RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hospitals facing Obamacare penalties for high readmission rates should heed the results of a new study, says EarlySense

One of the tenets of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, is that hospitals must reduce costs, by reducing their 30-day readmission rate — the theory being that a hospital ought to be able to do a good-enough job on patients deemed well enough to be released to keep them out of the hospital for at least a month.

As a result, hospitals are scrambling to find ways to reduce their exposure to the problem. Otherwise, thanks to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program component of the ACA, they could find their Medicare payments cut by up to 3%. While it doesn’t sound like a lot overall, hospital administrators, armed with spreadsheets and horror stories, would disagree, claiming they need every penny, and then some.

A new study by Israeli medical technology start-up EarlySense could help allay the concerns of administrators — as well as patients, most of whom presumably would want to avoid going back to the hospital as well. In the first-ever test of the EarlySense system that followed heart-failure patients after hospital discharge, the start-up, working with two top US health institutes, discovered that monitoring the respiratory activity of the patients was “the most important risk-adjusted associate of readmission for heart failure,” according to Dalia Argaman, VP of clinical and regulatory affairs at EarlySense.

With “wearables” all the rage now in health monitoring, EarlySense has done things a bit differently: The company has developed the first “sleepable” in a device which, when placed under a mattress, keeps track of how a person sleeps, including whether they toss or turn, the different stages of sleep (REM, etc.), their breathing, and other important sleep data.

One recent morning, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a security guard at the light rail station minutes from my home in Jerusalem. About an hour later, I drove past the station and was astonished to see—nothing. No increased police presence, not even police barricades. The guard had managed to shoot his attacker, and ambulances had taken both away. Commuters were waiting for the next train. As if nothing unusual had happened.

The ability to instantly resume the pretense of normalcy is one of the ways that Israelis are coping with the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. For the last six months, Palestinians—some as young as 13—have attacked Jews with knives and hatchets and even scissors, or else driven their cars into Israeli crowds, killing over two dozen people. (About 90 Palestinians have been killed carrying out the attacks.) The violence was provoked by the unsubstantiated Palestinian claim—strongly denied by the government—that Israel intended to permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
The almost daily attacks tend to blur together, though several have become emblematic—like the stabbing murder of a mother of six in her home while her teenage daughter ran to protect her siblings. Still, by Israeli standards, the violence so far has been manageable. Israelis recall that in the early 2000s, when suicide bombers were targeting buses and cafes, almost as many victims would die in a single attack as have been murdered in the current wave of terror.

Israelis have been here before. In 1992, a monthslong stabbing spree by Palestinian terrorists in Israel’s streets helped to catalyze one of the great upsets in Israeli politics, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, ending over a decade of rule by the right-wing Likud Party. The stabbings were the culmination of a four-year Palestinian revolt against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This first intifada (“uprising” in Arabic), as it came to be known, forced the Israeli public to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It also convinced many Israelis that the Likud’s policy of incremental annexation of the West Bank and Gaza was simply not worth the price.

Until the first intifada, Israelis had tended to regard control of the territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War as benign, bringing prosperity to the occupied as well as to the occupiers. As the intifada took hold, Israeli anger turned not only against the Palestinians but against the ruling Likud. There were antigovernment riots, and Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was widely ridiculed for his passivity and lack of vision. READ MORE AT SITE

Even months after the meltdown at the University of Missouri, who can forget Melissa Click, the professor caught on video calling for “muscle” to eject a student journalist photographing a sit-in on the quad? The university fired Ms. Click this week, and suddenly due process and free speech are back in vogue on campus.

On Thursday the University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators announced a 4-2 decision to terminate Ms. Click, a communications professor. Board chairman Pamela Henrickson told the press that Ms. Click’s conduct “was not compatible with university policies,” including interfering “with the rights of others.”

The Columbia campus faculty council chairman Ben Trachtenberg denounced the dismissal in a statement as “terrible,” saying Ms. Click was entitled to “a fair process.” Faculty council member Angela Speck told the Missourian newspaper that it was “ridiculous” that Ms. Click could be fired “without due process.” Both said at a Thursday meeting that the decision violated Ms. Click’s First Amendment rights, according to the Missourian. READ MORE AT SITE

A disturbing trend in fostering American-Muslim “otherness” can be seen in Simon & Schuster’s decision to create a new imprint called Salaam Reads. Targeted at age groups from early readers to young adults, it will present Muslim characters, stressing their own customs and ways, presumably to highlight their integration into our culture, not to stress Islamic theology or doctrine. If that last disclaimer is to be believed, we have to wonder why there is a necessity for a separate imprint with a guaranteed minimum of nine books a year – does Simon & Schuster have one for Catholic , Jewish or Buddhist Americans? What happened to the idea of America as the place that welcomed immigrants from all over the world so that they would have the freedom to believe and achieve what they wished, no longer bound by the strictures of birth or class structure. Are we now reverting to the notion that a Muslim child growing up in America must see her exact counterpart represented in story-books before she can feel comfortable in her own skin? According to Zareen Jaffery, the hyphenated Pakistani-American who heads the new imprint and remembers her own childhood: “I didn’t see myself reflected in books back then.” (NYT 2/25/16). Lest we forget, we are now living in the age of social media and selfies.

But beyond this rather innocuous explanation lies a more telling motive expressed by Ms. Jaffery in an online interview with storyandchai.com: “while I am answering these questions from a business perspective, it would be remiss and naïve of me not to state the obvious: racism is real. As is Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia – the list goes on.” So the emphasis for this imprint is on correcting the supposedly inaccurate image of Muslim Americans and showing them in a more positive light. This sounds very much like an agenda that might have financial backing from sources other than the publisher who isn’t generally interested in righting wrongs perceived by special interest groups.

Two of the finest institutions of higher education in the United States, Columbia and Cornell, have been identified as leading the list of “most anti-Semitic,” as they continue to host Jew hatred events on campus. By the time our students enter this new phase in their education, they have been well primed for the venomous climate, having been molded into frustrated, resentful, disrespectful, demanding, angry young adults, ill prepared for anything, unable to accept responsibility, and ripe to lash out at others. These young people have already been activated and prepared to join any group that uses “social justice” language, whether warranted or not.

The K-12 classes provide the first toxic element. Education is being restructured according to a radical political ideology promoted by the White House, Bill and Melinda Gates, and other supporters of a federal takeover of education. The purpose is to produce workers for a Global Economy (aka Agenda 21). The major players are Valerie Jarrett’s mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, a member of the Muslim Sisterhood; native-born terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Ayers (Weather Underground) who support a radical network to defeat America; and Secretary of Education (ret.) Arne Duncan, who promoted the Common Core Standards, with its drastic, untried curriculum overhaul that has lowered school standards to ensure that no child is left behind or excels at the expense of others. This is accompanied by the disturbing data mining that profiles the children (into adulthood) and their families.

Late last year, during the ongoing frenzy of violence directed at Israelis known as the “stabbing intifada,” 20-year-old Maram Hassoneh was killed in her second attempted knife attack on IDF soldiers manning a checkpoint. Hassoneh, a devout Muslim, was a top English student at An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus. Described by Hamas as “greenhouse for martyrs,” An-Najah may very well be San Francisco State University (SFSU)’s first academic partner in the Arab and Muslim world.

Under the leadership of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, SFSU reportedly established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah in 2014. Though there is no official corroboration of the relationship other than a recommendation in the All-University Committee on International Programs annual report (which Abdulhadi touted on Facebook), An-Najah claimed in a statement at its website last year that the MOU was signed on September 10, 2014, while a 2015 Xpress Magazine interview with Abdulhadi presented it as a fait accompli.

At a November, 2015 AMED panel discussion on “Palestine, Iran, and Syria” for which Campus Watch obtained a recording, Abdulhadi—in introducing notorious Israel-bashers Hatem Bazian of UC Berkeley and As’ad Abu Khalil of Cal State Stanislaus—spoke proudly of the partnership:

We . . . have the first agreement between San Francisco State and any Arab or Muslim communities . . . a memorandum of understanding with An-Najah University in Nablus, Palestine.

She reiterated her longstanding intention to do the same with another West Bank university, the Hamas-dominated Bir Zeit, and to set up a student exchange program, before delivering this telling disclaimer:

We believe that we need to produce knowledge for justice. We do not want to produce knowledge and teach students how to grow up and build bombs and destroy other people.

A century before American soldiers fought Muslim terrorism in the Middle East, they fought it in the Philippines. Their attackers were Moro Muslims whose savage fanaticism appeared inexplicable. A formerly friendly Muslim might suddenly attack American soldiers, local Muslim rulers promised friendship while secretly aiding the terrorists and the yellow left-wing press at home seized on every report of an atrocity to denounce American soldiers as murderers whose honor was forever soiled.

Much of what went on in that conflict, including the sacrifices of our soldiers, has been forgotten. The erasure has been so thorough that the media casually claims that the American forces did not use pig corpses and pig’s blood to deter Muslim terrorists. Media fact checks have deemed it a “legend”.

It’s not a legend. It’s history.

The practice began in the Spanish period. A source as mainstream as the New Cambridge History of Islam informs us that, “To discourage Juramentados, the Spaniards buried their corpses with dead pigs.”

Juramentados was the Spanish term for the Muslim Jihadists who carried out suicide attacks against Christians while shouting about Allah. American forces, who had little experience with Muslim terrorists, adopted the term and the Spanish tactics of burying Muslim terrorists alongside dead pigs.

It was a less sensitive age and even the New York Times blithely observed that, “The Moros, though they still admire these frenzied exits from the world, have practically ceased to utilize them, since when a pig and a man occupy a single grave the future of the one and the other are in their opinions about equal.”

The New York Times conceded that the story “shocked a large number of sensitive people,” but concluded that, “while regretting the necessity of adopting a plan so repugnant to humane ideas, we also note that the Moros can stop its application as soon as they choose, and therefore we feel no impulse either to condemn its invention or to advise its abandonment. The scheme involves the waste of a certain amount of pork, but pork in hot climates is an unwholesome diet, anyhow, and the less of it our soldiers and other ‘infidels’ in the Philippines have to eat the better for them.”

Colonel Willis A. Wallace of the 15th Cavalry claimed credit for innovating the practice in March 1903 to dissuade the Muslim terrorist who believed that “every Christian he kills places him so much closer in contact with the Mohammedan heaven.”

“Conviction and punishment of these men seemed to have no effect,” Colonel Wallace related. After a “more than usually atrocious slaughter” in the marketplace, he had the bodies of the killers placed on display and encouraged “all the Moros in the vicinity who cared to do so to come and see the remains”.

A professor at Oberlin College, one of the most prestigious institutes of higher education in the country, has written and shared a series of Facebook posts claiming that Jews or Israelis control much of the world and are responsible for the 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo attacks and the rise of ISIS.

Joy Karega, an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition, shared a graphic shortly after the Charlie Hebdo shooting last year of an ISIS terrorist pulling off a mask resembling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The terrorist has a tattoo with a Star of David and the acronym “JSIL” – presumably a Jewish version of ISIL/ISIS. The picture includes graphic text implying that the murder of cartoonists was a “false flag” conspiracy designed to stop French support for Palestinians. In the accompanying status, Karega wrote, “This ain’t even hard. They unleashed Mossad on France and it’s clear why.” The Mossad is Israel’s national intelligence agency.

She wrote the same day that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the massive free-speech rally in Paris “uninvited and of course he went even when he was asked by Pres. Hollande (France) not to come. Netanyahu wanted to bend Hollande and French governmental officials over one more time in public just in case the message wasn’t received via Massod [sic] and the ‘attacks’ they orchestrated in Paris.” She neglected to mention that Netanayhu was in Paris to honor four Jews who were killed in a terror attack in a kosher supermarket that same week. Karega also wrote in November that ISIS was not really Islamic, but rather “a CIA and Mossad operation, and there’s too much information out here for the general public not to know this.”

Three SUNY Albany students are facing criminal charges after falsely claiming they were victims of a racially motivated attack on January 30. The three African American women, Ariel Agudio, Alexis Briggs, and Asha Burwell, all 20, will be charged with third-degree assault and with falsely reporting an incident.

Early Saturday morning on January 30, Agudio, Briggs, and Burwell claimed they were harassed and assaulted by a mob of white people while riding on a CDTA bus back to campus from the bars in Albany.

Their story involved 10-20 white students spewing racial epithets and punching and kicking them while on the bus.

After the alleged assault, at least two of the women took to Twitter and Instagram with their claims.

“I just got jumped on a bus while people hit us and called us the ‘n’ word and nobody helped us,” wrote one of the students.

“I got beat up by 20 people screaming racial slurs,” wrote another, later adding that “a whole bunch of guys started hitting me and my two friends.”

One of them also wrote on Twitter: “I begged people to help us and instead of help they told us to shut the (bleep) up and continuously hit us in the head.”

Asha Burwell tweeted: “I can’t believe I just experienced what it’s like to be beaten because of the color of my skin.”

Her brother, San Diego Chargers lineman Tyreek Burwell, tweeted a threatening message to a student he thought hurt his sister.

Update: Mizzou uses its ultimate muscle against Melissa Click By Ethel C. Fenig

Using its ultimate muscle and getting her out of there, the University of Missouri at Columbia fired assistant professor of communications Melissa Click because, as the official statement bluntly stated:

The board believes that Dr. Click’s conduct was not compatible with university policies and did not meet expectations for a university faculty member. The circumstances surrounding Dr. Click’s behavior, both at a protest in October when she tried to interfere with police officers who were carrying out their duties, and at a rally in November, when she interfered with members of the media and students who were exercising their rights in a public space and called for intimidation against one of our students, we believe demands serious action.

The board respects Dr. Click’s right to express her views and does not base this decision on her support for students engaged in protest or their views. However, Dr. Click was not entitled to interfere with the rights of others, to confront members of law enforcement or to encourage potential physical intimidation against a student.

The photo of an angry Click, arms upraised, macro-aggressively shouting, “Hey who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” at the November rally mentioned in the statement above, quickly became a symbol of the protest at Mizzou, summarizing the out-of-control, intimidating behavior by some students and faculty on college campuses across the nation against those who do not agree with their world vision.

Oh, by the way, did you notice that Ms. Click, whose specialty is teaching communications, was attempting to halt communications and media people, whose opinions differed from hers, from communicating? And was communicating by force? Is this how she was teaching communications in class?