From the NYT:

Donald Trump Calls for Barring Muslims From Entering U.S.

Updated, 10:42 p.m. | Donald J. Trump called on Monday for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on” after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., an extraordinary escalation of rhetoric aimed at voters’ fears about members of the Islamic faith.

A prohibition of Muslims – an unprecedented proposal by a leading American presidential candidate, and an idea more typically associated with hate groups – reflects a progression of mistrust that is rooted in ideology as much as politics.

Mr. Trump, who in September declared “I love the Muslims,” turned sharply against them after the Paris terrorist attacks, calling for a database to track Muslims in America and repeating discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11. His poll numbers rose largely as a result, until a setback in Iowa on Monday morning. Hours later Mr. Trump called for the ban, fitting his pattern of making stunning comments when his lead in the Republican presidential field appears in jeopardy.

Saying that “hatred” among many Muslims for Americans is “beyond comprehension,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that the United States needed to confront “where this hatred comes from and why.”

“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump said.

Asked what prompted his statement, Mr. Trump said, “death,” according to a spokeswoman.

Repudiation of Mr. Trump’s remarks was swift and severe among religious groups and politicians from both parties. Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” said one Republican rival, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, while another, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, called the ban “offensive and outlandish.” Hillary Clinton said the idea was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Organizations representing Jews, Christians and those of other faiths quickly joined Muslims in denouncing Mr. Trump’s proposal.

“Rooting our nation’s immigration policy in religious bigotry and discrimination will not make America great again,” said Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of Interfaith Alliance, putting a twist on Mr. Trump’s campaign slogan.

Mr. Trump made his remarks a day after President Obama delivered a national address from the Oval Office urging Americans not to turn against Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Experts on immigration law and policy expressed shock at the proposal Monday afternoon.

“This is just so antithetical to the history of the United States,” said Nancy Morawetz, a professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law, who specializes in immigration. “It’s unbelievable to have a religious test for admission into the country.”

She added: “I cannot recall any historical precedent for denying immigration based on religion.”

I can: Soviet non-Jews.

In fact, I knew a Russian who was trying to fake being Jewish so she wouldn’t be kicked out of the country for not being Jewish.

Back in the 1990s, I knew one of the first of the great wave of Russian blondes to make it to the U.S. There was always a lot of drama revolving around whether or not the INS would kick her out of the country because her tourist visa had run out. Her boyfriend wasn’t interested in marrying her, so she was always on the lookout for a fake husband to scam the INS with. But when that angle petered out, she moved on to assembling genealogical records from back home to prove she was Jewish and therefore could get asylum in the U.S.

I’d never heard anything about her being even a little bit Jewish before, and it seemed like every economist in Cambridge, MA was on retainer to the Yeltsin government by that point, but apparently it was a serious plan: if she could document her theory of being Jewish by descent, she could, maybe, qualify for legal immigration to the U.S.. But if she were just a run of the mill Orthodox Christian, too bad, she was legally out of luck.

From a Trump campaign press release:

DONALD J. TRUMP STATEMENT ON PREVENTING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION

(New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, — Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing “25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad” and 51% of those polled, “agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.” Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won’t convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.

From the NYT, an update on Yale University’s Continuing Crisis over Halloween costumes

Yale Lecturer Resigns After Email on Halloween Costumes
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS DEC. 7, 2015

A Yale lecturer who came under attack for challenging students to stand up for their right to decide what Halloween costumes to wear, even to the point of being offensive, has resigned from teaching at the college, the university said Monday.

The lecturer, Erika Christakis, an expert in early childhood education, wrote an email in October suggesting that there could be negative consequences to students ceding “implied control” over Halloween costumes to institutional forces. “I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious,” she wrote, “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

She wrote the email in response to a directive from the Intercultural Affairs Committee at Yale that warned students that it would be insensitive to wear costumes that symbolized cultural appropriation or misrepresentation, or both, like feathered headdresses, turbans, war paint, blackface or redface, or costumes that made fun of people.

Ms. Christakis has made a “voluntary decision not to teach in the future,” according to a statement from the university on Monday. Her husband, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and a professor of sociology at Yale, will take a one-semester sabbatical, the university said.

The headline on an NYT Editorial waging the War on Noticing:

Fear Ignorance, Not Muslims

One of the reasons the name George Orwell still comes up all the time is Orwell’s deep insight into the tendencies of political journalists, such as the urge to call things by their direct opposite. Clearly, the NYT is calling for ignorance, but is invincibly convinced that it is on the side of knowledge.

From Reuters:

Pakistani security seeks to tamp down reporting on California shooter

By Mehreen Zahra-Malik

MULTAN, Pakistan Dec 6 (Reuters) – Pakistani security forces appeared to be trying to dampen down reporting this weekend on the background of Tashfeen Malik, who mounted an attack alongside her husband that killed 14 people in California.

Three professors at Malik’s university said they had been advised not to talk to the media, while men claiming to be from Pakistan’s security agencies told reporters to drop their investigations into her background on pain of arrest.

An official at the interior ministry later said this was due to a “misunderstanding”.

In the U.S., the Department of the Interior is in charge of the park rangers and other not very serious sounding jobs. In many other countries, however, the Ministry of the Interior is the Clampdown.

Farook Knows Best

Meet the Farooks with USA Today:

Dad: San Bernardino shooter agreed with ISIL, ‘obsessed with Israel’
Oren Dorell, USA TODAY 6:02 p.m. EST December 6, 2015

The father of San Bernardino suspect Syed Rizwan Farook told an Italian newspaper that his son expressed support for the Islamic State group and was obsessed with Israel.

The father, who is also named Syed Farook, told La Stampa that his son took on an overly conservative outlook on Islam and at least once expressed support for ideas promoted by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIL or ISIS.

“He said he shared the ideology of al-Baghdadi to create an Islamic state, and he was obsessed with Israel,” the father told a reporter in an interview outside the home of this other son, Syed Raheel Farook, in Corona, Calif.

Meet the Farooks

Charlie Chan was always referring to Number One Son and Number Two Son. That would be helpful with the Farook Family.

The father said he counseled his son to be patient because, he said, in time political changes in the Middle East will accomplish his desires.

“I kept telling him always: stay calm, be patient, in two years Israel will no longer exist,” the elder Farook told the newspaper. “Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China, America too, nobody wants the Jews there.”

Well, that’s pretty darn moderate of Syed Sr.

But Syed Rizwan Farook was not dissuaded, the father said.

The father said his family was destroyed when his son sided against him with his equally religious mother.

“Rizwan was the mama’s boy, and she is very religious like him,” he said. “Once we had a dispute about the historical figure of Jesus, my son yelled that I was an unbeliever and decided that marriage with my wife had to end.”

Okay …

For once, there has been some journalistic interest in how an immigrant who runs amok became an immigrant — in this case, the bizarre figure of the young mother / suburban terrorist who recently got a visa.

But I’m still wondering how the first generation of Farooks got into the U.S. What exactly did Farook Sr., a member of the long term unemployed, bring to the table that made it desirable for America to let him in? Did he promise to not do the jobs that Americans wanted to do? Maybe the deal clincher was his taste for goat fetuses?

Or does merely asking these questions violate the presumptive civil right of everybody on earth to move to America as long as they are not currently plotting terrorism? Trying to discriminate among who would be beneficial immigrants and who would be detrimental immigrants would be intelligent, but it’s still discriminating. In fact, intelligence largely is discrimination, so intelligence is racist.

Comments?

Transcript

Doing my usual In-Depth Command-F analysis, I see the following text strings occurred X times:

“refugee” – 0

“asyl” – 0

“migra” – 1, in noting that the San Berdoo victims included immigrants.

But just as it is the responsibility of Muslims around the world to root out misguided ideas that lead to radicalization, it is the responsibility of all Americans, of every faith, to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that muslim-americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL.

Muslim-americans are our friends and our neighbors. Our co-workers. Our sports heroes. And, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country. We have to remember that.

My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history. We were founded upon a belief in human dignity that no matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.

Even in this political season, even as we properly debate what steps I and future presidents must take to keep our country safe. Let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional.

So, a few observations on the implicit ideology:

– “American exceptionalism” mandates American national self-dissolution.

– Civil rights require that we not discriminate against any foreigner in the world who wishes to move to America.

– The ongoing massacres and expulsions of Christians in the Middle East cannot elicit our help, by, say, giving Christians the bulk of refugee spots, except in directly equal measure to our assisting the Muslim perpetrators with admission to America. That’s because the Christians of the Middle East have Christian Privilege.

From the NYT:

French Regional Vote: National Front Dominates First Round
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DEC. 6, 2015, 5:15 P.M. E.S.T.

PARIS — France’s far right National Front won more support than any other party in the first round of regional elections Sunday, according to polling agency projections, in a new boost for Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration strategy and a new blow to President Francois Hollande’s Socialists.

The projections put National Front candidates on top so far in six of France’s 13 newly drawn regions. But Sunday’s voting was only a first round, and some mainstream voters may steer away from far right candidates in the decisive Dec. 13 runoff. …

Voters are choosing leadership councils for the regions, and had the choice of several parties in the first round. Polling agencies Ifop, OpinionWay and Ipsos projected that the National Front won between 27 and 30 percent support nationwide. …

Sarkozy’s conservative Republicans party and its allies were projected to come in second place in the national vote at around 27 percent. The Socialists, who currently run nearly all of the country’s regions, were projected to come in a weak third place, with between 22 and 24 percent, followed by a smattering of mainly leftist groupings.

… The National Front “is the only (party) that defends an authentic French republic, a republic with only one vocation: the national interest, the development of French employment, the conservation of our way of life, the development of our tradition and the defense of all the French,” Le Pen said Sunday night in Lille.

The Islamic State-inspired Paris attacks on Nov. 13 that killed 130 people and a Europe-wide migrant crisis this year have shaken up France’s political landscape.

The arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Europe and the exploits of IS have bolstered the discourse of the National Front, which denounces Europe’s open borders, what it calls the “migratory submersion” and what it claims is the corrupting influence of Islam on French civilization.

Le Pen is campaigning to run the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, which includes the port city of Calais, a flashpoint in Europe’s migrant drama. Her young niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, is running to lead the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region.

Projections showed the National Front lists with around 40 percent first-round support in both regions, a good 15 percent ahead of second-place Republicans. Socialist leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis called for his party to withdraw from the runoff in both races in hopes of keeping the National Front from winning.

Voters left and right joined together to keep Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen from winning a presidential runoff in 2002. However, Marine Le Pen has worked to undo its image as an anti-Semitic party and has lured in new followers from the left, the traditional right and among young people.

“The verdict of the French people tonight is clear,” Sarkozy said Sunday night. “We must hear and understand the deep exasperation.”

Sarkozy said his party should refuse to ally with any National Front candidates or to pull out of any races in the second round. He said a victory for National Front ideas “would dramatically aggravate France’s situation and create conditions of dangerous disorder.”

Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls and the conservative-leaning national business lobby issued a public appeal this week to stop the National Front’s march toward victory.

From Meta Science News:

Cell: Nutrition is personal. Identical foods produce “healthy” and “unhealthy” responses in different individuals.

Biology • Health • November 19th, 2015 • Meta5

In today’s issue of Cell, two groups led by Eran Elinav and Eran Segal have presented a stunning paper providing startling new insight into the personal nature of nutrition. The Israeli research teams have demonstrated that there exists a high degree of variability in the responses of different individuals to identical meals, and through the elegant application of machine learning, they have provided insight into the diverse factors underlying this variability.

The existence of human biodiversity shouldn’t be such a startling new insight, but I guess it is.

It ought to be obvious by now that different people flourish or decay on different diets.

And yet we constantly read of nutrition studies that assume that their goal should be to find the best diet for everybody rather than to find diets that work better for some people.

Not the Duke’s favorite

Our vast amount of biographical knowledge of celebrities attests to important degrees of diversity in optimal diet. For example, the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) was a model of good health throughout his long, successful life, at a time when other aristocrats tended to get gout from overeating. The Duke was notorious in British society for eating what today we would consider a high carb diet of a huge amount of rice — he boasted of eating very little besides rice during three years service in India, and brought his taste for rice with him for the rest of his life.

A lot of people today flourish on a high carb diet, as Wellington did during his long life. But not everybody does. I tried it once and put on weight immediately.

The behavioral implication of this is that you ought to try different diets for yourself (especially ones that seem to work for your blood relatives) and see which ones work for you.

This advice doesn’t sound terribly unreasonable, but for some reason, however, taking into account the impact of genetic diversity strikes a lot of people these days as not Science.

Wellington lived in a time and place that took pride in eccentrics, especially if they were dukes.

Now that I think about it, perhaps our modern assumption that Science means that scientists will eventually discover the one best diet for everybody grows out of the rejection of the theory of human biodiversity that goes back to Hippocrates’ and Galen’s idea of four humors (“sanguine”, “choleric”, “melancholic” and “phlegmatic”), which vary in balance among individual leading to different temperaments.

The English around Shakespeare’s time were particularly taken with the Greek theory of the different humors, and they developed a nationalistic ideology of psychology and literature that asserted that English liberty allowed individuals to better express their humors in England than anywhere else. In turn, this led to English literature being more “humorous” than other literature in the sense that their plays and novels were full of amusing eccentrics. Or at least that’s how the English felt about why they were more humorous than, say, the Germans (or at the least English found themselves more humorous than they found the Germans).

Anyway, all this earth, wind, fire, and air stuff got dumped eventually as unscientific. But perhaps we threw out the baby of human biodiversity along with the bathwater of the humors?

From the New York Daily News:

Stasi: San Bernardino killers were radical, ISIS-loving monsters — but one of their victims was just as bigoted
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, December 5, 2015, 7:57 PM

by Linda Stasi

They were two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees interacting in one department. Now 13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage.

One man spent his free time writing frightening, NRA-loving, hate-filled screeds on Facebook about the other’s religion.

The other man quietly stewed and brewed his bigotry, collecting the kind of arsenal that the Facebook poster would have envied.

What they didn’t realize is that except for their different religions they were in many ways similar men who even had the same job….

The other man, the victim, Nicholas Thalasinos, was a radical Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew, who also connected with his future wife online and had traveled across the country to meet her.

The killer, however, became half of an Islamic Bonnie & Clyde, while the other died as the male equivalent of Pamela Geller.

The killers deserve every disgusting adjective thrown at them. And more.

But the victim is also inaccurately being eulogized as a kind and loving religious man.

Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot. Death can’t change that. But in the U.S., we don’t die for speaking our minds. Or we’re not supposed to anyway.

Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy, who posted that it would be “Freaking Awesome” if hateful Ann Coulter was named head of Homeland Security.

I’m guessing this isn’t a parody, although it’s possible that it is.

Assuming it’s not, have you ever noticed how often people who accuse other folks of being full of hate are really haters themselves?