Jason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the "Gang of Eight," is gone from Heritage.

He was purged after The Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.

Richwine's thesis:

And the potential consequences of this?

"A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market."

Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard's George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited The New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard—it earned Richwine a Ph.D.—it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.

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If after the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (dare I say Vietnam?) some people still want the U.S. government to intervene — further — in the war inside Syria (but fueled by outsiders), we must conclude, not that they can’t learn the lessons of recent history, but that they won’t because doing so would be contrary to their assorted political, ideological, and material interests.

It is quite clear that the U.S. military is powerless to make things better in Syria. That’s right. For all the trillions spent on the national-security state and global empire, the United States stands as a pitiful giant on the Middle East stage. Sure, it could increase the bloodshed on the ground and perhaps even cause the release of chemical agents. Indeed, it could even turn the dominant al-Qaeda-related rebels, some of them the same jihadists the U.S. government fought in Iraq, into a better-armed force. As the New York Times reports,

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government. 

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

Professor Stephen Zunes adds, “Even the so-called ‘moderate’ Free Syrian Army consists of literally hundreds of separate armed militias, some of which are quite radical, without a central command.”

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A handgun made almost entirely using a consumer-grade 3D printer fired a bullet over the weekend for the first time in the history of the infant technology. If some lawmakers have their way, it will also be the last.

Defense Distributed of Texas announced on Sunday that researchers fired a bullet designed for a traditional .380-caliber firearm with a gun built all but exclusively using digital blueprints, some plastic and an $8,000 printer. The only item aside from the bullet not printed out was a single nail that served as the firing pin.

As early s Tuesday, though, California State Senator Leland Yee was already looking to pass a bill that would outlaw other 3D weapons from being built outside of the factories where firearms are regularly assembled.

Sen. Lee, a Democrat that represents a large chunk of California that includes parts of San Francisco, issued a press release this week condemning Defense Distributed’s inaugural 3D handgun.

“We must be proactive in seeking solutions to this new threat rather than wait for the inevitable tragedies this will make possible,” Yee said.

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Explosions illuminated the skies over Damascus on Friday and Sunday causing casualties. But these weren’t the work of the Bashar Al Assad/Iran/Hezbollah camp or its opponents—the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat Al Nusra or Al Qaida. Israel has muscled into the raging conflict attacking an alleged military research centre close to the capital and a consignment of Iranian guided missiles en route to Tehran’s proxy, Hezbollah.

Israel has confirmed its intervention, maintaing that it will not tolerate the transfer of sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah’s military wing. But at a time when Hezbollah’s attention is focused on elements attempting to bring down the Syrian regime rather than Israel, could Tel Aviv be using weapons transfer as a pretext to manipulate the Syrian conflict to suit its own interests?

Put simply, is Israel trying to provoke Al Assad into retaliating so as to heap pressure on the US to get involved? President Barack Obama is currently wavering. He has little appetite to embroil his nation in yet another war in the Middle East and is reluctant to align Washington with Syrian radicals and foreign terrorists congregating in Syria like bees to honey.

Obama is in an unenviable quandary when the self-styled regional guardian is considered by some to be morally bound to intercede on humanitarian grounds to stop the carnage. But if Al Assad is foolish enough to strike Israel, the US will inevitably be dragged into a complex fray that could easily escalate to a stage when America is forced to strike Iran, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been unsuccessfully urging the US to do for almost a decade.

Moreover, even if Assad and his cronies are forcibly sent packing, it’s likely their exit will signal revenge attacks on Alawite communities and others that have remained faithful to the government. The cherished ambition of those, who initially participated in the Arab Spring uprising seeking political pluralism has become a pipedream when in all probability the regime will be succeeded by Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

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The snitch culture is being promoted heavily all over the country, and there have been a few cases recently where politicians and law enforcement groups have been extremely open about their own tyranny.

In a recent case in Florida a sheriff encouraged his audience to report their suspicious neighbors and friends, especially those that “hate the government”.

According to the Palm Beach Post:

Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf. Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers. The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed.

“Every single incident, whether it’s Newtown, that movie theater, or the guy who spouts off at work and then goes home and kills his wife and two kids — in every single case, there were people who said they knew ahead of time that there was a problem,” Bradshaw said. “If the neighbor of the mom in Newtown had called somebody, this might have saved 25 kids’ lives.”

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Let’s do a little exercise. Forget nationalities and identities for a moment.

Imagine you are a police detective investigating a horrific bombing in your city -- one in which several people were killed and hundreds were injured. You have a captured suspect whom you are sure was one of the bombers, and another was killed in a shootout, but both are young and not very sophisticated.

They might have acted alone, of course, but knowing how these things work, you are also looking for leads to try to determine who else might have been involved, and especially who might have been behind the incident.

As it happens, your two suspects are immigrants. They were brought to your country at a young age by parents who were refugees seeking asylum from from a region of the world riven by civil war, brutal repression by a larger power, and that was a breeding ground for terrorists who had been known to have launched terrible attacks against civilians, including schools and full movie theaters in that larger power.

Now supposing you discovered that the national intelligence agency of a rival nation to that larger power had actually provided support to the terrorists that were attacking it, and that, moreover, the two young men who were your suspects were related to an uncle who had for three years been married to the daughter of a top member of that intelligence agency -- the latter a man who had had a long history of active involvement in that agency’s major covert operations.

Wouldn’t you be deeply suspicious about the nature of the connections between the two young men and this intelligence agency? Of course you would!

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