Facebook soon to ban Gatestone? What you can do. Dear Friends, Last week, an important article, “Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech” by Douglas Murray, detailed a new initiative by Facebook in Germany, to remove supposedly “racist” comments from Facebook. This initiative by Facebook at the moment appears to include anything critical of the EU’s […]
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Beyoncé Knowles. Everyone knows her simply as Beyoncé, the multi-talented superstar wife of music-industry legend Jay Z. She’s also the glamorous and magnetic “Bey,” as President Barack Obama affectionately calls her. She’s held fundraisers for the President, performed at the White House, and cultivated a warm friendship with both Mr. and Mrs. Obama. Beyoncé often turns up at NBA basketball games, where she and her hubby can typically be seen in their courtside seats, soaking up the love of starstruck fans, broadcasters, and ballplayers alike. This past Sunday, as part of the Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé put on a performance that served as an ode to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. Her all-black female backup dancers proudly donned the Panthers’ signature black berets atop their ’60s Afro hairstyles, and emphatically raised their fists in the Panthers’ famous Black Power salute. In light of the passion with which so many screaming youngsters in attendance rocked and gyrated orgasmically to Beyoncé’s every move and word, it’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly who the Black Panthers were, and what did they do to deserve such a tribute from the lovely Bey.
The Black Panther Party was born as an outgrowth of the Oakland, California street gang of Huey Newton, a 24-year-old man whose only prior discernible achievements had been as a vicious thug, thief, and pimp. To define the Panthers’ mission, Newton in 1966 drafted a Ten-Point Program charging that because America’s “racist government” had collaborated with “the capitalists” to “rob” the “Black Community” blind, that same government was now morally “obligated,” as a form of restitution, to give all blacks “employment or a guaranteed income” as well as taxpayer-funded “land, bread, housing, education, [and] clothing” until the end of time. Moreover, Newton argued that “all Black people should be released from … jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.” He also issued a call for blacks to “arm themselves for self-defense,” which was in fact an incitement to a race war. As Panther “minister of culture” Emory Douglas put it in 1970: “The only way to make this racist U.S. government administer justice to the people it is oppressing, is … by taking up arms against this government, killing the officials, until the reactionary forces … are dead, and those that are left turn their weapons on their superiors.”
Throughout this primary season, Hillary Clinton and self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders have both been flogging the “crisis” of “income inequality,” which is “at the center of their campaigns,” according to CNN. Both have scourged the “greed” of the “1%,” called for higher taxes on the “rich,” and promised to expand and multiply government programs to rectify this injustice. Yet like other slogans progressives rely on, the idea of “income inequality” is an ideological construct, a statistical artifact that exploits envy and resentment for political advantage.
The first problem with “income inequality” is how “income” is defined. Progressives indulged in some noisy triumphalism a few years back when French economist Thomas Piketty seemingly proved with hard data that capitalism inevitably leads to a concentration of wealth and an increase in income inequality. Further analysis revealed the flaws in his argument and data. One problem is the same one that undermines how poverty is defined. As James Piereson wrote in The Inequality Hoax, “Figures [on income] exclude transfers from the government such as Social Security payments, food stamps, rent supplements, and the like, which constitute a growing proportion of income for many middle-class and working-class people.” Adding the value of those supplements would narrow the income gap considerably.
Ignoring the value of entitlement transfers also underlies Clinton and Sanders’ complaints about the “stagnant middle class” that worsens inequality. But Martin Feldstein points out in the Wall Street Journal that the dramatic gaps in income between the top 10% and everybody else “leaves out the large amount of wealth held in the form of future retirement benefits from Social Security and Medicare.” As Feldstein writes,
Add the $50 trillion for Medicare and Medicaid wealth to the $25 trillion for net Social Security wealth and the $20 trillion in conventionally measured net worth, and the lower 90% of households have more than $95 trillion that should be reckoned as wealth. This is substantially more than the $60 trillion in conventional net worth of the top 10%. And this $95 trillion doesn’t count the value of unemployment benefits, veterans benefits, and other government programs that substitute for conventional financial wealth.
And don’t forget, most retirees take 3-5 times more in benefits from Social Security and Medicare––which gobble half the federal budget–– than they contribute in payroll taxes. Try getting that deal in the private insurance market.
Universities Assign Simplistic, Childish Books as Common Reading for Incoming Freshmen By Peter Wood
Reading a book is like going to a dinner party. You agree not just to spend time with your host, the author, but with all the other invited guests—your fellow readers. If the party goes well, you meet people you like, and you definitely have something to talk about.
Colleges and universities have caught onto this idea. From Princeton University to tiny Hesston College in Kansas (“Start here, go everywhere”), some 350 institutions of higher learning this year assigned a single book that all the freshmen were asked to read. As the colleges see it, these common reading programs “build community.” Between the hors d’oeuvres and the demitasse, the students will discover their mutual admiration of…Homer, Proust, Hemingway? No, not quite.
The host books of these community-building parties definitely aren’t classics. The seven most assigned books this year are:
The Other Wes Moore
16 colleges, including Kansas State University, assigned this 2011 memoir by Rhodes Scholar Wes Moore in which he contrasts his fortunate life with a namesake crack dealer in prison for murder.
Just Mercy
14 colleges, including the University of Wisconsin, Madison, assigned this 2014 account of author Bryan Stevenson’s successful efforts to spring a black man in Alabama wrongfully convicted of murder.
The Circle
6 colleges, including the University of Tennessee, assigned this 2014 novel by Dave Eggers depicting a Google-like corporation’s attempt to take over the world.
The director of national intelligence warned Congress this morning that “unpredictable instabilities have become the new normal, and this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.”
In a briefing of worldwide threats referred to as his “litany of doom,” James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “violent extremists” are “operationally active in about 40 countries.”
“Seven countries are experiencing a collapse of central government authority, 14 others face regime-threatening or violent instability or both. Another 59 countries face a significant risk of instability through 2016,” he said.
Russia and China “continue to have the most sophisticated cyber programs” and China continues cyber espionage against the United States.
“Whether China’s commitment of last September moderates its economic espionage” — a vow touted by President Obama — “remains to be seen,” Clapper noted. “Iran and North Korea continue to conduct cyber espionage as they enhance their attack capabilities.”
ISIS, he said, “displays unprecedented online proficiency”and “at least 38,200 foreign fighters, including at least 6,900 from western countries, have traveled to Syria from at least 120 countries since the beginning of the conflict in 2012.”
From 2014 to 2015, the number of ISIS supporters arrested by the FBI increased fivefold.
And people are still voting for Bernie Sanders.
FBI technicians have been unable to unlock encrypted data on a cellphone that belonged to the terrorist couple who killed 14 people in San Bernardino on Dec. 2, the FBI director said Tuesday.
The failure, the second such case in recent months, has left investigators in the dark about at least some of the married couple’s communications before they were killed in a shootout with police.
“We still have one of those killers’ phones that we haven’t been able to open,” FBI Director James B. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It has been two months now and we are still working on it.”
FBI investigators have struggled to retrace the movements and plans of Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, before and after they attacked a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center.
