RUTHFULLY YOURS

The courage and sacrifice of today’s Christian martyrs should not go unnoticed and unappreciated. One such heroic figure, the 94-year-old Roman Catholic bishop Cosma Shi Enxiang, has recently died in Chinese custody, according to an official government statement, reported on February 2 by an independent Catholic news service focusing on Asia. His generation felt the brunt of Chinese Communist cruelty, but his death as a religious prisoner reminds us that religious repression in China is far from over.

Altogether, since 1954, Bishop Shi was held captive for over 40 years by the Communist government for his religion, making him one of the longest serving political prisoners of our age. (I intend in no way to minimize the suffering of Nelson Mandela and Alexander Solzhenitsyn by pointing out that Mandela was imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid government for 27 years, and that Solzhenitsyn was forced to spend eleven years in the Soviet gulag.)

Genocides happen when the civilized world shuts its eyes and does nothing while some gang of barbarians slaughters human beings by the thousands. Civilized silence promises safety to the killers and demoralizes their victims.

Samantha Power, Obama’s U.N. ambassador, has made a career criticizing U.S. government passivity in the face of genocide. She has written Pulitzer Prize-winning books like A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.

Now she has been U.N. ambassador – a major power position in the Obama administration, the most powerful political job she is ever likely to have to do what she wants.

What has Dr. Power done about genocide? What has she actually done to stop, or even to complain in public about, groups and regimes that thirst after genocide, like Iran, ISIS, the Taliban, the Wahhabi priesthood of Saudi Arabia, the mass killing rulers of the Sudan? What about Boko Haram killing, enslaving, and selling children in Nigeria? What about the Kenya massacres? What has she done?

“What should concern everyone who places value on life and religious freedom is that the murderers are not lunatics. They are calculated, savvy and entirely convinced they are following the commands of their religion. If they continue to attract adherents in the Middle East, and even in east London or Paris, the world is in trouble.”

The video of ISIS barbarians burning to death a Jordanian pilot sure makes one empathize with Israel. Thirty years ago, Israel was an oasis of sanity surrounded by nation-states essentially hostile but essentially tamed. Now, Israel is surrounded by an exploding movement of bloodthirsty ISIS murderers. Contrary to what President Obama would have you believe, the I in ISIS doesn’t stand for International.

What is exploding around Israel in the Middle East is now a modern death cult. Only in a culture as warped and backwards as the Middle East could a video of a human being burned alive in a cage attract supporters. Yet the American left wailed about Abu Ghraib for months.

ObamaCare Architect Gruber Wants to Tax Americans by Weight

Socialized medicine. It’s like a totalitarian dictatorship run by a million bureaucrats based on ideas from control freaks.

If you let it through the door, you’re giving it permission to terrorize you any way the sociopaths running it can think of. And they can think of a lot of ways.

Jonathan Gruber, long credited as the architect of ObamaCare, once discussed the necessity of taxing fat people by body weight in order to fight obesity.

“Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight,” Gruber wrote in an essay for the National Institute for Health Care Management in April 2010, just months after helping design ObamaCare with the president in the Oval Office and during the period in which he was under contract as an Obama administration consultant.

“While it is hard to conceive of this approach being a common public policy tool in the near term, such taxation may be happening indirectly through health insurance surcharges,” he wrote. “Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI.”

“The new health reform legislation increases this differential to 30 percent, with the possibility of rising to 50 percent. Results of programs that use differential premiums to impose direct financial penalties for obesity will bear watching in the future.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/islam-a-house-of-cards-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Michael Loftus, host of The Flipside With Michael Loftus, Morgan Brittany, a conservative TV and movie star, and Tommi Trudeau, host of Politics Tonight With Tommi Trudeau.

The Gang discussed Islam: A House of Cards?, analyzing why Islam’s guardians behave as if even a tiny bit of criticism will bring the whole structure down. The discussion was also focused on Hijab Day at NP3 High School, Michelle Obama’s “No” to Hijab in Riyadh, A Day in the Life of a Dissident Reporter in Obama’s America, and much more.

Homeland Security attempted to tackle the immigration crisis by cobbling together a bill, H.R. 399, the Secure Our Borders First Act of 2015 that would purportedly secure the US/Mexican border in increments that would ultimately bring a semblance of security to that dangerous border that at present is little more than a speed bump.

Those increments would be years apart. For example, while this bill requires that a biometric departure system would be a part of the measures to be implemented in conjunction with border security, this component of the bill would not have to be in place for seven years.

Let’s put this lunacy into proper perspective. On December 7, 1941 the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Almost 3,000 Americans lost their lives.

In just 44 months the United States, working with its allies including Russia, an ally of questionable loyalty, we won the war and defeated the Nazis and the Axis Powers. In order to accomplish this incredible achievement, the United States designed and constructed then-revolutionary fleets of a wide array of aircraft and ships. America’s “Greatest Generation” invented and rushed brand new weapons into production, including the world’s first atomic bombs.

In a morally coherent world, the chilling statement “Hamas & Sharia law have taken over UC Davis” would not have been spoken publicly, and certainly not by an elected student leader at an American public university.

But in California, the veritable epicenter of academic anti-Israelism and its attendant stealth jihad, this statement, spoken last week by student leader Azka Fayyaz during a divestment resolution debate at the University of California, Davis, is par for the course, and indicative of how debased the conversation about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has actually become.

Thus, while members of the UC Davis chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and others who supported this noxious vote purport to care solely about the malevolence of Israel and punishing the Jewish state for its political misbehavior and human rights abuses, at least some part of that campaign is clearly to embrace terrorism, as well as the rigid, oppressive precepts of a seventh-century theology comprising the tenets of Islam.

Are those absurd pronouncements by Ms. Fayyaz—that Sharia law and the invidious ideology of Hamas now define, and represent, the university—beliefs that are widely embraced on this American campus? What does Sharia law even have to do with UC Davis in the first place, or for that matter a resolution urging the school to divest from companies that contribute to the defense of Israel? Does being a supporter of Palestinian self-determination mean that the genocidal Islamist group Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and other nations, is now considered an appropriate group worthy of support and adulation?

To justify an illegal ouster of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Hillary Clinton falsely claimed the Libyan leader was planning genocidal attacks against his domestic enemies, an investigative report in the Washington Times suggests.

Documents and audio recordings examined by the newspaper suggest the former U.S. secretary of state had no clear plan for how to deal with the Libyan crisis she created and whether the lawlessness and chaos she spawned in that country led to the deadly Muslim terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.

Clinton was secretary of state on that terrible day. Despite her disastrous tenure at Foggy Bottom which saw Muslim irredentist movements gain ground in North Africa and the Middle East, she continues to be the early frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She resigned as secretary of state in early 2013, paving the way for the utterly undistinguished then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to take over as chief public cheerleader for the Obama administration’s pro-Islamist campaign.

The country needs a billion-dollar ‘tech unicorn’ to break through to the top, say experts

Israel has been ranked number five overall on this year’s Bloomberg Innovation Index, an annual ranking of countries that measures performance in research and development, tech education, patents, and other marks of technology prowess. Fifth place marked a dramatic rise from last year’s 30th.

Israel did especially well in the R&D category, with the country ranking second in GDP expenditure on research, as well as on the percentage of the labor force with advanced degrees and the number of research professionals per million population. Israel ranked fourth overall in both those categories.

The study measured country rankings in six areas: R&D, manufacturing, the number of high-tech companies located in each country (the total number, not adjusted for population size), the number of students enrolled in post-secondary education programs, the number of PhDs working in R&D, and the number of patents per capita.

If the world doesn’t watch out, bacteria that just a few years ago were held at bay by antibiotics could reassert themselves in an aggressive and deadly manner. Drug-resistant bacteria are already responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and that could climb to millions in the coming decade if something isn’t done.

So far, the response of science has been to develop ever-stronger antibiotics. But researchers at Tel Aviv University believe they have a solution that will be a lot more effective in the long run. The TAU solution uses fire to fight fire – inserting a virus that makes the antibiotic-resistant bacteria “sick” and weak enough to be killed off by drugs.