Our view on the pros and cons of a US military attack on Syria is very close to Douglas Murray’s as he expresses it in The Spectator (UK):

For me the conundrum of Syria now comes down to one particular problem. That is one which the House of Commons stumbled over last week and which the US Congress is likely to stumble over in the week ahead. The West has now given ample warning to President Assad of its intention to strike at some point. President Obama has famously drawn a red-line over the use of chemical weapons.

The problem then is this. If any country carries out punitive strikes against the Assad regime they will undoubtedly and rightly be demonstrating the international community’s revulsion over the use of chemical weapons. But if the targets that are hit in the resulting strike are meaningful (government buildings, installations etc) then there is the risk that such an intervention could tip the balance in the Syrian civil war. If that balance is tipped and Assad is severely weakened or even falls as a result then whoever carried out the strikes will be at least partly responsible for what comes next. That is a responsibility which neither America, Britain, France nor any other Western power can handle and it is one which none of us wants.

So – and here is the imponderable – the only purpose of strikes must be to hit targets which are meaningless. … That means something akin to President Clinton’s futile lobbing of missiles at an aspirin factory in Sudan as a response to the 1998 al-Qaeda embassy bombings in Africa. …

I don’t believe that the military should be used for making gestures, but rather to exert power and punish enemies in as meaningful a way as possible.

And the US should only intervene when its own interests are at stake. We want Iran’s nuclear installations to be attacked – in as effective a way as possible.

No, this is not about people who vote Democratic. It’s about scientists making miniature human brains artificially.

It’s an exciting story.

It comes from the Independent, written by Steve Connor:

Scientists have grown miniature human brains from skin cells in a laboratory for the first time as part of a study into the development of the most complex of all our organs, and the ultimate source of human creativity and consciousness.

The mini-brains are less than 4mm across but researchers say that they are equivalent in development to the brain of a human foetus at about nine weeks’ gestation, and even have the complex three-dimensional structure of a real embryonic brain.

Previous attempts at growing brain tissue in a laboratory dish have focused on culturing the nerve cells in two dimensions on a flat plate of nutrients, but the latest study used a droplet of nutrient gel as a three-dimensional scaffold on which the growing brain cells organised themselves into the miniature organ.

The scientists have called the primitive brains “cerebral organoids” and have emphasised that the living structures are still far from being described as true human brains with a potential for self-awareness or consciousness – a threshold of development that would be ethically wrong to cross, they said.

“Three or four millimetres do not sound very much, but for someone who is used to working with a microscope it’s quite a lot. The individual brain areas that we find in our organoids are not so very far away from the size of the endogenous organs at this stage of development,” said Juergen Knoblich, of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. …

The mini-brains were created from human skin cells that were converted into stem cells by a well-established genetic engineering technique. This produced induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells which were then coaxed by chemical stimulants and nutrients to develop into mature brain cells that self-organised into the rudimentary structures of an embryonic brain, such as the cerebral cortex.

Dr. Knoblich said that the organoids have already shed light on a condition called microcephaly, when the brain fails to grow to its correct size in the womb, and also could eventually help research into conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, which both involve unknown malfunctions in early brain development.

“There have been numerous attempts recently to model human brain tissue from human cells. Scientists have gone on to generate an eye, a pituitary gland and even a human liver, but so far the most complex of all human organs, which is the brain, has not been susceptible to these kinds of cultures. This technique allows us to study the human-specific features of brain development. We can analyse the function of individual genes in a human setting. We have been able to model one disease, microcephaly, but ultimately we’d like to move to more common disorders such as schizophrenia or autism. So far drug testing has been done on animal models and isolated human cells. These organ-culture models offer the possibility of testing drugs directly without animal experiments to get more informed results.”

The study, published in the journal Nature, showed that it was possible to convert skin cells into a specialised form of embryonic tissue called the neuroectoderm, which produces all the components of the brain and nervous system. Organoids from a patient with microcephaly failed to grow as fast as other organoids, but this could be corrected by replacing a defected gene responsible for the disorder, the study showed.

Andrew Jackson, of the Medical Research Council’s Human Genetic Unit in Edinburgh, who collaborated with Dr Knoblich, said that the brain organoids provides a new way of studying the human brain, the most complex structure known with an estimated 100 billion nerve cells and many times the number of nerve connections. “Being able to generate tissue with such complexity in cell culture is a significant advance for the study of human disease in the laboratory,” he said.

We knew it and we said it. When Left fascists in power advocate “free” – ie tax-payer funded – pre-kindergarten education for all toddlers, they are planning early indoctrination.

That is to say, in our vocabulary, they are planning to corrupt them.

At present they can only start at kindergarten level.

This comes from CNS:

The Chicago Public Schools this year are mandating that the district’s kindergarten classes include sex education … 

And it’s okay, you see, because the Left Fascist in Chief has ached for it for a long time …

… fulfilling a proposal President Barack Obama supported in 2003 when he served in the Illinois state senate and later defended when he ran for president in the 2008 election cycle.

At a Planned Parenthood convention at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2007, a teenage girl who said she worked as a sex-education “peer educator” in the D.C. public schools asked then-U.S. Sen. Obama what he would do to encourage the teaching of “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex education”.

Obama [said] … that he had worked with Planned Parenthood to push a sex education bill when he served in the Illinois state legislature. … [because] it is the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools.”  …

Explanations and “clarifications” follow. Belt out a few of those and no one should have any more questions. Okay, once more. Pay attention.

To further clarify Obama’s position on sex ed for kindergartner’s, Obama’s campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, pointed MSNBC to the “curriculum for those in kindergarten” produced by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).

Ah, there’s an authority to command respect. And we didn’t even know it existed! (Read about it here.) Obviously, with a name like that, it deserves to have the last word.

This curriculum suggested discussing same-sex relationships — in non-graphic terms – with kindergartners.

Non-graphic terms, you see. So what’s there to worry about? You thought they’d be discussing sex with five-year-olds in graphic terms? What do you think they are? Filthy-minded?

SIECUS explained that the bill Obama supported did indeed extend sex education to kindergartners in Illinois. At that time, Illinois mandated sex education only for children in grades six through 12. SIECUS also said the bill would have removed all mention of “marriage” from sex education in the state’s public schools. …

Marriage was even then becoming a no-no. Except for gays.

“It would also have expanded sexuality education to students in kindergarten through fifth grade and mandated that students be taught the age of consent, positive communication skills, and that they (the pupil) have the power to control behavior,” said SIECUS.

Bureaucratese is always a difficult language to interpret, but you could try.  Remembering that the euphemistic phrases are spoken by sex-maniacs, fill in the blanks:

Teaching five-year-olds “the age of consent” means …

“Positive communication skills” means …

“You, five year old, have the power to control behavior” means …

Well, it seems common sense prevailed that time in Illinois:

Despite Obama’s support for it, the bill did not pass and did not become Illinois law. …

But now the pedophobic pedagogues are having another go. Chiefly because they are determined that homosexuality be accepted as a norm, this time the corruption is “mandated”.

Its the healthy way, you see:  

According to a report published yesterday by the CBS affiliate in Chicago, the new sex education program mandated in Chicago public schools will — like the SIECUS curriculum — instruct kindergartners about same-sex relationships.

“Students [they’re “students” already at five] will also take a look at the different family structures that exist in today’s society,” said the CBS report. The report then quoted Stephanie Whyte, the chief health officer of the Chicago Public Schools: “Whether that means there’s two moms at home, everyone’s home life is different, and we introduce the fact that we all have a diverse background.”

When you’re  five years old, you gotta know that. Get it into your head, baby. Don’t sit there among your toys thinking nasty thoughts about homosexuals. We’re on to you. Listen up …

The Leftist fascists now in charge of America declare individual liberty, the ideal on which and for which the USA was founded, dangerously “extremist”.

Their aim is to make Leftist ideology the norm.

This comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

Once more, military training has become an Orwellian re-education camp where a radical transformation of the truth depicts the Founding Fathers as extremists and conservative groups as “hate groups.”

Saying “Give me liberty or give me death” qualifies Patrick Henry as an extremist, according to the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute training guide … And so were the rest of those who took up arms against the British Crown and pledged their lives, their fortune and their sacred honor for a shot at liberty and democracy.

Under a section titled “Extremist Ideologies,” the document states, “In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

We would not lump the two together necessarily, but the Pentagon does. …

“Nowadays, instead of dressing in sheets or publicly espousing hate messages, many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place,” the Pentagon guide advises.

Which provides us with an opportunity to recall the fact that those who dressed up in sheets to terrify Blacks, those who lynched and murdered them, which is to say the members of the Ku Klux Klan, were Democrats.

This is from Free Republic, quoting David Bartonand his book Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White:

Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching. Democrats successfully blocked those bills and their platforms never did condemn lynchings. …

Further, the first grand wizard of the KKK was honored at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, no Democrats voted for the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to former slaves and, to this day, the party website ignores those decades of racism …

Although it is relatively unreported today, historical documents are unequivocal that the Klan was established by Democrats and that the Klan played a prominent role in the Democratic Party … A 13-volume set of congressional investigations from 1872 conclusively and irrefutably documents that fact.

The Klan terrorized black Americans through murders and public floggings; relief was granted only if individuals promised not to vote for Republican tickets, and violation of this oath was punishable by death … Since the Klan targeted Republicans in general, it did not limit its violence simply to black Republicans; white Republicans were also included.

The IBD article continues about those designated “extremists” by the Pentagon:

They might even form groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9-12” in their name, like the groups targeted for political harassment and intimidation by the IRS.

“The Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military.

“And it is striking,” he added, “that some of the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and tea party investigations.

Indeed, it also echoes the 2009 document issued by Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that … are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

The guide makes no mention of Nidal Hasan, the Army major who worked his way up through the ranks amid politically correct indifference to kill 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, and shoot 32 others in a Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at the base in Killeen, Texas, while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!”

But then he was defending the Taliban, not seeking freedom from the British.

Somewhat less distressing – though wrong both factually and morally – is the information that the guide calls Catholics, Evangelicals, [religious] Jews, Mormons “extremists” – just like al-Qaeda.

So it labels al-Qaeda “extremist”, but not Muslims as such? The article doesn’t say, but we very much doubt that the guide has a word to say against Islam.

This is from PowerLine, by Paul Mirengoff:

The Chaplain Alliance has issued a press release alleging, based on a review of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that in training materials, the Department of Defense classified Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, and Mormons as religious “extremists” similar to Al Qaeda. The Chaplain Alliance also claims that the military deemed the [far left] Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” list a “reliable source” for this conclusion. …

There was never any reason to suppose that the left’s long march through our institutions would not encompass the U.S. military. And we’ve seen plenty of evidence of the success of this portion of the long march.

So now the mighty Pentagon is helping the Obama regime turn the USA into the land of the unfree, and the home of the politically correct.

If it is possible for the US to have a worse president than Obama, it would be Hillary Clinton.

The two of them have already embarrassed their country more than enough.

She’s done nothing to boast of in her long career as the wife of a politician, her very short career as a senator, and her disastrous career as Secretary of State. But she’s done much to be ashamed of. The worst thing she did was set up a death trap  – what difference does it make whether she meant to or not? – for a US Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Then she lied about it. Blamed an obscure amateur video maker. Weird!

Her speeches are flat, dull, unmemorable – inevitably so, because she’s a dull thinker. There have been, and will be, countless speeches by other politicians just as boring and forgettable, but none could ever be more so.

This is from PowerLine, by John Hinderaker:

The aftermath [of the appalling mess in Benghazi] is embarrassing, too. Hillary told the father of one of the murdered SEALs that the administration would stop at nothing to bring that lousy video maker to justice. The man must have thought she was a lunatic. Later, according to an eyewitness, Hillary erupted in rage against a Republican Congressman who suggested that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Which, of course, she knew it was shortly after it began. Is it bad to be a cowardly liar? Not if you are a Democratic presidential candidate, evidently.

The aftermath didn’t end with the administration’s initial lies, either. It continues to this day. One might think that a Secretary of State who lost an ambassador on her watch would stop at nothing to make sure that the terrorists who carried out the attack were killed or otherwise punished. (Killed, preferably.) If this is a subject in which Hillary has taken interest, she has shown no sign of it.

And this is from Front Page, by Daniel Greenfield:

This week CBS joined NBC and CNN in the Hillary entertainment business. While NBC airs a 4-hour miniseries produced by James D. Stern, the son of a top Bill Clinton donor, whom the New York Times accused of pushing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy eight years ago, CNN will air a documentary about Hillary and CBS is developing Madame Secretary, a television series about a female Secretary of State.

The biggest challenge for all these projects is how small a figure they have to hang so many hours of dead air on.

The NBC series will “recount Clinton’s life as a wife, mother, politician and cabinet member.” Tellingly, the political side of her life comes last. The CBS series will cover “the personal and professional life of a maverick female Secretary of State as she drives international diplomacy, wrangles office politics and balances a complex family life.”

It always comes back to the family life, because what else is there? Turn off the cameras and sitting there is the compulsively dishonest and corrupt wife of a compulsively dishonest and corrupt former president. The wife of a dishonest, but popular, president, running for his old job, may have a slight Latin American or Middle Eastern flavor, but it’s not even Evita; let alone Hillary of Arabia.

Hillary’s closest supporters don’t have much to say about her weak tenure as Secretary of State. Once you get past the usual material about serving as a role model for girls and facing the challenges of being a wife and a mother, there are very few specific mentions of what Hillary actually did while in office.

Hillary took a lot of trips and spent a lot of money on art in embassies and green energy, but you couldn’t find her actual accomplishments with a microscope.

The only two moments of her diplomatic career that anyone remembers is the bungled Russian reset button and her clumsy participation in the Benghazi cover-up. Even the most favorable reading of both events, a misspelled gimmicky button and blaming her subordinates for not providing adequate security funding which helped lead to the murder of four Americans, don’t make for much of a resume.

After Hillary stepped out of the State Department to begin her 2016 campaign, the medals and awards came pouring in almost as fast as the television shows.

The National Constitution Center awarded her a Liberty Medal because she “traveled to more countries than any other Secretary of State” and “used social media to engage citizens”. That’s not the bio of a Secretary of State. It sounds like a celebrity getting some meaningless UN humanitarian award for tweeting about Rwanda.

The National Defense University Foundation will follow that up by giving her the Patriot Award in the Ronald Reagan Building in order to celebrate “the American spirit of patriotism” which she embodies in some unspecified way.

The ridiculous parade of awards and shows is a rerun of how Obama, an uninteresting Illinois politician, was transformed into the most interesting figure in American politics through obsessive attention and hysterical praise. But Hillary Clinton, who will be pushing seventy by the time her big moment in the sun arrives, has fewer excuses for needing to slap this much greasepaint on an undistinguished resume.

The positions that will be used as props in her quest for higher office came to her only by way of being married to the former President of the United States. And it’s impossible to find anything revolutionary that she did with those positions, except use them as launching pads for an office she was even less qualified for. …

There is nothing factual in Hillary’s background to justify her inevitability as a candidate. Her time as Senator and Secretary of State was a shapeless blur of undistinguished mediocrity culminating in one final bloody disaster.

And Dan Calabrese writes about Hillary’s dishonesty:

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her [untrue] story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

He goes on to tell a little known story of what he mildly terms her “unethical behavior”. One to add to a long list. Find it here.

And this is an extract from Discover the Networks’ survey of Hillary’s deplorable career. (The whole survey is a must-read.)

In July 2012, author and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy noted the following items about the relationship between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Muslim Brotherhood …

• The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.

• The State Department announced [in November 2011] that the Obama administration would be ‘satisfied’ with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.

• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.

• The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

• On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official.

In the summer of 2012,controversy arose over the fact that Secretary Clinton’s closest aide and advisor, Huma Abedin, has longstanding intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Then came Benghazi …

They holiday alike; they dress alike; they govern alike; talk alike and now they’re “playing” war alike. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron are the Bobbsey Twins of their Brave New World.

It should come as no surprise that both Obama and Cameron also share the same creepy campaign guru in Jim Messina.

And Cameron, like Obama, is a disciple of Saul Alinsky.

The picture comes from Canada Free Press, as do the comments we quote, which are by Judi McLeod.

The two mealy-mouths were going through a series of vacations when the people of Egypt took to the streets to draw worldwide attention to the evils of the Muslim Brotherhood in the largest grassroots protest in history. …

On Saturday, Obama and his top military and national security advisers hashed out options for responding to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria amid “increasing signs” that the government used poison gas against civilians. …

With prospects of World War III …

We say World War IV, counting the Cold War as World War III, and we say  it has already started …

… now waiting only for the lighted match, the outcome of geopolitics now counts on a president who relies on a Valerie Jarrett for his marching orders and the prime minister of a country who lives mostly to copycat him.

If Obama had a baby brother, he’d look a lot like Prime Minister Davey Cameron. …

The entire world is a safer place when Barack Obama and David Cameron are on vacation.

Our reader Dale Jensen, commenting on our post Feminists submit to Muslim male domination (August 24, 2013 – about Swedish women putting on hijabs in mistaken solidarity with Muslim women) made these points which we extract from the full comment:

Cultural Marxism sees everything through the lens of oppression. In the deluded mind of Leftists, whites and indeed all of Euro culture is built on the oppression of non-whites; i.e. the legacy of imperialism. Whites must therefore pay for their past sins. Islam is seen as noble while anything associated with the West is seen as evil. That is why “we see a glorification of Islam on the part of many Leftists”. …

The Left are also pathological altruists. … This is the legacy of post-Kantian philosophy. Kant was trying to save Christian ethics from the skepticism which characterized much Enlightenment thought (he wasn’t wrong about that). His Categorical Imperative basically destroys self-interest as acting from “inclination” is always outside the realm of morality (it becomes amoral) and acting from “duty” is the only path to virtue. Kant would go on to advocate an extreme form of altruism where duty to the “other” is basically the only way to be moral. The moral philosophers that followed him would expand this. Auguste Comte would argue that Christian ethics was too selfish because it focused on the salvation of the individual soul. The legacy of this is that today genuine self-interested action, at an individual or national level, is considered outside the realm of morality (or immoral) whereas only duty-oriented action to the “other” is moral. The Other has become the standard of morality. Now you package that with egalitarianism and you see that you must sacrifice for the cultural other. …

According to the dictates of Leftist egalitarianism, the more non-Western or non-White the “other” is, the more you must appease or surrender to them. This combines Leftist egalitarianism and Post-Kantian altruism to get the modern spectacle. So Islam being the most non-Western and evil of our enemies must be appeased. What better way to offer sacrifices to our Islamic enemy than to give them White, Western women. It is the sign of a culture (Euro-White) sacrificing itself pure and simple; all on the altar of egalitarianism and white guilt. …

Female biological need for male psycho-sexual strength – this is also important. Leftism (and feminism in particular) has gelded and castrated the modern male. To use Nietzschean terminology, it has turned most men into some version of the “Last Man”; a video game playing, pro-sports team worshiping, overweight, feminized Last Man. Feminism has undermined male strength and male authority. Women crave this on a deep psychological level. Male dominance is something that makes a woman feel feminine. Without it, a woman is never fulfilled. I’m not saying that dominance needs to be malevolent. I think the dominance men wielded prior to the 1960s was actually benevolent, especially compared to the rest of the world. But it was undermined. Now we are seeing some women seek out that order and that dominance from Islam and Muslim men who are not wussified by feminism and Leftism. These women in the name of modern liberalism are turning themselves into basically Chattel Slaves of Muslim Men. It could make you want to cry or spit. …

The West is committing suicide. We are seeing this in many ways. But the way Western women are behaving is a leading indicator. To watch this knowing what is coming at the end of the tunnel is heart breaking. On my darker days I wonder if the entire liberal / libertarian project is inherently flawed, and only a strict Conservative regime can work. I’m uncertain about that last though.

We are not sure what a “strict” Conservative regime would be, but we do think the liberal project is entirely flawed, and the libertarian project has flaws in it.

There are many points in the comment worth discussion and we invite further comment on any or all of them.

Three adolescents set out to kill a man. And they did. The victim – a young Australian student and baseball player named Christopher Lane – was not known to them. One of them, fifteen year old James Edwards, said he did it because he was bored.

Let us now be disputatious, provoking, even – some might think – radical.

We contend that if the bored boy had to work for a living he would not have been bored. If all three boys had to work rather than sit at a school desk and have free “education” poured over them, they would have been too busy to kill.

The struggle to exist is a reason to exist. Socialism, the welfare state, by supplying all the necessities of life, can bring anybody – even the illiterate and non-introspective – to ask “What’s the point of my life?” “What’s it all for?” Or simply, “What can I do to stop being bored?”

Sure, there is a minority who have mental resources enough to keep themselves occupied if all their daily needs are provided. They have interests to pursue. They may be inventive. They set their own purposes and find their personal answers to existential questions.

The rest should invest time and effort in surviving. They’ll know then what their own lives cost, and probably be a lot less likely to hold the lives of others cheap.

*

About the mother of one of the killers, information is provided here by Bryan Preston at PJ Media.

Did “bored” teen James Edwards learn about crime from his mother? Edwards is the 15-year-old …  accused of shooting Australian baseball player Chris Lane in the back last Friday. He appeared in court Tuesday and reportedly made a mockery of the proceedings.

A search on Mugshots.com turns up one Brenda M. Edwards, 50, of Stephens County, Oklahoma. I called the Stephens County district attorney’s office today and confirmed that Brenda M. Edwards is James Edwards’ mother.

Edwards is currently incarcerated in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. Her extensive rap sheet begins in 1994 with a conviction for larceny, and spans her son’s entire life.

She has three known aliases. As things stand now, her relationship with Oklahoma’s criminal justice system won’t end for several decades. …

If we’re going to blame a “culture” for James Edwards’ alleged part in Chris Lane’s murder, as some want to blame the so-called “gun culture”,* shouldn’t the culture of recidivist criminality come under scrutiny?

And wasn’t Brenda Edwards paid by the state to have a child whom she couldn’t otherwise have afforded?

And hasn’t the welfare state taken on the guardianship of children, providing them with everything from housing and food to schooling and health care?

The Left sometimes characterizes the political philosophy of the Right as “Devil take the hindmost”. Today we feel that, speaking for ourselves, they are not entirely wrong.

* A few days later two teenage boys beat to death an old man – Delbert Belton, 88 – in a car park in Spokane, Washington. Belton should have been armed with a gun.

In the country that the Left admires most, Sweden, the feminists admire the way Islam treats women. They admire it so much that they are emulating Muslim women and putting on hijabs. Soon it will be burkas. They are doing it voluntarily now, but before long they will be forced to wear the black tent of sexual slavery when Muslims are in the majority and sharia becomes the law of the land. Perhaps it’s just as well that they’re preparing themselves for the new regime.

The picture comes from Front Page, where Bruce Bawer writes:

Europe is awash in dhimmitude, but Sweden is a case unto itself. There’s something desperate and demented about the levels of dhimmitude on display in Ikea-land. In no other European country, moreover, is there so little pushback in the media. …

Sweden has the highest percentage of rapes in the Western world. And the problem is getting steadily worse. Given the progressive Swedish establishment’s fondness for earnest rhetoric about women’s rights, you might think this rape crisis would be a subject of deep concern in the nation’s media. But no – it’s a non-topic. It’s unmentionable. And for one reason: because everyone understands that the ever-increasing incidence of Swedish rapes is directly related to the ever-increasing number of Swedish Muslims. And in Sweden, you can’t talk critically about Islam. You just can’t – not publicly, anyway. When the subject is Islam, nothing is permitted other than the usual mindless multicultural mantras. …

The Swedes are apparently a nation of dupes. A transparent ruse to make them feel guilty of Hijab-phobia worked so well it got all those liberated ladies tied up in head scarves in an eye-wink.

It started when a pregnant Muslim woman (one report put her age at 20; another identified her as a mother of three) claimed that she’d been attacked late Friday night. She was alone in a parking structure in the Stockholm suburb of Farsta, she said, when a man walked over to her, ripped off her hijab, and banged her head into a parked car, making her dizzy. He also growled something to the effect that people like her “don’t belong here”.

Now, if this actually happened, it’s repugnant. But there’s no evidence that it did happen – no eyewitnesses, no surveillance video – and it’s been suggested (although not, of course, in the Swedish media) that the woman’s story could be entirely bogus. In any case, it’s a man-bites-dog tale if there ever was one: Sweden is overrun with Muslim men who rape infidel women, not with infidels who pull headscarves off Muslim women.

Yet when the woman went public with her account, Swedish derangement syndrome kicked in – big time. On Sunday, Aftonbladet ran an op-ed signed by five persons: Bilan Osman, identified as an “anti-racist commentator”; Fatima Doubakil of the Muslim Human Rights Committee; Foujan Rouzbeh, an “asylum rights activist”; Nabila Abdul Fattah, “commentator”; and Nachla Libre, “poet.”

Yes, those are now Scandinavian names.

The five authors asserted that “the woman in Farsta isn’t the only one who has been attacked in this way.” Many Muslim women, they maintained, have been subjected to similar mistreatment by “white Swedish men…on buses, in stores, and at restaurants.” The authors painted a picture of a country filled with white people who “harass, degrade, intimidate, and abuse others in public places because of their religious attire.” And they argued that such offenses have become increasingly common because – and, yes, they actually wrote the following – “Islam and Muslims are described in the media and by political parties as a problem and a threat to Swedish democracy.”

Yes, Islam is a threat to Swedish democracy; but no, the Swedish media virtually never dare to admit this fact, or to say anything that might remotely hint at it. And the only political party that addresses this issue is the Swedish Democratic Party, whose members are not only routinely condemned in the media, in the harshest of terms, but have been repeatedly harassed, degraded, intimidated, and abused by the Swedish government itself.

The op-ed authors went on to demand – and that’s the word they used, “demand” – that Justice Minister Beatrice Ask “appoint a commission to investigate, map, and come up with specific action plans to combat the widespread hate crimes against Muslims.” They called on the government “to stop the march of fascism” (as represented, apparently, by that lone man in the parking structure who allegedly pulled off the woman’s headscarf). And they proclaimed what they called a “hijabupprop” – a hijab action. “We encourage all of our sisters in Sweden – religious and non-religious – to veil themselves on the morning of August 19 to show solidarity with all Muslim women who, all too often, suffer harassment and violence.”

They probably do. But not from Swedes.

The five authors tweeted their call to action on Twitter. The tweet was shared over 65,000 times. The idea was brilliant, providing politically correct Swedes with an excellent opportunity to posture. And it proved a magnificent success.

In “solidarity” with the purported victim, countless Swedish women – including a number of well-known actors, writers, journalists, artists, and politicians – wore headscarves on Monday. And took pictures of themselves doing so. Their photos flooded Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. …

The Swedish news media, notorious for the decorous silence they have long maintained about the country’s rape crisis, were all over this story. The newspapers were awash in stories about the hijab campaign and full of pictures of the famous Swedish women in Muslim headscarves. The hijab campaigners were interviewed repeatedly on TV and radio. One of them, Nabila Abdul Fattah, admitted that their goal was “to normalize the hijab”. …

[A] Muslim feminist Hanna Gadban was furious about the campaign, and tried to remind everyone that the hijab is a symbol of patriarchal oppression. But she was a voice crying in the wilderness. …

The zillions of photos of stupid, self-satisfied infidel women in veils symbolizing female subordination were ridiculous, deserving of mockery, of derisive laughter. But they were also scary. Seeing brainwashed people is always scary.

Linda, 18, victim of Muslim rape-wave in Sweden

See also our posts Raping for Allah, April 4, 2013, and Sweden (silently) submits to Islam, July 19, 2012.

Accidentally cut your ear off? Just 3D print a new one

Here’s splendid news reported by Mike Shedlock at Townhall:

Science marches on at a blistering pace. The star-trek “replicator” that seemed preposterously far-fetched is now here. …

This week, researchers at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China unveiled their Regenovo 3D printer. Unlike more familiar 3D printers, which work with plastic or metal dust, Regenovo prints living tissue – such as these little ears.

The Hangzhou team aren’t the only ones 3D-printing spare parts for people. Earlier this year, a team at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, also demonstrated an ear printer, and Organovo in San Diego, California, are on the way to building fresh human livers.

Last year –

An 83-year-old Belgian woman is able to chew, speak and breathe normally again after a machine printed her a new jawbone. Made from a fine titanium powder sculpted by a precision laser beam, her replacement jaw has proven as functional as her own used to be before a potent infection, called osteomyelitis, all but destroyed it.

The medics behind the feat say it is a first. “This is a world premiere, the first time a patient-specific implant has replaced the entire lower jaw,” says Jules Poukens, the researcher who led the operation at Biomed, the biomedical research department of the University of Hasselt, in Belgium. “It’s a cautious, but firm step.”

In this operation, a 3D printed titanium scaffold was steeped in stem cells and allowed to grow biocompatible tissue inside the abdomen of the recipient. …

By using an MRI scan of their patient’s ailing jawbone to get the shape right, they fed it to a laser sintering 3D printer which fused tiny titanium particles layer by layer until the shape of her jawbone was recreated. It was then coated in a biocompatible ceramic layer. No detail was spared: it even had dimples and cavities that promoted muscle attachment, and sleeves that allowed mandibular nerves to pass through – plus support structures for dental implants the patient might need in future.

The team were astonished at the success of the four-hour jaw implant operation, which took place in June 2011 but which has only just been revealed. …

Also:

In 2009, researchers reported successfully printing copies of whole thumb bones – opening the way for the replacement of smashed digits using information from MRI scans.

And:

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells.

Using stem cells as the “ink” in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern.

The cells were floating in a “bio-ink,” to use the terminology of the researchers who developed this technique. They were able to squeeze out tiny droplets, containing five cells or fewer per droplet, in a variety of shapes and sizes. To produce clumps of cells, the team printed out cells first and then overlaid those with cell-free bio-ink, resulting in larger droplets or spheroids of cells. The cells would group together inside these spheroids. Spheroid size is key, because stem cells need certain conditions to work properly. This is why very precisely controlled 3-D printing could be so valuable for stem cell research.

After being squeezed out of a thin valve, the cells were still alive and viable, and able to transform into any other cell in the body. … It’s the first time anyone has printed human embyronic stem cells, said lead researcher Will Wenmiao Shu, a professor at Heriot-Watt.