Displaying posts published in

November 2015

Organic Farming’s Deservedly Dismal Future By Henry I. Miller & Julie Kelly

The organic-products industry, which has been on a tear for the past decade, is running scared. Challenged by progress in modern genetic engineering and state-of-the-art pesticides — which are denied to organic farmers — the organic movement is ratcheting up its rhetoric and bolstering its anti-innovation agenda while trying to expand a consumer base that shows signs of hitting the wall.

Genetic-engineering-labeling referendums funded by the organic industry failed last year in Colorado and Oregon, following similar defeats in California and Washington. Even worse for the industry, a recent Supreme Court decision appears to proscribe on First Amendment grounds the kind of labeling they want. A June 2015 Supreme Court decision has cleared a judicial path to challenge the constitutionality of special labeling — “compelled commercial speech” — to identify foods that contain genetically engineered (sometimes called “genetically modified”) ingredients. The essence of the decision is the expansion of the range of regulations subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most rigorous standard of review for constitutionality, to include special labeling laws.

New ISIS video sends message to Pres. Obama- by Lisa Daftari

ISIS has released a new video threatening Pres. Obama and accusing him of “waging war against Allah.”

The message refers back to the U.S./Kurdish coordinated raid that freed 70 hostages in Hawijah, Northern Iraq last week.

Titled “The reality of the American raid,” the video appears to be a recounting of the attack by ISIS sympathizers and concludes with the execution of 4 prisoners, believed to be Iraqis.

An English speaking jihadi draws his knife as a prisoner dressed in an orange jumpsuit kneels in front of him. Facing the camera, he says:

“Obama, you have learned a new lesson. 600 soldiers of the Caliphate faced four hundred of your children. They killed and injured them. By Allah’s grace, you are probably surprised by this. Oh crusaders, it is the support of Allah. You did not gain anything. You returned to your bases with loses and humiliation. Obama, you wage war against Allah; He supports us against you. There is the promise of Allah; Allah will never fail in His promise.”

How Long Can Europe’s Welfare States Welcome Refugees and Migrants? John Fund

The growing refugee crisis in Europe is clearly a humanitarian issue. But if leaders don’t bring some common sense into the equation, the humanitarian problems could become a geopolitical crisis. The U.S. needs to heed the lessons of Europe because a similar situation could erupt on our borders.

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s Social Democratic foreign minister, declared this week that the refugee flow in her country, with its current population of 9.8 million, was enormous: “We cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year — in the long run, our system will collapse. And that welcome is not going to receive popular support.”

The 190,000 refugees expected in Sweden this year would be the equivalent of 6.5 million people arriving in the U.S. — the population of Indiana.

A major reason so many refugees want to settle in Sweden, Germany, and other Northern European countries is that they have generous welfare-state programs for non-citizens. Even so, some refugees can be picky. The Swedish newspaper Local reported last week that “more than 30 asylum seekers refused to get off a bus that took them to temporary accommodation at a holiday park on Sunday night because they didn’t want to stay in such a rural location.”

The Calcification of Climate Science By Ian Tuttle

According to Lord Christopher Monckton, Thomas R. Karl’s much-feted paper refuting “the Pause,” the inexplicable 19-year standstill in the earth’s average global surface temperature, has a small problem: To disappear the warming hiatus as Karl and his co-authors purport to do, you have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. (Not even the current president can do that.)

Karl and his colleagues, whose work appeared in the June issue of Science, “updated” previous data sets used to assess changes in surface temperatures, which supporters maintain is merely Science being self-critical and Scientific. Others — a lot of others — say different. E. Calvin Beisner rounds up criticisms at the website Watts Up With That, and quotes with approval the verdict of Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry:

This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. . . . So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

Was Netanyahu Right That Islam Changed Nazism and Not Vice-Versa? By Andrew G. Bostom

During a recent speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appropriately decried [1] the “apologetics” which have minimized the role played by ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin el-Husseini [2] (1895-1974) — founder of the modern Palestinian Muslim movement — in fomenting genocidal Islamic Jew-hatred. Netanyahu made these simple, irrefragable points, demonstrating [3] how from the 1920s through (in particular) the World War II era:

… the father of the Palestinians at that time, with no [Jewish] state and no so-called “occupation,” no territories and no settlements, already sought, through systematic incitement, to annihilate the Jews. Regrettably, Hajj Amin el-Husseini is still a venerated figure in Palestinian society, he appears in study books and is exalted as the father of the nation, and this incitement that began then, incitement to kill Jews, continues.

As I noted in what was the first full English translation and detailed analysis (here [2], here [4]) of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews — which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, till now — this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement was pure Islamic dogma devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists, epitomized by Johan (aka, Johann, Johannes) von Leers. (See Foreword by Julian Huxley, History on a Racial Basis [5], an abridged translation of Geschichte auf Rassicher Grundlage [6], London, 1936.)

Community Organizing America By Victor Davis Hanson

The modern art of a community organizer seems fairly simple.

The proverbial agitator identifies a particular aggrieved racial, ethnic, gender, or class group that believes equality of opportunity must guarantee equality of result.

Then he “organizes” the victims by claiming that their ostensible failure to obtain parity can only be due to systematic racism, sexism, and bias by the supposed callous establishment majority (usually emblemized as callous white, male, heterosexual Christians). Myth is useful (e.g., “hands up, don’t shoot” or “one in four women on campus suffer sexual assault”).

Next he mounts a shrill campaign to demand “fairness” and “equality” (demonstrations, demonization of public figures, boycotts, media campaigns, showing up outside the homes of supposed enemies of the people, getting “in their faces,” and metaphorically “taking a gun to a knife fight,” etc.).

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

· An Israeli cancer treatment causes tumors to self-destruct.

Fooling cancer cells. Israel’s BioSight has developed the amino acid astrabine which acts as a “Trojan Horse” chemotherapy treatment that kills leukemia cells without harming healthy tissue. Astrabine closely resembles a protein called aspargine that leukemia cells depend on and the cancer cells are fooled into self-destruction.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-start-up-uses-trojan-horse-technology-to-kill-cancer-cells/
Muscular dystrophy treatment success. Israel’s BioBlast announced promising interim results from its Phase II study of its Cabaletta treatment for oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD). Due to the success BioBlast seeks to fast track a Phase III study in 2016, leading to a 2017 launch date.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-bioblast-orphan-drug-gives-hope-to-opmd-patients-1001076594

· Israel was elected to the membership of a UN Space Committee.
· Ethiopia is to install an Israeli solar power plant.
· An innovative all-terrain Israeli suitcase is successfully funded.
· A delegation of 50 Australian entrepreneurs is currently visiting Israel.
· Two Israelis won medals at a judo competition in Abu Dhabi.
· Thousands flock to pro-Israel rallies in New York, Rome, Paris, Madrid and Kiev.

Obama’s EEOC Accommodates Muslim Religious Beliefs By Amil Imani and James Hyde

Overdriveonline, a trucking industry news site, blares the headline:

“EEOC awards Muslim truckers $240k after being fired for refusing to haul alcohol.” The Obama administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a trucking company, at taxpayer expense, when two Somali Muslim truck drivers were fired for refusing to haul alcohol. Doing so, the Islamists claimed, would infringe on their religious beliefs under “Islamic law.”

From the story: “EEOC also alleged that Star Transport could have but failed to accommodate their religious beliefs.” Stunning.

The intervention by EEOC was hypocritical, discriminatory and insanely out of equilibrium when the plight of Christians in the matrimonial business who object to providing goods and services for gay weddings is contrasted. Christian businesses are being fined; forced to take “diversity” propaganda courses or closed down for refusing to “accommodate” gay weddings. Are not their religious beliefs, duly protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment and 42 U.S. Code Chapter 21B – Religious Freedom Restoration equal to the beliefs of Muslims?

Since when does Islamic law trump the U.S. Constitution and U.S. federal law? For Obama, such violations of his oath began with the first breath he took after he took his inaugural oath. In fact, the scofflaw-in-chief gave us a glimpse of his personal religious preferences when, during his “Apology Tour,” he proclaimed to the world that, “The United States is no longer a Christian nation.” Had he taken the time to apply his finger to the nation’s pulse, he would have learned that an ABCNEWS/Beliefnet poll found that, “Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.” Granted, that number has diminished some since he first sat in the big chair, but it’s still north of 70%.

America’s Real Education Woes By Robert Weissberg

Despite ever-growing educational spending and endless experimentation to discover magic bullets, the recent news from the education front is depressing. For example, scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (the NAEP) showed a lack of progress in reading and math proficiency — only a third of the nation’s eighth-graders were “proficient” (or above) in math while the figure was only slightly higher for fourth-graders. Even worst news comes from Washington DC and New York City. Both have made expensive efforts to uplift students and close the race-related academic achievement gap. In DC eighty-two percent of white students met the proficiency standard in English; the corresponding figure for Hispanics was 8%, for blacks it was 4%. Meanwhile, in New York City the school Chancellor tried to spin truly dreadful outcomes into a “success.” She hailed the substantial uptick in blacks and Hispanics taking the Advanced Placement (AP) tests but her celebration failed to mention that 95% of the Hispanic students and 97% of the African Americans students could not pass a single AP test (and this despite Hispanic students being able to take an AP test in the Spanish language and culture).

Needless to say, these disappointing outcomes (and there are many others) will only further energize professional educators to demand yet more “investing in our future” and countless budget busting panaceas and, I suspect, much of this clamor will be heeded. After all, who could deny that America requires an educated workforce in today’s cutthroat global economy?

Obama’s Corrupt and Immoral Abuse of the Military By Jonathan Keiler

Barack Obama’s decision to send American special forces to Syria is not only hypocritical, but also a corrupt and immoral abuse of his powers as commander-in-chief.

This is not a comment on his circumvention of Congress, which is something that most modern American presidents have done at one time or another with respect to military engagements abroad. Rather, in Obama’s case – uniquely in American history – we have a president who puts Americans in harm’s way for no evident reason other than personal political calculations.

The insertion of fifty U.S. special-forces troops into Syrian peril, whether to serve as “non-combatant” advisors or something more, has been undertaken without any reasonable hope of meaningful military success or of advancing American interests. It is simply a political ploy, so obvious that no right-thinking American, on the right or the left, ought to countenance it, including the military officers charged with executing the mission.

Were this Obama’s only foray into meaningless and dangerous military policy, it might be excused as a rookie mistake or a well-meaning misapplication of power. But Obama has been president for seven years, and he has consistently abused the American military in ways that violate accepted principles of warfighting and application of power. In Afghanistan, Obama senselessly surged American forces and sent soldiers and Marines into some of the toughest fights of the war, with haphazardly selected force levels and without any plan or commitment to stick it out or produce a victory. The deaths and maiming of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan during Obama’s watch is a stain on his presidency.