MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The CDC Pushes to Vaccinate Toddlers, Again Its decision to include Covid-19 shots in children’s schedules is based on far-too-flimsy evidence. Allysia Finley hedcut By Allysia Finley

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cdc-pushes-to-vaccinate-toddlers-again-advisory-committee-children-schedule-covid-19-fda-risks-shot-evidence-public-health-11666529146?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention trying to give vaccine skeptics a shot in the arm? That’s the message its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices sent last week with its vote to add Covid-19 vaccines to childhood vaccination schedules.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf stressed that the CDC isn’t mandating vaccines for kids. “Mandates are not the remit of either CDC or FDA,” he tweeted on Oct. 19. Didn’t the CDC argue the opposite in court when defending its mask requirement for public transportation?

It’s true that states and localities don’t have to follow the CDC’s recommendations when deciding which shots kids must receive to attend daycare and school, but they usually do. One CDC panelist said the vote was merely symbolic. But symbolism matters.

Why else did face masks become so controversial? Given the scant evidence supporting widespread use of nonmedical-grade masks, many conservatives perceived masking as another instance of liberals imposing scientifically baseless rituals on nonadherent Americans. The same is now true with vaccinating children.

Most conservatives don’t oppose vaccines per se. But never before has the CDC recommended, or the FDA authorized, a vaccine for children based on such thin evidence of benefits and lack of clarity on potential risks.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

This Bill Would Sanction Iran’s Leaders for Human Rights Crimes. Not a Single Democrat Supports It. Adam Kredo

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/this-bill-would-sanction-irans-leaders-for-human-rights-crimes-not-a-single-democrat-supports-it/

As the Iranian regime violently cracks down on growing nationwide protests, lawmakers’ attention is again on the atrocities committed at the hands of the Iranian regime. Yet not a single House Democrat has lent support to legislation that would sanction Iran’s supreme leader and his inner circle for mass human rights crimes, according to senior congressional sources familiar with the matter.

The bill, dubbed the Mahsa Amini Act after the 22-year-old Iranian woman who was killed by the regime’s morality police for improperly wearing her head covering, would “impose sanctions on the supreme leader of Iran and the president of Iran and their respective offices for human rights abuses and support for terrorism,” according to a copy of the measure obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Amini’s murder last month sparked nationwide anti-regime protests that threaten to topple the hardline Iranian government, which has reacted to the demonstrations with more violence, including beating, imprisoning, and shooting protesters.

The Republican-led bill was circulated to every single Democratic House office, but not a single one has yet to cosponsor the bill, two senior Republican congressional aides told the Free Beacon.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

From Oslo to Abraham REVIEW: ‘In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East—and How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It ‘Eli Lake

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/from-oslo-to-abraham/

There are few things Americans love more than a story that exposes the folly of snobs and experts. It explains the initial appeal of Donald Trump and the enduring appeal of Michael Crichton novels. We need specialists to make our complex economy work, but every now and again the eggheads are blinded by group think and can’t see what’s in front of their nose.

This is a theme of Jason Greenblatt’s memoir of his time as former president Trump’s envoy for the Middle East, In the Path of Abraham. As he writes in the introduction, “Most books like this are written by professional politicians or longtime Washington insiders. I am neither of those.” Greenblatt instead is a real-estate lawyer who worked for years with the Trump administration, an observant Jew, and a strong supporter of Israel. In other words, he is the opposite of the typical American diplomat who has managed a stagnant Arab-Israeli peace process for the last 30 years.

Greenblatt, together with David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel, and Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law, oversaw the diplomacy that led to the Abraham Accords in 2020. These were bilateral agreements between Israel and four Arab states, establishing unprecedented diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world. The countries that normalized relations through the Abraham Accords include Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.

To appreciate how groundbreaking these agreements are, consider that it was Israeli foreign policy doctrine for its first 30 years to seek diplomatic ties with states on the periphery of the Arab world—countries like Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia—because the opposition of the Arab monarchies to the very existence of Israel was so implacable. Things began to change in the 1990s after the Oslo Accords, which established the first direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden racks up multiple records in chaotic year at border By Stephen Dinan –

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/oct/22/joe-biden-sets-new-record-terrorism-suspects-borde/

The Border Patrol apprehended a record 20 terrorism suspects in September, bringing the total for fiscal 2022 to nearly 100 and closing out the most chaotic 12-month period in border history.

On all the major yardsticks — illegal entries, gang members, convicted criminals, fentanyl and suspected terrorists — the situation got dramatically worse over the past year as smuggling cartels took advantage of the Biden administration’s more relaxed approach to the southern border.

All told, Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 2.4 million encounters with unauthorized migrants at the southern border in fiscal 2022, which ended last month. Of those, 2.2 million were caught by Border Patrol agents as they tried to sneak in, and the rest were encountered at ports of entry demanding to be let in without authorization.

Each of those numbers is believed to be a record, and they left Republicans seething — not least because the Department of Homeland Security released the numbers just before midnight Friday, in what critics said was a futile attempt to bury bad political news.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee said in a statement.

In September alone, CBP encountered 227,547 illegal immigrants at the southern border. That was the third-highest month on record, topped only by April and May of this year.

Among them were 20 terrorism suspects nabbed by the Border Patrol as they tried to sneak in along the southern border. That’s a monthly record, topping the previous high of 15 set in May.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Democrats Celebrate Their Delusion Over Healthcare Gerard Scimeca

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/22/democrats-celebrate-their-delusion-over-healthcare/

In a desperate attempt to reshape the narrative, President Biden hosted a celebration last month for the “success” of his party’s disastrous $750 billion spending package. Given the Democrats had just authorized three-quarters of a trillion dollars of new federal spending to “reduce” inflation, it was fairly obvious that the messaging drummed up for Biden’s choreographed charade was pure deception and duplicity.

In their attempt to buy votes before the midterms, Democrats doubled-down on the same policies of economic misery that have plagued the nation since Biden took office. But what bears special attention are their lies surrounding the entirely new misery they created in healthcare. 

Take, for example, their laughable claim that they “beat the special interests” to “lower health insurance costs” for Americans. Rather than beating the special interests, the Biden administration is actually heaping more funding on them with generous Obamacare subsidies for insurers, all while premiums are expected to rise by 10% next year.

Call it welfare for the wealthy. When the Democrats crow about finding “savings” in healthcare spending we can simply translate that word to mean “cuts,” which the IRA does to seniors’ Medicare by over $230 billion.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Independents Hold Key To 2022 GOP ‘Red Wave’: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/24/independents-hold-key-to-2022-gop-red-wave-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite both major parties claiming they have an advantage, the race for control of Congress appears to be a dead heat, the most recent I&I/TIPP data show. But there’s a big potential surprise element that could tilt the balance sharply: Nearly one out of every seven registered voters, or 15%, are “not sure” whom they’ll vote for.

The online poll of 1,158 voters across the country was taken from October 5-7, with a margin of error of +/- 2.9 points.

The poll asked those responding: “What is your preference for the outcome of this November’s congressional elections?”

Answers showed the sharp division among the electorate, with 42% saying they would prefer “a Congress controlled by Republicans,” and 43% saying they preferred “a Congress controlled by Democrats.” The results are within the poll’s margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The revenge of the technocrats Liz Truss’s spectacular downfall has emboldened our equally hopeless expert class. Tom Slater

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/22/the-revenge-of-the-technocrats/

Watching prime minister Liz Truss’s short resignation speech yesterday, I couldn’t help feeling that she was selling herself short. She managed to summon up just two achievements to boast about from her 44 days in office: the energy price guarantee and the cut to national insurance contributions. But we all know she’s achieved much more than that. She’s tanked her party in spectacular fashion, for a start. Right now, the only thing in Westminster more unpopular than the Tory Party (a poll today put it at 14 per cent) is Truss herself – she is only slightly more popular than Vladimir Putin among the UK population.

Her history-making achievements don’t stop there. Her premiership was the mother of all political cock-ups, in an era in which they have hardly been in short supply. She may even have succeeded in partially rehabilitating her predecessor, Boris Johnson, who has emerged as a strangely plausible candidate to replace her. (At least he has a democratic mandate.) And beyond the party and personality politics, what makes the end of Truss so tragic is that, ideologically speaking, her premiership has managed to achieve the precise opposite of its goals. Whatever Trussonomics was – the underlying logic was never entirely clear – it is now utterly discredited. Indeed, Truss was only able to limp on for a few more days as PM by getting Jeremy Hunt to rip up her mini-budget in the Commons, while she looked on with a kind of lobotomised zen.

More positively, Truss set out to challenge ‘the orthodoxy’, ‘the Treasury view’, ‘the consensus’ preached by various unelected and unaccountable institutions. She even had the gall to suggest that maybe the Bank of England – whose galaxy-brained governor said in August last year that inflation would be ‘temporary’ – wasn’t working as it should. Her chancellor’s first act in office was to sack Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar, a man no one had ever heard of but whose expertise was apparently all that stood between us and barbarism, in an act that our hysterical media seemed to equate with regicide. Her refusal of a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – another apparently unassailable institution, despite its stellar record of getting things wrong – was seen as another awful heresy.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The ‘settler violence’ narrative and Knesset elections By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-settler-violence-narrative-and-knesset-elections/

The current spike in Palestinian terrorism, marked by dozens of rock-throwing, firebombing, stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks each day, was upstaged last week by what the local press and certain politicians were highlighting as an intolerable “surge in settler violence.”

It’s hard to describe the fervor with which news outlets and the “anybody but Bibi” camp—the parties on the left side of the spectrum vying to prevent former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from returning to power after the Nov. 1 Knesset elections—jump on stories of “settlers” assaulting Israel Defense Forces troops and Palestinians.

Take Thursday’s clash in the town of Huwara, near Nablus, for example.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid promptly labeled the thugs who threw stones at Palestinian vehicles and pepper-sprayed members of the IDF’s 202nd Paratrooper Battalion, wounding the commander and a soldier, “dangerous criminals who must be denounced and brought to justice without hesitation and with all severity.”

They “endanger the lives of our soldiers and harm the State of Israel,” he added.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz took it a step further and attributed the incident to the behavior of his right-wing rivals in the Religious Zionist Party.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on October 23rd, 2022

Why don’t admirers and supporters of Israel show that B.D.S., the invidious movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel can cut both ways? Our B.D.S. would boycott, divest from and sanction the media, companies, and organizations that routinely slander Israel and distort its democracy, history and legitimacy.

The first step would be to support and circulate Michael Ordman’s compilations of Israel’s outsize contributions to the science and technology that bring health and hope and a better life to billions of people throughout the globe.  rsk

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Diagnosing irregular heart rates in high-risk patients. Prof Mahmoud Saliman of Rambam Health Care Campus is the first in Israel to insert an ultrasound device through a vein (without anesthesia) to safely diagnose a patient suffering from atrial fibrillation (AFib). High-risk patients cannot have anesthesia or blood thinners.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-718736
 
The secret to a healthy heart. Scientists at Israel’s Assuta Ashdod Medical Center found why patients with a high-risk of coronary heart disease (e.g., some diabetics and smokers) have healthy arteries. Their endothelial progenitor cells have longer telomeres and greater function. It can help in developing preventative medicines.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-719269  https://journals.lww.com/coronary-artery/Abstract/2022/11000/Identification_of_protective_biologic_factors_in.4.aspx
 
OrCam for dyslexics. OrCam Learn (see here previously) is a voice-activated, interactive handheld device designed for people with learning challenges. It combines AI with a high-resolution visual sensor, and laser capture. It reads text aloud from any surface, listens to the reader and provides feedback. And much more.
https://learn.orcam.com/en/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuNvoQGB4VU  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JeNTpAUDE
 
European approval for bone augmentation material. (TY Atid-EDI) The Ivory Dentin Graft™ dentin graft material from Israel’s Ivory Graft has just received the European CE Mark for use in the repair or augmentation of bone defects. Its similarity to bone makes it an ideal grafting material, e.g., in dental procedures.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/ivory-dentin-graft-the-first-and-only-dentin-graft-receives-ce-mark-301629353.html   https://ivorygraft.com/
 
Animal Assisted Therapy – a win-win. HAMA (see here previously) is among the pioneering organizations in AAI – Animal Assisted Intervention in Therapy and Education in Israel. Many of the animals are rescued from abuse and neglect, and have in turn enriched humans suffering from trauma, deep loss, and abandonment.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/mind-and-spirit/article-719815   http://hama-israel.org/
 
Detecting fetal anomalies. (TY UWI) More details about Israel’s IdentifAI Genetics (see here previously) and its Hoobari blood test invented by Tel Aviv University’s Professor Noam Shomron. The test separates the DNA of a 10-week fetus from that of its mother and then checks it for mutations. Much safer than amniocentesis.
https://www.israel21c.org/new-blood-test-may-detect-fetal-abnormalities-at-week-10/
 
Miracle baby. (TY UWI) Before aggressive chemo, Tzvia had ovarian tissue frozen. 20 years later, doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital defrosted and re-transplanted some of the tissue. It reversed her menopause and Tzvia has now given birth to a healthy baby girl – the longest ever time for a successful post-cancer transplant.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-gives-birth-after-menopause-reversed-with-transplant-of-20-year-frozen-ovary/  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Not Consensus, But Truth Thoughts on some senses of the word “steal” (with a brief excursus on “consensus”). By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 23rd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/22/not-consensus-but-truth/

We use the word “steal,” as we use many words, in several distinct but related senses. Here is an illustration of the core meaning. Joe goes into a candy store, looks around furtively (from the Latin fūr, “thief”) and then, when he sees that the shopkeeper is distracted, pockets some M&M’s and walks out. Joe just stole the M&M’s. 

That act of theft is simple. There are plenty of more complex and nuanced ones, but the element of assuming as one’s own something that rightfully belongs to another is key. 

Our elaborate and often convoluted financial system is replete with examples. So is our political life. 

Perhaps the most popular meme floating about in polite society today is the contention that any hint of the 2020 presidential election being tainted is a “Big Lie.” It is so popular, in fact, that some journalists and politicians appear to present themselves to the Office of Acceptable Propaganda each day before setting off on their rounds. They collect their allotted quota of different ways of ridiculing and dismissing those imprudent enough to suggest that, as a matter of fact, there were lots of problems with the 2020 elections. 

It is important that these approved scribes and politicians engage in this ritual because there are many different ways in which this rhetorical epithet needs to be expressed if it is to achieve its goal: to silence debate by intimidating people. 

To this end, a number of different rhetorical registers must be sounded. Some are blunt and angry, as for example this tweet from a writer for The Bulwark, a marginal NeverTrump site supported by leftist billionaires: “Chris Sununu, Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, and Glenn Youngkin . . . every single one of them is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic.”

The obloquy is directed not simply against certain ideas, but also against the people who express, or might express, them. Thus we find Michael Steele, an anti-Trump Republican and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, castigating supporters of the former president as “lice, fleas, and blood sucking ticks.” The formula does have the advantage of clarity: I mean, partly because of its unsavory historical echoes, you know where you stand with Steele.