Hope for Stroke Victims

Medical technology continues to give us hope of prolonging and improving the quality of life for millions of people. A recent development reported in Technology Review may give hope to stroke victims in particular:

For the 800,000 people in the United States who suffer a stroke each year, the window for drug therapy closes in the first few hours after the attack. That leaves some seven million stroke survivors in this country alone with no medical alternative beyond physical therapy. A small pharmaceutical company in New York hopes to change that with a drug that may help patients regain some of their lost mobility six months or more after a stroke.

Strokes happen when blood stops flowing to part of the brain, often due to a blood clot. Without blood to bring new oxygen, cells in the affected region start to die. If the symptoms of stroke are recognized quickly enough and the victim is brought to a hospital within a few hours, doctors can administer a clot-dissolving drug to minimize the damage. But only a small fraction of stroke patients seek medical attention soon enough for this intervention.

In the future, stroke patients who miss this window and are affected by reduced mobility long after their stroke may be able to turn to a drug that helps damaged nerves transmit electrical signals in the brain.

Earlier this year, Acorda Therapeutics reported that the compound dalfampridine improved motor function in both the forelimbs and hind limbs of rats that had suffered a stroke. This month, the company began recruiting patients for a clinical trial to test the effects of the compound in human stroke patients. Acorda plans to enroll about 70 people who have had a stroke at least six months prior. "That's the time that deficits seem to stabilize, so we can eliminate naturally occurring improvements in patients," says Jeff MacDonald, an Acorda spokesman.

Acorda is also developing drugs to treat Multiple Sclerosis and spinal cord injuries:

Spinal-cord injuries still garner a lot of focus from the company, which hopes to begin testing a compound licensed from Medtronic that protects neurons from the wave of cell death that follows the initial injury. Medtronic had already shown the compound to be safe in healthy patients, and later this year, Acorda plans to test its efficacy in patients in the first hours after a spinal-cord injury.

Patients with injured spinal cords are not nearly as numerous as stroke patients, "but if you are talking about costs to society, spinal-cord injuries are extremely expensive," says Naomi Kleitman, a spinal-cord injury expert with NINDS. "They tend to happen in fairly young people who need a lot of medical and assistive help if they have severe injuries."

The company is also looking to treat longer-standing spinal-cord injuries with a drug that would help break down the scar tissue that forms around a spinal-cord injury. The scar tissue is thought to prevent nerves from establishing the new connections that may help patients recover some functionality. The product is still in early development, and one challenge will be devising a method to deliver the large scar-busting molecule to its target site.

Despite the pressing need, the small market for spinal-cord injury drugs may be one reason the condition doesn't get a lot of attention from pharmaceutical giants. "No one else wants to develop compounds to treat spinal-cord injury as seriously as Acorda," says Edward Hall, a neurologist and spinal-cord and brain-injury specialist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "These aren't going to be billion-dollar-a-year products."

We should be thankful that there are companies like Acorda out there, but we need also be mindful that Acorda stays in business only to the extent that it can make a profit. Government regulations and high taxation will make it much harder for these companies to keep doing research and may thus ensure the continued disability or deaths of a lot of people who might in the future have benefited from the work they do.

Worse Than Our Despisers

Christianity has enough enemies, it doesn't need more, and it especially doesn't need them in the pulpit. There are two kinds of preachers who give Christianity a black eye. One is the liberal who really doesn't believe the classic creeds of the church but refuses to do the honorable thing and resign his post. The other is the preacher who believes the creeds but piles on a whole lot else that turns the Gospel into something cruel, hard, and unloving.

The Westboro Baptist bunch are an example of the latter. They've been around for a while, but lately a lot more like them seem to be popping up. The most recent example is a pastor in Seneca, Kansas who's declaring that the government should kill homosexuals. He doesn't say that individuals should take it upon themselves to do this, mind you, but the government should.

The Blaze has the story:

Over the past few weeks, bizarre and distressing video and audio files purporting to show anti-gay sentiment in U.S. Christian churches have been emerging.

First, there was the story of a pastor who quipped about parents hitting boys who appear effeminate (he has since attempted to better frame his words). Then, there was Pastor Charles L. Worley, who touted putting gays and lesbians in an electric fence, where they would inevitably die off.

And who can forget the small child who is seen on video singing about how homosexuals won’t be entering heaven. Now, there’s yet another audio file emerging of a pastor claiming that the government should kill gays. While it seems almost unbelievable on the surface, the clip, which was published by GoodAsYou.org, showcases some shocking words coming from Pastor Curtis Knapp of New Hope Baptist Church in Seneca, Kansas.

In the audio clip, a voice that is attributed to Knapp can be heard saying, in part:

They should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That‘s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. It tends to limit conversions. It tends to limit people coming out of the closet. Oh, so you’re saying that we should go out and start killing them? No, I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.

Knapp appeared on CNN (via the network’s KTKA affiliate this morning) to discuss the controversial March 27 sermon. Rather than backing down on his words, he defended them, claiming that they were Biblical in nature.

We punish pedophilia. We punish incest. We punish polygamy and various things. It’s only homosexuality that is lifted out as an exemption,” he said, going on to say that gays shouldn’t have fear about his words. ”I don’t believe I should lay a finger against them. My hope is for their salvation, not for their death.

My hope is that this guy finds some other line of work. A pastor is supposed to model Christ to his congregation. Does Mr. Knapp really think Jesus, the one who rescued the woman about to be stoned for adultery, would have urged Caesar to execute gays? Does he really think that saying someone who has not raped or murdered should nevertheless be executed is compassionate and just? Does he really think that this is the image of him that Jesus wants us to present to a skeptical world?

I don't know how big Pastor Knapp's congregation is, but if it's got a hundred or so people in it, I'll bet that some of those people have loved ones who are homosexual. How does it make them feel to hear their pastor, a man who is supposedly speaking for Christ, say that their loved ones should be killed as though they were vicious criminals? What has happened to the adage that Christians hate the sin but love the sinner?

Here's video of Knapp being interviewed on CNN:

Men like Mr. Knapp do a deep disservice both to the Gospel and to the God they claim to serve. They should get out of the ministry until they realize how unChristlike and cruel their words are and repent of their pharisaism. As long as they're in the pulpit they make it entirely too easy for atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to caricature Christianity and for the rest of the world to ignore the claims of the Gospel.

About Birds

Byron links us to a piece at the Huffington Post on a book about birds for children. The article is titled Eleven Things You Didn't Know about Birds and has a slide show illustrating the eleven facts with a picture of the relevant bird.

The book and article are written by Bill Thompson who starts with this: Sociologists and cultural trend watchers have been decrying the broken connection between today's youth and nature. With so many stimulating digital options dominating the attention spans of young people, the worry is that we'll raise several generations who have no connection to or understanding of nature.

Birds provide an easy doorway to re-establishing this connection between kids and nature. Why? Because birds are almost everywhere, they are active, easy-to-see creatures, they often have bright, beautiful colors, and many birds sing melodious, enchanting songs. Most importantly, they capture our imagination with their ability to do something that we humans only figured out about 100 years ago: they can fly!

Go to the link for the slides. There are some beautiful birds to see there.

Escape from Camp 14

Some time ago I read a review of the book by Blaine Harden titled Escape From Camp 14, the story of a young North Korean named Shin Dong-hyuk who was born in a prison camp and managed at age twenty three to escape it - the only person who, born in a camp, has been known to have escaped.

The review prompted me to buy the book, and I encourage anyone looking for summer reading to do the same. The details of Shin's story are gripping, from the reason for his birth in the prison, to his childhood betrayal of his mother and brother, to his amazing escape, Harden's account makes you not want to stop reading.

Equally gripping is his ancillary description of the hell that is North Korea. The entire country is a prison that has deadened the souls of its people, of course, but the prison camps are places of especial savagery, cruelty, and amorality, a place where people have no hope, where all that matters is avoiding a beating and getting a scrap of food to stave off starvation.

Shin was so scarred by his experience, so emotionally stunted by what he did and what was done to him, that adjusting to life after his escape has been almost as difficult as living in Camp 14.

The book also offers a fascinating illustration of the depth of depravity to which people sink once they've conflated a deep hatred of Christianity with power. North Korea is spiritually barren and consequently the only morality is a might makes right ethic according to which whatever those who have power do is ipso facto right. It's a repetition of the trajectory of virtually every state of the twentieth century whose leaders were both atheists and politically all-powerful - from the Soviet Union to Germany to China to Cambodia to Cuba and dozens of lesser states. The stories of the miseries inflicted by these governments on their people are everywhere. North Korea is perhaps worse than most but only because its people suffer worse deprivations than have the people of other totalitarian states.

Anyway, I recommend the book. You won't be sorry you read it.

Polish Death Camps

It was doubtless an innocent mistake. The President didn't mean to offend Poles, nor did he mean to imply that WWII era extermination camps were operated by Poles. The only reason I even mention it is to show the hypocrisy of the Democrats and their media supporters who would be absolutely skewering George Bush had he made such a gaffe. We would never hear the end of it just as we still hear about Gerald Ford's "liberation of Eastern Europe", Dan Quayle's "potatoe", etc.

We also have been hearing, and will be hearing, about every error and faux pas committed by Mitt Romney from now until November. Each one will be held up as proof that Mr. Romney is intellectually unqualified to lead the nation's international affairs, but those who'll be promoting this meme will doubtless ignore Mr. Obama's howlers.

It seems that it could go without saying that no one who voted for a community organizer who assured us that he had campaigned in "all 57 states" (with one to go and two that he won't be visiting for a total of 60 states), and who offends an entire nation by referring to the "Polish death camps" should criticize anyone else's suitability and qualification to lead the nation.

Here's part of ABC's report on the story:

Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.

“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”

The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”

Sikorski also tonight tweeted a link to an Economist story noting that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland. For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder. Unfortunately this seems to have escaped Barack Obama’s staff [who] seem not to have noticed this.”

There's more on the Polish reaction to Mr. Obama's unfortunate blunder at the link.

Flame

First there was Stuxnet, then DuQu, now Flame. A Russian antivirus company has discovered another form of malware infecting computers in the Middle East, primarily Iran, which has amazing capabilities. Whereas Stuxnet was designed to discombobulate Iranian centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, Flame, among other things, is designed to turn every computer it infects into a listening device for whoever planted the virus.

Wired has the story. Here's part of it:

A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.

The malware, discovered by Russia-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit that has been infecting targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa for at least two years.

Dubbed “Flame” by Kaspersky, the malicious code dwarfs Stuxnet in size — the groundbreaking infrastructure-sabotaging malware that is believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.

Although Flame has both a different purpose and composition than Stuxnet, and appears to have been written by different programmers, its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals — marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.

The researchers say that Flame may be part of a parallel project created by contractors who were hired by the same nation-state team that was behind Stuxnet and its sister malware, DuQu.

Early analysis of Flame by the Lab indicates that it’s designed primarily to spy on the users of infected computers and steal data from them, including documents, recorded conversations and keystrokes. It also opens a backdoor to infected systems to allow the attackers to tweak the toolkit and add new functionality.

The malware, which is 20 megabytes when all of its modules are installed, contains multiple libraries, SQLite3 databases, various levels of encryption — some strong, some weak — and 20 plug-ins that can be swapped in and out to provide various functionality for the attackers. It even contains some code that is written in the LUA programming language — an uncommon choice for malware.

Kaspersky Lab is calling it “one of the most complex threats ever discovered.”

There's much more on Flame in the Wired article. It's fascinating what's going on behind the scenes to try to avoid open war with Iran. It's also fascinating to think that we probably don't know the half of it.

Romney's Commencement Address

Columnist Dennis Prager examines a speech given by Mitt Romney at Liberty University's Commencement and notes that the speech tells us something about Mitt Romney's view of America. He also opines that the speech is not one that President Obama would give. I don't know if that's true, but read Prager's column and see what you think. Here are the highlights:

Romney: "You know who you are. And you know whom you will serve. Not all colleges instill that kind of confidence . . . ." This is a truism. Most American universities seek to graduate men and women who are as committed to secularism as nearly all the members of faculty are. In contrast, at traditional Christian and Jewish schools, the aim is, as Romney said, to produce students who know "whom [they] will serve."

What Romney is asking is this: If one is not morally accountable to God, to whom or what is one morally accountable? Most universities will respond: to one's conscience. But those who adhere to Judeo-Christian values do not trust the conscience alone. What Nazi or Communist mass murderer was not at peace with his conscience? The conscience is as easily manipulated as the heart (the heart being the other guide to behavior among most college graduates).

Romney: "Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning...."

The death of God has not only led to moral uncertainty; the secular left actually boasts of its moral uncertainty. Unlike the religious, who have a black and white view of moral issues (so the left tells us), those on the left struggle with moral complexity. But this is self-delusion. The left is as morally certain about its positions as the most fundamentalist Christian. Where is the left's moral uncertainty about same-sex marriage? About abolishing capital punishment? About race-based affirmative action? About higher taxes? Indeed, about anything the left believes in?

Romney: "That said, your values will not always be the object of public admiration. In fact, the more you live by your beliefs, the more you will endure the censure of the world."

Is that ever true. Those of us who adhere to Judeo-Christian values and live a religious life are mocked as fools when not dismissed as dangerous. If you believe that nature was designed by a Creator, you are regarded as an anti-science buffoon. If you get your values from the Bible, you are considered a living anachronism.

Romney: "Harvard historian David Landes devoted his lifelong study to understanding why some civilizations rise, and why others falter. His conclusion: Culture makes all the difference. Not natural resources, not geography, but what people believe and value. . . . For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2 percent. But, if those things are absent, 76 percent will be poor. Culture matters...."

This is the key to understanding the underclass here and in Europe. But it is the antithesis of what is taught at American universities. They -- and the rest of the left -- teach that it is not values or culture that most determines human behavior. Violent crime is not caused by a murderer's lack of moral values, father, self-discipline, church life, or marriage, but by poverty and/or racism.

Romney: "Central to America's rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition . . . ."

Exactly right. Every free country on earth was formed by Christianity or shaped by a Christian country that imposed it (India and Japan, for example). And the freest of them all, America, has been the most Judeo-based Christian country in the world.

Romney: "The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family...."

And each one of these values has been under siege by the left. The left undermines personal responsibility by excusing the irresponsibility of all but white Christian males; undermines the dignity of work with ever-increasing entitlements; shifts "the merit of service" from individuals and communal institutions to the state; and weakens the family by strengthening people's reliance on the government, and by removing all stigma to unwed motherhood.

Prager closes with his assertion that Mr. Obama would not have given this speech. What do you think?

Fishtown and Belmont

City Journal's Clark Whelton talks about Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart in which Murray describes a deterioration of the moral character of the white working class. It's Murray's prescription for this deterioration that Whelton focuses on:

Murray blames a deterioration of shared values such as honesty, hard work, marriage, and religion, a decline especially damaging to working-class Americans. For this cultural malaise, Murray proposes a cultural cure:

The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn’t even looking for work is behaving badly.

There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house-husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren’t working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.

It’s startling to see “bums”—a word rarely heard now outside the world of baseball—in cold print. But that’s just Murray’s point: “We need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.” If men of disreputable conduct are treated respectfully, Murray says, they will never abandon their bad habits.

This is exactly right, and it applies to women as well as men. When women choose to have children out of wedlock, for example, they should not be condemned but neither should they be cooed over and congratulated. To do so not only evinces an appalling lack of understanding of the difficulties the child will face, but it also sends exactly the wrong message to other girls in the young mother's ambit. It tells them that unwed motherhood is a wonderful thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth for most women and their children (or society). Unwed motherhood frequently results in diminished prospects and increased likelihood of poverty for both mother and child, especially if there are no grandparents in the picture to provide support.

To bring to life this wealth of disturbing data on white America, Murray creates two theoretical communities: an upper-class town he calls “Belmont” and an urban working-class neighborhood called “Fishtown.” Though both of his constructs are fictional, they are also the names of real places: Belmont, Massachusetts, is a pleasant, well-to-do suburb just west of Boston, while Fishtown is a lower-income neighborhood in northeastern Philadelphia.

Murray’s task is to persuade the successful residents of the real Belmont and similar communities that they can help repair America’s damaged culture if they show some constructive disdain toward feckless men who live in the real Fishtown....some men in Fishtown have steady jobs. But many others are not steadily employed and not necessarily looking for work, either.

These men get by thanks to a combination of government programs and a variety of personal-subsistence strategies: food stamps, Medicaid, welfare, unemployment checks, manipulating the disability and foster-care systems, pushing a little dope, scavenging, misdemeanors, working off the books, hustling odd jobs, vending their blood, and attaching themselves to working women in the classic style that’s been part of urban America for decades.

Murray calls this way of life unmanly, and indeed it is, but Whelton has a different word for it. He calls these feckless men "remittance" men after the 19th century British practice of paying the family ne'er-do-wells to stay away:

In nineteenth-century Britain, sons, brothers, and uncles whose disreputable conduct made them an embarrassment to their families sometimes received an offer they couldn’t refuse: “Move to Capetown, Jamaica, or Tasmania, and—provided you never come back to England — we will send you a monthly remittance. It won’t be a lot, but you’ll be able to live without working.”

Today we do the same. We in essence pay taxes to keep Fishtown's denizens from overflowing into Belmont. Our entitlement programs are a way of buying off the lower classes, of bribing them to not riot and to confine their slothful, violent, and morally improvident lifestyles to Fishtown:

Do the residents of Belmont (median household income $95,000) and countless other communities like it have a similar understanding of Fishtown’s feckless men? The Belmonts of America help fund the various government payments that keep neighborhoods like Fishtown afloat. In return for remitting to the tax man, Belmont, Massachusetts (83.5 percent white, 11.1 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and 1.8 percent black) gets a measure of isolation from the troubles and failures of urban neighborhoods....For years Murray warned that anti-poverty programs can become traps, with “perverse incentives” that lure the poor into lives of permanent dependence.

Perverse incentives create perverse cultures: in ours, being a moral person means a willingness to send money. Belmont expresses moral concern for Fishtown the way that Victorian remittance-payers dealt with Uncle Henry: by sending cash. Did relatives in England really care if Henry blew his stipend in a Hong Kong [casino]? Or if he got mixed up in shady schemes in Calcutta? Did they call him a bum for not marrying the women who bore his children? Everyone understood that Henry’s job was not to lead an exemplary life. His job was to take the remittance money and stay away.

This is, of course, what our modern welfare system does. Whether the recipients are white or black, they're given enough to pacify them. No one really thinks that anyone is actually helped by these programs, no one thinks that a government handout improves anyone's moral fiber. The only purpose, other than to allow ourselves to feel good about not letting the indigent starve, is to serve as a bribe. If our largesse only serves to perpetuate their dysfunctionality, well, that's too bad but at least we're "doing something."

Whelton concludes with this:

In remittance culture, morality equals money. Raising taxes, therefore, becomes a moral crusade. New sources of revenue must be found, and quickly. If the remittance dries up, remittance men might come home. This lesson has not been lost on Occupy Wall Street. They will continue to play Uncle Henry until someone remits.

Indeed. Entitlement programs are, to a large extent, a kind of protection payment we make to keep those who lack the virtues necessary to earn an honest living in society from showing up at our front door. Whelton's essay and Murray's book are both very much worth reading.

Remembering Our Heroes

These are the sort of men we honor on Memorial Day. Take a little time to read through their stories and thank God that our nation can still produce such valor.

To all who have served our country in uniform, and especially to those who are combat veterans, we at Viewpoint offer you our profoundest gratitude.

The End of Women's Rights?

Fay Voshell argues that women's rights are endangered in America but the threat doesn't come from any of the usual suspects, in fact it comes from quite an unexpected source - radical feminists. Here's the crux of Voshell's column:

The signature achievement of radical feminists agitating during the 1960s and early '70s was 1973's Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision, which essentially legitimized abortion on demand throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy.

Since that time, leftist feminists have clung to the absolute right to abortion, tolerating no exceptions to what they consider an inviolable right. The fact is that no argument on behalf of the unborn human being has been deemed a reason to curb abortion rights. Any woman in the U.S. can walk into an abortion clinic and be rid of her unborn baby for any or no reason at all.

How ironic is it, then, that absolutism concerning abortion may prove to be the Achilles heel of the entire leftist feminist movement? That Achilles heel is sex-selective abortion, which is gaining a foothold in Canada and the United States.

According to Adam Cassandra, a Canadian author writing for Life News, a recent study reveals that third-world immigrants from the East, especially those from India and China, are bringing to the West their preference for male babies. Women are using sex-selective abortions to get rid of female babies in order to try again for the male infants they crave.

The widespread gendercide of the East has now immigrated to the West. Little girls in the free West, where equal rights for boys and girls, men and women have largely been achieved after centuries of struggle, are now in jeopardy because of the absolutist interpretation of abortion rights.

The tragedy of female feticide and the inevitable erosion of women's rights is amplified by the noted absence of a megaphone from those who make themselves out to be defenders of women.

As Patrick B. Craine of LifeSiteNews noted in his article entitled "Woman-killing in the name of women's rights," abortion rights activists such as Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada have come out in favor of sex-selective abortions, claiming that restrictions on sex-selective abortions would be a "dangerous road to go down" because "women have the right to decide" even if they want to get rid of a girl-baby.

So there we have it. In the opinion of leftist feminists, it is better to stick to the ideological absolute of abortion on demand -- no matter the consequences -- than it is to rise to the defense of unborn girls in the name of women's rights.... How can any woman claim to be a defender of the female sex in any respect when she advocates choices that exterminate unborn little girls?

Feminists have embraced an ideological construct which declares loudly and clearly that any woman can decide that her unborn little girl is worth less than a little boy. They have gone along with the worst of third-world ethics, declaring female feticide a "choice" they can live with.

There's more to Voshell's argument, but she makes a convincing point in the part I've quoted. Sex-selection abortion essentially discriminates against females and the feminists are just fine with that, but if women can be treated unequally as infants in the womb, what logical argument do the feminists have for opposing other kinds of discriminatory conduct? If the law favors boys in the womb what rationale is there for opposing such favoritism outside the womb? It's a good question.

Thanks to BillT for the link.

Blackout

There's been an eerie silence in the media concerning one of the biggest news stories of the year, a story that is, at least in terms of jurisprudence, historic. Forty three Catholic dioceses and organizations are suing the Obama administration in federal court over the attempt to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortifacients with all of their health insurance.

Despite this unprecedented, massive legal pressure religious institutions are bringing to bear on the Obama administration there's been scarcely a peep about it in the major media. Brent Bozell of Media Research Center compares the blackout to the Chinese communists withholding news for 20 years that the United States landed on the moon because our achievement reflected poorly on their government.

Here's Bozell:

ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News completely failed to report this historic event! CBS Evening News only dedicated a brief 19 seconds to the story and framed it as a birth control debate. By contrast, ABC led their evening broadcast with the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera. That story received three minutes and 30 seconds of coverage at the top of the newscast.

This is not a mistake or an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. This is a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the 'Chosen One' who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect and are now abusing their journalistic influence to reelect. Even when a network like CBS mentions the suit ever-so-briefly, they botch the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit instead of what they know it to be: a religious freedom issue. It's bogus, dishonest ‒ a flat out lie.

The fact is that the Catholic Church has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising 'we will not comply' with a health law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn't 'news' then there's no such thing as news. This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special, in-depth reports. Instead, these networks are sending a clear message to all Americans that the networks will go to any lengths ‒ even censoring from the public an event of this historic magnitude ‒ to prevent the release of any information that will hurt Obama's chances of re-election.

Elizabeth Scalia at The Anchoress largely agrees with Bozell but thinks that the real reason for spiking the story has more to do with fear:

Well, that [Bozell's interpretation] might be the message they are sending. But I think the larger message that perhaps they hadn’t meant to transmit is one of stark terror. Like the kid who hides under the blanket figuring the boogeyman won’t see him, the mainstream media has decided that if they just ignore the 12 lawsuits launched against the Obama administration by 43 Catholic entities, the reality of them will go away; they simply won’t exist, and the Supreme Court won’t see them, either!

Glen Foden also adds his thoughts on the mysterious media silence:

In any case, it's little wonder that no one really trusts the mainstream media to give us an accurate picture of what's going on in the world.

Caring About Kids

When next the president pontificates on how we all need to do more to raise the educational achievement of our nation's children perhaps someone in the audience will burst out in a good horselaugh. Mr. Obama might care about children, but he appears to care much more about the opinion of the nation's teachers unions.

For example, Washington D.C., perhaps the most distressed city in the United States in terms of education - its schools rank 51st in state rankings for academic achievement, but first for school violence - has a federally funded scholarship program which provides the wherewithal for poor parents to send their children to private schools where they can learn without having to spend the entire day fearing for their safety. These are the schools the children of most Washington politicians, including the Obamas, attend.

According to columnist Mona Charen the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is a small federal outlay that provides scholarships to some 1,600 students to attend private or parochial schools. Since the program’s inception in 2004, more than 10,000 families have applied to participate. The average income of OSP participants is $24,000.

It's a great chance for kids who want to succeed to be given a decent chance to escape the asylums to which they would otherwise be condemned, but Mr. Obama is trying to kill it. He did the same thing in 2011, but House Speaker John Boehner, one of those racist Republicans, managed to save it. Now Mr. Obama is again trying to deprive thousands of poor young black kids a chance to go to a school of the same quality as the one his own daughters attend.

Here's Charen on the administration's reasoning:

The administration claims that it “strongly opposes” the OSP because it “has not yielded improved student achievement.” But as the Black Alliance for Educational Options reports:

The most recent federal evaluation of the OSP showed that students who used their scholarships had a 91 percent graduation rate — 21 percent higher than those who were offered but did not use scholarships and more than 30 points higher than D.C. public school students. The program has also produced gains in reading.

Like a black Bull Conner, Mr. Obama is standing in the doorway of D.C. public schools, only instead of keeping black kids out he's keeping them in. As is his custom he proposes increasing spending on public schools, but as Charen points out, this is just a waste of money:

The District now spends $18,000 per student. More than 60 percent of District fourth-graders cannot read at grade level. Only 14 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in reading. The Washington Post reports that in math, the District has, “by a wide margin, the nation’s highest proportion of fourth and eighth graders in the ‘below basic’ category — and the lowest in proficient/advanced.” During the 2007/2008 academic year, police received more than 3,500 calls from public schools, 900 of them for violent incidents.

Mr. Obama seems unfazed. Teachers oppose private education. Teachers want the money for their schools and for themselves, and teachers vote. That seems to be the long and short of it.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but if Mr. Obama really cared about kids he'd move heaven and earth to get them out of the hell-holes to which the Democratic party has condemned them.

Whenever I write about this I urge readers to watch the documentary titled Waiting for Superman. It's a vivid picture of how desperate some of these kids are to get scholarships like the OSP and to get a seat in a private school.

Coolness

An essay by National Review's Victor Davis Hanson does a good job of describing the distressing shallowness of much of our cultural and political life. His column is titled The Power of Cool and it makes the point that what matters, at least for many people, especially those in the commentariat, is not one's behavior, ideas, competence, or ability to help the country, but rather the fashionableness of one's political positions and the personal chic with which they express them.

How one looks, speaks, and carries oneself, but most of all, the views one champions, matter far more among many of those who pontificate upon such things than the quality of those ideas and the character of the person who holds them.

If you hold the right opinions then you're immune from criticism. If you don't, then you can expect to be savaged by a culture and a media that worships ideological fashion. This is not something that others haven't commented upon before, certainly, but Hanson amasses so many instances of the phenomenon that it's almost stunning to be reminded how superficial, frivolous, and unfair the culture, particularly the major media, is.

After opening with some general examples Hanson turns his attention to the political sphere:

The power of cool is evident also in politics. State quite correctly that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska, and you are ditzy white-trash Sarah from Wasilla; state falsely that Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on television in 1929, and you are just “good ol’ Joe Biden.”

John Kerry’s second married-into fortune probably dwarfs the one that Mitt Romney made himself, perhaps by a factor of ten. While we heard in 2012 that Romney wanted a car elevator in one of his many houses, we never heard much in 2004 of presidential candidate Kerry’s various mansions, boats, or assorted playthings, or how he proved to be a keen investor as a senator helping to set U.S. financial policy.

Kerry, you see, was cool. He windsurfed and wore spandex as he cycled, and found his exemption by championing the poor he rarely saw.

The same was true of John Edwards of “Two Americas” fame. Do we now recall how he ran to the left of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite the $500 haircuts and the self-indulgent mansion, replete with “John’s room,” a hideaway with all sorts of adolescent toys? Edwards, remember, earned those spoils by charming juries in his smarmy style, and nearly destroyed the practice of obstetrics in North Carolina through his flurry of malpractice suits. No matter, Edwards was liberal, Kennedyesque, and cool — and he earned prophylaxis in the manner of JFK himself, of whose White House orgies we did not learn until a half-century later.

Likewise we have been taught that there is no “power imbalance” or “insidious asymmetry” when a “mentor” has sexual relations with his young intern — as long as he is a feminist like Bill Clinton.

What, then, exactly, is this cool that allows you to earn whatever you like without censure, and then to spend it as you please without fear of public scorn?

It would seem that the disconnect is liberal politics, the coin by which one buys a sort of medieval indulgence from liberal gatekeepers in the media, academia, the arts, and the foundations that permits one to continue the pursuit and enjoyment of lucre and to indulge the baser appetites without harassment — in the manner that the medieval moneylender or sexual zealot still got to heaven by buying marble for the cash-strapped cathedral.

Bill Clinton could sexually assault women and it didn't matter because he had the correct view on abortion. He was cool. The married Al Gore could urge a masseuse to release his "third chakra" and the media ignored the risible incongruity of the mental image it conjured because Al Gore was cool on global warming. Bill Maher can get away with the most vile, degrading discourse about women because, as everyone knows, Bill Maher is on the right side of the issues. He's cool.

Here's an example Hanson cites that I thought amusing:

We simply don’t mind that Google and Amazon rake in billions, but we despise Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland for doing the same. It is not that we need social networking and Internet searches more than food and fuel, but rather that we have the impression that cool zillionaires in flipflops are good while uncool ones in wingtips are quite bad.

Those of a certain age will remember how George H. W. Bush was mercilessly ridiculed for expressing surprise at how a laser scanner in the supermarket checkout worked and how Vice-President Dan Quayle become the object of derision for misspelling potato, yet no one on the left mocked Barack Obama for claiming to have campaigned in all 57 states nor have they found anything mirthful in any of Vice-President Biden's endless stream of howlers.

We live in an age when image, style, and holding whatever opinions the "enlightened ones" hold are all that matters. Those on the correct side of the ideological divide are cool and above any reproach, those on the wrong side are not cool and deserve scorn and ridicule.

All of which explains, I suppose, why some of us have never achieved the enviable state of utter coolness (nor hotness, for that matter).

Did Iran Murder Its Own Scientist?

ABC News is running an interesting story by Randy Kreider in which he explores the possibility that at least one of the Iranian nuclear scientists to have been dispatched to the hereafter by assassins was actually murdered by the Iranians themselves.

They did this not because the scientist was a mole or a defector but because he supported Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man who is widely believed to have won the last election, the corruption of which briefly launched protests in Tehran and elsewhere.

Here are a few excerpts from the ABC story:

Iranian dissidents have long suspected that the country's Islamist regime has used the cover of its not-so-covert war with Israel to crack down on internal opponents, and that a leading Iranian nuclear scientist whose death was blamed on Mossad might really have been killed by his own government.

Now a prominent opposition blogger based in London says that discrepancies in the recent trial and execution of the "Israeli spy" officially charged with killing scientist Masoud Ali Mohammadi are yet more evidence that Iranian intelligence agents may have been the real assassins.

Mohammadi, a nuclear physicist, died in January 2010 when a motorcycle parked outside his house was detonated by remote control when he walked past.

More than two years later, on May 15, 2012, the Iranian government executed 24-year-old Majid Jamali Fashi, who had been convicted of assassinating Mohammadi. Iranian authorities claimed that Fashi, 24, was recruited and trained by Mossad and was paid $120,000 to kill Mohammadi.

In January 2011, Iranian media had broadcast Fashi's confession, in which he said he "received different training including chasing, running, counter-chasing and techniques for planting bombs in a car" while in Tel Aviv. Fashi also confessed to receiving forged travel documents in Azerbaijan to travel to Israel, Iran's Press TV reported.

Iranian dissidents, however point to discrepancies in this story and adduce evidence that Fashi was never executed at all. Check it out at the link.

The Multiverse Explained

Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast.

In the piece he quotes Carl Sagan as saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.

Perhaps one reason is that the universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision. If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^40 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.

It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist. Just as the probability of a blind-folded shooter hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe like ours appearing increases as the number of different universes that are produced increases.

It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so very little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so. It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation.

Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.

Why Israel Will (Almost Surely) Attack Iran

The question, it seems to me, is no longer whether Israel will attack Iran. The question is when and how hard. Iran's spokespersons have made it impossible for the Israelis not to launch a preemptive strike. For example, last Sunday Iran's top military commander proclaimed his government's dedication to the annihilation of the nation of Israel:

The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense gathering Sunday in Tehran.

While many within the Islamic regime, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have often stated that Israel should be annihilated, until Sunday no one in the nation’s leadership has announced Iran’s determined intention to carry it out.

In a statement, American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris said Firouzabadi’s comments “should also put to rest, once and for all, the fanciful views of those remaining political leaders, diplomats, and journalists who contend that Iran is a ‘peaceful’ nation which has simply been ‘misunderstood’ by the global community.”

The mullahs leading Iran’s Islamic regime believe in the messianic return of the 12th and last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi. According to Shiite belief, Mahdi will reappear at the time of Armageddon, and his coming — as the Iranian documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” revealed – will be triggered by the destruction of Israel.

Lest there be any doubt about the global ambitions of the fanatics and psychopaths who hold power in Tehran consider this statement by a prominent Iranian imam:

In a recent statement, Grand Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani, a religious authority and a top Iranian “Twelver Shia” — one who believes in the 12th Imam — addressed the future world described in the Quran. “The Quran is the proof that the world will be controlled and managed by the forces of truth and that there will be one government ruling everyone throughout the world,” he explained.

The Quran promises — twice — the worldwide rule of Islam and its victory over all other religions, Sobhani said, and this will only happen when the last descendant of Muhammad, Imam Mahdi, returns and takes the rule of Islam across the world.

Ayatollah Khamenei referred to this prophecy in a recent speech. “In light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God,” he said, “the Zionists and the Great Satan [America] will soon be defeated. Allah’s promise will be delivered, and Islam will be victorious.”

The article also includes this bit of Muslim kumbayah:

In February, conservative Muslims writing on a website tied to Khamenei told their followers that the Quran’s promises were “a ‘jurisprudential justification’ to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

When it is the stated purpose of a nation to annihilate another and when they're working feverishly to produce the weapons that will make that possible, the intended victims would have to be insane to sit back and wait to see if it happens. I can't see the Israelis doing that.

I wonder, though, how hard they will hit Iran. Will they seek to decapitate the regime so that the current leadership is not left in place to resume progress toward their goal after what might be a temporary setback or will Israel do what is necessary to insure that Iran is not in a position to do them further harm?

Machiavelli wrote that “the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” I suspect the Israelis agree.

What Recovery?

There's an article at Investors.com which puts the President's rosy economic claims in some perspective:

Just 16 states have seen job growth since President Obama took office, according to state employment data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The remaining states have lost a combined 1.4 million jobs since January 2009.

Even 34 months after the recession officially ended in June 2009, there are still 11 states that have fewer people working now than at the start of the recovery. Meanwhile, 20 states have unemployment rates at or above 8%, including nine with unemployment at 9% or higher, according to the BLS.

Obama has attempted to assuage such concerns by boasting about the "extraordinary progress that we've been able to make," including "4 million jobs created over the last two years." But the nation's workforce is still 5 million smaller than it was at the previous employment peak, set way back in January 2008, BLS data show. At 51 months, it's already the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression, with no end in sight.

There's more at the link. One interesting, an ironic, point is that states which tend to vote Republican have, on average, gained jobs at nearly twice that of states which tend to vote Democratic. In fact, Democratic states ("Blue" states) have had an average job loss of almost 1% since Mr. Obama took office whereas Red states have experienced net job gains.

In other words, what recovery there has been has largely been produced by Republican states. That might tell Mr. Obama and his economic advisors something they should heed.

Principles, Schminciples

This is very sad. I admired Cory Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, N.J. He has a great story, giving up a profitable career in finance to become a public servant, even saving someone's life in a house fire a couple of months ago, and doing a lot to get Newark turned around. He always seemed to me to be honest and principled. This assessment was reaffirmed as recently as Sunday morning when he went on Meet the Press and strongly criticized the Obama campaign, which he's a part of, for its absurd demonizing of private equity firms like Bain Capital for whom Mitt Romney worked for a number of years.

But then someone from the Obama campaign must have made a phone call and by Sunday evening Mr. Booker was moonwalking away from his earlier views in what Joe Scarborough at Morning Joe Monday morning was calling a "hostage video." Here, thanks to The Blaze, is the video of the Morning Joe segment. The relevant portion is the first six minutes after the commercial:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I guess everyone has feet of clay, but to see Booker cave so far so fast, to find him to be so unprincipled and so willing to make himself a laughingstock is very sad.

Speaking of a lack of principles, allow me a couple more thoughts about the Obama attacks on Romney over his association with Bain Capital. The Obama campaign is running ads featuring interviews with people who once worked for a Kansas City steel company named GST that went bankrupt in 2001 costing 750 people their jobs, but from which Bain nevertheless made a handsome profit. They're tying Romney to this unfortunate episode as though he were Mephistopheles himself, but there are three facts about this ad that should be noted: First, Romney hadn't been with Bain for two years when the company went under.

Second the guy who was running Bain at the time turns out to be one of Mr. Obama's biggest campaign bundlers and fund raisers, a man named Jonathan Lavine. If Mr. Obama is so outraged at Romney for what happened two years after he left Bain, if Mr. Romney is so tainted by his association with Bain, why is Mr. Obama associating with and taking huge amounts of cash from the man who succeeded Romney and was in charge during the bankruptcy of GST?

Third, Mr. Obama himself forced the layoffs of tens of thousands of employees at almost 3000 auto dealerships, often with less than a month's notice, as part of his bailout of GM and Chrysler. For the Obama campaign to criticize Romney because some of the companies Bain purchased in order to make them more profitable and efficient couldn't be saved is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Cultural Relativism and Double Standards

Imagine that large numbers of white Christian men were deliberately seeking out Muslim teenage girls for gang rape. Imagine that the numbers of girls victimized by these degenerates approached fifty. What do you suppose the reaction might be?

Surely Muslims around the world would use these crimes as an excuse to murder any Christian they could find. Here at home liberals would be shedding their opposition to capital punishment as fast as if it were a jacket set afire and demanding that the perpetrators be hung from the nearest tree. The media would be pointing to these crimes as just another confirmation of the inherent racism and sexism of the evil white male and of the moral poverty of Christianity.

But imagine that the roles in the story were reversed. What would be the reaction? Well, in England it was about what you might expect. Nicholas Farrell at Taki's Magazine fills us in:

We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded...a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

There were 47 known victims, mostly aged 12-16 and living in local government children’s homes. But there were probably many more victims and many more rapists. Last Tuesday in Liverpool those nine men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison. In separate recent trials, 56 men (50 of them Muslims) were convicted of similar crimes in other northern England towns.

In the coverage of this latest child-rape-industry trial, the British media avoided the fact that racism motivated the nine and that they are all Muslims. The police and social workers failed to investigate for the same reason. The nine are usually referred to as “Asian” or “Pakistani” and not “Muslim.” But at the root of their racism is their religion. Asian or Pakistani Christians or Hindus, for example, treat women of whatever age and color differently.

Farrell goes on to say that the liberal British media insist that every cultural group has its sociopaths and that we shouldn't make too much of the ethnicity and religion of the perpetrators, but Farrell's not buying it. These men would not have dreamed of assaulting Muslim girls like this, which suggests that the victims were selected on the basis of a religious bias, nor would white Christians be given a similar pass were they found to have behaved in such an abominable fashion.

It's a simple fact that no racial or religious group is held to the same standard as liberals hold whites, particularly white Christians. Why this should be the case is an interesting question. Is it that liberals deep down simply don't believe that other groups can realistically be expected to measure up to the high behavioral standard set by Western Christians? If so, isn't that more than a little chauvinistic, even bigoted, of our liberal friends? It certainly seems so.

The Stupidity of Political Correctness

A week ago I commented on the case of Naomi Schaeffer Riley who was fired from her position as blog writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education because she offended a number of readers in the academy by stating the obvious, i.e. that much of black studies scholarship isn't scholarship at all.

Riley has leveled similar criticisms at other academic fields as well, but that didn't matter. You can say what you want about other disciplines, but if you say anything critical about black studies it's a thought crime - ipso facto proof of racism. Any criticism of the quality of any scholarship associated with any approved minority, whether racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation, is heresy and must be expunged lest thoughtful people be impressed by the truth of it.

So I thought it amusing the other night watching a talk show on which Riley appeared as a guest describing her encounter with liberals who no doubt perceive themselves as deeply committed to tolerance and the diversity of speech and ideas. It was amusing because the host of the show, recounting the allegations of racism made against her by her detractors, invited her husband, a Wall Street Journal editor who was sitting in the audience, to join them on the stage to defend her against the indictment. The audience laughed as her husband made his way to the stage. The racist Ms Riley was married to a black man and has two biracial children.

Liberal political correctness isn't just insufferable. It's stupid. It's a form of holier-than-thou self-righteousness embraced by people who substitute formulas for thought because thinking is too taxing, who latch on to the slightest deviation from orthodox speech and behavior as proof that someone is a heretic. They're people so filled with their own prejudices that they just assume everyone else is also, and proof is just a matter of catching the other guy saying something that could be twisted by the witless to indicate a deviation from orthodoxy. They're the modern descendants of those who burned witches at the stake in the fourteenth century because the hapless women made some innocuous but careless remark. They're kin to those self-righteous prigs in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter who, though filled with their own sins, nevertheless sternly punished anyone who gave them the merest warrant for doing so. They're cut from the same cloth as the communist totalitarians who use mind-numbing reeducation camps and "snitches" to eradicate "deviationism" among the people.

They are stereotypical ideological puritans and if given enough power they'll eventually deaden all thought and discourse, which is doubtless their goal.