RUTHFULLY YOURS

After decades of failure, maybe government should get out of the business of giving dietary advice.

With the release of the eighth edition of the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines expected by year’s end, it seems reasonable to consider—with the “obesity plague” upon us and Americans arguably less healthy than ever before—whether the guidelines are to be trusted and even whether they have done more harm than good.

Many Americans have lost trust in the science behind the guidelines since they seem to change dramatically every five years. In February, for example, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee declared that certain fats and eggs are no longer the enemy and that cholesterol is “not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” This, after decades of advising Americans to “watch their cholesterol.”

Such controversy is nothing new. U.S. Dietary Guidelines were first released by the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. One nutrition expert at the time, Edward “Pete” Ahrens, a groundbreaking researcher on fat and cholesterol metabolism, called the guidelines “a nutritional experiment with the American public as subjects . . . treating them like a homogeneous group of Sprague-Dawley rats.”

Obama recently decided to effectively suspend enforcement of immigration law and unilaterally legalize huge numbers of illegal aliens. But one of his minions is sending around letters threatening states who refuse to accept his army of Syrian migrants, at least 13% of which poll as supporting ISIS. That means out of his first 10,000 Syrians, over a thousand would be ISIS supporters.

States are required to provide “assistance and services … to refugees without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political position” according to the Refugee Act of 1980, the letter points out.

“States may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to refugees based on a refugee’s country of origin or religious affiliation,” the letter states. “Accordingly, states may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to Syrian refugees.” States that do not comply with these terms are subject to “enforcement action, including suspension or termination.”

According to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on race or origin is against the law in all programs that receive federally-funded assistance, the letter adds.

Of course immigration policy precisely discriminates against immigrants based on their country of origin or religious affiliation, since the latter is used to determine quotas, while the former is used to verify claims of religious persecution.

Obama is claiming that the Civil Rights Act applies to immigration policy at the State level, but not the Federal level.

This is a new level of lawlessness even for Obama.

A popular meme on some sites is that the Statue of Liberty was “originally a Muslim woman”. Like a lot of viral memes, this is a myth.

The a grain of truth to the story is that the meme picked up on the interesting historical footnote that one of the earlier projects of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a large woman holding up a torch and symbolizing Egypt’s progress. The giant statue would have been titled, “Egypt or Progress Carrying the Light to Asia”.

Since Egypt’s ruler had no money, the project went nowhere.

Bartholdi at the time was somewhat obsessed with Ancient Egypt. It was ancient Egypt that interested him rather than Islam. The statue was meant to celebrate Egyptian civilization rather than Islam.

In any case the idea that “Egypt” became the Statue of Liberty is a myth. How do we know that?

Here’s what Bartholdi had to say about it, “At that time my Statue of Liberty did not exist, even in my imagination, and the only resemblance between the drawing that I submitted to the Khedive and the statue now in New York’s beautiful harbor is that both held a light aloft. Now how is a sculptor to make a statue which is to serve the purpose of a lighthouse without making it hold the light in the air?”

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln

The winning streak enjoyed by campus activists this fall was violently interrupted by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Some activists were sufficiently annoyed by their ejection from the limelight that they took to Twitter to complain under the hashtag “F***Paris.”

The most obvious irony stemmed from the fact that some of the same protesters who griped about media coverage of their antics — even declaring First Amendment-free zones — suddenly whined when the cameras turned to bloodshed in the heart of Europe.

But there’s a deeper irony. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, fueled by a cynical media strategy directed by the president himself, the national conversation turned quickly from Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures to the bigotry and insensitivity of the Republican party. There’s no denying that Donald Trump made this an easy pivot for the Beltway Brahmins. But left unnoticed in the clamor is the dismaying disconnect between the conversation elite liberals want to have and the one being pushed by their left-wing shock troops on the ground.