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What does ‘a Jewish state’ mean? Should there be a separation between shul and state? By MOSHE DANN

Posted By on April 30th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/judaism/jewish-holidays/what-does-a-jewish-state-mean-626097

A fundamental misunderstanding has dominated the discussion about this question. Does a Jewish state mean one that is run according to Halacha? Entangled in questions of interpretation and authority, the State of Israel struggles with this issue daily and in myriad ways. What is the place of secular, non-religious Jews? How can individual freedom be protected? Should there be a separation between shul and state?

The idea of a Jewish state is not about the role of Jewish law, a realm of rabbinic discourse, but about how a political structure can incorporate all of its constituent elements into a dynamic, organic whole. The function of a Jewish state is to provide by virtue of its sovereignty the basis of Jewish civilization, a context for Judaism to grow and develop, Jewish existence, a consciousness of what it means to be a Jew.

Jewish civilization and Jewish sovereignty

For Jews in Israel, the struggle to survive is often taken for granted. A fact of life that punches us with every terrorist attack, pounds with every anti-Jewish Arab riot and pains with condemnations by UN agencies and European Union diplomats. It’s nothing new; Jews have lived with persecution and the threat of extinction for millennia. It’s in our blood. We breathe our vulnerability, our eyes search for escape. Many assimilate and drop out, some join the perpetrators and turn on their own. And yet the fragile DNA of Jewish living persists.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Gates Praises China’s Response to Coronavirus, Slams U.S. By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/04/29/bill-gates-says-china-did-a-lot-of-things-right-on-coronavirus-slams-u-s-response-n386613

In an interview on Tuesday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates dismissed calls to hold China’s Communist Party accountable for lying to the rest of the world and enabling the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Gates said China “did a lot of things right,” while slamming America’s response. He insisted that any move to hold China accountable would be a “distraction.”

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria noted that many in Washington, D.C. want to hold China accountable. “Far from cooperating with the second-largest economy in the world, it is China that is to blame for this virus,” Zakaria explained. “How would you respond to the charge that the Chinese covered this up, they essentially deceived the rest of the world, and as a result, they should be held in some way responsible for this?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s a timely thing because it doesn’t affect how we act today,” Gates said. “China did a lot of things right at the beginning. Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and say, well, they missed some things. Some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place and they avoided the incredible economic pain, and it’s sad that even the U.S. — that you would have expected to do this well — did it particularly poorly.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Stacey Abrams on Tara Reade Allegation: Biden ‘Will Make Women Proud as President’ By Zachary Evans

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stacey-abrams-on-tara-reade-allegation-biden-will-make-women-proud-as-president/

“I stand by [former] vice president Biden,” Gillibrand told reporters during a conference call. “He’s devoted his life to supporting women and he has vehemently denied this allegation.”

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Tuesday said she backed Joe Biden despite new allegations of sexual assault against the former vice president.

“I believe women deserve to be heard, and I believe that has happened here,” Abrams told the Huffington Post. “The allegations have been heard and looked into, and for too many women, often, that is not the case. The New York Times conducted a thorough investigation, and nothing in the Times review or any other later reports suggests anything other than what I already know about Joe Biden: That he will make women proud as the next President of the United States.”

Abrams has been lobbying to be Biden’s pick for vice president, declaring her intentions publicly and, before Biden’s presumptive victory, meeting with Democratic candidates privately regarding the position.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Moment of Truth By Ashoka Mody

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/europes-moment-of-truth/

The COVID-19 crisis has pushed the euro zone to its breaking point.

O n April 16, responding to the COVID-19 crisis, French president Emmanuel Macron said Europe had arrived at its “moment of truth.” Economics is a “moral science,” he insisted. The euro zone’s financially stronger nations, therefore, have an obligation to look after their weakest partners by establishing a fund that “could issue common debt backed by a common guarantee.” It was the expected high-minded call for a technocratic solution, and it dodged the fundamental underlying political question. In a euro zone still based on nation-states, the strong, broadly speaking, ‘northern’ members have always asked why they should aid their weaker southern counterparts. Today, leaders of those northern states are being called to help the southern members on a scale never before contemplated. Not surprisingly, when they all met in a videoconference on April 23, they ignored Macron.

Europe is indeed at a moment of truth, but European politicians have yet to grasp how bleak that truth really is. All economic forecasts today are too optimistic. Even the strongest European countries will have their hands full coping with domestic economic distress. In such conditions, everyone is on his own. Cooperation is hard enough within federal states, as recent tensions in Germany and even more so the U.S. demonstrate. Cooperation on the scale required within the euro zone, based as it is on the E.U.’s confederation of nation-states, would require a remarkable political revolution.

All economic forecasts are optimistic

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

3 Digital Realities Arising From The Covid19 Pandemic Chuck Brooks

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/04/28/3-digital-realities-arising-from-the-covid19-pandemic/#14c1c8e634dc

The Covid19 pandemic has brought misery to most of the world. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic we do have a better ability to surveil the virus ecosystem and process lessons learned through our digital technologies. There are many lessons still to learn, but three digital realities can guide our future outlook.  

Hospitals And Healthcare Facilities Are Critical Assets That Need To Be Cyber Protected

During the Covid19 Hospitals and healthcare providers have demonstrated the critical importance to our economy and lives. While doctors, nurses and health workers are in the front lines fighting for patients survival, their medical facilities have been bombarded with cyber-attacks, including phishing emails, malicious malware and ransomware. Recently ransomware took down the website of the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District in Illinois, USA. NRC Health, a company that supplies software to healthcare organizations was also hit by a ransomware attack.

The reality is that hospitals are logical hacker targets. Medical care has become more networked and interconnected via computers and devices, and the digital landscape of health administrators, hospitals, and patients, has become increasingly vulnerable. Hospitals are  susceptible to cyber threats because of the large data flows many points of vulnerability throughout their various systems. It is not only the enterprise networks, medical devices such as ventilators, monitors, pumps, electrocardiographs, lasers, medical apps, infusion pumps, and diagnostic imaging systems are also hacker targets.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Who Wrote This Pro-Communist China Article? CNN Or Xi Jinping?By Kylee Zempel

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/29/who-wrote-this-pro-communist-china-article-cnn-or-xi-jinping/

This kind of false information from CNN demonstrates the U.S. mainstream media cannot be trusted so long as it continues to do the bidding of the Communist Party of China.

While the world runs damage control on a global pandemic that originated in communist China, CNN is praising China’s “model of control” and parroting Chinese propaganda in a story that reads as though it were written by none other than dictator Xi Jinping himself.

In an article Wednesday titled “China’s model of control has been blamed for the coronavirus crisis, but for some it’s looking increasingly attractive,” CNN’s James Griffiths props up the Chinese Communist Party’s coronavirus response, parroting Chinese media’s duplicitous claims that the country sufficiently control of the virus, while downplaying the CCP’s role in spreading COVID-19 to the rest of the world. The article’s inaccuracy is underscored by its internal contradictions, such as acknowledging state-run media as propaganda but then regurgitating its claims.

CNN Acknowledges Chinese Propaganda, Repeats It Anyway

After guilting “numerous Western politicians, particularly on the right” for blaming the CCP for the pandemic, CNN notes that the virus did indeed originate in China, but couches it in laudatory language. “[F]or some, the Beijing model is not necessarily looking so bad,” Griffiths says. “China … has coped with the ensuing pandemic far better than many other countries.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

AN EGREGIOUS STATISTICAL HORROR STORY  By George Gilder

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2020/04/an-egregious-statistical-horror-story/  

With the latest reports of plummeting death rates from all causes, this crisis is over.

The pandemic of doom erupted as a panic of pols and is now a comedy of Mash-minded med admins and stooges, covering their ifs ands and butts with ever more morbid and distorted statistics.

The crisis now will hit the politicians and political Doctor Fauci who gullibly accepted and trumpeted what statistician William Briggs calls “the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time.”

An egregious statistical horror story of millions of projected deaths, suffused with incense and lugubrious accents from Imperial College of London to Harvard School of Public Health, prompted the pols to impose a vandalistic lockdown on the economy. It would have been an outrage even if the assumptions were not wildly astronomically wrong.

Flattening the curve was always a fool’s errand that widened the damage.

President Trump had better take notice. He will soon own this gigantic botch of policy and leadership. No one will notice that his opponents urged even more panicky blunders.

As Briggs shows (see link), the latest figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Deaths are lower than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015, slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is imparted by population growth.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Remember the Hong Kong flu? Carol Brown

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/remember_the_hong_kong_flu.html

An I’m-so-cute-and-clever reporter recently asked the president if he deserved to be re-elected given the number of deaths from coronavirus, noting that the number is greater than American fatalities from the Vietnam war.

People can always find something as a point of comparison as if that automatically adds weight to what they are implying. No doubt this reporter thought stats from the Vietnam war added gravitas to her query.

In any case, her disrespectful and rude question didn’t deserve to be dignified with an answer. But Trump answered her anyway. Unfortunately, he didn’t use the opportunity to his advantage by giving her a little history lesson, as discussed at The Daily Wire:

…She may have been unaware that at the height of the Vietnam war, there was something that killed more Americans than the war did, and it was a similar virus — and no one questioned whether a president should be elected or not because of the virus, known as the Hong Kong Flu.

In 1968-69, the Hong Kong flu ravaged the world; it wound up killing more than one million people worldwide, over 100,000 of them in the United States. No lockdowns were imposed and people still went to work, albeit lessening bus travel and implementing social distancing and more washing of their hands.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

To Prepare for COVID-19 Vaccine, Let’s Ensure Manufacturing Capacity Will Meet Demand Edmund Haislmaier

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/04/28/to-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-lets-ensure-manufacturing-capacity-will-meet-demand/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=to-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-lets-ensure-manufacturing-capacity-will-meet-demand?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWXprd1l6azRaalV5T1RSayIsInQiOiJMUitrRE9ySFlCczlwQlcra0pERXd5WE9NNTU5aEJcL0llbWVmQUhvU2dMSnpVVEF6dWg5R0ppZVZBaG82aHpkZG5FWkdqY1Ntc1BnR29kRkhGdkMxbmY5emJLZDllY1l5dFZJMXVcL0VnU2xRZ2ZHU3pTSTdFSmJaNmRLVlVsRlwvWSJ9

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, in collaboration with scientists in academia and government, are working flat-out to develop drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent COVID-19.

Although a vaccine is still months away, policymakers and the public should ask now: If and when their efforts succeed, will there be sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet the likely enormous demand?  

Fortunately, thanks to legislation passed by Congress back in 2004, President Donald Trump and his administration already have the authority they need to support and incentivize private companies with the relevant expertise and skills to build out manufacturing capacity as quickly as humanly possible.

Private industry faces significant risks in building manufacturing capacity at this stage. Given the national interest in making a vaccine available, the president should task his administration with acting now to prepare this capacity. 

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

How It Works

The Project BioShield Act of 2004 gave the Department of Homeland Security authority to determine if a chemical, biological, or radiological agent presents “a material threat against the United States population sufficient to affect national security.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

The House of Representatives has identified itself as a non-essential service By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 29th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/the_house_of_representatives_has_identified_itself_as_a_nonessential_service.html

The original plan in Washington, D.C., was for both the Senate and the House to reconvene on May 4. News broke on Tuesday, though, that the House will not be returning to work. It turns out that so many members of the House panicked at the thought of working once more for the American people that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was forced to announce that the House would remain closed next week (emphasis added):

We made a judgment that we will not come back next week but that we hope to come back very soon,” Hoyer told reporters on a press call.

Hoyer said he and Pelosi made the decision to halt plans to return after consulting Monday evening with the Capitol’s attending physician, who warned that lawmakers could be at risk given the still-rising number of coronavirus cases in the Washington, D.C. area. Nearly 4,000 people have tested positive in D.C., as of Monday, plus thousands more in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

“We had no choice. If the Capitol physician recommends that we not come back, then we have to take that guidance,” Pelosi told reporters on a separate call Tuesday afternoon.

Pelosi’s statement that “we had no choice” is a load of bull manure. All over America, people have been making choices to keep the country functional: Healthcare workers, truckers, factory workers, store clerks, sanitation workers, and many more. The list is endless.