The Soros Plot to Topple Netanyahu

by Daniel Greenfield

In late February, the Israeli Knesset passed the NGO Funding Transparency Bill by 40 to 34. It had been a long journey for the bill, which despite, its neutered, state was still a declaration of war by the conservative Likud Party against the shadow NGO empire that was the Soros way.

While the bill was no longer able to empower the lifting of tax exempt status for foreign funded NGOs and it only addressed foreign funding of NGOs by government entities, it was a major step for foreign funding transparency. The Soros empire had been built on non-transparency, on hidden donor lists and front groups funded by think tanks with money pipelined in grants through a dozen different organizations.

NGO transparency threatened the entire Soros empire and the passage of even a neutered bill meant that Israel might finally be ready to begin rolling back the peel on the rotten fruits of the Open Society Institute. First governments, then foreign funders, parliamentary inquiries into foreign funding, and then the loss of tax exempt status for left-wing NGOs waging a civil war.

The response came quickly. Less than two months later, Stanley Greenberg​, whose firm had done work for OSI, presented a plan to use social protests to create a new majority against the government. Some of the funding for the protests came from fellow Shadow Party billionaire, S. Daniel Abraham.

Abraham was a former board member of Soros’ International Crisis Group and had provided the manpower for J Street, while the Soros money stayed hidden in the paperwork that no one was supposed to see. The president of Abraham’s eponymous organization is Robert Wexler, the former congressman from J Street and an adviser on the Middle East to the Obama campaign.

Netanyahu’s sharp exchange with Obama in May motivated even Democrats who weren’t in Soros’ vest pocket to find a way to force him out of office. It was no longer just fear of losing the Israeli left as their hand puppet – the American Jewish vote was in play. Replacing Netanyahu with a lefty eager to appease the terrorists would heal the split with Obama and Jewish voters.

The American and European left could provide the money and the strategy, but the Israeli left would have to do the heavy lifting to save the millions of dollars flowing their way from their foreign backers. On the Israeli side were left-wing veterans of Clinton’s successful effort to topple Netanyahu. Greenberg had been on that campaign and the plan was to do it all over again.

Two months after Greenberg’s presentation, the ball was rolling. Eldad Yaniv, who had been there when the master plan to take over the country was unveiled, was soliciting volunteers for a campaign against housing prices. And not long after that, Daphni Leef, a radical left-wing activist, set up an encampment and a Facebook page protesting against high real estate prices. Who was Leef? She was a video editor for the New Israel Fund.

The New Israel Fund is the mothership of Israeli left-wing NGOs and it is the most threatened by donor transparency. The NIF’s 25-million-dollar annual budget is used to fund even more radical groups, some of which call for boycotting or outright destroying the State of Israel. A recent WikiLeaks report quoted the local head of NIF, Hedva Radovanitz, as saying that she expected the country to disappear and be replaced by a more “democratic” Arab state.

Soros had used his Open Society Institute to feed money to the NIF, one of its employees had become the point woman for the protests — and the NIF was also funding the protests.

Shatil, the NIF’s “empowerment and training,” arm mobilized tent protesters, wrote up a guide for them and brought out the money. Also helping out was Rabbis for Human Rights, recipients of sizable grants from the Open Society Institute and the Tides Foundation. Rabbis for Human Rights had even given awards in one evening to both the presidents of the NIF and the OSI.

The Greenberg plan, in typical Sorosian fashion, aimed at dispersing the organization to as many groups as possible to make it seem as if there was a plurality of voices in a grassroots populist movement, rather than a well-orchestrated plan by the left’s international backers to topple a government that had become a threat to them.

Netanyahu’s sound fiscal management had brought Israel through the global economic turmoil in fairly good shape, but the country was not immune to the rising prices that had stirred up the revolts of the Arab Spring. The social protests followed a similar template with a similar intent.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy and its elected officials can be forced out by no-confidence votes. In 1999, a no-confidence vote had ended Netanyahu’s first term in office. Protests, trumped up charges and Clinton’s meddling allowed a cabal of leftist tycoons and NGOs to oust Netanyahu and replace him with Barak. Now, the left is partying in Tel Aviv like it’s 1999 all over again.

The left is utilizing a tactical blueprint, tested around the world by Soros front groups or grantees. Hijacking protests over the price of bread allowed him to topple Mubarak. Now it’s Israel’s turn.

The campaign for Israeli NGO transparency threatens Soros’ long-term influence in Israel, and the defection of Jewish voters threatens his influence in America. His Israeli puppets have big money at stake. Soros, the Shadow Party billionaires and the EU have spent fortunes to buy up the left. Israeli left-wing university grads with no talent for tech have a lucrative alternative to dot coms in the NGO, and if their NGO mafia were to collapse, it would give the leaders of the housing protests some real economic problems to cry about.

Meanwhile, a guillotine was set up at the center of Tel Aviv’s housing protest tent city. It’s a message for Netanyahu from the man who has toppled governments and currencies that his days are numbered.

Speed of light 'broken' at CERN, scientists claim

It was Albert Einstein, no less, who proposed more than 100 years ago that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

But last night it emerged that the man who laid the foundations for the laws of nature may have been wrong.

The science world was left in shock when workers at the world’s largest physics lab announced they had recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light

If the findings are proven to be accurate, they would overturn one of the pillars of the Standard Model of physics, which explains the way the universe and everything within it works.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity, proposed in 1905, states that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. But researchers at the CERN lab near Geneva claim they have recorded neutrinos, a type of tiny particle, travelling faster than the barrier of 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers) per second.

The results have so astounded researchers that American and Japanese scientists have been asked to verify the results before they are confirmed as a discovery.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, said: “We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing.”

Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of physics.

John Ellis, a theoretical physicist, said Einstein’s theory underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics”.

Mind-Reading Experiment Reconstructs Movies in Our Mind

Associated Press

It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed.

Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday.

In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper.

He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. But the experiment dealt with scenes being viewed through the eyes at the time of scanning, and it's not clear how much of the approach would apply to scenes generated by the brain instead, he said.

People shouldn't be worried about others secretly eavesdropping on their thoughts in the near future, since the technique requires a person to spend long periods in an MRI machine, he noted.

Another expert said he expected any mind-reading capability would appear only far in the future.

For now, the reconstructed movie clips are only crude representations, loosely mimicking shapes and movement, but not nearly detailed enough to show that a blurry human-like figure represents the actor Steve Martin, for example.

The new work was published online Thursday by the journal Current Biology. It's a step beyond previous work that produced similar results with still images.

The paper reports results from the brain scans of three co-authors, who were chosen because the study subjects had to be motivated enough to lie motionless in an MRI machine for hours and stay alert as they stared at a tiny dot, Gallant said. The machine was used for a technique called functional MRI, or fMRI. Unlike ordinary MRI, which reveals anatomy, fMRI shows brain activity.

The first task was to teach the computer how different parts of each subject's brain responded to scenes of moving objects.

Participants stared at a dot to keep their eyes still as movie clips lasting 10 to 20 seconds unfolded in the background. That went on for two hours as the MRI machine tracked activity in their brains.

The study focused on parts of the brain that respond to simple features like shapes and movement, rather than other parts that identify objects. So it was limited to "only the most basic parts of vision," Gallant said.

Next, the question was: Could the computer use that brain activity information to reconstruct what appeared in the movie clips?

To test that, researchers fed the computer 18 million one-second YouTube clips that the participants had never seen. They asked the computer to predict what brain activity each of those clips would evoke.

Then they asked it to reconstruct the movie clips using the best matches it could find between the YouTube scenes and the participants' brain activity.

The reconstructions are blends of the YouTube snippets, which makes them blurry. Some are better than others. If a human appeared in the original clip, a human form generally showed up in the reconstruction. But one clip that showed elephants walking left to right led to a reconstruction that looked like "a shambling mound," Gallant said. The YouTube clips hadn't shown elephants and so "we just had to make do with what we had."

The quality could be improved by better techniques to blend human forms, as well as a bigger storehouse of moving images, he said.

Still, the overall results are "one of the most impressive demonstrations of the scientific knowledge of how the visual system works," said Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University.

"I'd give 50 or 100 dollars to see dreams of mine with that (current level of) quality," said Just, who didn't participate in the new study.

Perhaps the technique could be used someday to provide helpful brain stimulation to people who have trouble processing visual information, he said.

Michael Tarr, co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, called the work a "cool demonstration" of how scientists can use fMRI to study the brain.

"I don't think people should interpret this as a precursor to mind-reading," said Tarr, who didn't participate in the work. "The level of knowledge we'd have to have about the brain before we could even think about seeing whether mind-reading would work is decades, if not centuries, away."

Gold to surpass $2,000 by next year, industry predicts

Jack Farchy / Financial Times

The gold market is revving up to reach new record highs in excess of $2,000 (U.S.) an ounce in the next year, according to the average forecast of bankers, traders and investors at the gold industry’s largest annual gathering.

The bullish prediction, if correct, suggests that the gold bull market remains intact, despite having already gained almost 30 per cent this year and 600 per cent over the past decade.

The widespread optimism at the London Bullion Market Association conference in Montreal, the largest gathering of the gold industry, comes as the gold market has been transformed from a backwater dominated by jewellery demand to one of the hottest investment assets.

The conference, which enjoyed a record attendance in excess of 500, predicted that gold would be trading at $2,019 an ounce at the time of next year’s meeting in November 2012. That would mark a fresh nominal record for gold, although it is still below the inflation-adjusted peak touched in 1980, which translates to more than $2,400 in today’s money.

The delegates at the LBMA conference have a strong record of predicting the trajectory of the gold price, although their forecasts have traditionally been overcautious. Last year, with gold trading at $1,298 an ounce, the conference predicted a price of $1,450. On Tuesday, bullion (GC-FT1,785.80-22.30-1.23%) was trading at $1,805.70, down from a record peak of $1,920 in early September.

The forecasts, if accurate, bode well for hedge fund managers such as John Paulson of Paulson & Co and David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, who bought gold in the financial crisis as a means of betting that governments and central banks would fail to safeguard their economies from the market turmoil.

Many hedge fund investors believe a sharp appreciation in the gold price is likely as they expect the eurozone debt crisis to deepen.

Despite the optimistic price predictions, traders were wary of growing volatility in the gold market, which has experienced some of the sharpest swings on record in recent weeks. Asked whether the market was in a bubble, 39 per cent of the traditionally bullish audience replied that it was. A growing number expect the market to accelerate in the next year or two and peak above $2,500.

“We expect to see $2,500 some time in the next 12 months,” said Som Seif, chief executive of Claymore Investments, a Canadian asset manager.

The most bullish forecast came from Pierre Lassonde, chairman of Franco-Nevada (FNV-T43.560.461.07%), who predicted that gold would reach parity with the Dow Jones industrial average index, at present trading at 11,400, within the next four to six years. “This bull market is far from over,” said Mr. Lassonde, whose predictions are optimistic even by the standards of market bulls.

A drop below $1,600 an ounce could mark the end of the rally for the next few months, traders believe – although many expect demand from Asian investors and central banks to prop up prices above that level.

Mr. Lassonde said: “I think there’s going to be a strong correction at some point and it’s going to set up the last phase that will take the market to numbers that few people can imagine.”

The bullish sentiment has been underpinned by the strength of demand for coins and small bars from retail investors from Germany to China.

Steven Nathan, marketing director at the Rand Refinery in South Africa, said that sales of the popular gold krugerrand coin were at a record level: “Demand is insatiable. It’s the strongest period ever right now.”

A comparable surge in demand was reported by other mints, refiners and coin dealers. “I just can’t see the price coming down,” said one senior precious metals banker. “Physical demand is incredibly strong.”

IMF chief economist: 'global economy has entered dangerous new phase'

Olivier Blanchard from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that stock prices have fallen due to fear of the unknown.

Speaking at a press conference in Washington, the chief economist said: "The global economy has entered a dangerous new phase. The recovery has weakened considerably and downside risks have increased sharply.

"Fear of the unknown is very high. Stock prices have fallen. These will adversely affect spending and growth in the months to come.

"Markets have clearly become more sceptical about the ability of many countries to stabilise their public debt", Blanchard added.

As a result, the IMF has downgraded its economic outlook for the UK, the US and Europe through to the end of next year.

UK gross domestic product will grow just 1.1 per cent in 2011, compared with the IMF's report in April of 1.7 per cent. The US will grow by 0.4 per cent more than the UK.

The organisation has advised policymakers to pay particular attention to the eurozone crisis and weak activity in the US, which will affect global growth.