Mike Wasserman

David Attenborough narrates the Gaza Flotilla activists getting absolutely humbled at a Spanish airport ✈️🦍🇪🇸 Entitled rodents meet Spanish security mammals. Nature is healing. Enjoy the documentary. 📺

🚨 EVER HEARD OF THE “BLACKSTONE MEMORIAL”? Most people have not. In 1891, decades before the Balfour Declaration, decades before the Holocaust, and more than half a century before the founding of modern Israel, hundreds of prominent Americans signed a petition calling for the Jewish people to be restored to their ancestral homeland. It was called the Blackstone Memorial. The petition was written by William Eugene Blackstone and presented to U.S. President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine. Its central argument was simple: Millions of Jews were facing persecution in Russia. Europe did not want them. America could not absorb them all quickly. So the question was asked: Why not restore the Jewish people to their ancient homeland? The memorial pointed out that the international powers had already helped restore other peoples to their historic lands. Bulgaria to the Bulgarians. Serbia to the Serbians. Greece to the Greeks. So why not Palestine to the Jews? The petition argued that the Jewish people had been expelled from their land by force, had never stopped longing to return, and that restoring Jewish autonomy there would be both just and humanitarian. And this was not some fringe document. It was signed by leading American politicians, newspaper editors, clergy, rabbis, judges, bankers, businessmen, and public figures. Among the names were future President William McKinley, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and hundreds of others. Think about that. In 1891, major American voices were already publicly saying that the Jewish people had a legitimate historic claim to their homeland. This was not invented in 1948. It was not created by the Holocaust. It was not some colonial project suddenly dropped into the Middle East. The idea that the Jewish people belonged in their ancestral homeland was recognized by major American figures generations before the State of Israel was reborn. The Blackstone Memorial is a reminder that Jewish restoration was not a modern propaganda slogan. It was an old moral, historical, and political argument. And America knew it long before the world pretended to forget. @revenuepath

Until 1948, "Palestinian" overwhelmingly meant Jewish. The Palestine Post (1932): Jewish newspaper, renamed the Jerusalem Post after Israel was founded. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra (1936): built by Bronislaw Huberman to rescue Jewish musicians from Europe. The Palestine Electric Company (Pinhas Rutenberg, 1923): Jewish. The Anglo-Palestine Bank: became Bank Leumi. Keren Hayesod was the "Palestine Foundation Fund." The Jewish Agency's official name was the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Jews carried "Palestinian" passports under the Mandate and used the term as a self-identifier. Arab leaders, meanwhile, rejected it. February 1919: the First Palestinian Arab Congress in Jerusalem declared Palestine "part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time." The slogan was Suriyya al-Janubiyya - Southern Syria. 1937: Auni Abd al-Hadi, founder of the Istiqlal Party, told the Peel Commission: "There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. Our country was for centuries part of Syria." 1946: Princeton's Philip Hitti, the most prominent Arab-American historian of his generation, told the Anglo-American Committee: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not." The PLO wasn't founded until 1964. And even its founding charter explicitly disclaimed sovereignty over the West Bank (Jordanian) and Gaza (Egyptian). A distinct Palestinian national identity, defined against Israel rather than as part of pan-Arabism or Greater Syria, is largely a post-1967 phenomenon. PLO Executive Committee member Zuheir Mohsen put it bluntly in Trouw, March 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity. Today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese." None of this means the millions who identify as Palestinian today aren't sincere. Identities get constructed, reinforced, become real. That's how nationalism works everywhere. But the sequence matters. A Jewish national identity tied to this land is millennia old. The Arab "Palestinian" identity, as something distinct from Syrian or pan-Arab, is a 20th-century construction. And for its first decades, the people we now call Palestinians actively rejected the label.

@A_MacLullich Using the term “confusion” is poor clinical practice; akin to saying “the heart doesn’t sound right” for a cardiac exam.

Family: "I've known him 60 years. This is not him." Chart: "Confused." ⁕ One of these is clinical data. ⁕ One is lay description masquerading as a diagnosis. → Calling delirium "confusion" is poor practice ← #delirium #medtwitter

A team of researchers in New Zealand followed 1,037 babies from the day they were born for the next 45 years to find out what actually determines a successful adult life, and the strongest predictor they found had almost nothing to do with intelligence or family wealth. The findings have been published in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Almost no parent has heard of them. His name is Avshalom Caspi. Her name is Terrie Moffitt. They are a husband and wife research team based at Duke University and King's College London, and the study they have spent their careers running is called the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. It started in 1972 in a single hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand. Every baby born there in a 12-month window was enrolled. 1,037 of them. The study is still running today. The retention rate is the part that should astonish anyone familiar with how research usually works. After more than 45 years, over 90 percent of the original participants are still being tracked. Most longitudinal studies lose half their sample inside ten years. The Dunedin team has lost almost nobody. They measured everything. Blood. DNA. Brain scans. Income. Criminal records. Romantic relationships. Drug use. Dental health. Sleep. Mental health. Lung function. They flew participants who had moved abroad back to Dunedin every few years for a full day of assessments. Some of those people now live in seven different countries. They still show up. For the first decade of life, the team did something nobody else was doing systematically. They measured each child's self-control. Not IQ. Not family income. Not parenting style. Self-control. They watched 3-year-olds in a research lab and rated their ability to wait, regulate frustration, follow instructions, and resist impulsive reactions. They added teacher ratings. They added parent ratings. They added the children's own self-reports as they grew older. They combined all of it into a single highly reliable score. Then they did the thing nobody else had the patience to do. They waited. When the data came in at age 32, the result was so consistent it should be illegal to teach a child without it. The children who scored lowest on self-control at age 3 grew into adults with worse physical health, more substance dependence, lower incomes, more credit card debt, higher rates of single parenthood, more criminal convictions, and worse mental health than the children who scored highest. The pattern was not subtle. It was a clean gradient. Every step up in childhood self-control produced a measurable step up in adult outcomes across every domain the team could measure. The detail that should disturb every parent reading this is what happened when the researchers controlled for the obvious objections. When they controlled for IQ, the effect held. When they controlled for family income and social class, the effect held. When they compared siblings inside the same family, the sibling with lower self-control still had worse adult outcomes than the sibling with higher self-control. Same parents. Same house. Same dinner table. The trait was running independently of everything researchers expected to explain it. The paper landed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. The title was as plain as it gets. "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety." It has been cited thousands of times since. Almost no policy maker has acted on it. The reason most people resist this finding is that it sounds like a sentence handed down before the child could speak. If the trait that determines your adult life is locked in by age 3, the rest of your life is a formality. The Dunedin researchers say that is the wrong way to read the data. They found something else in the same paper that almost nobody quotes. Some of the children whose self-control scores improved between childhood and adolescence ended up with adult outcomes far better than their early scores predicted. The trait is not destiny. It is a muscle. Children who learned to wait, regulate, and resist between ages 5 and 15 caught up with kids who started ahead. Self-control is the one childhood trait nobody seems to teach on purpose anymore. Schools focus on test scores. Parents focus on activities. Coaches focus on performance. The part of the brain that decides between five seconds from now and five years from now is left to develop on its own, and the data shows it usually does not. The most uncomfortable part of the research is the cost calculation Moffitt and Caspi ran. They estimated that if a country could move the bottom 20 percent of children up one rung on the self-control ladder, it would measurably reduce healthcare spending, welfare dependency, and incarceration costs at the national level. The intervention is cheaper than almost any other public health investment available. Almost no country has tried it at scale. The reason adults struggle with money, weight, addiction, and relationships is rarely intelligence. It is the gap between what you want right now and what you want in ten years, and which side of that gap your nervous system is built to listen to. Most people lost that fight at age 4 and never went back to learn the technique. You were not behind because life dealt you a bad hand. You were behind because the part of you that decides between right now and the rest of your life was never taught how to choose. The good news is the muscle is still there. Almost nobody trains it after age 10. You can be the one who does.

@JulietMosesNZ Truth.

Brilliant.

There are a few things things that college kids—especially the ones chanting "free palestine" and "from the river to the sea"—should know about the history and founding of Israel. A Palestinian state was already created in 1921. There was a British mandate of Palestine, which was a foreign occupied colony of the British Empire, which comprised modern-day what's Israel and what's now Jordan. The Jews believed they were entitled, based on the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to the entire mandate of Palestine to be the future Jewish state. In 1921, it became clear that wasn't to be. The British understood they were gonna need oil from the Arab states in a future global conflict, and so they ceded 77% of that land to create a state for the Arab Muslim Palestinians. They weren't called Palestinians then, but they were the Arab Muslims who lived in the British colony of Palestine. That country became first known as Transjordan on the other side of the Jordan, then it became the Kingdom of Jordan, and ultimately today we know it as Jordan. So there is a Palestinian state full of Palestinian Muslim Arabs. There's a Palestinian queen in that state today. The prince and future king of that state is a Palestinian, and over 60% of the population are people who are Arab Muslims from the mandate of Palestine. So there is a Palestinian state. What they really want is a second Palestinian state, a 58th Muslim state, a 23rd Arab state in the world—but it's just too much to have one teeny-tiny Jewish state. The second and more important thing to understand is that Israel and the international community have already offered the Palestinians on six prior occasions, in 1936 in the Peel Commission, 1947 in the Partition Plan, 1967 at Khartoum after the Six-Day War in Sudan, 1993 at Oslo, 2000 at Camp David with Bill Clinton, and again 2008 with Ehud Olmert as the prime minister. On six different occasions, Israel, America, and the international community offered the Palestinians their own state, their own sovereign territory with their own government to to do as they please with, on the land that college kids now seem to believe they deserve a state on. And what college kids don't understand is the Palestinians rejected that state on six different occasions. On college campuses, when kids chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," realize that is only the English jingle that was created in order to appeal to and deceive American college kids. In Arabic, the original phrase is: "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arabic." They want a full Palestinian Arab state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with no Jews on it. That's what they've done in every other Arab country in the world, where they've expelled and ethnically cleansed the 850,000 Jews who lived all over the Muslim world, starting in the middle of the 20th century. People who have lived there, by the way, for centuries, all ethnically cleansed. They want to do the same thing with the 10 million people who now live in Israel, and we're never gonna allow that to happen.

@UCSFGeriatrics Awesome! Bucket list race:)

Dr. Stephanie Rogers, MD will race the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon on June 7 to support Little Brothers–Friends of the Elderly and raise funds to combat isolation in older adults. Donate: littlebrotherssf.networkforgood.com/projects/29458…

It is encouraging to scroll down the comments and to find that nearly all of them explain what the Nakba truly was: the day that five Arab countries turned down the UN partition plan and unsuccessfully, and yes catastrophically for them, tried to destroy the State of Israel.

Delirium can present in several ways. The key concept is change from baseline in hours/days. This distinguishes delirium from dementia. #delirium #dementia #patientsafety #4Ms

If you’re a leader of any #Geriatrics program, this program is a MUST!

@JulietMosesNZ This is hate speech pure and simple. The author is calling for violence and destruction of other human beings. “Free speech” that incites violence has no place in civilized society. On the other hand, they might want to live in Iran instead.

Another great piece from Ani, this time about a “poem” in the AUT Student magazine that includes the screenshot below. The “poet” has been celebrated by Creative NZ and won an award in the past. There is only one country whose death is called for (referred to both as “Israel” and “Zion”). That is an unequivocal call for genocide. Along with billionaires, colonisers, rapists, and paedophiles, the death of “Zionists” (anyone who, unlike the author, wants Israel to continue to exist, and often just used as a proxy for “Jews”) is also called for. Presumably, of those categories, only “Zionists” are identifiably present on campus.   It may be tempting to dismiss these words as just the harmless expression of a creative student.  However, it is now beyond doubt that antizionism is a violent hate movement that has led to a permissive environment in which attacks on Jews are justified and even considered morally incumbent, in the same way as that has occurred in the past because Jews were demonised as Christkillers, babykillers, race-polluters and so on. The perpetrators of the Bondi Beach attack expressly condemned “Zionists” in a video not long before the massacre. I therefore take these words very seriously. Our community does not have the luxury of dismissing them while it is on high alert and has to run through lockdown procedures before every synagogue service and event, and students feel compelled to hide their identity.

The idea that antipsychotics are a general treatment for delirium is a major mistake in the history of medicine.

Sedated for "agitation." Pelvic fracture found 2 days later. The agitation was pain. It very often is, especially in surgical patients. When someone is agitated & delirious, the first question isn't "what do we give them?" - It's "what's causing this?" Pain. Infection. Urinary retention. Constipation. Hypoxia. The list of treatable causes is long.  ↳ A systematic head to toe approach is always needed when evaluating the possible triggers. #delirium #medtwitter

@Marwanjaberr Thank you for having the courage to share this’

I am 17 years old. I went into Gaza with my own camera. 📸 What I saw is the opposite of what you see on the news. Thousands of aid trucks and endless supplies. The world is being lied to, and it’s time to show the truth. 🚛 WATCH THIS. 👇 #Gaza #Israel #TheTruth

Such a good piece. “Antizionism is a psychosis dressed up as a theory of justice, the ultimate pathological, nihilistic, anti-Western brew, a disgusting concoction of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Third Worldism and critical theory, fused together with aspects of Nazism, Christian anti-Semitism, Islamism and Cold War Soviet nostrums…. Antizionists support a neo-Inquisition that identifies and cancels Zionists. They want to force British Jews to denounce Israel, to renounce friends and family, to pass a purity test. Modelled on the Cultural Revolution's struggle sessions and the "taking of the knee" ritual, antizionists celebrate "good Jews", in politics or the arts, who have turned against Israel, who have proved their loyalty, who "converted", who humiliated themselves.”

Famillies know the patient best. "This isn't like her normal self" is a sign of #delirium. 👍 Staff: take this observation seriously & assess for delirium with a tool like the 4AT.

@JulietMosesNZ How can money go to a movement that is inherently violent and promotes the destruction of an existing country? This is state funding of antizionism.

It looks like Palestine may also be on the ballot in November in NZ (assuming this party gets registered).

@JulietMosesNZ Precisely!

“The “pro-Palestine” mafia fails to appreciate that there will never be a free or independent Palestine without making alliances with broad segments in Israel, including in government, civil society, business, and faith communities.” It’s ironic (to put it as nicely as I can) that the “pro-Palestine” mafia amplifies the most extreme Israeli voices (on left and right) while the ones who believe in dialogue, co-operation, “radical pragmatism” as Ahmed calls it, and actually making changes on the ground - in other words that can actually realistically help Palestinians - are shunned and silenced. That’s how you know BDS isn’t actually about helping Palestinians.