ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on November 17th, 2019

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Good results in sepsis treatment trial. As reported previously (see here)Israel’s Enlivex Therapeutics has developed Allocetra which rebalances the immune system. Allocetra was given to six patients suffering from severe sepsis at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. All survived.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-11/04/c_138528152.htm
 
Amazing medical innovations.  Great video by Naftali Hananya about Israeli medical innovations previously reported in this newsletter. It highlights nano eye drops to restore vision (see here); Savicell’s lung cancer test (see here); the multiple myeloma treatment XPOVIO (see here); and Relivion’s migraine headset (see here);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh3b5z1rqKM
 
Teva launches anti-cancer treatment. Israel’s Teva is launching Truxima, a biosimilar for Rituxan – Roche’s oncology treatment. It is initially targeted at non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma patients but also could treat rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3773475,00.html
 
Early diagnosis of autism. Professor Ilan Dinstein of Israel’s Ben Gurion University has developed a method of detecting children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from the early age of 18 months. He tracks eye-movements of children watching films. ASD children have significantly more idiosyncratic gaze patterns.
https://aabgu.org/bgu-professor-making-strides-in-autism-early-diagnosis/#8230;-early-diagnosis/
 
Another discovery about memory. Researchers from Ben-Gurion University working with Spanish scientists have discovered that single-cell organisms such as amoebas are capable of developing memory capabilities. The breakthrough could help treat patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
https://aabgu.org/memory-breakthrough-could-help-dementia-patients/
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5589348,00.html
 
Seven joint UK-Israel medical projects. The British-Israel research organization BIRAX is granting funds of £2.8 million to seven, new, three-year bilateral scientific research projects in the field of ageing. These focus on vascular, brain and eye diseases, plus diabetes and involve precision medicine and Artificial Intelligence.  
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/271385
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3773637,00.html
 
Sheba’s Innovation Center. (TY Stuart) Israel’s Sheba Medical Center has launched its ARC Innovation Center, with world-class medics plus top technology experts developing new approaches for treatment and rehabilitation. It is the first hospital in the world to provide a virtual reality rehab facility.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-israeli-hospitals-innovation-center-brings-personal-medicine-to-life/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbnRwXllIlM
 
The robot will see you now.  Israeli startup Diagnostic Robotics has developed an Artificial Intelligent Emergency Room triage robot that assesses the urgency of each patient to determine their priority in seeing a human doctor. The robot also provides the doctor with a preliminary diagnosis and recommendations.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3773621,00.html
 
Volunteer paramedic delivers 3 babies in 48 hours. Israel’s Issachar Weiss is a volunteer paramedic for Magen David Adom in the Tel Aviv area. He delivered one baby at 4:30am Sunday in Givatayim, another at 5am Monday in Bnei Brak and a third at 5pm Monday in Hatikvah Tel Aviv. It may be a new record.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/volunteer-paramedic-delivers-3-babies-in-48-hours/
 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Breaking Down the Fallout from Marie Yovanovitch’s Testimony By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 17th, 2019

Breaking Down the Fallout from Marie Yovanovitch’s Testimony She did not move the needle on impeachment, but the main event has always been 2020. There were fireworks aplenty, but the most important development during former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony at Friday’s House impeachment hearing was an undetonated bomb. Or was it just a dud? Ambassador […]

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

INTERMISSION

Posted By on November 16th, 2019

REGULAR POSTINGS WILL RESUME ON MONDAY NOVEMBER 18TH

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment Inquiry Is Bad . . . for Biden Schiff’s impeachment tribunal, aimed at Trump, is misfiring—and it comes at a precarious moment for the Biden campaign. Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/14/impeachment-inquiry-is-bad-for-biden/

Amid the consensus that Wednesday’s congressional testimony by the Beltway version of the Duke brothers (that’s a “Trading Places” reference, millennials) fell flat without any “pizazz,” Democrats undoubtedly are scrambling to create some fireworks next week.

House Intelligence Committee chairman and Hollywood wannabe-screenwriter Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) must be channeling his inner creative genius to fabricate a dramatic role for what Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) called “the low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to the boarded-up Trump-Russia collusion theater. One can only guess who will grab the spotlight; performances from eight more impeachment accomplices begin Tuesday.

Unfortunately for the tightly scripted Schiff, one name continues to make an unwanted cameo appearance: Hunter Biden.

As former Vice President Joe Biden’s partisan bodyguards in the press bury any criticism of Hunter’s lucrative overseas business deals—the Democratic presidential candidate has declared “war” on negative coverage of his son—Schiff arguably  is staging Biden’s biggest political liability for the American people to see, unfiltered.

The Press Can’t Ignore This for Long

Testimony from George Kent, a Ukraine expert in the State Department, must have Team Biden in a tizzy. On several occasions, Kent described Ukraine’s legacy of endemic corruption and the U.S. government’s attempts to curb fraud and political malfeasance in that country. Both Kent and Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, confirmed that Ukraine has received $1.5 billion in U.S. aid over the past several years.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump Derangement Syndrome Fatigue: Impeachment Viewership 32% Lower Than Comey Hearings

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/11/trump-derangement-syndrome-fatigue-impeachment-viewership-32-lower-than-comey-hearings/

Fatigue from Trump Derangement Syndrome? The first day of impeachment hearings only brought in 13.1 million viewers.

The number becomes bleaker considering how many channels carried the hearing.

The numbers for these major hearings have declined since the Comey hearings:

The 13,098,000 who tuned in on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN and PBS marks a 32 percent drop from the number of people who watched James Comey’s testimony to Senate Intelligence Committee in May 2017, which delivered more than 19 million viewers.

In February, former Trump personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony delivered 15.8 million viewers, while 13 million tuned in to see former special counsel Robert Mueller testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Global Warming Politics Are Dividing Us, Because That’s The Way The Alarmists Want It

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/15/global-warming-politics-are-dividing-us-because-thats-the-way-the-alarmists-want-it/

A CNN producer recently wrote an opinion piece headlined “Climate politics are tearing the West apart.” He got it about half right. They are tearing us apart but not for the reasons he thinks.

Johan Bader, an associate producer for “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” is in agreement with The Economist, which has declared: “environmentalism is emerging as Europe’s new culture war.” We’re seeing much the same in the U.S.

But the cultural divide is not simply “concerned citizens” who “are pouring into the streets to lambaste feckless politicians for failing to protect the planet” against neighbors who “inveigh against out-of-touch politicians for instituting environmental policies that fail to protect them.”

The schism has been caused by a coalition of anti-capitalists, arrogant academics, authoritarians who have a need to dictate to others, know-it-alls, those who relish the status of their imagined moral superiority, and inveterate virtue-signalers who have “othered” global warming skeptics as well as the agnostics who have legitimate concerns about how the policy solutions forced on them will change their lives.

The first group, the aggressors, believe that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is beneath them. These elitist bullies consider a conflicting opinion an indication of low intellect, or criminality, or both. That’s why they can so easily define skeptics as rubes and outlaws who should be caged.

The cultural gap has been made obvious by the Extinction Rebellion. In one of its more infamous tantrums, the “painfully middle-class agitators” went “to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work,” British columnist Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in Spiked.

The tension is not produced so much by one group being more well off than the other as it is one group thinking it is smarter than the other, and is therefore justified in hectoring and obstructing the othered group, and stealing its time. This plays out in the many efforts of true believers to “educate” their inferiors.

There is of course a religious element to the global warming scare, as well.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hong Kong’s Week of Rage Boils Over: ‘All Day All Night We Are Gonna Fight’ Clashes between protesters and police since Monday have turned universities into battlefields and gridlocked the city By Steven Russolillo, Joyu Wang and John Lyons

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-week-of-rage-boils-over-all-day-all-night-we-are-gonna-fight-11573803380

Antigovernment protesters and police shocked Hong Kong with some of the ugliest incidents in nearly six months of unrest this week, leaving the city’s leaders scrambling for a way to restore order under increasing pressure from Beijing.

A 70-year-old man died Thursday night after being hit in the head with a brick during a clash a day earlier. A 15-year-old boy was in critical condition on Wednesday, according to the Hospital Authority, which declined to comment on his current status. Local media said he sustained injuries after appearing to be hit in the head by a tear-gas canister. And police shot a 21-year-old protester on Monday; later, pro-democracy demonstrators set a man who argued with them on fire.

On Thursday in Brazil, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged a tough police response to the protests.

The Chinese government will “firmly support the Hong Kong police in strictly enforcing the law and firmly support the Hong Kong judicial bodies in severely punishing the violent criminals in accordance with the law,” Mr. Xi said. He made his comments on an international stage at a summit of leaders from emerging markets.

Clashes between protesters and police this week turned universities into battlefields, rendered highways and tunnels unusable, disrupted public transit and frequently left the city’s bustling financial district under a fog of tear gas. Shops across the city closed, further crippling an economy that has already tumbled into a recession. The Hang Seng Index, the city’s stock market, dropped 4.8%, its worst week since early August.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: An “Inverted Colonization” by Guy Millière

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15155/france-inverted-colonization

Soon after, Muslim organizations that had asked for students to have the right to wear the veil in schools also asked for a change in the school curriculum — in history, so that Muslim civilization would be presented in a more “correct” and “positive” way.

“If the way I dress disturbs you, leave my country”. — Signs at a demonstration, October 27, 2019.

“Any criticism of Islam is now blasphemy.” — Ivan Rioufol, columnist, Le Figaro, November 4, 2019.

Details lead one to see that the anti-Christian acts were mostly acts of church vandalism, the anti-Semitic acts were very often violent attacks against Jews or cemetery desecrations, and that the anti-Muslim acts were almost only anti-Muslim graffiti or the laying of slices of bacon the entrance to a mosque or in the mailbox of a Muslim organization. No Muslims were physically attacked.

“We are not in a project of assimilation.” — Yassine Belattar, former advisor to French President Emmanuel Macron, October 27, 2019.

Éric Zemmour has suggested that France is threatened not by a risk of “partition”, but by an inverted “colonization”.

On October 12, 2019, a meeting of the Regional Council of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté was held in Dijon, a quiet town in central France. A woman wearing a long black veil was in the audience, apparently accompanying a group of students. All at once, the head of the National Rally party group at the Regional Council, Julien Odoul, rose and said that the presence of a woman wearing an Islamic headscarf in a public building was incompatible with the values ​​of the French Republic:

“We are in a public building, we are in a democratic enclosure. Madame has all the time to keep her veil at home, in the street, but not here, not today. It’s the Republic, it’s secularism. It’s the law of the Republic, no ostentatious signs.”

He was neither threatening nor violent, yet his words immediately upset others in the room. A boy, apparently the son of the veiled woman, rushed crying into her arms. She then left the room slowly, accompanied by other children.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Deval Patrick Daydream Is this the answer for voters seeking a non-socialist non-Biden?

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deval-patrick-daydream-11573777283

There’s fashionably late, and then there’s showing up to a soiree as the dishes are being cleared. Which one is Deval Patrick ? On Thursday the former two-term Governor of Massachusetts joined the Democratic campaign for President. Nothing against the 17 other hopefuls, he said, but they’re selling either “nostalgia” or polarization: “It’s our way—our big idea—or no way.”

There’s something to this analysis. The Democratic war horse in the lead, Joe Biden, looks unsteady. Close behind are a proud socialist, Bernie Sanders, and a furtive one, Elizabeth Warren, both of whom pledge to eliminate private insurance used by some 170 million people. Far back lag the rest: a 30-something mayor, floundering Senators, Andrew Yang.

At least a few Democrats are now wondering if they can order off menu. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-Mayor of New York, is weighing a 2020 bid. Hillary Clinton, no introduction required, says she is “under enormous pressure from many, many, many people to think about it.” But those late entries are plausible in that Mr. Bloomberg is a billionaire and Mrs. Clinton is universally known.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Immunizing students from true diversity. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on November 15th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/academia-producing-men-and-women-without-chests-jack-kerwick/

“Learning, then, demands fortitude, an intestinal fortitude, in fact, to meet ideas that clash with one’s own certainties, and engage civilly with those who advance those ideas. When, however, the university promulgates and enforces with an iron hand an orthodoxy, thus, immunizing students from any and all ideas that conflict with that orthodoxy, it promotes softness, weakness, shallowness.”

At the risk of sounding redundant, the public nevertheless needs to be reminded of just how politicized—and, thus, intellectually flaccid—academia has become.

Real Clear Education recently published its “2019 Survey of Campus Speech Experts.” The report identifies those colleges and universities that are “best” and “worst” for “free speech and viewpoint diversity.”  That of the 22 invitees—“academics, pundits, and policy experts”—who accepted the invitation to participate in this study the vast majority (though not all) are right-leaning is instructive, for Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to express concern that professors will inject their politics into the classroom.

As a Pew Research Center study informs us, 79% of Republicans have this concern compared to only 17% of Democrats who do so. A comparable disparity exists between the 75% of Republicans versus the 31% of Democrats who are concerned that colleges are determined to shield students from perspectives that they may find offensive.

Yet Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to be concerned with viewpoint diversity precisely because it is the leftist ideology associated with Democrats that has long since prevailed in academia.

The panelists consistently ranked University of Chicago as the best of institutions when it comes to “speech climate.”  They just as consistently ranked Yale University as the institution in “most need for improvement” when it comes to this subject.

The panelists offered their thoughts as to why they ascribe as much importance as they do to the campus speech climate.  Below is a small, select handful of particularly noteworthy comments that represent the shared judgments of the entire panel: