RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a wide-ranging conversation on the threat posed by political correctness and the “culture of comfort” to the wellbeing of American universities, Lawrence Summers discusses his opposition to the faculty movement pressing for divestment from the Jewish state, along with his fight to return ROTC to campus. (Interview by Bill Kristol; video, 22 minutes.)

CH. 1: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS ON CAMPUS Larry Summers reflects on political correctness and its consequences for our universities.

CH. 2: UNIVERSITIES AND THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH Summers explains why universities must be devoted to the pursuit of truth, even when uncomfortable.

CH. 3: ISRAEL BOYCOTTS AND ROTC Summers discusses several significant controversies from his tenure as president of Harvard.

CH. 4: THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION How might technological developments impact higher education? Summers and Kristol discuss.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say,Is a keen observer of life,The word intellectual suggests right away A man who’s untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden could well have carried his lampoon further by pointing out that any intellectual these days is most likely to be untrue to his country, his compatriots, and their culture. It seems to come naturally to some characters to condemn what they are expected to praise, and praise what they are expected to condemn. Accordingly, the assumption takes root that Western societies are unjust at many a level, and that they do things much better somewhere else.

One approved model used to be the Soviet Union, then it was Maoist China or Castro’s Cuba, and there are even socialists now who look to the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. A small but
vociferous number of academics and littérateurs repeatedly put across some inner vision that possesses them, falsifying reality in the manner ofartists.

The primary explanation of this phenomenon is snobbery. The works of a Gore Vidal, a Norman Mailer, a Harold Pinter, an Edward Said, and alltheir kind are exercises in superiority. To hold opinions about national politics and purposes contrary to those of everyone else seems like flattering evidence of being cleverer than the masses who can’t think
things out for themselves and don’t know they are being hoodwinked. In this mindset, doing harm is progressive and unpopularity is proof of courage.

A particular subsection of intellectuals comprises Jews who are engaged in a very old battle to define their identity. Scattered in many countries and living among Christians or Muslims, they were nonetheless always a nation, with a faith and languages and customs of their own. The obvious strategies for survival were to avoid drawing attention to themselves, to stay apart, to do whatever was asked by the powers that be, and finally to flee if persecution was threatening martyrdom.

Move over, vegetarian; the “climatarian” is now taking the smug seat at the dinner table.

This new term is a convergence of two political crusades: climate change and the food movement. It landed on the New York Times list of the top new food words for 2015. Here’s how the Grey Lady defined the term:

climatarian (n.) A diet whose primary goal is to reverse climate change. This includes eating locally produced food (to reduce energy spent in transportation), choosing pork and poultry instead of beef and lamb (to limit gas emissions), and using every part of ingredients (apple cores, cheese rinds, etc.) to limit food waste.

Climate activists are ratcheting up their attempt to blame global warming on food production and consumption, targeting the meat industry in particular. As the public tunes out stale climate-change rhetoric, climatarians hope to turn attention away from your SUV and onto your dinner plate.

They have plenty of help to make their case. A dire report released last November by Chatham House at the Royal Institute of International Affairs claims that the livestock sector is responsible for emitting about 15 percent of greenhouse gases, which “is equivalent to tailpipe emissions from all the world’s vehicles.” The United Nations pegs the figure even higher, at about 25 percent. They want us to think that if we cut out meat, we’d dramatically reduce emissions.

A specious report from the cancer agency of the World Health Organization last year warned that processed and red meat are carcinogenic. The group’s goal is to foment public fear about America’s favorite protein, despite a dearth of scientific evidence to back it up

In its latest act of illicit intervention in Israeli public life, the foreign (mainly U.S.)-funded “New Israel Fund” (where their ‘New Israel” means Palestine) has filled the Israeli press and the country’s billboards with a McCarthyist anti-democratic vilification poster that essentially endorses all who seek to deny freedom of speech in Israel to non-leftists.

It is the NIF’s response to the campaign by the student Zionist movement Im Tirtzu against ‘Shtulim’ (plants) in Israel, meaning foreign-funded anti-Israel subversives. In the NIF ad, it shows Yitzhak Rabin with the slogan “THEY already took care of that plant,” meaning “THEY” collectively murdered Rabin. By THEY the NIF does not mean Yigal Amir and his brother. It means all Israeli critics of the left.

For decades, the mantra of Israel’s anti-democratic left has been that Rabin’s death was caused by the exercise of freedom of speech by non-leftists in Israel, especially when they criticized Rabin and called him names. Their conclusion is that criticism of the left by non-leftists is a clear and present danger that produces murder and so must be suppressed. Just how they know that assassin Yigal Amir’s behavior was not caused by his attending law school has never been explained. In any case, the catechism of the left, which includes most journalists, is that the Rabin murder was caused by “incitement.” Curiously, they are not reminding people what Rabin really thought of leftist NGO B’tselem!

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/19/islamophobia-is-how-islamic-law-comes-to-america-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

His guest was Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know. The discussion focused on: “Islamophobia” is How Islamic Law Comes to America, unveiling how the accusation of “racism” is installing Sharia on our shores.

Don’t miss it!

Hear about the scholarly paper allegedly debunking the fact that there has been no pause in rising temperatures? Well it’s rubbish — and that verdict doesn’t come from climate sceptics but statisticians who really do believe the planet is overheating

It’s always undignified to get hit by ‘friendly fire’. That’s what’s happened to a group of Stanford University statistical experts and their late-2015 peer-reviewed paper “Debunking the climate hiatus” in the prestigious journal Climate Change.

Two statistician bloggers, Radford Neal and Grant Foster, have torn the paper apart, even though both agree – for other reasons – that the 15+ years pause or hiatus in warming is a statistical illusion. So, warmists, it’s no use making ad-hominem attacks on these bloggers because they’re on your side.

statisticianI am unqualified to comment on the statistical arguments, having barely passed Stats 101 at ANU in 1972, the era of the slide rule. So my point is about prima facie and uncorrected crud making its way into a prestigious peer-reviewed climate journal, which may now have to publish some soul-destroying corrections. And if that essay made it into “the science”, what other junk has also been elevated to scientific holy writ?

Critic Radford Neal (right) is Professor, Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto. He not only looks to me like a good statistician, but his papers have earned 22,600 citations, including 8,600 in the past half-decade. He sets out the status of the “Debunk” authors:

(Bala) Rajaratnam is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and of Environmental Earth System Science. (Joseph) Romano is a Professor of Statistics and of Economics. (Noah) Diffenbaugh is an Associate Professor of Earth System Science. (Michael) Tsiang is a PhD student. Climatic Change appears to be a reputable refereed journal, which is published by Springer, and which is cited in the latest IPCC report. The paper was touted in popular accounts as showing that the whole hiatus thing was mistaken — for instance, by Stanford University itself.

If Barack Obama is right, there is no Islamic terror wave today, just a few “incidents.”

Likewise, progressive politicians in Germany, Britain, Sweden and other parts of Europe say much the same thing: no need to worry — only isolated incidents.

The European progressives have been saying for years that reports of Muslim immigrants carrying out sexual assaults on non-Muslims, committing hate crimes against Jews, planning terror assaults on newspapers, cartoonists and authors are the products of “Islamophobia” — an unreasoning fear of Muslims.

The facts say that Obama and the European progressives are wrong. Indeed, the facts show that Obama and many European leaders — and leaders of public opinion such as newspaper editors and television directors — have been trying to hide the sad truth, by claiming that people who see the truth are suffering from a “phobia.”

The Soviet Union tried a similar tactic. For years, anyone who criticized Soviet policy was classified as a mental case, shipped off to a well-guarded mental asylum.

The recent New Year’s Eve rapes and assaults this year in in Cologne and other German towns by gangs of Muslim men were hidden by German politicians some of whom even tried to blame the women for bringing it on themselves.

In Britain, local authorities conspired for years to hide a wave of hundreds even thousands — of sexual abuse crimes committed by Muslim immigrants.

In France, police and media conspired to hide the rising tide of Muslim hate crimes against Jews, burying the stories or classifying them as property offenses. French newspapers began to take the terror a bit more seriously when the terrorists attacked a French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, a year ago.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Rabies vaccine is ready for US market. Following successful trials, Israeli biotech Kamada has launched its KamRAB anti-Rabies vaccine in 10 countries, including Israel. Kamada will now apply for a Biologics License Application (BLA) from the US FDA – the last step before offering a remedy for sale in the United States.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-firm-seeks-to-take-bite-out-of-rabies-vaccine-shortage/

Collagen wound treatment final trials success. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s CollPlant announced positive final trial results for Vergenix FG (Flowable Gel), designed for the treatment of chronic, hard to heal wounds and surgical wounds. 4 weeks after a single application, average wound closure was 80% with 45% fully closed.
http://www.collplant.com/userfiles/1a9b1870-e5f1-4d4c-bacc-9e18ea96183f.pdf

Blood test for Alzheimer’s. Israeli biotech NeuroQuest is to begin clinical trials of its blood test for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Human trials in Israel have already proved 87% accurate – with blood tests, anything over 70% is considered medically significant.
http://www.israel21c.org/blood-test-for-alzheimers-begins-clinical-trials/

Non-implant heart valve treatment. Israel’s Pi-Cardia has developed the Leaflex Catheter System – a novel non-implant based technology for treating patients with aortic valve stenosis, rather than replacing the heart valve. Pi-Cardia has just raised $10 million to help complete development of a second-generation device.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-catheter-co-pi-cardia-raises-10m-1001094130

Faster diagnosis of a heart attack. Dr Amos Danielli, now of Israel’s Bar Ilan University, developed technology at Tel Aviv University to identify minute quantities of chemicals using magnetic particles attached to fluorescent molecules. One use is to detect the protein Troponin, an indicator of an imminent heart attack. Dr Danielli has founded the company MagBiosense which has won a NIS 900,000 grant from the BIRD foundation. http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-magbiosense-to-shorten-heart-patients-er-wait-time-1001093195

Israel hosts emergency response conference. Israel hosted hundreds of delegates from 30 countries, plus the World Health Organization, at the Fourth Israeli International Conference on Healthcare System, Preparedness and Response to Emergencies and Disasters in Tel Aviv and Beersheva.
http://www.israel21c.org/200-international-er-specialists-gather-in-israel/

Helping us get to 120. Israeli-born Technion graduate Dr Nir Barzilai is now director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. As he approaches his 60th birthday himself, he is working with the US FDA on treatments that could make everyone live a lot longer.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/want-to-live-till-120-this-professor-works-on-drugs-that-could-get-you-close/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK_1HKRnoe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnMmtr2uAcM

President Obama enters his final year as President having given up on trying to resolve the Jewish-Arab conflict – following in the footsteps of so many other American Presidents whose similarly-shared lofty and noble aspirations ended in abject failure.

In Obama’s case his inability to fully comprehend Jewish history and the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel was the catalyst for his inevitable failure – as tellingly illustrated in his landmark speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009:

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

Israel’s current Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dore Gold, has now revealed how Israel’s then leadership viewed Obama’s above remarks in this frank exchange published in Frontline on 6 January:

Like the vagaries of the weather itself, true believers in man-caused global warming twist with the wind as challenges to their beliefs blow by. For example, I recently pointed out to a graduate of a large, well-respected university that one of the highly credentialed, long-time professors in the university’s atmospheric sciences department was an outspoken skeptic of disastrous anthropogenic global climate change. The graduate promptly responded by informing me that it was well-known that this professor was off medication, literally “nuts,” and this is why the professor was outspoken (even to the point of maintaining a popular contrarian website) regarding their fantasy that humans are not likely to have much culpability for cataclysmic climate change.

So, doing some twisting myself, I suddenly realized how much sense this argument made. Professors who believe that they can confidently predict the global climate decades from now are on medication. When they go off their medication, they start to think differently. Other professors, still medicated, notice this independent thinking and become upset. (After all, settled science must not tolerate unsettled thinkers.) The flustered faculty, finding the uncomfortable situation a tough pill to swallow, cast aspersions on their antiseptic colleague, calling them nuts, off-their-medication, and the like, trying to shame the colleague back on sedation. Ultimately, the true-believer professors simply resort to shunning their loose-cannon colleague and go on with the palliative knowledge that climate will be calamitous as long as humans continue to live comfortably.