RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/pete-du-pont-conservative-ahead-of-his-time/

Du Pont, who died Saturday, was a great two-term GOP governor and conservative innovator.

Pete du Pont, the man who inadvertently may have jump-started Joe Biden’s political career in Delaware, passed away on Saturday at age 86.

Du Pont, an heir to one of the most successful corporate legacies in America, had a bigger impact on American government than his failed 1988 presidential bid for the GOP nomination would indicate. He served as a congressman and then rescued his bankrupt state during two terms as governor by applying classic Reagan conservatism: cutting taxes, deregulating, restraining spending, and expanding economic opportunity.

His record as Delaware’s governor won bipartisan plaudits and prompted him to run for president in 1988, when Ronald Reagan retired. His campaign attracted plenty of attention from pundits, but GOP primary voters plumped for a more well-known member of another aristocratic family: George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president.

Though he never ran for office again, du Pont devoted another quarter century to building and supporting the conservative movement, including a stint as president of the National Review Institute from 1994 to 1997.

He studied engineering at Princeton and law at Harvard, and then he worked for six years in product development at the family company. Frustrated that he would have to wait his turn to run the company until he was past 60, he entered politics at age 33 and won a seat in Delaware’s part-time legislature. In 1970, he easily won Delaware’s sole congressional seat.

In 1972, Republican U.S. senator J. Caleb Boggs was preparing to retire. Du Pont prepared to run, but he would have faced then–Wilmington mayor Harry G. Haskell Jr. in a bitter Senate primary. To avoid a divisive primary, President Richard Nixon helped convince Boggs to run again with united party support.

But Boggs was 63 — he looked tired and ran a lackluster campaign. He was upset by a hard-charging young Democrat named Joe Biden, who beat Boggs, even though he didn’t reach the required age of 30 until after the election. We can speculate how different history might have been if du Pont had beaten Biden and sent “Uncle Joe” in a different direction.

Instead, in 1976, du Pont decided to tackle a real challenge. Delaware had 9 percent unemployment, some of the highest taxes in the nation, a staggering debt, and one of the lowest bond ratings in the country. Previous governors had failed to halt the slide: None had been reelected in 25 years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/love-song-bill-and-melinda-daniel-greenfield/

After Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleoptra, and Pepé Le Pew and Penelope, there were Bill and Melinda. The Microsoft technocrat and his spouse were a love story for the ages.

In 1993, Bill proposed to Melinda: an executive at his company. In 1994, they were married. In 1995, Melinda debuted Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob treated computer users like idiots who were too stupid to be allowed to use their computers without a lot of handholding.

Condescending handholding was also what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offered the world as one of the industry’s most notoriously miserable human beings decided to become a philanthropist and save the world from all the people who weren’t running it properly.

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, left his day-to-day role in 2008, and departed as chairman of the board in 2014. He also jettisoned 8 million shares of the company.

Forget CEO of Microsoft, Bill would use his vast wealth to become the CEO of the world.

Each of Bill’s resignations followed another ‘Microsoft Bob’, another failed Microsoft project, from Windows 2000, to Windows Vista in 2006, and most infamously, Windows 8 in 2014.

Every time Microsoft screwed up badly, Bill Gates seemed to decide that he should spend less time trying to make the company that had temporarily made him the richest man in the world succeed, and more time trying to run the world. Running the world hasn’t gone well for Gates.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/texas-muslim-who-helped-his-father-evade-capture-robert-spencer/

In Fort Worth, Texas on Tuesday, a 32-year-old Muslim named Islam Said was sentenced to ten years in prison for spending the last thirteen years helping his father, Yaser Said, one of the FBI’s Most Wanted criminals, evade capture. Yaser Said was wanted for murdering his two daughters, Islam Said’s sisters, Amina and Sarah Said. What kind of man would know that his father had murdered his two sisters and then help his father avoid justice, rather than turning him in? The answer to that question is far too uncomfortable and inconvenient for law enforcement officials to face honestly.

Islam Said was arrested along with Yaser last August. Apparently he was in hiding with his father, although he doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the killings. And according to the Dallas Morning News, Islam Said denies that the killings were honor murders or had anything to do with Islam. “It’s something else. Religion has nothing to do with it.”

Yet that raises the question of why Islam Said was with his father at all. If these weren’t honor killings, why would Islam Said go on the run with Yaser and help him hide for all these years? Why wouldn’t he have the normal human reaction of thinking that what his father had done in murdering his sisters was abhorrent, and turn his father in to authorities? Did Islam Said’s commitment to the religion of Islam override that natural human reaction and make him think that what his father had done was good and praiseworthy?

For despite media denial and obfuscation of the fact, honor killing is something that many Muslims believe to be good and in accord with their faith. According to Islamic law, “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law. In this case the victim was the murderer’s daughter, a victim to the culture of violence and intimidation that such laws help create.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-scientific-method-identity-politics-11620581262?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

The Biden administration is considering a laudable major expansion in funding for scientific agencies to shore up America’s research base. The money will help, but it doesn’t obviate the need to scrutinize who will be leading the government’s scientific efforts, as many of us did during President Trump’s term in office. The current emphasis in academic hiring on affirmative action shouldn’t be of concern here. We should expect that merit and accomplishment will guide promotion to the highest levels of scientific leadership. Even if the Biden administration may appear more in touch with the concerns of the scientific community, it isn’t excused from the duty to appoint qualified people to leadership positions.

Many don’t realize that the largest funder of physical science in the country isn’t the National Science Foundation, whose 2022 budget the Biden administration has proposed to increase by 20%, but the Energy Department. Here, too, the Biden administration is proposing a major funding increase.

The DOE Office of Science’s $7 billion budget, set to rise by $400 million, supports research in high-energy and nuclear physics with large accelerators, materials physics with X-ray synchrotrons, fusion and advanced scientific computers, and runs 10 national laboratories employing thousands of researchers.

President Biden has nominated Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, a soil biogeochemist from the University of California, Merced, to lead the Office of Science. Ms. Berhe will be the first black woman to lead the science office, happily lending a more diverse face to science in this country.

Ms. Berhe’s research program on soil chemistry, exploring the capture of carbon dioxide, is relevant to climate-change policy. But her research expertise isn’t in any of the Office of Science’s major programs, and she has no experience as a scientific administrator and minimal experience with the Energy Department itself.