RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Success for diabetes treatment trial. Israeli biotech Oramed has reported success in the Phase IIb study of its insulin capsule. Oramed highlighted that it was the first time an oral solution showed a significant drop in blood sugar at night. Oral insulin will replace injected delayed-release insulin. (See also May 2015 newsletter)
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-oramed-announces-success-of-phase-iib-oral-insulin-trial-1001125569

Breakthrough scanning technology. GE Healthcare’s Israeli R&D center has developed the Discovery NM/CT 670 CZT system to perform faster, more accurate, safer and less intrusive SPECT/CT scans of the body. It uses 50% less radioactive tracers and captures all the required data on multiple organs in a single pass.
www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-developed-imaging-system-lowers-radioactive-dose-for-patients/

Living on the edge. The borderline between genius and madness is well known. Now Ben Gurion University and Weizmann researchers have shown that learning processes can make the brain operate at peak performance in processing incoming sensory information. However, it may also risk causing hallucinations.
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/brain_hallucinations.aspx

Exoskeletons – the next generation. (TY Hazel) Israel’s ReWalk has teamed with Harvard University’s Wyss Institute to develop ‘soft suit’ exoskeleton systems enabling people to walk following stroke, lower limb disabilities, MS etc. Millions need some structural support but not a rigid exoskeleton such as ReWalk.
http://www.israel21c.org/rewalk-announces-collaboration-with-harvard/

Jay Leno raises $50k for United Hatzalah. (TY Janglo) US personality Jay Leno donated a $36,000 fully equipped “ambucycle” to Israeli Emergency Medical Service United Hatzalah at a concert to support the EMS. Leno also made a separate appeal to the 1300 members of the audience, which raised another $50,000.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/jay-leno-raises-50k-in-one-minute-for-united-hatzalah-in-israel-donates-ambucycle/2016/04/12/

Help create new dream doctors. I have reported about Dream Doctors (Israeli medical clowns) previously. Now you have the opportunity to donate in a matching scheme to sponsor five new clowns to heal and decrease the suffering of sick children in Israeli hospitals. https://www.causematch.com/en/projects/dream-doctors/

Imaging tech to save women’s lives. (TY Hazel) Israeli startup Illumigyn, is using IDF technology to develop the Gynescope – an advanced machine-vision image-recognition device for gynecologists to identify cervical cancer and other diseases in routine inspections. http://illumigyn.com/
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-medical-company-hopes-to-save-thousands-of-womens-lives-per-year/

Israeli men have world’s 5th longest life expectancy. Israel is ranked fifth in terms of men’s average life expectancy, at 80.6 years – after Switzerland, Iceland, Australia, and Sweden. Israeli women’s life expectancy is ranked ninth globally, at 84.3 years.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/212563#.Vz619r4bN30

A medical device powerhouse. (TY Dan) This is a very informative look at Israel’s medical device sector with 725 medical device companies. http://investingnews.com/daily/life-science-investing/medical-device-investing/isreal-a-medical-device-powerhouse/

The existential “Who Am I?” question is taking on a radical new meaning in light of the gender bathroom subject. Yet this issue is a lineal descendant of certain quarters of radical feminism which has always wanted to eliminate male/female characteristics. As quoted in Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, Alison Jaggar, a leading feminist philosopher of the 1990s, asserted that “the family structure [is] a cornerstone of women’s oppression: it enforces women’s dependence on men, it enforces heterosexuality and it imposes the prevailing masculine and feminine character structures on the next generation.” Thus, “the sexual division of labor must be eliminated in every area of life… so men must participate fully in childrearing and, so far as possible, in childbearing” [emphasis mine].

On the other hand, according to Nandhini Narayanan, radical feminists also believe that “transgender women were perceived to be men encroaching upon women’s safe spaces and claiming to understand the feminine experience. It began to be perceived as a form of male entitlement.”

In 2014 “Wellesley was one of the only colleges in the country that would allow transmen to continue their education despite being an all-girls’ school. Consequently, “terms like ‘sisterhood’ need to be readjusted to ‘sibling-hood.’ Administrators need to account for growing resentment among the student body when leadership roles meant for women are held by men. Infrastructure needs to accommodate gender neutral restrooms. There is also a need to reevaluate the school’s identity — is it a women’s school but with gender non-conforming students?” Critics argue that the transgender movement reinforces conventional and traditional gender roles; if trans women were initially ‘men’ who ‘felt female’ irrespective of social conditioning and growth environment, then it implies that the differences between the male and the female are biological alone. They argued that transgenderism perpetuates the notion that ‘female brains need to stay female, and will not be happy in conventionally male pursuits.’”

N.Y.C. Admin. Code 8-102(23) maintains that “gender is defined as one’s ‘actual or perceived sex and shall also include a person’s gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression, whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.'”

Thus, the Administrative Code explains that “Cisgender is an adjective denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity conforms with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex.” On the other hand, “Gender Identity”… may be male, female, neither or both while “Gender Expression” is “expressed through one’s name, choice of pronouns, clothing, haircut, behavior, voice or body characteristics.”

The leftist madness is not limited to US universities:

First they came for the bags of sugar, removing them from the campus shop. Then they blocked Six Nations
rugby matches from being screened in the student union bar.

After that coffee was targeted: Starbucks and Nestlé were subject to campus boycotts. Sombreros were next;
handing out the hats at a freshers’ fair was deemed cultural appropriation.

They even tried to ban Ukip after students said that inviting its candidate on to the campus would make them
feel less safe and secure.

So when the University of East Anglia stopped graduating students from tossing mortarboards in the air during
their official photograph, it came as little surprise. The university in Norwich, which last year became the
first in Britain to introduce day-time sleeping berths for hung-over students, is developing a reputation as
one of our most crackpot campuses.

It was the university authorities that generated headlines this week by declaring that tossing mortarboards
skywards posed an unacceptable risk because it could lead to injury.

An offer to have flying mortarboards added digitally to graduation photographs for an extra £8 did not
mollify students. Its justification was given short shrift by the Health and Safety Executive, which said
that the chance of being hurt by a flying mortarboard was incredibly small.

Yet it is UEA’s student union, housed in a brutalist concrete and glass building on the campus, that has
been most active with bans and boycotts. Tate & Lyle sugar and Starbucks coffee were barred from the campus
shop over their company’s tax affairs; Six Nations rugby because its sponsor, RBS, funded fossil fuel
extraction; Nestlé over claims that its baby milk powder discouraged women in poor countries from breast
feeding.

Mustafa Amine had been Hezbollah’s operations chief since February 2008, when his predecessor and brother-in-law, arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, was killed in a car-bomb attack in Damascus.

Last Friday, May 13, Badreddine, too, met a violent end—killed, according to reports, in a mysterious explosion near Damascus International Airport.

Badreddine’s terror activity with Hezbollah went back to 1983, when he led a cell that car-bombed the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. Captured and imprisoned in Kuwait, he managed to escape in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded the country.

Badreddine made it back to Beirut, his Hezbollah comrades, and terror activity—both against Israel and against U.S. and British forces in Iraq. But Badreddine’s most notorious exploit came on February 14, 2005, when he masterminded the vicious killing of moderate Sunni Lebanese leader Rafiq Hariri in Beirut.

As Israeli investigative writer Ronen Bergman describes it:

a suicide bomber driving a van loaded with explosives equal in damage power to three tons of TNT collided with Hariri’s armored convoy, turning it into a fiery hell.

Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.”

Miller was one of the great proponents of the Bush “road map” for Israel another clone of the endless policies promoting Israeli territorial concessions in exchange for blather….He wrote this in May 2005 in the Washpo…which give a good indication of his proclivities with respect to Israel:

“I’m not a lawyer by training,” Miller wrote. “But I know one when I see one. For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel’s attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations.” ….“With the best of motives and intentions, we listened to and followed Israel’s lead without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations.” so his opinions of Lieberman are tainted by bias….rsk

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Replacing Moshe Ya’alon, who announced his resignation Friday as Mr. Netanyahu publicly negotiated his replacement, would do a lot for Mr. Netanyahu: He stands to broaden his thin governing majority and to reinforce himself against right-wing pressure at home as well as U.S. efforts to press him on the peace process and settlements. He could better secure his position until 2018, when he would surpass David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-governing prime minister. The exit of Mr. Ya’alon, a longtime Israeli military figure, also sends a powerful signal that the Israel Defense Forces should be careful about challenging his government. Senior military officials, and Mr. Ya’alon, have been critical on several points, including the government’s defense of an Israeli soldier who shot a wounded Palestinian lying on the ground in March after the Palestinian stabbed another Israeli soldier.

In the short term, Mr. Netanyahu’s actions may bring peace to his governing coalition. But the price will be continued and possibly greater tensions with the Palestinians, the U.S. and others. Notably, though, Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t much care. This move illustrates his decision to look beyond the Obama administration toward what he hopes will be a friendlier face in Washington.

Mr. Lieberman’s party joining the Netanyahu government would add precious seats to Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition. But Mr. Lieberman is a problematic partner. He represents a secular party that has had its share of tensions with Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-orthodox coalition partners over national service. Mr. Lieberman resigned last year as foreign minister to protest what he considered Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to wipe out Hamas in Gaza and to build more settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. He also wanted more support for legislation to remove Arabic as an official language, strengthen the influence of Jewish law, reduce the Israeli Supreme Court’s powers, and, according to the New York Times, “entrench the automatic citizenship of Jews worldwide and Jewish symbols of the state.” Mr. Lieberman, who is known for provocative statements and lives in an Israeli settlement south of Bethlehem, has threatened to bomb the Aswan dam in the event of war with Egypt and has proposed transferring some Arab-Israeli towns to the Palestinian Authority to help preserve the Jewish Israeli majority in the north. CONTINUE AT SITE

Good riddings….to “Bogie”Ya’alon- his nickname is short for “bogus”- a political chameleon in hawk’s clothing….rsk

TEL AVIV—Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon resigned Friday from what is widely considered Israel’s second-most powerful position, amid maneuvering by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shore up his coalition.

Mr. Ya’alon, a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party, said in a Facebook post Friday that he decided to step down after the prime minister moved this past week to negotiate with the ultranationalist lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman, reportedly offering him the defense ministry.

Mr. Ya’alon said he was resigning his seat in the Knesset, or parliament, as well and would be “taking a timeout from political life.”

The prime minister expressed his regret and said he had offered Mr. Ya’alon the position of foreign minister, which Mr. Netanyahu currently also holds. Mr. Netanyahu denied there was any “crisis of confidence” between the two of them, but said he needed to “expand the government, in order to bring stability to Israel.”

Mr. Netanyahu, who has a one-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset, has been seeking to shore up his political base by negotiating to bring Mr. Lieberman’s ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party into his conservative coalition.

Talks began on Wednesday, according to a senior Israeli official. The official wouldn’t comment on whether Mr. Lieberman had been offered the defense ministry portfolio, saying talks were ongoing.

As head of an underground Jewish resistance group, David Raziel had been pursued by the British. Come WWII, he would offer his help.
On May 20, 1941, David Raziel, commander of the Etzel – the Jewish underground militia in Palestine affiliated with Revisionist Zionism – was killed while leading a commando mission in Iraq for the British army.

In its early years, the Etzel, the acronomyn of Irgun Tzvai Leumi – literally “national military organization” –treated the British Mandatory government in Palestine as an enemy. But after World War II started, Etzel made common cause with the British, which is how it was that Raziel was asked to assemble a team to travel to Iraq. Its mission was to destroy the oil refineries west of the capital, which were supplying the Germans with fuel critical for their war effort.

He was born David Rozenson, on December 19, 1910, in Smorgon, in modern-day Belarus. His father was Mordecai Rozenson, a Hebrew teacher, and his mother the former Bluma Gordin. The family, which also included a sister, Esther, were Zionists, and spoke Hebrew in their home. When Mordecai was offered a position teaching at the Tachkemoni School, in Tel Aviv, in 1914, they immigrated there, if not for long.

During World War I, the Turkish rulers of the Land of Israel exiled Russian-born residents, whom they considered enemy aliens, to Egypt. This happened to the Rozensons too, and they went back to Russia, only to return to Israel in 1923.

David studied at his father’s school, graduating in 1928, when he moved to Jerusalem to attend the Merkaz Harav yeshiva, where his hevruta (study partner) was Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. At the same time, he was a student at the Hebrew University.

A school board in North Carolina has unanimously given initial approval to a policy that would stop allowing its high schools to name valedictorians and salutatorians of its graduating classes because that kind of “competition” is apparently hazardous to students’ health.

“We have heard from many, many schools that the competition has become very unhealthy,” Wake County School Board Chairman Tom Benton said, according to an article in the News & Observer.

According to the News & Observer, a final decision on the policy won’t be made until June 7. Given the fact that it was unanimously supported in that initial vote, however, I’ve got to say it sounds pretty doggone likely that it will be approved.

Under the new policy, the schools would use the Latin honors system that’s used in colleges, giving a “cum laude” designation to students with a 3.75 GPA or higher, a “magna cum laude” designation to students with a 4.0 to a 4.249 GPA and a “summa cum laude” to students with a 4.25 GPA or higher.

Benton said he thinks this change will also stop students from being tempted to fill their schedules with easier classes to pad their GPAs in pursuit of a “valedictorian” or “salutatorian” title.

“Students were not collaborating with each other the way that we would like them to,” he said. “Their choice of courses was being guided by their GPA and not their future education plans.”

Um, Tom? How the hell would the elimination of those titles stop that? After all, those GPA numbers are still going to mean the same thing. Any kids who were going to have their “choice of courses” be “guided by their GPA” is probably still going to have them guided that way because — stay with me here — they’ll still have GPAs!

Why do liberals hate science?

The Left has long claimed that it has something of a monopoly on scientific expertise. For instance, long before Al Gore started making millions by claiming that anyone who disagreed with his apocalyptic prophecies was “anti-science,” there were the “scientific socialists.” “Social engineer” is now rightly seen as a term of scorn and derision, but it was once a label that progressive eggheads eagerly accepted.

Masking opinions in a white smock is a brilliant, albeit infuriating and shabby, rhetorical tactic. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Science is the language of facts, and when people pretend to be speaking it, they’re not only claiming that their preferences are more than mere opinions, they’re also insinuating that anyone who disagrees is a fool or a zealot for objecting to “settled science.”

Put aside the fact that there is no such thing as settled science. Scientists are constantly questioning their understanding of things; that is what science does. All the great scientists of history are justly famous for overturning the assumptions of their fields. The real problem is that in politics, invocations of science are very often marketing techniques masquerading as appeals to irrefutable authority. In an increasingly secular society, having science on your side is better than having God on your side – at least in an argument.

I’m not saying that you can’t have science in your corner, or that lawmakers shouldn’t look to science when making policy. (Legislation that rejects the existence of gravity makes for very silly laws indeed.) But the real intent behind so many claims to “settled science” is to avoid having to make your case. It’s an undemocratic technique for delegitimizing opposing views and saying “shut up” to dissenters.

For example, even if the existence of global warming is “settled,” the policies for how to best respond to it are not. But in the political debates about climate change, activists say that their climatological claims are irrefutable and so are their preferred remedies.

If climate change is the threat they claim, I’d rather spend billions on geoengineering to fix it than trillions on impoverishing economic policies that at best slightly delay it. It doesn’t matter; I’m the Luddite buffoon for thinking ethanol subsidies and windmills are boondoggles.

This month, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) will be sponsoring a panel discussion about Islamophobia. Islamophobia is a modern-day term used mainly by Islamists to describe an unwarranted fear or hatred of Islam and/or Muslims and a term also used by the like to, more appropriately, shut down any conversation about the radical element found within the Muslim community. Not surprisingly, the majority of the event’s panel is made up of those linked to terrorism and bigotry, themselves.

The title of the forum, which is scheduled to take place at FAU in Boca Raton, on May 23rd, is ‘ISLAMOPHOBIA, Voices from the Muslim Community.’ The flyer for the event displays the photos of five panelists, at least three of which have known ties to terrorism. They are Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, the imam of the Darul Uloom mosque, located in Pembroke Pines, Florida; Wilfredo Amr Ruiz, the legal counsel for the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); and Bassem Abdo Alhalabi (al-Halabi), an Associate Professor at FAU.

Shafayat Mohamed is the imam at Darul Uloom. He founded it in October 1994. Since then, it has become a haven for al-Qaeda associates. “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla was a student at Darul Uloom. Now-deceased al-Qaeda Global Operations Chief Adnan el-Shukrijumah was a prayer leader there. And Darul Uloom Arabic teacher Imran Mandhai, Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Mossa Jokhan hatched an operation at the mosque to blow up different structures, including area power stations, Jewish businesses, and a National Guard armory.

Shafayat Mohamed, himself, has been thrown off a number of boards in Broward County due to his outspokenness against homosexuals. In February 2005, an article written by him was published on the Darul Uloom website, entitled ‘Tsunami: Wrath of God.’ In it, he claims that gay sex caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Shafayat Mohamed’s article doesn’t just target homosexuals. It also attacks Jews and Christians. In the piece, he claims that most Jews and Christians, whom he refers to as “People of the Book,” are “perverted transgressors.”

Another of the Islamophobia forum participants is Wilfredo Ruiz. Ruiz is the attorney for CAIR-Florida.