Amb. Sandland Getting The Kavanaugh Treatment. Schwab Leaves. Father Guido.

"
Now that Amb. Sandland's testimony proved useless to Schiff and his renegades, Democrats have resorted to their most prized attack, called "The Kavanaugh."  The Liberal  Portland media have accused the Ambassador of attacking women. He has denied same but the stench has attached.
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When I make personal comments and then a few days later op eds on the same topic appear, I assure you I have no advance notice or vaulted insight.  I am not clairvoyant, though I admit to being somewhat topical at times.

Schwab leaves California for Texas and eventually a good bit of the government will vacate D.C.

My son is right about deleveraging.  When we can no longer afford what we wanted, once had and were unwilling to pay for, it will happen. (See 1 below.)

I have finally found the solution to his view that college education must soon drop in price:

Five Minute University - Father Guido Sarducci

And:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4& v=b8JZo6PzpCU&feature=emb_logo

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Michael Barone reviews my friend's new book - Amity Shlaes: "Great Society: A New History." 

and in the process punctures Johnson's Great Society along with progressive radicals who 
preach big government is the solution. (See 2 below.)

I have read Amity's books about FDR's  The Forgotten Man and Coolidge and commend them both.
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A few days ago Newsweek fired a reporter for fake news regarding Trump and one spokesman said they were returning to the era of hard news.

All misguided trends end because they are built upon false premises and have shaky/unstable  roots. I do not believe we are there but I do see cracks forming.

We all know Trump has no foreign policy and I guess that is why The NYT's is now reluctantly  reporting  the worst rioting in Iran is occurring in decades.
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Good News Again. (See 3 edited below.)
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DORIS
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1) Move the Bureaucrats Out of the Beltway

It no longer makes sense to cluster federal agencies and their employees in Washington, D.C.

By Terry Wanzek

“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field,” said President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. That pretty much describes the Agriculture Department bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. Although the big building on Independence Avenue is full of smart and well-meaning people, there’s no getting around the fact that they’re far removed from the regular business of farming.

It doesn’t have to be that way—at least not according to a couple of Republican senators, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. They’ve proposed moving the Agriculture Department and nine other federal agencies outside D.C. and into the heart of America.

It’s a thought-provoking idea reminiscent of what agronomist Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, said on his deathbed: “Take it to the farmer.” What he meant was, if we seek excellence in food security, everyone in the food business must collaborate with the men and women who work the land. That’s what Borlaug did as a scientist. He developed new crop strains, boosting food production so much in the 1950s and 1960s that he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Today, “taking it to the farmer” involves not just the scientists who innovate but also the Beltway regulators whose rules and mandates affect what happens to those who work the land a thousand miles—or more—away. The Hawley-Blackburn bill calls for moving Agriculture and its more than 100,000 employees to Missouri. Other departments would go elsewhere: Commerce to Pennsylvania, Education to Tennessee, Energy to Kentucky, Health and Human Services to Indiana, Housing and Urban Development to Ohio, Interior to New Mexico, Labor to West Virginia, Transportation to Michigan, and Veterans Affairs to South Carolina.

They wouldn’t relocate to just anywhere within these states, but rather to economically depressed regions. The bill’s sponsors pitch their legislation as an employment program. They call it the HIRE Act, which stands for “Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy.”

That’s fine, but the main benefit would come from putting regulators into proximity with the people whose lives and businesses they regulate. It makes sense for Agriculture to have its headquarters in a big farm state such as Missouri, and it also makes sense to move Interior to New Mexico, where it will be closer to the Western lands that occupy so much of its time.

Under this plan, federal regulators would gain firsthand knowledge of what the policies they adopt and enforce do to real people. In the future, maybe an official at Agriculture will actually be able to live on a farm. A bureaucrat at Interior will be married to a rancher, and a deputy assistant secretary at Transportation will have a brother who works on an automotive assembly line.

This would be a government “of the people”—something that is lacking as the administrative state inexorably grows in Washington, D.C.

Before the advent of air travel and telecommunications, it made sense to cluster federal agencies in Washington. In the 21st century, however, technology enables us to do so much more—and to take advantage of a truly federal system, which seeks to disperse the power of government.

The Trump administration appears to understand the principle: The headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management soon will move to Grand Junction, Colo., and 547 employees of the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture will shift to Kansas City, Mo.

The Hawley-Blackburn bill could attract bipartisan support. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang also has proposed moving agencies out of Washington. Several liberal-leaning think tanks and journalists have expressed support for the concept.

“The proper role of government” is “that of partner with the farmer—never his master,” said President Eisenhower. Let’s seize a chance to take it to the farmer, as well as everybody else who has a stake in the decisions that we ought to make closer to the people.

Mr. Wanzek grows wheat, corn, soybeans and pinto beans on a family farm in Jamestown, N.D. He represents the 29th district in the state Senate and is a member of the Global Farmer Network

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2) ‘Great Society’ Review: A ‘Mystical Belief’ in the State

The architects of the antipoverty programs devised in the 1960s were intoxicated by America’s postwar prosperity—and heedless of unintended consequences.

By  Michael Barone

How can government get rid of poverty? It’s a question that gets asked not in a society where almost everyone is poor but in one giddy with surging growth and concerned about those who seem left behind—a society whose leaders have “an almost mystical belief in the infinite potentials of American society.”

Those are the words of Paul Jacobs, a prominent left-wing journalist and activist a half-century ago, quoted by Amity Shlaes in “Great Society: A New History.” Just as she presented a skeptical alternative to New Deal historians’ accounts of the 1930s in “The Forgotten Man” (2007), Ms. Shlaes now offers an illuminating alternative to sentimental reminiscences of liberals’ attempts in the 1960s—actually, in the years starting around 1963 and ending around 1972—to banish poverty in America. Lyndon Johnson’s raft of Great Society programs—from Head Start and Community Action to Medicare and Medicaid—is a centerpiece of this period, of course, but it is only part of the story. The longer arc, as Ms. Shlaes shows, is a “mystical belief” in America’s potential and the government’s often misguided attempts to achieve it

Her account is original and persuasive, presenting the leading poverty warriors not with scorn but with sympathy and piercing insight. Her subjects include the gentle socialist Michael Harrington, with his background in the Catholic Worker movement; the religious intellectual and Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps’ first director who was drafted to head LBJ’s Office of Economic Opportunity; the up-from-the-working-class professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, plucking politically inconvenient truths from overlooked data; the student-journalist and activist Tom Hayden, pursuing endless causes and a radical vision of “participatory democracy.” These are basically good people brimming over with good intentions.

A central figure in the book is one often overlooked in histories of the times: Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. His father, Valentine Reuther, was a German-born socialist proud of keeping a Carnegie library out of his home town of Wheeling, W.Va. Walter, together with his brother Victor, spent a year in the Soviet Union and came back a strong anticommunist, dedicated to the freedoms that some liberals then and even now seem ready to set aside. With Victor and another brother, Walter led activists in organizing the sit-down strikes that forced the auto companies to recognize the UAW and then helped keep the auto factories humming with war production.

Autos had been America’s boom industry for the first three decades of the 20th century; the New Deal-assisted unionization of auto workers and the workers in other mass-production industries had doubled the size of organized labor. Reuther’s leadership in the prolonged 1945-46 GM strike and his elevation that year to the UAW presidency made him, at just 38, a powerful figure in one of the so-called Big Units—big government, big business, big labor—that had won World War II and would usher in prosperous postwar America in the next dozen years.

Reuther’s UAW secured wage increases and health insurance for its hundreds of thousands of members, and its auto contracts set terms for millions of others. But Reuther’s ambitions went further. He was a friend of and collaborator with Scandinavian social democrats and an admirer of Scandinavian architecture (more attractive than continental Brutalism, as Ms. Shlaes rightly suggests). He especially admired Scandinavia’s success in spreading postwar growth and prosperity to people who might otherwise be left out.

Ms. Shlaes shows Reuther setting up the conference out of which Tom Hayden and other students produced the 1962 Port Huron Statement—a call for a hazily defined regeneration of society—and started organizations that later transmogrified into the radical Students for a Democratic Society and Weathermen. She shows Reuther aiding the civil-rights movement in Mississippi, organizing with Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Martin Luther King a 125,000-person march in Detroit and then helping run King’s march in Washington two months later. She shows him taking the lead role in putting together Hubert Humphrey’s shambles of a campaign after the disastrous convention in Chicago in 1968—and notes that many of the protesters there were from groups that Reuther had helped set up.

Reuther’s story is but one of many in “Great Society” demonstrating how ideas in this period percolated up from unlikely quarters and sparked government programs. She traces how Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” (1962), an evocative description of remaining pockets of poverty, caught the Kennedy administration’s attention and how Lyndon Johnson’s local Community Action personnel organized antipoverty protests against mostly Democratic mayors and liberal governors—and were largely shut down. She describes the appeal of the idea, suggested by the success of the church-based Southern civil-rights movement, that only the poor could point the way to eliminating poverty.The idea that government could do a better job of providing housing than the private sector may have come naturally to postwar Americans doubled up in multi-generation houses, because almost no new housing had been built in the preceding 15 years of depression and war. And the cramped and dank conditions of New York’s turn-of-the-century tenements probably account for the spread of the idea, cherished by European architects and pushed by American government bureaucrats, that poor families would be better off in well-lighted high-rise apartments than in houses. Ms. Shlaes’s vivid account of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project—opened with high hopes in the 1950s and demolished beginning in 1972—shows how that dream quickly became a nightmare of crime and squalor.

The architects of antipoverty programs were, like most policy makers, creatures of their times, and after the perceived policy successes of some of the New Deal and early postwar programs, they were heedless of potential unintended consequences—like the vast increases in crime and welfare dependency in the 1965-75 decade. Most of all, they were intoxicated with the unexpected postwar prosperity, which was producing so much revenue that Lyndon Johnson thought he could pay for both guns and butter and which prompted Richard Nixon, in 1972, to sign a revenue-sharing law that diverted federal money directly to the states. The ascetic Michael Harrington, in 1964, blanched at asking for $1 billion to fight poverty, but the ebullient Sargent Shriver was happy to pony up. “We have plenty of money,” he later said.

“Great Society” is in part a story of how antipoverty programs like Community Action sprang into being and then nose-dived. But interspersed among Ms. Shlaes’s chapters on the programs’ architects are chapters on seemingly unrelated individuals and trends. Between the Port Huron Statement and Michael Harrington, we encounter General Electric CEO Ralph Cordiner, his labor-relations head Lemuel Boulware, and company spokesman Ronald Reagan: Together they launched a campaign of free-market boosterism that would see fruition, politically, decades later in the 1980s and ’90s.

In between Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity and its scuffles with mayors and governors, we meet Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce as they leave Fairchild Semiconductor, found what would become Intel, and develop microchips, whose capacity, as has been famously calculated, doubles every 18 months or so. After we read about Tom Hayden’s trip to North Vietnam in 1965 and the “Negro removal” necessary to build Pruitt-Igoe-type projects, we learn about European nations, in their attempts at economic recovery, whittling down America’s gold supply and threatening devaluation of the dollar. And after describing the tumult at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Ms. Shlaes shifts our attention to Japan, where Toyota executives are preparing to boost sales in America of tiny Corollas produced by workers empowered to make decisions and not represented by adversary-minded labor unions like the UAW.

These juxtapositions underline a central message delivered not explicitly but by unmissable implication: The architects of the Great Society’s war on poverty thought their ideas and strategies were the wave of the future. Hadn’t government shown its capacity to win a world war, develop technology and provide direction for the macroeconomy in the two decades before Harrington wrote about the “other America”? The Big Units of big government, big business and big labor just needed the right guidance and the injection of energy from yet another generation of young men (and an occasional woman) to eliminate the last pockets of poverty and racism.

But the critical changes that were coming turned out to be not from thinkers with connections at the top of society but from innovators whose ideas were bubbling up, mostly unseen, from odd geographic corners and outside familiar institutions. The Big Units’ dominance was being quietly, without celebration in newsmagazine covers, undermined by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Japanese auto makers, by financial innovators and by that former spokesman for GE, who would be elected governor of California and, in time, U.S. president.

At least one of the antipoverty programs’ progenitors recognized that progressive policies could produce regressive results. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 report on the breakdown of the black family sprang from his noticing that welfare dependency among blacks was rising despite widespread economic growth and in the wake of the successes of the civil-rights movement. Perusal of data a few years later would have shown crime rates rising as well, even if liberal reforms resulted in reduced prison populations. Los Angeles’s Watts riot occurred in 1965 just after passage of the Voting Rights Act. Detroit, the home base of Reuther’s UAW, whose Lafayette Park was one of the first urban-renewal projects, was the site of the nation’s deadliest riot in 1967 (which I witnessed as an intern in the mayor’s office).

The final chapter of “Great Society” shows how the usually frosty Richard Nixon encouraged bonhomie among his economic appointees at a Camp David weekend in August 1971, when Treasury Secretary John Connally pushed Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to endorse closing the gold window—thereby, in Ms. Shlaes’s analysis, ushering in 10 years of inflation and deficit spending. One of the arguments of “The Forgotten Man” was that, more than is usually grasped, Herbert Hoover’s policies were much like Franklin Roosevelt’s . One of the arguments of “Great Society” is that Richard Nixon’s policies were an extension, not a repudiation, of Lyndon Johnson’s. Neither Hoover nor Roosevelt, Ms. Shlaes argued, ended the Depression. Neither Johnson nor Nixon, she argues, ended poverty.

The genuine achievements of the 1940s and ’50s led them to imagine they could. That is one of the lessons of “Great Society”: Success breeds failure. But another lesson comes from those interlaced vignettes of embryonic financial and technological innovation: Failure can breed success. Ms. Shlaes’s chronicle is not just a story of how good people’s good intentions went wrong. It is also a story of how the assumption that the near future will closely resemble the recent past can lead even the best intentioned and most well-informed people to pursue policies that turn out to be mostly counterproductive and often destructive.

—Mr. Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t).”

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3)ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Targeting chemo at tumors only. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a method that delivers chemotherapy drugs directly to malignant cells and bypasses healthy ones. Cancer cells emit the protein TRPV2 into which the scientists inserted a low dose of doxorubicin to destroy the tumor.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/272339

Nano-chips help treat Alzheimer’s. Neural growth factor proteins can limit damage from Alzheimer’s disease but are normally blocked by the Blood Brain Barrier. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute and Bar-Ilan University have developed nanoscale silicon chips that deliver these proteins directly to the target brain tissue.
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Technion-Bar-Ilan-U-create-protein-administration-chip-for-Alzheimers-treatment-608747

Human radiation therapy trial successful. Good results of the first multi-center human trials of the Alpha Dart radiation therapy (see here) developed by Israel’s Alpha Tau. Over 78% of the skin cancer tumors were completely cured. Most of the patients had previously received other treatments that failed to kill the tumors.
https://www.alphatau.com/single-post/scc-clinical-study-results
https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016(19)34040-4/fulltext

VR system saves 2-year-old. As reported here previously, the Virtual Reality technology from Israel’s Surgical Theater is saving thousands of lives. Here is one example of two-year-old Ari whose deep brain tumor was removed, thanks to surgeons having practiced the delicate operation using the groundbreaking VR system.
https://www.today.com/video/virtual-reality-helps-surgeons-remove-tumor-from-2-year-old-s-brain-73526853582

Using AI to discover treatments. Israeli startup Pepticom uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to discover new peptide-based candidates that could become the basis of the next big medical treatment. Pepticom was launched as a company by Yissum – the technology transfer arm of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-AI-start-up-Pepticom-receives-5m-in-Series-A-funding-605752

Assisted feeding. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Fidmi has received FDA approval for its low profile gastronomy system / enteral feeding device (see here). Its easily replaceable inner tube which can be changed by patients without the need to visit a doctor or nurse. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fidmi-medical-receives-fda-regulatory-clearance-for-low-profile-enteral-feeding-device-300939572.html

Keeping the blood flowing. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Perflow Medical has received the CE Mark (European approval) for its Cascade Agile device that helps surgeons repair ruptured intercranial aneurysms. Its unique net design enables continuous blood flow during cerebral aneurysm operations.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/perflow-medical-receives-ce-mark-approval-of-novel-cascade-agile-300941472.html   https://perflow.com/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m-4gisRbiA

Detecting strokes across the US. (TY Atid-EDI) Since US giant Medtronic began marketing the AI brain scan analysis system from Israel’s Viz.ai (see here), it has been installed in 300 US hospitals. Viz.ai has just raised $50 million to help fund its fast growth.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-ai-stroke-diagnosis-co-vizai-raises-50m-1001304401

Diagnosing narrowing of the arteries. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s MedHub is developing AutocathFFR - an automated system that detects stenoses (narrowing) in the coronary arteries surrounding the heart. It has just commenced a pivotal multi-center clinical trial to test the system’s effectiveness.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/medhubs-ai-powered-solutions-are-disrupting-cardiology-300942834.html   https://www.medhub-ai.com/

Fighting MRSA resistance. (TY Atid-EDI) As reported (here) previously, Israel’s Biomica is developing microbiome therapies for antibiotic resistant bacteria. It is now partnering with the Weizmann Institute to develop a selective treatment against MRSA - antibiotic resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus infection.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/biomica-to-collaborate-with-weizmann-institute-of-science-to-develop-a-selective-treatment-against-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-300943752.html
https://www.biomicamed.com/


ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL

Female entrepreneurs meet investors. A business networking event was held last week in Jerusalem at the Urban Place for female entrepreneurs, in honor of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW). It was an opportunity for Israeli female business owners from across Israel to network with both investors and other business owners.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/272192
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfI4fCfmqQs

Preserving Jewish-Ethiopian culture. (TY WIN) The Atachlit Beta Israel village in Kiryat Gat serves as a heritage center for the preservation of Ethiopian Jewish culture and heritage. The village and farm also give older Ethiopian Jews a new sense of purpose by continuing traditional farming, building and cooking methods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzyxg8oTuN0 https://www.jnf.org.au/project-items/atachlit/

Relations with Kazakhstan improve further. The Central Asian, Muslim-majority country of Kazakhstan has a history of strong connections with Israel. Under the new President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, these ties are expanding, especially in commerce, agro-tech, clean water, cyber security, education and public diplomacy.
https://www.jns.org/israel-kazakhstan-relations-continue-to-expand-and-diversify-under-new-president/

Aid to Chad. Volunteers from NGO Israeli Flying Aid (IFA) brought supplies to refugee camps, hospitals and orphanages in the landlocked African country of Chad, suffering under constant terror attacks. It included 14 dialysis machines and three anesthesia machines donated by Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-ngo-flies-sorely-needed-aid-to-women-and-kids-in-chad/

Searching for Albanian earthquake victims. (TY Hazel) An Israel Rescue and Service team from Mevo'ot HaHermon Regional Council is searching for survivors in the city of Durres, following a 6.4 on the Richter Scale earthquake that shook Albania. It was the strongest earthquake to hit Albania in decades.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/H11Eu433r



SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Nine of the best 100 inventions for 2019. Nine Israeli startups are in TIME magazine’s 100 Best Inventions for 2019. They are Or Cam, Theranica, WaterGen, Tyto Care, Temi, ECOncrete, Eviation Aircraft, Intuition Robotics and Lemonade. All have been reported previously in this newsletter – check www.IsraelActive.com
https://www.timesofisrael.com/9-israeli-inventions-find-place-in-time-magazines-100-best-inventions-for-2019/

Testing disaster recovery plans. Israel-based EnsureDR develops technology for identifying and fixing disaster recovery plans. It uses an automatic process that operates and tests secondary data sites on a weekly basis. EnsureDR has just raised $2.5 million. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKjhvBJBf1I
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3772482,00.html https://ensuredr.com/

Intelligence by vision. Israel’s Viisights Solutions develops a video intelligence service that analyzes and manages video content for specific advertising campaigns., It also analyzes real-time footage from security cameras. Viisights has just raised $10 million of funds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cazz4PFo4Y
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3773914,00.html https://www.viisights.com/

Helping athletes to think. (TY UWI and I24) Israeli Air Force veterans have founded the startup Applied Cognitive Engineering (ACE) and developed the Intelligym – training software that boosts the cognitive abilities of soccer and hockey players. https://soccer.intelligym.com/home-uk/  https://www.intelligym.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MYJN3xtpZohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=501ETub5GaU

How does UBQ do it? Israeli startup UBQ’s revolutionary recycling facility has been reported (here) previously. This new article goes into much detail about the process which produces plastic containers and building material from almost any kind of garbage.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/climate-solutions/israeli-startup-ubq-turning-trash-into-plastic-products/

More shrimps to feed a hungry world. (TY Atid-EDI) This newsletter reported previously (see here) on three Israeli startups that were farming disease-free shrimps. Here is a fourth – Israel’s AquaMaof. Its RAS (Recirculating Aquaculture Systems) use cutting-edge technology to breed shrimps and other fish on land.
https://vimeo.com/362240498  http://aquamaof.com/

Give us a summary. Researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev said they have developed MUSE (Multilingual Sentence Extractor) software that automatically summarizes texts in many languages. It can help readers go through articles, magazines, databases and academic research faster and more efficiently.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/algorithm-can-sum-up-texts-in-any-language/

Read my lips. Israeli startup Hi Auto is developing speech recognition software for vehicle drivers. It uses a microphone and camera so it can track the driver’s lips to eliminate commands from other voices in the car.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3772286,00.html

Making hospital fabrics bacteria free. (TY Hazel) More on the method (see here) that Israeli startup Sonovia has developed to bacteria-proof hospital fabrics. They use ultrasound to form tiny vapor-filled cavities. Antibacterial chemicals can then be propelled onto the molecular structure of the fabric.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-invention-to-make-hospital-bedding-germ-resistant/

SpaceIL reveals new challenges. SpaceIL – the Israeli NGO that sent the world’s first private spacecraft to the moon – has announced plans to send spacecrafts to the Moon and to Mars. The Moon mission is scheduled to take place in 2022 and is expected to cost even less than the £100 million Beresheet mission.
https://worldisraelnews.com/spaceil-reveals-new-moon-mission-set-for-2022-with-mars-attempt-in-works/


ECONOMY & BUSINESS

Top of the world. (TY Atid-EDI) In the World Economic Forum’s 2019-2020 Global Competitiveness Report, Israel was ranked first for entrepreneurship, (risk, embrace of disruptive ideas, growing innovative companies), R&D expenditure, macroeconomic stability and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Overall Israel was 20th of 141.
https://nocamels.com/2019/10/world-economic-forum-global-competitiveness-2019-2020-israel/

Unemployment at 3.4% - lowest in 40 years. Israel’s unemployment rate fell from 3.6% in September to a record low of 3.4% in October.  https://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/october-israels-unemployment-rate-reaches-historic-low/2019/11/25/

Good all-round improvement. Israel’s Composite State of the Economy index for October increased by 0.3% - a slight acceleration in the last two months. All components improved, especially consumer goods exports, services exports, industrial production, imports, retail trade revenue, services revenue and job vacancies.
https://www.boi.org.il/en/NewsAndPublications/PressReleases/Pages/26-11-19.aspx

Importing hi-tech skills. NGO Masa Israel’s “FastTrack Pro” program serves as a pipeline for coding and other key technical skills by matching North American Jews to jobs at Israeli start-ups. Meanwhile, (TY Jacques) The Council for Higher Education’s “Study in Israel” also attracts international hi-tech talent.
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Israels-brain-drain-and-how-one-plucky-nonprofit-is-fighting-it-608245
http://israelbetweenthelines.com/2019/11/21/israel-working-towards-brain-gain-with-international-students/

AstraZeneca launches digital health program. AstraZeneca previously (Sep 2013) teamed up with Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital to develop new treatments. It has now started a NIS 10 million program for investing in Israel’s digital health sector. It will provide Israeli startups with funds, mentorship and training.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3774690,00.html

Teaming up to protect hospital systems. As reported previously, (Dec 2017)Israel’s Medigate protects medical devices from cyber-attack. It has now partnered with Japan’s Sompo Risk Management and Israeli private hospital chain Assuta Medical Centers to develop cybersecurity services for hospitals.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3774742,00.html

Vayyar raises $109 million. As reported previously (see here) the technology from Israel’s Vayyar can see through walls and other materials. Its 4D radar can also detect a patient falling and alerts an emergency contact. Vayyar has just raised $109 million and is opening new offices in Jerusalem and Haifa.
http://nocamels.com/2019/11/4d-imaging-sensor-vayyar-raises-109m-see-through-walls-tech/
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3774146,00.html

Sodastream plans $92 million expansion. PepsiCo is planning a $92 million expansion of its Sodastream plant in Rahat, southern Israel. It will hire an additional 1,000 employees; approximately one third of its current 1,500 strong workforce is comprised of Bedouin Arabs from the surrounding area.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pepsico-will-expand-sodastream-plant-in-southern-israel/


CULTURE, ENTERTAINMENT & SPORT

Smile please.  (TY UWI) The Arava International Photography Festival, part of the PlanetArava festival, recently took place in southern Israel. It offered 150 International photographers the chance to photograph the Holy Land’s unique wildlife and vibrant vistas.  https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/HJe33YMhB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1346&v=m6xCy_67mKc https://www.planetarava.com/

Another gold medal in Abu Dhabi. Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, was again played in Abu Dhabi on Sunday after Israel’s 21-year-old Nimrod Ryder won the gold medal in the Under 77kg adult category at the Jiu-Jitsu World Championships.
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/hatikvah-played-again-at-abu-dhabis-jiu-jitsu-world-championships-as-israel-takes-another-gold/2019/11/25/

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Why I Post Ross Rants. Do Israeli Laboratories Hold The Solutions?

In a Democracy/Republic where the society demands to remain free and tolerates/seeks the exchange of ideas in a free and safe environment there is hope betterment will flourish.

This is the reason progressive radicals do not want these conditions to obtain. This is why the Soros' of the world want to control and or resist conditions that allow for positive change.

This is why the likes of the Holder's, Obama's, Schiff's, Pelosi's Water's, the four renegades and their kind (THE ESTABLISHMENT) need to be flushed out of government along with corrupt bureaucrats that willingly do their bidding.

This is why I post The Rants because the author not only addresses market factors but the underlying social and cultural  issues that dictate attitudes and psychology which have a lot to do with market directions and economic conditions.

In his latest Rant he discusses education  and the attraction of making under-performers believe racism is their barrier. Yes, there is racism, yes there is prejudice and as long as man populates the earth there will be these negative attitudes but the basic problem relates to broken family structures, the misguided belief rewards not effort is the shovel out of sewer misery.  Progressive radicals and their politically correct solutions have increased that which they profess they want to eliminate. I sincerely believe they actually want power and this necessitates growing the uneducated, increasing the numbers  who believe they are victims, those who underachieve because of family and cultural issues and an unwillingness and/or incapability of toughing it out. Dependents are more easily manipulated.

Tragically, government and bureaucratic solutions are all too often the enemy.
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Will earth shattering solutions for mankind come from Israeli laboratories? (See 1 ans 1a below.)
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DORIS
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1) In possible climate breakthrough, Israel scientists engineer bacteria to eat CO₂

Decade-long research at Weizmann Institute could pave way for low-emissions production of carbon for use in biofuels, food, and help remove excess global warming CO₂ from air

By Sue Surkes 

In a remarkable breakthrough that could pave the way toward carbon-neutral fuels, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have produced a genetically engineered bacteria that can live on carbon dioxide rather than sugar.

The extraordinary leap — reported Wednesday in Cell, and quickly picked up by prestigious publications such as Nature — could lead to the low-emissions production of carbon for use in biofuels or food that would also help to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere, where it is helping to drive global warming.

Plants and ocean-living cyanobacteria perform photosynthesis, taking the energy from light to transform CO₂ into a form of organic carbon that can be used to build DNA, proteins and fats.

As these photosynthesizers can be difficult to moderate genetically, the Weizmann team, under Prof. Ron Milo, took E. coli bacteria — more commonly associated with food poisoning — and spent ten years weaning them off sugar and training them to “eat” carbon dioxide instead.

Through genetic engineering, they enabled the bacteria to convert CO₂ into organic carbon, substituting the energy of the sun — a vital ingredient in the photosynthesis process — with a substance called formate, which is also attracting attention as a potential generator of clean electricity.

To get the bacteria to move from a sugar to a carbon dioxide diet, the team, which also included Roee Ben-Nissan, Yinon Bar-On and others in the institute’s Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, then almost starved the bacteria of sugar (glucose), while giving them plenty of carbon dioxide and formate, and bred several generations to test whether evolution would allow some of the bacteria to mutate and be able to survive solely on CO₂.

After a year, some of the bacteria descendants made the complete switch to CO₂, following evolutionary changes in just 11 genes.

The lab bacteria that moved over to a CO₂ diet were fed very high amounts of the gas. However, under regular atmospheric conditions, they would still need sugar, as well, to live.

“Our lab was the first to pursue the idea of changing the diet of a normal heterotroph [one that eats organic substances] to convert it to autotrophism [‘living on air’],” said Milo. “It sounded impossible at first, but it has taught us numerous lessons along the way, and in the end we showed it indeed can be done. Our findings are a significant milestone toward our goal of efficient, green scientific applications.”

1a) Israeli team uses silicon chip to deliver Alzheimer’s-busting protein to brain

In Technion, Bar-Ilan trials, nanochip ferries ‘neural growth factor’ — which combats neurodegenerative diseases — and releases it where needed, overcoming blood-brain barrier

By Shoshanna Solomon

Researchers at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University have developed technology they hope will help inhibit the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

The study was published recently as a cover story in the journal Small. It was led by Prof. Ester Segal and PhD student Michal Rosenberg from the Technion Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering with their partners, Prof. Orit Shefi and PhD student Neta Zilony-Hanin from the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Engineering.

Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, is a neurodegenerative disease whose symptoms include memory loss, speech impairment, orientation problems, and significant impairment of motor functions.

It primarily strikes the elderly, and among those age 85 and up it reaches a prevalence of some 30%. Due to the increase in life expectancy, the overall incidence of the disease has grown and it is today referred to as the epidemic of the 21st century.

The major cause of the disease is the accumulation of a protein called amyloid beta (Aβ) in brain tissues. The protein blocks and kills nerve cells, also called neurons, in different regions of the brain. This leads, in part, to damage of the “cholinergic mechanisms,” the neurons in charge of brain function.

Research has previously shown that administering a specific protein, called “neural growth factor,” inhibits damage to the cholinergic mechanisms and slows the disease’s progression, said the Technion’s Prof. Segal in a phone interview.

“In people with neurodegenerative diseases, the expression of the neural growth factor protein is reduced,” she said.

The protein is known to have restorative qualities, but the problem is how to get it to the brain, she said.

Delivering the protein to the target area is not a simple task because the brain is shielded by the blood-brain barrier from infiltration by bacteria and harmful substances in the blood.

This protective barrier, however, also restricts the passage of drugs from the bloodstream to the brain, making it difficult for brain-curing medications to get through.

Thus, the neural growth factor proteins, if given in drug form, do not pass through the barrier, and even if they could, they would not live long enough to make the long journey to the brain, Segal said.

Some clinical trials have already started injecting these neural growth factor proteins directly into the brain via a catheter, but the procedure is complicated, invasive and very risky, Segal said.

Now, the Technion and Bar-Ilan University researchers say they have created nanoscale silicon chips that could meet this challenge.

The chips allow the insertion of the curative protein directly into the brain and its release at the targeted tissue.

These chips, developed in Segal’s lab, have a nanoscale porous structure that allows them to be loaded with large amounts of the protein. Through precise control of various features, including the dimension of the chips’ pores and the chemical properties of their surface, the researchers were able to create a silicone structure that retains the protein in its active form and then releases it gradually, over a period of about a month, to the target area in the brain. After releasing the drug, the chips safely degrade in the brain and dissolve, the Technion said in a statement.

With the use of the chips as a vehicle, the protein no longer needs to cross the blood-brain barrier, since the chip is inserted directly into the brain. This is done in one of two possible ways, explained Segal.

The first is by implanting the chip into the brain. Segal admits that this procedure is also invasive, as the skull needs to be drilled into. But, she said, it is less invasive than inserting a catheter, since the chip is not inserted into the brain itself but rather is placed on the outer layer of the brain — the dura mater, a dense connective tissue that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. The researchers aim to eventually be able to load the chip with medication that releases even more gradually, over the period of a year, to prolong the drug’s effect. Currently, in trials with mice, the chip releases the proteins over a period of a month.

The second way to get the proteins to the brain is by using a “gene gun” — a device that has been developed to inject DNA into plant cells in order to transform their genetic structure.

As part of the study, Prof. Shefi of Bar-Ilan reworked the gun, transforming it into “something like a nose spray” that injects the silicon chip with the protein particles into the brain via the nose, bypassing the blood-brain barrier.

The nose has direct pathways to the brain, explained Segal “Not for nothing drug addicts sniff cocaine via their noses,” she said.

This is the first time researchers have successfully used a gene gun to directly deliver particles into a live animal brain, she said.

In a series of experiments, the researchers showed that the two ways of delivering the platform into mice brains “led to the desired result,” said Technion doctoral student Michal Rosenberg. The technology has also been tested on a cellular model of Alzheimer’s disease, where the protein release led to the rescue of the nerve cells, she said.

The team is already conducting pre-clinical studies on animals, at Bar-Ilan , Segal explained, and hopes to expand them to clinical trials if all goes as hoped.

The research was conducted with the support of the Russel Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion

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