RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week’s fare at the Angelika Film Center in New York City includes “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a purported documentary that began its run on Friday. If only the theater’s schedulers had been making a droll point by choosing April Fool’s Day to launch this dangerously misleading movie falsely linking vaccines to autism. Instead, they all too eagerly snatched up the film after it had been ousted on March 26 from plans for the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

The decision to remove “Vaxxed” from the festival was the right one, and credit goes to organizers, in particular co-founder Robert De Niro, who has a son with autism, for having the courage to reconsider their plans. If “Vaxxed” had been submitted as science fiction, it would merit attention for its story line, character development and dialogue. But as a documentary it misrepresents what science knows about autism, undermines public confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and attacks the integrity of legitimate scientists and public-health officials.

As Mr. De Niro explained in announcing that “Vaxxed” would be dropped from the festival: “My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family. But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”

I am among those Mr. De Niro consulted. In a 45-minute phone conversation with him, I recommended that the festival withdraw the film from the “documentary” category and not screen it.

The filmmakers claim they have not stated that autism is caused by the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, known as MMR. However, that is the inescapable message of “Vaxxed.” And it is certainly the stance of Andrew Wakefield, the discredited British researcher who is the movie’s director and co-writer. CONTINUE AT SITE

Every warmish day inspires media references to broken temperature records, the implicit message being that we have just endured further evidence of a planet in its sweaty death throes. Need it be said that those alarms should be taken with the usual grain of salt?
In late January, I was startled to hear the Nine News weather reporter breathlessly exclaim that a maximum of 33C in Sydney on the 21st of that month happened to be 7C above the city’s average January maximum. That’s it – 7C, for Heaven’s sake! My initial impression was that couching the report in those terms had been intended to add a global warming shock-and-awe angle to the report. After all, 7C is well above the 2C we are told is the magical figure beyond which we will all fry. Not that contrasting one day’s mercury with long-term records is an apples-to-apples comparison, but how many gullible warming believers would be capable of, or even bother, making this distinction?

My second reaction was to think that 33C doesn’t seem to me to be remarkably hot for January; neither did it strike me that 26C would be a likely average January maximum, so I had a look at Weatherzone. To my surprise it confirmed that the mean January maximum for Sydney is, indeed, 25.9C. So there you are. This is the long term mean maximum for January. The high mean maximum for January is actually 29.5C and that was recorded in 1896.

A closer examination of the data reveals that the figure of 7C on any particular day is not all that remarkable – so unremarkable, in fact, that it confirms my impression it was cited for purely propaganda reasons.

Sydney’s January high maximum is 45.8C and its low minimum is 10.6. So, historically, daily January temperatures in Sydney range over 35.2C. The maximum temperature on January 21 of 33C was actually 12.8C lower than the highest recorded January maximum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQjTLGgQV2w – A Special Kind Of Hate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZKAewadF9U – Feminist Whores for Islam

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Ann Marie Waters, the Director of Sharia Watch UK and deputy leader ofPegida UK. http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/03/ann-marie-waters-on-islam-kills-women-on-the-glazov-gang/

Ann Marie discussed “Islam Kills Women” — the name of the protest that she will be holding on August 20, 2016 outside the Parliament in Westminster to bring attention to Islam’s oppression of women in the UK and abroad. [For more info on the protest, write Ann Marie via contact@shariawatch.org.uk.]

Ann Marie focused on Islam’s hazardous impact on free speech and women’s rights in Britain and around the world — and the way the government and culture are demonizing truth-tellers on this issue. She also brings attention to the myriad catastrophic consequences that opening borders to vast numbers of men from Sharia environments is having on the UK and the West.

Don’t miss it!

The infant undergrads of America hit another low last Monday when Emory students woke up and discovered that pro-Trump slogans had been written in chalk on some of the university’s sidewalks. According to the Emory student newspaper, about 40 Emorites responded to the chalking by assembling outside the university president’s office and demanding that he meet with them, because they were “in pain.” The paper quotes students saying the chalk slogans were “fear”-inducing; one said she didn’t “deserve to feel afraid at [her] school.”

Why do these kids need to be handled so very gently? According to one Emory undergrad, who echoes whining heard on campuses across the country, some students “are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community and focus on these issues” of student comfort.

What these kids need, besides a kick in the pants, is a look at university life in the good old days, when universities were just starting to revolutionize education and lay groundwork for the Enlightenment.

When you get right down to it, two men invented modern test-and-result science: Francis Bacon and William Harvey (who discovered blood circulation). They both got their start as undergrads at Cambridge in the late 16th century.

What was Cambridge like in the late 16th century? Not pleasant. Harvey, like all students too poor to afford private lodging, slept in a tiny attic room with three other students. The attic had a window, but the window had no glass, and the room had no fireplace. According to a 16th-century writer — quoted in Thomas Wright’s superb Harvey biography, A Life in Circulation — Cambridge students were known to “run up and down half an hour, to get heat in their feet,” before turning in at night.

At 4 in the morning, students were awakened by the college bell, which gave them time to dress and prepare themselves for chapel, which began at 5. Chapel was mandatory; missing morning prayers resulted in a fine of at least twopence (at a time when one penny was enough for a meal that four students could share).

After chapel, at 6:10, classes began. Like prayer, classes were mandatory, and missing one of your hour-long lectures would get you hit with another two-penny fine. With short breaks for lunch and dinner, classes continued — in unheated and badly ventilated rooms — until 7 in the evening, when students returned to chapel for evensong. After the evening prayers, studies resumed, until 9 or 10; then the students put a little heat in their feet, climbed into their attics, and managed five or six hours’ sleep before starting again at 4.

This was all rough on Harvey, who entered Cambridge at the tender age of 15. It was probably even rougher on Bacon, who started Cambridge at 12.

I spent part of the week speaking on several college campuses in Texas, and my subject was free speech and the threats against it on campus and beyond. The students were in the main shocked and dismayed at the revitalization of censorship as a political ideal and by the widespread support for censorship among so-called liberals. Most of them were genuinely unaware of just how far and wide the war against free expression currently ranges.

This is strange, because the war on free speech starts on campus.

In March of 2014, Professor Lawrence Torcello of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the seal of which appears alongside the definition of “second-rate” in many dictionaries, published a short article online calling for the criminalization of what he calls “climate denial,” meaning the holding, perpetuating, and, especially, the financial support of heretical ideas about global warming. A few articles were written criticizing the article, and the response was the expected one: “It’s just one crank nobody professor from some second-rate philosophy department publishing a blog post, don’t make such a big deal about it!” Professor Torcello subsequently denied that he had argued what he plainly does argue, namely that legal protections for free speech should not encircle those who dissent from the received dogma of global warming. “Misguided concern regarding free speech,” he wrote, should be no impediment to imposing criminal sanctions on those whose activism “remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action” on the issue.

We’ve taken this ride before: An obscure academic writes something loony. We withstood “feminist physics” and “queer algebra,” and we’ll get through this, too.

Unless we don’t.

Shortly after Professor Torcello’s tentative exploration of criminalizing political disagreement, Gawker published an article by Adam Weinstein bearing the straightforward headline: “Arrest climate-change deniers.” Building on Professor Torcello’s argument, Weinstein called explicitly for the imprisonment (“denialists should face jail”) of those working to further particular political goals (“quietist agenda posturing as skepticism”) on climate change. Never mind that protecting people and institutions attempting to further a political agenda is precisely the reason we have a First Amendment. Weinstein dismisses the First Amendment out of hand, with the expected dread cliché: “First Amendment rights have never been absolute. You still can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year, all saying the same thing.”

Yelling “balderdash” at the conventional wisdom has a very long and proud tradition. (Not that it should matter to this debate, but I suppose I should here note for the record that I hold more or less conventional views on climate change as a phenomenon but prefer mitigatory policies to preventative ones.) The name “Elsevier” is not beloved on college campuses (the modern company is a publisher of academic journals and sometimes is criticized for its pricing), but it is to that company’s spiritual ancestor, the Dutch printing house of Lodewijk Elzevir and his descendants, that we owe the publication of, among other articles of samizdat, the works of Galileo, at that time under Inquisitorial interdict. (The story of Elzevir’s 1636 covert mission to Arcetri to meet with Galileo and smuggle his manuscripts to Amsterdam, a city that was then as now a byword for liberality, would make a pretty good movie.) It isn’t that it’s likely that our contemporary global-warming critics are doing work as important as Galileo’s: It’s that no one knows or can predict, which is the practical case for free expression, which should be of some concern even to our modern progressives, self-styled empiricists and pragmatists who reject the moral case for free expression.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Two Israeli inventions can save the lives of stabbing victims.
Israeli ultrasound brain surgery has cured an Israeli of Parkinson’s.
An elite IDF unit is helping Arab-Israeli startups.
A Dubai woman named her son after the IDF officer that helped deliver him.
A new Israeli innovation keeps fruit and vegetables fresh.
Shh… an Israeli company helped the FBI unlock a terrorist’s iPhone.
A sale of $1.5 billion Israeli bonds was five times oversubscribed.
The BBC bought an Israeli story to base its new drama series about autism.
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Preventing lung collapse. (TY Dan) Another innovation from Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s BioDesign students. They developed ThoraXS – a one-handed thoracic portal opener that shortens the procedure time of chest-tube insertion from minutes to less than 30 seconds. It is timely for saving victims of terror stabbings.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29654 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ3fhZmgyiY

Stopping uncontrolled bleeding. Gallium is a bio-metal currently used to stop bone loss in cancer patients. Moshe Rogosnitzky, a researcher at Israel’s Ariel University, has discovered that Gallium in liquid form (known as gallium nitrate) can rapidly halt bleeding from deep wounds, without causing blood clots.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/209371#.Vv53uUfn95R

Leukemia trial results. Latest reports of Phase II trials of BL-8040 from Israel’s Bioline Rx (see Nov newsletter), show that 38% of patients with acute myeloid leukemia, went into complete remission after just two cycles of the treatment. All these patients had previously failed to recover from other leukemia treatments.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-biolinerx-reports-positive-phase-ii-leukemia-drug-results-1001113425

How bacteria escape their enemies. A joint team of scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from the Netherlands have discovered that the common E. coli bacteria plays “hide and seek” to avoid detection from the predatory B. bacteriovorus bacteria. It extends research into combating antibiotic resistant bacteria.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29284 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1824/20152154

Gene enhances insulin production. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that the gene p16 enhanced insulin secretion in beta cells of mice that suffer from diabetes, thereby partly reversing the disease and improving the health of the mice. Similar results in human cells are expected.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29587

Mending hearts again in Tanzania. Surgeons from Israel’s humanitarian organization Save A Child’s Heart returned to Tanzania in March to perform more life-saving operations on African children. (See July newsletter for previous mission) http://www.israel21c.org/healing-childrens-hearts-in-tanzania/

$25 million to fund new blood center. Israel’s emergency service Magen David Adom received its largest ever donation – $25 million – to build a new blood services center in Ramle. The Marcus National Blood Services Center will replace a facility in Tel Hashomer that is vulnerable to rocket attacks from Gaza.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/magen-david-adom-blood-center-gets-largest-donation-ever/

Exercise center for the brain. (TY Jacques) Swiss Ambassador to Israel Andreas Baum inaugurated Israel’s first BrainPath in Neve Eshkol, near Gaza. The fitness parlor, adjoined to the region’s largest senior citizen center, has eleven exercises that stimulate blood-flow to the brain. http://www.neveshkol.org.il/page_50511
http://israelbetweenthelines.com/index.php/2016/02/05/make-way-welcome-to-israels-first-real-brainpath/

China seeks Israeli remote health tech. Renming Zhu of China’s Truth Enterprises is seeking Israeli startups for its new incubator in Shanghai. Of particular interest are solutions to bring medical care out of the doctor’s office and into the field. China’s vast geography and aging population puts a huge strain on its healthcare costs.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-remote-health-tech-sought-for-chinas-healthcare-system/

Israeli woman cured of Parkinson’s. The focused ultrasound brain surgery of Israel’s Insightec has been used 500 times around the world. In its first procedure in Israel, surgeons at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center successfully cured an Israeli woman of her uncontrollable shaking. (Video had 570,000 views in 2 days).
http://www.onlysimchas.com/news/28445/first-in-israel-surgery-that-removes-shaking-due-to-parkinson-disease

John McAdams – a conservative university professor in Wisconsin – has been suspended indefinitely for criticizing a fellow professor for not allowing debate about same-sex marriage in her classroom. McAdams may return to Marquette University as professor in January of 2017, only if he admits that he was “guilty.”

It all started at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Catholic university in 2014 when a student recorded his encounter with his philosophy professor Cheryl Abbate regarding the issue of same-sex marriage. Abbate had told her class that the issue of “gay rights” was not up for debate, that “everybody agrees on this, and there is no need to discuss it.”

After class, the student discussed the issue with Abbate, but the professor eventually suggested to the student that he drop the course, adding that “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions…You don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.” She stated, “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

The conservative university professor John McAdams wrote a post on his blog Marquette Warrior in 2014 exposing the student-professor encounter and criticizing Abbate for her intolerance. He concluded, “Like the rest of academia, Marquette is less and less a real university. And when gay marriage cannot be discussed, certainly not a Catholic university.”

When French President Francois Hollande met with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday to share ideas on how the two countries can fight Islamist terrorism, it probably didn’t occur to him that saying the words “Islamist terrorism” would be a problem. But in the Obama White House, putting the word “Islamist” (or Islamic) next to the word “terrorism” is a faux pas worthy of being struck from the record.

Via the Federalist:

While the official transcript available on the White House web page includes Hollande’s use of the phrase “Islamist terrorism,” the White House video of the remarks muted the audio during that portion of Hollande’s remarks. The audio of the French-to-English interpreter stops right before Hollande characterizes “Islamist terrorism” as the root of terrorism in Syria and Iraq.

“But we’re also well aware that the roots of terrorism, Islamist terrorism, is in Syria and in Iraq,” Hollande told Obama, according to the transcript of the exchange provided by the White House. “We therefore have to act both in Syria and in Iraq, and this is what we’re doing within the framework of the coalition.”

Blogger “Allahpundit” made the point at Hot Air that Hollande actually chose the term carefully for the sake of accuracy. And it was still rejected by the Obama White House.

You know what the worst part is? Hollande didn’t say “Islamic terrorism,” which is the supposedly objectionable term. He said “Islamist terrorism.” “Islamist” was, I thought, a term that came into use precisely because it gave the speaker an efficient way to distinguish between “moderate Muslims” and the more jihad-minded. “Islamic” describes all things Muslim; “Islamist” describes a supremacist view in which Islam is the highest authority of the state. Many critics of Islam would dispute that there’s a meaningful distinction between those two, but Obama and Hollande certainly wouldn’t. ISIS may not be Islamic to Obama but it’s certainly Islamist. Point being, Hollande chose his words carefully here according to the White House transcript so as not to conflate the average Muslim with the jihadis he’s discussing — and the White House still censored him. That’s the point we’re at.

A French paper noticed the omission and wondered if it was a “technical problem or a real deliberate act of censorship.”

The White House has not definitely said. But it’s all the same a strange moment that Francois Hollande experienced, Thursday March 31 at Washington, even if the President of France wasn’t fully aware of it.

Since last Thursday, when an Israeli soldier shot a subdued terrorist in the head, the issue of the IDF’s Code of Ethics has been debated to death. Arguments about whether the usual rules of engagement should apply to situations like those that have grown so commonplace over the past six months are not at all new in the Jewish state; they are as old as its enemies’ repeated attempts to wipe it off the face of the earth in one way or another.

The current method has taken the form of a “lone-wolf intifada,” the term coined to describe a disorganized war of attrition waged mostly by young, knife-wielding Palestinians on Jew-killing rampages. That it is not deemed an official “uprising” by the Palestinian powers-that-be who encourage it passively while actively egging it on is the only thing that differentiates it from previous waves of terrorism to which Israelis were accustomed.

The soldier who has become the topic of every dinner-table conversation from Metula‎ to Eilat is now serving as a symbol for all sides of the dilemma that our boys and girls must face as soon as they finish high school and don an IDF uniform. It is impossible to know what his parents told him before he got on the bus to go off to basic training. But I admit to telling my own children, each in turn, that I’d rather visit them in a military prison than in a graveyard.

That particular sentiment was born of watching my kids grow up in a society whose underlying message was that it was just as important to be armed with a law book as a gun when forced to fight enemies with no rules of engagement whatsoever. Other than useless slaughter, that is. And backing from an “international community” with extremely high double standards.

Indeed, the first time I allowed my 7-year-old to walk by himself to school, a report on the radio that a terrorist was on the loose in our neighborhood sent me tearing down four flights of stairs, with babies in my arms, to make sure he was safe. As it transpired, my son had made it to his classroom, but an 18-year-old female soldier named Iris Azoulay was not so lucky. After kissing her own mother goodbye before heading to the bus stop to return to her base, a Palestinian laborer — who had worked in the area for years painting houses and the like for Jewish families he knew well — went on a stabbing spree with a 15-inch knife and slashed her to death. Right in front of her home.