RUTHFULLY YOURS

Science is a process for finding truth in our material world. The blossoming of science occurred in Medieval Europe and continued to flourish until the early part of the last century, almost exclusively in the Western world. This was not coincidental.

The combination of the ancient Greek desire for free inquiry combined with the Judeo-Christian belief in an orderly universe and, most vitally, the Judeo-Christian primary value of honesty created in poor, small Europe explosions in thought that the old, rich empires of the East could not achieve.

It is also not an accident that the overwhelming majority of early great scientists were either among a small pool of ancient Greeks – essentially Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Euclid – or among especially devout Medieval Christians – (Friar) Roger Bacon, (Bishop) Jean Buridan, (Bishop) Robert Grosseteste, (Father) Nicolai Copernicus, and (Canon) Galileo.

Because these profoundly devout Christians considered physics and mathematics simply another manifestation of a holy and ordered Creation, they never worshipped science. Lying was a sin, and lying about the nature of the world was a particularly serious sin, because it knowingly concealed the true nature of the world.

Within the Medieval university was that same sort of freedom and mutual respect that had never existed before except in the academy of Plato. As with the academy, the Medieval university had schools of thought and different interpretations of what phenomena meant. This was science.

Scientism, on the other hand, is a vile misology that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and has infected those processes intended to discover the truth about our world ever since. The most evil and dishonest regimes in modern history – Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China – were all utterly and passionately devoted to whatever pseudo-science was needed to support the party.

Often these regimes cranked out huge numbers of physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and related hard science disciplines, but it is not the quantity of trained scientists, but the quality of their environment that matters. We were afraid, at the beginning of the Cold War, that the hordes of physicists and engineers that the Soviet Union turned out would leave America behind. In fact, science did much better under the tsars than the Soviets.

Millions of Americans enrolled in for-profit colleges in recent years to learn a trade and find decent-paying work. A new study found devastating results for many of their careers.

The working paper, published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, tracks 1.4 million students who left a for-profit school from 2006 through 2008. Because students at these schools tend to be older than recent high-school graduates, they’ve spent time in the workforce. The researchers used Education Department and Internal Revenue Service data to track their earnings before and after they left school.

The result: Students on average were worse off after attending for-profit schools. Undergraduates were less likely to be employed, and earned smaller paychecks–about $600 to $700 per year less–after leaving school compared to their lives before. Those who enrolled in certificate programs made roughly $920 less per year in the six years after school compared to before they enrolled.

The key factor is that most of these students never earned a degree–they dropped out early. Excluding them, the minority of students who earned degrees saw an earnings bump after graduating.

“Certificate, associate’s, and bachelor’s degree students generally experience declines in earnings in the 5 to 6 years after attendance relative to their own earnings in the years before attendance,” write co-authors Stephanie Riegg Cellini of George Washington University and Nicholas Turner of the U.S. Treasury Department.

The picture is even worse when considering most students borrowed to attend the colleges. Nearly 9 out of 10 for-profit school students took on student debt; those in associate’s programs borrowed an average $8,000 and those in bachelor’s programs, $13,000. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is not every day that a panelist at a conference worries about getting killed later.
“You are going to get me killed…I have got my flight back home,” stated Pakistani religious freedom advocate Arafat Mazhar to an audience questioner at an April 20 Georgetown University conferencerecently made available online. His jarring response emphasized that the conference’s examination of Islamic blasphemy norms in Pakistan and the world beyond was no mere academic matter but involves global, often lethal, threats to freedom of speech and religion.

Mazhar’s statement occurred during the conference’s afternoon panel in an exchange with an audience member from Afghanistan studying in America. Mazhar emphasized that his organization Engage Pakistan currently only supports reforming the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws with theological arguments such that these laws would not have a divine status. Any abolition of these laws, a proposition that has had deadly consequences for Pakistan’s Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer and Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, would be a much longer term goal.

Just as illuminating and disturbing was Mazhar’s Afghan interlocutor who cited a 2015 Afghan incident in which a mob brutally killed a woman accused of burning a Quran. “Had there been a good anti-blasphemy law” with codified standards, he suggested, “she would not have been killed that viciously.” On the basis of such conjectured more humane executions he accordingly asked, “Is it a good idea to get rid of the anti-blasphemy law or is it good to have a good law?”

Mazhar responded that empirical evidence contradicted such arguments previously made in favor of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. From Pakistan’s 1947 independence to the 1986 completion of these laws, Islamic blasphemy accusations caused only four extrajudicial killings, but after 1986 these killings increased by 2,500 percent. His fellow panelist, University of Notre Dame professor Daniel Philpott, noted that Pew studies had found that blasphemy laws had a perverse “pedagogical effect” in inciting hostility towards the protected faith’s opponents real or imagined.

Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, a retired American career diplomat, concurred on the panel that blasphemy laws are “like handing a loaded gun” to people. He cited a 2005 Sudan case where the government had dropped charges of insulting religion against a newspaper editor, but outraged mobs still demanded retribution. Months later his beheaded corpse turned up after a kidnapping.

Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, came to Yale University in 2013 with high expectations. At Harvard, the couple had held prominent teaching and administrative roles. At Yale, Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and physician, received a laboratory directorship and four appointments; Ms. Christakis, an expert in early-childhood education, became a seminar instructor. Two years after their arrival at Yale, Dr. Christakis and Ms. Christakis were awarded positions as master and associate master of Silliman College, Yale’s largest residential college. (I attend the university and reside at Silliman).

Last week, the Christakises resigned those posts.

Their departure comes as no surprise. For seven months, the couple has been subject to bullying, harassment and intimidation. They inadvertently became a national media story last fall and catalyzed a month of campus protests, prompting Yale President Peter Salovey to tell minority students: “We failed you.”

The Christakises encountered a witch-hunt mentality on a contemporary college campus. It began fittingly on the day before Halloween, when Ms. Christakis questioned guidelines from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee warning against “culturally unaware or insensitive” costumes. Ms. Christakis reasoned, in an email to Silliman residents, that students should decide for themselves how to dress for Halloween, without the administration’s involvement.

Student radicals of the 1960s might have recognized her note as a defense of free expression, but those days are long gone. Instead, Ms. Christakis was denounced as a proponent of cultural insensitivity. Irate students circulated petitions, wrote editorials and posted social-media tirades. They scribbled criticisms in chalk outside the Christakises’ home and posted degrading images of them online. Two student groups demanded their removal from Silliman. CONTINUE AT SITE

Contrary to conventional “wisdom,” most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine – and most of the 320,000 1948 Arab refugees – were migrant workers and descendants of the 1831-1947 Muslim immigrants from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc.. Britain enticed Arab immigration and blocked Jewish immigration.

Thus, between 1880 and 1919, Haifa’s Arab population surged from 6,000 to 80,000, mostly due to migrant workers. The eruption of WW2 accelerated the demand for Arab manpower by the British Mandate’s military and its civilian authorities.

Moreover, Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman Empire, and then by the British Mandate, to work in major civilian and military infrastructure projects. Legal and illegal Arab migrants were, also, attracted by economic growth, which was generated by the Jewish community beginning in 1882.

According to a 1937 report by the British Peel Commission (featured in the ground-breaking book, Palestine Betrayed , by Prof. Efraim Karsh), “during 1922 through 1931, the increase of Arab population in the mixed-towns of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem was 86%, 62% and 37% respectively, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7% and a decrease of 2 percent in Gaza.”

Irrespective of occasional Arab emigration from British Mandate Palestine – due to intra-Arab terrorism, which has been an endemic feature in the Middle East – the substantial wave of Arab immigration from 1831-1947 triggered dramatic growth of the Arab populations in Jaffa (17 times), Haifa (12 times) and Ramla (5 times).

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

I am grateful for your letter of May 30./2/ I appreciate particularly the steadfastness with which the Government and people of Israel have maintained a posture of resolution and calm in a situation of grave tension. All of us understand how fateful the steps we take may be. I hope we can continue to move firmly and calmly toward a satisfactory solution.

Our position in this crisis rests on two principles which are vital national interests of the United States. The first is that we support the territorial integrity and political independence of all of the countries of the Middle East. This principle has now been affirmed by four American Presidents. The second is our defense of the basic interest of the entire world community in the freedom of the seas. As a leading maritime nation, we have a vital interest in upholding freedom of the seas, and the right of passage through straits of an international character.

As you know, the United States considers the Gulf of Aqaba to be an international waterway and believes that the entire international maritime community has a substantial interest in assuring that the right of passage through the Strait of Tiran and Gulf is maintained.

I am sure Foreign Minister Eban has reported to you the written statement which I had prepared and from which Ambassador Harman made notes during our meeting of May 26./3/ The full text of that statement is as follows:

“The United States has its own constitutional processes which are basic to its action on matters involving war and peace. The Secretary General has not yet reported to the UN Security Council and the Council has not yet demonstrated what it may or may not be able or willing to do although the United States will press for prompt action in the UN.

“I have already publicly stated this week our views on the safety of Israel and on the Strait of Tiran. Regarding the Strait, we plan to pursue vigorously the measures which can be taken by maritime nations to assure that the Strait and Gulf remain open to free and innocent passage of the vessels of all nations.

“I must emphasize the necessity for Israel not to make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities. Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone. We cannot imagine that it will make this decision.”……

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, one of the few openly authoritarian organizations functioning in the United States, once sued the Food and Drug Administration for refusing to regulate Americans’ salt intake. No worries: This week, the Obama administration finally embraced CSPI’s junk science and allowed the FDA to set new “guidelines” to “nudge” companies into treating a perfectly harmless ingredient as if it were a dangerous chemical.

Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell explained that pressuring private companies into lowering sodium levels is “about putting power back in the hands of consumers.” Of course, consumers already have an array of bland, low-sodium choices, if they desire. But in progressive-speak, limiting people’s choices is the same as giving them power. According to our government, consumers’ having too many choices means “the deck has been stacked against them.”

The good news is that the FDA is almost always wrong about everything. The bad news is that these guidelines set an incredibly ridiculous precedent that allows our intrusive government to mislead Americans with bad advice.

But let’s concede the point for a moment and say that sodium is killing you.

If you’re one of those last starry-eyed idealists, you may ask yourself: “What governing principle empowers the Obama administration to launch crusades that ensure that every citizen is living salubriously? What principle authorizes the state to control how salty my soup is?” Life is a killer, after all. If Washington, D.C., can regulate the amount of ingredients in foods — not poisonous ingredients, or instantaneously unhealthy ingredients, or even hidden ingredients, but ingredients that the CSPI has decided to whine about — what can’t it regulate? And if salt is worthy of all this attention, why is the Obama administration allowing citizens to commit mass suicidal acts by ingesting sugar? Or dairy? Or bleached white flour? Or canola oil?

President Obama has been traveling around the country touting the robustness of the nation’s economy during his two terms. You might call it the Wishful Thinking Tour.

“From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% annually,” Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Since 2000, it has grown at half that rate — 1.76%. Even in the years since the bottom of the great recession in 2009, which should have been a time of fast catch-up growth, the economy has only grown at 2%.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial on February 5 provides context to that slow economic growth: “The overriding problem continues to be a lack of business confidence and investment, which leads to slower growth, which gives the U.S. economy a lower margin for absorbing growth shocks from around the world.”

But the crisis in business confidence and investment is only a symptom. The underlying disease is the panoply of anti-innovation policies, actions, and attitudes of the Obama administration. Obama’s White House has been an outlier — to the high side — in the number of “economically significant” regulations (those that are expected to cost Americans $100 million or more annually) it has added. According to Daniel Pérez, of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, “As of the end of January 2016, Obama had 393, with 12 months remaining in his administration,” and the most recent of the administration’s “unified agendas,” released last November, indicated that more than 2,000 regulations are in the pipeline, of which 144 are deemed economically significant, a new record.

The regulations cut a huge swath through the American economy. They include labeling requirements for pet food, new test procedures for battery chargers, mandated paid sick leave for contractors, and speed governors for trucks, and a host of new rules that will limit energy consumption and increase the price of household appliances.

This month will mark the 49th anniversary of the Six-Day War, fought between June 5 and 10, 1967 by Israel against the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It was a war intended to annihilate Israel as stated clearly by Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1965: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand; we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.” His threats were echoed by then Syrian Minister of Defense Hafez al Assad who was to become Syria’s President: “Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united. As a military man, I believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”

In their jihadist agenda they received the blessings of the entire Arab world. President Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq exulted: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map.”

King Hussein of Jordan, the pluckier papa of the present King Abdullah, was repeatedly asked by Israel’s leaders to stay out of the war, but anxious to shore up his standing in the Arab League he signed a defense pact with Egypt and joined the war against Israel. As a result, he lost control of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The rest is history. Israel won a decisive victory, inspiring pride and confidence in Diaspora Jews, respect and admiration from military and defense experts throughout the world, and resolve among dissidents in the Soviet Union who organized a powerful army of “refuseniks.”

The 1967 war was won in battle but lost in the war of words. Israel’s media and leaders immediately referred to Judea and Samaria as “occupied territory,” and its Arab inhabitants as “Palestinians.”

After defeat, the Arabs and their protagonists replaced the emphasis on refugees with a myth of victimization under “occupation” by Israel. The media, academics, and politicians bought into the lies and “occupation” is now the buzzword for the morally degenerate boycott and divest movements ostensibly seeking “justice” for the Palestinian Arabs.

In fact, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were under illegal occupation from 1949 until 1967. Jordan’s rule was recognized only by Pakistan and England. In further contravention of international law which decreed that Jerusalem would be an open city, the Arabs trashed Jewish shrines, forbade access to Jews and limited access to Christian churches and shrines. Arabs built settlements throughout the area, but they made sure that the “refugee camps” were maintained in squalor as poster boys for anti-Israel propaganda.

There was no outcry about this illegal occupation, not even from the Palestine Liberation Organization which was formed in 1963 out of an alphabet soup of splinter terrorist groups who all adhered to one main principle of the Palestine National Charter, namely, the destruction of Israel, every inch of which was considered then and now as “occupied.”

The “occupied” Arabs of the West Bank enjoy basic freedoms unavailable to them in any Arab nations.

They might do well to consider some of the “justice” perpetrated on the Arabs by other Arabs.

Widely known as “the skeptical environmentalist,” Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg has been vilified for his views on climate change. In this documentary, a companion to his book of the same name, Lomborg expounds on his opinion that the earth is not facing an imminent environmental catastrophe, contrary to the prevailing opinion of the scientific community. The filmmakers follow him as he travels the planet sharing his views in a series of interviews and lectures.

Cool It is a groundbreaking book that transformed the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns. Sundance ward winning director Ondi Timoner filmed a documentary with the same name based on the book and following Bjorn Lomborg for almost a year.