Displaying posts published in

2016

Bitten by the Unresponsive, Irresponsible FDA Regulators are blocking innovative approaches to protecting us from Zika and other viruses. By Henry I. Miller & Drew L. Kershen

The mosquito species Aedes aegypti transmits viral diseases, including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, West Nile, and yellow fever, between human hosts. For most of these viral diseases, there are no vaccines and no effective medicines. So until recently, public-health officials have had to use old, low-tech approaches to controlling the mosquito vector and reducing the incidence of infections: pesticide sprays, public education about exposure (DEET, mosquito nets, and clothing that covers as much skin as possible), and control of breeding areas (water in flower pots, tires, drains, etc.).

Oxitec, a British subsidiary of the American company Intrexon, has created a new way to control Aedes aegypti. Male mosquitoes are bred in the laboratory with a specific genetic mutation that, in the absence of a certain chemical, causes their offspring to die before reaching maturity. Male mosquitoes do not bite, so their release presents no health risk, and, because their progeny die, the genetically engineered mosquitoes do not persist in the environment. Releasing the males over a period of several months causes a marked reduction in the mosquito population.

In field tests conducted in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and Panama, Oxitec has shown that the release of these genetically engineered male mosquitoes has consistently reduced wild populations by more than 80 percent, and the most recent field trials show greater than 90 percent reduction. In 2014, on the basis of these field trials, Brazil’s regulatory authority approved the commercial release of these mosquitoes. Brazil approved Oxitec’s approach because the traditional approaches to mosquito control were failing to protect the country’s inhabitants from A. aegypti–borne viral diseases. The apparent association of Zika-virus infection with microcephaly in babies born to infected mothers has only added to the urgency.

The EPA’s Troubled Waters It claims jurisdiction over drainage ditches, farmland, and even backyards. By Leigh Thompson

Clarity!” has been the battle cry of the EPA over the last year as it put the final touches on its expansive and overreaching definition of “waters of the United States” (or “WOTUS”). And yet, a week after the final rule was published, the only clarity the EPA has provided is its intent to snatch up every piece of land that can channel, pool, or absorb water and include it within its newly minted jurisdiction.

The effects of this rule are both far-reaching and disastrous. Tributaries make up only one aspect of this unconstitutional overhaul of the Clean Water Act, but they provide useful insight into the impractical mind of the EPA.

The amended definition of a “tributary” will expand the EPA’s dominion to ephemeral flows — or, as an ordinary person might know them, dry lands where water sometimes flows after heavy rains — as well as many common drainage ditches. If a tributary contributes any flow at all, regardless of frequency or volume, to a downstream water, it is now within the EPA’s purview.

Practically, this means that the average drainage ditch, the channels between rows of planted crops, and the land beneath the crudely formed streams from the torrential rains that carried away portions of central Texas over the last several weeks are now all subject to federal jurisdiction if water from them can be carried downstream at any point. To build one’s home, to plant crops as a means of livelihood, to erect a fence or build a road, the average person will now need to seek a permit from the Corps of Engineers.

The EPA’s Lawless Land Grab Obama’s power-mad agency claims jurisdiction over land and water use almost everywhere in the United States. By Rupert Darwall

In his final book, economist Mancur Olson wrote of the profound and crucial connection between representative government and the property and contract rights important for economic progress. Olson quoted James Madison: “Just as a man may be said to have a right to his property, so he has a property in his rights.” The rule of law is therefore essential for the preservation of constitutional government and for economic growth. In no country have the economic fruits of the rule of law been more plentiful than the United States.

Today there is no greater threat to the rule of law and the right to the peaceful enjoyment of property than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the course of prosecuting its ostensible mission to clean the air and the water. Under the guise of the Clean Air Act, the agency’s Clean Power Plan will take control of America’s electrical-power infrastructure.

Yet Congress did not envisage that the 1970 legislation would be used to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. To get around the inconveniently precise wording Congress provided in the statute, EPA resorted to rewriting the provision of the Clean Air Act that didn’t fit with its regulatory plans — a gambit that has had ups and downs in the Supreme Court, which will soon address the legality of the Clean Power Plan. Until Monday, the timetable was well advanced, with states being required to submit compliance plans this summer. Then, on Tuesday, the Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision agreed to freeze its implementation, showing that the plan’s opponents have a reasonable prospect of persuading the courts to throw out the plan.

In Search of Fixes for a Fossilized Economy By Victor Davis Hanson

The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015.

While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor-force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied adults are either not currently in the labor force or have stopped looking for work altogether.

Average household incomes have been mostly stagnant in recent years relative to the rate of inflation. The Dow Jones industrial average fell by 2.2 percent in 2015 and has continued to plummet this year. Most people’s retirement portfolios have been losing money.

Such economic sluggishness, more than seven years after the 2008 financial crisis, was not supposed to happen, given all the traditional economic stimuli.

When times are tough, politicians sometimes call for a reduction in energy taxes to help lower gas prices and bring down household heating and cooling costs. Such cutting usually puts more disposable income into the pockets of families.

Yet, largely because of Persian Gulf oil politics and private-sector fracking and horizontal drilling, U.S. gas prices have already plunged to a national average of less than $1.80. That is a huge drop from the average 2014 price of about $3.34 a gallon — and it should provide an enormous economic stimulus.

Hillary Fights to Keep Wall Street Speeches Secret The Occupy Wall Street populist is terrified of being outed as a 1-percenter Wall Street elitist. Matthew Vadum

The campaign of class-warrior Hillary Clinton is pushing the panic button over the prospective release of secret transcripts of high-dollar speeches she made to Goldman Sachs that threaten to portray her as a two-faced un-progressive Wall Street elitist who is out of touch with the common people.

The Democrats’ leading avatar of avarice depicts herself as the candidate of Occupy Wall Street, a fearless champion of the downtrodden, but the transcripts of three speeches for which Goldman paid her an astonishing $675,000 threaten to torpedo the false, focus group-friendly image she has cultivated.

In the speeches to her fellow one-percenters, she reportedly comes across as unduly cozy with the financial titans that her angry left-wing base blames for most of America’s (and the world’s) problems today. In the current political environment publication of the transcripts could be as damaging to her run as Republican Mitt Romney’s ruinous “47 percent” speech was to his 2012 campaign.

One speech attendee reportedly said Clinton “sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director” than a politician. This phrase could easily end up in her Democratic opponent’s TV ads as the race shifts to the March 1 vote in critical South Carolina.

First Islamic State Celebrates Anniversary And it isn’t the one you think. Kenneth R. Timmerman

The first Islamic State since World War II celebrates its anniversary this week. And it isn’t the one you might think.

ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, is the late-comer to the world of Islamic-inspired murder and mayhem. The regime that invented the genre will celebrate its 37th anniversary on Feb. 11. It’s official name: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

You can’t really call a regime a Republic when it has a Supreme Leader whose wishes trump every single elected official, institution, and law in the country.

So let’s call the Iranian regime by the title it has earned: the Islamic State of Iran.

Everything that you see ISIS doing in Iraq, Syria and now Libya, the Islamic State of Iran has been doing for 37 years to its own people.

Chopping off hands in application of the Sharia law punishment for thievery? The Islamic State of Iran began that practice at the outset of the Revolution in 1979. Same goes for gouging out eyes, ripping out tongues, and dismemberment using jeeps attached to the arms and legs of the condemned person.

Stoning women for allegations of adultery? Check. Just watch the Stoning of Soraya M if you would like to get a feel for the gristly details.

The Islamic State of Iran leaders and their apologists would have you believe that women in Iran are more “free” than in neighboring countries, such as Saudi Arabia. In Iran, after all, they go to co-ed universities, work, and drive cars.

Our Good Islam/Bad Islam Strategy Islamic terrorism is just what we call Islam when it’s killing us. Daniel Greenfield

Our only hope of defeating Islamic terrorism is Islam. That’s our whole counterterrorism strategy.

But Islamic terrorism is not a separate component of Islam that can be cut off from it. Not only is it not un-Islamic, but it expresses Islamic religious imperatives. Muslim religious leaders have occasionally issued fatwas against terrorism, but terrorism for Muslim clerics, like sex for Bill Clinton, is a matter of definition. The tactics of terrorism, including suicide bombing and the murder of civilians, have been approved by fatwas from many of the same Islamic religious leaders that our establishment deems moderate. And the objective of terrorism, the subjugation of non-Muslims, has been the most fundamental Islamic imperative for the expansionistic religion since the days of Mohammed.

Our strategy, in Europe and America, under Bush and under Obama, has been to artificially subdivide a Good Islam from a Bad Islam and to declare that Bad Islam is not really Islam. Bad Islam, as Obama claims, “hijacked” a peaceful religion. Secretary of State Kerry calls Bad Islam’s followers, “apostates”. ISIS speaks for no religion. It has no religion. Which means the Islamic State must be a bunch of atheists.

Our diplomats and politicians don’t verbally acknowledge the existence of a Bad Islam. Even its name is one of those names that must not be named. There is only Good Islam. Bad Islam doesn’t even exist.

None So Brave Why is a Green Beret who confronted a violent child sex predator involuntarily discharged from the military? Elizabeth Yore

“De Oppresso Liber”
(To Liberate the Oppressed)
~~Motto of the U.S. Army Special Forces.

A poignant Afghan proverb declares, “Cowards cause harm to brave men.”

This ancient Pashtun adage reflects the shocking true life story of U.S. Special Forces Sgt. Charles Martland.

Five years ago, Sgt. Martland saved the life of an Afghan boy who was abducted from his mother, imprisoned as a sex slave, and repeatedly raped by an Afghan police chief, Abdul Rahman. Martland’s heroic actions to rescue a defenseless child cost him dearly. The Army punished not Rahman, but Martland, and relieved him from his duty post in Afghanistan, and is now seeking to involuntarily discharge him from military service.

What was the dreadful and dischargeable infraction by the highly decorated Green Beret Charles Martland?

In 2011, Martland and his Special Forces Captain Dan Quinn (who has since resigned from the military) physically assaulted Abdul Rahman, after learning that Rahman had abducted an Afghan boy, chained him to a bed, repeatedly abused him as a sex slave and beat up the boy’s mother when she sought to find and rescue her son. The Green Berets intervened when they discovered that the boy was being raped and held by Rahman. According to the Martland and Quinn, the Afghan villagers were pleading with them to do something about repeated sexual assaults against children by the Afghan police.

Here is the dirty, not so little secret of Afghanistan: The sexual abuse of children is widespread and embedded into the Afghan Pashtun culture. There is scant prosecution of child sex exploitation in Afghanistan. American military have long been saddled with the knowledge of the Afghan practice of “bacha bazi,” translated as dancing boys. Bacha Bazi is the ancient and widespread practice of Afghan men who abduct and lure poor boys into the grisly world of child sex slavery where they are raped and exploited by Afghan men. Frontline exposed this lurid child sex trafficking trade.

U.S. military stationed in Afghanistan experience the hideous reality that children are expendable in the worthless Afghan criminal justice system. Cultural mores trump human rights among the tribesman of Afghanistan. Incredibly, our military is warned to turn a blind eye to this insidious abuse of children. See no evil.

This wasn’t the first time that Martland and Quinn experienced inaction from the Afghan government for serious child sexual exploitation crimes committed by the Afghan police force. Martland and Quinn knew that two Afghan commanders were not prosecuted nor punished for the rape of a 15-year-old girl and the honor killing of an Afghan commander’s 12 year old daughter who kissed a boy.

Martland, who was disgusted and fed up with the ongoing sexual exploitation of children by Afghan officials said, “I felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our Afghan commanders to commit these atrocities.”

Since when is a highly decorated Green Beret who confronts a violent child sex predator and trafficker and woman beater, punished and involuntarily discharge from the military? Is this the new politically correct ethic dominating deployments in foreign lands.

Notes After New Hampshire by Mark Steyn

~Long, long ago – August 12th last year, in fact – I wrote:

The integrity of a nation’s borders and the privilege of its citizenship is certainly a “truly conservative” principle. More practically for this election, it may be the one on which all the others depend… And, as Ann Coulter says to the other candidates, if you don’t like Trump, steal his issue.

According to exit polls, in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, two out of three GOP voters favor Trump’s proposed temporary ban on all Muslim immigration – despite the universal reaction from the massed ranks of the politico-media class that this time he’d really gone too far. In other words, as I said all those months ago, it’s the old Broadway saw: Nobody likes it but the public.

The only reason any pollster is even asking this question is because Donald Trump proposed it. As those numbers suggest, any of Trump’s rivals could have helped themselves by “stealing his issue”. And yet no other candidate has gone anywhere near it – or anything like it. Perhaps one reason why American elections have the lowest voter participation rate of almost any developed nation is because the political class mostly seems to be talking about its own peculiar preoccupations. Consider this astute observation by Steve Sailer:

American citizens have turned in large numbers to old-white-guy candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. For all their differences, both give the impression that they are running for president of the United States, not president of Davos.

I live in northern New Hampshire, where every town that isn’t a ski resort is dead. They were pleasant, sleepy places in genteel decline 20 years ago. Now they’re hollowed out by heroin and meth, and offering no economic opportunity beyond casual shifts at the KwikkiKrap. And when you listen to the Dems they’re worried about micro-aggressions and transphobia and when you listen to Congressional Republicans they’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The two-party one-party state has nothing to say to tens of millions of Americans.

Trump won because he put real-world issues on the table. Nobody needs to be told that he “isn’t a real Republican”. That’s the point of Trump. The Republican base loathes the Republican leadership far more than they love the vessel they’ve chosen to express their loathing.

Senate Passes New North Korea Sanctions 96-0- President Obama “continues to work with his counterparts” By Bridget Johnson

“Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) returned from the campaign trail to vote for the bill. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) were absent for the vote.”

The Senate approved new sanctions on North Korea 96-0 while the White House remained mum about its thoughts on the legislation, which is opposed by China.

“Four nuclear tests, three Kims, two violations of United Nations Security Council Resolutions and one attempt by North Korea to transfer nuclear technology to Syria later — it is clearly time for the United States to start taking the North Korea challenge seriously,” said co-sponsor Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), a top Dem on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the panel’s former chairman.

“With today’s overwhelming bipartisan vote, we have taken a major step forward in creating a new policy framework that combines effective sanctions and effective military countermeasures that can stop North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and bring some sanity back to the political calculus,” Menendez said. “This new framework leaves no doubt about our determination to neutralize any threat North Korea may present – with robust, realistic diplomacy toward the clear goal of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.”