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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.
June 18, 2015

Colonization and Cultural Genocide — and They Call it “Immigration”

By Selwyn Duke

Have you heard about the millions of Chinese flooding into Tibet? With their displacement of the native peoples and the supplanting of Tibetan with Chinese culture, anthropologists and human rights activists have labeled the colonization “cultural genocide.” (See here, here, here, here, and here, for example.) It is a cause célèbre with its own popular bumper sticker:

Interestingly, this situation corresponds precisely to what’s happening in most Western countries — most notably the United States — except for one minor detail:

No compassionate liberal activists call it cultural and demographic genocide.

They call it “diversity.”

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June 16, 2015

Are Trans-racials the New Transgenders?

By Selwyn Duke

“My story? Okay. It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin' on the porch with my family, singin' and dancin' down in Mississippi,” said white actor Steve Martin in The Jerk. Speaking of which and as you’ve probably heard, the above is also essentially the story of Rachel Dolezal (shown), the just-resigned ex-head of the Spokane NAACP who, it was revealed last week, has been masquerading as a black person.

That’s right — she’s white.

How did Dolezal get away with such a brash deception? Precisely by being brash.

Read the rest here.
June 16, 2015

Orwellian America: Principal Fired for McKinney-comment Thought Crime

By Selwyn Duke

"He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life. I commend him for his actions." The essence of this opinion, about ex-McKinney, Texas, police officer Eric Casebolt, has been expressed by many, including talk-radio giant Mark Levin. But the verbatim quotation above was in reality authored by high-school principal Alberto Iber (shown).

Actually, make that former high-school principal — Iber was just fired for rendering his opinion.

Iber’s view, posted on Facebook, certainly isn’t the politically correct one. It may not even be the correct one — that’s a matter for debate. But some might say removing him from his position as head of North Miami Senior High school smacks of the same mentality that calls for criminal charges against climate realists. We already have supposedly “settled science,” based completely on the very unscientific thing called consensus. Do we also now have “settled” positions on perhaps poorly understood current events, so settled, in fact, that deviation from them should mean career destruction?

Read the rest here.