RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama and his family are enjoying Father’s Day in Yosemite National Park, a place of stunning natural beauty that refreshes the mind, the heart, and the soul. But of course, Obama being Obama and America needing constant correction of the evils of our ways, the trip became yet another opportunity for Obama to lecture us on why we should never emit CO2 the way he does, because all that CO2 will warm up the planet, according to computer models that haven’t predicted anything correctly.

Oh, and it will also make the planet greener, literally, by providing the CO2 that plants need. But that is not what the president told us:

Obama remarked not just on the beauty of the parks but also the threats they’re under from climate change. He said officials at Yosemite told him climate change has already forced some bird habitats to move further north and long-standing wetlands have begun to dry up. Across the country, Obama said rising seas threaten everywhere from the Everglades to New York’s iconic State of Liberty.

“That’s not the America I want to pass on to the next generation. That’s not the legacy I think any of us want to leave behind. The idea that these places that sear themselves into your memory could be marred or lost to history, that’s to be taken seriously. We can’t treat these things as something that we deal with later,” Obama said. “On this issue, unlike a lot of issues, there’s such a thing as being too late.”

Not only did President Obama bring a 40 car motorcade to Yosemite, causing no small amount of mirth on Twitter:Strange lack of hand-wringing or condemnation of not taking climate change seriously with this huge carbon footprint

His aerial carbon emissions were spectacular:

Back at Castle Airport (formerly Castle AFB) near Merced. The CO2 has been spewing for days and days:

There already has been activity at Castle this week from jumbo jets delivering equipment and Marine One and Two, the presidential helicopters, said Joe Pruzzo, CEO of Castle Air Museum.

Chapter one of this story began when Father Gabriel Naddaf, a Greek Orthodox priest in Nazareth, started to speak up for the idea that it was time for Christians to embrace their homeland, Israel, and their Jewish roots.

“Christian Arabs are hostages.” — Father Gabriel Naddaf.

“We have a joint fate in this land [Israel], because whatever happens to the Jews here will happen to us.” — Father Gabriel Naddaf.

“On what authority does President Abbas claim that Jesus was a Palestinian? The Bible says that He was born in the Jewish city of Bethlehem to Jewish parents from the city of Nazareth and was circumcised on the 8th day as a Jew and presented to the Jewish Temple by His parents according to the Mosaic law.” — Father Gabriel Naddaf.

Father Naddaf has been providing leadership to unite Christians and Jews; a rapidly increasing number of Christians see him as offering them the opportunity to envision and build a tremendous future.

When Father Gabriel Naddaf, a Greek Orthodox priest in Nazareth, Israel, launched his campaign to convince Israeli Christians to enlist in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), he unwittingly ignited a firestorm between opposing forces within and around Israel’s Christian and Muslim communities.

His decision, born of his love and respect for his native land — combined with his acknowledgement of Judaism and Israel as the cradle of Christianity — perhaps has set the stage for a long overdue reunification in Israel between contemporary Christians and Jews.

In the short term, Father Naddaf’s decision has polarized the Christian community, a large part of which has aligned itself with the Arab-Palestinian narrative — a narrative engineered by forces behind Yasser Arafat in the 1960s — and designed to obliterate Israel as a Jewish nation.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

UK NHS funds melanoma treatment using Israeli discovery. The BBC has just reported that the UK’s National Health Service has approved the funding of patients receiving the pioneering melanoma (skin cancer) treatment developed by Israeli Professor Jacob Schachter. The approval was one of the fastest in NHS history. The anti-Israel BBC doesn’t mention the Israeli connection, so please read Sheba hospital’s article for details.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36549674
http://www.friendsofsheba.org/cure-for-terminal-cancer-discovered-with-breakthrough-immunotherapy/

75% reduction in added surgery. (TY Atid-EDI) Surgeons at Mercy Medical Center at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, have reported that MarginProbe from Israel’s Dune Medical has reduced the number of repeat breast-cancer operations by 75%. MarginProbe checks accurately that all cancerous tissue has been removed first time.
https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-452899528.html

Osteoarthritis pain and hypertension treatment by end of year. (TY Atid-EDI) Israeli biotech Kitov has announced that it will be ready at the end of 2016 to launch its KIT-302 treatment for osteoarthritis pain and hypertension simultaneously. Dexcel will mass-produce and market the treatment.
http://kitovpharma.investorroom.com/news-releases?item=25

Digital Health incubator is launched. I reported previously (Oct 2015) that IBM, Medtronic, Pitango and Rambam Medical Center planned a digital medicine incubator at the Life Sciences Park being built in Haifa. Well I can now report that “MindUP” is up and running, and ready to build technologies to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2zYvladEcw
http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/israels-startup-culture-is-launching-digital-health/
http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-health-firms-haifa-hospital-team-up-to-incubate-digital-medicine-start-ups/

An ingredient to win your heart. (TY Atid-EDI) The supplement Cardiomato, from Israel’s Lycored, beat hundreds of high-quality competitor products to win the NutraIngredients Award for Best Finished Product of the Year – Heart Health. Cardiomato reduces oxidized LDL cholesterol and lowers systolic blood pressure.
http://www.lycored.com/the-panel-has-spoken/ http://www.nutraingredients-awards.com/

What will they print next? I reported previously (Jun 5) about Israeli research into bio-ink that could potentially print human organs. Now two Israeli companies, Nano Dimension and Accelta have successfully lab-tested a proof-of-concept 3D bio-printer. It may even be able to print stem cells!
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-cos-develop-3d-bioprinter-for-stem-cells-1001127272

ALS solution wins $32k from public votes. The communication device for ALS and other “Locked in” patients from Israel’s EyeControl, reached the final in the on-line competition “The Venture”. The public voted $32,683 of the $250,000 prize fund to EyeControl – the second highest of the 27 finalists (from 3000 entries).
https://www.theventure.com/gb/en/finalists/eyecontrol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WkmqMUIEJ8
http://israelactive.com/science-technology/device-allows-als-sufferers-to-communicate/

Microsoft health analytics conference. (TY Dan) Microsoft’s Israeli Research & Development Center in Herzliya is the venue for the company’s first ever health analytics conference on Jun 22. Subjects include Internet data, wearables, big data and IBM Watson,
http://microsoftrnd.co.il/Pages/healthanalytics2016.aspx http://microsoftrnd.co.il/Pages/HealthAbstracts.aspx

Sleep scientist wins $100,000 prize. The Adelis Award for groundbreaking research by a young scientist has been presented to Dr. Yuval Nir of Tel Aviv University for his work in the field of sleep. The $100,000 award aims to encourage excellence among young Israeli scientists performing brain research in Israel.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/100000-adelis-prize-to-a-young-israeli-scientist/

You could almost get the idea that there are some things you simply are not allowed to say. Criticism of Islam, for instance, which saw the gay and thoroughly amusing conservative Milo Yiannopoulos suspended this morning from Twitter. There has been yet another Islamist massacre in Florida, you see, and unfettered discussion of the event might further the view that the Religion of Peace is an example of false advertising. The ban was lifted after an outcry, but how many other, less prominent voices have been gagged for good? There is no way to know, but let the clips below serve as a guide to the sentiments that set the gatekeepers of acceptable speech clutching at their pearls.

First, Yiannopoulos on Western feminists’ betrayal of their oppressed, veiled and mutilated sisters.

And second, put bluntly, why an advanced degree of cognitive dissonance is required to simultaneously endorse same-sex marriage and the multiculturalism that insists Islam is just another inoffensive, garden-variety creed.

**UPDATE** Following tremendous backlash, Milo Yiannopoulos’ Twitter account has been restored.

Original story:

Conservative commentator and Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been suspended from Twitter ahead of a planned press conference in Orlando, Florida.

The timing of this suspension cannot be ignored. Yiannopoulos was planning to give a press conference today near the Pulse dance club in Orlando, the target of a deadly Muslim terrorist attack that left over 100 dead or wounded. The event is still scheduled to take place, outside the Christ Church Of Orlando at 2pm EDT. Full details for those wishing to attend can be found at the bottom of this article.

It comes as a number of other figures, great and small, have been censored on social media for being too outspoken about the threat of Islam in the wake of the shootings. Islam critic Pamela Geller was suspended on Facebook. A games developer who called for the surveillance of radical mosques was suspended on Twitter. Masses of users discussing the shooting were censored on Reddit. Jim Hoft, aka “The Gateway Pundit,” another gay conservative activists who recently called on LGBT people to acknowledge the homophobia of Islam and “come home to the Republican party,” was suspended on YouTube.

And now Milo Yiannopoulos has been censored on Twitter. The pattern is clear.

“America has to make a very simple choice here. This is not a question of fine distinctions politicians and our media make between Islam and radical Islamist terrorists, really it’s all the same thing, there is a structural problem with Islam, most of them don’t like gays very much. This isn’t news to anyone except our media.” said Milo yesterday on the Todd Shapiro show. Perhaps it is Milos outspoken opinion on this subject that has had him removed from Twitters already restrictive platform.

It is not yet entirely clear why Milo has been suspended but it is unsurprising that this has happened mere days after Milo tweeted his condemnation of Islamic culture and it’s opinions of homosexuals. Yiannopoulos has been highly outspoken in his condemnation of Islam following the Orlando attacks, and recently wrote a viral article slamming the left for “choosing Islam over gays.”

Battle has been joined in a war that — fought right — promises to realign American politics. Leading environmental activist Bill McKibben says that economic growth is a problem to be “solved.” The economy has grown too large. A new trajectory is needed, a managed descent for relatively graceful decline, McKibben argues in his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. While Democrats are in hock to radical environmentalism, Steve Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White’s Fueling Freedom, perhaps the most important book of this otherwise dismal election yea​r, provides the ideas around which Republicans can unite and regroup.

“Never before have the rulers of a society intentionally driven it backwards to scarcer, more expensive, and less efficient energy,” Moore and Hartnett White write at the start of Fueling Freedom. There’s no letup in the rest of the book’s 252 pages. Modern economic growth is the “greatest surprise in economic history.” The authors demonstrate how industrialization is inseparable from access to abundant fossil fuels — first coal and then petroleum and other hydrocarbons. The good news is that cheap energy is here to stay, “as long as government doesn’t outlaw it.”

They fell global-warming catastrophism with a series of swift, sharp blows. “How can a ‘greenhouse effect’ reduce food production?” they ask. As recently as 2008, when oil briefly went over $150 a barrel, peak oil was the rage. Today, the world is drowning in oil. Technology is outpacing depletion. America has twice the reserves it had in 1950 and has produced nearly ten times as much oil as government surveys said there was.

Moore and Hartnett White quote Robert Zubrin, who notes in Merchants of Despair that leftists used to claim that human activity must be limited because the resources are limited and will run out. Zubrin observes that leftists now insist that it’s not the resources themselves that are limited but the rights to use those resources. This new variant is morally worse than its previous incarnation. It is one thing to urge people to use less of something because it’s believed to be in short supply. It’s another to knowingly make people poorer and restrict their freedom to pursue prosperity and a better life — which is what we’d do by permanently locking up potential hydrocarbon wealth.

https://www.nas.org/articles/the_disappearing_continent

Editor’s Note: What follows is the digital publication of an important new NAS study: a critique of the College Board’s new Advanced Placement European history standards. Two years ago NAS’s critique of the College Board’s dramatically revised U.S. History Standards touched off a national debate. That debate led the College Board in 2015 to revise those standards again. NAS’s critique also prompted a movement to develop a competing set of standards and tests to provide American schools an alternative to the College Board’s monopoly.

What the College Board did to American history it has now done to European history: erase and contort. Much of the European past goes missing in the new AP European History Course and Exam Description, as it is officially called. Columbus is absent, and Churchill is reduced to a single prompt. The College Board tells the story of European history as the triumph of secular progressivism, and shunts to the margins the continent’s centuries-long rise to political freedom and prosperity.

In his 12,200-word essay, The Disappearing Continent, NAS Director of Communications David Randall (Ph.D., History, Rutgers University, 2005; specializing in early modern European history) traces the pattern of exclusions and inclusions in these standards, which are already shaping high school curricula across the country. The Disappearing Continent is the first extended examination of the College Board’s European history initiative. We hope to inspire others to join us in the effort to challenge the new standards—to improve them if possible and to replace them if necessary.

David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. He writes on early modern European history and has taught European history survey courses.

On CNN and Fox News, one politician after another professed to be “shocked” by the massacre in Orlando. “Who would have expected such a thing?” people kept asking. Actually, I’ve been expecting just such a thing for years. The only shock was that it took this long for some jihadist to go after a gay establishment.

Islamic law, after all, is crystal clear on homosexuality, though the various schools of sharia prescribe a range of penalties: one calls for death by stoning; another demands that the transgressor be thrown from a high place; a third says to drop a building on him. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, as well as in parts of Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Iraq, homosexuality is indeed punishable by death.

Nor do Muslims magically change their views on the subject when they move to the West. As long ago as 2005, the head of the Netherlands’ leading gay rights group said that, owing to the growth of Islam in Amsterdam, tolerance of gay people was “slipping away like sand through the fingers”; over the last 10 or 15 years, Dutch gays have fled the cities in droves to escape Muslim gay-bashing. In Norway, several high-profile Muslims have refused publicly to oppose executing gays, and when challenged on their views have gone on the offensive, demanding respect for orthodox Muslim beliefs. This past April, a poll established that 52 percent of British Muslims want homosexuality banned.

Many on the left (and some on the right, too) refuse to face these facts. In 2004, when gay activist Peter Tatchell urged London’s then-mayor Ken Livingstone to rescind an invitation to Koranic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi—who supports the death penalty for gays—Livingstone issued a report calling Qaradawi a liberal and Tatchell a racist.

Yes, there are self-identified Muslims who harbor no antigay prejudice; I suspect that more than a few of them are actually apostates who—aware that Islam considers apostasy, too, a capital crime—choose to keep quiet about their infidel status. Some gays who were born into Islam claim that they’ve worked out for themselves a version of their faith not inconsistent with their homosexuality; good luck to them, but they’re in a tiny minority. Whenever a Muslim commits some atrocity, we’re reminded that the world contains some 1.5 billion Muslims, the great majority of them tolerant, peace-loving, etc.; the fact is that the great majority of those 1.5 billion Muslims also belong to varieties of Islam that preach contempt for, and severe punishment of, homosexuals.

There are many threads to the horror in Orlando.

Most disturbing is the serial inability of the Obama administration — in this case as after the attacks at Fort Hood and in Boston and San Bernardino — even to name the culprits as radical Islamists. Major Hasan shouts “Allahu akbar!” and Omar Mateen calls 911 in mediis interfectis to boast of his ISIS affiliation — and yet the administration can still not utter the name of the catalyst of their attacks: radical Islam. It is hard to envision any clearer Islamist self-identification, other than name tags and uniforms. The Obama team seems to fear the unwelcome public responses to these repeated terrorist operations rather than seeing them as requisites for changing policies to prevent their recurrence.

On receiving news of the attack, Obama almost immediately called for greater tolerance for the LGBT community — as if American society, rather than jihadism and the cultural homophobia so characteristic of the Middle East, had fueled the attack; or as if Mateen had not phoned in his ISIS affiliation. Obama strained to find vocabulary equivalent to “workplace violence” and was reduced to suggesting that the Orlando club was a nexus for gay solidarity and thus a target of endemic LGBT hatred, a half- but only half-right summation. Why is Obama’s first reaction always to find perceived fault within American society rather than with radical Islamism, an ideology certainly at odds with all progressive notions of gay rights, feminism, and religious tolerance?

In Obama’s view, it appears, the problem was a dearth of the community-organizing spirit, not of anti-terrorist measures. And then he channeled the gun-control narrative — forgetting apparently that the Islamist security officer Mateen had passed the requisite background checks to get his guns (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?), and that the Boston massacre, the beheading in Oklahoma, and the stabbings at UC Merced had nothing to do with firearms, and that the strictest firearms legislation in the world did little to prevent Islamist terrorism in Belgium and France. Obama, both ideologically and temperamentally, apparently is not up to the task of putting the security of American citizens at a higher priority than his preconceived multicultural ideas of Middle Eastern “difference” and his domestic agendas. Or perhaps he believes, as do many, that there is no practicable way to prevent these sorts of radical-Islamist killers from murdering Americans. Banning knives, box-cutters, pressure cookers, ball-bearings, and all guns will not stop the Tsarnaevs and Mateens of the world, although holding accountable authorities who ignore warning signals about radical Islamists might.

The late Taher Jaber al-Alwani (d. March, 2016), trained at Al-Azhar University, founded in 973 C.E., and Sunni Islam’s most prestigious religious teaching institution since the mid-13th century, till now. Receiving his Ph.D in Islamic Law from Al-Azhar in 1973, al-Alwani subsequently taught Islamic Law at the Imam Muhammad b. Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Al-Alwani participated in the founding of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in the United States in 1981. He was also a founding member of the Council of the Muslim World League in Mecca, a member of the international Organization of Islamic Cooperation Islamic Fiqh [Islamic Jurisprudence] Academy in Jeddah, since 1987, and President of the Fiqh Council of North America from 1988, till his recent death. In short, al-Alwani was a highly trained, greatly respected, mainstream Muslim authority on Islamic Law, internationally, and within the US.

Al-Alwani’s June 18, 2003 “fatwa” on homosexuality—an Islamic “legal” ruling per Islam’s theo-political totalitarian “legal” system, the Sharia, merits careful consideration in the wake of pious Muslim jihadist Omar Marteen’s mass murderous attack on an Orlando gay night club early yesterday, Sunday, June 12, 2016.

Citing precedent from the Koran itself, and the most trusted hadith or “traditions” of Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, and human behavior prototype, al-Alwani makes plain homosexuality is a “moral atrocity,” punishable by death in the corporeal world, and eternal torment in the hereafter.

[I]t should be clear that homosexuality is sinful and shameful. In Islamic terminology it is called ‘Al-Fahsha’ or an atrocious and obscene act. Islam teaches that believers should neither do the obscene acts, nor in any way indulge in their propagation. Allah says, “Those who love (to see) obscenity published broadcast among the Believers will have a grievous Penalty in this life and in the Hereafter: Allah knows, and you know not.” (Al-Nur [chapter 24]: 19)