NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Seth Cropsey — Restore the U.S. Sixth Fleet

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

In the Middle East, ships on the sea can be as important boots on the ground.
Whatever else was accomplished, the congressional hearings on Benghazi last month were a reminder that the Obama administration’s Libyan expedition failed. Libya has been in turmoil since the beginning of the Libyan civil war in 2011. American airstrikes and a no-fly zone helped a mix of moderate and Islamist groups topple Moammar Qaddafi’s brutal regime in 2011, but the country is no more stable. Libya descended into civil war again in 2014, with the internationally recognized government fighting for control of the country against Ansar al-Sharia and the Islamist New General National Congress.

The situation is much worse today. As of October 2015, the Islamic State (IS) has taken military control of the area around Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace. Sirte lies along the Libyan coastline, positioned between the major ports of Tripoli and Benghazi. The Islamic State now has full control of a strategically positioned coastal area in an unstable country that has become a proxy battlefield for Middle Eastern powers, and through which millions of refugees from Africa might be allowed to pass on their way to Europe.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

For Syrian Christians and Other Non-Muslims, U.S. Refugee Policy Is a Barred Gate By Nina Shea —

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

Over the past five years of Syria’s civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Syrian Christian refugees, a lone Yazidi, and fewer than ten Druze, Bahá’ís, and Zoroastrians combined. That so few of the Syrian refugees coming here are non-Muslim minorities is due to American reliance on a United Nations refugee-resettlement program that disproportionately excludes them. Past absolute totals of Syrian refugees to the U.S. under this program were small, but as the Obama administration now ramps up refugee quotas by tens of thousands, it would be unconscionable to continue with a process that has consistently forsaken some of the most defenseless and egregiously persecuted of those fleeing Syria.

The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group — Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions — constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Organic Farming’s Deservedly Dismal Future By Henry I. Miller & Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

The organic-products industry, which has been on a tear for the past decade, is running scared. Challenged by progress in modern genetic engineering and state-of-the-art pesticides — which are denied to organic farmers — the organic movement is ratcheting up its rhetoric and bolstering its anti-innovation agenda while trying to expand a consumer base that shows signs of hitting the wall.

Genetic-engineering-labeling referendums funded by the organic industry failed last year in Colorado and Oregon, following similar defeats in California and Washington. Even worse for the industry, a recent Supreme Court decision appears to proscribe on First Amendment grounds the kind of labeling they want. A June 2015 Supreme Court decision has cleared a judicial path to challenge the constitutionality of special labeling — “compelled commercial speech” — to identify foods that contain genetically engineered (sometimes called “genetically modified”) ingredients. The essence of the decision is the expansion of the range of regulations subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most rigorous standard of review for constitutionality, to include special labeling laws.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

New ISIS video sends message to Pres. Obama- by Lisa Daftari

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

ISIS has released a new video threatening Pres. Obama and accusing him of “waging war against Allah.”

The message refers back to the U.S./Kurdish coordinated raid that freed 70 hostages in Hawijah, Northern Iraq last week.

Titled “The reality of the American raid,” the video appears to be a recounting of the attack by ISIS sympathizers and concludes with the execution of 4 prisoners, believed to be Iraqis.

An English speaking jihadi draws his knife as a prisoner dressed in an orange jumpsuit kneels in front of him. Facing the camera, he says:

“Obama, you have learned a new lesson. 600 soldiers of the Caliphate faced four hundred of your children. They killed and injured them. By Allah’s grace, you are probably surprised by this. Oh crusaders, it is the support of Allah. You did not gain anything. You returned to your bases with loses and humiliation. Obama, you wage war against Allah; He supports us against you. There is the promise of Allah; Allah will never fail in His promise.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Long Can Europe’s Welfare States Welcome Refugees and Migrants? John Fund

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

The growing refugee crisis in Europe is clearly a humanitarian issue. But if leaders don’t bring some common sense into the equation, the humanitarian problems could become a geopolitical crisis. The U.S. needs to heed the lessons of Europe because a similar situation could erupt on our borders.

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s Social Democratic foreign minister, declared this week that the refugee flow in her country, with its current population of 9.8 million, was enormous: “We cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year — in the long run, our system will collapse. And that welcome is not going to receive popular support.”

The 190,000 refugees expected in Sweden this year would be the equivalent of 6.5 million people arriving in the U.S. — the population of Indiana.

A major reason so many refugees want to settle in Sweden, Germany, and other Northern European countries is that they have generous welfare-state programs for non-citizens. Even so, some refugees can be picky. The Swedish newspaper Local reported last week that “more than 30 asylum seekers refused to get off a bus that took them to temporary accommodation at a holiday park on Sunday night because they didn’t want to stay in such a rural location.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Calcification of Climate Science By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

According to Lord Christopher Monckton, Thomas R. Karl’s much-feted paper refuting “the Pause,” the inexplicable 19-year standstill in the earth’s average global surface temperature, has a small problem: To disappear the warming hiatus as Karl and his co-authors purport to do, you have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. (Not even the current president can do that.)

Karl and his colleagues, whose work appeared in the June issue of Science, “updated” previous data sets used to assess changes in surface temperatures, which supporters maintain is merely Science being self-critical and Scientific. Others — a lot of others — say different. E. Calvin Beisner rounds up criticisms at the website Watts Up With That, and quotes with approval the verdict of Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry:

This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. . . . So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Was Netanyahu Right That Islam Changed Nazism and Not Vice-Versa? By Andrew G. Bostom

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

During a recent speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appropriately decried [1] the “apologetics” which have minimized the role played by ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin el-Husseini [2] (1895-1974) — founder of the modern Palestinian Muslim movement — in fomenting genocidal Islamic Jew-hatred. Netanyahu made these simple, irrefragable points, demonstrating [3] how from the 1920s through (in particular) the World War II era:

… the father of the Palestinians at that time, with no [Jewish] state and no so-called “occupation,” no territories and no settlements, already sought, through systematic incitement, to annihilate the Jews. Regrettably, Hajj Amin el-Husseini is still a venerated figure in Palestinian society, he appears in study books and is exalted as the father of the nation, and this incitement that began then, incitement to kill Jews, continues.

As I noted in what was the first full English translation and detailed analysis (here [2], here [4]) of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews — which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, till now — this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement was pure Islamic dogma devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists, epitomized by Johan (aka, Johann, Johannes) von Leers. (See Foreword by Julian Huxley, History on a Racial Basis [5], an abridged translation of Geschichte auf Rassicher Grundlage [6], London, 1936.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Community Organizing America By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

The modern art of a community organizer seems fairly simple.

The proverbial agitator identifies a particular aggrieved racial, ethnic, gender, or class group that believes equality of opportunity must guarantee equality of result.

Then he “organizes” the victims by claiming that their ostensible failure to obtain parity can only be due to systematic racism, sexism, and bias by the supposed callous establishment majority (usually emblemized as callous white, male, heterosexual Christians). Myth is useful (e.g., “hands up, don’t shoot” or “one in four women on campus suffer sexual assault”).

Next he mounts a shrill campaign to demand “fairness” and “equality” (demonstrations, demonization of public figures, boycotts, media campaigns, showing up outside the homes of supposed enemies of the people, getting “in their faces,” and metaphorically “taking a gun to a knife fight,” etc.).

BOOKS Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

· An Israeli cancer treatment causes tumors to self-destruct.

Fooling cancer cells. Israel’s BioSight has developed the amino acid astrabine which acts as a “Trojan Horse” chemotherapy treatment that kills leukemia cells without harming healthy tissue. Astrabine closely resembles a protein called aspargine that leukemia cells depend on and the cancer cells are fooled into self-destruction.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-start-up-uses-trojan-horse-technology-to-kill-cancer-cells/
Muscular dystrophy treatment success. Israel’s BioBlast announced promising interim results from its Phase II study of its Cabaletta treatment for oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD). Due to the success BioBlast seeks to fast track a Phase III study in 2016, leading to a 2017 launch date.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-bioblast-orphan-drug-gives-hope-to-opmd-patients-1001076594

· Israel was elected to the membership of a UN Space Committee.
· Ethiopia is to install an Israeli solar power plant.
· An innovative all-terrain Israeli suitcase is successfully funded.
· A delegation of 50 Australian entrepreneurs is currently visiting Israel.
· Two Israelis won medals at a judo competition in Abu Dhabi.
· Thousands flock to pro-Israel rallies in New York, Rome, Paris, Madrid and Kiev.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama’s EEOC Accommodates Muslim Religious Beliefs By Amil Imani and James Hyde

Posted By on November 2nd, 2015

Overdriveonline, a trucking industry news site, blares the headline:

“EEOC awards Muslim truckers $240k after being fired for refusing to haul alcohol.” The Obama administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a trucking company, at taxpayer expense, when two Somali Muslim truck drivers were fired for refusing to haul alcohol. Doing so, the Islamists claimed, would infringe on their religious beliefs under “Islamic law.”

From the story: “EEOC also alleged that Star Transport could have but failed to accommodate their religious beliefs.” Stunning.

The intervention by EEOC was hypocritical, discriminatory and insanely out of equilibrium when the plight of Christians in the matrimonial business who object to providing goods and services for gay weddings is contrasted. Christian businesses are being fined; forced to take “diversity” propaganda courses or closed down for refusing to “accommodate” gay weddings. Are not their religious beliefs, duly protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment and 42 U.S. Code Chapter 21B – Religious Freedom Restoration equal to the beliefs of Muslims?

Since when does Islamic law trump the U.S. Constitution and U.S. federal law? For Obama, such violations of his oath began with the first breath he took after he took his inaugural oath. In fact, the scofflaw-in-chief gave us a glimpse of his personal religious preferences when, during his “Apology Tour,” he proclaimed to the world that, “The United States is no longer a Christian nation.” Had he taken the time to apply his finger to the nation’s pulse, he would have learned that an ABCNEWS/Beliefnet poll found that, “Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.” Granted, that number has diminished some since he first sat in the big chair, but it’s still north of 70%.