[Ynet] Massive show of support for Israel, among star signatories joining Schwarzenegger and Stallone, are TV host Bill Maher, Academy Award nominee Minnie Driver, as well as major studio execs.
After first expressing their support for Israel during Operation Protective Edge, members of the film industry posted an additional ad Saturday in the New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... which included 300 of Hollywood's most prominent figures expressing their "commitment to peace and justice."
The stars have already planned their next target, setting their sights on Europe, particularly Germany and the city of London, where many they feel cultural figures operate against Israel.
"This is an unprecedented show of support by Hollywood for Israel. Not only does the list of signatories to our statement keep growing, their voice is being picked up by national, as well as international, press," said CCFP (Creative Community for Peace) director Lana Melman.
CCFP, an organization that brings together prominent members of the entertainment industry to counter the cultural boycott of Israel, applauded the hundreds of artists and executives who signed the statement.
Scores of celebrities and power-brokers from the Hollywood establishment have come out in support of Israel and a peaceful resolution to its conflict with Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason,.
Stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen expressed support for Israel and said Hamas "cannot be allowed to rain rockets on Israeli cities, nor ... hold its own people hostage."
The statement comes after weeks in which a number of celebrities, including Penelope Cruz and husband Javier Bardem, condemned Israel for its handling of conflict, with Cruz and Bardem even accusing Israel of genocide. But with the notable exceptions of comedian Joan Rivers and actors Roseanne Barr and Mayim Bialik, few have expressed support for Israel.
Aaron Sorkin, Academy- and Emmy-award winning screenwriter, producer, and playwright, commented on his own endorsement, stating, "The CCFP statement fully supports the right of the Paleostinians in Gazoo to live in peace and prosperity. We unambiguously condemn the values and actions of Hamas, a barbaric and brutal terrorist organization that is the enemy of basic human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... , equality, freedom, and peace."
The statement has already run in major industry publications, including Billboard, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline Hollywood, as well as in mainstream national publications such as the Los Angeles Times. The ad was also sent to international publications from India to Romania, including the Times of India, the Latin Post, Italia's Il Mattino, and Romania Libera.
"It is gratifying to see that recent events in Israel and Gazoo have caused an outpouring of support for Israel in its fight against Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the death of all Jews and the obliteration of an entire nation," said CCFP co-founder David Renzer.
"This support comes from all facets of the entertainment industry, including top musicians, actors, and executives. The unifying statement also comes at a time of growing concerns regarding the rise of global anti-Semitism, usually cloaked in anti-Israel sentiment," added Renzer.
Among the signatories are veteran action stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, television host Bill Maher, Academy Award nominee Minnie Driver and owners of large Hollywood studios such as co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment Amy Pascal, Chairman and CEO of MGM Gerry Barber.
#7
We've got more than enough propaganda. What the US needs is more of the electorate willing to think things through & willing to reject sound bites, slogans and catchy images. Ethel, where's my remote?
[Bloomberg] A black market for an Ebola treatment derived from the blood of survivors is emerging in the West African countries experiencing the worst outbreak of the virus on record, the World Health Organization said.
The United Nations ...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks... health agency will work with governments to stamp out the illicit trade in convalescent serum, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told news hounds today in Geneva, where the organization is based. There is a danger that such serums could contain other infections and wouldn't be administered properly, Chan said.
The WHO is encouraging the use of properly obtained serum to treat current patients and said last week it should be a priority.
More than 300 health-care workers have been infected with the Ebola virus, and almost half of them have died, the WHO said in a situation report today.
The other half therefore survived, and could be serum donors...
The WHO is helping establish a system that can be used to safely draw blood from those who have recovered from the disease, prepare it and re-inject it into patients. Doctors at Emory and Nebraska are also working on lists of survivors by blood type who could donate.
#3
Survivors, SteveS, The theory here is that blood serum of the survivors contains anti-virus antibodies. The problem is, I'm pretty sure immunity to virus is cellular not humoral.
#4
It's both. The anti-serum could be very useful.
The bigger problem is the lack of supportive care in West Africa. One of the reasons why the American docs survived at Emory was that they had first-class supportive care, simple things like transfusions, IV fluids, nutrition, attention to electrolyte imbalances, etc.
Ebola looks to be similar to cholera in this regard: if you can just keep the patient alive they'll usually recover on their own. West Africa can't keep any sick person alive.
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/14/2014 10:45 Comments ||
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#5
"Black Market in Blood Serum Emerging Amid Ebola Outbreak"
What could go wrong?
Posted by: Barbara ||
09/14/2014 10:50 Comments ||
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#6
There are a great many possible blood-borne diseases that can come along with the ride, particularly from those who have been in Africa. Therefore the necessity for proper screening and handling. The desperately ill who have the resources to pay may not be interested in all that red tape. Black market blood products will most likely cause more problems.
#7
So Steve, what tools and procedures can be used in a remote village to drop the rate of infection of caregivers (and the folks who bury the dead) from whatever sky-high rate it is now? They can't rely on the medical institutions, which were swamped long ago, or hope for some aid miracle. Care for the sick has to be local.
That means few resources and very little training, so whatever is tried has to be very cheap and very simple.
Random thoughts from a non-medical person:
Build a "sick hut" and if someone dies there burn it. Small place, with something relatively disposable for the roof. Most people won't have ebola. Needs elbow grease and a bit of gasoline. (It rains a lot)
Buckets with bleach water to dunk hands, utensils, clothing, everything. (They're trying to do this already for hand washing)
Only touch someone sick, or their clothes, with bleached rags over your hands, and put the rags back in the bleach water when you're done. (Needs bleach, supply of cloth, and training and a bit of indoctrination--"Never use sick rags for clothing!")
Use something disposable for the bed for the sick: a shallow trench piled full with leaves? (Always burn the contents, no matter what the disease was.)
I don't know what the caregiver infection rate is, but people write as though it was 100% for the unprotected. Could things along this line drop it enough to be useful?
Posted by: James ||
09/14/2014 15:18 Comments ||
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His statement might alarm many people. But Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg told DW that he is losing hope, that Sierra Leone and Liberia will receive the necessary aid in time. Those are two of the countries worst hit by the recent Ebola epidemic. Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will "become endemic" in this part of the world, if no massive assistance arrives. With other words: It could more or less infect everybody and many people could die.
Schmidt-Chanasit knows that it is a hard thing to say. He stresses that he doesn't want international help to stop. Quite the contrary: he demands "massive help". For Sierra Leone and Liberia, though, he thinks "it is very difficult to bring enough help there to get a grip on the epidemic." According to the virologist, the most important thing to do now is to prevent the virus from spreading to other countries. Moreover, much more money has to be put into evaluating suitable vaccines, he added.
In the headquarters of Welthungerhilfe, a German non-governmental aid organization that is engaged in helping with the Ebola epidemic, Schmidt-Chanasit's statement causes much contempt. Such declarations "are not very constructive," a spokeswoman said.
Continued on Page 49
#2
In Sierra Leone, the government has ordered a quarantine of 21 days for every household in which an Ebola case occurred. Soldiers and police are guarding these houses preventing anyone who has come into contact with an Ebola patient from leaving. According to Moninger, that is exactly the right thing to do: isolating sick people - should it be necessary, even with military force.
Yep. That's the only response that will be effective at this stage.
A modern equivalent of plague villages.
We past the point where more medical services and contact tracing would work, a month or two back.
The link is in Russian, but the text is from a guy I consider a Russian Alex Jones
Unreported is the fact that Russia has 20 surface combatants building, as I write this, corvette class or larger. That we know of...
On Wednesday, Deputy Chairman of the RF Government D O Rogozin said that building an aircraft carrier in Russia just isn't worth the expense and bother. As previously reported by the Minoborony, Russia won't authorise any new aircraft carriers for at least another five years. The state armaments programme doesn't plan to authorise building a new aircraft carrier until 2020, at the earliest.
Rogozin told reporters after a meeting with President Putin on the 2016-20 state armaments programme, "Whether or not to build aircraft carriers is more of a geopolitical decision than a military-technical one. We proved that we had the military-technical capability to do so on 16 November last year [the commissioning date of INS Vikramaditya, built at Sevmash: editor], when we showed that Russia had competence in building fleet aircraft carriers. If we need to do so, we'll be able to do it. However, such a task isn't necessary now".
Meanwhile, as reported, the idea of contracting with France to build the Mistral LPHs came about as Russia needed to get experience with the technology and skills needed to build such ships. At present, the Russian Navy has one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov.
#1
Something else to remember when reading this: the Sevastopol shipyards were used to build the previous Soviet aircraft carriers, but were allowed to deteriorate while they were in Ukrainian hands. It will take at LEAST five years to get those shipyards back up to the level they were before the Russians allowed them to run down. I'm sure that played a significant role in Russia's decision to retake the Crimea. Now they're trying to take enough Ukrainian territory to form a land corridor from Russia to the Crimea.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
09/14/2014 13:43 Comments ||
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Dr. Hira just gave the GOP the talking point that they have desperately been needing regarding this issue. Question is, will the establishment GOP bullhorn this loud and clear across the electorate before November?
Dr. Ron Hira, professor of public policy at Howard University, argued that the tech industry supports executive action by President Obama on illegal immigration in order to depress wages, which he stated amounts to a war on the middle class on Thursday's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on the Fox Business Network.
Hira said that the claimed shortage of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workers is refuted by the lack of increase in STEM wages. And that increasing the number of foreign STEM workers crowds out American STEM workers, in addition to "discouraging US students from going into these fields, and these fields are really important stepping stones to the middle class." He added "most of the rhetoric is about the best and brightest, in reality, most of the foreign workers they're bringing in, have no more than ordinary skills and are paid cheaper wages, and so this is really about bringing in cheaper labor."
Hira concluded by agreeing with Dobbs that "class warfare is being practiced in this country, just not by the president and Democrats, the first front in that war is Corporate America, technology companies, Silicon Valley, against middle class American workers," further declaring that Silicon Valley was warring "against the middle class and it's against those who are aspiring upward mobility into the middle class from the working class."
#2
Not only that, Gromguru, this whole article misses the larger issues, those being the never-ending ratcheting up of material expectations, the toxic progression of relative deprivation amongst the population at large, and the massive increase in government regulation costs which are a de facto pay increase to workers, all of which created this situation in the first place.
The population has seen fit to define up the terms "working class" and "middle class" to ridiculous levels in terms of material living standards that our grandparents would have never recognized. The money for this has come from borrowing and massive increases in labor costs to businesses, particularly small and medium ones.
Fix that and many of these off shoring and immigration problems will go away.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
09/14/2014 5:15 Comments ||
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#3
A small facet of a much larger issue.
All immigration depresses incomes of existing residents. Whether they be doctors or mexican peasants.*
The beneficiaries are business and the rich - specifically those who consume more than they produce.
* The only exception I can think of is some lawyers and professional immigration advocates funded from the public purse.
#4
Under immigration "reform" H1B visas would triple to 180,000 annually. Each visa good for up to 6 years w/ extensions. By then the visa holder will have a Green Card or go back (and be eligible for another).
6 x 180,000 = 1.08 million H1B visa holders at any one time.
#5
Phil, a business which consumes more than it produces goes bankrupt and ceases to exist.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
09/14/2014 5:55 Comments ||
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#6
Also, I think you have things backwards.
If the public hadn't used union thuggery, and state, federal, and local labor law, and hadn't voted for regulation-happy politicians to extract historically ridiculous levels of wages from business, and driven up labor costs in the first place, there wouldn't be nearly the demand for foreigners we see now.
I'm not advocating for wretched poverty for the masses here but a happy medium has not existed since the post WWII peace dividend ran out in the '70's. That's just reality.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
09/14/2014 6:01 Comments ||
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#7
All immigration depresses incomes of existing residents. Whether they be doctors or mexican peasants.
Americans became poorer by receiving the cream of European educational systems through 20th century?
#8
The left sees amnesty as more dem voters and a bunch of new suckers for the GIVERnment Ponzi schemes that need fresh stooges (54 million abortions did not help this situation). The RINOs in congress owned by the chamber of commerce see amnesty as cheap labor (ie. lower pay with better work ethic).
If only the two camps could get together and pass this without the American people seeing that they are getting royally screwed.
#9
the toxic progression of relative deprivation amongst the population at large
The average American has access to things and services the 1 percenters a mere hundred years ago could never enjoy. Show up at an emergency room and get medical care that the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Duponts couldn't even image. This little 'household appliance' communicates at nearly the speed of light around the world. Unthinkable but in a Jules Verne novel of the day. The rich were fat and the poor were grisly thin. Instead of appreciating the vast strides against the true poverty of the masses in history, we just get an unending whine of self pity. It's all about covetousness preached by the socialist for over that hundred years.
#12
Don't blame the [usual suspects] Captains of Industry. Industry no longer needs to import cheap labor. As we have seen over the past 50 years, industry will move globally to achieve it's earnings goals. The blame for rampant illegal immigration lies elsewhere, and we all know where that is.
#13
I remember when 1HB were about 10,000 for 'essential' skills. That was over 40 years ago. Industry has had time to grow their own in the country, but has suppressed the incentive for people to invest their time and money for the skills when the Captains of Industry just call up their Representative or Senator and order more 'quotas'. Captains of Industry prefer the corrupt politicians they know at home than have to move their operation to another country for corrupt politicians they don't know (an who have a record of seizing assets of such 'meddling' foreigners on a whim particularly when they can play their own citizens with a cry to nationalism).
#14
Uro, I have never heard of a computer or engineering job that's unionized.
And Dr. Hira is right about the relative skills. Most "offshore" developers have had, at most, a cram course on whatever tech their employer thinks is in demand. They've not used it, and don't know how to use it.
Their hourly rate is lower, but it takes two to three times as long AND someone usually has to come back around and redo everything to make it work.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
09/14/2014 9:12 Comments ||
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#15
In the oil industry, I see a great many foreign workers, in STEM positions. Engineers, geologists, drilling engineers, etc. Many of these are quite experienced as quite a few of US people have retired and there's not enough to fill the ranks.
#16
...cause expertise and skill come with experience that takes time. Why waste so much of your life getting the skills and experience to have the 'employer' simply dump money into a reelection campaign to get a cheaper (and more pliable to protect his visa) foreigner to fill the bill? They've done this for nearly 40 years, two generations. They've taught the potential STEM candidates not to bother.
#17
Let's find some facts that we can agree upon in this conversation rather than getting all up on our hobby horses.
Now these proposed "facts" represent my hobby horses, but it seems plausible (to me) that we can all agree that:
1. Raising the price of something means less of it will be created and consumed.
2. The technical work performed by H1B immigrants largely is in building new things (software, pipelines, etc) that provide enduring value. This type of work is in contrast to the value provided by maintenance work (cutting hair, selling shoes, etc) that is necessary to keep civilization from collapsing, but adds nothing new to the civilization.
3. Having a system of immigration that encourages the admission of immigrants with jobs and skills delivers more goods and services to the country, than a system that encourages the admission of immigrants without jobs or skills would deliver.
4. Given a choice, it is always better to have talented hard working people joining your country than opposing your country.
#19
Dr. Ron Hira, professor of public policy at Howard University, argued that the tech industry supports executive action by President Obama on illegal immigration in order to depress wages, which he stated amounts to a war on the middle class
I can believe this but there is another dimension that should be mentioned and that is the push for multiculturalism that goes on throughout American universities. If you go to a university and take a look at the students in engineering and the sciences, you will see a large number of grad students from other countries which take up resources and displace American students.
Basic economics is that you get MORE of what you pay for.
If prices rise more producers are enticed into the market. Pay more in welfare benefits for more kids and you get poor people breeding more. Holds true in all endevours. The purpose of H1B is to hold prices for technical labor DOWN to the benefit of the owner class.
Your 3&4 are tautologies which avoid the down side of displacement of citizens from these same good jobs. If there is a real, as opposed to manufactured, shortage then bring in the immigrants. Until then don't pay for current residences to goof off on welfare.
#21
If the public hadn't used union thuggery, and state, federal, and local labor law, and hadn't voted for regulation-happy politicians to extract historically ridiculous levels of wages from business, and driven up labor costs in the first place, there wouldn't be nearly the demand for foreigners we see now.
A couple of reactions:
1. Public unions. Public unions such as SEIU don't have a place in the government. They tend to taint the political process by insuring there is a permanent class in government that favors the Democratic Party in the bureaucracy. All who pay taxes end up paying for something in which they don't believe. They also end up supporting the Democratic Party.
2. Regulations. I read or heard the other day that governmental regulations cost us something like $2-3 trillion/year. This may be an underestimate when all Federal, State, and local regulations are considered. Out of a economy of about $17 trillion/year, this represents a huge amount of our economy. These act as an additional tax which robs money from infrastructure, innovation, and jobs.
What's the upshot? Industry tries to buy cheaper labor or cut labor.
#24
Let's just say for a moment that immigration was 100% a good thing for the US, what does that mean for the countries these people are leaving?
Europeans immigrated to the US in droves in the last century and left the easily manipulated by totalitarians and socialists behind. That has not been helpful to the world in general.
Mexico has had constant flow of the less risk averse (or desperate) for decades and had minimal political change back home as a result because without that safety valve the politicians would have had to face the people long ago.
Cuba's best have snuck out leaving nobody behind to face down the Castros.
We have to live in the world, we should be considering some of these issues on a larger scale.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The Blood Serum market is much safer than the powdered hipp'o tooth cure. Just say'n. 
His statement might alarm many people. But Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg told DW that he is losing hope, that Sierra Leone and Liberia will receive the necessary aid in time. Those are two of the countries worst hit by the recent Ebola epidemic. Schmidt-Chanasit expects the virus will "become endemic" in this part of the world, if no massive assistance arrives. With other words: It could more or less infect everybody and many people could die.
