The Right Lane 1.20.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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"When any nation mistursusts it's citizens with guns it is sending a clear message, it no longer trusts it's citizens because such a governemetn has evil plans." George Washington

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Jesse Jackson: Assault Rifles Can Shoot Down Airplanes

 “Bang! Bang! Bang!”  Hear that? It’s the sound of an assault weapon in the hands of a rogue individual, taking down an airplane flying overhead. At least, that’s what the Reverend Jesse Jackson thinks assault weapons can do. The Reverend’s misinformed assertion that assault weapons are capable of shooting down airplanes came during a Fox News appearance yesterday. “These semi-automatic weapons, these assault weapons, can only kill people, and in fact, they are threats to national security … the young man who did the killing in Aurora, Colorado … he could shoot down airplanes, so this is a matter of homeland security as well,” he said while speaking about gun control with anchor Martha MacCallum on ‘America’s Newsroom.’   We must advise the Pentagon, they should KNOW in this!

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57% Think Enforcing Current Gun Laws More Important Than Creating New Laws

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Sunday, January 20, 2013. Most Americans feel it is more important for the government to enforce existing gun control laws than to create new ones. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 32% of American Adults believe creation of new gun control laws is more important. Fifty-seven percent (57%) think more emphasis should be put on stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.

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NBC/WSJ poll: NRA more popular than entertainment industry By NBC's Mark Murray

As Washington prepares for a political battle over the Obama White House's proposals to curb gun violence after the Newtown, Conn., shootings, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that the National Rifle Association is more popular than the entertainment industry. Forty-one percent of adults see the NRA -- the nation's top gun lobby -- in a positive light, while 34 percent view it in a negative light.

By comparison, just 24 percent have positive feelings about the entertainment industry, and 39 percent have negative ones. The NRA's fav/unfav score is virtually unchanged from its 41 percent-to-29 percent rating in the Jan. 2011 NBC/WSJ poll, nearly two years before the Newtown shootings. Has the administration underestimated the people's choice?

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Bill Whittle Gives Us a History Lesson On Why We Need the 2nd Amendment  Watch here

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At What Point Do We Call Obama’s Policies ‘Tyranny’?

Luke Rudkowski hits the streets of NYC to find out what people think about the possibility of Tyranny in the United States.  Watch and be amazed!

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CBS News’ Political Director John Dickerson: Obama Must ‘Destroy’ Republican Party

Reading the Left’s fevered desires over at Slate isn’t anything new. Not even articles breathlessly titled and subtitled:

Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.

Not even articles that read:

The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat. … Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

What is worthy of note, though, is that a CBS News' political director is now comfortable openly calling for the destruction of the Republican Party. He obviously fears no admonitions from his colleagues or his employer. And why should he? Earlier this week, Bob Schieffer, a CBS News "living legend," was perfectly comfortable publicly comparing the NRA to Nazis.

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WSJ: Health Premiums Could Double Under Obamacare By: Newsmax Wires

Health insurance costs will rise as much as 100 percent under Obamacare, Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, and Mark Litow, a retired actuary, write in The Wall Street Journal. “The reason: the congressional Democrats who crafted the legislation ignored virtually every actuarial principle governing rational insurance pricing,” the duo states. “Premiums will soon reflect that disregard — indeed, premiums are already reflecting it.”  Obamacare requires that health insurers accept everyone who applies, that they can’t charge more based on serious medical conditions, and that they pay for some uncovered medical conditions.  The guaranteed acceptance drives people to wait on buying insurance until they get sick. Obamacare includes a financial penalty to keep people from doing that. But, “it is too low to be a real disincentive,” Matthews and Litow say. “The result will be insurance pools that are smaller and sicker, and therefore more expensive.”
They feel confident making that projection because eight states enacted similar requirements in the mid-1990s and “wrecked their individual health insurance markets,” the pair states. “Premiums increased so much that Kentucky largely repealed its law in 2000.”  States that will likely experience the biggest insurance price increases under Obamacare are Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, and Virginia — between 65 percent and 100 percent, Matthews and Litow write. The editorial argues that President Barack Obama was right when he said during fiscal-cliff negotiations that “we have a healthcare [spending] problem,” and that problem is of his own making.

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What Obama Really Believes About The Second Amendment: People Shouldn’t Have Guns by Tim Brown

Barack Hussein Obama just cannot be clear on the Second Amendment, at least in his rhetoric. In one breath he says he respects it, but with his votes in the Illinois State Senate and the United States Senate and, ultimately, how he has responded in the office of President, he has demonstrated that he is utterly against it. His rhetoric has been all over the map on the issue, but one thing we must keep in mind and that is what is his ideology and what has been his voting record when it comes to the Second Amendment. Back in the 1990′s Barack Obama told author and college faculty colleague John Lott, “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.” Obama also tagged Lott as “the gun guy.” Lott referenced many of accounts of Obama’s anti-gun mindset in his book Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, which he authored with Grover Norquist. In an interview that was published in June of 2012 between Kathryn Jean Lopez and John Lott, she asked Lott why people should believe his citation of Barack Obama’s quote above, “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.” Lott responded:

Well, don’t just take my word for his views on guns, look at the positions Obama took on guns during his time in Chicago. Obama supported a ban on handguns in 1996, and a ban on the sale of all semiautomatic guns in 1998 (a ban that would have encompassed the vast majority of guns sold in the U.S.). In 2004, he advocated banning gun sales within five miles of a school or park (essentially a ban on virtually all gun stores), and he has worked in other ways to support bans. He was on the board of directors for the Joyce Foundation, the largest private funder of research to ban gun ownership in the U.S. When Jodi Kantor of the New York Times was writing an article on Obama’s time at the University of Chicago Law School, she heard that I might have some stories about Obama. She interviewed me during the summer of 2008, and I provided her with the different accounts that I provided in Debacle. But these examples were not included in her final article. Ms. Kantor said in an e-mail correspondence that “the Obama people denied that the conversation ever took place.” In a follow-up conversation with her, I kept asking what exactly they were denying. That I ever talked to Obama? That we ever talked about guns? That we knew each other at Chicago? But the only statement she ever received back from the Obama camp was that they “denied that the conversation ever took place.” It seems pretty clear that if the Obama people hadn’t denied the story, the New York Times would have run my quotes.

A key point of my stories was how different Obama was from academics in his unwillingness to discuss things with those who held opposing views. In my own case, Obama would just turn his back and walk away from conversations. Kantor noted that others had told her similar things. That was another reason my anecdotes were not crucial: “There was, frankly, a fair amount of other evidence, independent of the incident you told me about, that Sen. Obama did not engage much with conservatives/libertarians.”  While Obama’s Second Amendment hatred could be summed up in that one comment, it goes far beyond that in what he actually says, but what he does.

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Human Genome in Meltdown - A Direct Challenge to Evolution Theory

Most of the deleterious mutations in the human population arose in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, a survey claims. According to a study published Jan. 10 in Nature by geneticists from 4 universities including Harvard, “Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants.”  By recent they mean really recent on evolutionary timescales:

We estimate that approximately 73% of all protein-coding SNVs [single-nucleotide variants] and approximately 86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000–10,000 years. The average age of deleterious SNVs varied significantly across molecular pathways, and disease genes contained a significantly higher proportion of recently arisen deleterious SNVs than other genes.

The authors explained this in evolutionary terms as the result of “explosive population growth” and that “selection has not had sufficient time to purge them from the population.”  They claimed Europeans had more variants “consistent with weaker purifying selection due to the Out-of-Africa dispersal.”…. The last paragraph assesses the impact of their findings:

More generally, the recent dramatic increase in human population size, resulting in a deluge of rare functionally important variation, has important implications for understanding and predicting current and future patterns of human disease and evolution. For example, the increased mutational capacity of recent human populations has led to a larger burden of Mendelian disorders, increased the allelic and genetic heterogeneity of traits, and may have created a new repository of recently arisen advantageous alleles that adaptive evolution will act upon in subsequent generations.

As for advantageous mutations, they provided NO examples.  That’s merely an assumption, based on neo-Darwinian theory, that evolution would need beneficial mutations as raw material for “adaptive evolution” in the future.  What they observed, by contrast, was a “larger burden of Mendelian disorders” afflicting mankind. The findings depend on models and assumptions, but appear to support the thesis of John Sanford’s book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, which argues that the genetic load increases so rapidly that mankind could not have survived for tens of thousands of years, to say nothing of millions (see recent YouTube interview part 1 and part 2).  How can such rapid rate of degradation be sustained over evolutionary time?

The authors seemed a bit baffled by their findings.  The following paragraph gives a hint of that (compare “expected” vs. observed):

The site frequency spectrum (SFS) of protein-coding SNVs revealed an enormous excess of rare variants (Fig. 1a). Indeed, we observed an SNV approximately once every 52 base pairs (bp) and 57 bp in European Americans and African Americans, respectively, whereas in a population without recent explosive growth we would expect the SNVs to occur once every 257 bp and 152 bp in European Americans and African Americans, respectively (Supplementary Information). Thus, the European American and African American samples contain approximately fivefold and threefold increases in SNVs, respectively, attributable to explosive population growth, resulting in a large burden of rare SNVs predicted to have arisen very recently. For example, the expected age of derived singletons, which comprise 55.1% of all SNVs, is 1,244 and 2,107 years for the European American and African American samples, respectively. Overall, 73.2% of SNVs (81.4% and 58.7% in European Americans and African Americans, respectively) are predicted to have arisen in the past 5,000 years. SNVs that arose more than 50,000 years ago were observed more frequently in the African American samples (Fig. 1b), which probably reflects stronger genetic drift in European Americans associated with the Out-of-Africa dispersal.

But how can they claim Europeans “probably” had stronger genetic drift at the same time Africans did not?  Genetic drift is not racist.  It appears they are fudging assumptions. To the degree they have empirical support, their findings seem to fly in the face of long ages but support a human population that has only been in existence for 10,000 years or less, as indicated in the Genesis record.