RUTHFULLY YOURS

So much for Europe’s efforts to put the junk science surrounding genetically modified (GMO) food to rest. Berlin last week signaled it will prohibit cultivation of GMO crops in Germany, even if the crops have been approved by EU scientific bodies and despite an attempt by Brussels to legalize them.

Berlin is using an opt-out option granted by the EU to member states in April. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker moved to keep GMO foods generally legal in the EU, but he bowed to green pressure to allow individual states to prohibit EU-approved GMOs in response to concerns that “are usually not based on science but on other considerations.” That means politically driven consumer opposition or agricultural protectionism.

Obama is giving the mountain its Alaskan native name on the eve of visit.
Having spent four decades in a towering identity crisis, North America’s tallest peak is changing names, from Mount McKinley to Denali.

The White House said Sunday that Sally Jewell used her authority as secretary of the Interior Department to switch to the name given to the mountain by Alaskan native tribes.

“Generally believed to be central to the Athabaskan creation story, Denali is a site of significant cultural importance to many Alaska natives,” the White House said in a written statement. The change was announced on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Alaska.

Denali, an Athabaskan word meaning “the high one,” has been the name used by Native Alaskans for centuries, and Mt. McKinley has long been a politically controversial replacement. A prospector exploring the area named the 20,320-foot-high peak after William McKinley after his nomination for president in 1896. In 1901, after Mr. McKinley was assassinated, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names “hurriedly” endorsed it despite the fact that the president had no connection to the mountain, according to the 1995 cartography book “Drawing the Lines—Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy” by Mark S. Monmonier.

They are fleeing the war in Syria—and turmoil in Iran, Afghanistan and beyond.
Lesbos, Greece

They wash ashore daily. This Greek island is the first port of call for many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the war-torn failed states that encircle Europe today. Some 33,000 arrived in Lesbos in August, according to international aid groups, though local authorities believe the real number was much higher. Roughly a third escape Syria’s war zones. The rest hail from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia, even Bangladesh.

Popular with tourists for its mountain vistas overlooking a deep-blue Aegean, Lesbos now doubles as a front-line processing center amid the biggest global refugee crisis since World War II. From here, the refugees sail on commercial vessels to Athens, then make their way by train, bus and foot to Macedonia toward destinations in Western and Northern Europe. The journey begins the moment the they set foot on Lesbos.

Disembarking dingy boats on the island’s northern shoreline, five miles from the Turkish coast, they walk to a makeshift outdoor camp in Molyvos, the first European town they encounter. Body odor mixed with the stench of urine engulfs you even before you set foot in the camp. Families sleep on the ground, garbage strewn all around them.

It’s a mystery to us where President Obama or his interior secretary, Sally Jewell, gets the authority to rename in Alaska a mountain whose name was ratified by Congress a century ago as McKinley. We can understand the Democratic Party’s interest, in that McKinley, a Republican, was a particularly fine President. He was, moreover, one of four presidents felled by an assassin. We can understand, too, the sentiments of Alaska, whose legislature has wanted to change the name. Where, though, does the president come off doing this by fiat?

‘Everything, all the time.” That’s how the Eagles once described life in the fast lane. Those words now epitomize Big Government in the Obama era.

Obama maintains a southern “border” that deserves those sneer quotes. He let cyber attackers seize the personnel records of some 22 million federal workers. And in his spectacularly dysfunctional Veterans Affairs system, combat vets literally drop dead waiting for medical care while corrupt staffers shred patients’ files to cover up their toxic incompetence and lassitude.

Despite this mind-blowing incapacity to perform core functions, Obama’s minions stay busy, busy, busy doing everything, all the time, everywhere else. Consider these examples of their micro-mismanagement:

On page 30 of a 101-page document titled “Energy Conservation Program: Test Procedure for Automatic Commercial Ice Makers,” the U.S. Department of Energy announces that it will “require that the ice hardness factor, as defined in AHRI Standard 810-2007 with Addendum 1, be calculated, except that it shall reference the corrected net cooling effect per pound of ice . . . using seasoned, block ice.”

“The EPA is out of control. Like the rest of our expanding federal bureaucracy, it has seized power the Constitution never intended it to have — power that diminishes states’ sovereignty and the rights to private property. The EPA must be reined in — or abolished”

Regulation: A federal judge has once again slapped down the Environmental Protection Agency, this time for its attempt to seize control of virtually all water, anywhere in America. Is there no end to the EPA’s overreach?

Judge Ralph Erickson minced no words in condemning the EPA’s attempt to control much of America’s privately held land by regulating the water on it, calling the EPA regulation “inexplicable, arbitrary and devoid of a reasoning process.”

Erickson issued an injunction in the 13 states that sued. But the EPA, never one to give up a power grab, says it will impose its rule on the rest of us anyway.

A few weeks ago, the California education department did a peculiar thing: It scrubbed historical data about standardized-test scores from its public DataQuest website. This being a government agency, it immediately began to lie to the public about why it had done this.

California law forbids using comparisons between different tests to set policy or evaluate programs. This makes sense: If last year 40 percent of students received 85th-percentile ratings on a standardized test and then this year 70 percent of students received 85th-percentile ratings on a different standardized test, it is likely that the radical difference is in the test, not in students’ performance. The law, however, says not one word about making historical test-score data available to the public or suppressing that data.

Naturally, California then cooked up a new lie: The data hadn’t been deleted at all, the education department said, simply moved to another part of the website. That might be technically true, inasmuch as the data was no longer available on the section of the website where — get this — historical data about test scores is published; the department says it was still made available to researchers. That’s one definition of public service: making it more difficult for citizens to access information about their government, obstructing informed democracy, and being a general pain in the Trump.

That a serious Christian can place political agreement with an intransigent enemy before the simple morality of calling for an immediate end to terrorism beggars belief.

Given that the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel or the rights of the Jewish people, the Pope’s recognizing a state of Palestine seems a contradictory gesture. By making this badly-thought-out choice, the Vatican simply encourages the Palestinians in their conviction that their tactics of violence, rejection of peace offers and glorification of terrorists and suicide bombers across their towns and villages is, regardless of all morality and prudent policy, the right course of action.

If morality is at stake, it will also enthuse them to continue with the lies about Jews, hate videos, hate preaching, false historicism, and school textbooks and TV shows that teach children to despise Jews as “sons of apes and pigs.” Is that what the Vatican really wants? Is that a goal remotely in keeping with the wishes of Pope Francis?

“Christian children are massacred, and everything is done in plain sight. Islamists proclaim on a daily basis that they will not stop until Christianity is wiped off the face of the earth. So are the world Christian bodies denouncing the Islamic forces for the ethnic cleansing, genocide and historic demographic-religious revolution their brethren is [sic] suffering? No. Christians these days are busy targeting the Israeli Jews. The Pope, who should represent the voice of one billion Catholics around the world, was not busy these days in writing an encyclical against the Islamic persecution of Christians. No, the Catholic Church was very busy in signing a historic agreement with the “State of Palestine,” a non-existent entity which, if it (God forbid) should be created, would be the first state after the Nazi Germany to officially ban the Jews and expel the remnant of its Christians.” – Giulio Meotti, journalist.

One might safely assume that Jesus would never have approved of Palestinian anti-Semitism, the preaching of bilious hatred, or the infliction of violence on innocent followers of the community to which he himself and his mother belonged.

English crusaders turned to Jewish moneylenders to raise funds. In 1149, one decided to kill his creditor.

Of all the calumnies leveled at the Jews down the centuries, none has been as lethal as the blood libel. This infamia, which “branded the Jews as bloodthirsty ‘others’ who deserved to be killed,” as the late, revered historian Robert Wistrich explained it, has appeared in a dizzying range of locations. From the 12th-century kingdoms of England and France, the blood libel, which accused entire Jewish communities of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes, spread to other territories and cultures, among them Poland and Lithuania in the 17th century, Damascus in the 19th century, and Kiev as recently as 1913.

“The Murder of William of Norwich,” by the Princeton academic E.M. Rose, is a landmark of historical research into the grotesque 800-year history of blood-libel accusations. The book traces in forensic detail—Ms. Rose calls it microhistory—the circumstances around the emergence of the first recorded blood libel in history and in so doing demonstrates how the libel was used as a tool in wider Christian struggles over power, money and territory, in which the Jews became all too convenient pawns.

The story of an apprentice boy named William, who would eventually be canonized as St. William of Norwich, begins in eastern England in 1144, less than a century after the Norman Conquest. As Ms. Rose demonstrates in her mesmerizing study, it was a dark time for England. Violent civil war raged between King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror, and his cousin Matilda, who challenged him to the throne. The situation was considered so dire that, in the words of one chronicler of the time, it was as if “Christ and his saints were asleep.”

For years we’ve warned readers about the burgeoning calamity known as student loans, and the latest news is that the debt bomb is hurting the economy as well as the federal fisc. New evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia illustrates how subsidized student loans sap small business creation.

Student loans have ballooned tenfold since 1999 to more than $1 trillion, the authors note in a July report. Other consumer debt—mortgages, car loans, credit cards—dipped during the 2008 financial crisis, but student debt doubled from $547 billion in 2007, nearly all of it on Education Department books. The Philly Fed is the first to examine how mortgaging an education influences entrepreneurship.