The Evil That Cannot Be Left Unanswered

International New York Times -- Roger Cohen
The Evil That Cannot Be Left Unanswered

“Across the wide area of Syria and Iraq that it controls, the Islamic State enacts its nihilistic death cult drawn from a medievalist reading of the Koran. They slit throats at public executions, butcher “infidel”’ communities like the Yazidis en masse and turn women and children into sex slaves as they build a self-styled caliphate based on oil revenue, absolutist zealotry and digital slickness.”

At the Yazidi refugee camp, Anter Halef said to me, “We no longer have a life in this world. It’s empty.” He was broken, but at least, unlike his children, he had lived his life. “ISIS has no religion,” he went on. “No sane man would slaughter a child. In one night, they killed 1,800 people.”

For evil, unmet, propagates. To allow Islamic State to consolidate its hold over territory and minds over the coming year is to invite, or at least to accept, an inevitable replay of the Paris or the San Barnardino slaughters. It is to accept that the Syrian debacle will worsen for another year. And that, in turn, will further exacerbate the anxiety and fears on which nationalist, often Islamophobic politicians in Europe and the United States thrive.

Follow the Money

WSJ -- Kimberley A. Strassel
Justice’s Liberal Slush Fund
Legal settlements are being used to funnel millions to left-wing activists like La Raza.

This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, which for 16 months has engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. The department is in the process of funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups, at least some of which will actively support Democrats in the coming election.

It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.

ISIS and Religious Persecution

RealClearPolitics -- Michael Novak
The Tragedy of Christian Persecution

“If you are going to read only one book on the most massive violations of religious liberty -- happening today, even as you read this -- or you feel it's your duty to read only one thing in solidarity with this immense suffering, Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy by George J. Marlin is the one to keep at hand.”

“The chairman of Aid to the Church in Need covers eight nations of the Middle East, from Turkey to the Sudan, in some painful detail. Behind this detail, lie many hundred thousands of Christian families faced with instant death (or sexual enslavement) or two other choices (1) renounce their hard-won historical faith and submit to the authority of Allah, or (2) enter intodhimmitude, that half-life of paying fines for just being allowed to live and of keeping one's faith completely private, invisible and silent.”

“Then, summarizing the findings of the Muslim director of Yafa Center for Study and Research, Nasry lists five aims of terror in Islam. In cruelly brief form they are: (1) to punish infidels for unbelief (2) to frighten infidels into keeping their treaties with believers (3) to be a definitive tool of divine might. Q8:12 "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them." (4) to cut as a two-edged sword: striking fear into infidels, and protecting believers from their evils and (5) to put an end to oppression, tumult, and division. Fr. Nasry applauds those who try to bring Islam "up-to-date, but regrets that they have so far been very broadly rejected.”

See also:

• Religious Persecution of Christians and the Silence of Obama
• What ISIS Really Wants
• Foreign Policy -- Debate -- Can the wave of violence sweeping the Islamic world be traced back to the religion's core teachings? An FP debate about the roots of extremism.
  
  • Islam Is a Religion of Violence -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Islam Is a Religion of Peace -- Manal Omar

Another result of the corruption in the Chicago Democratic political machine

The Corrupt System That Killed Laquan McDonald
The Atlantic -- Conor Friedersdorf

In short, Chicago does an atrocious job of identifying and disciplining bad cops. And this failure appears to have directly contributed to the wrongful death of McDonald—Van Dyke had 18 civil complaints filed against him, but had never been disciplined. “The Independent Police Review Authority, the civilian board that handles the most serious cases, doesn't take into account previous complaints against the same officer when investigating a new one,” according to a Tuesday editorial in the Chicago Tribune. “11 officers racked up a combined 253 complaints that resulted in a single five-day suspension. Come on. What does it take to flag a problem cop?”

If police shooting video had been released sooner, would Emanuel be mayor?
Chicago Tribune -- John Kass

Would Mayor Rahm Emanuel have been re-elected if voters had seen the video of Laquan McDonald's execution?

No.

Rahm would have lost the election. Why? Because he would have lost Chicago's black vote.

"No," said the alderman, meaning no, Rahm would not have won the election. "But you already knew that. Why are you asking us?"

American Universities Begin to Implode

American Universities Begin to Implode
Real Clear Politics -- Dennis Prager

“For over half a century, American universities, with few exceptions, have ceased teaching and begun indoctrinating. In the last few weeks, this downhill spiral has accelerated. The university is now a caricature of an educational institution. It is difficult to come up with an idea or policy that is more absurd than the ideas and policies that now dominate American campuses.”

“The University of California, once an elite public institution, now circulates a list of "microaggressions" that students and faculty must be careful to avoid lest they engage in racism and bigotry. Some examples: "There is only one race, the human race." You read that right. The denial of the significance of race in favor of the primacy of the individual and the affirmation of the equality of all human beings -- one of the noblest achievements of liberal Western society -- is now officially listed by the University of California as a racist statement. It is a pure expression of moral inversion.”

America’s higher education brought low -- WP - George Will

“People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not.”

The Yale Problem Begins in High School
HeterodoxAcademy -- Jonathan Haidt

“After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.”

Kunduz Hospital Tragedy

Not just a tragedy but also a lost opportunity to declare and covey our values

ABC News -- LUIS MARTINEZ -- 'Human Error' Cited in Mistaken US Airstrike on Kunduz Hospital

The accidental bombing of the Doctors without Borders hospital in Northern Afghanistan was a tragedy. This is especially so because Doctors without Borders represents in practice the primary moral concept of our government of equality understood as a respect for human dignity and our common humanity.

President Obama says that we have to fight radical terrorists with better ideas and values. Our government, the academics, the media, and even those running the presidential primaries, however, have focussed almost entirely on freedom rather than equality understood as a respect for an inherent personal dignity and our common humanity. What a lost opportunity to describe and garner global support for Doctors without Borders and to convey our primary value of equality.

My work The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy: An Analytical and Historical Inquiry into the Primary Moral Concept of Equality can be freely accessed at www.moralfoundations.com See Also the my blogs on the following:

• Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
• What Medical Ethics has to offer the Larger Fields of Moral and Political Philosophy

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

"NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be..."

The Gene Hackers

The Gene Hackers
A powerful new technology enables us to manipulate our DNA more easily than ever before.
The New Yorker -- MICHAEL SPECTER -- Annals of Science --NOVEMBER 16, 2015 ISSUE

A technical but very informative article on the research in genetics.

It didn’t take Zhang or other scientists long to realize that, if nature could turn these molecules into the genetic equivalent of a global positioning system, so could we. Researchers soon learned how to create synthetic versions of the RNA guides and program them to deliver their cargo to virtually any cell. Once the enzyme locks onto the matching DNA sequence, it can cut and paste nucleotides with the precision we have come to expect from the search-and-replace function of a word processor. “This was a finding of mind-boggling importance,” Zhang told me. “And it set off a cascade of experiments that have transformed genetic research.”

With CRISPR, scientists can change, delete, and replace genes in any animal, including us.

There Should be Zero Tolerance for Heroin in Law Enforcement

Cleveland.com -- Jeremy Pelzer
Ohio's heroin epidemic gets national exposure in new '60 Minutes' segment

“A record 2,482 Ohioans died of drug-related deaths in 2014, according to preliminary statistics from the Ohio Department of Health. About half of those deaths – 1,177 – involved heroin, which many addicts have turned to as a cheaper and more available alternative to prescription pain pills.”

When I was an orthopedic resident in New York City from 1969 until 1973 there was a heroin epidemic. The police station in the South Bronx was called “Fort Apache” because it was surround by crime and and communal decay. It was the subject of the movie Fort Apache: the Bronx. Ten years later President Carter visited this area which had burned out and been abandoned and the police station at that time was known as “the little house on the prairie.” A study during that time showed that a mainline heroin addict committed 250 felonies a year to support such their drug habit. Heroin addicts discard their needles and make parks and public green spaces for children unsafe. There were 1,177 heroin related deaths in just Ohio in 2014. There is a very clear health hazard with the risk of AIDS and hepatitis. The emergency rooms are now commonly treating infections and abscesses from heroin injections. There should be zero tolerance for for heroin in law enforcement for a heroin epidemic will destroy individual lives and and it has the potential to destroy a community.

Opinions Gradually Changing in Ohio on the Death Penalty

Columbus Dispatch
Worth the trouble?
Problems surrounding the death penalty show no sign of abating

"But how about the argument that the death penalty is just too difficult to impose and trying to make it work uses up too much time, energy and money to be worthwhile?"

Death Penalty Information Center
Florida Acquits Death Row Inmate

“On October 12, 2015, the Circuit Court for Pascal County, Florida, entered a judgment of acquittal and the Florida Department of Corrections released Derral Hodgkins from custody after the Florida Supreme Court denied the prosecution's motion to reconsider its June 18, 2015 decision acquitting Hodges of all charges in the stabbing death of his former girlfriend.”

Sen. Ted Cruz is Far from the Center

Politico -- By Burgess Everett
How McConnell outfoxed Ted Cruz
Cruz can't get the best of the GOP stalwart.

“The breaking point came in July, when Cruz called McConnell a liar for holding a vote on the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives vehemently oppose.

Even then, McConnell bit his tongue, quietly urging senators not to take the floor in his defense, wary of giving Cruz a bigger platform for his GOP primary run.”

Real Clear Politics -- By Mark Salter
What Ted Cruz Really Stands For

“Then again, I can’t recall any senator who was as nearly universally loathed by his colleagues as Cruz. There have been others who weren’t likeable. There were plenty who were self-interested and who preened and blustered as often as Cruz does—and who routinely elicited senatorial smirks and rolled eyes. There have been senators who frequently forced their colleagues to cast difficult and unpopular votes. And, of course, there is a long list of senators who ran for president and treated the Senate floor as a campaign stop. (And for some of them it worked). But no senator in my memory did all that with such abandon and was disliked with as much intensity as is Ted Cruz.”

National Review -- ELIANA JOHNSON
When Cruz Makes His Move, Watch Out

“Cruz has proved to be an ambitious and serious campaigner, devoted to doing the hard and unglamorous work required of presidential candidates.”

An Interesting Juxtaposition

States Scramble for Drugs Used in Executions, Causing Delays
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

“death-penalty states are finding it harder to carry out executions as they struggle to obtain and properly use limited supplies of ever-changing combinations of suitable drugs.”

California governor signs bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide SACRAMENTO, CALIF. | BY SHARON BERNSTEIN

"There is a deadly mix when you combine our broken healthcare system with assisted suicide, which immediately becomes the cheapest treatment," said Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund in Berkeley. "The so-called protections written into the bill really amount to very little."

Capital Punishment's Fatal flaws

Aljazeera America -- Lauren Carasik
Glossip case highlights capotal punishment's fatal flaws

In denying his request for a reprieve on Sept. 28, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals was deeply divided. Three judges held that new evidence merely expanded on previous theories and did not warrant overriding the principle of final judgment. The panel’s remaining two judges supported a stay of execution and a hearing on Glossip’s innocence, with one arguing the state would not be harmed by a delay and that it had “no interest in executing an actually innocent man” and the other lamenting that his “trial was deeply flawed.” As his defense attorney Don Knight said, “We should all be deeply concerned about an execution under such circumstances.”

“Glossip’s conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old drug addict who worked at a hotel owned by Barry Van Treese, in exchange for room and board. Sneed confessed to murdering Van Treese but avoided the death penalty by implicating Glossip, a manager at the hotel, as the crime’s mastermind. Glossip was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1998, but the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2001 because he received ineffective assistance of counsel, including his attorney’s failure to show the jury the tape of Sneed’s interrogation, which would have provided ample fodder to impeach his credibility — an obvious blunder. Glossip was found guilty at a second trial in 2004 and sentenced to death again after his lawyers inexplicably failed to present the evidence whose egregious omission justified overturning his previous conviction.

A Climate of Blaming America First does not Provide a better Global Vision

The Orange County Register -- Joel Kotkin
Becoming America the not-so-beautiful

“Virtually all the leading reformers in our history – Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, the Roosevelts and Martin Luther King – couched their proposals in terms of fulfilling American ideals. Throw out the ideals, and those who originally formed them, and we lose the precious ability to meld our traditions with change. We are left simply with a postmodernist battle of interest groups, with no unifying or moderating principle.”

The Los Angeles Times -- Joseph J Ellis
Op-Ed -- The Founding Fathers: Demigods or scoundrels?

“In the case of the founders, such disavowals also provide therapeutic opportunities to transform U.S. history into a morality play with a ready-made cast of villainous dead white males, thereby obviating the need to encounter history's ironies and paradoxes or to comprehend its intractable tragedies.”

International New York Times -- GARDINER HARRIS and ERIC SCHMITT
Obama’s Call at U.N. to Fight ISIS With Ideas Is Largely Seen as Futile

“This means defeating their ideology,” he said. “Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They are defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision.”

Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
James Rutherford -- The Far Center Blog

“We are missing a defining opportunity in the history of the moral and political philosophy of the liberal tradition; first, by not defining our primary moral value as equality, understood as a respect for the dignity and worth of our common humanity; and second, by not defining our government as a constitutional democracy, which is the only way to convey both the substantive and the procedural concepts of equality that it incorporates.”

Widespread Corporate Corruption is Just the Cost of Doing Business

If we are not going to bring criminal charges in these types of cases then personal fines or rescinding bonuses should maybe be part of these settlements.

Huffington Post -- Steven Brill
America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker

“It’s their cost of doing business,” the analyst added, perhaps unintentionally echoing the view of one senior J&J lawyer who told me that the cases against his company are the unavoidable price of dealing with a litigation system easily abused by those targeting big corporations.

“True, eight of the other nine largest pharmaceutical companies in the world have settled federal claims over the last decade related to allegations similar to what Johnson & Johnson was accused of in selling Risperdal”

Houston Chronicle -- Tom Hays and Tom Krisher, Associated Press GM will pay $900 million over ignition switch scandal

“The twin agreements bring to more than $5.3 billion the amount GM has spent on a problem authorities say could have been handled for less than a dollar per car. Those expenses include fines, compensation for victims and the recall of millions of vehicles.”

The Republican Primary Rules May Favor Donald Trump

International New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JONATHAN MARTIN

Party Rules to Streamline Race May Backfire for G.O.P

“If Mr. Trump draws one-third of the Republican primary vote, as recent polls suggest he will, that could be enough to win in a crowded field. After March 15, he could begin amassing all the delegates in a given state even if he carried it with only a third of the vote. And the later it gets, the harder it becomes for a lead in delegates to be overcome, with fewer state contests remaining in which trailing candidates can attempt comebacks.”

The Syrian Refugee Crisis

The Guardian
Patrick Kingsley Migration correspondent, Mark Rice-Oxley and Alberto Nardelli
Syrian refugee crisis: why has it become so bad?

“It is hard to find definitive reasons, but conversations with Syrians across the migration trail and a survey of recently available data suggest a mixture of the following.”

BBC News -- Michael Stephens
Migrant crisis: Why the Gulf states are not letting Syrians in

“For example, citizens in the UAE and Qatar number a little over 10% of the resident populations in their respective countries. The vast majority of residents are transitory economic workers.”

Real Clear Politics -- Thomas Sowell
The Past and Future of the Refugee Crisis

“No nation has an unlimited capacity to absorb immigrants of any sort, and especially immigrants whose cultures are not simply different, but antagonistic, to the values of the society in which they settle.”

llinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York

Market watch -- Sue Chang
Unlucky lottery winner gets IOU from state of Illinois

Of the 50 states, Illinois ranked dead last in fiscal health, according to a report in July from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

“Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York rank [as] the bottom five states, largely owing to low amounts of cash on hand and large debt obligations,”

What else do these states have in common?

Death Penalty Ruling May Pave Way for National Abolitionists

ABC News -- PAT EATON-ROBB Associated Press

Connecticut Court Strikes Down State Death Penalty

A sweeping decision this week by the Connecticut Supreme Court that found the death penalty no longer meets society's evolving standards of decency could be influential across a nation that is increasingly questioning the practice, legal experts said.

What the pundits miss about Donald Trump

Most of the media have recognized that those who are being supported in the Republican primary polls are outsiders, such as Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. This is understandable, when Congress has an approval rating of much less than 20%.

What is not generally recognized is that almost all of Trump’s policies whether on immigration or the Middle East are someway tied into improving the economy and increasing jobs. This is also the major concern of the voters in the presidential election.

North Korea

WP -- Blaine Harden -- Can we believe all the horrors described by North Korean escapees?

“Perhaps the greatest value of these new memoirs is to show the nuttiness of life under a family dictatorship that survives by spying upon, terrorizing and imprisoning its 24.9 million people, many of whom are chronically malnourished.”

Yahoo News -- North Korea threatens imminent strikes against South, warns US

“North Korea on Saturday threatened South Korea with "indiscriminate" military strikes unless it halts cross-border propaganda broadcasts, and issued fresh nuclear weapons warnings against the United States.”

Donald Trump has published his immigration policy

Donald Trump has published a white paper outlining his immigration policy.

It can be viewed or downloaded here.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform

This is one of the more aggressive policies to on issues related to immigration and it will surely be a center of discussions in the primary election campaigns and debates.

John Kasich

A lot of attention has been paid to the remarkable success of Donald Trump in the polling for the Republican primary election. I think that the best explanation for this success is to simply look at not only the approval rating of the policies of President Obama with the Republican primary voters, but also the dismal approval rating of the Congress, which is often in single digits, with all of the voters.

I think that the ability of Gov.john Kasich to make it into the top 10 in the polls for the 1st debate, however, should also be receiving more attention. I think that Gov. Kasich will climb in the polls and do well in the initial primaries the better he and his policy positions are known. His experience and the success of his record both in Congress and as Governor of Ohio can match or exceed that of all of the other contenders. He general approach of pragmatism and a goal of just making things better and going in the right direction should resonate with a lot of the electorate and especially with the independent voters and even some Democrats. This is true at least in Ohio. The demographics also indicate that the Republicans cannot win the national presidential election without winning both Florida and Ohio. I would predict that Governor Kasich will be one of the last ones standing in the Republican primary elections and that he will be on the Republican ticket for 2016.

Turkey and the Kurds

Spiegel Online- By Maximilian Popp and Christoph Reuter
Erdogan's Cynical Game: Is Turkey Creeping Toward Civil War?

“Turkish President Erdogan claims to be battling the terrorist Islamic State, but in reality he is mainly fighting against the Kurdish PKK militia. By doing so, he has shown that he is willing to derail the peace process in his country for the sake of clinging to power.”

“But Erdogan's true intentions quickly became clear. He wanted to use the opportunity to fight what he and the other hardliners in his party felt was the greater evil: the PKK. This has created an absurd situation in which Turkey is now striking at both IS and its most effective and toughest opponents.”