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June 5, 2012

Michelle Obama’s Food Desert Myth

By Selwyn Duke

It may be a peculiar manifestation of American exceptionalism, but the United States has the distinction of being a nation that actually has fat poor people. This doesn’t sit well with those who want to grow government faster than waistlines, and thus do we have Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, designed to fight obesity by eliminating “food deserts.”

No, that isn’t supposed to be “desserts’; although the health Nazis aim to eliminate those, too. (That is, except for themselves. Michelle can clear a table like a hurdler it’s said; as for the commoners, however, it’s “Let them eat whole grain bread!”) It is “food desert,” which, we hear, is a poor area “underserved” by food suppliers, creating a situation wherein its denizens are relegated to a hell of fatty fast food offerings. And, you guessed it, Michelle wants to use our tax money to remedy this problem.

Only, it appears it’s a cure in search of a disease.

Even the Boston Globe now admits this in an editorial. The paper writes, according to American Thinker:

Read the rest here.
May 30, 2012

The Left, the Right and the Wrong Side of History

By Selwyn Duke

It’s always amusing when secularists speak of traditionalists being on the “wrong side of history.” We heard this recently after the vote in North Carolina upholding marriage; liberals said that the state was on the wrong side of history.

Now, these people are circling around something that is absolutely true, and it's only charitable to help them understand exactly what it is. What they really mean is that traditionalists are on the wrong side of fashionable trends, and the polls on marriage certainly bear this out. But as G.K. Chesterton said, “A fallacy doesn’t cease to be a fallacy because it becomes a fashion,” and one fallacy secularists have fallen victim to is that they actually grasp history.

History isn’t merely what has happened in the United States during the last century, which has certainly seen the seemingly inexorable advance of moral and intellectual decay — or, as some people like to call it, “progressivism” — through our institutions and social fabric. History isn’t just that same time period in the whole of the West or even the world; it is, rather, the story of Man from the very beginning of recorded time.

Now, history is invaluable because it actually is the record of a grand series of social experiments. Through it we can learn what works and what doesn’t, what stood the test of time in the laboratory of life and hence is timeless, and what are merely old mistakes masquerading as new ideas. But as with science, we cannot learn from it if we, so to speak, lose our data. This is what some call forgetting history but actually is a failure to learn it in the first place. It also could be called progressive education.

Read the rest here.
May 29, 2012

The 10 Least Religious States: Also the Meanest?

By Selwyn Duke

When it comes to religiosity, some American states truly do fit in to the union — the European Union, that is.

According to recent surveys, the most and least religious states are mainly where one might expect: respectively, the Bible Belt of the South, and New England and the West. A recent Gallup study, for instance, rated (in order) Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Oklahoma as the 10 most religious states; and Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, New York, and Rhode Island (the last three were tied for 10th place) as the least.

This is significant because authentic religiosity correlates with many other things. Just consider voting patterns, for instance. Nine of the 10 most religious states are conservative bastions that consistently vote Republican in presidential elections; the one exception is North Carolina, which, owing in large part to demographic changes, is now a Republican-leaning swing state. In contrast, 10 of the least religious states are either Democrat bastions or are close to that; the exceptions are Democratic-leaning swing state New Hampshire; and Alaska, whose rugged rural individualism breeds a conservative libertarianism. And is it surprising that these American states vote like Europeans? When it comes to faith, their residents believe like Europeans. Modern liberalism is the political arm du jour of atheism.

Another thing that correlates with atheism is lower charitable giving.

Read the rest here.
May 28, 2012

When Conservatives Follow the Left’s Vulgar Lead

By Selwyn Duke

Many of us have heard the story about the North Carolina schoolteacher who shrieked at her students that they could be “arrested” for criticizing Barack Obama. The teacher’s words speak for themselves and have been, as is only right, roundly condemned. But it’s not her behavior that bothers me most.

It’s no secret that schoolteachers often seek to instill their leftist tendencies in students or that conservatives recognize the problem. What conservatives don’t recognize so well are the leftist tendencies in themselves.

What do I mean? Consider the following exchange between said teacher (her name hasn’t been released) and the student she locked horns with:

Read the rest here.
May 22, 2012

Does the GOP’s Demographic Death Spiral End in a Texas Graveyard?

By Selwyn Duke

If Democratic voters were rapidly increasing in number and Republican voters rapidly decreasing, it should be pretty big news, shouldn’t it?

Not when at issue is a third rail of American social commentary: race.

Recently I wrote a piece on race and voting patterns, using as a lede the story about how white births now account for less than 50 percent of the U.S. total for the first time in history. And while most respondents agreed with my analysis, some reacted predictably: Uncomfortable even hearing about race and/or frightened by what lies ahead, they rationalized away obvious facts.

And here is one: You cannot understand where our nation is headed ideologically without grasping the link between racial identification and voting patterns — and demographic changes that will yield Democratic hegemony.

One response to my piece was that “it’s not about race.” This is true — in a sense. It’s about how group identification correlates with many other factors. For instance, Scandinavian immigrants are very liberal, and Jews vote Democratic upwards of 80 percent of the time. Thus, if these two white populations were increasing rapidly, it would make sense to discuss their future impact on the political landscape. But they’re not.

Another response was that I was confusing race with culture. Actually, though, this confuses the “what” with the “why.”

And here is a significant “what”: Republicans derive 90 percent of their presidential-election vote from whites. Democrats win the non-white vote by, on average, more than 70 percent.

Read the rest here.
May 22, 2012

And That’s the Way It Isn’t: Ten Liberal Myths People Believe

By Selwyn Duke

When a big lie is repeated often enough and becomes “truth,” there can be serious consequences. For reality is like a jigsaw puzzle: If too many pieces (little pictures) are wrong, you’ll never be able to assemble them and see the big picture. The result is dislocation from reality. What follows are 10 big lies that have gained currency — and the actual truth behind them.

1. Pope Pius XII was a Nazi Collaborator

According to Rabbi David Dalin in his book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, Pius saved at least 800,000 Jews from extermination at the hands of the Nazis. This is why, during and especially just after WWII, Pius was roundly praised by Jewish figures such as Golda Meir, Albert Einstein, and Moshe Sharett, just to name a few.

So what happened? Well, five years after Pius’ death, a play called The Deputy was made by leftist Rolf Hochhuth. It portrayed Pius as a self-serving man who was indifferent if not hostile to the Nazis’ Jewish victims, and the increasingly secular world ran with it. The Big Lie was repeated until it was “truth.”

But the back story here is even more interesting: The highest-ranking communist intelligence officer to ever defect to the West, Ion Mihai Pacepa, divulged that the attack on Pius — including The Deputy — was no accident. It was Soviet agitprop.

2. There are more whites than blacks on welfare

When responding to this, educated people often mention that only percentages matter, not raw numbers. But here’s the real surprise:

Read the rest here.
May 21, 2012

The Composite President

By Selwyn Duke

When analyzing Barack Obama’s electoral success a few years back, I pointed out that there was more than white guilt at work. He was, quite frankly, what every good little liberal had always been looking for. Sure, he was “black,” using that old bigoted “one-drop” standard, which, curiously, has been embraced by modern black activists. But more specifically he was half black, with Kenyan pedigree, half white and bore an exotic name. He was mentored by a Marxist, mothered by an atheist (when Momma Dunham was actually around), lived in Indonesia and Hawaii, had Muslim influence and black-church conscience. An attorney and the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he was purportedly an intellectual.

Obama was well-traveled and thus, by leftist lights, broad and sophisticated; having put down roots in Chicago’s black community, he was also grounded. Heck, his mother even had a boy’s first name (Stanley) before “sex” was “gender” and gender was whatever you wanted it to be. He was a multiculturalist’s dream, a Democrat’s 2008 electoral fantasy. A politically active socialist with the soul of Van Gogh couldn’t have drawn him up better if the candidate had been a composite.

What we couldn’t fully know in 2008, however, is that everything about Obama seems a composite fabrication. With Mr. Barack Barry Hussein Soetoro Obama (PBUH), nothing is as it seems.

Read the rest here.
May 21, 2012

Barack Obama: “Born in Kenya” – When the Truth is a Problem

By Selwyn Duke

“Do you know what your problem is?” asked Barack Obama rhetorically of erstwhile “uncle” Reverend Jeremiah Wright; “You have to tell the truth.” This exchange was related to Edward Klein, author of the newly published Obama exposé The Amateur, in an interview that Wright granted the writer. The reverend’s response to the President was, “That’s a good problem to have.”

Unfortunately, it’s clearly not a problem Barack Obama has.

The latest story evidencing this is the shocking revelation that Obama’s literary firm billed him as having been “born in Kenya” in promotional material issued in 1991. Joel Pollak broke the story at Breitbart.com, writing:

Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

The booklet, which was distributed to "business colleagues" in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.

Now, understand that Acton & Dystel is no rag-tag outfit. The promotional literature literally cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce and is a polished, finely crafted volume. Nonetheless, the individual who helped edit the booklet, Miriam Goderich, has come forward to say that the claim about Obama was merely a “mistake.” Breitbart published her statement:

Read the rest here.
May 19, 2012

Demographic Tipping Point: Whites Now Less than Half of US Births

By Selwyn Duke

Bill Clinton once said that he looked forward to the day when whites were a minority in America. While he won’t live to see such a time, a demographic milestone that should send a tingle up Slick Willie’s leg was just reached. Writes The New York Times:

After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Obviously, a big reason for this demographic shift is migration – and mainly the legal variety. As a result of Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the level of yearly immigration increased from approximately 250,000 prior to ‘65 to about 1,000,000 afterwards. And its nature changed also: 85 percent of our new arrivals now hail from the Third World and Asia. This radical departure from America’s traditional immigration patterns has created a demographic transformation possibly unprecedented in world history – except for cases of actual invasion.

(more…)
May 18, 2012

The Truth About Homosexuality

By Selwyn Duke

According to modern dogma, homosexuals are like sprinters: born and not made. Thus, even though psychology’s longstanding nature-nurture debate has concluded that many traits are the result of both factors, it isn’t politically correct to consider even this possibility with respect to homosexuality. But does this biology-is-destiny theory hold water with respect to same-sex attraction? And, if so, what does this say about the behavior’s moral status? Let’s examine the matter.

When discussing same-sex attraction’s cause, the first thing usually mentioned is the much touted “homosexual gene” theory. In fact, the idea has been repeated so often that many today accept it as fact. But the reality is this: Neither the groundbreaking Genome Project nor any other research endeavor has found any such gene. Moreover, it makes no sense from an evolutionary (or selective breeding, if you prefer) standpoint. After all, such a gene would greatly reduce the chances of its bearer procreating, would be unlikely to be passed on, and thus would be a dead-end mutation unable to survive many generations. And, I must say, it’s a testimonial to the emotion-oriented decision-making of secular modernists — who are generally staunch evolutionists — that they would glom on to a theory so contrary to Evolution 101.

Next we have the intrauterine development theory.

Read the rest here.