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Ruth King

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Demand for American Sperm Is Skyrocketing in Brazil Explosive growth spurred by more wealthy single women and lesbian couples turning to U.S. donors By Samantha Pearson

By on March 23rd, 2018

SÃO PAULO—With “jewel-tone eyes,” blond hair and a “smattering of light freckles,” Othello looks nothing like most Brazilians, the majority of whom are black or mixed-race. Yet the “Caucasian” American cashier, described in those terms by the Seattle Sperm Bank and known as Donor 9601, is one of the sperm providers most often requested by wealthy Brazilian women importing the DNA of young U.S. men at unprecedented rates.

Over the past seven years, human semen imports from the U.S. to Brazil have surged as more rich single women and lesbian couples select donors whose online profiles suggest they will yield light-complexioned and preferably blue-eyed children.

Brazil is one of the fastest-growing markets for imported semen in recent years, said Michelle Ottey, laboratory director of Virginia-based Fairfax Cryobank, a large distributor and the biggest exporter to Brazil. More than 500 tubes of foreign semen frozen in liquid nitrogen arrived at Brazilian airports last year, officials and sperm-bank directors said, up from 16 in 2011. Complete data from Anvisa, Brazil’s health-care regulator, isn’t yet available for 2017.

U.S. sperm-bank directors said preferences like those of Brazilian purchasers hold across their global market. “The vast majority of what we have and what we sell are the Caucasian blond-haired, blue-eyed donors,” said Fredrik Andreasson, CFO of Seattle Sperm Bank, which provides about a quarter of Brazil’s imports.

Everyone wants a “pretty kid” and for many parents in Brazil, where prejudice often runs deep, that means “the white biotype—light-colored eyes and skin,” said Susy Pommer, a 28-year-old data analyst from São Paulo who decided to get pregnant last year after a breast-cancer scare left her eager to raise a child right away with her partner, Priscilla. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Russia, the NRA and Fake News Journalists propagate another wild tale from Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson. Kimberley Strassel

By on March 23rd, 2018

Washington in 2016 saw one of most audacious dirty tricks in political history: the Donald Trump -Russia collusion claim. Now it’s happening again—same partisans, same media; new conspiracy, new victims, including the National Rifle Association.

Remember how the Trump-Russia trick played? Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to compile a dossier of salacious Trump allegations. The Fusion team delivered it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then, when briefing reporters, cited the bureau’s interest to establish the document’s credibility. To this day the accusations in the dossier have not been corroborated.

To pull this off, Clinton partisans needed government officials willing to entertain wild claims and media willing to propagate them. Both still exist in abundance, as we now witness a new conspiracy theory elevated into news.

Starting in February 2017, media outlets began issuing stories about a Russian central banker named Alexander Torshin and a Russian gun-rights activist named Maria Butina. Most broadly claimed the duo had been cozying up to U.S. conservatives; they specifically noted that they had an interest in the NRA. What was weird was that so many journalists were simultaneously doing this story—among them Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, the self-described “old friend” of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, who was also among the first to write about the dossier—at Mr. Simpson’s pitch.

This January, the House Intelligence Committee released its transcript of Mr. Simpson’s November testimony, in which he regaled incredulous committee Republicans with a wild new tale—of how the Russians had “infiltrated the NRA.” Fusion GPS had “spent a lot of time investigating” a “Mafia leader named Alexander Torshin” and a “suspicious” and “big Trump fan,” Maria Butina. Mr. Simpson provided zero detail to back up this claim—no names, dates, money transfers or specific actions.

But never mind. The day Mr. Simpson’s conspiracy-laden transcript was due to go public, McClatchy ran this headline: “FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump.” The story cited only two unnamed “sources familiar with the matter.” The article admitted it “could not be learned” whether the FBI had any evidence involving the NRA, but it nonetheless went on at length about the group. A flurry of articles from other news organizations followed, while Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden fired off letters demanding the NRA account for itself. House Democrats jumped in, with Rep. Adam Schiff positing “an effort by Russia to create a back channel or assist the Trump campaign through the NRA.” Another flurry of articles. All still based on nothing but Mr. Simpson’s infiltration claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

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John Bolton for National Security Donald Trump must have warmed to his new adviser’s direct style.

By on March 23rd, 2018

President Trump has said he is at last assembling a Cabinet team to his liking, and late Thursday he announced that John Bolton will replace General H.R. McMaster as his National Security Adviser. It is a solid and experienced choice.

General McMaster, like others, reportedly had fallen out of favor with Mr. Trump. But there should be no doubt that General McMaster helped the President through a challenging first year, which included an array of problems inherited from the Obama Administration, not least the North Korean nuclear threat.

Mr. Bolton’s critics often accuse him of belligerence and reactive saber-rattling. He is indeed direct. No listener comes away from a conversation with John Bolton in doubt about where he stands. That must include Mr. Trump, who had Mr. Bolton under consideration to be his first Secretary of State last year and has discussed foreign issues often with him since.

The charge that Mr. Bolton can be an unguided missile misconstrues his ideas and experience. He served in the State Department during both Bush Presidencies. Under George W. Bush he created the multinational Proliferation Security Initiative in 2003, a useful effort explicitly designed to deter North Korea’s efforts to smuggle weapons materials.

Those wanting an understanding of John Bolton’s thinking on security issues should read the many essays he has written for these pages in recent years—most recently “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First” on Feb. 28.

Mr. Bolton’s first job will be to prepare the President for an historic meeting with Kim Jong Un. We may assume Pyongyang knows now that bluffing the U.S. won’t work.

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Camouflaged Elites by Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 23rd, 2018

Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of relatively poor classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary.

An anonymous and irascible Athenian author—dubbed “The Old Oligarch” by the nineteenth-century British classicist Gilbert Murray—wrote a bitter diatribe known as “The Constitution of the Athenians.” The harangue, composed in the late fifth century B.C., blasted the liberal politics and culture of Athens. The grouchy elitist complained that poor people in Athens don’t get out of the way of rich people. He was angry that only in radically democratic imperial Athens was it hard to calibrate a man by his mere appearance: “You would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome.”

The Old Oligarch’s essay reveals an ancient truth about privilege and status. Throughout history, the elite in most of the Western world were easy to distinguish. Visible class distinctions characterized ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence, the Paris of the nineteenth century, and the major cities of twentieth century America.

A variety of recent social trends and revolutionary economic breakthroughs have blurred the line separating the elite from the masses.

First, the cultural revolution of the 1960s made it cool for everyone to dress sloppily and to talk with slang and profanity. Levis, T-shirts, and sneakers became the hip American uniform, a way of superficially equalizing the unequal. Contrived informality radiated the veneer of class solidarity. Multimillionaires like Bruce Springsteen and Bono appear indistinguishable from welders on the street.

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John Brennan Shouldn’t Be Lecturing America, He Should Be The Focus Of A Congressional Inquiry David Harsanyi

By on March 23rd, 2018

Donald Trump’s sins do not absolve you of yours.

Former CIA chief John Brennan is a liar. And he’s not the kind of garden variety dissembler that we see in Washington all the time, either. Rather, Brennan is the kind of man who feels comfortable brazenly misleading the American people about an attack on democracy, and then shamelessly lecturing them about civic decency.

You may recall, as director of the CIA, Brennan oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a staffer of the legislative branch of the United States government. At least five agency officials under his watch broke into Senate computer files, viewing drafts of a report on torture and reconstructing emails of at least one staffer. Brennan would attempt to cover up the agency’s actions by doubling down, blaming the Senate, and pushing to fire at least one staffer charged with investigating his agency.

It wasn’t until the CIA’s inspector general confirmed this wrongdoing that Brennan began negotiating with the senators about owning up to the spying (which we still don’t fully understand). Even then, however, he was lying about it to the public. When asked about the CIA hacking into Senate computers at an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, the intelligence chief responded that “nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” Brennan went on to contend: “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”

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Internet Insecurity by Linda Goudsmit

By on March 23rd, 2018

How did we get along before the Internet?

Young people today cannot imagine living in a world without electronic devices – a time before fast-paced computers, laptops, and smart phones provided instant connectivity. Their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents cannot imagine living in a world without automobiles, airplanes, and television – a time of slow-paced letter writing, waiting, and sailing boats. People live in the cultural, physical, and political historical context of their lives.

Russian-American philosopher and writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982) sailed the month-long journey that brought her from Russia to the United States in 1926.

Ayn Rand rejected the tyranny of collectivist Communist Russia that she was born into and spent a lifetime warning the free world about collectivism and its deceitful motto “for the public good.” Her works of fiction and non-fiction argued passionately for the rights of individuals over the collective. Her philosophy of life championed reason, democracy, and laissez-faire capitalism.

Architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (1943) and industrialist Hank Reardon in Atlas Shrugged (1957) are brilliant men whose characters are developed in defense of personal liberty, individual freedom, and ownership of one’s intellectual work and personal property. Ayn Rand’s novels illustrate her philosophy of Objectivism which asserts:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute – facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

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The University of Denial Aggressive suppression of the truth is a central feature of American higher education.By Amy L. Wax

By on March 23rd, 2018

‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” observed― Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.”

Somewhere deep in a file drawer, or on a computer server humming away in a basement, are thousands upon thousands of numbers, with names and identities attached. They’re called grades. They represent an objective reality, which exists independent of what people want reality to be. They sit silently, completely indifferent to indignation, angry petitions, irritable gestures, teachers’ removal from classrooms—all the furor and clamor of institutional politics.

Those numbers are now solely within the control of the individual students who earn them and the educational institutions that generate them—powerful entities ruled by bureaucracies that serve as gatekeepers to privileged positions in our society. They are jealously guarded, protected by cloaks of confidentiality and secrecy. But they are what they are. Hiding facts is not the same as changing them.

Of course the numbers can be ignored. When it comes to grades—which measure students’ knowledge, proficiency and achievement—we can declare they don’t matter and that complete nondisclosure is therefore a wise course.

The problem is that students, including law students, go out into the real world. They are hired, paid and expected to perform, and their actions have real consequences for others. Whether we like it or not, grades help predict future performance. Some social actors acknowledge this, implicitly or overtly. As a law professor, I observe, for example, that federal judges unapologetically select clerks based on academic record and rank, and that elite law firms are also highly grade-conscious.

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MY SAY: ELECTIONS ARE COMING

By on March 22nd, 2018

My letterbox is increasingly stuffed with requests from candidates for donations. It goes something like this:

Dear Ruth, As you know blah, blah, blah….security blah,blah,blah, Israel, blah, blah blah, energy blah,blah, blah, values blah blah blah. Send money…..

Well, I have a nonpartisan rule of thumb…..If J Street, the assisted suicide organization for Israel, supports any candidate, I do not send a nickel.

The following Senators who are running for re-election have been endorsed by J Street:

Dianne Feinstein D. California

Chris Murphy D. Connecticut…the NUTmeg state

Angus King I- Maine

Sherrod Brown D…Ohio

Sheldon Whitehouse D. Rhode Island

Tim Kaine D-Virginia (Hillary’s running mate in 2016)

Maria Cantwell D- Washington

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Oliver Friendship Theocratic Iran and its Citizens’ Lives

By on March 22nd, 2018

The political authority of the unelected Supreme Leader and his personally selected Guardian Council to veto bills and choose presidential candidates makes a mockery of Iran’s supposed ‘democracy’. For those who might criticise such a system, a mandatory seventy-four lashes await.

In his 1689 publication A Letter Concerning Toleration, the English philosopher John Locke recommended that the institutions of religion and state be made into totally separate entities, because such a separation would lead to a high level of social stability. Locke’s ideas were considered revolutionary at the time, but the notion of a separation of religion and state has long been a staple of developed nations. However, numerous countries, especially in the Middle East, still implement a form of government where religion and state are intertwined. Iran is one such nation.

Iran’s theocratic ruler, the “Supreme Leader”, is a clear representative of the interests of the dominant Shia Islam in the nation’s political sphere, and has a stranglehold over matters pertaining to the Iranian state. This situation has resulted in internal lawmaking that negatively affects the lives of Iranians, and a political structure that denigrates the country’s democracy.

Iran used to have a form of more democratic governance promoting the separation of religion and state until the 1979 uprising that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The uprising was led by the nation’s first Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, and was supported by many of the older, more religiously fanatical citizens who were against the rapid modernisation and Westernisation of Iran by the then government. With this new political order came a new constitution, stating that “All civil, penal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations must be based on Shia Islamic criteria.” This constitutional basis for the authority of the dominant Shia Islam over matters of state is politically and practically manifest in the role of Supreme Leader.

The current Supreme Leader of Iran is Ali Khamenei. Elected to this position not by popular vote, but by decree of the Assembly of Religious Experts, Khamenei was chosen as a “suitable cleric” to uphold the beliefs of Shia Islam in Iranian politics. The members of the Assembly of Religious Experts are also strict followers of Shia Islam and experts in the Koran and sharia law. The Supreme Leader they elect is guaranteed to be of a similar hardline Shia conviction, which Khamenei is, and act on behalf of Shia interests and principles, which Khamenei does.

The Supreme Leader operates both within and above a largely impotent publicly elected civil government and President, and has powers over matters of state that are far-reaching, controlling, and near absolute. In the Iranian constitution, the Supreme Leader’s role is defined as to “determine the interests of Islam in Iran”, and to “guide” and “supervise” the nation. This was included in the constitution by Iran’s original Islamic revolutionaries in order to assuage fears that a more moderate, democratic and Westernised government would regain power.

The Supreme Leader has far-reaching control over jurisdictions typically considered matters of state in the West. While the elected President of Iran does handle matters of small civil legislation, the theocratic Supreme Leader is totally responsible for control of the armed forces and defence, and can “dictate general guidelines of Iranian foreign and domestic policy”. The Supreme Leader also has the authority to appoint military commanders, the director of national radio and television networks, members of the national security council, the chief judge and prosecutor, and mosque leaders in all of Iran’s major cities.

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Deep-Freezing the Truth at Penn A distinguished law professor is publicly shamed for pointing out truths about race preferences. Heather Mac Donald

By on March 22nd, 2018

The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion. The academic-achievement gap, the behavioral differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society. This dissimulation was on display last week at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, when Dean Ted Ruger announced that law professor Amy Wax would no longer teach mandatory first-year law courses at the school. In a memo announcing his decision, Ruger accused Wax of “conscious indifference” to truth. It is Ruger, however, who has distorted facts.

Ousting Wax from her first-year civil-procedure class has been a desideratum of the academic Left since she published an op-ed last August celebrating bourgeois virtues like the work ethic, respect for authority, and sexual temperance. Wax was deemed a “white supremacist” for suggesting that not all cultures were equal in preparing people for participation in a modern economy.

In December, Dean Ruger asked her to desist from teaching first-year students and to take a leave of absence, in the hope that the controversy spurred by her op-ed would die down. As a “pluralistic dean,” he said, he needed to accommodate all factions in the school. Wax declined the request and reported the details of the conversation immediately thereafter to friends. (I was one of the people to whom she spoke.) Wax later described the conversation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Ruger denied her account through a spokesman, claiming that he had merely engaged in a pro forma discussion of her sabbatical schedule, such as he would have done with any other professor. Ruger’s version is not credible, though: in an informal survey, no law professor polled reports ever having a dean drop by his office to discuss a routine sabbatical. This alleged bureaucratic convention does not exist, unless Dean Ruger has only recently introduced it.

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