The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/995930
The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, June 20, 2018 C-9 OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg The prophet Joel wrote several hundred years before the birth of Jesus, "Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision." What is this decision? To say it bluntly, Europe has thrown off [or out] its God and re- placed it with secularism, coexis- tence, pluralism, and multicultur- alism. The Christian nations of Europe have inflicted upon them- selves cultural schizophrenia. Europe is following in the steps of ancient Hebrews. The proph- et Jeremiah wrote about Israel's backsliding from its covenant with God, "Has a nation changed their gods, which are not gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit [i.e. worthless idols]." The stability of a nation and its people does not reside in its govern- ment, but in its religion and values. An example-the one nation of Europe that is experiencing a re- naissance of religious fervor is for- mer communist Russia. Commu- nism suppressed the church for 75 years, but when Communism faded, the church began to blos- som. The Western World may not warm to President Vladimir Pu- tin, but he is a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian and observes the church's special days and takes communion. That is leadership! Christianity has been pressured since its establishment to get with it and be in synch with the cul- ture. The church has an honored and glo- rious roll call of lead- ers and men and wom- en who refused to go along with cultural norms and were martyred for the faith. There are still men and women standing for the faith, but there is no physical martyrdom in the western world today. What does take place is Christian sects and people who champion the faith of our fathers are marginalized, de- based, and ignored. Many scholars felt the God is Dead movement of the 1960s would have grave repercussions on the church. It was 19th centu- ry German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who coined the term God is Dead long before the tur- bulent 60s. Nietzsche, though an atheist, did not rejoice over the idea that God was dead. He argued that the Christians of Europe had made God dead by their actions; they paid lip service but were practic- ing atheists. He wrote: "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a sys- tem, a whole view of things thought out to- gether. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole." The Christian faith has core values that are immutable. Many modern Christians cherry-pick what they "believe" and hold dear in their heart and conscious; giv- ing no thought to what the scrip- tures nor the church has taught for 2,000 years. The writer of the Book of He- brews mentions six essential doc- trines that are undebatable: "… repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God: the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment." The recent demand by the sec- ular and religious world for the church to accept "as is" the LGBT" Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Segregating children from adults in custody Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Minority View by Walter E. Williams In the valley of decision? Pray! Diversity and inclusion harm Singapore and the 'search for happiness' Continued on page 10 Continued on page 10 My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. A supervisor came over the ra- dio a few decades ago to call me to the office. When I arrived, the department head, who hadn't spo- ken six words to me in two years, invited me in an unfamiliar friend- ly tone to step into his own office. As soon as I did so, a uniformed marshal stepped out from behind the door and asked me if I was Bart Stinson. It was about a traffic tick- et. I lived in a state with no per- sonal income tax, and they were very serious about their other rev- enue sources. I was serious about my income sources, too, and was working a lot of overtime. I usual- ly got home around 2 or 3 o'clock. I overslept a couple of 8 a.m. court appointments. Did I have enough cash to pay the fine on the spot? It was my last chance to avoid arrest. But I didn't have it. And so I took off my work shirt, emptied my pockets, took off my belt, removed my shoe strings, and the marshal searched and handcuffed me. Then he perp- walked me past gaping customers and co-workers to a government vehicle, where I was shackled at the ankles. He drove me through the desert and across a major city to reach his suburban jail. There is no way it could have been cost-effective for them. But they were making an ex- ample of me, and they were teach- ing me a lesson. I guarantee you that I never slept through a court date again, even if it meant reduc- ing my work schedule and losing much-needed income. It was the second time in my life that I had been jailed. In neither case did the authorities ask me if I'd like to have my family with me in jail. I can honestly report that I missed my family while I was in jail. I had some anxiety about the consequences of my quarantine. But when the government takes custody of law-breakers, it's not for the convenience and preferences of the law-breaker. I met several young men in jail, mostly Black. None of them were allowed to have their loved ones in jail with them, either. Through the slats of the holding tank, we saw the officers walk young wom- en in single file to the podium for processing. None of them were al- lowed to keep children with them in jail. So far as I know, nobody ever ap- pealed to the authorities to let any of us keep family with us in jail. It's safe to say nobody cared that we were isolated from our family members. However, Democrats and nomi- nal Republicans are outraged that foreign adults, taken into custody for immigration misdemeanors, are temporarily segregated from children whom the adults claim as family. Open-borders Democrats say that families should be released on their promise to appear for hear- ings to determine their immigra- tion outcomes. But over the past 20 years, 37 percent of parties re- leased pending immigration hear- ings were no-shows for the sched- uled proceedings. Almost one mil- lion aliens with final orders of de- portation have not left our country. Thus immigration hawks are right to resist Democrats' demand to release foreign invaders into our communities. Over the first year of the Trump administration, front-line immi- gration enforcement reported a 315 percent increase in "illegal aliens fraudulently using [unre- lated] children to pose as family units to gain entry into this coun- try." I have yet to hear a Demo- crat or #Nevertrump Republican express any concern whatsoever about this. We're told by indignant MSNBC news ranters that it is not a crime to be a refugee. But if the invaders were sincerely interested in apply- ing for refugee status, they could have done so at any U.S. embassy in their own countries. They could have done so at ports such as El Pa- so and San Ysidro, where there is a system in place for adjudicating such requests. Each year, the trustees of So- cial Security and Medicare issue their report delivering the news, invariably dismal, about the finan- cial condition of the nation's two largest entitlement programs. This year, in the report just is- sued, it's worse than usual. Last year, the trustees forecast that Social Security and Medi- care's hospital insurance would have to start dipping into their trust funds by 2022 and 2023 in order to finance their obligations. They report now that the situation has deteriorated such that both need to start dipping in this year. The HI trust fund will be de- pleted by 2026, and Social Secu- rity's trust fund will be depleted by 2034. In the case of Social Security, in 2034, just 16 years away, if no ac- tion is taken now, either benefits must be cut by 21 percent or taxes will need to be raised 31 percent, to meet obligations. Analysts have been writing about the grave fiscal problems of Social Security for years. Yet noth- ing gets done. Why? Social Security is the largest spending program in the U.S. bud- get. Ninety percent of Americans 65 and older get Social Security benefits. Any government program, once it gets rooted in our culture and Americans start getting benefits, becomes almost impossible to change. President George W. Bush tried to bring fundamental changes to Social Security. He Last stop on three most joyful places on the planet- Singapore. It has been in the news worldwide. Everyone knows about the sum- mit meeting between our Presi- dent Donald Trump and North Ko- rean leader Kim Jong Un. What an amazing event. Singapore is locat- ed at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, consisting of one main island and 62 islets. It used to be a colony of the United Kingdom and became a sovereign nation in 1965. The government is a parliamentary republic. It has a population of 5.6 million, largely Chinese (74.3 per- cent), Malays (13.4 percent) and Indians ( 9.1 percent). English is its predominant language. Malay is the national language. It has a tropical rainforest cli- mate. It has a very low unemploy- ment rate of 1.8 percent as of 2015. Buddhism is the most widely prac- ticed religion (33 percent), fol- lowed by Christianity, Islam, Toa- ism and Hinduism. Seventeen per- cent of the population has no re- ligious affiliation. According to the author Dan Buettner, who pro- duced the November 2017 article in the National Geographic titled " The search for Happiness….the most joyful places on the planet," success for the Singaporeans lies at the end of a well-defined path: follow the rules, get into the right school, land the right job, and hap- piness can be yours. Continued on page 10 Continued on page 10 Continued on page 10 Continued on page 10 Why can't we fix Social Security and Medicare? In conversations with most college officials, many CEOs, many politicians and race hus- tlers, it's not long before the magical words "diversity" and "inclusiveness" drop from their lips. Racial minorities are the in- tended targets of this sociologi- cal largesse, but women are in- cluded, as well. This obsession with diversity and inclusion is in the process of leading the nation to decline in a number of areas. We're told how it's doing so in science, in an article by Heath- er Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, ti- tled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences" (http:// tinyurl.com/y9g8k9ne). Mac Donald says that iden- tity politics has already taken over the humanities and social sciences on American campus- es. Waiting in the wings for a similar takeover are the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math. In the eyes of the diversity and inclu- siveness czars, the STEM fields don't have a pleasing mixture of blacks, Hispanics and women. The effort to get this "pleasing mix" is doing great damage to how sci- ence is taught and evaluated, threaten- ing innovation and American competi- tiveness. Universities and other institutions have started water- ing down standards and requirements in order to attract more minorities and women. Some of the argu- ments for doing so border on in- sanity. A math education profes- sor at the University of Illinois wrote that "mathematics itself operates as whiteness." She says that the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetu- ates "unearned privilege" among whites. A professor at Purdue University's School of Engineer- ing Education published an ar- ticle in a peer-reviewed journal positing that academic rigor is a "dirty deed" that upholds "white male heterosexual privilege," adding that "scientific knowl- edge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing." The National Sci- ence Foundation and the National In- stitutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund university research and support postdoctoral educa- tion for physicians. Both agencies are consumed by diver- sity and inclusion ideology. The NSF and NIH can yank a grant when it comes up for renewal if the college has not supported a sufficient number of "underrep- resented minorities." Mac Don- ald quotes a UCL A scientist who reports: "All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more wom- en and minorities by 'changing' (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for gradu- ate level study? " Mac Donald ob- serves, "Mathematical problem- solving is being deemphasized No denying the economy's strength Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner "We Ran Out of Words to De- scribe How Good the Jobs Num- bers Are." That's a real headline. And it ap- peared in The New York Times. No, that's not a misprint. The ac- tual New York Times, which has published scathing criticisms of President Trump, was admitting in a June 1 article that the U.S. econ- omy is strong beyond description right now. Words such as "splendid" and "excellent" certainly fit, accord- ing to reporter Neil Irwin: "Those are the kinds of terms that are ap- propriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 per- cent, a new 18 -year low." There's more. Average hourly earnings are up 2.7 percent over the last year, while unemploy- ment has dropped. It's even low- er for black Americans — 5.9 per- cent, "the lowest on re- cord," which we would count as 'great'," Mr. Irwin wrote. The unemployment rate is also near histor- ic lows for Hispanics (4.9 percent) and for women (3.6 percent). "Employers are cre- ating more jobs, lead- ing more people to work and fewer people to be unem- ployed, and leading wages to rise," Irwin added. All the numbers "af- firm that the United States econo- my is in basically sound shape, dis- playing neither the slightest warn- ing signs of recession nor any clear evidence of overheating and infla- tion risks." All of this is great news for work- ers. Employers are really having to step up their game and compete to attract the best workers. That means paying more, of course. Aver- age hourly earnings for all private-sector employees have ris- en 71 cents over the last year, the largest 12-month increase since 2009. Many companies reacted to the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December by hiking pay and giv- ing their employees generous bo- nuses. (For more than 600 specif- ic examples, check Americans for Tax Reform's web site, which has a running list of which companies have ponied up and by how much.) "To date, over 4 million Amer- icans have received a pay raise and/or a bonus because of tax re-