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August 2017

Kill the Alligators, Then Drain the Swamp Deeds, not words, are the best defense. Bruce Thornton

Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to “drain the swamp” ––the D.C. establishment made up of most Congressmen from both parties, employees of executive agencies and bureaus, the political appointees who head up those agencies, and the hordes of lobbyists, fundraisers, Congressional staffers, “consultants,” “journalists,” and pundits. These are the “Beltway insiders” or the “political establishment” whose natural habitat is the swamp. These are the alligators Trump needs to get rid of.

Of course, many of these D.C. denizens of the establishment are permanent dwellers in the swamp, beyond the reach of the president or even Congress. Besides, monitoring Congressmen should be the business of their constituents, who should hold them accountable. But too often voters like the pork their alligators bring back to their states or districts. As for pundits, consultants, lobbyists, fundraisers, and journos, they are employees of private businesses, with the right of political free speech and association. Keeping them in line is the responsibility of citizens trading in the market-place of ideas, and imposing ballot-box accountability to punish the office-holders corrupted by these parasites.

Then there are 2.1 million federal employees. They manage the federal government’s agencies, execute the laws that they, not Congressmen, actually write, and judge whether the rest of us comply––collapsing together and usurping the separation of powers central to our Constitutional order. And they do so without any accountability to the voters who pay their handsome salaries and Cadillac benefits (85% higher in value than private employees’). They are, no surprise, stalwart supporters of big-government Democrats, to whom this last election they gave 95% of their political donations. And don’t forget the 3.7 million federal contract-workers who also do the federal Leviathan’s bidding.

Something could be done about reducing the size and intrusive scope of this bureaucratic behemoth. Trump has made a good start. He has left many vacancies open with a hiring freeze, and has proposed reducing some agency budgets in order to starve the beast and prune the regulations that empower it. In his 2018 budget proposal he also called for eliminating cost of living raises for employees in the Federal Employee Retirement System, cutting the Civil Service Retirement System’s COLAs by 0.5%, and making employees contribute more to their retirement annuities. If Congress approves, of course. Good luck with that. But he has not yet tackled reducing the more shadowy contract workers, although some are a legitimate resource for the military. When it comes to domestic affairs, however, they carry out the bidding of the federal agencies while most of us citizens have no clue who they are or what they’re up to.

As for Congress, it could pass legislation changing the laws that make federal employees almost untouchable. Like unionized teachers and professors, federal employees benefit from both union protections and virtual tenure––the civil service regulations that make disciplining or firing federal workers time-consuming and costly. There’s nothing to keep Congress from abolishing unions for federal employees, which were created 55 years ago by John Kennedy through an executive order. One of Ronald Reagan’s boldest and most consequential domestic actions came in 1981 when he fired nearly 12,000 air traffic controllers and decertified their union. A Republican Congress should likewise defang this reliably Democrat voting bloc.

Political appointees are another matter, since they’re easier to get rid of. They serve at the pleasure of the Chief Executive. There is no law that keeps the president from firing political appointees. There may be political costs, as Richard Nixon found out, but there are no Constitutional limits, outside of criminal behavior, on the reasons why he fires a political appointee. This is where Trump has been remiss.

Start with former FBI director James Comey, who immediately after the inauguration should have heard Trump’s trademark “You’re fired!” Comey’s careerism and arrogance made him mishandle the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s patent violations of the laws governing classified material, and her probable obstructions of justice. An indictment could have been justified based simply on the information already made public. Indeed, Comey himself laid out the predicates for indictment in his infamous July 2016 announcement. Then he rewrote the relevant statute to let Clinton off the hook, simply to spare AG Loretta Lynch, who had met with Bill Clinton in a private confab in an airplane, the pretext Comey used for usurping the prosecutor’s role. Along the way he violated the foundation of any free government––equality before the law.

Genetically Engineered Wheat Reduces Need for Fertilizer, Helps Environment Alex Berezow

One of the troubles with agriculture is the need for farmers to apply fertilizer. The plants don’t soak up all of it, which inevitably results in fertilizer running off into lakes and rivers.

That’s problematic not just because it is wasteful of the farmer’s precious financial resources, but because it is also wasteful of the planet’s finite supply of phosphorus. Worse, when phosphorus and other nutrients make their way into bodies of water, they can trigger nasty algal blooms, which kicks off a chain reaction known as eutrophication. As the algae die off, they are decomposed by bacteria that use up much of the oxygen, suffocating animals and resulting in massive fish kills. (See image, below right1.)

Decreasing the amount of applied fertilizer is therefore a goal that farmers and environmentalists should support. Now, a team of Pakistani researchers has genetically engineered a strain of wheat that should require less fertilizer.

Transgenic Wheat Is More Phosphorus Efficient

Depending on the type of soil, a phosphorus-containing compound called phytate may be in abundant supply. However, plants are largely unable to use it. The researchers turned to a fungus, Aspergillus japonicus, which produces an enzyme, called phytase, that breaks down phytate. The authors figured that this enzyme could help free up the phosphorus locked up inside phytate.

So the team inserted the fungal gene for phytase into wheat. They tweaked the gene so that it was only “turned on” in the roots, and they added another tweak that caused the enzyme encoded by the gene to be secreted into the environment. The result was the creation of wheat plants with high phytase content in their roots, some of which was oozed into the soil. The enzyme would then break down phytate and release the phosphorus, which the wheat could soak up.

When compared to control plants grown in the presence of phytate, the genetically engineered plants grew bigger and contained more phosphorus. The best-performing plant had 118% greater phosphorus efficiency than the control plants2.

Therefore, the authors successfully demonstrated that their transgenic plants could grow quite well in soil containing phytate, a condition that would be considered “phosphorus deficient” for other plants. The next step would be to conduct field trials to verify that, under real-world conditions, their plants require less fertilizer than other crops. Furthermore, they should examine how secreted phytase affects the soil microbiome and soil quality. Finally, the team should strongly consider commercialization, assuming they can find a company interested enough3.

Trump’s Win Squelched the Anti-GMO movement Out: meaningless warning labels. In: science and innovation. By Julie Kelly see note please

There is a tragedy here. The anti genetically modified crops movement relegated millions in Africa to malnutrition and famine. Nobel Laureate, and Congressional Medal of Freedom Winner, Dr. Norman Borlaug whose life mission was to end hunger was quoted “Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world.Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.” His efforts to introduce genetically modified food crops that would thrive and grow even in arid soils, were thwarted by the junk scientists and faux environmentalists…….I was fortunate to hear him speak at a small luncheon organized by the late Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, former founder and director of The American Council of Science and Health (http://www.acsh.org/)
rsk

What a difference a year makes.

Last summer, the anti-GMO movement was riding high. The nation’s first GMO-labeling law had kicked in July 1 in Vermont, forcing companies to disclose whether their products contained ingredients that were genetically modified. A few weeks later, Congress passed — and President Obama signed — a controversial bill requiring mandatory GMO labels for all food products nationwide. The legislation was the result of years of successful lobbying by the organic industry and environmentalists to alarm consumers about GMOs in their food. (Organic food cannot contain genetically modified ingredients; the organic industry wants to make GMOs sound dangerous so people will buy more non-GMO, organic goods.) It was supported by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, who starred in a press conference on Capitol Hill to endorse the measure, and it is strongly backed by Democratic politicians including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Even though the bill did not require the on-package label that activists wanted, most figured they would get their way under Hillary Clinton’s department of Agriculture. (The USDA had two years to figure out all the details before food companies would have to comply.) Many labeling crusaders were Clinton donors and supporters; the main funder of the GMO-labeling movement was rumored to be vying for a top post at the USDA. With GMO foes populating Clinton’s USDA, FDA, and EPA, activists would have the power to demonize and perhaps even halt progress on this promising technology and necessary agricultural tool. Their future looked bright.

Then November 8 happened.

Since the election, the anti-GMO movement here has mostly fallen apart, thought it is still strong in Europe. Their dream of using a government-sanctioned, GMO warning label to scare consumers into buying organic food has been crushed. President Trump’s USDA is already delaying the label’s timeline; the agency has posted 30 questions seeking input from “stakeholders” and has now extended the deadline for replies into late summer. The final rule might require companies only to print a QR code or a 1-800 number that consumers can use to get information about GMO content, a far cry from the skull-and-crossbones symbol that activists envisioned. There is even a slim chance the law could be quashed entirely thanks to Trump’s pledge to drastically reduce federal regulations.

That would be a major blow, perhaps even death knell, to this anti-science, anti-farmer, anti-common-sense crusade. Yes, there are still plenty of GMO-related tags on everything from orange juice to popcorn, but it is becoming so ubiquitous that it’s essentially meaningless. It could be the least useful and informative label on the market. Many products that have a non-GMO label, such as canned tomatoes and even salt, have no GMO alternative — so the label is akin to marketing water as “fat-free.” Processed goods, such as soup and cereal, could have several ingredients sourced from genetically modified crops, including corn, soybean, or sugar-beet derivatives, and a GMO label does not indicate which ones are GMOs. Despite the pro-labeling faction’s claim that people have a “right to know what’s in their food,” the label as it now stands largely fails to tell consumers anything.

Companies disingenuously use a GMO label to virtue-signal to consumers that their products are healthier and safer, even though every scientific study affirms that GMOs are safe and pose no threat to human health. Most consumers could not begin to explain what a GMO is, nor do they care. According to a Pew survey last year, only 16 percent of adults in America said that they “care a great deal about the issue of genetically modified foods.”

So after nearly a decade of activism and tens of millions of dollars spent on a politically motivated fear campaign to demonize a perfectly safe technology, the anti-GMO movement has come up empty-handed. They can expect more troubles ahead as the Trump administration pushes GMOs here and abroad. In April, Trump announced via executive order the formation of an “Interagency Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity,” headed by USDA chief Sonny Perdue, who is a strong proponent of genetically engineered crops. One goal of the committee is to “advance the adoption of innovations and technology for agricultural production.” It is also tasked with making sure “regulatory burdens do not unnecessarily encumber agricultural production, harm rural communities, constrain economic growth, hamper job creation, or increase the cost of food for Americans and our customers around the world.” Supporters are hopeful that the approval process for new genetically engineered plants and animals, often delayed under the Obama administration, will now be accelerated.

The FDA is preparing to launch a public-awareness campaign to educate consumers about the benefits of genetically engineered crops and counter misinformation about the technology. More than 60 business and agricultural groups have applauded the move: “Dedicated educational resources will ensure key federal agencies responsible for the safety of our nation’s food supply are able to more easily convey to the public science- and fact-based information about food.” (Although the $3 million price tag should be picked up by industry, not taxpayers.)

And under a new trade agreement with the Trump administration, China will expedite its approval of several genetically engineered seed varieties; four have already been green-lighted, and four more are under consideration. This has major international consequences because many countries follow China’s lead on accepting GMO seeds.

There were plenty of political losers after November 8. Fortunately, the anti-GMO movement is one of them.

Race Hysteria Erupts over a Commonsense Casting Decision on Broadway Everyone associated with The Great Comet will soon be out of work if the show doesn’t find a way to boost ticket sales. By Kyle Smith

There are times when watching progressives try to grapple with their own conceptual contradictions is like watching a blind man with Crisco on his hands trying to juggle chainsaws. Broadway theater, an aggressively leftist institution, is today presenting the following spectacle: A white actor has been shamed out of playing a white character in a Broadway show because it would have been hurtful to black actors.

Mandy Patinkin, a reliable box-office attraction on Broadway going back to the 1970s (Evita) and a star of television (Criminal Minds, Homeland) and film (The Princess Bride), was set to take over the lead male role in the musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, replacing Josh Groban, whose popularity is widely credited with making the oddball show a success. Great Comet, with original songs and a story based on (a small slice of) War and Peace, wasn’t an obvious candidate for box-office glory, but Groban’s huge fan base filled the seats. “It wasn’t Leo Tolstoy who turned out the crowds,” notes New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel, the definitive Broadway observer. “It was Josh Groban.” Post-Groban, advance ticket sales for late summer and fall were “catastrophically low,” the show’s composer, Dave Malloy, said.

When Groban left the show on the expiration of his contract on July 2, the boyish baritone was temporarily replaced by an unknown, Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan, whom Patinkin would have replaced. Onaodowan is black. Patinkin isn’t. So an utterly routine fact of Broadway life — star replaces non-star — was dressed up in racial outrage. Social media seethed. The Daily News headline read “‘Great Comet’ actor Okieriete Onaodowan shoved aside for Mandy Patinkin, causing outcry.” One actor, Rafael Casal, tweeted, “Telling lead actors of color to #makeroom? Really? @greatcometbway #makeroom is the new code for ‘still not your turn.’” Actress Cynthia Erivo, who won a Tony in 2015 for The Color Purple, also took exception, tweeting, “This has been handled badly. Ticket sales shouldn’t override a person doing his job” and “Oak worked extremely hard for this. Which makes this occurrence distasteful and uncouth.”

Patinkin withdrew from the show, groveling. The producers who hired him also scraped and begged forgiveness, as did the composer. All did much agonizing about how they should have better understood the “optics.” Then Onaodowan himself quit, announcing that August 13 would bring his last performance.

So Great Comet, which now doesn’t have a big-name star in either lead role, is in even more severe danger of closing soon. “Ticket sales shouldn’t override a person doing his job?” Soon, everyone associated with The Great Comet will be out of a job if the show can’t find a way to boost ticket sales. Onaodowan, by the way, would have received full pay for the lead role after yielding to the bigger star. So no one would have suffered any economic loss in the event that Patinkin had taken the stage. A major social-justice win in this instance amounts to probably throwing a bunch of left-wing showbiz people of color out of work.

Flight and Fancy by Mark Steyn

RussiaRussiaRussiaRussiaRealbitofnewsRussia
RussiaRussiaRussia…

Wait a minute, what was that?

On Monday night Imran Awan, the principal IT aide to former DNC honcho Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was arrested at Dulles Airport attempting to flee the country. “IT” means information technology, as in computers, as in hacking, as in what the Democrats insist happened to the election.

Mr Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, has already flown the coop. In March, she pulled their three kids out of school and skipped back to Lahore, with (according to the FBI) “numerous pieces of luggage” and over $12,000 in cash.

Monday’s airport arrest follows the seizure of broken hard drives from the garage of the Awans’ former home. The hard drives had been smashed with a hammer. Whether it was the same ceremonial DNC hammer used to smash Hillary’s Blackberries has not yet been determined.

What we have here, for the benefit of American reporters who may be unfamiliar with the concept, is an actual news story – an unusual event that’s happened in recent times. It thus stands in contrast to, say, speculative fancies about whether or not money-no-object special counsel Robert Mueller is expanding his “Russia investigation” to set the many Hillary donors on his payroll into investigating Trump’s sale of some property in Florida in 2008.

What connects the “fake news” and the real news is the DNC. The Russia “story” exists because the election wasn’t hacked but the DNC was. Wikileaks released the Democrats’ embarrassing emails to the world, although, helpfully, the US media mostly declined to report on them, and, in fact, CNN’s Chris Cuomo lectured America that it’s totally illegal for you mere citizens even to glance at these leaked emails. As it happens, the world’s most inevitable presidential victor somehow managed to lose the election, and casting around for a reason the Dems decided that blaming it on a stiff tired unlikeable legacy candidate with no message and a minimal campaign schedule was too implausible. So instead they decided to blame it on Russian “hacking”.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks says the Russians had nothing to do with the DNC email leaks. Take that with as many grains of salt as you want: he is, of course, a fugitive from justice, just like the DNC chair’s IT aide and his wife and various relatives of theirs.

The Awan story has many interesting elements: The Pakistani-born Imran Awan, his wife, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and Abid’s wife Natalia have provided IT services to Debbie Wasserman Schultz and dozens of lesser Democrat congressmen since about 2004. The family salaries totaled some $5 million, because supplying computer services to prominent Democrats is so vital and specialized a skill that it requires a rare and exceptional skill.The Awans’ services were so critical that in March last year eight Democrat members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a letter demanding that these staffers be granted access to Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI).

Yet at the same time the Awans ran a full-time Virginia car dealership amusingly called Cars International A – or “CIA” – and were almost continually short of cash, requiring loans from all kinds of people including – Collusion Alert! – the Iraqi politician Ali al-Attar.

For inept broke car-dealers, the Awans somehow made themselves indispensable to powerful Democrats, among them those on sensitive committees such as Intelligence and Foreign Affairs including Andre Carson, Joaquín Castro, Lois Frankel, Robin Kelly, Ted Lieu and Jackie Speier. That’s a lot of Democrat computers to wind up in the hands of one family of Pakistani immigrant car dealers. And it wasn’t the full extent of the Awans’ connections: that’s Imran up above with putative First Gentleman Bill Clinton.

But who cares? It’s not like Trump’s son or son-in-law or vaguely connected former campaign advisor being in a room for 20 minutes with a Russian lawyer.

Meanwhile, Mr Awan’s counsel says his client has been arrested for “working while Muslim”. That line’s so desperate it’s bound to take off big-time.

Five months ago, as the coppers began closing the net on the family, other Democrats began distancing themselves from the Awan clan, notwithstanding their peerless IT skills. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York fired Mrs Awan on February 28th. Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio fired Mr Awan on March 1st. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not fire Awan until yesterday – after his arrest at the airport. Indeed, she has spent five months digging in with the guy. You want powerful politicians interfering with federal investigations? Forget about Trump hinting to Comey that he’s really hoping for some loyalty, and consider a powerful member of a House sub-committee threatening the head of the Capitol Police that “you should expect that there will be consequences” for refusing to return one of her laptops set up and controlled by Awan:

Why did Debbie Wasserman Schultz not do as her fellow congressmen did and dump the Awan clan as no longer politically convenient?

Occam’s razor: Because she was head of the DNC and thus Awan knew too much for her to cut him loose.

Until yesterday. After his capture at the airport, while fleeing back to Pakistan.

The enterprsing lad is said to have been trusted by Debbie with her iPad password and other access codes. So in other words – unlike speculation about Putin’s FSB being in DNC computers – we know this guy was in them.

Are the “Russia investigation” and the Awan story comparable? Well, they’re both about hacking, and both about DNC computers. One of them has actual arrests, on-camera political interference, destroyed evidence, and a proven money trail from foreign politicians. The other has no arrests, and a meeting with a minor Russian lawyer arranged by an Azerbaijani pop star’s publicist.

Professor coins term ‘white priority,’ says white people think they’re better than others (University of North Carolina-Charlotte)

A philosophy professor argues that white people enjoy a “sense” of importance, calling it “white priority,” a term the scholar coined to summarize her claim that people with white skin feel superior to others. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/35063/

“White priority concerns a white person’s felt conviction about herself (however egregious or misplaced, and often unconscious) that no matter the quantifiable, statistical details of her life, she is not on the very bottom run of society’s ladder,” writes Professor Shannon Sullivan.

Sullivan, department chair of the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, made the comments in a recent scholarly article in “Critical Philosophy of Race.”

The piece takes issue with the term “white privilege,” with Sullivan writing that it doesn’t quite hit the mark in describing the “advantages of whiteness.” But “white priority” describes a white person’s “sense of coming before someone else,” noted Sullivan, who is white.

“As a poor, struggling white person, I might not be financially privileged or very high up in social circles and many people might disparage me, but at least I’m not the lowest of the low. I come before someone else: people of color and black people in particular,” Sullivan wrote.

The article, headlined “White Priority,” was published in a special issue of “Critical Philosophy of Race” dedicated to “Race after Obama.” A listing of Sullivan’s academic papers shows she’s written on whiteness multiple times throughout her career.

Sullivan did not respond to The College Fix’s request for comment. An automatic reply said she’ll have “irregular access” to her email account until Aug. 10.

In “White Priority,” Sullivan argued that the word privilege suggests one’s lived an easy life and it doesn’t quite fit for white people who’ve faced hardships. White privilege is “the right term to describe middle-class and affluent white people’s particular racial advantages,” but she argued that white priority applies to all white people no matter their financial standing.

This nuance is important, she wrote, because “life after Obama is a time for greater nimbleness and dexterity as we think about race and its intersections with class.” She argued there was a “white backlash” against President Barack Obama during his tenure in the Oval Office, an alleged backlash that stemmed from what individuals saw as his “extremism.” This extremism wasn’t based on Obama’s policies but rather that a black man was president, Sullivan wrote.

“It is as if a black intruder broke in and was allowed to stay, and we could say this almost literally given the white imaginary understanding of blackness as inherently criminal,” Sullivan stated.

As for proof that white priority exists, Sullivan stated she does not exactly have any, noting “white priority is not something that can be empirically verified or disproven.”

The One Reason the UN Climate Change Panel Cannot Be Trusted By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

It is time for governments to wake up to this scandal, and withdraw funding to UN organizations that promote the climate scare.

Comment period for the next UN climate report has begun.

As of July 31, climate experts from around the world are providing comments to the authors of a new special report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Entitled “Global Warming of 1.5°C”, the report will address:

… the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.

The IPCC claims that:

The purpose of this expert review is to help ensure that the report provides a balanced and comprehensive assessment of the latest scientific findings.

In reality, the report will almost certainly be highly biased, and will ignore scientific findings that do not conform with the UN’s man-made climate change disaster scenario.

There are a number of reasons to expect such an outcome from any IPCC process.

First, consider the panel’s mandate. Most people think that the IPCC studies all climate change, and indeed, in response to the direction of UN General Assembly Resolution 43/53 of December 6, 1988, that was the original purpose of the panel. But the IPCC itself admits that that is no longer the case.

Today, the IPCC’s role is defined differently in “Principles Governing IPCC Work”:

[T]o assess … the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. (emphasis added)

With this narrow focus, if human-induced climate change is found to be trivial, then there would be no reason for the IPCC to exist. The IPCC will therefore always support the climate scare, no matter what their examination of the science reveals.

The IPCC’s mandate change is apparently the result of the definition of “climate change” given by the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Convention asserted:

Climate Change means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.

Since the IPCC “Principles” state that the panel “shall concentrate its activities … on actions in support of the UNFCCC process,” then clearly the IPCC had to adopt this unduly restricted definition — and this means that policymakers, not scientists, lead the process.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Richard Lindzen was not exaggerating when he said that the supposed scientific consensus was reached before the research had even begun. Indeed, this was clear from the very start. The 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report stated:

[I]t is not possible at this time to attribute all, or even a large part, of the observed global-mean warming to the enhanced greenhouse effect on the basis of the observational data currently available.

‘Competitive Victimhood’ Among Racial Minorities Backfires, Study Finds By Toni Airaksinen

Racial minorities engage in “competitive victimhood” in a quest for recognition of past sufferings such as slavery and colonialism, according to a new research study published by Belgian professors.

Laura De Guissmé and Laurent Licata, professors at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, made the claim in a recent article in the European Journal of Social Psychology, further finding that the struggle for victimhood can “foster intergroup conflict” such as a desire for revenge, increased hostility, and racism against other minorities.

Consequences of competitive victimhood are especially dangerous, the professors note, because they can contribute to the escalation of conflict (for example, with regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict), reduce trust and empathy, and impede the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means (heightening the threat of violence).

While the need for recognition is part of human nature, the desire for recognition of “past sufferings” can be especially problematic. This is because past sufferings often involve feuds between different tribal, ethnic, or racial groups — feuds which oftentimes have persisted to the present (past slavery of African Americans is one example), and thus have present-day consequences.

Recognition of victimhood status is especially important because it can be weaponized for the benefit of the minority group in question, Guissmé and Licata write:

The victim status is highly coveted because it tends to empower victimized groups, which are perceived as morally superior, entitled to sympathy, consideration, and protection against criticism.

Conversely, the lack of victimhood status poses a problem to minorities, since it reduces their ability to garner attention, protection, and even financial rewards (reparations, for example). This explains why the denial of victimhood status can be so troubling: denial of victimhood recognition can lend credence to a denial of help and assistance.

While much of the literature on minorities’ desire to claim victimhood status is largely theoretical, Guissmé and Licata conducted three studies at their university to learn more about the negative consequences of victimhood.

For one study, they surveyed 133 Belgian Muslims on their sense of victimhood and their levels of anti-Semitism. The sense of victimhood among Muslims was gauged by how much respondents agreed with statements such as “Muslims have a huge past of sufferings” and “The suffering Muslims have been through was undeserved and unfair.”

Then, the Muslims were asked questions designed to gauge if they held anti-Semitic viewpoints, such as “Jews should stop constantly complaining about what happened to them in Nazi Germany” and “The Jews exploit the remembrance of the Holocaust for their own benefit.”

Maryland city to allow non-citizens to vote…again By Robert Knight

If you want to know where the progressive left wants to take U.S. elections, a trip through Maryland’s Washington, D.C.-area suburban counties is instructive.

The City of College Park in Prince George’s County is on the verge of becoming the ninth city in Maryland to allow non-citizens – including illegal aliens – to vote in municipal elections.

In a revealing 20-minute video of a June 7 council meeting, city officials discussed how best to get rid of the citizenship requirement so that virtually anyone of legal age living in the city can vote. A council vote is slated for August 8.

One councilwoman noted that in the hippie community of Takoma Park (modifier added), where 16-year-olds can vote, “they do not ask and do not care if the resident is in their city legally or not,” a policy she indicated should be adopted by College Park.

One lone College Park council member opined that immigration status should be a factor and that the council could serve all residents without letting unqualified residents vote.

Because elections loom in November, the council discussed creating a separate deadline for citizens and non-citizens to register before the election. Citizens must register 28 days ahead of an election. But non-citizens can register up to 14 days before the election if the city charter amendment is approved.

When someone asked whether legal residents who missed the 28-day mark could have a grace period up to 14 days, the idea was quickly dismissed. Welcome to the new America, where actual citizens are intentionally disadvantaged.

The eight other Maryland cities that already allow non-citizens to vote include Hyattsville, which is also in Prince George’s County and is a “sanctuary city,” and Mount Rainier, also in Prince George’s, which amended its charter in January. The others are Takoma Park, Barnesville, Glen Echo, Garrett Park, Martin’s Additions, and Somerset, all of which are in tony Montgomery County.

The radical nature of this voting scheme reflects the progressive view that borders are merely artificial inconveniences and that citizenship is a leftover concept from slave-holding days that should give way to global consciousness.

Apparently, no documentation will be needed at all for non-citizens, green card holders, undocumented fence-jumpers, or over-stays on visas. The council did informally agree to “retain the other qualifications” that Maryland law stipulates, barring felons and mentally incapacitated people – presumably Republicans.

At the July 11 council meeting, along with immigrants’ rights groups promoting the policy, some residents voiced opposition, including U.S. Army veteran Larry Provost.

According to the Diamondback, the University of Maryland newspaper, “Provost stood firmly opposed to the amendment. He said he and his wife try to teach their child, whom they adopted from overseas, about what it means to be a citizen.

“‘Voting is a right, but it is also a privilege,’ Provost said. ‘There are standards for voting. It is no mistake that the 14th Amendment gave citizenship and the 15th Amendment gave the right to vote. I would urge the council to look elsewhere to integrate our non-citizens.'”

Here is a voice of reason that should be heeded.

Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union.

Time to Shut Down Iran Regime Mouthpieces in the USA By Walton K. Martin and Reza Parchizadeh

n early June, a group of concerned Americans of Iranian origin as well as other Americans held a meeting at the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. to set the stage for regime change in Iran. They assembled at the House Visitors’ Center and discussed practical ideas for bringing about regime change in Iran. The impression the meeting made among those concerned with the situation in Iran and the Middle East was so positive that the event immediately made headlines around the world.

A number of prominent figures followed up on that event. A few days later, the former crown prince of Iran in exile, Reza Pahlavi, visited a number of House and Senate members, allegedly discussing very much the same possibilities. On June 14, 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the United States policy toward Iran is based on the support of Iranian forces who can bring about peaceful regime change – to which the Iranian dissidents warmly responded by an open letter. On July 10, 2017, the Daily Caller broke the news of Secretary of Defense Mattis’s stance toward Iran to the effect that “Iran needs regime change for relations to improve with the U.S.”

On the other hand, the Iran regime’s lobby in America, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), immediately attacked the “June 8 Coalition” meeting in the press and on their blogs, as well as directly confronting the participants on social media with their Iran regime supporters’ echo chamber, which was set up by Trita Parsi and bragged about in the New York Times by former Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes.

Here is where we say, “Hold the presses!” The Iran lobby has run circles around Obama, Clinton, Kerry, the State Department, and Congress for more than a decade. If you don’t believe us, ask anyone at the National Endowment for Democracy. Or ask former U.S. Republican senator Mark Kirk, who blasted the lobby on the U.S. Senate floor. Or ask Democrat senator Bob Menendez, who also opposed the “Iran deal.”

Before we can contemplate regime change in Iran, we must set policy standards and implement a decisive plan of action to clean our own house and take down the Iranian regime-supporters in America. We should start by investigating and auditing all Iran lobby groups and their financial resources, the misuse of their 501(c)(3)s, and the possible misuse of their 501(c)(4)s, one of which should have never been approved, after a U.S. court sanctioned Trita Parsi and the NIAC and forced them to pay a $172,000 settlement to Hassan Daioleslam, who had exposed the illegal lobbying activities on behalf of the Iranian regime by Trita Parsi at the NIAC.

To improve the situation, President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson should immediately consider John Bolton’s appointment to a now understaffed State Department. As Reza Parchizadeh has written before, former U.N. ambassador Bolton is perhaps the most experienced character in American politics when it comes to the Iranian regime and the Middle East. Bolton will bring his much needed experience and a coherent Iran policy, as well as order to State’s Middle East section.

Next, Congress needs to come down hard on senators and congressman who fundraise for Iran lobbies, which in turn benefits the Iranian regime that has openly declared the United States and her allies Israel and Saudi Arabia as the regime’s number-one enemies. The House members’ assisting the enemy, in any form, is unconscionable and must stop.

We must also remove the regime-supporters from the U.S. taxpayer-funded entities Voice of America Persian and Radio Farda and get back on a pro-democracy, pro-liberty, and pro-human rights mission. According to BBG Watch, during an address on Capitol Hill – as part of an event about regime change in Iran, coordinated with the office of Congressman Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.) – Reza Parchizadeh said:

The old media, including the state media directed towards Iran, must be completely overhauled and restructured. In that regard, Voice of America and Radio Farda stand at the forefront, as they have been stuffed with regime sympathizers. So biased has been their broadcast in favor of the Iranian regime that the people of Iran and the dissidents derogatorily call Voice of America the “Voice of Ayatollahs” and Radio Farda “Radio Khatami.”

Removing pro-regime agents and sympathizers from VOA and Radio Farda must be made a State Department priority, to be accomplished by November 30, 2017.