(Calls for Criminal Investigation into Biden Family |
Lee Zeldin’s call for an investigation comes after Fox News reported that a person who was on an email thread with Joe Bidens son confirmed to the news network that the emails were accurate. Fox News’ focused on a series of emails, which . . . . . |
READ MORE ) |
HOT MIC: Dianne Feinstein Caught Making Disparaging Comments About Amy Coney Barrett’s Pro-Life, Religious Views
Well, this is awkward. Senator Dianne Feinstein was caught making disparaging comments about Judge Amy Coney Barrett during a break in the Senate confirmation hearings on Thursday.
In the clip, Feinstein can be heard talking about Barret’s Catholic faith and pro-life views.
“She’s been pro-life for a long time,” she can be heard saying. “So I suspect with her, it is deeply personal and comes with her religion.”)
How historian Fred Siegel came to appreciate the president’s defense of ‘bourgeois values’ against the ‘clerisy.’
By Tunku Varadarajan
Illustration: KEN FALLIN
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Donald Trump can count at least one new supporter in this year’s election. “I had a close friend who’d been a business partner of Trump in the ’90s,” the critic and historian Fred Siegel tells me. “Trump ripped off a quarter of a million dollars from him. He told me this when we were discussing the election” four years ago. “Trump just said, ‘So, take me to court.’ I couldn’t vote for him.” Mr. Siegel couldn’t abide Hillary Clinton either, so he “slept through” the 2016 election. Next month he’ll be wide awake—though not woke—and will vote for Mr. Trump.
Joe Biden needn’t worry too much, perhaps. Mr. Siegel, 75, has only twice backed a winning presidential candidate since he reached voting age. But while he’s no bellwether, he does make an energetic case for the incumbent.
Mr. Siegel, a professor emeritus at New York’s Cooper Union and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says he overcame his distaste for Mr. Trump for three reasons. First, foreign policy: “Crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving our embassy to Jerusalem, and making fools of those people who insist that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Second, by his “ability to withstand a prolonged coup attempt by the Democrats and the media,” which started with the Steele dossier: “If I’m saying what I find impressive about Trump, it’s that he’s survived. He has an extraordinary amount of arrogance, egotism, and self-confidence.”
Mr. Siegel’s third reason goes to the heart of his own political philosophy. He sees the president as a champion of “bourgeois values,” under threat from the “clerisy,” Mr. Siegel’s word for the dominant elites who “despise” those values. He regards Mr. Biden as a “captive” of this clerisy, and running mate Kamala Harris as the “embodiment of it.”
“I don’t want to see her as president,” Mr. Siegel says of Sen. Harris. “I don’t want a San Francisco Democrat who’s likely to impose elements of the Green New Deal, which she sponsored but lied about sponsoring on television. If Biden wins, she will be president in short order. I don’t know how long Biden will last.”
In Mr. Siegel’s view, “hard work, faith, family and autonomy” have enabled America to thrive, and Mr. Trump stands for these values, even if he doesn’t always exemplify them. “The elite is largely detached from the middle class,” Mr. Siegel says. “The two major sources of wealth in the last 20 years have been finance and Silicon Valley. Neither of them has much connection to middle-class America, or Middle America.” Mr. Trump is “in favor of manufacturing jobs, which are often middle-class.” The president also “recognizes the ways in which China is a threat to the survival of middle-class life in America, directly and indirectly.”
Mr. Siegel takes heart from Mr. Trump’s hostility to political correctness. “Wokeness is a force that undermines the middle class,” he says, “and you couldn’t have had wokeness without an elite contempt for the values of the middle class.” Middle Americans see political correctness “as a threat to the democratic republic they grew up in, where people could speak their mind.” I ask Mr. Siegel to define political correctness: “The inability to speak the truth about the obvious.”
As we sit on his porch in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park, his opinions—unfashionable in a borough where Mrs. Clinton outpolled Mr. Trump by more than 60 points—cause passersby to turn their heads. When he offers examples of political correctness that annoy him, a young man walking by the house looks startled. “Why can’t you say ‘Wuhan virus’?” Mr. Siegel exclaims. “Why can’t you say there are two genders?” The young man scuttles past as if singed, and Mr. Siegel says, with palpable sadness, that people don’t stop to talk to him on his porch as much as they used to. Word has got around that he is “a Trump supporter, so fewer people schmooze with me.”
Mr. Siegel is the author of several books, including “The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America’s Big Cities” (1997) and “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014). Just out is “The Crisis of Liberalism,” a selection of his recent political essays, published by the small, independent Telos Press.
He started as a man of the left, and still describes himself as a protégé of Irving Howe, the democratic socialist literary critic. “Howe died young,” Mr. Siegel notes—in 1993, at 72. He was a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh in 1968, studying the political economy of tobacco in Virginia, when he cast his first vote. But he sat out the 1972 election. “I voted for Humphrey. I did not vote for McGovern or Nixon. I worked for McGovern as a spokesperson in Western Pennsylvania, and I was stunned to discover that he thought Henry Wallace had been right about a lot of things. Lightbulbs went off.”
In 1976 he voted for “Gerald Ford, the man.” Ford was “moderately competent and unpretentious. Jimmy Carter was pretentious. I thought his religiosity was painted on.” His aversion to Mr. Carter persisted, and in 1980 he backed John Anderson, a liberal Republican running as an independent.
Mr. Siegel voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984. “If anyone was going to make the Great Society work—and it was a mess by this time, a farrago—it was Mondale.” Mr. Mondale had “intelligence and knowledge,” but his defeat, and Reagan’s notable successes, made Mr. Siegel “rethink a lot of things.” A man like Mondale, he says, “would not be possible in today’s Democratic Party. There’d be no room for him.”
By the late 1980s Mr. Siegel had become “a centrist Democrat—part of a group that no longer exists.” Michael Dukakis was too liberal for Mr. Siegel, so he skipped the 1988 election. He became a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. He voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and advised—“but didn’t invoice”—Mrs. Clinton on her successful 2000 bid for Senate.
He didn’t vote in 2000 or 2004 and thinks George W. Bush “was a horrible president”: “The conduct of the Iraq war was extraordinarily inept. I supported the war initially, but I watched how it was being conducted, and I changed my mind.” The first time he voted for “the Republican Party as a party” was in 2008, by which time he had started to define himself as a conservative.
By 2012, when he voted for Mitt Romney, Mr. Siegel had developed an exceedingly low opinion of President Obama, whom he describes as “a faux intellectual with preacher’s cadences and an academic veneer.” In his opinion, “the worst thing” about Mr. Obama was “his effect on race relations. We couldn’t have the cold civil war we have now without Obama, because he, in a very cunning way, exacerbated all of our racial tensions.”
Under Mr. Obama, Mr. Siegel says, “racial grievance” took on a “new legitimacy, and it came from a president talking in asides, and saying things between the lines. He didn’t push back against anything, not even against the idea that Michael Brown said ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ in Ferguson [Mo.], which was just a fabrication.”
Yet Mr. Siegel traces the origins of the “present-day contempt” for the middle class back a century. He cites H.L. Mencken’s demeaning of the bourgeoisie, in the celebrated editor’s coinage of “booboisie.” Mr. Siegel has written extensively on Herbert Croly, the political philosopher and co-founder of the New Republic, as well as on the novelists H.G. Wells and Sinclair Lewis (who, in 1930, became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature). These three men, Mr. Siegel says, laid the foundation for an elite revolt against the American middle class that endures to this day.
“Croly’s idea was that the college-educated, the elite, should become a new aristocracy,” Mr. Siegel says. “Croly believed that the middle-class and their allies—latter-day Jeffersonians who advocated individual freedom and acted in their own self-interest—were impeding the path of the experts, who were ‘disinterested.’ ”
Wells and Lewis bolstered the view that the professional class was above the fray, giving the argument an almost aesthetic hue. “They thought the middle class was vulgar,” Mr. Siegel says. Mr. Siegel cites a passage in Lewis’s novel “Main Street” (1920), which he regards as “a sardonic sally at the small-town American middle class and its commercial culture.” In the passage, Carol Kennicott, a young woman from the big city trapped by marriage in small-town America, describes Americans as “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs . . . and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” In a word, deplorables.
Croly has been largely forgotten, Mr. Siegel says, because liberalism has been largely eclipsed. “Wokeism is not liberalism,” he says. “I don’t want to be unfair to liberals. I was very critical of liberals, but they were in favor of debate; they were in favor of empiricism, of open argument.” Wokeism, by contrast, is a “new secular revealed religion,” which involves no “investigation or empirical study.”
The eclipse of the old “Crolyite liberalism” began, Mr. Siegel says, in the 1980s and ’90s, with the eruption of postmodernism into American intellectual life. “There began to be an emphasis on ‘narratives’ and feeling, which undermined the Crolyite emphasis on empiricism and evidence.” Liberalism had already been weakened by Reagan’s victory in 1980. “There was questioning among liberals, and some self-doubt,” Mr. Siegel says. “But the questioning didn’t go far enough, and blame was placed squarely on Carter. He didn’t check all of Croly’s boxes, he wasn’t a natural, Ivy League aristocrat. He was a farmer”—in contrast with John F. Kennedy, an archetypal Crolyite president.
There was, Mr. Siegel says, an ideological “hiatus” under Mr. Clinton, in which a party that had been “demoralized by the defeat of the technocrat Dukakis in 1988” recovered some of its mojo. But “postmodernism turning to wokeness was churning” in the 1990s. The 2000 election was “a trauma” for the Democrats, and Howard Dean’s unsuccessful candidacy for the 2004 nomination previewed “some of the craziness and hysteria that would come full-bore, on a broader scale, a decade later.” Wokeism achieved its apotheosis in 2014, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting. “Ferguson allowed Ivy League grads to assert their ‘natural leadership,’ in opposition to lowlife cops and guys with pickup trucks—again, the deplorables.”
In Mr. Siegel’s understanding, wokeism holds that “the important truths are already known, and that the American aristocracy has to impose those truths on the country.” These are “given positions”—irrefutable and sacrosanct. Wokeism, he says, is a “perilous threat” to America and particularly to the First Amendment. “It says we don’t need debate. We don’t need free speech. We don’t need freedom of religion. We need to obey.” Mr. Siegel’s vote is his personal act of disobedience.
Mr. Varadarajan is a Journal contributor and a fellow at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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Ordman's Good News From Israel:
GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL COMPILED BY MICHAEL ORDMAN
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Covid-19 prevention cocktail. Trials will start soon of an antibody cocktail developed by Tel Aviv University scientists to treat Covid-19 patients and to protect highly vulnerable individuals from the virus until a vaccine is available. The serum contains six different antibodies that can provide immunity for several months.
Nasal spray prevents Covid-19 spread. Israeli biotech Nasus has developed the Taffix anti-viral nasal spray. It creates a thin gel over the nasal mucosa, blocking viruses for 4-5 hours. In recent tests, Taffix reduced Covid-19 infections from 10% down to 2.4%. Taffix is marketed in Europe and available at SuperPharm in Israel.
https://www.nasuspharma.com/
BBC says Israeli Covid-19 tests work like magic! (TY Hazel) Ben Gurion University Professor Tomer Hertz, was interviewed on the BBC World Service’s statistics show “More or Less” about how Israel’s “mathematical magic” of testing pooled swab samples could help countries to ramp up their Covid-19 testing capacity.
Webinar featuring Professor Haick. An opportunity to see and hear the amazing Technion Professor Hossam Haick (reported here previously), discuss with fellow Professor Naama Geva-Zatorsky, about fast Covid-19 testing. The Technion UK event is on Tues 20 Oct at 6pm (UK), 8pm (Israel) or 1pm EDT. Register below.
Sleep apnea device wins major US award. The US National Sleep Foundation (NSF) has chosen Israel’s Itamar Medical.(reported here previously) as the winner of its 2020 SleepTech Award, which recognizes the year’s most innovative achievement in sleep technology. Itamar’s WatchPAT ONE diagnoses sleep apnea.
AI triage for Brown University. Israel’s Diagnostic Robotics (reported here previously) is bringing its Artificial Intelligence-powered patient triage and prediction platform to the Brown University-Lifespan Center for Digital Health in Providence, Rhode Island.
Train the brain for a better game. Israel’s i-BrainTech uses neuroscience to train the brains of soccer players off the field. With a unique helmet, players visualize their tactics while an avatar (image of the player) performs the actions on a screen. A 30% improvement in 2 months is claimed. It is also used in stroke rehabilitation.
Spine surgery under local anesthetic. (TY UWI) Surgeons at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital repaired several vertebral fractures in the spine of an Israeli who stayed awake throughout the operation. Due to the 74-year-old patient’s heart and lung issues, only local anesthesia was used – a procedure only Hadassah surgeons perform.
Surgeons save baby unable to breathe. During a C-section at Israel’s Ichilov hospital, doctors bypassed a tumor that was blocking the baby’s airways. Only then could they cut his umbilical cord to avoid oxygen starvation. The doctors practiced the complex operation using a 3D-printed model of the baby’s neck.
Bio-convergence is the next big thing. The Israel Innovation Authority is to invest up to about $30 million in bio-convergence technologies and companies, the next growth engine for the Israeli economy. Bio-convergence is the overlap of biology, physics, computer science, math, engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.
ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL
The first country to ban trade in animal fur. Israel is to set to ban the fur trade – the first nation in the world to do so (only some cities and California have banned it). Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel said, “Utilizing the skin and fur of wildlife for the fashion industry is immoral.” Even the BBC reported the news.
First Bedouin graduates of Startup Negev. Startup Negev (reported here previously) is a new tech accelerator catering to Israel’s Bedouin minority. Its first graduates included a mixed team of a Bedouin father and son plus a Jewish couple who won NIS 50,000 with their homework platform for children with learning disabilities.
App to help PA Arabs get Israeli medical treatment. Jewish paramedic Yaara and PA doctor Zafer have developed the “Care and Transfer” app to help speed up the transfer of sick Palestinian Arabs to Israeli hospitals. The two met at Tech2Peace (see here) a 12-day peacebuilding tech event for PA Arabs and Israelis.
Bribery stops here. For the second year in a row the NGO Transparency International ranked Israel in the four best nations for cracking down on bribery of foreign public officials by companies operating abroad. The survey rated 47 top nations, including 43 signatories to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
Historic Berlin meeting. Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, met for the first time in Berlin, and together visited the Holocaust Memorial there. The event was also attended by German ministers.
Meals for 1000 needy Londoners. (TY Barry Shaw) For World Food Day, the Israel Embassy in London. partnered City Harvest London and Eran Tibi of London’s Bala Baya Israeli restaurant to cook 1,000 meals for London’s needy. They will go to women’s shelters, children’s charities, the elderly and soup kitchens.
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
More power to Israel. Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office has formed the Fuel Cells Consortium. Its aim is to improve fuel cell durability and power and to cut its costs. The consortium includes Israeli fuel cell companies GenCell (see here) and PO-CellTech plus 12 researchers from all of Israel’s universities.
New R&D center for breeding better seeds. Israel’s Equinom (reported here previously) has opened a hi-tech R&D center in a huge renovated warehouse at Kibbutz Givat Brenner in Central Israel. The facility will boost Equinom’s efforts to develop the next generation of its non-GMO Smarter Seeds for tackling global hunger.
Fast delivery by hybrid UAV. (TY WIN) Israel’s Gadfin (“wings” in Aramaic) has developed a long-distance aircraft with folding wings to hover like a UAV but fly like a plane. Ideal for delivering emergency supplies to inaccessible locations up to 250km away. Italy’s Enei will use Gadfin to check electrical power lines.
Cutting security delays at airports. Israel’s SeeTrue provides a hi-tech AI solution that quickly identifies banned items in X-rays of baggage. SeeTrue was a winner in the UN World Tourism Organization Healing Solutions challenge, contested by over 1,100 companies.
https://www.israel21c.org/
Locating landmines by detecting bacteria. Israel has developed some unique innovative methods for finding deadly unexploded landmines (see here). Now, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have engineered a strain of E. coli bacteria that, a few hours after scattering over a minefield, will glow brightly if near TNT.
Charging up the road. Israel’s ElectReon does not stop. Having begun building pilot vehicle charging roads in Sweden, Germany and Tel Aviv (see here), it is now partnering European infrastructure company, Eurovia (part of Vinci S.A.), to promote and build wireless electric road systems in Germany, France and Belgium.
New EV chassis is right on track. Israel’s REE Automotive (reported here previously) has three prototypes of its modular and flexible electric vehicle platforms. Each is sized appropriate to the dimensions and applications of the final completed target vehicle. REE has partnered Mitsubishi, Masushi, NSK, AAM, KYB and Mahindra.
https://jewishbusinessnews.
Boosting streaming for Cisco & BT. Israel’s Qwilt (reported here nine years ago) is integrating its software to accelerate the pace and streaming of live and VOD video broadcasts into Cisco’s computer systems. British Telecom (BT) is the first company that will integrate the new development in its infrastructure.
Safer, cheaper construction. Israel’s Samson Logic has developed a hardware / software system for managing construction materials. It can help save lives, save crane and worker time, optimize storage area, and manage material waste. Samson Logic has been selected to join the Proptech Zone Startup Accelerator. Great video.
Helping the UN monitor disasters from space. United Nations’ Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) has signed an agreement with Israel’s Ben Gurion University to create a Regional Support Office for the UN Platform for Space-Based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-SPIDER).’
Ecosystem security pioneer. Israeli cybersecurity startup Cyberpion says that it detects threats from all connected third-party online solutions, their connections, and so on. It “systematically identifies vulnerabilities and neutralizes previously undetectable threats within the vast, highly dynamic online ecosystem.”
Manage stress with personal nutrition. Israel’s myAir.ai has developed a series of plant-based nutrition bars to reduce different type of stress. The herbal extract blends are personalized using an algorithm and profiling of an individual’s cognitive response to stress, tracked via a smart watch.
Car from Israeli recycled material. A team of Dutch students has built a zero-waste car. The body of the “Luca” is made of bio-based thermoplastic from recycled trash, developed by Israeli startup UBQ Materials (reported here previously). The students’ aim is to show that waste can be used for a multitude of applications.
Color from yeast. A spinoff from Israel’s Weizmann Institute, startup Phytolon has developed natural food coloring by fermenting yeast. The process involves extracting the gene that determines the color of a certain plant and using it to generate a strain of baker yeast, which is then fermented.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
ECONOMY & BUSINESS
Record quarter for hi-tech investment. The Israeli Tech Funding report by IVC and ZAG for the third quarter of 2020 showed that the total of investment in Israeli high-tech soared to a new quarterly record – $2.74 billion.
US-Israel trade forum. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the first US Free Trade agreement – with Israel. On Oct 26, the US-Israel Trade Forum celebrates the successes of this agreement and examines areas for the continued growth of these commercial ties. Register for this virtual event at the linked site below.
Why Chevron’s takeover of Noble is good news. When Arab countries boycotted Israel, major oil companies did the same. As the Arab world makes friends with Israel, so major oil companies feel free to invest in Israel’s successful economic future. Chevron will now help extract Israel’s natural gas deposits, for mutual benefit.
On the wings of eagles. Yeshiva student Eli Rozenberg, son of Naftali, now officially controls Israel’s national airline El Al through his father’s company. Naftali is not an Israeli citizen (one of the ownership requirements for El Al) but his son is. Naftali’s company is Kanfei Nesharim – Hebrew for “The wings of eagles”.
Superb play by Joe Montana. Legendary San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana has invested in Israeli startup Walnut which develops an application for customized sales demos. Walnut enables a seamless, effective, sales process while working remotely without reliance on professional designers or developers.
Were you watching? Back in Feb 2016 Israel’s Tipalti was one of seven Israeli “startups to watch” (reported here). Hopefully, you read it, because the developer of automation solutions for global payments is now worth $2 billion. Its clients include Amazon Twitch, Twitter, GoDaddy, Fiverr and Vimeo.
Billion-dollar exit, but still independent. At the peak of the coronavirus crisis, with businesses around the world paralyzed, Israeli application security company Checkmarx pulled off a massive $1.2 billion exit and maintained its independence in the process. Israeli founder and CTO, Maty Siman, explains.
Israeli secure digital transfer attracts French bank. Israel’s Curv (reported here previously) has partnered French banking giant BNP Paribas to complete a proof of concept of Curv’s process for transferring security tokens securely between market participants.
We never close. (TY Jacques) During the recent Israeli lockdown, only certain essential businesses can stay open. To avoid closure, some businesses have used creative “chutzpa”. A flower shop sells “agricultural products” and herbs. A falafel shop delivers to the closest bench. A clothing store sells fruit and veg.
Vegan eggs available in the US. Israel’s Zero Egg, developer of a vegan substitute for eggs (reported here previously), has now launched in the US to food service operators and manufacturers. Zero Egg contains soy, potato, pea, and chickpea, is low fat, has no cholesterol, and just 15 calories compared to 65 for an actual egg.
Investment in Israeli startups: Tipalti raised $150 million; apiiro raised $35 million; Illusive Networks raised $24 million; Access Fintech raised $20 million; Dataloop raised $16 million; SiteAware raised $10 million; Cyberpion raised $8.25 million; Butterfly Medical raised $7 million; TetaVi raised $6 million; Phytolon raised $4.1 million; Walnut raised $2.5 million; Samson Logic raised $400,000.
CULTURE, ENTERTAINMENT & SPORT`
Israeli Opera for locked down fans. (TY Hazel) The Israeli Opera has upgraded its website, to entertain fans at home. It has video on demand, opera games and puzzles, popular clips, full operas, duets, solos and stories. The sample video clip below is “Yihye Tov” (It will be good) – an appropriate title for this newsletter.
Watch Israeli tech on TV. True Future TV began filming last year for its docuseries Season 4 that features Israeli medical technology (reported here previously). Free online streaming begins 22 Oct. Host Joe Mullings found Israel to be “a nation on the cutting edge of medtech, healthtech, robotics and artificial intelligence.”
HBO buys another Israeli TV series. HBO has bought the global rights to the highly anticipated Israeli TV series Valley of Tears, based on the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It is said to have the biggest budget of any Israeli series to date. In Hebrew, the show is called “Sh’at Ha’neilah,” – the hour of the Yom Kippur Neilah service.
Enjoy the great outdoors, indoors. (TY Nurit) For those who love wildlife and have been deprived of it because of the pandemic lockdown, University of Haifa’s Dr. Motti Charter has set up a YouTube channel with live videos and recordings from cameras at Israel’s premier wildlife nature sites.
Israel team wins first Grand Tour stage. (TY UWI) The Israel Start-Up Nation (ISN) cycling team has made history. It recorded its first-ever stage victory in a Grand Tour race when Alex Dowsett finished first on the 200km Stage 8 of the Giro d’Italia from Giovinazzo to Vieste. Teammate Matthias Brändle finished 5th.
THE JEWISH STATE
Ancient two-Shekel weight discovered next to Western Wall. A weight, measuring 2 shekels (23 grams) dating to the First Temple period, some 2,700 years ago, was discovered during excavations adjacent to Wilson’s Arch of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. It is marked with a Shin and two lines, signifying 2 shekels.
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