RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let’s Hit ‘Pause’ Before Altering Humankind

Modern biological research continues to generate new technology at a staggering pace, bringing to society new challenges and new opportunities. A recent appearance is the so-called CRISPR/Cas9 technology for altering genes in the body’s cells, including, most troublingly, early embryonic cells.

To understand the challenge brought by this technology it is important to make a distinction between somatic cells and germ-line cells. Somatic cells are the run-of-the-mill cells of our bodies: muscles, nerves, skin and the like. Germ-line cells are the egg and sperm cells that, when joined, give rise to offspring. Making gene changes in somatic cells can have dramatic effects, but they are not transmitted to the next generation and therefore fall comfortably into the category of pure therapeutics and generate minimal controversy. It is changes in germ-line cells that create heritable alterations.

“Mr. Brennan’s naked public partisanship harms the CIA by making whatever it now says about Iran simply unbelievable.”

The CIA director calls critics of Obama’s Iran policy dishonest.

Remember when the left accused the Bush Administration of politicizing intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq? It wasn’t true, but someone ought to remind CIA director John Brennan. Because in attacking critics of the President’s Iran policy Tuesday, he sounded more like a White House communications director than a CIA chief.

During remarks at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, Mr. Brennan said anyone who knew the facts and believes the deal with Tehran “provides a pathway for Iran to a bomb” is being “wholly disingenuous.” If we take him at his word, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, who wrote on our pages Wednesday, must be dishonest in their detailed, careful critique.

Think about that for a moment. A CIA director claims that any disagreement over a highly complicated and controversial deal must come from base motives. Think of the signal that sends to the CIA analysts who will be responsible for monitoring the deal and ascertaining whether Iran is violating it. Better not speak up!

Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using.

Last weekend, with the ink on the Iran nuclear deal still being deciphered, the Obama Doctrine fell out of an interview between President Obama and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

“You asked about an Obama doctrine,” Mr. Obama said. “The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

In nine words, Mr. Obama explained what has been going on the past six years, culminating in what we now see is the nucleus of the Obama worldview, an accommodation with Iran.

Hard to credit are the breadth and depth of this President’s blunders, of which his craven capitulation to Tehran is but the latest. Unlike the mess in Libya, the pointed alienation of Israel and so many other debacles, the consequence of this greatest folly is apt to be measured in megatonnage.

President Obama could be right to believe the promises of the despots in Tehran, but this would be the first time his thinking on the Greater Middle East has worked out. Obama was foolhardy to appoint Turkey’s Erdogan as his point man in the region, misguided to back the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, unfounded in his enthusiasm for the Arab Spring, mistaken describing the Republic of Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” in December, 2011, ineffective when fulminating against civil war in Syria, hubristic describing America’s role in Libya as a “model intervention”, erroneous portraying the Islamic State group (ISIS/IS) as a “JV team” (junior varsity team) days after it captured Fallujah, lacking judgement in Yemen and imprudent countenancing Turkish and Qatari assistance to negotiate an end to the 2014 Hamas-Israel conflagration.

The report shows how the increasing influence of Sharia law in Britain today is undermining the fundamental principle that there must be equality for all British citizens under a single law of the land.

“I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from.” — Muslim woman interviewed for the report.

The report concludes by calling on the British government to launch a judge-led inquiry to “determine the extent to which discriminatory Sharia law principles are being applied within the UK.”

“The government’s response will be a litmus test of the extent to which it genuinely upholds the principle of equality before the law or is so dominated by the fear of ‘giving offense’ that it will continue to allow these women to suffer in ways which would make our suffragettes turn in their graves.” — Baroness Caroline Cox.

Modern American universities used to assume four goals. First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry.

From cost to employment prospects, the state of American higher education is dismal for students.

Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — and exposure to all sorts of weird ideas and mostly unpopular thoughts. College talk was never envisioned as boring, politically correct megaphones echoing orthodox pieties.

Third, four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment.

Finally, universities were not monopolistic price gougers. They sought affordability to allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money. The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.

California’s drought provides a useful lesson. I am glad California is having a drought. Not because I hate California (I love California) or Californians (I hate them only a little, for what they’ve done to California) or Central Valley farmers (some of my best friends . . .) or even Governor Jerry Brown, droll disco-era anachronism that he is, but because the episode presents an excellent illustration of the one fundamental social reality that cannot be legislated away or buried under an avalanche of government-accounting shenanigans and loan guarantees or brought to heel by politicians no matter how hard the ladies and gentlemen in Sacramento and Washington stamp their little feet: scarcity.

Federal district court judge Andrew Hanen slammed the Obama administration with a solid one-two punch late last night. In one order, he refused to lift the preliminary injunction barring implementation of the president’s immigration amnesty plan. In a second order, Hanen said that the “attorneys for the Government misrepresented the facts” about the implementation to the court. On February 23, the Justice Department filed a “Motion to Stay” the injunction pending an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Hanen denied that motion, saying not only that his original ruling was correct, but that subsequent events had “reinforced” the correctness of his original decision. Hanen cited President Barack Obama’s own words as part of this reinforcement. Speaking at a town hall after the injunction order had been issued, the president said that any government official who did not halt the deportation of anyone who qualifies under his new plan would suffer the “consequences.”

Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), a United Kingdom-based radical Islamist front organization, is openly bragging about its close relationship with both the Tory and Labour political parties, the UK’s Telegraph reports. The group’s chief executive, Sufyan Islamil, characterizes MEND as “kingmaker” in the May election, claiming to influence up to 30 seats.

In a speech at Bolton’s Zakariyya Central Mosque, Ismail compared British Jews fighting for the Israeli military with British Muslims fighting for Syrian rebels, including the Islamic State.

“…British Muslims going to Syria fighting against Assad…will definitely face interrogation. Now do you think that if we landed those 20 seats or 30 seats he [Prime Minister Cameron] would have the audacity to say that (foreign fighters should be prosecuted] to the Muslim community? Not a chance!”

According to the Arab News, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter recently participated in an official Carter Center delegation to Saudi Arabia, where he met with Saudi billionaire and prolific funder of Middle East studies in the U.S, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. The prince’s largesse has resulted in the Islamist apologist-dominated Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University (headed by chief apologist John Esposito) and Harvard University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, whose faculty, although less controversial, is equally tendentious.