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GOOD NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on January 26th, 2020

http://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/ 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Fixing the root cause of diabetes. (TY WIN) Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Motti Chevion has developed Zygosid-50, the first treatment to restore near-normal cellular sensitivity to insulin, without side effects. Israel’s Concenter BioPharma is preparing to trial Zygosid-50 and give new hope to Type 2 diabetics.

https://www.israel21c.org/finally-a-pill-that-could-fix-the-root-cause-of-diabetes/

The doctor can see you now. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s RSIP Vision has developed an Artificial Intelligence-based image analysis solution for tissue diagnosis.  It assists doctors in multiple medical imaging fields: e.g. cardiology, pulmonology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, radiology, robotic surgery, microscopy and more.

https://www.rsipvision.com/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmCI2hBLrok

A clearer future for children. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s NovaSight has developed two products: EyeSwift uses eye-tracking technology to detect multiple vision problems in children (e.g. lazy-eye and squints). CureSight treats lazy-eye using 3D image algorithms and variable focusing, while the child watches entertaining videos.

https://nova-sight.com/about/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5HnxVW_JUo

Discovery prevents preemie lung collapse. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute built a 3D model of the lungs of a premature baby. They discovered that in standard respirators for babies an air jet could cause damage to the infant. They have now recommended reconfiguring the air flow, potentially saving many young lives.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/preemies-breathe-easier-with-israeli-breakthrough/

https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2020/01/innovation-for-infant-assisted-ventilation/

Micro robot is revealed. Israel’s Microbot Medical previously demonstrated a prototype of its self-cleaning shunt for cleaning blockages in the brain (see here). At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Microbot demonstrated LIBERTY – the world’s first fully disposable robotic system for endovascular procedures.

https://microbotmedical.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/microbot-medical-unveil-worlds-first-fully-disposable-robotic   https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/jpm-microbot-medical-unveils-disposable-device-for-remote-catheter-procedures

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment Ratings Not Strong, Dropping Each Day People just do not care. by Mary Chastain

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/01/tds-fatigue-continues-impeachment-ratings-not-strong-dropping-each-day/

The actual impeachment trial has lower ratings and each day loses more viewers.

Joe Concha

✔ @JoeConchaTV

Context:
20.5M watched the Kavanaugh hearings
19.5M watched Comey testify before the Sen. Intel Cmte
16M watched Michael Cohen testify Oversight Cmte
13.1M watched Day 1 of the House impeachment hearings
11M watched Day 1 of the Senate trial on Tuesdayhttps://thehill.com/homenews/media/479683-89-million-watched-first-day-of-opening-arguments-in-trump-impeachment-trial …

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New EU Report on Integration Misses the Point by Judith Bergman

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15376/eu-integration-report

It is worth noticing that the European Commission places the responsibility for integration of third-country nationals exclusively on the shoulders of EU member states.

The most conspicuous aspect of the report is how it insists that integration of people who have come mainly from the Middle East and Africa is merely an issue of ensuring that the rights that they are entitled to under EU and national laws be fulfilled and everyone will live happily ever after. It takes a lot of denial of the facts to reach such a conclusion….

First, the report appears to operate on the premise that EU countries have unlimited resources at their disposal with which to care for third country nationals. It completely ignores, for example, that countries such as Sweden, as a result of the high number of migrants that they have taken in, are now experiencing financial hardships that make it difficult even properly to take care of their own nationals.

Second, the report completely disregards how poorly the project of multiculturalism in Europe, including the integration of people from the Middle East and Africa, has fared until now.

The Six Country Immigrant Integration Comparative Survey… conducted 9,000 telephone interviews in Germany, France, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and Sweden. The respondents were Turkish and Moroccan immigrants. Two thirds of the Muslims interviewed said that religious rules were more important to them than the laws of the country in which they lived.

The EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights instead has chosen to ignore reality. The question is why.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights recently published a report in which it warned Europe against creating a “lost generation” of migrants aged 16-24, who had arrived in Europe between 2015 and 2018. The report focuses particularly on the experiences of those young people who arrived in 2015-16 and looks specifically at the five EU member states with the most asylum applicants: Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. The report also includes Greece, as it is a first EU member state of arrival.

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Donald Trump’s America: A vast improvement By Amil Imani

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/donald_trumps_america_a_vast_improvement.html

“We are making America stronger, prouder, and greater than ever before.”

—President Donald J. Trump

No president in the history of the United States has achieved as much in his first three years in his first term in office as has President Donald Trump.  Meanwhile, no president in the history of America has been subjected to such incessant vile and unjustified attacks as has President Trump.  Why?  Because he believes in American exceptionalism, not globalism.

“Make America Great Again.”  Just a slogan, the people of failure shout back.  The Obama/Biden team had failed us for eight years in every aspect of our lives. To the leftists, failure is not only normal; it is expected.

The list of failures for the previous administration is so long and glaring that I hardly need to repeat all of them here.  Under the previous administration, once well paid manufacturing jobs had disappeared and were relocated to other countries.  President Trump managed to reverse this trend and brought back many manufacturing jobs.  Before President Trump at the helm, huge swaths of this nation from northern New York to the great states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and many others, previously vibrant manufacturing regions, looked like ghost towns, but now they have come back, and people are optimistic about the future of this country.

During a PBS town hall, Obama referenced Trump’s promise to bring back jobs to the United States when talking about manufacturing.

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The tape of Trump seeking to dismiss Amb. Yovanovitch is a nothing burger By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_tape_of_trump_seeking_to_dismiss_amb_yovanovitch_is_a_nothing_burger.html

Democrats are excited that a tape has emerged in which Trump can be heard saying that he wants to have Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch fired, for they see it as more impeachment fodder. The tape, however, as is the case with so many things that excite Democrats, is actually nothing special.

It’s not clear how someone recorded a tape of a private dinner party on April 30, 2018, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. That itself ought to be a scandal. It’s also not clear how ABC got a copy of the tape, another scandal.

Among the attendees were Trump, Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Fruman. Trump has disclaimed knowing Parnas, describing him as a groupie. Assuming that Trump is speaking the truth about Parnas (who now accuses Trump of all sorts of heinous behavior), he means that he was aware of Parnas, but that Parnas was such a meaningless, peripheral individual he made no impression on a man who routinely sees, speaks with, and even dines with thousands of people a year.

At the dinner, Trump apparently learned for the first time that Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama holdover, had been bad-mouthing him to the Ukrainians:

Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

A British feminist says men who dislike “woke” women are destroying the world By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/a_british_feminist_says_men_who_dislike_woke_women_are_destroying_the_world.html

British actor Laurence Fox became a target when he refused to accept allegations about overarching white racism and toxic masculinity in Britain. He recently earned additional ire from the left when he announced in a Sunday Times article that he does not “date woke women.”

Woke woman Vicky Spratt was outraged. In an article at Refinery29 entitled “The Dangerous Rise Of Men Who Won’t Date “Woke” Women,”* she wrote,

Laurence Fox – who you perhaps only knew as Billie Piper’s ex-husband because you’ve never seen Lewis (what?) – does not date “woke” women who he believes are being taught that they are “victims”, irrespective of whether they are right or not.

[snip]

Not wanting to date “woke” women, far from being laughable, is actually one of the more insidious aspects of it. Spend an afternoon on any major dating app and you’ll come across (generally white) men saying openly sexist and misogynistic things. They might say “no psychos” or that they “fucking hate big eyebrows” in their bios. And, by and large, they also tend to hold extremely right-wing views and see themselves as victims of liberal thinking.

To Spratt, men who won’t date “woke” women are far-right wackos who like Jordan Peterson even though he denies white privilege and urges millennials to stop being social justice warriors. Worse, aside from the “incels” (heterosexual men who have given up on women), Spratt says that evil anti-woke-woman men are becoming right-wing!

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Righteous Anger vs. Politics as Usual By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/righteous_anger_vs_politics_as_usual.html

There is anger and then there is righteous anger. Peter Finch yelling out the window, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

From Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, where parts of a whole are coming undone, to Hong Kong to Puerto Rico to France and Venezuela, people are mad as hell.

Consider Lebanon. Independent in 1943, but occupied by Syria from 1975-2005, and brought into Iran’s orbit through the creation of Hezb’allah in the early 1980s, the same constellation of politicians have held power since the end of the civil war in 1990. Americans appear to worry most about the security implications of Hezb’allah, a U.S.-designated terror organization with its own army and a drug/weapons/money racket in South America, pulling strings in Beirut. And worry, too, about the U.S. armed and trained Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), working alongside and sometimes in cooperation with Hezb’allah. Hassan Nasrallah calls the LAF “a partner.”

But how did Lebanon come to this point and why are people angry now?

Multiethnic and multicultural, Lebanese politics are sliced into sectarian segments; you are Druze or Shiite or Maronite Christian. The government has no national commitments, only confessional ones, which makes it easy to set one group against another, leaving the best-armed and richest on top, i.e., Hezb’allah. That is also a recipe for corruption — take care of your own and the devil take the rest, also the devil is the rest.  Lebanon ranks 147th out of 183 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Index. There are 6-7 million Lebanese (numbers vary widely because so many live abroad). Government debt is $89.5 billion and interest payments consumed 48 percent of domestic government revenues in 2016. The debt-to-GDP ratio is 151% with an annual growth rate of negative 0.2 percent for 2019. The Lebanese pound has lost more than 60 percent of its value in recent weeks on the black market. 

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

MARILYN PENN: A REVIEW OF JO JO RABBIT

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

http://politicalmavens.com/

In order to succeed, satire and parody require a common understanding of what is being satirized. If the audience doesn’t have this, satire quickly degenerates into flat-tire. Sadly, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, most Americans have little idea of the history of World War II and the extent of brutality that tortured and murdered six million Jews, one million of whom were children.

The elite private school Fieldston in Riverdale which has a significant population of Jewish students has had two episodes of anti-semiitism, the first featuring swastikas that appeared in hallways and classrooms in 2015. The school initially explained the swastika as an ancient symbol of peace without mentioning the word Holocaust, and only after objections from parents, did the school call an assembly to refer to the symbol in connection with the murder of six million Jews. In October 2019, a Muslim speaker from Columbia Law School spoke at Fieldston and compared the Israeli survivors of the Holocaust to Nazis, accusing them of similar violence against Palestinians It took a month before the school responded simply by reaffirming their firmly held values without specifying what these are or condemning the outrageous comparison.

The academic response to Israel Apartheid Week on campuses across the U.S. is another example of refusal to deal with the dangers of anti-semitism No other minority would be continually pilloried in this way on any American campus but objections to turning Jewish students into pariahs have been sporadic at best, and the accompanying BDS movement, directed solely at Israel, has been supported by many campus groups including faculty.

Now for JoJo Rabbit, a film about a ten year old boy infatuated with Hitler and thrilled to be a part of Hitler Youth. Hitler appears to the boy, remaining invisible to everyone else, and the two have lively exchanges about Nazis, Jews and the need to kill them whenever possible. Oddly enough in a movie that takes place during the war, there is no mention of ghettos, concentration camps or mass shootings into pits dug by the victims. The only Jew we see is a lovely young girl who is being hidden in the attic of JoJo’s house by his mother, a sympathetic Scarlett Johansson who pays for her kind empathy later in the film. Jews who were hiding during the war lived in sewers, underground cellars, sometimes on a closet shelf for prolonged periods of time None of this is revealed or mentioned in this movie. Ironically, the only military violence we see is that of the Russian and American liberators who destroy JoJo’s town with armor, machine guns and mass explosions. If asked to review this movie, it wouldn’t be strange if a student reported that WW II was about the mass destruction of Germany.

What would the reaction of Hollywood and the Left be to a movie about illegal immigrant children who were being kept in “cages” if only one was shown in a comfortable waiting room and the only violence was that of the long lines of raucous adult immigrants storming the border fences? Would this pass as an acceptable subject for satire and would the above theoretical description be considered appropriate?

JoJo Rabbit ends with a quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
The Squad and Black Lives Matter would never allow that quote to be affixed to their contemporary complaints. To our eternal shame, it has become acceptable when it comes to the indescribable horror of the Holocaust.

JoJo Rabbit has been nominated for six Academy Awards incuding Best Picture of the Year.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum :Gantz’s stammering stance and Netanyahu’s mudslinging Kicking off a political campaign by pointing out the flaws of one’s opponent is par for the course, and nobody knows this better than Benny Gantz.

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Gantzs-stammering-stance-and-Netanyahus-mudslinging-615191

Of all the mud slung at Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, this week’s phony scandal surrounding comments he made about his key rival in the upcoming Knesset elections deserves a prize for the slimiest.

The orchestrated outrage in question followed the launch of the Likud Party campaign on Tuesday evening in Jerusalem. During the flashy event – which resembled a rock concert replete with adoring fans – Netanyahu ridiculed Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz for being indecisive and ill-fit to lead the country.The way he did this was to show a video clip of Gantz fumfering in response to questions about policy, and then to imitate the Blue and White leader’s faltering.

Making fun of the fact that Gantz’s entire platform is based on an “anybody but Bibi” mantra, Netanyahu said, “It used to be ‘either us or them.’ Today, it’s ‘either us or eh, eh, eh.’ Now the question is, ‘What would they be doing? What would they be doing if they were [heading] the government?”

Nothing unusual there. Kicking off a political campaign by pointing out the flaws of one’s opponent is par for the course. Nobody knows this better than Gantz, whose fledgling political career has consisted solely of attacks on Netanyahu.

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How A Bumbling Fool Marches From Triumph To Triumph Francis Menton

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-20-how-a-bumbling-fool-marches-from-triumph-to-triumph

I’m old enough to remember the press coverage of Ronald Reagan as President. It was not as uniformly and aggressively hostile as the current coverage of President Trump, but close. The gist was that this guy was a bumbling fool who didn’t understand anything about either foreign or domestic policy. He had gone to a nothing college that no one had ever heard of. All the smart people knew that the right foreign policy was to reach accommodations with the Soviet Union, but instead he put us at risk of World War III by calling it an “Evil Empire” and vowing to out-compete it. The smart people also knew that the right domestic policy was massively increasing government spending, but instead he fought to restrain the government’s domestic footprint.

The Soviet Union collapsed, and the economy soared.

I thought that Reagan was quite intelligent; but another possibility is that you don’t need to be all that intelligent to do a good job as President. All you need to do is to replace the progressive program of utopian fantasies and wishful thinking with a small dose of reality and common sense.