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Ruth King

Sliding Down Euthanasia’s Slippery Slope By Douglas Murray

Every age preceding ours sanctioned acts that we find morally stupefying. So it is reasonable to assume that there are at least some things we are presently doing — possibly while flush with moral virtue — that our descendants will regard with exhalations of “What were they thinking?” Anyone interested in our age should wonder what these modern blind spots might be — those things akin to slavery or the Victorians’ shoving children up chimneys. As an entry into this category, you could do worse than consider the case of Nathan (born Nancy) Verhelst.

This was a Belgian who as a little girl felt that her brothers were favored over her. In adulthood she chose to “transition” into a man. She underwent hormone therapies as well as surgical operations. These were insufficiently successful for Nancy’s liking and left considerable scarring. Nathan — as he then was — became depressed. In September 2013, when Nathan was 44 years old, the Belgian state killed him by lethal injection because of his “unbearable psychological suffering.”

Perhaps we can leave the ethics of trying to turn women into men for another day. But it seems likely that any future civilization will look back on the practice of euthanasia in the Western liberal democracies in the early 21st century and sense an awesome moral chasm: “Let me get this right, the Belgian health service tried to turn her into a man and then killed her?” Strangest of all might seem the fact that this killing was done in a spirit not of malice or cruelty, but of kindness.

Several advanced Western countries now practice some form of euthanasia. The State of Oregon allows a version that was much cited in the United Kingdom last year, when there was an unsuccessful attempt to introduce a euthanasia bill in the parliament. But nothing yet equals the practice of euthanasia in the two most liberal democracies of Western Europe: Belgium and Holland. In both countries, deciding (or, in cases of dementia, having decided for you) the date of your death has become, in the eyes of euthanasia advocates, a positive — indeed a liberal — act. The generation of Baby Boomers in the Low Countries that led the way in advancing the rights of sexual and other minorities are the same generation that then advanced the “right” to die. For them, it is the last right. As with some other rights arguments, the case puts the rights of the individual over those of the community irrespective of the impact this may have on wider society.

Even so, no other “right” can be said to have anywhere near the implications of this last one. The “right to death” makes every other right look like a plaything by comparison, because enjoying the right to death changes almost everything about the way a society views not only death but also life and the very purpose (or otherwise) of existence.

How to Steal a State: Governor McAuliffe Expands the Criminal Vote for Democrats By Hans A. von Spakovsky & Roger Clegg

In what is likely an unconstitutional state action seemingly calculated to ensure that the purple state of Virginia goes blue in the November election, Governor Terry McAuliffe (D.) signed an order on Friday restoring the voting rights of 206,000 ex-felons in Virginia, including those convicted of murder, armed robbery, rape, sexual assault, and other violent crimes. The order also restores their right to sit on a jury, become a notary, and even serve in elected office.

McAuliffe believes that ex-felons can be trusted to make decisions in the ballot booth and the jury box but apparently not to own a gun. He draws the line at restoring their Second Amendment rights; that would be a bridge too far. His order specifically does not restore their “right to ship, transport, possess, or receive firearms.” And while his order requires that felons complete probation and parole before enjoying restoration of their rights, it applies regardless of whether they have paid any court fines or restitution to victims.

What McAuliffe entirely dismisses is the principle that if you won’t follow the law yourself, you can’t demand a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote. Restoring a felon’s right to vote should be done not automatically, as soon as he has completed his sentence, but carefully, on a case-by-case basis, after he has shown that he has really turned over a new leaf. The unfortunate truth is that many people who walk out of prison will be walking back in; recidivism rates are high. We have both testified before Congress and written about this problem. Governor McAuliffe may be happy as long as the ex-felons who can now vote just don’t walk back into prison before November.

Having a waiting period, examining each ex-felon’s application for restoration of rights carefully and individually, and differentiating between violent and nonviolent crimes is exactly the system that Virginia had — at least until Friday’s order. In a three-page summary released by the governor’s office, McAuliffe asserts that any claim that he doesn’t have the authority to grant a blanket restoration of rights is “far-outside the weight of constitutional authority across the nation and would read into the text of the Virginia Constitution words that simply are not there.” This is just legal gibberish — the weight of constitutional authority “across the nation” has no bearing on interpreting the Virginia constitution. McAuliffe is reading into that constitution authority he does not have.

Obama: ‘Isolate’ North Korea for ‘Continuous, Provocative Behavior’ By Bridget Johnson

President Obama said alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany today that the United States is “still analyzing and assessing with precision the activities that North Korea engaged in over the last several days” before elaborating on any potential response.

South Korea, meanwhile, said Saturday’s submarine-launched ballistic missile launch in the Sea of Japan is an “open provocation” that requires a response, while North Korea called the launch one more demonstration that it can strike the U.S.

“We will take necessary steps in close cooperation with related countries,” South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said today. “Regardless of whether the test was a success or not, it is a clear violation of UNSC resolutions.”

“The government has warned on various occasions that the North would face stronger and more stern responses from the international community in the event of its additional provocation,” Cho said. “We will further strengthen our efforts to increase pressure on the North through the faithful implementation of the UNSC sanctions resolution and international cooperation.”

The UN Security Council said in a statement today that members “would continue to closely monitor the situation and take further significant measures in line with the council’s previously expressed determination.”

Obama said he’d “let the Pentagon and our intelligence community debrief everyone once we have precise information.”

The administration issued no statements on the launch over the weekend.

“What is clear is that North Korea continues to engage in continuous, provocative behavior; that they have been actively pursuing a nuclear program, an ability to launch nuclear weapons. And although more often than not they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time they engage in these tests. And we take it very seriously. And so do our allies, and so does the entire world,” Obama said.

EPA Budget Cuts Lung Cancer Program, Ups Climate Change Funding By Nicholas Ballasy

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle criticized the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed budget for cutting clean water funding and eliminating a lung cancer prevention program.

The Obama’s administration’s $8.3 billion EPA FY2017 budget request increases climate change-related funding to $235 million, which includes money for its Clean Power Plan.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) argued the administration should be putting that money into existing programs instead since the Supreme Court placed a stay on the Clean Power Plan.

“The EPA has testified before this committee that they have done no modeling on whether the rule [Clean Power Plan] would have any impact on global temperature change,” he said during a committee hearing on the EPA budget. “The president is intent on picking winners and losers in the energy economy.”

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) asked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy how she justifies cutting water infrastructure funding after incidents like lead poisoning in Flint, Mich., occurred. Cardin said he is “perplexed” by the $413 million reduction.

“There are obviously constraints that we have. One is we have to respect the levels that were established in the bipartisan budget agreement and our choice was how do we use the money that is allocated to us in the best way that we can,” McCarthy told Cardin.

The Forgotten Genocide: Why It Matters Today By Raymond Ibrahim

April 24 marks the “Great Crime,” that is, the Armenian genocide that took place under Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman Empire, during and after WWI. Out of an approximate population of two million, some 1.5 million Armenians died. If early 20th century Turkey had the apparatuses and technology to execute in mass—such as 1940s Germany’s gas chambers—the entire Armenian population may well have been annihilated. Most objective American historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000…. Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

Indeed, evidence has been overwhelming. U.S. Senate Resolution 359 from 1920 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.” In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islam’s rules of war).

Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

‘Far-Right’ Anti-Immigration Candidate Leads in First Round of Austrian Elections By Michael Walsh

Well, well, well:

Austria’s far right made big wins in the latest round of voting in the country’s presidential election. Norbert Hofer, candidate of the anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe), took home almost 37 percent of the vote out of five candidates in Sunday’s polls.

The election will now go to a runoff that will take place on May 22, when Hofer will face either Green Party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, who gained 19.7 percent of the vote this round, or independent candidate Irmgard Griss, who won 18.8 percent. For an all-out win a candidate must obtain more than 50 percent of votes to become the country’s head of state, which is a largely ceremonial role.

But the results do reflect Austrians’ frustration with their leaders’ response to Europe’s refugee crisis, and mean that, for the first time since 1945, Austria will not have a president from either the center-left Social Democrats or the center-right People’s Party. Hofer sailed past the candidates from those two parties — the Social Democrats and the People’s Party – who gained only 11.2 percent of the vote each.

Sunday’s results were the biggest victory that Hofer’s Freedom Party has seen since the party’s inception after World War II.

Guilt and the Immigrants

Angela Merkel’s chickens — which she generously distributed up and down the European continent in her suicidal attempt to change the very nature of Europe itself — are coming home to roost.

Hofer, who says he almost always packs a Glock in order to protect himself from refugees, is considered by German media to be the friendlier face of the Freedom Party over its more aggressive leader, Heinz-Christian Strache.

How Smart Is Justin Trudeau? By David Solway

“The truth is, I suspect, that Trudeau’s public performances in the physical and intellectual domains, as well as his documented appeal to female effusiveness, is a vivid expression of his followers’ utter lack of political sobriety, intellectual acumen and emotional maturity. That a country could give its support and a 66 per cent approval rating to a preening charlatan boggles the mind and beggars the imagination—or would, if Americans had not done the same with a smooth-talking ignoramus like Barack Obama, who thinks the U.S. consists of 57 states and that Austrians speak Austrian.”

-Much has been made of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s recent exploits, avidly devoured by the press and lapped up by his dazzled acolytes. The latest installment in the Trudeau saga involves a photo just circulated of Trudeau balancing on a conference table in the advanced yogic Mayurasana or “peacock” pose, which has sent the media into yet another Trudeau frenzy and his fans swooning with adoration. Take a look at the image above.

One admirer tweets: “This guy is just too good to be true.” Another: “I’m so happy to be Canadian.” As CBC News puts it: “Photo of Justin Trudeau doing yoga makes the internet freak out — again.” In my estimation, this is not a posture befitting a head of state—but maybe that’s just me.

A few days earlier, media focus was on Trudeau’s apparently uncanny brain power, to wit, a “stunning” riff on the topic of quantum computing. The media, of course, failed to report that Trudeau’s Wikipedia stunt was set up by Trudeau himself, who asked to be asked so he could reel off a couple of boilerplate lines he had obviously memorized. According to the Daily Mail, “Justin Trudeau stuns room full of reporters and scientists with perfect answer to complex quantum computing question.” Here is Trudeau’s reply to a journalist’s stuttering query (“I was going to ask you about quantum computing, but …”):

“Very simply, normal computers work by …,” he began before he was interrupted by the crowd’s shocked laughter. “No, no, don’t interrupt me, when you walk out of here you will know more — well no, some of you will know far less — about quantum computing. Normal computers work by … either the power going through a wire or not. It’s 1 or a 0. They’re binary systems. What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit. A regular computer bit is either a 1 or 0 — on or off. A quantum state can be much more complex than that because as we know, things can be both particles and waves at the same time. And the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer.”

So far as I can see, the question is neither “complex” nor the answer “perfect.” Note how Trudeau says nothing about the real problem, namely quantum indeterminacy and how to manage the superposition of incompatible states reliably and practically. Nor does he explain how the principle of uncertainty would allow us to compress and encode information, which is precisely the issue in question.

Hillary Wants Your Guns : John Hinderaker

Given the Democrats’ dismal record when they run on an anti-gun platform, it is hard to believe that Hillary Clinton wants to make gun control her signature issue. Nevertheless, that appears to be the case. Campaigning in Connecticut, she waxed hyperbolic on firearms:

I am here to tell you I will use every single minute of every single day if I’m so fortunate enough to be your president looking for ways that we can save lives, that we can change the gun culture.

Every single minute of every single day, on guns? Well, that would be a good thing for our foreign policy, but I don’t think she means it. Still, it is always interesting to try to decode liberals’ talk about firearms. What do you think Hillary means by “chang[ing] the gun culture”? My guess is that she knows next to nothing about the “gun culture” as it is experienced by those who own and use firearms, and what she has in mind is making it really, really hard for anyone to buy a gun. Except for her armed guards, of course.

Chelsea Clinton, campaigning for her mother, brought a moment of clarity to the Democrats’ usual obfuscation:

Chelsea Clinton said Thursday at an event in Maryland that there is now an opportunity for gun control legislation to pass the Supreme Court since Justice Antonin Scalia passed away.

“It matters to me that my mom also recognizes the role the Supreme Court has when it comes to gun control. With Justice Scalia on the bench, one of the few areas where the Court actually had an inconsistent record relates to gun control,” Clinton said. “Sometimes the Court upheld local and state gun control measures as being compliant with the Second Amendment and sometimes the Court struck them down.”

Clinton then touted her mother’s record on gun control issues and knowledge that the Supreme Court has an effect on whether many gun control laws stand.

Chelsea’s comment is stupid. (Normally I wouldn’t criticize a family member of a candidate, but Chelsea is an adult and Hillary sent her out on the trail as a surrogate.) The idea that upholding some gun control measures while invalidating others is “inconsistent” betrays a profound lack of understanding of the law and the Constitution. To point out the obvious, the Supreme Court has similarly upheld some restrictions on speech as constitutional, while finding that others violate the First Amendment. And it has found some searches and seizures to be legal under the Fourth Amendment, while others are unconstitutional. This is not inconsistent, it is what courts do.

“Brexit” – What Else Is Wrong with the European Union? by Josephine Bacon

Ever since the inception of the European Economic Community, British politicians across the entire political spectrum have been perceptive enough to realize that Britain will lose its sovereignty and turn into a vassal of the France-Germany axis.

This month, in March, an official audit reported that EU auditors refuse to sign off more than £100 billion ($144 billion) of EU spending. The Brussels accounts have not been given the all-clear for 19 years in a row.

There is a joke going around the internet it how the European Union works (or doesn’t):

Pythagoras’s theorem – 24 words.
Lord’s Prayer – 66 words.
Archimedes’s Principle – 67 words.
10 Commandments – 179 words.
Gettysburg address – 286 words.
U.S. Declaration of Independence – 1,300 words.
U.S. Constitution with all 27 Amendments – 7,818 words.

EU regulations on the sale of cabbage – 26,911 words.

Why are EU Regulations so long? Maybe because they have to be translated into the 18 official languages? Interpreters also have to be found who can work into and from those languages at the European Parliament. The translation budget is massive. One of the official languages currently is Irish. It can confidently be said that there is no one in the Republic of Ireland who does not speak English; many Irish do not even speak or understand Irish, and certainly none of Ireland’s politicians will be fluent only in Irish. But all of the “acquis,” the body of regulations that are already part of the EU body of laws, also have to be translated into the languages of candidates for EU membership, such as Turkey, thus adding more languages to the tally each time a new regulation is passed. If Catalonia breaks away from Spain and remains a member of the EU, Catalan will need to be added, even though Catalan politicians all speak perfect Spanish.

Palestinians: Peace Starts with Facing the Harsh Reality of Hate by Fred Maroun

The Arab states, many Europeans and the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement have been using the same tactic since 1948 — keep the Palestinians in poverty, victimhood, and dependence so that Israel can be blamed, with the hope that Israel would lose legitimacy and its Jewish residents would be thrown into the sea or they would pack up and leave.

Values that bring peace (acceptance of differences, religious tolerance, and non-violent conflict resolution) are taught all over the liberal democratic world, including Israel, but somehow, when it comes to Arabs, all expectations of socialized behavior are thrown out the window.

Somehow, people expect to resolve a conflict without neutralizing the root cause of that conflict: programming people to hate.

Teach Peace: This is the solution that Western politicians urgently need to talk about when they meet Palestinian officials. It should be at the start, at the middle, and at the end of every meeting and every speech, and all funding should be made contingent on it and strictly linked to it.

As an Arab, the situation of the Palestinians breaks my heart, as does the situation of Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and even those living in relative peace under dictatorships. But the Palestinian situation bothers me most because no realistic solution is ever seriously considered.

While Palestinian refugees are scattered over several countries and given few rights by their Arab hosts, and while they live in various states of dependence in Gaza and the West Bank, resolution of their status is delayed decade after decade, with occasional lip service paid to a negotiated two-state solution — the magic solution that would supposedly cure everything!

Who should be blamed for this? Most of the world is quick to blame Israel. I do not blame Israel for one second. The Jews accepted the UN partition plan of 1947 which would have given the Palestinians a state more viable than what was given to the Jews, but the Arab states convinced the Palestinians that it was a bad deal, and the Palestinians have been rejecting all opportunities for a state ever since.