Displaying posts published in

December 2019

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Egypt: Christian Churches Burn “Accidentally,” or Have “Terrorists Changed Operations”? by Raymond Ibrahim

By on December 8th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15255/egypt-churches-fires

Preliminary reports from Egyptian authorities said that all three fires appeared to be accidents related to electrical or circuit failures, not arson…. General opinion among Christians, however, is that the fires were “not a coincidence.”

“The fire started from the wooden ceiling of the adjacent hall.” Video footage, he added, indicated that something from the market behind the church was hurled onto its roof. — Fr. Samuel, St. George Church in Mansoura, World Watch Monitor, November 11, 2019.

“Terrorists change their operations, from bombings to burning.” — Fr. Ephraim Youssef, a priest at St. George Church in Mansoura, World Watch Monitor, November 11, 2019.

Recently, over the course of two weeks, three Christian churches were torched in Egypt.

First, on Sunday, October 13, “a massive fire swept through a major Coptic church in a Cairo suburb causing heavy damage, but no casualties.” Online images and video of the St. George Church in Helwan — considered “one of the greatest and oldest churches belonging to the Coptic Orthodox Church” — confirm that , to quote Bishop Bishara, it “had been completely destroyed.”

“I immediately rushed to the church and found it on fire with heavy smoke filling the place,” said Fr. Andrew, who personally served at the church for three decades.

“The old wooden building burned down very fast and the fire destroyed everything inside, even before the firefighters arrived…. Our loss is great. We have lost a great historical building and we can’t rebuild anything like it.”

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The Mullahs’ Losing Game by Amir Taheri

By on December 8th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15254/iran-mullahs-losing

After initial hesitations the elite regained its unity by responding in the best way it knows, not to say the only way it knows: a brutal crackdown that claimed hundreds of lives and over 10,000 arrests.

Translated into simple terms, Khamenei is calling on the “prosperous 30 percent” not to take their current well-being for granted and to help the regime crush the mass of the poor who wish to upset the apple cart.

The danger to [the Shah’s] regime came from urban middle classes that in any society do not remain content with economic prosperity and social freedoms for long; they always end up demanding political rights commensurate with their economic and social status.

[I]f he [Khamenei] manages to crush the 70 percent, thus removing their threat, he would face the 30 percent’s increasing demands for social and political freedoms no clerical regime can grant. And, if he fails, the 30 percent in question will look for someone else who can do for them what the Khomeinist regime cannot. In either case, the “Supreme Guide” is playing a losing game.When popular protests erupted in Iran’s top 100 cities, including the capital Tehran, last month, it soon became clear that the ruling elites were at pains to decide what was really going on.

The faction led by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei started by dismissing the uprising as a déjà vu version of the protests that have punctuated Iran’s history since the 1979 revolution. The daily Kayhan, reputed to reflect Khamenei’s views, dismissed the uprising as “sporadic disturbances fomented by a handful of hooligans.” Khamenei himself saw it as “a bump on the road” to the “Great New Islamic Civilization” he says he is building.

The official media dismissed what it claimed was “a blind riot with no leadership.”

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The Tortoise and the Hare of Modernity Reconsidered Roger Kimball

By on December 8th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/07/the-tortoise-and-the-hare-of-modernity-reconsidered/

Hares do not countenance irrational impediments such as “taboos.” Their response to the tortoises who deploy them is a mixture of loathing, hysteria, and contempt. But as a wise man put it, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Not to be overly paradoxical about it, but the names Donald Trump, Adam Schiff, and Jerry Nadler will not appear in this essay. Like you, I am weary of that shrill and unproductive static. Let us, then, take a brief holiday and consider a different sort of problem, a problem that stands behind—admittedly pretty far behind—that static I mentioned and which we might do well to think about. Let us, for lack of a better phrase, call it “Modernity and Its Discontents.”

No educated person in the English-speaking world can hear that phrase and fail to think of the memorable English title that James Strachey gave to Freud’s late masterpiece: Civilization and Its Discontents. Pressed to give a single word summary of what Freud concluded about those Unbehagen, those “discontents,” one could do worse than offer the brief imperative “No.” “Sad is eros, builder of cities,” W. H. Auden wrote, and that sadness, Freud thought, followed inevitably from the basic instinctual denials that made civilization possible. 

“Modernity,” it will be pointed out, is not quite, or perhaps I should say “not hardly,” coterminous with “civilization.” If pressed to give a one-word précis to describe the Unbehagen in die Modernität, I might venture to suggest that it centrally involved the diminishment, the attenuation, the abandonment of that imperative denial that Freud analyzed. 

Unfortunately, the loss or—more to the point—the active repudiation of “no” does not necessarily get you to any positive “yes.” 

That’s the idea, of course: that by kicking over the traces, by saying “no” to all those inherited constraints, habits, structures, customs, prejudices, and dispositions that made us who we are, we thereby emerge into a glorious sunlit upland in which we enjoy the cities but dispense with the sadness. 

The reality has been somewhat different. George Orwell gave dramatic expression to one set of differences when he noted that “For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.”

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Evil ascendant By Eric Utter

By on December 8th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/evil_ascendant.html

There is a large and growing strain of anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party.  It is rife with incredibly bad ideas– economic, social and otherwise. It now makes no bones about appealing to erstwhile fringe elements. It courts and embraces Antifa members, anarchists, America-haters, gender deniers, extreme hedonists, aspiring Marxist-Leninists, and assorted other radicals. Yet, on the other hand, it similarly appeals to those who would elevate Sharia Law over constitutional rights. The only things it doesn’t tolerate are traditional mores and America’s founding values of limited government of, by, and for the people and their attendant natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as granted by the Creator.

Late-term and after-birth abortion, aiding and abetting young children in their tragically misguided attempts to “change sexes,” taxation without proper representation, violation of religious freedoms, suppression of free speech and the right to defend oneself and other core Democratic beliefs explicitly fly in the face of our founding principles and are simply evil.

If politics is indeed downstream from culture, when the culture is polluted, politics will be as well. The Founders would not have put up with the wide-scale poisoning of our culture and the internal annexation of the country they begat us. They would not have tolerated an attempted coup. Deep down, progressives know this. It is largely why they are bashing the Founders now.

Progressives try to skirt these facts by equivocating and asserting that everything is relative. There is no objective truth, they aver, only “my truth” and “your truth.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FBI Arrests SIX More Saudis Near the Scene of Pensacola Naval Base Shooting By Rick Moran

By on December 8th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fbi-arrests-6-saudis-near-the-scene-of-pensacola-naval-base-shooting/

A source familiar with the investigation into the murders by Saudi national Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani of three U.S. Navy personnel at the base in Pensacola says that six additional Saudis have been arrested near the scene. The New York Times reports that three of those arrested had been filming the terrorist incident.

Six other Saudi nationals were detained for questioning near the scene of the shooting, including three who were seen filming the entire incident, according to a person briefed on the initial stages of the investigation. A group that monitors online jihadist activity said that shortly before the shooting, a Twitter account with a name matching the gunman’s posted a “will” calling the United States a “nation of evil” and criticizing its support for Israel.

The gunman was using a locally purchased Glock 45 9-millimeter handgun with an extended magazine and had four to six other magazines in his possession when he was taken down by a sheriff’s deputy, the person familiar with the investigation said.

Authorities are being tight-lipped about the progress of the investigation, perhaps in hopes of rounding up additional suspects.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL WHERE #ALL LIVES MATTER! FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on December 8th, 2019

Israelis and Israeli innovations that save lives are so prominent in this week’s positive Israel newsletter. Medical research breakthroughs and programs; vital medical devices and emergency responders; global initiatives to reduce hunger, poverty and drought; rescue operations, doctors and surgeons treating non-Israelis overseas; technology to prevent plane crashes, maintain emergency services and reduce CO2 levels; and organizations and activities that rescue animals.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Another breakthrough in pancreatic cancer research. Israeli scientists and doctors have induced the self-destruction of pancreatic cancer cells in mice. A small molecule, PJ34, normally used to treat stroke victims, reduced cancer cells by up to 90 percent a month. There were no adverse effects. Normal cells were unaffected.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-possible-breakthrough-molecule-destroys-pancreatic-cancer-cells-in-mice/
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-scientists-find-way-to-treat-deadly-pancreatic-cancer-in-14-days-609647  
 
US approvals for AI image analyses. Israel’s Zebra Medical has received several approvals from the US FDA. They include detecting heart disease, (see here) pneumothorax (lung trauma – see here), intercranial hemorrhages (brain bleeds – see here). It has just received another for detecting fluid on the lungs.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/zebra-medical-gets-fda-nod-for-device-that-detects-water-in-lungs/
 
Green light for finger prick blood test. As predicted previously, (13th May) the OLO finger prick blood test device from Israel’s Sight Diagnostics flowed through the US FDA approval process.  It enables use of the CBC (Complete Blood Test) device in laboratories run by hospitals, diagnostic providers, and outpatient clinics.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/unlike-theranos-startups-blood-test-device-delivers-on-promise-with-fda-nod/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/04/reuters-america-u-s-fda-clears-israeli-startup-sight-diagnostics-finger-prick-blood-test.html
 
Israeli doctor runs Canadian AIDS clinic. (TY Robert) To coincide with World AIDS day, Robert Sarner wrote this article about Israeli-born Dr Neora Pick. As medical director of Canada’s only multidisciplinary clinic for women and children with HIV, she treats some of the 63,000 (and increasing) Canadians with HIV.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-born-doctor-fights-for-her-patients-at-canadas-only-holistic-hiv-clinic/
 
Increasing US-Israeli medical cooperation. (TY Janglo) 21 bipartisan US lawmakers have requested that the US establishes an FDA office in Israel to facilitate collaboration in life-saving research. They wrote that Israel’s world class medical research programs have positively impacted the global health system.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-lawmakers-call-for-a-food-and-drug-administration-office-in-israel/
 
Teva partners Israeli universities for new cancer treatments. (TY Nocamels) Israel’s Teva and Tel Aviv University have signed an R&D agreement in the fields of cancer and brain studies. Teva has also partnered with Israel’s Weizmann Institute to identify the next generation of innovative antibodies for cancer treatment.
https://www.tevapharm.com/news/Teva_and_Tel_Aviv_University_sign_a_collaboration_agreement.aspx
 
Showcasing Israeli digital health tech. Over a thousand participants gathered in Tel Aviv for the second annual Digital.Health.Now conference. It focused on showcasing advanced Israeli innovations in telemedicine, digital healthcare, and general wellness aided by technology.
http://nocamels.com/2019/11/virtual-hospitalnav-app-blind-ar-microscope-israel-digital-health-tech/
 
How blind people use Smartphones. One Israeli startup at the Digital.Health.Now conference was RightHear. (see here). This video shows how the blind use its technology to access the functions on a Smartphone. Also, (TY Jacques) RightHear is supporting the first official blind-friendly street in Israel, and possibly the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkQk8ZbToNo
http://israelbetweenthelines.com/2019/12/05/the-israeli-startup-leading-the-blind/
 
Calm down. Another Israeli product showcased at Israel’s Digital.Health.Now conference was Calmigo. Its advanced technology provides immediate, drug-free relief for moments of distress, anxiousness, and stress by regulating your breathing patterns and stimulating your senses.
https://calmigo.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ktjXiRCGOo
 
Reducing injuries. Zone7, founded by IDF veterans, uses AI to foresee and prevent injuries to sports people. It advertises an 80% reduction in injury days and provides coaches, trainers and sports scientists with intervention strategies. Zone7 is partnering its platform with global medical company Garmin Health.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zone7-raises-2-5-million-seed-round-to-help-professional-sports-franchises-and-ncaa-athletic-departments-predict-injury-risk-300803592.html  http://zone7.ai/
 
A day in the life. Last week 50 members of our synagogue were privileged to be given a tour of Emergency Service United Hatzalah’s headquarters in Jerusalem.  United Hatzalah’s volunteer EMTs arrive at the scene of an incident within three minutes, often saving lives in Israel.  Click the link to read a recent typical example.
https://israelrescue.org/blog/early-cpr-intervention-saves-truck-driver/   https://israelrescue.org/
 

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Why moderates are holding back on impeachment NBC News

By on December 8th, 2019

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/12/07/why-moderates-are-holding-back-on-impeachment/23876261/

BY JONATHAN ALLEN AND LEIGH ANN CALDWELL

Like many of the 31 Democrats from districts President Donald Trump won in 2016, freshman Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., is feeling the squeeze of impeachment.

A former CIA, Pentagon and National Security Council before winning election to the House last year, Slotkin helped launch the House inquiry into President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal by co-writing an opinion column calling for a probe after an intelligence community whistleblower accused the president of abusing his office.

But now, as the House Judiciary Committee drafts articles of impeachment and Democrats from politically competitive districts wait to see how they are written, Slotkin is being lobbied by Republican colleagues who argue that Trump’s actions — even if imperfect — don’t amount to impeachable offenses and that she should accept, given her background, that the president needs room to use leverage in foreign policy.

“I feel very strongly that in my prior life we often went to other countries and foreign governments when I was at the Pentagon and said, ‘We want you to do X in exchange for Y,’ but that exchange was exclusively for the national security interests of the country, not for Elissa Slotkin’s personal or political gain,” said Slotkin, who hasn’t committed one way or the other on impeachment. “And that’s a pretty fundamental difference and that was the conversation I had with one of my peers.”

While the GOP push hasn’t been persuasive, moderate Democrats are worried that liberals in their own party are going to put forward articles of impeachment that are hard to vote for and even harder to explain voting for.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

DECEMBER 8, 1941

By on December 7th, 2019

Here is the complete text of President Roosevelt’s
8 December 1941 address to Congress:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. CONTINUE READING

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MARK STEYN: TOO STUPID TO SURVIVE

By on December 7th, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9896/too-stupid-to-survive-cont

I can no longer remember when I first used the line, but, as I’ve said many times before, sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.

Back when President Trump was Candidate Trump, he famously proposed a soi-disant “Muslim ban” on entry to the United States “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.

Which was a rationale to which I was rather partial – because a failure to “figure out what the hell is going on” is a big part of why we’re where we are a generation after 9/11. Mohammed is now in the Top Ten boys’ names in America, which means it will sooner than you think be, as it is in Europe, among the Top Five boys’ names, and eventually the Number One. [UPDATE: See Michelle Stone’s comment below.]

Well, the “Muslim ban” never happened, after being struck down by judges and filleted into meaninglessness by the lawyers of the permanent bureaucracy. But you would think, given the mountain of corpses piled up on 9/11, that at the very minimum Saudi nationals would no longer be being given pilot training in Florida. After all, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and half of those who flew the planes received their lessons in the Sunshine State.

Yet today Americans pick up their papers to read:

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A Saudi Arabian military pilot training in the United States opened fire Friday morning at Naval Air Station Pensacola, leaving three people dead and several others wounded before Florida sheriff’s deputies shot and killed him.

Or as The New York Times headlined it:

Florida Shooting Updates: Authorities Say It’s Too Early to Know if It’s Terrorism

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Once More into the Fogged Bottom by Mark Steyn

By on December 7th, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9853/once-more-into-the-fogged-bottom

Yesterday I caught a bit of the impeachment theatre en route to a lunchtime speaking engagement. To be honest, if they’d come round and performed it live in my hotel room, I’d still have fled. If universally respected eminent lifelong career foreign-service bigshots Bill Taylor and George Kent are Adam Schiff’s star witnesses, their chief purpose seems to be to get Democrats pining for the charisma of Bill de Blasio and the self-effacement of John Kerry.

In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.

First up was George Kent, the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus”. He warmed up the crowd with some extensive biographical material about the “nearly sixty years” of George Kents (I believe he’s George III or some such) who have “chosen” to endow America with the blessings of their “public service”. It didn’t help that he wore a bow tie. Eventually he stopped talking about himself and started talking about Ukraine:

Our strategic aim for the entirety of my foreign service career is not possible without a Ukraine whole, free, and at peace, including Crimea and Donbas, territories currently occupied by Russia.

Crimea is, of course, familiar to anyone who’s read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die…

Or, in the case of low-level diplomats who’ve never had a single conversation with the President, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or tender their resignations after first ensuring that their pensions won’t be affected. Instead:

Into the valley of the SCIF
Rode the six hundred hearsay witnesses…

As I said, any Tom, Dick or Harry can bandy Crimea, but it takes a career striped-pants Foggy Bottom public servant to toss in “Donbas” with gay abandon. It would have been interesting to see whether Adam Schiff or anyone else in the room could have found Donbas on a map. The odds of pinning the tail on the Donbas blindfolded are better. It’s bordered to the north, east and south-east by Russia, so it’s akin to the Russian foreign ministry regarding northern Mexico as a vital national-security interest of Moscow’s.

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