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July 3, 2015

Trumping Trump: Political Victory Via Economic Destruction

By Selwyn Duke

Political winds are giving The Donald the Trump bump, with the real-estate mogul taking second place in polls on the 2016 presidential race. But economic winds are a different matter, with the brash businessman becoming the latest American targeted for destruction by the politically correct powers-that-be.

Donald Trump (shown), who officially declared his White House run June 16, recently took second place in national, New Hampshire, and Iowa polling for the GOP nomination (in Iowa he’s tied with renowned physician Ben Carson). But after making comments about the criminal nature of far too many illegal migrants, he has lost a certain place: in the hearts of some business interests. NBC dropped The Apprentice franchise and the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, Spanish-language network Univision has also dropped Miss Universe, Macy’s has kicked his clothing line to the curb, and Mayor “Bolshevik” Bill de Blasio announced that NYC was reviewing its contracts with Trump.

Read the rest here.
July 2, 2015

Climate Change: Is a Deadly Ice Age on the Horizon?

By Selwyn Duke

The last ice age ended approximately 12,000 years ago, and since then we’ve been enjoying a pleasantly warm “interglacial period.” But given that an interglacial may last only 12,000 years, we’re confronted with a scary prospect: Another ice age may be nigh.

And this could have devastating effects on mankind.

So says atmospheric and space physics expert S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and a founding director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. While he has never been worried about global warming — emphasizing that climate alarmists’ predictions have been consistently wrong — he writes at American Thinker today that he has “recently become quite concerned about ice ages and the dangers they pose to humans on our planet — and indeed to most of terrestrial ecology.”

Read the rest here.
July 2, 2015

States’ Reaction to Same-sex “Marriage” Ruling: A Little Talk, Even Less Action

By Selwyn Duke

“To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”

So wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case in which the Supreme Court declared Friday that faux marriage must be governmentally recognized throughout the nation. And, tragically, critics might say, virtually all American governors are ensuring that a lack of representation will be a reality.

Reacting to the Court ruling, most of the governors in the 13 states that still had operative faux-marriage bans registered notes of complete capitulation, with the exception of two governors who exhibited varying degrees of mild defiance.

Read the rest here.
June 29, 2015

When the Feds Quash Free Speech with Legal Tyranny

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine you run a website and are ordered by the federal government to divulge personal information on article commenters. Now imagine that the feds also issue a gag order preventing you from revealing what they’re up to.

This is precisely what happened with award-winning libertarian website Reason.com

Site editor Nick Gillespie related his travails just today at the Daily Beast, and it’s a story many will find chilling. His problems began after he blogged about the life sentence handed down to Ross Ulbricht, founder of Dark Web website Silk Road, by a judge named Katherine Forrest. Not surprisingly, agitated Ulbricht defenders took to his piece’s comments section and, par for the Internet course, savaged Forrest. As Gillespie writes, they suggested “that, among other things, she should burn in hell, ‘be taken out back and shot,’ and, in a well-worn Internet homage to the Coen Brothers movie Fargo, be fed ‘feet first’ into a woodchipper. The comments betrayed a naive belief in an afterlife [note, my libertarian friend Gillespie, that people without that ‘naïve’ belief in an afterlife generally have a naïve belief in government] and karma, were grammatically and spelling-challenged, hyperbolic, and… completely within the realm of acceptable Internet discourse, especially for an unmoderated comments section.” Gillespie then continued:

But the U.S. attorney for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York thought differently…

Read the rest here.
June 27, 2015

Supreme Court Rubber Stamps Same-sex “Marriage” — Time for Nullification

By Selwyn Duke

Has our nation traded the rule of law for the rule of lawyers? Critics would say so. And this week’s Supreme Court rulings — most notably Friday's 5-4 decision on faux marriage — could be their Exhibit A.

Friday's ruling, stating that same-sex couples have a “right” to “marry” in all 50 states, went down precisely as critics had predicted — and feared. Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the Court’s four most liberal judges — Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer — in the promotion of faux marriage; he also wrote the majority opinion. Justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito were on the opposing side, with each writing his own dissent.

Scalia was scathing in his denunciation of the majority opinion, calling the Court a “threat to American democracy,” characterizing its opinion as “lacking even a thin veneer of law,” and writing that it “is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.” Chief Justice Roberts, known for his own activist lawyercraft in the Court’s infamous ObamaCare decisions, wrote that the “court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us." Roberts perhaps felt particularly strongly about today’s decision as he read a summary of his dissent from the bench, the first time he has done so during his almost decade-long tenure. And putting matters in no uncertain terms, he said to faux marriage advocates, “By all means celebrate today's decision…. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it."

Read the rest here.
June 27, 2015

Keep the Confederate Flag Flying

By Selwyn Duke

“Take it down! That symbol must go!” We hear these cries in the wake of the Charleston church shooting in reference to the Confederate battle flag, which still flies above the South Carolina Capitol. As you know, one criminal who committed a heinous act had sometimes sported the symbol, so, the thinking…er, feeling…goes, it should be sent to cultural Siberia. But the flag should remain — especially right now.

This is precisely the opposite of the fashionable view, of course. It holds that especially right now, in this time of pain, sorrow and efforts at reconciliation (by some), it’s an ideal time to dispense with the flag. I say otherwise, but not mainly because the flag is viewed by millions as a symbol of Southern heritage, of state’s rights or of defiance against an increasingly despotic federal government. The real reason is simple. If removing the flag really a good idea, guess what?

It’ll also be a good idea a year from now.

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June 27, 2015

Eminent Scientist: Humans Will Be Extinct in a Century

By Selwyn Duke

Our “Anthropocene” epoch may be named after man, but it will also see man’s demise, says a prominent scientist. And, he avers, our end times are nigh — a mere 100 years off.

This warning was issued by Frank Fenner, an eminent Australian researcher credited with helping to eliminate smallpox. But now his concern seems to be that man is, at least by his lights, a pox upon the planet. And for it there is supposedly no cure, as we face what he calls the “irreversible” problems of overpopulation, environmental degradation, and climate change.

Read the rest here.
June 23, 2015

Chinese Espionage: Was the OPM “Hack” Not a Hack, but Treason?

By Selwyn Duke

Despite its importance, there’s a story that’s not getting out to the public — at least not as quickly as data that should be secret is getting out to the Chinese. Many of you have heard about the supposed “hack” of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in which the Chinese were able to obtain personal information on millions of U.S. government employees. But PJ Media’s Richard Fernandez points out that the term “hack” should be used advisedly. He then quotes technology site Ars Technica:

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment testified that encryption would “not have helped in this case” because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked — likely through social engineering. And because of the lack of multifactor authentication on these systems, the attackers would have been able to use those credentials at will to access systems from within and potentially even from outside the network.

As Fernandez explains, “social engineering” is Internet technology lingo and a euphemism for “Someone gave them the password.” And that means that “hack” here could be a euphemism for something else: Treason.

Read the rest here.
June 23, 2015

Cultural Marxism: Nobel Scientist Sacked for Making Innocent Joke about Women

By Selwyn Duke

We just heard about the Miami high-school principal fired for soberly disagreeing on social media with the McKinney narrative. Now comes an even more outrageous story involving what’s usually called political correctness, but should really be labeled what it is: evil.

Sir Tim Hunt is a darn good scientist. So good, apparently, that he won the 2001 Nobel Prize in physiology. But none of this matters to the University College London, which just forced this esteemed mind to resign over a joke he made at a conference on women in science in South Korea. The quip has been called “sexist,” you see.

And what was his trespass? Did he take the podium drunken and make lewd comments about women’s anatomy? Was it a remark about wife-battery? It must be just awful, as the 39 words uttered have now ended his career. Here’s the joke he told attendees:

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June 18, 2015

Italy: Little Schoolchildren Cross-dress Under New Gov’t Program

By Selwyn Duke

"Girls will be boys and boys will be girls; it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world….” In 1970, this was just a song lyric. In 2015, though, it increasingly is part of school curricula. And the latest news on this front is a shocking story about a taxpayer-funded elementary-school program that involves having children dress as the opposite sex in order to combat so-called “gender stereotypes.” Moreover, it’s reported that school officials tried to keep the program secret from parents.

Read the rest here.