News

Democrats changes immigration rules to admit people with multiple STDs

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Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

The Daily Caller reports:

The Obama administration will no longer ban immigrants with three sexually transmitted diseases and bacterial infections from entering the country, the Center for Immigration Studies noted.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced the rule Jan. 26, and it goes into effect on March 28.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, within HHS, decided to remove chancroid, granuloma inguinale, and lymphogranuloma venereum from the list of inadmissible diseases for an immigrant seeking to enter the country. The Obama administration estimates that the change would not cost more than $100 million.

In President Barack Obama’s first year in office, the Department of Health and Human Services decided that HIV was no longer a “communicable disease of public health significance.”

[…]The U.S. has the highest rate of HIV infection of any developed nation. More than 1.2 million people in this country are HIV positive.

Is HIV infection a serious problem?

The Washington Examiner explains:

“Despite the declaration that HIV was no longer a communicable disease of public health significance, the CDC estimates that approximately 50,000 people in the United States are newly infected with HIV each year and that over 1.2 million persons in the country are HIV positive. The United States has the highest prevalence of HIV infection of any developed country,” said CIS in a report released at midnight.

[…]Feere, the Center’s legal policy analyst, added, “This change in policy illustrates, once again, that increased immigration is the main goal of the Obama administration, no matter the costs. The administration itself estimates that more people will become infected and that there will be increased health care costs as a result of these changes. But obviously these are considerations that have little relevance for those with an open-border perspective.”

Democrats never want to shame people for bad behaviors like promiscuity. They think that it’s better if we reward them by giving them admission to the USA, even if it puts innocent people who are already here at risk. Just ask Kate Steinle how good it is that the Obama administration does not deport illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes, once they are released from prison. Or ask the victims of the San Bernardino terrorists how good it is that the Obama administration doesn’t screen out radical Islamists.

The important thing (to Democrats) is not that the American public is protected, it’s that immigration of big-government supporters increases. That’s why the Democrats want to let in more and more unskilled immigrants – they are future Democrat voters. They have to change the electorate so that people who behave morally, understand the Constitution, and believe in the free market system become a minority. Skilled immigrants are bad because they won’t look to bigger government to save them from their own poor decisions. But unskilled immigrants – especially ones who need free health care for their sexually-transmitted diseases – are perfect Democrat voters. And they can infect other people, some of whom will also need free health care.

Big government to the rescue – to solve a crisis they created.

News

Detainee released by the Democrats is now top recruiter for Islamic State (ISIS)

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Neville Chamberlain Obama: peace in our time
Neville Chamberlain Obama: peace in our time

Since the prison at Guantanamo Bay is in the news lately, it might be worth reviewing the Obama administrations actions related to radical Islamic terrorism to see whether Democrats can be serious about protecting America.

Here is a typical case of the Obama administration releasing radical Islamist terrorists from Gitmo.

Investors Business Daily explains:

Last year, the president claimed he only freed five Taliban leaders to free “POW” Bowe Bergdahl, whom he portrayed as a hero. But now the Army says Bergdahl’s a deserter. We smell a rat, and it’s not just Bergdahl.

The Army on Wednesday charged Sgt. Bergdahl with desertion and endangering the safety of a command, which carries a life prison term.

The findings of the military’s six-month investigation corroborate an internal 2009 Army report that found Bergdahl had a history of walking off his post and more than likely deserted. That’s why the Pentagon never listed him as a POW.

The report said he shipped his laptop back home to Idaho, and left a note expressing his disillusionment with the war, before ending up in the arms of the Taliban.

Obama had access to this intelligence long before he made his Taliban deal. So why did he trade a known deserter — and likely enemy sympathizer, if not collaborator — for five enemy commanders that he acknowledged posed a national security risk? And why did he glorify Bergdahl as a war hero?

To justify the release from Gitmo of five hardened terrorists who would never have been released otherwise and to help close down Gitmo.

The goal is not to improve security, it’s to make it easier to close the prison.

And here’s another case reported by the Weekly Standard from earlier this week:

A former detainee hold at Gitmo has been arrested for ties to the Islamic State.

“Spanish and Moroccan police on Tuesday arrested four suspected members of a jihadi cell that sought to recruit fighters for the Islamic State group, including one described as a former Guantanamo detainee who once fought with militants in Afghanistan,” reports the Associated Press.

“Three people were arrested in Spain’s North African enclave city of Ceuta while a Moroccan was arrested in the Moroccan border town of Farkhana, next to Melilla, Spain’s other North African enclave, statements from the two nations’ interior ministries said.

“One of those detained in Ceuta was the former Guantanamo detainee who was not named by Spanish authorities but described as ‘a leader who was trained in handling weapons, explosives and in military tactics.’ After being captured in 2002 and held in Guantanamo, he was returned to Spain in 2004, said Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz.”

Obama says that closing Gitmo would actually strengthen our national security. He cites no experts for this, and he has no evidence that it’s true – it just sounds nice to him, is all.

The truth is that releasing Islamic terrorists actually drives up recruitment of more terrorists.

Here’s Andrew C. McCarthy to explain, in National Review:

The second driver of terrorist recruitment is the perception that the jihadists are winning, the conviction that they will ultimately prevail. Osama bin Laden wooed young Muslims with the wisdom that people are always drawn to the strong horse and shun the weak one. While Islamic State “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi follows up each jihadist atrocity by seizing more territory and enslaving more subjects, the president of the United States follows each jihadist atrocity — Benghazi, Paris, and now San Bernardino — by releasing more jihadists from Gitmo.

It’s not Gitmo driving recruitment. It’s our president.

In truth, Muslims don’t care a whit about Guantanamo Bay. I prosecuted one of the world’s most notorious terrorists in the mid ’90s, the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, who formed the cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. He got the gold-plated due process of a civilian trial and all the trimmings of top-shelf civilian prison — no Gitmo for him. And you know what? Islamic supremacists continue to condemn his incarceration and jihadists have killed scores of people to try to extort his release. They don’t care where we detain jihadists; they care that we detain jihadists.

Does Obama think we should release all the terrorists in federal penitentiaries, too? You know, to depress recruitment . . .

Because it is Islamic supremacism and the perception of victory that draws young Muslims to the jihad, the brute fact is: It’s not detaining terrorists at Gitmo that spurs recruitment; it’s releasing them. Muslims who wage war against America and are held in our prisons become icons of the jihad. They rise from obscurity to legend, and their status imbues them with authority to command attacks, raise funds, and attract recruits.

The real concern of the left in all of this is NOT to protect America from threats such as radical Islamic terrorism. The real desire is to attack and punish those who make radical Islamists feel bad about what they are doing. Obama wants everyone to accept terrorists as just as moral as we are. Releasing them is his way of saying that they did nothing wrong – which is what he really believes. If anyone is in the wrong, Obama thinks, it’s we Americans. We somehow provoked these innocent terrorists… get off your high horse, and remember the Crusades. That’s his worldview. Terrrorism is your fault, and these innocent terrorists are the real victims, and that’s why we need to release them.

Polemics

John C. Sanford’s genetic entropy hypothesis

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

JoeCoder sent me a recent peer-reviewed paper by John C. Sanford, so I’ve been trying to find something written by him at a layman’s level so I could understand what he is talking about.

Dr. Sanford’s CV is posted at the Cornell University web page.

I found this 20-minute video of an interview with him, in which he explains his thesis:

The most important part of that video is Sanford’s assertion that natural selection cannot remove deleterious mutations from a population faster than they arrive.

And I also found a review of a book that he wrote that explains his ideas at the layman level.

It says:

Dr. John Sanford is a plant geneticist and inventor who conducted research at Cornell University for more than 25 years. He is best known for significant contributions to the field of transgenic crops, including the invention of the biolistic process (“gene gun”).

[…]Sanford argues that, based upon modern scientific evidence and the calculations of population geneticists (who are almost exclusively evolutionists), mutations are occurring at an alarmingly high rate in our genome and that the vast majority of all mutations are either harmful or “nearly-neutral” (meaning a loss for the organism or having no discernible fitness gain). Importantly, Sanford also establishes the extreme rarity of any type of beneficial mutations in comparison with harmful or “nearly-neutral” mutations. Indeed, “beneficial” mutations are so exceedingly rare as to not contribute in any meaningful way. [NOTE: “Beneficial” mutations do not necessarily result from a gain in information, but instead, these changes predominantly involve a net loss of function to the organism, which is also not helpful to [Darwinism]; see Behe, 2010, pp. 419-445.] Sanford concludes that the frequency and generally harmful or neutral nature of mutations prevents them from being useful to any scheme of random evolution.

[…]In the next section of the book, Sanford examines natural selection and asks whether “nature” can “select” in favor of the exceedingly rare “beneficial” mutations and against the deleterious mutations. The concept of natural selection is generally that the organisms that are best adapted to their environment will survive and reproduce, while the less fit will not. Sanford points out that this may be the case with some organisms, but more commonly, selection involves chance and luck. But could this process select against harmful mutations and allow less harmful or even beneficial mutations to thrive? According to Sanford, there are significant challenges to this notion.

Stanford is a co-author of an academic book on these issues that has Dembski and Behe as co-authors.

Now, I do have to post something more complicated about this, which you can skip – it’s an abstract of a paper he co-authored from that book:

Most deleterious mutations have very slight effects on total fitness, and it has become clear that below a certain fitness effect threshold, such low-impact mutations fail to respond to natural selection. The existence of such a selection threshold suggests that many low-impact deleterious mutations should accumulate continuously, resulting in relentless erosion of genetic information. In this paper, we use numerical simulation to examine this problem of selection threshold.

The objective of this research was to investigate the effect of various biological factors individually and jointly on mutation accumulation in a model human population. For this purpose, we used a recently-developed, biologically-realistic numerical simulation program, Mendel’s Accountant. This program introduces new mutations into the population every generation and tracks each mutation through the processes of recombination, gamete formation, mating, and transmission to the new offspring. This method tracks which individuals survive to reproduce after selection, and records the transmission of each surviving mutation every generation. This allows a detailed mechanistic accounting of each mutation that enters and leaves the population over the course of many generations. We term this type of analysis genetic accounting.

Across all reasonable parameters settings, we observed that high impact mutations were selected away with very high efficiency, while very low impact mutations accumulated just as if there was no selection operating. There was always a large transitional zone, wherein mutations with intermediate fitness effects accumulated continuously, but at a lower rate than would occur in the absence of selection. To characterize the accumulation of mutations of different fitness effect we developed a new statistic, selection threshold (STd), which is an empirically determined value for a given population. A population’s selection threshold is defined as that fitness effect wherein deleterious mutations are accumulating at exactly half the rate expected in the absence of selection. This threshold is mid-way between entirely selectable, and entirely unselectable, mutation effects.

Our investigations reveal that under a very wide range of parameter values, selection thresholds for deleterious mutations are surprisingly high. Our analyses of the selection threshold problem indicate that given even modest levels of noise affecting either the genotype-phenotype relationship or the genotypic fitness-survival-reproduction relationship, accumulation of low-impact mutations continually degrades fitness, and this degradation is far more serious than has been previously acknowledged. Simulations based on recently published values for mutation rate and effect-distribution in humans show a steady decline in fitness that is not even halted by extremely intense selection pressure (12 offspring per female, 10 selectively removed). Indeed, we find that under most realistic circumstances, the large majority of harmful mutations are essentially unaffected by natural selection and continue to accumulate unhindered. This finding has major theoretical implications and raises the question, “What mechanism can preserve the many low-impact nucleotide positions that constitute most of the information within a genome?”

Now I have been told by JoeCoder that there are many critical responses to his hypothesis, most of which have to do with whether natural selection can overcome the difficulty he is laying out. But since this is not my area of expertise, there is not much I can say to adjudicate here. Take it for what it is.

Positive arguments for Christian theism