RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire on Monday signed to play for the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball team for two years.

Stoudemire, 33, announced his retirement from the NBA on July 26, after a 14-year career. He is a six-time NBA all-star, and had career averages of 18.9 points and 7.8 rebounds per game.

“I am looking forward to playing for Hapoel Jerusalem and helping the team compete for titles,” he said, according to the Hapoel Jerusalem website. “My family and I are excited to start a new journey in Israel, a country I have grown to love.”

Hapoel Jerusalem won the Israeli championship last year for the first time in its history and will play in the EuroCup this year. The team moved to the newly completed Jerusalem Pais Arena in 2014.

The owner of the team said he was “thrilled” Stoudemire was coming on board.

“We are thrilled to have a player of Amar’e’s caliber join our team, solidifying our place among the top echelon of Israeli and European basketball,” said Ori Allon, president and majority owner of Hapoel Jerusalem, according to the site. “More importantly, bringing Amar’e to Jerusalem raises the profile of the entire Israeli Basketball League, and we hope that his joining our team will lead to increased interest in our league from basketball fans around the world as well as talented international players.”

When classes reconvene at Harvard this fall, the all-female Seneca Organization, which promotes female empowerment among Harvard’s students, will officially go “gender neutral,” in accordance with new Harvard policy guidelines. But it won’t actually have to admit any men.http://heatst.com/culture-wars/all-clubs-at-harvard-have-to-be-gender-neutral-except-womens-clubs/

How does that work? you might ask.

How does that work? you might ask.

Although male-only “final clubs” gear up for war with the administration, which has told them their members won’t be considered for scholarships or leadership positions if they remain male-only, Harvard’s Dean of Student Affairs reportedlyassured the Seneca group that it could “could continue to operate as it always has.” All it has to do is make semantic changes to its bylaws.

“Like Women in Business or Latinas Unidas, although men may apply, our membership can be made up wholly of women without incurring the sanctions of the administration’s new policy,” the group’s leader told Seneca’s members in an email.

The administration insists that Seneca can violate the new rules because it has 501(c)(3) non-profit status, and isn’t “purely social.” But Harvard’s policy seems to carry no such official exceptions; the only quality that invokes the rule’s drastic punishment is that the club is gender-specific.

An attorney who is consulting with one of Harvard’s single-gender final clubs about the policy called the Seneca exception “a very convenient carve-out.”

The new elastic interpretation also seems to coincide with outcry from Harvard’s all-female groups, who want the gender-inclusive policy enforced, just not against them. A group called the Crimson Women’s Coalition has demonstrated against the policy several times, claiming that women’s-only groups are “safe spaces” for female students, and that welcoming men opens those organizations to the possibility of sexual assault.

“By removing… spaces for women, Harvard is making our campus less safe for women,” one student protester told a crowd of demonstrators in May, just after the gender-inclusive policy had passed.

It seems, now, Harvard is actually figuring out how best to accommodate campus feminists.

The sociology department of the University of Pennsylvania is tackling only the most important issues of our time.

It has a paper in the most recent issue of Social Psychology Quarterly examining the various ways zoos are cesspools of dangerous gender stereotypes that parents (intentionally or inadvertently) reinforce with their kids. You’ll have to pay to read the full article (or have a subscription to Social Psychology Quarterly), but you can get the gist of the paper from its abstract.

The study says that adults seem to want to characterize zoo animals according to “binary” gender terminology, forcing the camels and penguins and elephants of this world to conform to either “male” or “female,” even though those particular zoo animals haven’t truly examined whether they would like to identify as their birth gender. Although zoology does allow for checking the actual sex of an animal, adults should, apparently, refrain from referring to zoo animals as a “girl” or a “boy,” unless they’ve asked the said animals.

Another problem: Parents tend to use zoo exhibits to model traditional family roles. The study says “adults mobilize zoo exhibits as props for modeling their own normative gender displays.”

Talking about “mother” and “father” animals, then, forces children to believe in traditional, gender constructs, which could harm their psyches as they grow older. Children will question whether their parents will love them even if they don’t fit a typical gender definition—all because that giraffe was characterized as male or female.

All of this makes the search for one’s place on the gender spectrum a difficult journey, apparently. No doubt, the UPenn sociology department would recommend that signs in zoos be changed to reflect a more fluid approach to wild animal sexuality.

How ironic that Science – a supposed neutral methodology — has taken on the status of an authoritative graven image, with all the dogmatic accoutrements that accompany a religious system. Nothing illustrates this more than its stance on Naturalistic Macro-Evolution and on Climate Change.

As for the former, the Neo-Darwinian model never had the intrinsic explanatory power to be so much as a working hypothesis, even before its detractors began making mincemeat of its assumptions by holding its manifold contradictions and threadbare evidence to the antiseptic light of day. Yet, it permeates modernity’s worldview and is as resistant to the call for reconsideration or reformation as any 16th-century cleric. If the edifice is now crumbling, it is due to the fact that all idols contrary to truth, like Dagon in the Philistine temple, come to fall on their faces.

As for the latter, it is no longer an article of contention that those who drive the global warming agenda have made common cause with political forces, and those entities are hell-bent on maximizing their own climate of fear as they aggregate power for their own ends. Having perfected the technique of using a thin veneer of altruism as a fig leaf to cover their nakedness, the Left have become what they once claimed to despise: a monolithic authority impervious to reason. And it is for this reason alone that they have wrangled science into a state of harlotry, using influence, money, and promotion as the methodology by which their new quasi-science will approach the remaking of the world. Those who have whored out a tool of inquiry, in the service of justifying their agenda, revealed their true hand when threats of prosecution, as well as the demolition of professional reputations of the heretical, were laid on the table. Apparently, little has changed from when Galileo was forced to mutter under his breath, “Yet, it moves.”

Bill Nye — “the Science Guy” — thinks that the recent deadly flooding in Louisiana is a result of climate change.

That’s not surprising. Bill Nye thinks everything is the result of climate change. Flooding in Missouri is climate change. Tornadoes in Kentucky is climate change. Fire in Alaska is climate change. A morning thunderstorm in Houston is climate change. One time, there was a blizzard in New York in January. That was climate change, too. The event doesn’t even have to be weather-related. The Islamic State’s massacre of 130 people in Paris last year? You guessed it.

When it comes to Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” it’s almost like “science” has nothing to do with it.

That would not be particularly surprising, either. After all, William Sanford Nye’s scientific bona fides consists of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and a stint at Boeing. But you can be anything you want on television, and in the late 1980s, hard at work pursuing a career in comedy, Nye landed a recurring bit as Bill Nye “the Science Guy” on Almost Live!, a Seattle-area sketch-comedy television show, and a role as Christopher Lloyd’s laboratory sidekick on Back to the Future: The Animated Series. Nye then leveraged that success into his namesake PBS Kids show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which from 1993 to 1998 filmed 100 half-hour episodes, each focused on a particular topic (dinosaurs, buoyancy, germs, &c.) and accompanied by a parody soundtrack (e.g., Episode 75, on invertebrates: “Crawl Away,” by “S. Khar Go” — a parody of “Runaway” by Janet Jackson). Somehow, because of this, Nye is now the go-to authority on exoplanets and dark matter and whether we are living in a computer simulation — and, of course, environmental policy.

Oddly, being America’s foremost “edutainer” is a sweet gig. When Nye is not pronouncing on all matters scientific, he pals around with pop stars and “bonds over Jay Z” with SNL actors. He does q-&-a’s with the New York Times and Esquire. He sits with Arianna Huffington at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and take selfies with rapper DJ Khaled — who, it turns out, is “concerned about climate change.” (What a coincidence!) Nerddom would seem to have come a long way from passing-period swirlies.

Except that Bill Nye is not exactly a nerd. He just plays one on TV. Whatever Bill Nye was — to be fair, it’s no small accomplishment making science hip and interesting for millions of students — he is now primarily the foremost science-side participant in the cycle of personal validation and political-agenda-pushing that has come to characterize the relationship between leftwing politics and science. Stipulate that Bill Nye is a scientist. He then proclaims that climate change is not only real, but an apocalyptic threat. Rachel Maddow and Touré and all the other people who already believed that about climate change for political reasons get a fuzzy feeling, because they have been validated by a Scientist. They tousle Bill Nye’s zany hair. Rinse and repeat. Everybody wins.

Over the past decades Israel has been growing and developing at a phenomenal pace. Thanks to ongoing immigration and a high birthrate, its population has doubled over the past 30 years. Since 1990 its GDP per capita has tripled. And the start-up nation—still very small with a population of 8.5 million—has become a world leader in some of the most important fields.

After a recent visit to Israel as head of a delegation from his state, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush noted, among other things, that Israel’s water-desalination company, IDE Technologies, is considering a “program in Texas to help cities, communities and industrial partners meet their water needs.” Israeli firms are already helping California solve its water crisis.

It should come as no surprise in light of a recent Scientific American article detailing Israel’s pioneering innovations in this field. Just 15 years ago Israel, one of the world’s driest countries to begin with, was suffering from a drought and at the brink of a water catastrophe. Now, thanks to its revolutionary desalination technology, Israel not only fully supplies its own water needs but is at the forefront of solving the world’s water crisis.

During his visit Commissioner Bush met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “discussed [with him] several economic areas where Israel and Texas can work together.” Bush noted that “Texas is home to the Silicon Prairie” while “Israel is the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.” We locals call it Silicon Wadi—the Tel Aviv-area beehive of Israeli high-tech companies that a Forbes article speculated could become “the dominant tech ecosystem in the world.”

At present, as Israeli commentator Yoram Ettinger notes, according to a recent study tiny Israel is “one of the top five world high-tech powers.” Only two countries—the U.S. and China—have more companies trading on the NASDAQ. Israel is one of only eight countries in the world to have launched space satellites, “a global co-leader with the US” in that field—and so on.

Of particular relevance to the Texas delegation’s visit was Israel’s offshore natural-gas exploration, which it is doing in partnership with Houston-based Noble Energy. It was Noble that, at the start of the millennium, first discovered the natural-gas deposits off Israel’s coast. Today the huge Tamar gas field is already online, and the even larger Leviathan field is on the way. Israel will be exporting natural gas to Jordan next year, and it is nearing a deal with Egypt. And although the politics are complex, Israel is also talking about possible gas deals with Turkey and with Greece and Cyprus.

“The worst example of international diplomacy in history, with none other than the world’s leading state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, at a time when the free Western world is being plagued by a scourge of Islamic terrorism.”

The media and much of the Republican establishment have caught on to only part of a story about a shady deal that the Obama administration made with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a deal that took a rather labyrinthine and bizarre form. What they are talking about is bad enough, which involves paying a ransom for hostages, opening up Americans to kidnappings and imprisonment whenever they travel abroad.

The part of the story that they are missing, however, is that what the administration did was highly illegal, according to statutes we still have on our books.

On August 3rd, a story broke that an unmarked cargo plane loaded with $400 million in foreign currency landed in Tehran as part of a United States payment to Iran. Coincidentally this happened the very same day that three American hostages were released.

The next day President Obama took to the airwaves, and emphatically stated, “We do not pay ransom for hostages. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future.” He went on to describe how he has met with various American families whose loved ones are being held hostage around the globe, and that we simply do not pay ransom because that would encourage more hostage taking in the future. “Those families know we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom,” Obama said. “And the notion that we would somehow start now, in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we’re looking in the faces of other hostage families whose loved ones are being held hostage, and saying to them we don’t pay ransom, defies logic,” President Obama added.

However, Washington is abuzz with the news from the Thursday, August 18th Wall Street Journal that an Iranian cargo plane from Iran Air went on a trip to Geneva where pellets were loaded onto it, with foreign currencies including Swiss francs and euros. One of the hostages, Pastor Saeed Abedini, had said that he was kept waiting at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran on January 16th, until the morning of January 17th, and “was told by a senior Iranian intelligence official that their departure was contingent upon the movements of a second airplane,” according to reports.

Another aspect of the story is that Iran Air is the official airplane used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to transfer weapons and manpower to Syria to fight for President Bashar Assad’s brutal dictatorship and to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran Air had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for ferrying weapons and supplies until January 16th of this year, the very same date these foreign currencies were being ferried to Tehran.

Interestingly, January 16th was also “Implementation Day” of the agreement.

Senior Palestinian Authority officials told the Hebrew news portal Walla on Sunday that the Israeli ‎leadership is rooting for a Hamas victory in the upcoming PA municipal elections. The reason cited for ‎Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s ostensible favoring ‎of a majority win for the terrorist organization that runs Gaza over its rival faction, Fatah, is that this ‎would legitimize Jerusalem’s claims that there is no partner for negotiations on the Palestinian side.‎

Everybody, other than delusional leftists, knows by now that the only difference between one jihadi ‎group and another is internal, involving power struggles and arguments over the best way to eliminate ‎the world’s infidels. For decades, Israel has acted on the hope — and prayer — that this is ‎surmountable. Like all Western countries, even the one situated in the Middle East, Israel operated ‎under the assumption that enemies could be moderated, with heaps of goodwill, territorial concessions ‎and help from the international community.‎

However, the cold, hard reality, which has been evident throughout history, is that this premise is ‎false. Europe, whose memory is so short that it has forgotten the lessons of World War II, is unable to ‎articulate this realization. But a glimmer of understanding occasionally rears its head among citizens ‎shaken awake by terrorist attacks, whose increasing frequency is beginning to cause insomnia. ‎

German Chancellor Angela Merkel — one European leader whose popularity is plummeting as a result ‎of a spate of gruesome attacks committed by radical Muslims against innocent people — last week ‎made a desperate attempt to defend herself against charges that her open-door policy to refugees was ‎responsible.

‎”Islamist terror in Germany wasn’t imported with [them],” she said, though more than 2 million ‎unvetted migrants have flooded her country since 2015. The phenomenon of homegrown radicals ‎going to Syria to train with Islamic State terrorists, she explained, “has been concerning us for years.” ‎

How comforting.‎

http://spectator.org/west-bank-story/ Does a Good Samaritan have a chance these days? Over a month ago, a terror attack in the West Bank killed Rabbi Miki Mark, seriously injured his wife (now recuperating in hospital), and lightly injured his teenage son and daughter. The attack, in which Palestinians terrorists fired over 20 bullets into the Marks’ car […]

On the eve of Tisha B’Av, which marks the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the Second Temple by the Romans, most restaurants in Israel close early and no comedies are broadcast on TV. As a result, when invited to a dinner at a trendy eatery in Herzliya on Saturday night, I questioned whether it would be open.

Not only was the answer yes, but the place was packed, to boot.

Seated near a large window watching the orange sun slowly sink into the Mediterranean, I felt a mixture of great fortune and guilt. The meal I was about to enjoy, the price of which could cover my rent, would be as delicious as the company was interesting. But it was the start of a somber Jewish fast day, when we should have been at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, not partying along the beach.

Years ago, an Orthodox friend contended that Tisha B’Av should have become a feast day when the State of Israel was established, because it signified that we had returned to our homeland from exile. When I asked why he did not put this theory into practice, he said his neighbors would take it the wrong way.

Indeed, Judaism is big on “marit ayin,” meaning the way things appear, which is why I’ve never been good at observing it. I am nevertheless a sucker for its spiritual tenets, moral lessons and endless wisdom. So I decided that if we were all feasting while our neighbors were fasting, I could at least make a meaningful toast befitting of the occasion.

“Let us hope that next year on Tisha B’Av, Jews will be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount,” I said, referring to the fact that today only Muslims are permitted to do so, and if any Jew is caught even mouthing words suggesting he is communing with God, Muslims and police descend upon him like the plague.

And boom, before our glasses even had a chance to clink, it was clear I had sparked a political fight. In my defense, it was one of few times I actually hadn’t intended to be provocative. I knew that the people at the table shared my views, and believed I was saying something non-controversial.