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February 2017

Thoughts on Making Universities Safe for Free Speech by Jeff Trag

If a speaker or group is committing battery, assault or vandalism, the situation should be police and judicial matter — as well as valid grounds for mandatory expulsion. There is no place for vigilantism by students, faculty or administers on campus to enforce political conformity.

The people who are causing the problems should be the ones who pay — not only in colleges and universities but in other venues also.

We should never let rioters have a hecklers veto over who gets to speak.

Universities and colleges in the United States need to be safe places where students of all backgrounds and beliefs can live and study, free from intimidation by other students, faculty, and administrators.

Protests are fine, and they are our right as Americans, but there needs to be zero tolerance for violence and intimidation. If a speaker or group is committing or inciting battery, assault or vandalism, the situation should be a police and judicial matter — as well as valid grounds for mandatory expulsion. There is no place for vigilantism by students, faculty or administers on campus to enforce political conformity. There is no place for any kind of intimidation and violence anywhere in the US. We should never let rioters have a hecklers veto over who gets to speak. The following are some ideas to rein in the current terror on campuses:

Pass a law that the leaders of protesters will be responsible for — and must pay for — the extra security needed.

The people who are causing the problems should be the ones who pay — not only in colleges and universities but in other venues also. If you participate in and/or pay for a group and organize a protest, and if you or your group intentionally commits violence, you and your protestors should be held responsible for the cost of police and other security in the event of physical or personal injury. The protesters (or rioters) will say it is free speech, but when they are trying to shut down someone else’s free speech in a physical way, that is denying someone’s constitutional rights with violence.

A Ray of Hope for Mental Health At long last, a bipartisan bill paves the way for genuine reform of our atrocious mental-health system. By E. Fuller Torrey & John D. Snook

Yes, President Trump is shaking up Washington, but some things definitely need to be shaken up. Exhibit A is the nation’s mental-health services — or lack of same. As if we needed another reminder, when a man with a gun walks into an FBI office hearing voices and complaining that the CIA is pushing him to become a member of al-Qaeda, he is asking to be treated for his psychosis. Instead, he was given some anti-anxiety medication, released after three days, and given back his gun, which he then took to Ft. Lauderdale. Alaska or Arizona, Colorado or Connecticut — it is the same story, year after year, differing only slightly in detail and diagnosis. But the outcome is the same: innocent people needlessly killed and injured.

On the horizon of this bleak landscape, a light recently appeared. Within the 21st Century Cure Act, passed by Congress in an unusually bipartisan fashion in December, is a provision for an assistant secretary of mental health and substance abuse. This new position will have authority to coordinate efforts by the dozens of federal agencies that have mental-health programs. Equally important, the person will also have authority to reform the dysfunctional Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the $3.5 billion federal agency that is officially charged with reducing “the impact of substance abuse and mental illness on America’s communities.” Thus, it is critical that Representative Tom Price (R., Ga.), now confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, select as assistant secretary a mental-health professional who is strong, clinically and administratively experienced, and unafraid to rattle federal cages. Changing the direction of an aircraft carrier is simple compared with changing the direction of a federal agency.

What might we expect from successful leadership by an assistant secretary? We should expect improvement in the many measures of a failing mental-illness-treatment system that were brought to light by congressional hearings held by Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.), the author of the original legislation that proposed the creation of an assistant-secretary position.

These measures include homicides by people with untreated serious mental illness, suicides, homelessness, increasing numbers of mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons, increasing numbers sitting for days in emergency rooms waiting for psychiatric beds, and increasing encounters between mentally ill individuals and law-enforcement officials. Since SAMHSA came into being in 1992, the nation is significantly worse off on every one of these measures.

We should also expect the many federal agencies that have mental-health programs to speak to one another and meet regularly, which has not happened for years. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the Veterans Administration, for example, all spend huge amounts on mental-health care, but there is virtually no coordination among them or with SAMHSA’s mental-health block grant to the states. Since the states have the ultimate responsibility for delivering the services, there must also be coordinated, federally funded demonstration projects and data collection to identify the programs that are most effective in stabilizing and providing rehabilitation and recovery for mentally ill individuals. The funding of assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) programs under the recent legislation is a step in this direction.

Peter Murphy The Anglosphere’s Quiet Revolution

Brexit represents a remarkable historical moment for the possibilities it opens up. Many of these will not be realised, but the ones that are realised will work because enough people will say ‘No’ to depressive political economies and ‘Yes’ to the spirit of endeavour, adventure and resolution.
The British vote to leave the European Union was surprising. But in a good way. The EU is a long-term slow-motion train wreck and the reasons to leave it are compelling. Ruled by an unaccountable bureaucracy, the EU is a facade democracy, conceived during the Second World War by the Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli. Its elected parliament can neither propose nor repeal laws, only amend them;[1] EU legislation is crafted by the unelected European Commission. The European Parliament is designed not to limit government but to rubber-stamp its expansion. The Commission is lawmaker and executive in one. EU insignia, citizenship, referenda and elections in different degrees are all phoney. The European Union is contemptuous of opponents and disdainful of public opinion. It conducts itself by political stealth and subterfuge. Its ministers are anonymous appointees. It ignores referendum outcomes, overturns governments and violates its own laws if it doesn’t like them.[2] Its temperament is omniscient and authoritarian.

It is a self-appointed supranational power that operates by means of the capillary action of a million microscopic rules. Its officials enjoy Soviet-era nomenklatura-style private shopping malls, national-tax exemption and low-tax privileges. From its inception in 1951 the EU was a political project. It was designed to create a technocratic-bureaucratic superstate that eventually would replace Europe’s nation-states. It has already evolved from a customs union into a regulatory leviathan. The final step envisaged by its advocates is a mega-state with taxing and fiscal powers. The EU meets its every failure with one response: we need more power. The EU’s founding notion was that nationalism, not militarism or totalitarianism, led to two world wars. From day one the EU’s purpose has been to white-ant the sovereignty of its member states. The activist European Court of Justice expedites this. Its rulings repeatedly invalidate national laws in favour of EU directives.

The EU sees itself as a superstate based on the free movement of labour, services, capital and goods. In reality the “eurocracy” oversees an ugly parody of these principles. Rather than the free movement of skilled labour, EU rules encourage benefit-seeking, kin-driven immigration. The mass flow of people, legal and illegal, from kin-based low-growth societies places a drag on dynamic economies. High-growth societies replace kin with couples. EU migration reverses this. It replaces efficient self-reliant skill-based nuclear families with dependency-prone extended family groups.

Sixty years on, the EU still has in place innumerable regulatory barriers to free trade in financial services. This has been a source of perpetual British frustration. On exiting, this frustration may get worse. The UK could lose its existing right to sell financial services across the EU from one location, London. The doomsday scenario is that business will flee to Frankfurt. But that’s unlikely given the efficiency of UK financial services. Nevertheless British-based finance companies may be forced to open needless branch offices in Continental cities. Campaigners against Brexit cite this as a reason to stay. Equally it is a reason to leave. The “office-in-every-country” penalty for exiting reveals a basic flaw of the EU. It reflects the widespread discomfort in the EU with the distance delivery of services.

The internet and increasingly “fintech” facilitate long-distance trade, trade without offices, trade between machines, and trade between distant strangers. Continental Europe has an historic unease with this. In contrast Britain and its offshoots including Australia and America are good at doing things at a distance. The most cogent reason why Britain never fitted very well into the EU was coined not by an Englishman but by the French President Charles de Gaulle. In 1963 and 1967 France vetoed the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community. De Gaulle explained that Britain was a “maritime” nation and was accordingly “linked though her interactions, her markets, and her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries”. Britain was instinctively at ease acting at a great distance. This “very original habit” put Britain irredeemably at odds with its Continental peers.

Peter Smith: The Politicians We Deserve

Conservatism is not the best hope for mankind simply because of its positive agenda. It is the best hope because it offers a limited bulwark against a progressive political class that professes to be improving the lot of mankind while almost invariably making things worse.
People are apparently sick of politicians. I am not sure anything has changed. Personally I think most have always viewed politicians as a necessary blight. They recognise that leaderless people turn into mobs. Better, therefore, to be led by dimwits and carpetbaggers than not led at all.

One of the charges levied against politicians is that they are ‘all talk no action’. Oh, if it were only thus. I like them better when they talk endlessly, stalling the exponential growth of pages of legislation and regulations. I admired Kevin Rudd in verbosely failing to get in place an emissions trading scheme.

Filibusters are a great American invention and might have saved the world if they’d been available to all democratic parliaments since the dawn of civilised time. Unfortunately it is now too late. Urgently, we need the kind of action which goes deeply against the psychological disposition of politicians. To wit, action which undoes action of their ‘esteemed’ predecessors, most of whom ended up with gongs for public service; when they should have been put in stocks.

Australia’s fractured parliament is preventing things from getting done. Is it not? No, it is preventing things from getting undone. Try to get an unaffordable social welfare benefit reduced or rescinded without some compensating measure; there is Buckley’s chance.

Wonder why Australia’s parliament is fractured and therefore can’t get things undone? It is because politicians of the past have created such a mess that people are flailing around for answers. Misfits become appealing. Try herding misfits into a corral without offering inducements. Ironically, the damaging legacy of past politicians is protected by the very social malaise they created.

Mind you, a fractured Parliament simply makes matter worse. Even in the best of circumstances, getting anything undone brings out numbers of special interests who have nothing better to do than fight for their ‘rights’. And, of course, increasingly the courts are used to protect the status quo.

Consider some of the main policy goals of Donald Trump. He wants to repeal Obamacare, which is in process of collapsing in any event; to dismantle job-killing regulations and onerous environmental overreach; to reduce uncompetitive rates of taxation; and to undo damaging trade deals. Sure he also has a ‘doing agenda’ (e.g., building a wall) but much of his agenda is tearing down political idiocies of the past. Already there is strident political opposition, and not just from the Democrats; and the beginning of endless litigation.

What is Theresa May’s biggest policy goal? Clearly it is to make Brexit a reality; to get something undone. Fear-driven political leadership in the past led a world-trading Britain into making common cause with an insular, sclerotic, bureaucratised, European sanctuary. Never mind, nothing to see there. Yesteryears’ politicians did their pathetic best, even if they contributed to undermining the cultural identity and cohesion of British society. Now you can get arrested for quoting Churchill. Just maybe, out of Europe, you will eventually be able to freely quote Churchill again. Though don’t bank on it. Can’t blame the EU for everything.

A conservative political agenda is not the best hope for mankind because of its positive agenda. It is the best hope because it offers a (limited) bulwark against most politicians, who desperately want to do things to improve the lot of mankind. Almost invariably these things worsen the lot of mankind. Often this takes a long time to become evident. By then the political perpetrators are gone. They undeservedly escape opprobrium. If not dead, their fat pensions continue to be paid.

Trump on Immigration Policy: ‘Doing What We Said We Would Do’ Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offers polite disagreement to policy by stating his nation’s own By Louise Radnofsky

WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump said that deportations since his inauguration reflect that “I’m just doing what we said we would do” to make the country safer, adding that travel restrictions on people from countries suspected of sympathizing with terrorism were “getting such praise.”

“We’re actually taking people that are criminals, very, very hardened criminals in some cases with a tremendous track record, and we’re getting them out,” Mr. Trump said, at a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in which the two men were asked about contrasts in the two countries’ approach on refugees.

“It’s a stance of common sense,” Mr. Trump said in apparent reference to the travel restrictions. “We are going to pursue it vigorously.”

Mr. Trudeau offered polite disagreement.

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu Prepares for High-Stakes Talks With Trump U.S. and Israeli leaders may be on a collision course after their early efforts to foreshadow warmer relations By Rory Jones and Carol E. Lee

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began meetings in Washington Tuesday ahead of a critical summit with President Donald Trump that officials in both countries hope will clarify the new U.S. administration’s policies in the Middle East.

Mr. Trump made lofty promises during his campaign, such as pledging to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem if he were elected, a move that would effectively recognize Israel’s claim to the holy city as its capital. Relations are ripe for a reset after eight years of tensions with the former administration over settlements and the deal with Iran to restrain its nuclear program.

Yet as Mr. Trump tempers some of his campaign positions that were cheered by Mr. Netanyahu, the Israeli leader heads into their White House meeting on Wednesday under pressure from hard-liners at home to abandon his commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a solution the U.S. has long advocated.

The dynamic complicates efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and potentially sets the U.S. and Israeli leaders on a collision course after their early efforts to foreshadow new, warmer relations between the two countries.

“I think both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have a very big stake in wanting to demonstrate that whatever the problems were with the last administration, they’re now gone,” said Dennis Ross, a veteran U.S. diplomat in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Mr. Trump has now put off moving the embassy from Tel Aviv and said settlements could hamper efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, telling an Israeli news outlet last week that they “don’t help the process.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Eavesdropping on Michael Flynn Did U.S. spooks have a court order to listen to his conversations? Why?

A White House spokesman said Monday that President Trump is “evaluating the situation” regarding national security adviser Michael Flynn over his pre-inaugural contacts with Russian officials. (See the editorial nearby.) While the President is at it, how about asking if the spooks listening to Mr. Flynn obeyed the law?

Mr. Flynn is a retired general who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, so surely he knew that his Dec. 29 call to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak would be subject to electronic surveillance. U.S. intelligence services routinely get orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor foreign officials. But under U.S. law, when they get those orders they are supposed to use “minimization” procedures that don’t let them listen to the communications of Americans who may be caught in such eavesdropping. That is, they are supposed to protect the identity and speech of innocent Americans. Yet the Washington Post, which broke the story, says it spoke to multiple U.S. officials claiming to know what Mr. Flynn said on that call.

The questions someone in the White House should ask the National Security Agency is why it didn’t use minimization procedures to protect Mr. Flynn? Or did it also have a court order to listen to Mr. Flynn, and how did it justify that judicial request?

If Mr. Flynn was under U.S. intelligence surveillance, then Mr. Trump should know why, and at this point so should the American public. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation, but the Trump White House needs to know what’s going on with Mr. Flynn and U.S. spies.

The Baker-Shultz Carbon-Tax Plan Is a Bad Deal for Americans The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. By Rupert Darwal See note please

Anything that James Baker proposes…is wrong….from the time that he was a student….vile man…vile Secretary of State (1989-1992)…rsk
‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’ retaining control of the Senate. Now the grandees of the Old Republican Establishment, led by former secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker, are calling for President Trump to put the new Republican majority at risk by enacting an escalating $40-per-ton carbon tax.

Where they are right is that a carbon tax is economically superior to cap-and-trade and EPA regulation. Their proposal addresses one of the big weaknesses of the latter two approaches by preventing “carbon leakage,” the migration of energy-intensive production to developing nations. It does this by reimbursing carbon taxes incurred in making goods for export while imposing a tax on imports from countries that did not price carbon, although it glosses over the vast expansion of the IRS that would be required to make such a system watertight.

The package is topped off by giving away the entire proceeds of the carbon tax to anyone with a Social Security number. The political bet is that the lure of free money for all — a reprise of a ploy first used by environmentalists in the 1930s, when the Green Shirts marched through the streets of London demanding payment of the national dividend to all — will be enough to induce wary Republicans who opposed cap-and-trade and want the Clean Power Plan nixed to embrace carbon taxation.

All government interventions to decarbonize impose an economic penalty. The best that can be said for a carbon tax is that it is the least bad way. A government-created market distortion that discourages the use of efficient hydrocarbon energy shrinks the economy’s productivity frontier — its potential output at the current state of best practice — and subverts consumer choice, so that for the same income families are forced to consume less than they would otherwise. This in turn shrinks the Gross Domestic Product, hurting consumers and increasing the deficit — effects ignored by carbon-tax advocates.

In that regard, the Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends produced by the Climate Leadership Council is disingenuous and dishonest. An American receiving as much in carbon dividends as he pays in carbon taxes would end up worse off because the economy would be smaller and his consumer preferences suppressed. So a carbon tax would not contribute to economic growth but detract from it.

SJW Internet Publishes a Guide to Being as Many Genders as You Want without Culturally Appropriating Thank God — I’ve been worrying about this a lot. By Katherine Timpf

In case you’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about all of the different genders, and wondering if any of your or your friends’ many genders might be cultural appropriation, there’s a piece making the rounds on Social Justice Internet that’s here to help.

In a piece titled “What Does Multigender Mean? 10 Questions You May Be Afraid to Ask — Answered,” Jenny Crofton explains that there’s “an infinite diversity of genders in the world” and “at least as many genders as there have been humans who lived.”

“I say ‘at least’ because as it turns out, people can embody more than one gender in their lifetime,” Crofton writes. “We can even embody more than one gender at once.”

“We can experience them as full and independent, or as partial and mixed,” Crofton continues.

A few examples of possible gender identities offered in Crofton’s article include “amorgender,” which is “gender that changes in response to a romantic partners,” “mirrorgender,” which is “gender that changes to reflect those around you,” “chaosgender,” which is “gender that is highly unpredictable,” and “gendervex,” which is “having multiple genders, each of which is unidentifiable.” Genders can also be negative instead of positive — something Crofton calls “antigender.” For example, some people might identify as “antigirl,” and that’s not to be confused with identifying as “male.”

Now, lest you think that all of this sounds too simple and restrictive, Crofton also clarifies that your gender absolutely does not have to be something that’s included on this or any list, because even though “dominant culture wants us each to conform to a single gender,” you are totally allowed to have as many genders as you want, to change your gender or genders as often as you want, and to identify as a certain gender or genders like only a little bit instead of completely. Basically, anything goes — except, of course, for cultural appropriation.

Yes, that’s right. According to Crofton, certain gender identities can be appropriation, such as “the Two-Spirit genders of some North American Indigenous groups” and “autigender and fascigender, which are exclusive to people with autism.”

“Because it’s impossible to access these genders without being part of a specific cultural context, it’s inappropriate for outsiders to claim any Two-Spirit gender,” Crofton writes, adding that if even one of your genders is “culturally appropriated,” then your whole “overarching identity also becomes problematic” — a situation that can be an issue for “pangender people.”

“Pangender people, in a literal sense, identify as all genders,” Crofton writes. “The problem is that ‘all genders’ includes culturally specific genders that must not be appropriated.”

The Uses of Populism The economy, academia, immigration, and the environment could benefit from Trump’s unorthodox approach. By Victor Davis Hanson

Populism of the center (as opposed to Bernie Sanders’s socialist populism) has received a bad media rap — given that it was stained in the past by xenophobic and chauvinistic currents. Who wishes to emulate all the agendas of William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, or Ross Perot? Yet there were some elements of Trump’s populist agenda — mostly concern for redeveloping the industrial and manufacturing base of the American heartland, and with it creating better-paying jobs for globalism’s losers — that were not only overdue but salutary for the Republican party. His idea that broad-based prosperity could diminish tribalism and racial fault lines sought to erode traditional Democratic support.

Populism is certainly identified with lots of grassroots movements, from far left through the center to far right. The common tie is that ordinary voters feel estranged from an elite class in politics, government, the media, and entertainment — a phenomenon that dates from the Solonian crisis at Athens and the Gracchi of Rome to Ross Perot, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.

Often prairie-fire outrage manifests in emotional responses to existing affronts rather than carefully crafted policies designed to remedy perceived grievances. (One can remember Al Gore’s 1993 pompous but undeniable evisceration on CNN of a stuttering, ill-informed populist Ross Perot, on the NAFTA treaty.).

All that said, these periodic uprisings in consensual societies are needed to disabuse an insular governing class of its sense of entitlement and privilege.

The spark that ignites populist movements is not so much disparities in wealth and status (they are not always French Revolution or Bolshevik-like class-driven attempts to grab power) as rank hypocrisies: Elites condescendingly prescribe nostrums to hoi polloi, but always on the dual premise that those who are dictating will be immune from the ramifications of their own sometimes burdensome edicts, and those who are dictated to are supposedly too dense to know what is good for them. (Think Steven Chu, the former energy secretary, who either did not commute by car or had a short drive to work, while he hoped that gas prices for the nation’s clueless drivers might climb to European levels of $9–$10 a gallon.)

We’ve already seen Trump’s anti-doctrinaire approach to jobs, trade, and the economy: his notion that the free-market in reality can often became a rhetorical construct, not a two-way street when it comes to trading blocs. Free-market purists might see the outsourcing of jobs and unbridled importation of foreign subsidized products as a way to toughen up the competitiveness of American companies and trim off their fat; but people who take this view are usually the ones who benefit from globalism and who are in little danger of having their own job downsized, eliminated, or shipped overseas. Few of us often ask whether full professors are very productive, whether op-ed writers are industrious and cogent, whether Hollywood actors are worth millions per picture, whether politicians are improving the nation’s lot, or whether journalists are disinterested and competent. Instead, we assume that because they all have well-compensated jobs, they are qualified, essential, and invaluable to the economy.