RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Do science, technology and humanitarian relief affect natural selection, in regards to the human species? Will these developments have unintended adverse consequences for the propagation of our species? In studying evolution, Charles Darwin developed the theory of natural selection, which stated that only the fittest of any species would survive. In simple terms, that meant the healthy, strong and intelligent. In the interest of improving the human condition, have we altered natural development?

Over the four and a half billion-year life of our planet, thousands of species from mammals to plants have come into being and subsequently died out; so, too, will man, at some point. It is the natural order of things. What allows one species to survive longer than another is the ability to adapt to such inevitable changes as weather, pestilence and predators. While Homo sapiens date back a mere 100,000 years, there has been life on Earth for a long time. The Trilobite, for example, dates to the Devonshire Period, 400 million years ago. In the last few years species such as the Pinta Island Tortoise and the Western Black Rhinoceros have died out. Other species have recently been discovered, like the Carolina Hammerhead Shark and the New Turkish Scorpion.

Better medicines and healthcare and improved humanitarian efforts, like the Feed the World Campaign that began in Ethiopia in 1984, have allowed millions of children to live that only a few years ago would have died. The population of Ethiopia, during the ensuing thirty years has grown from 34 million to 86 million. The country remains one of the poorest in the world, with an estimated annual income per person of $410. While mortality statistics have improved substantially, infant mortality at 58.3 per 1000 births is still one of the highest in the world, as is maternal mortality at 590 per 100,000. Humanitarian aid has allowed the population to expand, but has done little for the well-being of the people. In the West, drugs and healthier lifestyles have allowed the average person to live longer, while some relatively newer practices, like better sanitation, risk compromising immune systems.

Yesterday I attended a lecture by Rabbi-Professor Daniel Gordis who spoke about his new book and its subject in the most  intelligent, appreciative, knowledgeable and actually moving presentation I have ever heard on the subject and the man. Rabbi Gordis is not a man of the right or the Likud or the legacy of Jabotinsky, […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/can-reuniting-israel-end-the-violence/print/

No word is more seductive to politicians than “solution.”

In an age of wealth and power when anything seems possible, politicians cannot grasp that some problems are caused by human nature and have no easy answer. Instead they tackle problems with experts, blue-ribbon committees, studies and proposals. Once the “solution” has been identified, it becomes unchallenged political dogma.

Few problems lead to as much blind faith in unworkable solutions as the problems of war and the solutions of peace.

Chamberlain brought back “peace for our time.” When challenged by Churchill, he retorted that if it were impossible to have “friendly relation… with totalitarian States… there is no future hope for civilisation or for any of the things that make life worth living.”

It takes a strong mind to reject the seductive solution of a piece of paper from the enemy promising peace and to look at the alternatives that can actually preserve civilization. That is what Caroline Glick has done in her latest book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/preaching-islamophobia-to-the-choir-at-saudi-funded-georgetown/print/

“I don’t have any desire to debate Robert Spencer….I would never give someone like that a forum,” Hofstra University Professor Daniel Martin Varisco declared at Georgetown University on February 26, 2014. Addressing the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU), Varisco’s equally flawed outlooks on Islam and intellectual inquiry had disturbing implications for modern academia.

Prior perusal of the opening pages of Varisco’s 2007 Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid did not raise hopes for his briefing “Khutba vs. Khutzpa: Islamophobia on the Internet.” In this book, Varisco analyzes leftwing intellectual Edward Said’s Orientalism and its legacy, expressing agreement “with most of Said’s political positions on the real Orient.” Varisco reveals his discipleship of Said with condemnations of post-World War II United States having “become by stealth and wealth the neo-colonial superpower” in which a “neocon clique…engineered the wars” not just “against” Iraq but also Afghanistan. Varisco’s one-sided estimate of historical harms includes a “PhD cataloguing of what the West did to the East and self-unfillfulling political punditry about what real individuals in the East say they want to do to the West.”

Yet, Varisco writes, “Said hardly scratched the surface of the vast sewerage of racist and ethnocentrist writing, art, and cinema that for so long has severed an imaginary East from the dominating West.” “In particular,” Varisco emphasizes,

almost anything that Muslims would consider holy has at one time or another been profaned by Western writers. Perhaps the frustrated worldwide Muslim anger at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was emetic justice for centuries of vicious and malicious verbal abuse from the West, where this controversial best seller incubated.

Both matters of principle and practicality deter further reading of Varisco. “Truth with a capital T does not exist for anyone,” Varisco nonsensically proclaims as one of his “own operational truths,” thereby placing in doubt Varisco’s views. Varisco’s attempts at humor also do not amuse, such as when he describes the book’s “anal citational flow of endnotes” designed to allow a person to “read for entertainment” Varisco’s turgid tome.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/netanyahus-aipac-speech-rebutting-obama-affirming-israel/print/ On Sunday, even before Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu had arrived in America for his current visit, President Obama was portraying him in an interview to Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg as the obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. At the same time, Obama lavished praised on Netanyahu’s opposite number on the Palestinian side, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud […]

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Sensenbrenner on Camera Denies Text of Own Voter Law!!!Wisconsin Republican seeks to restore racial categories, empower Holder DOJ

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372585/print

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R., Wisc.) told constituents at Wisconsin town halls that voting-rights legislation he is sponsoring does not exclude white voters from the protection of the Voting Rights Act. Sensenbrenner also says he is proud to work with the ACLU and far-left groups to pass the legislation that would resurrect Attorney General Eric Holder’s powers to block state election laws such as voter ID or citizenship verification.

In a video from Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Sensenbrenner also accused Texas and Georgia Republicans of trying to stop minorities from voting.

Sensenbrenner is sponsoring a bill to undo the June 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. In Shelby, the Supreme Court struck down the federal mandate requiring 15 states to submit every single election law change, no matter how minor, to Justice Department bureaucrats for approval. Officials in the attorney general’s Voting Section have power to block state election laws — ranging from sensitive matters like voter ID to procedural items such as moving a polling place from a school cafeteria to the school library.

The federal mandate was part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was designed to eradicate Jim Crow barriers to voting. While the law captured most southern states such as Texas and Mississippi, it also captured New York, California, Michigan, South Dakota, and Alaska — though not Sensenbrenner’s home state of Wisconsin. Forty percent of Americans lived in states subject to the federal mandate.

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/the_ayatollahs_lobby_on_k_street.html

Has the National Iranian American Council and its founder, Trita Parsi, inserted itself into the debate over Iran sanctions under false pretenses? Has the left been duped and psychologically disarmed by Parsi and the folks at NIAC, who have seemingly tried to appeal to the left’s dove-like idealistic sentiments? Substantial evidence points to the conclusion that NIAC’s agenda, far removed from the actual interests of the Iranian-American community at large, displays almost zero daylight between itself and the docket of the “supreme leader’s” theocratic regime.

Trita Parsi and the staff at NIAC have penned articles in several left-wing mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times and The Huffington Post, among many others. Parsi recently lectured at CIA headquarters and has personally met and lobbied former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Parsi, along with the staff at his disposal, claim to be “the voice” of the one million Iranian Americans in the United States, with the stated mission of “advancing the interests of the Iranian American community.”

If NIAC’s mission is truly to serve the best interests of the Iranian-American community, it has epically failed to meet that objective. When polled, 99% of Iranian Americans who support a pro-democracy trajectory for Iran expressed that NIAC did not in any way represent their interests. Furthermore, a staggering 99% of respondents also believed that NIAC are simply a lobby for the Ayatollah’s Islamic Republic.

Mohsen Makhmalbalf, an established leader in Iran’s Green Movement, said of Parsi, “I feel his lobbying has secretly been more for the Islamic republic.” When reached for comment, Amir Fakhravar, an Iranian jailed dissident and recipient of the Annie Taylor Journalism Award, said of NIAC, “You cannot find any difference between their statements and the Iranian regime’s statements. Either officially or unofficially, they are following the path of the regime.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4780/killing_the_poor_is_a_perverted_obsession_of_the_left

The Left needs the poor so much that it wants as many people as possible in poverty. Just look at the data and find an argument to dispute this. Shame on the Left for its disgraceful, self-serving behaviour

On several occasions, I’ve observed that the poverty rate in America was steadily falling, but that progress came to a halt in the mid-1960s when the government declared a War on Poverty.

And I almost always included a chart showing the annual poverty rate over several decades. Moreover, I posted graphs showing how government programs trap people in dependency because of very high implicit marginal tax rates. And that’s true in other nations as well.

But it didn’t matter how many times I revisited this issue, I was never clever enough to look at the poverty-rate data to estimate what would have happened if the federal government hadn’t become involved.

Fortunately, John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis was insightful enough to fill the breach. He shows that the War on Poverty has made a big difference. But in the wrong way.

Poverty Goodman

Here’s some of what John wrote about the topic in a column for Forbes.

“From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half. Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone. Economic growth is clearly the most effective antipoverty weapon ever devised by man.

“The dotted line shows what would have happened had this trend continued. Economic growth would have reduced the number in poverty to a mere 1.4% of the population today—a number so low that

private charity could probably have taken care of any unmet needs. …we didn’t continue the trend. In 1965 we launched a War on Poverty. And as the graph shows, in the years that followed the portion of Americans living in poverty barely budged.”

John augments this analysis by looking at some of the social science research about poverty and government dependency.

The numbers are very depressing.

“…here is something you may not know. Early on ― in the first decade of our 50-year experiment with an expanded welfare state ― carefully controlled experiments funded by the federal government established without question that welfare changes behavior. It leads to the very behavioral changes that keep people in a state of poverty and dependency. …

“The experiments were all conducted by social scientists who believed in the welfare state and had no doubt about its capacity to be successful. …The experiments were all controlled. Randomly selected people were assigned to a “control group” and an “experimental group.” …the results were not pretty. To the dismay of the researchers, they largely confirmed what conventional wisdom had thought all along. …

“The number of hours worked dropped 9% for husbands and 20% for wives, relative to the control group. For young male adults it dropped 43% more. The length of unemployment increased 27% among husbands and 42% for wives, relative to the control group. For single female heads of households it increased 60% more. Divorce increased 36% more among whites and 42% more among blacks. (In a New Jersey experiment, the divorce rate was 84% higher among Hispanics.)”

President Obama and other folks on the left don’t seem overly interested in this data. Instead, they beat the drums about class warfare and income inequality.

They want us to believe the economy is a fixed pie and that all of us somehow get less if some entrepreneur becomes rich. But John’s point from the column is correct. Economic growth is the way to help the poor, not redistribution.

Unfortunately, many politicians are hostile to the types of policies that produce more growth. Maybe it’s because they don’t understand economics. Or maybe they understand economics but don’t care because they think they’ll be more successful at the ballot box if they pursue the politics of envy and division.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/following-obama/?print=1

Meet President Bucky Brewster. You’ll like his style, even if MSNBC, NPR, PBS, CNN and Time magazine won’t.

Imagine if a hard-right-wing president were to follow Barack Obama and embrace the new precedents that Obama himself has established for the presidency. Would he then be seen as an unusually polarizing figure, who abused the power of his office? Let’s call him Bucky Brewster, the new Republican President from Montana.

Settled law?

President Bucky Brewster announces that he finds most of the Affordable Care Act patently unconstitutional [1]. So he suspends all its timetables of implementation, stops the employer and individual mandates, and gives exemptions to big corporations, Tea Party groups, and the NRA. Brewster goes on to throw out Obama’s recently passed “comprehensive immigration reform” act, deporting at once four million illegal aliens and cancelling the Dream Act, remarking: “It contradicts prior law. The federal immigration law is the law.”

Brewster worries about the EPA a lot [2]. So he decides that the Endangered Species Act is unconstitutional and a threat to property rights. He suspends enforcement of it indefinitely. Brewster also orders a regulatory raid on liberal Solaris, alleging that its solar panels will cause too much glare for private aviation pilots and are made of rare imported silica, and so shuts the company down. Brewster also advises Boeing that, if it were smart, it should leave Washington and go to a right-to-work state like Mississippi [3]. Brewster also reminds that the Defense of Marriage Act has never been repealed and thus he outlaws all gay marriages “in accordance with settled law.”

What will MSNBC say? The abuse of power? Unconstitutional? Impeachment?

Appointments?

President Bucky Brewster wants to fundamentally transform America and so his appointments must reflect his conservative ideology. So he taps as green jobs czar an ad man for the oil companies who, we learn, is a “birther.” [4] His new NASA director gives an interview pledging that the chief aim of the space agency is now to reach out to Christians abroad [5].

One of his communications directors praises the efficiency of Mussolini, who, she says, has always been her role model. His EPA director, who is a big Keystone pipeline booster, opens a fake email account to take the pulse of the pipeline debate — and has the EPA give an award to her alias! He appoints as Treasury secretary Donald Trump, who confesses that he wrote off his kids’ camp fees as tax deductions and pocketed his FICA allotments. His new energy secretary, Billy Bob Fella, who drives a Hummer, announces: “We want gas prices to get down to around 70 cents a gallon [6], right down there to those Saudi or Kuwaiti levels. What a great way to save the planet by returning a little cash to the poor driver’s pocket.”

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/03/02/introducing-a-deity-who-makes-sense/ “HEAVENLY Father,” take to thee The supreme iniquity, Fashioned by thy candid hand In a moment contraband. Though to trust us seem to us More respectful—“we are dust.” We apologize to Thee For Thine own Duplicity. That’s by Emily Dickinson, the wonderful 19th-century American poet who churned out almost two thousand […]