RUTHFULLY YOURS

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann has expressed public outrage over the refusal of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue to speak out against the flogging of Raif Badawi, a Saudi human rights activist and blogger who has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam.”

“Saudi Arabia practices a form of Sharia law that is one of the most brutal systems in the world… Does the Austrian Foreign Ministry really want to give such a state the opportunity to build an international propaganda center in Austria?” — Editorial, Die Presse.

“An inter-religious dialogue center that remains silent when it is time to speak out clearly for human rights is not worthy of being called a dialogue center. It is a silence center.” — Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

“If the center wants to remain only an economic center with a religious fig leaf, then Austria should no longer be a part of it. In any event, Austria will not allow itself to be threatened or blackmailed.” — Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

It all looks nice. It isn’t.

On Muslim Brotherhood channels based in Turkey, Egyptian clerics and commentators called for the murder of Egypt’s President Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi and the journalists who support him.

Under the nice wrappings of Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is an entirely different Turkey.

Perhaps he thinks the Holocaust, too, happened because of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

For a few moments, one could think there are two countries in the world that go by the name “Turkey.” Then reality quickly corrects the mistaken belief.

“We hope that every person develops an understanding of the Holocaust, which constitutes one of the darkest moments in human history, and will consider the importance of working together so that such a tragedy, and the conditions that made this inconceivable crime possible, will never re-emerge,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement on January 27. How nice and thoughtful. But there were more Turkish niceties.

Oh puleez! The pentagon is now psychoanalyzing?….Hmmm….they missed knowing that Major Hassan of Fort Hood was a crazed jihadist…Will they decide that Bowe Bergdahl had potty training problems? rsk

He’s hardly the first foreign leader to be put on the couch by our foreign-policy establishment.

‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world,” wrote the great British historian Thomas Carlyle, to open his 1840 Lectures on Heroes, “is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”

It was in that spirit that the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, published “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend,” in the early 1940s:

Unconsciously [Hitler] is not dealing with nations composed of millions of individuals but is trying to solve his personal conflicts and rectify the injustices of his childhood. Unable to enter into a “give-and-take” relationship with other human beings which might afford him an opportunity of resolving his conflicts in a realistic manner, he projects his personal problems on great nations and then tries to solve them on this unrealistic level. His microcosm has been inflated into a macrocosm.

That study, written with the aid of psychologists from Harvard University, the New School for Social Research, and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was the American government’s first attempt to employ the cutting-edge techniques of psychoanalysis to gain a strategic edge in foreign affairs.

The practice persists. It was revealed this past week that the Office of Net Assessment — the Pentagon’s “internal think tank,” established by President Nixon in 1973 — tentatively diagnosed Russian president Vladimir Putin with Asperger syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder, in a study written by its “Body Leads” behavioral analysis project in 2008.

The conclusions drawn by researchers are based on an analysis of patterns of movement. “How a person (and their body) visibly reveals the self in motion,” writes the Naval War College’s Brenda Connors, who prepared the report, “ultimately offers a map to how their brain functions and how they make decisions.” For example:

The Brute-Force Left

There has been a great deal of overblown talk about the alleged “libertarian moment” that the United States is experiencing just about now, and there is a reason that the Right, broadly speaking, has taken an intellectual turn in the libertarian direction. The first and most important is the ascendance of Barack Obama, whose vision of effectively unlimited government gives conservatives the willies. But there are deeper reasons, too: The Right believes, not without some reason, that the main reason we ended up with a disastrous Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate government — the brief years of which imposed damage that will take much longer to undo — had to do with the foreign policy of George W. Bush and the fiscal incontinence of congressional Republicans during the Bush years. While the Obama administration has not yet produced a superior foreign-policy operating model, the Bush approach is not really looking any better in retrospect, at least in the sense that it would be difficult to say with a straight face that Iraq, Afghanistan, or the broader Middle East look today like more tractable problems than they did in 2001, or like they might become more tractable. On the domestic front, abortion has effectively calcified into a modus vivendi (more accurately, a horrifying modus mortis), and the new lion of the social issues, gay marriage, is a wet kitten by comparison, in that no sensible, non-fanatical person thinks of gay marriage as being as urgent an issue as abortion.

All of those are relevant, but consider one further, broader dynamic at work: The Right is finally coming around to the understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the fight between Right and Left is about coercion.

With Mitt Romney out, former Governor Jeb Bush is the new front runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, as he tries for the third restoration of the House of Bush. Although his Florida backers assure us he governed as a conservative, Jeb actually has actually warned us that, like his brother George W. Bush, he would be a Big Government Republican.

Jeb Bush said the President he would most emulate is not his father, Bush 41 or Ronald Reagan but big government himself … Lyndon Baines Johnson! According to the Miami Herald in February of 2013, Jeb Bush told several hundred people at a St Leo University that, were he to become president, he would strive to be like LBJ. Putting aside LBJ’s lies to the American people about what was really happening in Vietnam, and the first government raid on the Social Security trust funds which was the first step towards the massive federal debt of today, LBJ’s expansion of the Welfare State under his ‘Great Society” programs started the entitlements bankrupting us today. Bush praised “LBJ’s strong, practical leadership”. This is Jeb’s role model?

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — During the 1980s and ’90s, the historic alliance between the wealthy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the country’s powerful clerics emerged as the major financier of international jihad, channeling tens of millions of dollars to Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. Among the project’s major patrons was Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who last month became Saudi Arabia’s king.

Some of those fighters later formed Al Qaeda, which declared war on the United States and later mounted major attacks inside Saudi Arabia as well. In the past decade, according to officials of both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Saudi government has become a valuable partner against terrorism, battling Al Qaeda at home and last year joining the American-led coalition against the extremists of the Islamic State.

The Anti-Defamation League has also now been pulled on to the Netanyahu Congressional Speech Drama.

Oooh, another bit of drama in the ‘Obama-Bombing-Bibi Soap Opera’ …

The White House has started bringing out the heavy artillery: The New York-based Anti-Defamation League is the latested to be recruited to pressure Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into canceling his address to the U.S. Congress on March 3.

Yes. It’s another round of messing with Israeli politics, cloaked in the guise of harassing a prime minister over a speech to Congress. But it’s really about trying to rally enough bad blood to make Netanyahu look bad to people who know he’s probably one of the few in Israel who actually knows how to lead, mistakes notwithstanding.

Ah — and lest we forget — it’s also about trying to distract the American public from that other thing: the Iranian nuclear threat that’s being carefully hidden away in a pretty package with a shiny pink bow. It’s about to be sealed in an agreement between Tehran and world powers led by President Barack Obama at the end of March. Obama’s not very happy that Netanyahu is planning to talk about that with Congressional lawmakers.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Building muscle after hip replacement. Israel’s Pluristem Therapeutics has announced that the improvement in muscle force of hip-replacement patients treated with its PLX-PAD cells was 40-times better than those who received a placebo.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-further-posiitive-trial-findings-for-pluristem-1001006064

The tiniest pump for diabetes and Parkinson’s. (Thanks to Israel21c) Israel’s TouchéMedical is developing the world’s smallest, cheapest and smartest patch pump, for patients of all ages with diabetes, Parkinson’s and other chronic conditions.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/worlds-smallest-cheapest-patch-pump-for-diabetics/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=B7wf7EiLT64

Making it easier to remember your meds. Israel’s MediSafe is opening an office in Boston. It will help market MediSafe’s medication reminder app, which up to now has been promoted mainly by world of mouth. Despite this, the app has been downloaded 1.3 million times and is used regularly by hundreds of thousands.
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/startups/2015/01/israeli-startup-medisafe-raises-6m-for-move-to.html?page=all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seE6rCZGm2Q

“MEDinISRAEL – The heartbeat of Medical Innovation.” Representatives from 60 countries will attend Israel’s MEDinISRAEL conference from 23-26 March. They will join 120 Israeli medical device companies and biotechs to discuss and demonstrate Israel’s latest developments in medical innovation.
http://itrade.gov.il/singapore/2015/02/03/health-nation-israeli-medical-innovation-healthier-world/

Two Israeli-Arabs develop app to treat ADHD. Aziz Kaddan and Anas Abu Mukh began degree courses at Haifa University when they were 16 years old. They were just 19 when they thought up Myndlift – an app that teaches ADHD children and adults to concentrate by using their brainwaves to display a bright image.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-myndlift-an-israeli-app-being-developed-to-cure-adhd-1001007206

ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL

Israel’s “Lego man” tells of Ezer Mizion’s kids. Maor Cohen is known in Israel as the Lego man. Three years ago Maor went to Israeli cancer charity Ezer Mizion to donate some Lego to young cancer sufferers. But seeing children with sick parents reminded him of his early life. So Maor stayed, and the Lego sets just grew.
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2015/02/04/israels-lego-man-tells-ezer-mizions-kids/

Female cancer survivor becomes IDF officer. Rotem Chiprut made aliya and joined the IDF as a lone soldier, only to discover she had cancerous cells in her thyroid gland. Following surgery and treatment she completed her officer’s training and has now been promoted to 2nd lieutenant.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/01/idf-lone-soldier-who-survived-cancer-promoted-to-2nd-lieutenant/

Give your heart out. 90% of jewelry manufacturer YVEL’s employees arrived in Israel from 20 countries. YVEL also trains Ethiopian Jews in all jewelry crafts. It is now supporting the latest campaign by Israel’s Save A Child’s Heart (SACH) to raise funds for performing free heart surgery to children from developing countries.
http://www.yvel.com/magazine/yvel-save-childs-heart-giving-hearts-valentines-day/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9BAOpoKRYI

Haiti – five years on. (Thanks to Israel21c) Five years after the devastating earthquake, Israel has not abandoned its work in Haiti. Humanitarian organization IsraAID is running a medical facility, an agriculture program, a youth empowerment center and a gender violence prevention program for Haitian women.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/five-years-post-quake-israel-is-still-helping-haiti-heal/

Clean water for Tanzanian school. Students from Tel Aviv University have built a 48,000-liter rainwater harvesting and advanced filtration system that provides 400 school kids and staff at Nkaiti Secondary School in Minjingu, Tanzania with safe drinking water. It will stop the children growing up with skeletal deformities.
http://nocamels.com/2015/01/tau-engineering-tanzanian-school/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLdjTekHhb4

Solar energy to Rwanda. Israelis have helped install the largest solar field in East Africa. Gigawatt Global, with its Israeli R&D center Energiya Global, has built an 8.5 Megawatt facility in Kigali, Rwanda, at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a kibbutz-style orphanage for victims of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-to-dedicate-largest-solar-field-in-east-africa/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Detecting cancer with the SniffPhone. The NaNose cancer breathalyzer technology developed by Professor Hossam Haick of Israel’s Technion will soon be installed in a mobile phone – to be called, appropriately, the SniffPhone. Using a tiny smell-sensitive sensor, the phone will be able to detect cancer on a users’ breath.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/mobile-sniffphone-will-detect-cancer-on-a-users-breath/

Music Messenger is an instant hit. Israelis invented the first instant messaging system ICQ. Now the Israeli startup Music Messenger allows friends to send music to each other. Recent investors include some major players and celebrities from the music industry, some who have never before worked with an Israeli company.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-music-sharing-app-music-messenger-raising-30m-1001006392

How the Cornell Technion is developing. Whilst the new 2 million-square-foot Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island is being constructed, its 2nd semester is underway in temporary offices provided by Google. Graduates from the two-year program will receive dual degrees from the New York and Israeli schools.
http://www.fromthegrapevine.com/innovation/innovative-tech-incubator-campus-evolving-new-york

Israel is one of world’s most innovative countries. (Thanks to Michelle) Depending on which report you read, Israeli innovation is rated 3rd in the world by the World Economic Forum and 5th by Bloomberg.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/New-Tech/Israel-ranked-5th-in-Bloomberg-innovation-index-389639
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-jasinowski/innovation_b_6603514.html

my sentiments exactly and I would add Ben Carson….rsk
Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie, in case you’re wondering.

I’ve said this before, in various places. But here’s Andrew Ferguson, saying it over at the Weekly Standard:

Boy, that didn’t take long. Over the span of a few short days in late January and early February, three members of the top tier of Republican presidential candidates demonstrated why they’ll never be president. They didn’t do anything to disqualify themselves directly, just revealed the traits that will make them appear unsuitable to most voters by the time the campaign really heats up, say, when the presidential election is a mere 18 months away. As it is, all three of them—Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Chris Christie—can pack it in right now and save months of time and tons of money. They’d be doing themselves a favor, and us too.

Couldn’t agree more. Huckabee, who reminds me of no literary character more than Elmer Gantry, has zero chance of getting elected outside of Arkansas and the Protestant part of Louisiana. Rand Paul is the acorn that landed mere centimeters away from the paternal tree. And Christie… well, let’s just say there’s a lot less there than meets the eye, conservative-wise.

And I had thought that Hillary Clinton was having trouble developing her message. In a single tweet this week she may have revealed the slogan for her 2016 campaign. Jumping on gaffes by Chris Christie and Rand Paul, Clinton wrote: “The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let’s protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest.”

I have read this tweet several times now and cannot help being amazed. Clinton not only omits her own flirtation in 2008 with anti-vaccine politics, she also breaks the unstated rule of limiting oneself to a single hashtag per tweet. And she is, less surprisingly, remarkably condescending and clichéd — blue skies, spherical earths, it’s all about the children. Gag me.

Naturally the press marveled at the ability of a rich and powerful woman to hire someone much younger and trendier, with smaller and nimbler fingers, to compose and edit tweets for her. How savvy Clinton is, how above it all, floating to coronation while the two idiot Republicans adopt a hippie cause as their own. And yet the most depressing aspect of the controversy, for me, was that second hashtag, the one about #GrandmothersKnowBest.