Got any questions? Go find Rep. Allen West, he’s an expert on all sorts of stuff. Fallacies, fantasies, fairy dust . . my goodness, what a Maestro Buffoon.

West counters Obama: MLK would not have backed Wall Street protests
By Alicia M. Cohn | The Hill

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) rejected President Obama’s comparison between Martin Luther King Jr. and what he called the “Occupy Wall Street gangs.”

“Martin Luther King Jr. would not have backed these types of protesters,” West said, noting that he was born and raised in King’s neighborhood. “First of all, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a focus, a message. He was divinely inspired. I don’t know what the inspiration is for these individuals.”

Allen sees no connection between the struggles for civil rights and social justice. He should.

“I think the hypocrisy of this movement is somewhat laughable,” he said. “[Unemployment] has nothing to do with Wall Street. It has everything to do with the failed policies coming out of the Obama administration.”

Heavens, the nerve of these Obamabots. First, they slash jobs by the millions. Next, they protest their own unemployment.

West does not understand, uhh, many things. But what of his MLK assessment? Let’s see if Allen’s right. King talked plenty about social justice, but what specifically did he say?

1.) “Timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We have got to confront the power structure massively.”

Hmm.

2.) “I’m not talking about communism. Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.”

Communo-capitalism? West would grenade the smell of it.

3.) “The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. … In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent.”

Allen loses. He could use a decent college education. What about this?

“The young people of the Occupy movement all over this country and throughout the world are seeking justice,” Martin Luther King, III, son of Martin Luther King, Jr., said.

That was last weekend.

“We have bailed out the auto industry, and we should have. We bailed out Wall Street. Now it’s time to bail out working Americans” . .

“I believe that if my father was alive, he would be right here with all of us involved in this demonstration today.”

I defer to the speaker. West could use a newspaper subscription, too.

Say what you will about Glenn Beck, he’s no stealth wingnut. Sure, he’s dumber and crazier than a craphouse cockroach, but he’s not hiding it.

I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!

He’s going after your church now, the one that preaches the Commie/Nazi concept of “social justice”. After rejecting calls for withdrawal from Iraq and for universal healthcare for his fellow Americans, should we be surprised by his attack on something so fundamental to so many churches and to the very teachings of Christ himself? I suppose not.

But it surprised me, so I guess I’m a bit of a naif:

Witness the evils of “social justice,” per John Rawls:

Rawls asserted that, “There is . . . a general presumption against imposing legal and other restrictions on conduct without sufficient reason. But this presumption creates no special priority for any particular liberty.” (at pp291–292) This is support for an unranked set of liberties that reasonable citizens in all states should respect and uphold — to some extent, the list proposed by Rawls matches the normative human rights that have international recognition and direct enforcement in some nation states where the citizens need encouragement to act in way that fixes a greater degree of equality of outcome.

* Freedom of thought;
* Liberty of conscience as it affects social relationships on the grounds of religion, philosophy, and morality;
* Political liberties (e.g. representative democratic institutions, freedom of speech and the press, and freedom of assembly);
* Freedom of association;
* Freedoms necessary for the liberty and integrity of the person (viz: freedom from slavery, freedom of movement and a reasonable degree of freedom to choose one’s occupation); and
* Rights and liberties covered by the rule of law.

Don’t know why churches should be so distant from all that good stuff. The truth is that, of course, they’re not:

. . since the Catholic Church, the Black Churches, the Mainline Protestant churches, more and more Evangelical and Pentecostal churches including Hispanic and Asian-American congregations all consider social justice central to biblical faith, Glenn Beck is telling all those Christians to leave their churches. Of course, Christians may disagree about what social justice means in our current political context — and that conversation is an important one — but the Bible is clear: from the Mosaic law of Jubilee, to the Hebrew prophets, to Jesus Christ, social justice is an integral part of God’s plan for humanity.

Is it any wonder that the Civil Rights movement came right out of the pews? Who was that guy again?

Human stem cell lines aren’t yet genetically diverse:

U-M Study Reveals Surprising Lack of Genetic Diversity in the Most Widely Used Human Embryonic Stem Cell Lines
ANN ARBOR, Mich., Dec. 16 / PRNewswire-USNewswire

The most widely used human embryonic stem cell lines lack genetic diversity, a finding that raises social justice questions that must be addressed to ensure that all sectors of society benefit from stem cell advances, according to a University of Michigan research team.

In the first published study of its kind, the U-M team analyzed 47 embryonic stem cell lines, including most of the lines commonly used by stem cell researchers. The scientists determined the genetic ancestry of each line and found that most were derived from donors of northern and western European ancestry…

“Embryonic stem cell research has the potential to change the future of medicine,” said Sean Morrison, director of the U-M Center for Stem Cell Biology and one of the study leaders. “But there’s a lack of diversity among today’s most commonly used human embryonic stem cell lines, which highlights an important social justice issue.”

The same old issue: even if you could grow a kidney from stem cells and then transplant it, it’d be best that it comes from a genetic background similar to the recipient. So when you’ve got a limited stem cell population, you’ve got a limited target population for ‘cures.’

The current stem cell populations were derived from embryos generated in in-vitro fertilization clinics. Those clients would be upper middle class westerners of white European ancestry, ergo the genetics problem.

It’s crucial that diverse lines are available for this research to ensure that all patients benefit from the results, Morrison said.

“If that’s not done, we run the risk of leaving certain groups in our society behind,” said Morrison, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at U-M.

So what did Dobson’s FRC make of this science factoid and the call to diversify the stem cell pool?

It’s never enough with some of these people. Supposedly having at their disposal several hundred new hESC lines was satisfactory, plus the open-ended promise from President Obama of as many fertility-clinic embryos as they would like. But Michigan’s Sean Morrison . . .

“. . will also make it a priority to derive new embryonic stem cell lines from underrepresented groups, including African-Americans.”

So, apparently Prof. Morrison is going to be stalking minority couples at IVF clinics, targeting their embryos for his lab . . .