Israel's Exit From U.N. Or The Antisemitism Of The U.N. Security Council

Posted: 12/26/2016

Trigger

The shameful passing of U.N. Resolution 2334 on December 23, 2016! Just before Hannukah and Christmas during the lame duck session after the 2016 U.S. presidential election! This was the first Israeli-Arab conflict U.N. resolution in about eight years. Enough is enough!

Still president Obama goes down in history as one of the worst U.S. presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt (Obama has done far more to deserve this designation. This last action just confirms it all!)! Such a spiteful or malicious U.S. president is almost unheard of in recent times! (I have previously blogged here about Obama’s already terrible legacy before this action)

It is appalling and very disappointing that none of the Western countries on the U.N. Security Council (France, United Kingdom, Spain, New Zealand, United States of America) voted against this appalling, anti semitic resolution.

China clearly missed this opportunity to become a responsible global player and to become a positive force on the world stage.

Resolution Reeks Of Anti Semitism

How many biased resolutions against Israel has the United Nations passed since its inception? This latest one is no different!

Pertinent quotes from the press release and resolution plus comments (emphasis added; Source: U.N. press release):

1. “The Security Council reaffirmed this afternoon that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace and security, within internationally recognized borders.” (First sentence of the resolution)
   [Has there ever been a U.N. resolution condemning all the terrorist acts (suicide bombers, stabbings, vehicle attacks etc.); using children as soldiers; building of attack tunnels underneath the border; constant rockets firing; using population as human shields; using hospitals, ambulances, or schools as military facilities and so on coming from the Palestinian territories]
2. “... the Council reiterated its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.  It underlined that it would not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the two sides through negotiations.”
3. “The Council called for immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation and destruction.  It further called for the strengthening of ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, including through existing security coordination, and to clearly condemn all acts of terrorism.  The Council called on both sides to observe calm and restraint, and to refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric in order to de-escalate the situation on the ground and rebuild trust and confidence.”
   [Laughable, hollow words in the face of decades long attacks from Arabs coming from Gaza or West Bank. This phony appearance of neutral resolution language also insinuates some equivalency between Israeli and Arab violence, which is absurd!]
4. “ It called upon all States to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”
5. ““Reaffirming the obligation of Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, and recalling the advisory opinion rendered on 9 July 2004 by the International Court of Justice,”
   [Pure Antisemitism!]
6. ““Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, including, inter alia, the construction and expansion of settlements, transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes and displacement of Palestinian civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions,”
   [No mentioning of how Christians are treated in the West Bank or Gaza. What about other minorities? This absolutely one sided, no pretense of neutrality!]
7. ““Expressing grave concern that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperilling the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines,”
8. I stop quoting here, any reader will get the point!

No Western country should have ever signed language like “territory occupied since 1967” or “East Jerusalem” or “not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines”. This is incredible! How many times did the Arabs attack Israel since its founding?

Severely Undermining The Negotiation Position Of Israel

Until I read the text of the resolution, I could not believe how much damage the Western countries have done! It’s absolutely appalling and disappointing!

The Widespread Bias Against And Animosity Towards Settlements

I admit freely that I am not an expert on the settlements in Israel. However, speaking in general terms, these settlements are peaceful acts of a growing population faced with a decades unresolved Israeli-Arab conflict. Thus, I would generally view these settlements as positive developments.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power

I have blogged here about Samantha Power about 3 years ago and had a poor opinion of her back then.

The official U.N. press release states about Samantha Power’s position (emphasis added):

“Explaining her delegation’s abstention… it had been a long-standing position of her country that settlements undermined Israel’s security and eroded prospects for peace and stability.  She emphasized, however, that her vote today had not been straightforward.  Explaining that Israel had been treated differently from other States for as long as it had been a member of the United Nations, she noted that during the course of 2016, 18 resolutions adopted in the General Assembly and others in the Human Rights Council had all condemned Israel.  It was because of that bias that the United States had not voted in favour of the resolution, she said, emphasizing that her delegation would not have let the resolution pass had it not addressed terrorism and incitement to violence.”

Could there ever have been a greater fool becoming the highest representative of the U.S. at the U.N.?

With Obama’s and Samantha Power’s abstention the U.N. passed another, the 19th resolution in 2016 against Israel.

ILExit From United Nations Highly Recommended

First, the prime minister of Israel should send all Western ambassadors who voted for this U.N. resolution packing immediately!

Second, Israel should withdraw from the U.N.!

A Few Simple Free Market Ways To Lower The Cost Of Healthcare In The U.S.

Posted: 12/25/2016

Introduction

This is only food for thought! This is by far not a complete list of reform measures!

For decades, the cost of health care has risen exorbitantly and unjustifiably  in most Western countries for largely similar reasons. It is the prevalent and dominating Road to Serfdom socialism in those countries mostly responsible for it.

A Few Simple Ways

1. Abolish the prescription requirement for most drugs! More over the counter drugs please (incl. e.g. antibiotics)!
2. Empower patients! Patients should have the right to try new, unproven medications, medical devices, or therapies!
3. More competition is urgently needed!
4. Substantially reduce and shorten the extensive intellectual property protections for medications, medical devices, and therapies!
5. Substantially reduce the medieval guild powers of the medical establishment (doctors, nurses, medical schools)! This lobby has become far too powerful for any democratic society!
6. Substantially relax licensing of medical professionals!
7. Diversify and open up medical training. Medical training should again include training on the job or over the Internet etc.! Why do nurses or doctors have to go through mandatory several years of expensive medical schools and residency training?
8. Reciprocity of approval. Medications, medical devices, and therapies approved in one (Western) country should be automatically approved in other (Western) countries. There could still be a proviso of a temporary approval to monitor the safety of the product.
9. Public health agencies should only approve medications, medical devices, or therapies exclusively on the basis of safety not including efficacy or other considerations!
10. Importation of medications, medical devices, and therapies need to be deregulated!
11. Expand and allow for more mutual insurance companies where citizens join voluntarily to cover the cost of fellow citizens (Rampant statism and socialism has largely driven out this historical approach)

Europe Needs A Gitmo

Posted: 12/25/2016

History is often full of irony!

The Terrorist Attack Of Berlin

The latest radical islamic attack on Berlin perpetrated by a single attacker using a large commercial truck demonstrates a need in the European Union for something similar to the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

An Odyssey Of Sorts

As it turned out the attacker was convicted in Italy as a criminal who is presumed to have entered Italy from Tunisia in or around 2011. His asylum or refugee status was rejected in either Germany or Italy. He had been under observation by Germany law enforcement authorities for a few months, but monitoring was ended just shortly before he went on the killing spree in Berlin. His homeland, Tunisia, refused to take back this “citizen”. The perpetrator had assumed several false identities while moving around in Europe.

Concentration Camps, Labor Camps, And Gitmo

Unfortunately, Europe’s history is marred with terrible, historical examples of concentration or labor camps (Germany, United Kingdom, Soviet Union). Thus, it is difficult for some Europeans to support the idea of a European Gitmo.

This should not be a serious obstacle! It would be quite possible to establish a very humane camp to hold terrorist suspects for some time in accordance with human rights!

P.S.

I have not had the time to research or follow all the details of this latest heinous crime, i.e. the Berlin attack of December 19, 2016. Please excuse my inaccuracies here in this blog post! I only tried to capture some of the essence of this event.

Watch How Many Democrats In The U.S. Congress Will Support Trump

Posted: 12/24/2016

In one of my previous blog posts I have tried to illuminate the series of crushing election defeats the Democrats have suffered under the eight years of the Obama Presidency.

It stands to reason that some, if not a significant number of, Democrat members of the U.S. Congress will finally come to their senses and abandon some of these socialist, defeatist policies of the past that the Democratic Party so espoused and cherished.

It is already happening as we learn e.g. from this article (published 12/24/16; emphasis added):

“Several Senate Democrats broke with President Obama and sided with President-Elect Donald Trump in a bipartisan rebuke of the administration’s decision to allow a controversial United Nations Security Council resolution dictating an end to Israeli settlements to pass Friday.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York issued statements Friday in which they rejected Obama’s support of the U.N. resolution. The senators’ statements came the day after Trump called for a veto of the resolution that would put “Israel in a very poor negotiating position” and be “extremely unfair to all Israelis” in their dealings with Palestine.”

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (30)

Posted: 12/23/2016

1. New ultrasound technique is first to image inside live cells (“This new kind of sub-optical phonon (sound) imaging provides invaluable information about the structure, mechanical properties and behaviour of individual living cells at a scale not achieved before.”)
2. RNA pathway plays key role in health, lifespan, fly study shows (“Humans and other animals carry rogue sequences of DNA in their genomes called transposable elements (TEs). To prevent passing TEs to their offspring, they employ the piRNA pathway in their reproductive organs to block the elements from being active in their sperm and eggs. … to show that the anti-TE activity of the piRNA pathway also operates in a normal non-reproductive body tissue, the fly fat body, and that it helps to sustain the life of the animal.”)
3. Pregnancy resculpts women’s brains for at least 2 years (“In particular, gray matter shrinks in areas involved in processing and responding to social signals. … The changes occurred primarily in areas of the brain involved in social tasks like reading the desires and intentions of others from their faces and actions. The hippocampus, a region associated with memory, also lost volume. ”)
4. Deep probe of antimatter puts Einstein’s special relativity to the test (“... with an experiment called ALPHA-2 have measured the wavelength of light absorbed by antihydrogen as the positron in it jumps between two particular levels—the so-called 1s and 2s levels. … they measured that "spectral line" to a precision of a few parts in 10 billion … In hydrogen, that line has been measured 100,000 times more precisely. Still, the result marks the beginning of antihydrogen spectroscopy, … The advance opens the way to precisely comparing hydrogen and antihydrogen and … special relativity requires antimatter to mirror matter …  if that mirror relationship were not exact, then the basic idea behind special relativity couldn’t be exactly right … ”)
5. Paleontologists provide a new look at a beautifully preserved fossil cephalopod (“... but rarely do paleontologists get to see the characteristic soft tissue anatomy of these many-armed swimmers. That makes a fossil found in the 165 million year old rock of France all the more wonderful. ...”)
6. Discovery of bismuth superconductivity at extremely low temperature jeopardizes theory (This research comes out of India not from Indians researching in the U.S.! “The finding by the team has shed doubt on the reliability of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory, because the metal does not have enough electrons to allow for partnering up—the means by which most semiconductors operate without resistance. It also now represents the lowest carrier density superconductor. ”)
7. An ant’s kiss may hide a sneaky form of communication (About the evolutionary meaning of kissing? “... The finding suggests that saliva exchange could play yet-undiscovered roles in many other animals, from birds to humans, … Social insects—like ants, bees, and wasps—have long been known to pass food to one another through mouth-to-mouth exchange, a behavior known as trophallaxis. They store liquid food in “social stomachs,” or crops, from which they can regurgitate it later. It’s how nutrients are passed from foraging ants to nurse ants, and from nurses to the larvae in a colony. Other research has suggested that ants also use trophallaxis to spread the colony’s odor, helping them identify their own nest mates. … the researchers discovered that this social fluid contains a diverse array of chemicals, including growth-, digestion-, and immune-related proteins; nest mate recognition cues; and a juvenile hormone, important for regulating ant reproduction, development, and behavior. The discovery of the juvenile hormone was particularly unexpected.”)
8. Your dog remembers more than you think (More on animals with episodic memory)
9. How turning off a plant's sunshield can grow bigger crops
10. New atlas depicts first two months of human development in 3-D (Shocking: “In their paper the researchers note that modern medical textbooks offer prospective doctors imagery of the first months of human conception that are wildly out of date—pictures and diagrams are from work done half a century ago or longer. Some are from the early 1900's. Some of the illustrations have even been made by artists attempting to apply what can be seen in the early development of other animals, such as mice ...”)
11. Theory that challenges Einstein's physics could soon be put to the test (“Scientists behind a theory that the speed of light is variable - and not constant as Einstein suggested - have made a prediction that could be tested. … But some researchers have suggested that the speed of light could have been much higher in this early universe. … Structures in the universe, for example galaxies, all formed from fluctuations in the early universe – tiny differences in density from one region to another. A record of these early fluctuations is imprinted on the cosmic microwave background – a map of the oldest light in the universe – in the form of a 'spectral index'.”)
12. China Is Building a Robot Army of Model Workers  Can China reboot its manufacturing industry—and the global economy—by replacing millions of workers with machines? (China, a giant awakens and catches up very fast, e.g. buying robotics companies in Germany)
13. Super-Fast-Growing GM Plants Could Yield the Next Green Revolution  Scientists have used genetic engineering to make plants that grow 20 percent larger.
14. Vaccines that rob microbes of iron could fight food poisoning, UTIs (This could be HUGE! Could this be a way to defeat bacteria of all kinds? Could this become a solution to antibiotics resistance?)
15. Dutch unveil giant vacuum to clean outside air (If you include CO2 removal, then this could be the future! After water treatment finally comes air treatment! “The system is said to be able to suck in air from a 300-metre radius - and from up to seven kilometres ... upwards. It can treat some 800,000 cubic metres of air an hour, filtering out 100 percent of fine particles and 95 percent percent of ultra-fine particles”)
16. New gene-editing technology successfully cures a genetic blood disorder in mice (“Unlike the popular CRISPR gene-editing technique, the new technology can be administered to living animals and it significantly decreases unwanted, off-target gene mutations. The new system consists of biocompatible nanoparticles containing PNAs [peptide nucleic acid], small nano-sized synthetic molecules in which a protein-like backbone is combined with the nucleobases found in DNA and RNA. PNA is designed to open up double-stranded DNA and bind near the target site in a highly specific manner without cutting anything. And the PNAs easily fit inside the nanoparticle delivery system, which is FDA-approved and has already been used to treat neurodegenerative diseases in humans.  ... used next-generation PNA chemistry to design a PNA molecule called a gamma-PNA with a polyethylene glycol group on the side chain. This innovation makes the PNA water-soluble and biocompatible, which means that it doesn't bind to proteins and other biomolecules in a non-specific manner. Additionally, the specific stereochemistry of the polyethylene glycol group pre-organizes the PNA into a right-handed helical motif, making it bind to DNA more readily.”)
17. New clues to how lithium soothes the bipolar brain may shed light on other mental illnesses (“Lithium treatment restored healthy numbers of dendritic spines in mice engineered to carry a genetic mutation that is more common in people with autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder than in unaffected people, ”)
18. Cold May at Last Be Beatable After decades of disappointment there is a new flurry of vaccine activity (“Colds can also cause more physical harm than scientists previously appreciated. ... have discovered that some types of rhinovirus can invade deep into the lungs. Many cases of childhood pneumonia turn out to be caused by rhinoviruses. Rhinoviruses are especially dangerous for people who already have certain chronic disorders such as asthma, cystic fibrosis, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Even a mild cold can trigger runaway inflammation in their lungs. It turns out that the majority of asthma attacks are brought on by rhinoviruses. … They injected the vaccine into macaques and then later drew blood from the monkeys. When they mixed the viruses into the blood, they got a strong antibody response to 49 out of the 50 types [of rhinoviruses].”)
19. Mouse egg cells made entirely in the lab give rise to healthy offspring (This is huge! “”)
20. Unusual quantum liquid on crystal surface could inspire future electronics (“that the electrons, when kept at very low temperatures where their quantum behaviors emerge, can spontaneously begin to travel in identical elliptical paths on the surface of a crystal of bismuth, forming a quantum fluid state. … "This is the first visualization of a quantum fluid of electrons in which interactions between the electrons make them collectively choose orbits with these unusual shapes …”