RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was obvious that we’d lost the Vietnam War long before the last helicopter lifted off from a rooftop in Saigon. Though the rights and wrongs of the war had been at the top of the news for years, it wasn’t until our military faced up to the questions of why we lost that the most important debate began.

What went wrong, how did we lose and were we wrong to go to war in Vietnam were the questions to which politicians and the public were eager to debate only to assign blame. The recriminations lasted for more than a decade. And, as some would argue, their effects are still affect the minds of our military leaders.

It wasn’t until the military realized that it had the duty to answer the ugliest questions that those questions were faced, and then embraced, by the generals, admirals and those who succeeded them. On those debates were built the military we have today.

Washington’s energy debate has been focused on President Obama ’s endless opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, but maybe that was only a warm-up. His new fossil fuel shutdown target is Alaska.

President Obama announced Sunday that he’ll use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, walling it off from resource development. This abrogates a 1980 deal in which Congress specifically set aside some of this acreage for future oil and gas exploration. It’s also a slap at the new Republican Congress, where Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been corralling bipartisan support for more Arctic drilling.

The ANWR blockade also seems to be part of a larger strategy to starve the existing Trans-Alaska pipeline, the 800-mile system that carries oil south from state lands in Prudhoe Bay. ANWR occupies the land east of that pipeline. The Interior Department this week will release a five-year offshore drilling plan that puts vast parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas—the area to the north of the pipeline—out of bounds for drilling. This follows an Administration move in 2010 to close down nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA)—the area west of the pipeline.

The jihadist group in Nigeria killed 11,245 people last year. Now their rampage seems ready to escalate in 2015.

The new year began with terror attacks in Paris inspired or orchestrated by al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula and ISIS and then reports of up to 2,000 residents killed by Boko Haram in a days-long massacre in Baga, Nigeria. While Paris has grabbed the majority of media attention, the events in Baga may prove to be the most significant as Boko Haram expands in northeastern Nigeria. This weekend the group captured the town of Monguno and its military barracks while simultaneously attacking the state capital, Maiduguri.

A key goal of all terrorists is to provoke outsize reactions by committing heinous deeds. This is particularly true of jihadists, whose main feature is the takfir they impose on the majority of other Muslims—declaring them not to be “true” believers and thus outside of their group and liable for death. High-profile attacks aim to polarize societies and create animus against mainstream Muslims, creating more potential recruits for the radical Islamists.

Why capitalism is the only real cure for corruption.

Whenever I think of Greece and its economy, I can’t help but recall the stool-sample story.

Sorry to begin on a scatological note, but here’s a revealing tale about a country that, by electing the radical left-wing Syriza party over the weekend, just voted itself down the toilet. In 2011, Greek entrepreneur Fotis Antonopoulos and his partners decided to start OliveShop.com, an online store specializing in organic olive-oil products.

Before they could start their business, they first needed the right paperwork. As recounted in the Greek newspaper e-Kathimerini, authorizations were required from the government tax office, the local municipality, the fire department. Also the bank, which insisted that the entire website be in Greek—and only in Greek—despite Mr. Antonopoulos’s attempts to explain that he intended to market his products to foreign customers.

“In Ireland you can hear people say almost every day: ‘Oh, those poor Palestinians! It is wrong what Israel is doing to them! It is terrible what Israel is doing to them!’ I ask them: ‘Have you ever been to Israel?’ The answer is always ‘no.’

“So my next question is: ‘Then how can you make an informed judgement? Based on media reporting? Don’t you know that the media in Ireland is always anti-Semitic? The media reports are lies.’ I tell them to visit Israel and see the truth for themselves.

“Every day I put on my lovely Star of David necklace and wear it so that people can see it. People stop me and exclaim: ‘What a nice necklace you have on! Where did I get it?’ This gives me a chance to promote Israel as a great place to visit.

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

Jerusalem displays Jewish-developed cholera vaccine. Dr Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian-Jewish microbiologist, developed the cholera vaccine in 1892. Jerusalem’s Tower of David Museum is now exhibiting one of the original ampoules of vaccine. Dr Haffkine also developed a vaccine for plague and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1897. Sir Waldemar donated his extensive personal archive to the National Library of Israel.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/original-cholera-vaccine-turns-up-in-jerusalem/

ALS treatment trial shows success. Israel’s Brainstorm has announced positive final results from its phase 2a clinical trial of NurOwn cells in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients used on 14 subjects at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. Nearly all subjects experienced clinical benefit.
http://www.brainstorm-cell.com/index.php/news-events/331-january-5-2015

Good results for Fabry Disease treatment. Israel’s Protalix Biotherepeutics reported good results in its trials of its PRX-102 treatment for the genetic disease Fabry’s. Even a low dosage had an average 78.8% decrease in the effect of pain on the patients’ functioning.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-protalix-jumps-on-positive-fabry-disease-trial-results-1000999518

Teva launches a generic painkiller. (Thanks to Atid-EDI) Israel’s Teva has launched the first FDA-approved generic equivalent to Celebrex (Celecoxib) Capsules in the US. Celebrex is used to treat arthritis, pain, menstrual cramps, and colonic polyps.
http://www.tevapharm.com/Media/News/Pages/2014/1996478.aspx

The fruitful way to conceive. Israel’s Fruitful Way Ltd. has pioneered a new, natural fertility and conception toolkit for couples who are trying to get pregnant. It includes a unique, science-backed dietary supplement, scientifically mated with a sophisticated fertility app.
http://www.fruitful4u.com/706 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5nfoZq4oIs

Israeli science saves 5-year-old girl. A 35-year-old study by Israel’s Professor Raphael Mechoulam convinced Denver-based physician Dr. Alan Shackelford to use synthesized cannabidiol or CBD to save 5-year-old Charlotte Figi who suffered 300 epileptic fits a week. Dr Shackelford immigrated to Israel in 2012.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2015/01/dr-cannabis-alan-shackelford-puts-medicine-into-cannabis-in-israel/

Barack Obama is really, really smart. I know, because he told me so during his State of the Union address. Our president is especially smart on foreign policy. I know because Mr. Obama told me that, too. “I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership,” the president said. “We lead best when … we don’t let our fears blind us to the opportunities that this new century presents. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now. And around the globe, it is making a difference.”

Of course it is.

Take how smart the president has been in combating ISIS (aka ISIL and the Islamic State). On Tuesday night Mr. Obama informed us that he was asking Congress to pass a resolution to authorize the use of force against the Islamic State. This comes precisely a year after our really, really smart commander in chief referred to ISIS as a “jayvee team.” That prediction was so prescient that the president decided to deceive us about it.

The “cancer of Christian persecution is metastasizing” in an “epidemic” that is “spreading at an unprecedented rate in modern times,” stated Open Doors USA president David Curry at a January 7 briefing in Washington, DC’s National Press Club. Curry’s presentation before an audience of about 30 of Open Doors’ 2015 World Watch List (WWL) depressingly reviewed ongoing Christian martyrdom, often at the hands of Marxists and Muslims.

The WWL, an Open Doors press release noted, is a unique annual survey of the persecuted church worldwide, praised by Curry as the most dependable study of its kind. Open Doors research is “meticulous,” concurred at the briefing religious freedom scholar Nina Shea from the Hudson Institute. The WWL “ranks the top 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to be a Christian,” the press release explained. An accompanying map displayed at the briefing and available online with the report showed these countries coded by color according to persecution severity.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) has been involved in a scandalous, unethical, and illegal human exposure experimental research program for two decades.

The Agency has sponsored, encouraged and funded research that exposes children and adults to air pollution, which it has told the congress and announced to the public is toxic, lethal, even cancer causing.

During the 2000s, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-funded researchers at Southern California Medical Schools sprayed high doses of diesel exhaust particles up the noses of 10-15 year old children in a ‘scientific’ experiment to see what would happen. Federal and California State laws prohibit such immoral and unethical experiments with children or even adults. Does the EPA disregard and disrespect law and ethics in a mindless crusade to regulate air?

Although specifically required to do so by federal regulations and the Nuremberg Code-based California state law — if not basic morality — the University of Southern California (USC) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers failed to disclose to the children and parents of those children that the EPA, at the time had concluded that diesel exhaust emissions contained particles that are toxic, dangerous, deadly and cause cancer.

I know it’s early and the roster of potential Republican nominees for the 2016 presidential race is hardly set. But I’m already fed up with pundits and party operatives telling me what I think of the candidates, as if they had performed a Vulcan mind meld with the conservative grassroots and GOP base (which I will use interchangeably to include local GOP boots on the ground, social conservatives, and Tea Partiers).

The punditocracy might occasionally glance at a few e-mails their assistants have sorted through, but mostly, they converse among themselves and read one another’s articles, and, rather than listening intently to the input from this varied and complex group of conservatives, they often project their perceptions onto the base. They might chat briefly with some folks at book signings or speeches, and their prognostications might occasionally square with the base, but not this time.

To dig into the current thinking of the base regarding the Republican nominee, I sent an e-mail to members of the Bay Area Patriots/San Francisco Tea Party (both of which I have coordinated since 2009). The group is quite diverse, with dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, disgruntled Democrats, Ron Paul Libertarians, and independents.

This was not a survey with simple yes-or-no questions. Prompted by Laura Ingraham’s assertion that negative commentary about Mitt only serves to help Jeb, I asked what they thought about both men getting into the race; if they would vote for them against Hillary even if they did not support them in the primaries; who their preferred candidates were; and if there was anyone they would refuse to support. I was quite startled by several consistent revelations.

Approximately 350-400 opened the e-mail, and about 90 responded – a 23-26% sample. Respondents overwhelmingly (and vehemently) oppose Jeb Bush – only three consider him their preferred candidate. While 30 respondents would “hold their nose” and vote for him if he were the nominee against Hillary, roughly 36 said “no way” to Bush, and too many indicated they would stay home or vote for a third-party candidate. If all stayed home on Election Day – 40% – that would be an electoral apocalypse when translated onto the national stage. I doubt that that would occur, but even if 5% of 50 million voters rebelled, that would be a damaging 2.5 million lost votes. Jeb’s condescending and dismissive attitude toward the grassroots, concerns about a Bush dynasty, and Jeb’s views on Common Core and immigration factored heavily into the anti-Bush sentiment.