MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Why Cancer Drugs Are Being Rationed The government squeeze on generic profits is leading to shortages.

Posted By on May 23rd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-shortages-price-controls-government-fda-white-house-cancer-treatments-b2d08ba4

Politicians like to grouse about high drug prices. Well, now we’re seeing what happens when drug prices are too low: Shortages of essential medicines, which are a portent of what’s to come with the Inflation Reduction Act’s price controls.

Drug shortages aren’t new, but the number in short supply has grown as generic prices have fallen. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists lists 301 drugs in short supply, up from 202 five years ago. These include many local anesthetics, basic hospital drugs, chemotherapy drugs and liquid albuterol for lung ailments.

The American Cancer Society warned this month that “first-line treatments for a number of cancers, including triple-negative breast cancer, ovarian cancer and leukemia often experienced by pediatric cancer patients,” are facing shortages that “could lead to delays in treatment that could result in worse outcomes.” Healthcare providers say they’re having to limit access to some drugs to the sickest patients. They can substitute therapeutic alternatives when possible, but this increases risk of medication errors and inferior results. What’s going on?

Headlines have focused on shortages of the ADHD drug Adderall and new weight-loss treatments, which owe to increased demand. But most drugs in short supply are older generics that are off-patent and complicated to make. Manufacturers have stopped producing them because profit margins are too thin, resulting in one or two suppliers.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Real Threat to Al-Aqsa Mosque is From Muslims, Not Jews by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19671/threat-al-aqsa-mosque

f anyone has been desecrating al-Aqsa Mosque, it is Muslims who have been rioting and using rocks and fireworks to attack police officers and Jewish visitors. Muslim rioters — not peaceful Jewish visitors — are the real threat to the sanctity of the mosque.

Israeli authorities have clarified that the route of the “flag parade” absolutely does not include entry into any mosque.

Assurances by the Israeli authorities, however, have not stopped Palestinians and other Muslims from spreading fake news and libels against Jews.

Iran’s terror proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have also used the celebrations in Jerusalem to spread the libel that Jews are planning to “desecrate” al-Aqsa Mosque.

As far as Hamas and other Palestinians are concerned, the very presence of Jews at their holy site and in Israel is supposedly a “provocation.”

Hamas and several terror groups in the Gaza Strip, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also repeated the lie that “al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger.”

When the terror groups talk about “resistance,” they are referring to the need for terrorism against Israel, including firing rockets from the Gaza Strip, and attacks by stabbing, shooting and car-ramming.

“The people of Palestine have no historical rights to Palestine. They have no right that dates back 2,000, 3,000, or 4,000 years. The right of the Canaanites to Palestine is equal to the pharaohs’ right to Egypt. Is it conceivable that any Muslim in Egypt would say: ‘I am Pharaonic and proud of it?’ Well, it is the same if a Muslim in Palestine said, ‘I am a Canaanite and proud of it.’ To hell with your Canaanite identity and to his Pharaonic identity. People, our history is simple and it is not ancient. It must not be said that the Palestinians have Canaanite roots. Our history dates back only 1,440 years…. The only thing you are allowed to say is: Oh Palestinians, you are Muslims.” — Issam Amira, Palestinian Islamic scholar, al-Aqsa Mosque, April14, 2023

The revival of the “al-Aqsa is in danger” libel is part of an ongoing effort by Palestinians and other Muslims to delegitimize and eliminate Israel. Palestinian leaders and Muslim “scholars” spread lies about Israel and Jews to encourage and justify terrorism.

The real threat to the mosque and other holy sites in Jerusalem is posed those Palestinians and Muslims who use battle cries to incite violence, terrorism and Jew-hate.

Incomprehensibly, much of the international community, the media, and even prominent self-declared “human rights” organizations persist in defaming Israel and ignoring this fabricated, toxic incitement by Palestinian and Muslim leaders.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Abandon the Swamp The only hope for the republic is to downgrade the place of Washington in our public life. The business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. That is not what the people want.  By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/abandon-the-swamp/

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

June 2023 Anti-Semitism Campus Diversity Is Campus Jew-Hatred Campus Diversity Is Campus Jew-Hatred How DEI is openly attempting to marginalize and silence Jewish students by Seth Mandel

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://www.commentary.org/articles/seth-mandel/campus-diversity-jew-hatred/

By every metric, American Jewish campus life is a shadow of what it once was. The City University of New York is losing the last two Jewish members of its 80-member senior leadership team—in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. Jewish enrollment in elite universities, most notably the Ivy League, is in free fall. And a sense of security on campuses nationwide has evaporated, as anti-Semitic incidents have hit all-time highs and students report hiding their Star of David pendants and taking winding paths to their campus Hillel.

By contrast, one area of American higher education has seen explosive growth: the programs and officers charged with spreading the gospel of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

This is not a coincidence.

Much like “Hate has no home here” lawn signs and “Coexist” bumper stickers, DEI university activity has become a reliable indicator of overt hostility to Israel and, at the very least, suspicion of any visible expression of Jewishness.

On campus, DEI bureaucracies are straightforward ideological enforcers. Their ideology views Jews as emissaries of (white) power. That’s why DEI officials aren’t merely indifferent to campus Jew-baiting, but its ringleaders.

Take CUNY. The taxpayer-funded university system’s pervasive anti-Semitism—harassment of students, administrators overheard complaining that there are “too many Jews” on the faculty, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction campaign to isolate Israel—is the subject of state and city investigations. Amid such complaints, CUNY’s chancellor in 2021 hired a new chief diversity officer, Saly Abd Alla, and put her in charge of investigating anti-Semitism.

Abd Alla was a firm supporter of BDS while working as civil-rights director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a powerful anti-Zionist pressure group. The “anti-discrimination portal” she oversees now at CUNY links to the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, which absolves BDS of Jew-hatred and undermines the more accepted definition of anti-Semitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Ice Cube suggesting blacks leave the Dem party Jason Walsh

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://hotair.com/headlines/2023/05/21/ice-cube-suggesting-blacks-leave-the-dem-party-n552199

Rapper and Hollywood actor Ice Cube has called on black Americans to reconsider voting for the Democrat Party because “nothing has changed.”

Ice Cube, whose real name is O’Shea Jackson, appeared on Full Send Podcast with hosts Kyle Forgeard and Steiny Steinberg, where he voiced his political views and criticisms of the Democrat Party.

Ice Cube has been working to bridge the gap between politicians and grassroots movements with projects like “Contract with Black America.”

In 2020, the rapper faced backlash for working with then-President Trump on his plan for black Americans.

Ice Cube defended working with Trump at the time, tweeting, “Every side is the Darkside for us here in America. They’re all the same until something changes for us. They all lie, and they all cheat, but we can’t afford not to negotiate with whoever is in power, or our condition in this country will never change. Our justice is bipartisan.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

As Michael Ordman who catalogs this dazzling list from Israel reminds us every week and 24/7: “Israelis have been revealing more innovations and activities to benefit humanity.”

In medicine, from A (Alzheimer’s) to Z (Zika virus) Israel researches and develops early detection and promising treatment options.

In computer technology, water saving and recycling, international rescue alerts and response, Israel provides outsize contributions to the entire world.

This week on May 25th the Jewish festival of Shavuot is celebrated with biblical heralding of the wheat harvest. How apposite to Israel’s outsize contributions to agriculture and food production to eradicate world hunger and famine.   rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Successful skin cancer treatment. (TY OurCrowd) A small trial of Alpha DaRT from Israel’s Alpha Tau (see here previously) was 100% successful in treating 10 patients with skin cancer. All were 100% clear at 12 weeks with no recurrence or toxicities in 24 weeks.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/05/11/2667240/0/en/Alpha-Tau-Announces-the-Publication-of-its-US-Multicenter-Pilot-Skin-Cancer-Trial-Results-in-JAMA-Network-Open.html  
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804784
 
Proton cancer therapy trials. Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center has partnered Israel’s P-Cure (see here previously) and has begun trials of its focused proton radiation therapy for cancer patients. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center is to install proton radiation machines from Belgium’s IBA.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/proton-therapy-touted-as-cancer-killer-without-side-effects-set-for-israel-debut/
 
Preventing strokes from CAD. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s InspireMD (see here previously) has just completed the first in-human trial of its CGuard Prime stent that opens blocked Carotid Arteries and traps dangerous emboli released. Carotid Artery Disease (CAD) can stop blood flow to the brain and cause a stroke.
https://www.inspiremd.com/en/press-center/inspiremd-announces-successful-first-in-human-procedure-utilizing-cguard-prime-its-next-generation-carotid-artery-stent-cas-platform/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6xXfhcT4zs
 
Why female Alzheimer’s patients rapidly decline. Hebrew University researchers have discovered that women lose certain mitochondria (maternally inherited) RNA molecules in their brains much faster than men. This adversely affects the neurotransmitter that plays a role in memory, learning, attention, and more.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-reveals-molecular-basis-for-female-alzheimers-patients-rapid-decline/   https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/371219
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/alz.13095
 
Where does creativity come from? A study at Israel’s Beilinson hospital is looking at why many Parkinson’s patients develop an obsessive desire to take up art or creative writing for the first time. Researchers are investigating if the area of the brain affected by the disease is also responsible for creativity.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/mrkqcjrrt
 
Hospital testing goes virtual. Israel’s Sheba Medical Center has partnered with Israel’s Mpcheck and Israel’s Teva to allow Teva’s employees to perform medical tests at their workplace or at home. Sheba Virtual Hospital’s “Beyond” tests include blood, urine, cervical cancer, hearing and more.                              
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-741898
https://mpcheck.co.il/
 
One number to call them all. Israel is to unify the emergency medical hotline number. Currently, each medical emergency service has its own number – 101 for Magen David Adom, 1221 for United Hatzalah etc. Subject to Knesset approval, the public will just call 101, which all services can respond to.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-742420
 
Biomed Israel 2023. One of the sessions at Biomed 2023 is personal nutrition. It is a field of technology based on multidisciplinary research that utilizes AI and machine learning to tailor unique nutrition recommendations.
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-742081
https://kenes-exhibitions.com/biomed/
 
Speak to an AI expert anytime. Israel’s Wolfson Medical Center in Holon is using artificial intelligence to monitor female cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy in partnership with Israel’s XOLTAR ai. Patients receive personal, round-the-clock support tailored to their individual needs based on AI analyzed data.
https://nocamels.com/2023/05/cancer-patients-get-revolutionary-ai-carers/
https://xoltar.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flYMdOfz7pQ
 
 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Absurdities of Our Age What cannot go on, will not go on and all the absurdities of the present will end with a bang not a whimper.  By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/the-absurdities-of-our-age/

A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples:  

Reparations  

How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations? 

The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. Its $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths with a foot of track.  

California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what? 

Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.  

Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.  

California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm.  

The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.  

Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.  

Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?  

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Another ‘mistake’ in New York: Nearly a million registered voters become ‘Democrats’ By Monica Showalter

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/another_mistake_in_new_york_nearly_a_million_registered_voters_become_democrats.html

An upstate New York printing company on a no-bid contract mailed out voter registration cards to New York’s Nassau County voters ahead of the June 27 primary — and somehow, everyone who got one is now a registered Democrat.

That’s weird stuff given that 60% of the registered voters in that county are Republican. Well, now they are all Democrats, at least until “corrected” registration cards can be mailed out.

Hey, just a flub, they’re saying. Nothing to see here, move along.

According to the New York Post:

An upstate printer has once again screwed up downstate election materials, this time by mailing registration cards to Nassau County’s nearly 1 million voters — identifying them all as Democrats.

“It’s a terrible error. People are upset. People are angry. There is a lot of confusion,” GOP County Executive Bruce Blakeman seethed at a Tuesday press conference.

Democrats make up about 40 percent of the county’s 972,000 voters, according to state Board of Election records from February.

Blakeman, though, who runs the Republicans, is a piece of work.

He can be heard dismissing his own party voters’ concerns as emotionalism and assuring everyone else that there’s nothing to see here, just a little printer error that doesn’t involve elected officials (who gave that company its no-bid contract):

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Barr Is His Own Worst Enemy By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/bill_barr_is_his_own_worst_enemy.html

Uniparty propagandist and Deep State shill Bill Barr is waddling from one television studio to the next to tell audiences that the feds will almost certainly indict Donald Trump by late summer for mishandling classified documents.  The Cheka FBI has been outed as a criminal enterprise engaged in subverting elections and spying on the American people, but sure, let’s get all worked up about whether the president of the United States — in whom the Constitution’s Article II executive powers are vested — has somehow inexplicably infringed his own declassification authority.  Although Augustus Gloop Barr can barely conceal his joy, this tiring new chapter in the never-ending “get Trump” saga comes off as yet another manifestation of Bizarro World, in which a group of criminals running the American government get to pretend that nobody is “above the law.”

Walrus Barr enjoys playing the “scolding father” who “knows best” in a worn-out daddy routine alongside scripted corporate news hosts performing for the cameras.  Although he remains a consummate Deep State stooge who will do anything to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the Oval Office, he also spends a great deal of TV time burnishing his “I’m the only adult in the room” bona fides.  He has called out New York State’s vindictive lawsuits against President Trump as a “political hit job” and “gross overreach.”  He has excoriated Democrat district attorney of New York Alvin Bragg’s Trump indictment as an “abomination” that “makes us look like a banana republic.”  He acknowledges that the Durham probe proves that “Russiagate” has not only been a “grave injustice” to Trump, but has also “vindicated” the president’s accurate denunciation of the Clinton-Obama Russia Hoax conspiracy as a “witch hunt” from the very beginning.  Barr readily admits, in other words, that state and federal prosecutors have shamelessly pursued Trump for recklessly and maliciously partisan reasons that have threatened both the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.  

After broadly recognizing the seriousness of the Deep State’s crimes and the depth of its depravity, though, loyal palace guard Barr then sweeps these horrific State crimes to the side, shakes his head in disgust, and instead blames his former boss for being “his own worst enemy.” 

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘FBI True’ Series – But What’s the Other Half of it? The real ugly – and treasonous – part. by David J. Baldovin

Posted By on May 22nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-true-series-but-whats-the-other-half-of-it/

A new series on Roku’s Paramount + Channel titled FBI True caught my attention and aroused my curiosity. It was put together by a retired FBI Agent, Anne Beagan who has founded her own production company, in concert with one Craig Turk. It features real agents talking about real cases, and is hosted by one of two retired agents, either Cindy Coppola or Kristy Kottis. The film footage is real, not reenacted

Two episodes in the Paramount TV series specifically caught my attention, one being the episode titled “Boston Marathon Manhunt;” the other being the “San Bernadino Mass Shooting.”

The location of these interviews is the Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor in downtown Manhattan. The opening introduction for each series goes something like this, in part, “In the FBI we make a lot of headlines. We understand why people want to tell stories about us. But they don’t know the half of it.”

I have watched several episodes and overall, in my opinion, it is a pretty good series. I enjoyed watching some of my retired colleagues talking about cases they worked on.

I would agree with the above quoted introduction narrative that my prior employer is certainly making a lot of headlines these days, of course not to the Bureau’s credit. Many of my active duty colleagues are apparently violating their oaths of office by aiding and abetting the Communist enemy within, having become the enforcement arm of an anti-American political party, here and here. But I digress.

Now, let us explore the real other “half of it” regarding these two TV episodes, probably unknown by many concerning the Marxist/Muslim Brotherhood enemy within.

I attribute my knowledge of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood to one Phil Haney,  deceased, (and others), a patriot and a founding member of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security,  author of “See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the  Government’s Submission to Jihad,” here.

I interviewed Phil for two days in 2019, prior to his 2020 demise. One can watch and listen to Haney here, and here, as he expounds on the Boston Marathon Jihad attack as well as the Jihadi attack in San Bernadino.

Predictably neither the words Islam or Jihad are mentioned in the respective TV episodes. The closest one comes is when retired Los Angeles Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Stephen Woolery comments that the San Bernadino shooters were “devout.” Devout what?