November 15, 2013

Rice: Settlement plans caused ‘tensions’

Leave a Comment / Mobile, News, United States / Jewish Journal

U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Israeli settlement expansion announcements helped spur recent tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

In a speech Thursday to a Washington think tank, the Middle East Institute, Rice said the United States remained committed to Middle East peacemaking, but made clear that Jewish settlement construction plans are hampering those efforts, Reuters reported.

“We have seen increased tensions on the ground. Some of this is a result of recent settlement announcements. So let me reiterate: The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” she said.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday his delegation of peace negotiators had resigned over the lack of progress in statehood talks with Israel. The development would mark a new low point for the talks, which resumed in July.

Abbas suggested negotiations would continue but that he would need a week to resume talks.

The disclosure Tuesday that Israel’s Housing Ministry had commissioned separate plans for nearly 24,000 more homes for Israelis raised U.S. concern and drew Palestinian condemnation.

Netanyahu intervened later in the day, ordering a halt to the projects amid condemnations by several world powers.

Netanyahu has accused the Palestinians of creating “artificial crises” over the settlement issue and has said that most of Israel’s building in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem is in areas it intends to keep in any future peace deal.

Rice: Settlement plans caused ‘tensions’ Read More »

New Cholesterol Treatment Recommendations

Leave a Comment / Blogs / Albert Fuchs, M.D.

This week the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association released ” target=”_blank”>spreadsheet that calculates this risk is available and requires you to know your most recent cholesterol panel and blood pressure.

This last criterion will likely apply to many men in their 50s and women in their 60s, vastly expanding the number of people taking statins.

The new recommendations also state that non-statin cholesterol-lowering medications like ” target=”_blank”>Zetia should not be routinely used since the evidence that they prevent strokes and heart attacks is scant or nonexistent.

The new recommendations have generated some criticism. Some experts claim that they are too complex. Others bemoan the number of people that will now be offered statins. I think the recommendations are actually simpler than what we were doing before. I’m sure we’ll all need some time to get used to them and understand the fine points. My impression is that patients will be able to apply these recommendations much more easily and see for themselves how they compare to the various treatment groups.

As to the criticism that statin use will dramatically increase, if this leads to marked declines in the numbers of strokes and heart attacks then this is not a criticism of the new guidelines but a major improvement over the prior recommendations.

Learn more:

” target=”_blank”>Shift In Cholesterol Advice Could Double Statin Use (NPR Shots)
” target=”_blank”>Panel Unveils Shake-up in Strategy to Cut Heart Risk (Wall Street Journal)
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ACC/AHA Prevention Guideline “>Follow me on Facebook

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First Baby in the Real World

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Ariel Blumenthal

Wouldn’t you like to live in a world where the only problem is Israel?

This is the sweet world the 4th committee of the UN General Assembly lives in: On Thursday the committee had adopted 9 resolutions against Israel – and rested. One of the resolutions called for handing over the Golan Heights from Israeli to Syrian control. You read it correctly: the UN 4th committee wants more people to come under the crushing violence of the Syrian civil war.

The 4th committee’s total performance for 2013, as “>[watch on YouTube]

“>automatic majority</a> against Israel in the UN, consisting of the Organization of Islamic Conference (56 countries) and the Non-Aligned Movement (118 countries). Members of these 2 groups will vote for a resolution that blames Israel for global warming, if need be. The Non-Aligned have nothing personal against Israel, but they do against the US, and that’s enough to abandon the moral obligations of the UN’s 4th committee towards humanity and focus on a single, made up villain. No other indicator reflects the UN’s tragic loss of way stronger than the mounting of entire committees for the sake of the angry desire to undo Israel, a UN member. The spectacle of Israel-hate and anti-Israel action in the UN (from the General Assembly through UNRWA, UNICEF and of course the pathetic UN Commission on Human Rights and its racist creation, the Durban anti-racism[!] process), is a reflection of a world dominated by countries like Sudan, Mauritania, Venezuela and Nigeria, the likes of which sponsor the 4th committee anti-Israel resolutions with great redundancy. The rule of their values and morality is the face of the UN’s harsh anti-Israel policies. Meanwhile, in the real world, a <a href="http://www.itn.co.uk/World/89458/baby-born-in-a-field-hospital-in-the-philippines <view-source:http://www.itn.co.uk/World/89458/baby-born-in-a-field-hospital-in-the-philippines>“>first Philippine baby</a> was delivered by Israeli doctors in the Israeli field hospital set up following the typhoon. His parents named him Israel. </div> <a class="" href="https://jewishjournal.com/uncategorized/124444/"> First Baby in the Real World Read More »</a> <div class="entry-content clear" itemprop="text" > </div> </div> </div>  </article> <article class="post-124442 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-culture category-giving category-mobile_20111212 ast-grid-common-col ast-full-width ast-article-post" id="post-124442" itemtype="https://schema.org/CreativeWork" itemscope="itemscope"> <div class="ast-post-format- ast-no-thumb blog-layout-1 ast-article-inner"> <div class="post-content ast-grid-common-col" > <div class="ast-blog-featured-section post-thumb ast-blog-single-element"></div><h2 class="entry-title ast-blog-single-element" itemprop="headline"><a href="https://jewishjournal.com/mobile_20111212/124442/" rel="bookmark">Bob Odenkirk on ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Breaking Bad’</a></h2> <header class="entry-header ast-blog-single-element ast-blog-meta-container"> <div class="entry-meta"> <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/mobile_20111212/124442/#respond">Leave a Comment</a> / <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/category/culture/" rel="category tag">Culture</a>, <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/category/giving/" rel="category tag">Giving</a>, <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/category/mobile_20111212/" rel="category tag">Mobile</a> / <a title="View all posts by Naomi Pfefferman" href="https://jewishjournal.com/author/naomi-pfefferman/" rel="author" class="url fn n" itemprop="url" > Naomi Pfefferman </a> </div> </header> <div class="ast-excerpt-container ast-blog-single-element"> Actor Bob Odenkirk seems to be everywhere these days, on screens large and small.   Having burst into the comedy zeitgeist with series like “The Larry Sanders Show,” and “Saturday Night Live,” he’s best known for playing Saul Goodman, meth-cooker Walter White’s sleazy but scene-stealing attorney on AMC’s “Breaking Bad.”  (No, Saul isn’t Jewish – he just changed his surname from McGill because, as the character put it, “The Jew thing I just do for the homeboys.  They all want a pipe-hitting member of the tribe, so to speak.”) Now Odenkirk, 51, is finally getting his own show, “Better Call Saul,” a “Breaking Bad” spinoff that was recently green lit by AMC; he’ll also star in FX’s limited series “Fargo,” inspired by on the Coen brothers’ esteemed 1996 movie.  And on Nov. 22, Odenkirk will hit theaters in Alexander Payne’s acclaimed new film “Nebraska;” the movie spotlights Woody (Bruce Dern), a curmudgeonly alcoholic who is erroneously convinced he has won a $1 million publishing house sweepstakes and insists on collecting the prize in person. A road trip ensues in which Woody’s sensitive younger son (Will Forte) drives him from Billings, Montana to Nebraska to collect his “prize;” Odenkirk plays Ross, Woody’s ambitious, angrier older son, who is aghast at the idea of the trip. Last week I spoke to Odenkirk by phone from his Los Angeles office, where he discussed everything from working with Payne, why he’s shocked that everybody loves Saul and his own Jewish wife and kids.  Here are excerpts from our conversation: Q:  What’s your personal connection to the character of Ross in Nebraska? A:  I relate to it very directly.  My father had an alcohol problem and the character of the father in “Nebraska” also is an alcoholic, and a kind of difficult, challenging guy.  People in the family aren’t at peace with his crotchety nature and there’s a lot of anger brewing, certainly with my character, who is less forgiving of the father. The feelings of frustration around family are recognizable to me; family can be a really difficult place of contentious interaction, but also a place for a kind of forgiveness and acceptance.  And all of that is in the movie. Q:  Did you achieve that kind of acceptance with your own father? A:  Unfortunately, no.  He left the family when I was about 13, but when I was 21 he developed terminal bone cancer and he came home. I did try to connect with him, but it just didn’t happen.  I don’t think there was an overlap in anything that we really cared about in our values or our natures.  But I was just a kid, so I wonder if I got to meet him again as an older man I would maybe be able to make some kind of a connection with him. Q:  What themes does the film explore? A:  It examines how we don’t always know each other — even people who are close to us – our fathers or our mothers and siblings; there might be challenges in their lives that they haven’t shared with us.  In “Nebraska,” we learn more about the father and the challenges he grew up with, and I think it leads to an empathy from the brothers.  That may have been true in my own life; maybe if I’d gotten to know my own father better I would’ve developed some empathy towards him but I didn’t have the opportunity to find that out. The movie is also about learning people’s stories, even people close to you, and how much you can ask a person to change and how much you have to accept them. It’s about the value of accepting people and their dreams and who they are in the moment and not always wanting them to be better or more than they are. Q:  How is Alexander Payne unique as a director? A:  I made another film called “The Spectacular Now” that came out this past year, and the director, James Ponsoldt, only shot very little coverage – which means you don’t need different angles to cover the scene, you commit to one angle.  Alexander did that to an extent I’ve never seen before.  And what it does is it encourages you to take every single take extremely seriously, because that could very well be all you get to do of the scene.  It means that you’re performing in a two-shot or a group-shot, so that the energy between the actors and the characters is preserved onscreen, not so much from being pasted together in the editing room.  But it takes a lot of confidence for a director to do that, and after all the movies that Alexander has made he’s gained it.  It’s a kind of calm assuredness that he has; he’s just extremely aware. Q:  There’s a funny story about how you landed the role of Saul on “Breaking Bad.” A:  I got a phone call from [the show’s creator], Vince Gilligan, and he was telling me about the character; he said his name was Saul Goodman and he went on and on and at a certain point I stopped him and said, “You know, I’m not Jewish, though my wife and kids are.” And Vince goes, “No, no no, Saul isn’t Jewish; he’s Irish.  That’s just a last name he took to appeal to the homeboys he services, that he’s a prototypical lawyer.”  It’s like if your lawyer’s not Jewish, he’s not really a lawyer – that’s how I think Saul perceives taking on that name. Q:  What kinds of things did you personally contribute to the character? A: As soon as Vince described Saul to me — literally in that first phone call — I said, “I already know what he looks like, and if you’ll allow me, I’d like to have a comb-over and a mullet in back and cleaned up on the sides.”  And Vince laughed and said, “That sounds awesome.” Q:  What do attorneys tell you they think of Saul? A: They always tell me the same thing:  They say, “I know guys just like Saul“ — of course implicitly implying that they are not a person like that. I’m very surprised that people actually like Saul.  I stop people who love Saul and I say, “Talk to me, tell me why you love him?”  And they always say that he’s funny, he’s good at what he does, they like how his brain works – it works fast – and he’s fun to watch; he makes a lot of jokes.  It’s surprising to me because he’s totally self-interested; he’s absolutely a selfish guy, although as the show went on he revealed that he’s capable of having a conscience. Q:  How do you feel about the character of Walter White? A:  I totally was rooting against him in the last season and a half; he’s just crazed, his ego is so out of control!  The character of Walter White is just an awful person; he is so desperate to make his power known and recognized.  And in the end, he sacrifices his family for his own ego. Q:  What’s your connection to the Jewish community? A:  I was raised Roman Catholic – I’m half Irish and half German – but I married a Jewish woman, Naomi Yomtov [17 years ago] and our two children are being raised as Jews.  I did not convert, but when we were looking for schools for the kids we went to the Purim carnival at Temple Israel of Hollywood and I just loved the energy and community there, and that’s where we sent our kids.  I liked the school and I liked Reform Judaism and I like it even more now.  It’s a connection to the ancient principles and beliefs that hold a lot of truth to us now and a belief in God that is complicated and complex and ever changing and growing in the way that a person over a lifetime who’s paying attention will also grow. So it’s thriving and challenging and I get it.  It’s a little hard for me to connect to the ritual aspects, although they are also constantly being studied and brought into the light as it were, just because you need to grow up with them to have them connect with you on a real organic level.  But we observe a lot of the holidays, Pesach and certainly Chanukah, and both my kids were bar and bat mitzvahed, which I found to be really rewarding and deeply meaningful and moving – more than I ever imagined.  Q:  What do you hope to see happen to your character on “Better Call Saul?” A:  I’d like to actually have a reason to like him as a person.  You can really take almost any person and hear their story and maybe develop some empathy for them and what they’ve been through, which has made them who they are.  Saul is just such a wildly self-involved, self-promoting, self-engaged person, I’d like to think that there’s something outside of himself that he has feelings for.  I’d like to see a richer character, but I’m sure that will happen because Vince Gilligan and [the show’s co-creator] Peter Gould are great writers and together they are going to fill that character out and we’re going to learn new things about him. <iframe width="584" height="438" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ZuIBvmxIN4w" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

Bob Odenkirk on ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ Read More »

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Rice: Settlement plans caused ‘tensions’

New Cholesterol Treatment Recommendations

First Baby in the Real World

The Annoyed Jew

Demographic Duo

The Wide Angle

More Than Talking

Wrestling With One’s Self

30 Years After

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