County, following reports of chain of custody issues there.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Regime Propaganda, Ray Epps, and the New York Times  In order to understand what the Times is up to, one needs to approach its stories as one would approach those emitted by the Soviet Union or other totalitarian regimes. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/16/regime-propaganda-ray-epps-and-the-new-york-times/

Is the New York Times playing four-dimensional chess?

Or is it only tic-tac-toe with a three-year-old?

I ask because I cannot quite fathom the Times’ latest intervention into the January 6 miniseries, its aromatic aria bewailing the fate of Ray Epps.

Who is Ray Epps?

We don’t really know—not yet.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 jamboree, he was on the Stasi’s—er, the FBI’s—list of most wanted “domestic extremists,” “insurrectionists,” etc.

He was also a star of several videos, a right-out-of-central-casting, MAGA-hat-wearing Trump nut telling anyone who would listen on the evening of January 5 that the next day they had to go “into the Capitol, into the Capitol.”

Into the Capitol, not “to” the Capitol. You see the difference.

Back in January 2021, the entire regime propaganda machine was indiscriminately fanning the line that “Trump sparked an insurrection, an attempted coup, an effort to overturn the 2020 election.” Glenn Greenwald, no friend of Trump’s, was an early skeptic about that overblown hysteria. “Condemning that riot,” Greenwald noted, “does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The disgraceful disruption of the Abraham Accords Ruthie Blum

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-disgraceful-disruption-of-the-abraham-accords/

 The debate in Israel about the significance of U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent visit to Israel and affirmation of America’s “bone-deep” relationship with the Jewish state should make way for a far more serious question. Biden wasn’t lying when he told Channel 12’s Yonit Levi in an interview last week that he considers the anti-Israel members of his party to be “wrong.”

The very fact that the pronouncement made such bold headlines goes to show that what he said had been in some kind of doubt. But Biden has never been a radical, despite his eight years under former President Barack Obama, a loyal Alinskyite on a mission to erode America internally and “lead from behind” abroad.

No, Biden is a typical, old-guard liberal with all that entails, such as a tendency to pander more to the left than the right. It is thus that the proud Catholic who once opposed abortion did an about-face and jumped on the bandwagon against the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

What hasn’t changed is his position on the “peace process.” And here is where his same old colors were on full display, which rendered his joint pledge with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons worse than meaningless.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Nikki Haley Calls Biden’s Iran Policy ‘Slap in the Face’ to Israel By Diana Glebova The former U.N. ambassador also warned that the administration’s overtures to Tehran were ‘dangerous for America.’

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nikki-haley-calls-bidens-iran-strategy-slap-in-the-face-to-israel/?utm_source=

As President Biden finishes his diplomatic trip to the Middle East, Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the U.N. under Donald Trump, criticized the administration’s approach to Iran, calling it “dangerous for America.”

“Iran is selling drones to Russia and attacking American troops, and President Biden still wants to make a deal with the Ayatollahs. It’s a slap in the face to Israel and our Arab allies, and dangerous for America,” Haley said in a statement to National Review.

“By refusing to stand up to Iran, he yet again shows weakness when we should be showing strength,” she added.

Iran was a primary subject during Biden’s trip, intended to counter Russia’s growing presence in the Middle East. Biden vowed to stay tough on Iran’s nuclear program during his visit and pledged to use military force “as a last resort,” despite keeping talks open with a country drawing nearer to being able to build nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 on account of Tehran’s work on ballistic missiles and the limited scope of the terms in the agreement, and Biden has worked to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) throughout his presidency.

Recent reports show Iran is coming close to having enough enriched uranium to building a nuclear weapon, is targeting to kill U.S. officials and is holding military negotiations with Russia.

Russian officials visited Iran at least twice in the past month to look at weapons-capable drones, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN along with satellite imagery of the airfields.

“We have information that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with several hundred UAVs, including weapons-capable UAVs,” Sullivan told CNN in a statement.

The president assured Middle Eastern leaders the U.S. is “committed to ensuring Iran never gets a nuclear weapon” on Saturday following the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

January 6 Committee’s Bid to Prove Trump Criminally Liable for Violence Falls Short Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/january-6-committees-bid-to-prove-trump-criminally-liable-for-violence-falls-short/?utm_

If anything, the panel has bolstered Trump’s defense rather than undermining it.

The January 6 committee seemed to hit the point of diminishing returns this week. The Democrat-controlled panel is straining to establish that its target, former president Donald Trump, is not just morally and politically but criminally culpable for the deadly Capitol riot, but it can’t make the case. Its evidence of criminal intent is too weak, and its tactic of conflating Trump’s state of mind with the unhinged words of extremists who reacted to his rhetoric is sleight-of-hand.

Plus, Trump has an intent defense: He was trying to ratchet up political pressure on Congress, not provoke a forcible uprising. And the committee is not only ignoring that defense but bolstering it (however inadvertently).

To be clear, I am speaking here narrowly about crimes involving the intent to use force, a necessary element of such offenses as seditious conspiracy, with which the Justice Department has charged several rioters. Trump’s liability for other potential crimes arising out of the events that culminated in the Capitol riot remains an open question. The committee is correct that Trump orchestrated a raucous rally on the National Mall on January 6, 2021. But the evidence that he intended the rally to turn lethally violent, as the committee implies, is slim.

To draw the committee’s conclusion, one must pretend, as the panel mulishly does, that Trump never said, during his speech at the rally that preceded the riot, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” (Memo to the Committee: In real criminal proceedings, which, unlike scripted political presentations, have cross-examination and the right to present a defense, your case gets laughed out of court when you get caught burying the exculpatory evidence. Competent prosecutors confront the exculpatory evidence head-on. Rather than signaling fear of it, they try to persuade the fact-finder that it’s trumped by other, more compelling evidence. Being persuasive involves playing it straight to maintain your credibility.)

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Resegregating American Education By Kenin M. Spivak

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/resegregating-american-education/

The Biden administration and progressives are encouraging schools to separate students along racial lines — an unforgivable step backwards.

It took 86 years from the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. With support from the Biden administration and the complicity of the Department of Justice, it has taken less than 70 years for radical leftists to reimpose separate educational facilities under the guise of promoting equity.

More than a year after its Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch this month received records from District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) that show D.C. officials are providing segregated “affinity spaces” for its teachers and other staff on the basis of race and sexual identity. A September 2021 DCPS presentation explains, “Affinity spaces are gathering opportunities for people who share a common identity. This space will be organized based on the racial identities represented in Central Office as we aim to lean into the Courageous Conversation condition of isolating race.”

A form included in the presentation asks respondents to submit their pronouns and to select the racial affinity group(s) they intend to join. The choices are: Asian American/Pacific Islander, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous/Native American, Multi-Racial, and White. The form also asks if respondents are interested in new LGBTQIA+ affinity spaces. Those spaces are divided into BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Color) LGBTQIA+ and White LGBTQIA+.

A June 2021 email setting the agenda for a meeting at Marie Reed Elementary School explains that the “goal of these affinity groups is to create a safe space among colleagues to process the impacts of racism and white supremacy within our school community and identify collective actions to take as individuals and as groups.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Report: Just 14 Percent of Stacey Abrams’s Fundraising Haul Came From Georgia Residents Donors in California, New York, and Washington, D.C.Andrew Stiles

Posted By on July 17th, 2022

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/stacey-abrams-fundraising-scandal/

Stacey Abrams has raised almost $50 million for her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. Just $7 million (14 percent) of that fundraising haul came from residents of that state, however, according to an analysis by Washington Free Beacon alum Lachlan Markay.

Nearly half the money raised by Abrams’s campaign and leadership committee ($22.7 million) came from donors in three deep-blue states and one liberal territory that wants to be a state but never will: California ($10.2 million), Washington, D.C. ($6.4 million), New York ($3.6 million), and Delaware ($2.5 million). The result is not entirely surprising given that Abrams recently described Georgia as “the worst state in the country to live.”

Those astonishing figures stand in stark contrast to the fundraising numbers posted by Abrams’s opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp (R., Ga.), who has raised most of his campaign funds from in-state donors. More than 83 percent of the $31.5 million raised by Kemp’s campaign and leadership committee came from Georgia residents, the analysis found.