Israel's Instable Governments. Trump Hating Endemic At All Levels. Wokeness, America's Greatest Threat.

Refreshing:

Study: Vitamin D deficiency raises risk of death from COVID by 50%

Art Moore(WND), 7/26/22

Patients with a Vitamin D deficiency have as much as a 50% higher probability of death from COVID-19, according to a study by researchers in Israel and Russia.

The boost to the immune system from Vitamin D can be found in supplements as well as foods such as egg yolks, fatty salmon, sardines, herring, canned tuna, beef liver, fortified milk, cereals, yogurt, and orange juice. CONTINUE

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Even if Israel were not facing potential destruction from Iran the way they select their unstable  governments borders on insanity:

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Bennett’s bad precedent and the curse of Israel’s small parties

Despite this past year’s failed “experiment” in coalition-building and governance, the same people are at it again, reciting tired mantras about the need to “keep Bibi out of Balfour.”

Posted By Ruthie Blum

The Israeli Knesset hall, ahead of the vote to disband, June 30, 2022. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90.

The Israeli Knesset hall, ahead of the vote to disband, June 30, 2022. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90.

Ever since the April 9, 2019 Knesset elections, foes of Likud Party chairman Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu—the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history and currently the head of the opposition—have been blaming him for the political quagmire that is sending the public back to the ballot box this fall for the fifth time in three-and-a-half years.

This chorus is made up of various voices inside the halls of parliament and beyond, with protesters and pundits of different stripes uniting around an aversion to a common enemy. The mantra-chanters in question claim that if Netanyahu would only step aside, all of Israel’s coalition crises would vanish, making way for a broad and stable government.

The past year’s “experiment”—with a government created for the sole purpose of “kicking Bibi out of Balfour” (the name of the street in Jerusalem where the official residence of the prime minister is located)—led by Naftali Bennett, whose party garnered just a few seats above the threshold, exemplified that the above assertion was completely false. Astonishingly, however, it is still being repeated ad nauseam, and by the same people.

You know, those who should be eating their hats, rather than parading around like peacocks.

Alas, the looming elections, slated for Nov. 1, have brought us back to square one. But it’s the “anyone but Bibi” crew and not Netanyahu who bear responsibility for the chaos. 

Bennett’s legal manipulation of the system to crown himself premier is also at fault. It not only set a dangerous precedent; it whetted the appetite and stirred the imagination of the heads of other small anti-Netanyahu parties.

It is crucial to note in this context that the original coalition-impasse culprit was Yisrael Beiteinu Party chief Avigdor Lieberman. A member of the right—at least, at the time—he had vowed to back Likud. This is why all surveys placed him on the Bibi side of the pie chart. As a result, when the exit polls came in, Netanyahu appeared to be a clear winner.

After the final vote count, however, Lieberman suddenly reneged. Had he decided to fink out all the way, he could have supported Benny Gantz’s “anybody but Bibi” Blue and White bloc, which received a single mandate more than Likud. And a government would have been formed in a flash.

But he opted out of that, too. It was a perfect example of a small party wielding disproportionate power.

Little did Israelis realize that two years and three more elections later, an even smaller party, Yamina, would end up doing something far worse: robbing right-wing votes and handing them over to the left. Still, it satisfied Lieberman, who was anointed finance minister.

The fairytale didn’t end well, of course, since the ideological mish-mash was impossible to sustain. Even the fictional accounts of its successes promoted by anti-Netanyahu media outlets weren’t able to keep Humpty Dumpty from falling to pieces.

Nevertheless, small parties are working furiously to repeat the mistake. Gantz, who served as defense minister under Netanyahu, Bennett and now under Prime Minister Yair Lapid, is unable to give up his dream of taking the helm.

Because of his poor showing in the polls, he quickly merged with New Hope leader Gideon Sa’ar, who was unlikely to make it past the electoral threshold, to increase both their chances. In other words, here they go again.

Not only that. In a Channel 13 interview on Monday evening, Gantz went as far as to hint that he could pull a stunt similar to that of Bennett and become premier with a third of the seats that Likud will probably win. Prior to Bennett’s maneuver, such an idea wouldn’t have occurred to him.

Ironically, though touting himself as a true statesman of the “center” who can “unify” all sectors, he announced that his main goal is to “prevent Netanyahu from reaching the 61 [seats]” he needs to form a government in the 120-seat Knesset, then “to provide an alternative.”

Can’t these guys come up with any fresh material? That they constantly obfuscate the inconvenient fact that Netanyahu’s Likud has more seats than any other single party in the Knesset is understandable, especially with an election on the horizon.

This is why their focus always returns to Bibi’s criminal trial (which is crumbling with each cross-examination of prosecution witnesses) and the “dubious” character and/or outrageous statements of a couple of candidates running in the Likud primaries next month. All this does, though, is smack of elitist snobbery aimed at Likud voters. It certainly doesn’t move the needle.

If Israelis wish to end this exhausting and expensive electoral cycle, they need to make a choice between two camps: the one whose victory will bring Bibi back to Balfour; and that which will see Lapid, who heads the second-largest party, Yesh Atid, remain in the Prime Minister’s Office. Afterwards, they can push for a change in the system. But no one must bank on that happening any time soon, thanks to opposition from the small parties.

Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ”

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Renegade Trump hating government radicals defied Trump at every turn.

https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_from_the_swamp_V8.pdf

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Shelf life of a useful idiot

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What is the Shelf Life of a Useful Idiot?

By Steve Feinstein

“President” Biden is often described as a useful idiot. The term originated during the Cold War and is defined as a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The phrase has since broadened from non-communists being manipulated to do PR bidding by communists to mean anyone who is being unwittingly duped into furthering a cause of which he has no big-picture comprehension.

Biden is the dictionary definition of the current meaning of useful idiot: someone who has no clue that he’s being used to promote an extremist agenda that he doesn’t actually understand. When Joe Biden was in his prime as a senator -- such as that ever was -- he at least had some general idea of the major issues of the day and their implications. He took sides based on their potential political and personal payoff, but at least he did it intentionally. In a singularly undistinguished Senate career that began in 1972, Joe Biden has consistently made the choices that redounded to his maximum personal benefit. At a bare minimum, he had the awareness to put himself first. 

That is no longer true. Biden has no awareness or understanding of complex issues. He reads what he’s told to read. He walks -- stiffly and unsteadily -- where he’s told to walk. His cognitive impairment is so blatantly obvious and advanced that there’s no need to even recount all the examples here.

None of this is a surprise to Democrat party operatives. Everyone knew this all along, but the “get Trump out” movement was so strong that Biden’s dementia just didn’t matter at all. The Democrat machine, taking full advantage of the so-called COVID “emergency” (you know, the disease with the 99.7% survival rate for those under 70 without severe comorbidities), illegally changed battleground state voting regulations so they could fabricate a fraudulent, easily manipulated mail-in voting scheme to rig the election for Biden.

It worked. The Republicans were outmaneuvered. The courts, showing amazing cowardice and displaying an astonishing aversion to rocking the legal/structural boat, refused to hear cases of voter fraud in spite of mountains of tangible evidence. Biden was “elected.”

Having their empty figurehead in place, the behind-the-scenes operatives (Ron Klain? Susan Rice? Valerie Jarrett? Obama himself?) went to work. They immediately dismantled everything Trump had done regarding border security, promoting domestic energy production, and maintaining a strong military and law enforcement. Then they went further, and actively installed and formalized the woke policies of CRT in schools and gender fluidity and are now trying to claim emergency powers in order to ram home the Green New Deal. Along the way, they intentionally printed billions of worthless dollars and injected those into the money supply, knowing full well it would devalue the dollar, cause generationally horrific inflation and wreck the domestic economy.

All these moves were well-considered and premeditated. These decisions were not unfortunate moves by an ill-informed, inexperienced administration. Quite the contrary -- every measure was designed to weaken the population’s individuality and autonomy and make them more beholden to the government for their very existence and sustenance. The Democrats’ aim is to perpetuate their hold on power by subjugating the population to economic, domestic and employment hardship and then promising to dole out -- at their whim -- small snippets of relief in the form of tax-funded “benefits.”

Does Biden realize this? Is he aware of the full scope of what is happening around him? No. He is a useful idiot. Actually, he is an imbecile, in the formal psychological definition of the word (an adult with the mental capacity of a seven- or eight-year-old child), not the pejorative colloquial usage of the word.

However, the point at which Biden’s political liability and damage to the Democrat party brand exceeds his value as an easily exploited dupe is rapidly approaching. Biden is now spoiled, curdled milk. The Democrats can’t count on him dying or voluntarily resigning, so they will probably have to invoke some angle of the 25th Amendment and have him removed from office because of a health matter. They have already raised the cancer issue and the Dems would certainly prefer to have some sympathy-inducing public reason for Biden stepping down, rather than having to acknowledge their complicity in installing a doddering, senile old man as President.

So, the Democrats are searching for their next useful idiot. Who it is isn’t important to them, since that person will merely be their new dupe, their latest puppet. What they need is someone who won’t damage their image, who gives the appearance of at least minimum coherence and competence, and who will not exceed their “sell by” date before the Democrats can come up with a plausible candidate for 2024.

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More liberal crap is allowed to filter into medical practices and education. Why is it allowed?

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Medical Education Goes Woke

Future doctors will be obliged to learn how health relates to ‘systems of oppression.’

The Editorial Board 

The woke domination of American higher education can seem tragically comic when it’s confined to the English department. But when it infiltrates the hard sciences, far more is at stake. Read and wince at how woke politics is about to infect medical education.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that represents and advises medical schools. It also has influence with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the national accreditor that sets med-school standards. So when the AAMC tells schools to revise how they teach, America’s future physicians will be obliged to listen.

The AAMC recently released a report describing the new “diversity, equity and inclusion competencies” that medical students and residents will be expected to master. Practicing physicians who work at teaching hospitals may also soon be required to undergo this form of, well, political re-education.

As a starting point, aspiring doctors will have to become fluent in woke concepts such as “intersectionality,” which the AAMC defines as “overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.” Med students who managed to avoid learning critical race theory in college will now get an immersive course.

They will also be expected to demonstrate “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities”—not to be confused with personality disorders—and “how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” This sounds as if every medical diagnosis will have to be made with an accompanying political and sociological analysis.

Aspiring doctors will have to learn that race is a “social construct that is a cause of health and health care inequities, not a risk factor for disease.” Yet racial or ethnic groups do sometimes have a greater propensity for certain health problems. For instance, black women are at higher risk for a type of breast cancer known as triple-negative and women of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage are at greater risk of the BRCA gene mutation.

Relationships between race and disease aren’t always well understood, but knowing they exist can improve minority patient outcomes. It doesn’t help patients with immediate needs for a doctor to assume that their condition is really about the “systems of power, privileges, and oppression” in society.

Med students will also be expected to articulate how their own “identities, power, and privileges (e.g., professional hierarchy, culture, class, gender) influence interactions with patients” as well as “the impact of various systems of oppression on health and health care (e.g. colonization, White supremacy, acculturation, assimilation).”

Most young people who pursue a career in medicine want to help patients. Now they will be taught that “an intricate web of social, behavioral, economic, and environmental factors, including access to quality education and housing, have greater influence on patients’ health than physicians do,” AAMC leaders write in a StatNews op-ed trumpeting their new woke curriculum. The implicit message is that the best way to help patients is to expand the size and scope of government.

Social and economic circumstances clearly can affect individual health behavior. But the hyper-class and -racial consciousness that the AAMC wants to instill in doctors may result in worse care for minorities. “Systems of oppression” as a standard of analysis could easily become medical fatalism.

AAMC leaders write further in StatNews that “we believe this topic deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.” That sounds dangerous. Will learning about mRNA technology or the latest treatment for melanoma take a back seat to new theories of cultural appropriation?

America faces a looming and severe doctor shortage as baby boomers retire. It won’t help attract prospective doctors to tell top students they must attend to their guilt as racial and political oppressors before they can diagnose your cancer.

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I was able to separate Trump's personality flaws from his accomplishments and pleaded with others to do so but was ineffective.

I am afraid crooked Democrats have accomplished their goal with help from our narcissistic former President. He should not run again because of the trauma he would create.  Biden was supposed to be the healer and I also warned about that but hatred of Trump was too strong to overcome Trump Hater Bias and certainly, the mass media were never going to change because they have been so radicalized they only serve one purpose - destroy our Republic.

The attached article has much to commend it but the forces of evil , I am afraid, would prevail again because voters can still be manipulated. They are not mentally tough enough or smart enough to make the necessary distinction as Mathews.

I fear "wokeness" will continue to strangle our nation. The grip is too strong, too engrained, too pervasive and therein lies our republic's demise.

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I was wrong about Trump

By M.B. Mathews

I recently wrote a column about why I believed Trump should not run in 2024. I was wrong. I allowed my distaste for Trump’s personality to override his virtues, which are considerable. Some people want Trump without his vices. I was among them -- until yesterday, when I watched and listened to Tom Klingenstein’s speech titled “Trump’s virtues.”  It was masterful and shamed me that I did not make the distinction between Trump's character and his virtues, the former being deeply flawed, the latter being almost perfect. I need to man up in my defense of the former President's virtues. The speech was among the most pointed I have heard and deserves some exposure. Klingenstein says:

Other Republicans say some version of “I like Trump policies but I don’t like the rest of him.” This gets it almost backwards. Although Trump advanced many important policies, it is the 'rest of him' that contains the virtue that inspires the movement… Trump was born for the current crisis, a life and death struggle against a totalitarian enemy I call woke communism... that control all the cultural and economic powers in America…  

[Trump] revealed, not caused, the divide in this country. In war, you must make a stand… Trump is a manly man... traditional manhood, even when flawed, is absolutely essential… Trump plays to win... There are no clean hands in a fistfight…Trump is unreservedly, unquestionably pro-America… Trump is a refreshing break from the guilt and self-loathing that marks our age…

It is anti-Americanism that makes so many of us very angry: The Left have trashed America's Founding and her history to the point where some believe it virtuous to hate America. Rather than advocating forgiveness for sins, the Left are advocating hair shirts, self-flagellation, and perpetual guilt. It is un-American and certainly un-Christian.

Trump thinks we can vanquish all comers if we just put our minds to it, and he's right… Courage never demands perfection… Trump over and over said exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying... Trump said Haiti is a shithole and that representative Maxine Waters has a low IQ. These were not racist lies. They were uncouth, politically incorrect observations that most of us would agree with but would not dare say.

In 2016, we loved Trump for his outspokenness. But many seem to have changed their minds without cause; Trump is the same today as he was before he was elected. The very things we disdain today are the things that made him the man for our time.

From morning to night, we were told that Trump is a racist. But endless repetition does not make it true. It isn’t. Trump’s contempt for political correctness showed patriotic Americans that its ever-tightening grip could be loosened... It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Trump’s fight against political correctness, a fight which most Republicans are reluctant to engage… Trump treated the woke media with the same contempt he treated political correctness, provoking their outrage and revealing their utter corruption... it must be defeated.

I take back my unwillingness to engage Trump on his own terms. It is the Left, not we, who are politically correct. They are the ones restricting speech, cancelling and censoring, not we on the Right.

Unlike most politicians, when Trump sees a problem, he goes out and fixes it. He fixed our porous borders. He moved our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem after decades of inaction. He eliminated hate-America critical race theory in his administrative agency. He developed a vaccine in record time. He achieved energy independence and much, much more.

His accomplishments far outweigh his personality quirks. No other president did so much in so little time.

Trump smoked rats out of hiding places. Because of Trump we know our intelligence agencies are corrupt. We know also that the mainstream media is not just biased, that it is the propaganda arm of the Democratic party.

Had it not been for the vehement and irrational hatred of Trump, we never would have discovered that our own security and intelligence structures are compromised. I blame #NeverTrumpers for corrupting these Agencies. This unprecedented breach of the very security of this nation is unprecedented and deeply dangerous, leaving us open to the espionage of courtesans who prey on politicians who think with their private parts.

A large part of Trump’s appeal was that he was a bona fide outsider. He distrusted the experts who believe they knew better than the average American how to run the country. This distrust was appealing to Trump’s base who believed, and with good reason, that is the experts who created the despotic mess in which we find ourselves.

We always knew but never had anyone champion that we, not the Swamp, knew better how to manage our money, our time, our personal lives, our resources and our families. In their authoritarian mindsets, the Left wanted to take over all these very personal, uniquely American functions and replace it with governmental overreach. They nearly got their wish, had it not been for COVID's home zoom classes where we found out that very young children are being sexualized, perverted, deliberately alienated from their parents and taught to hate America and white people.

…They know that Republicans will lose all further elections until they get to the bottom of the last one.

This most sensitive area of politics is a disaster. I believe the election was stolen and millions of others do. We now have evidence from many quarters that this is so. It cannot be permitted a repeat or there will be severe repercussions that will dwarf the current ones.

Some will say that Trump is a bad man and that disqualifies him. I do not think Trump is a bad man, but for those who do I remind them that a bad man in some circumstances can be a good president. If you’re dying of thirst and there is only one person offering you water, you accept the water gratefully without much concern for the character of your rescuer.

We wanted Trump not only to fix things; we wanted him to be perfect while doing it. That is unrealistic in the average family, the average relationship, the average business and the average political or cultural milieu. Yet some of us wanted Trump to be perfect enough to invite to tea. He is not that man. But he is the man for our tumultuous times.

This enumeration of Trump’s virtues does not fully capture his uncommon courage and firmness of purpose. Trump is the most towering political figure in living memory… Trump inspired a movement. If properly deployed this movement might challenge the woke-comms, and God willing, save the country.

These very things are what the Left hate, yet it is not their favor we need to care about. They will not embrace anyone on the Republican ticket and certainly not one they cannot bully. We need to stop worrying about acceptance of our candidates by the Left or they will have won.

Republicans, however, should not forget that it is his support and the spirit they embrace that have become the life force of the Republican party. Among the talked-about alternatives to Trump I have not yet seen anyone who possesses or even understands Trump’s virtues. Nor have I seen anyone with his backbone and fortitude. One does not appreciate the strength of relentless gale-force winds until one is in the eye of the storm.

…which is exactly where Trump and we are at this moment. We have to prepare for the gale-force winds we will encounter. To not do this is to ignore the lessons of the recent past and it will be forever to our sorrow to ignore them.

His virtue must be the standard by which we judge other candidates.

Amen and amen. We don't have to like his personality but his virtues far outweigh it. I humbly stand corrected and offer my mea culpa.

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