EDUCATION Comments turned off

Rochester Institute of Technology Students Demand Transgender Drugs By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on April 6th, 2018

On Monday, students at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) protested to demand the school’s on-campus health center provide transgender drugs, which it stopped providing last spring.

The on-campus student health center had briefly provided hormone replacement therapy (HRT) under Dr. Annamaria Kontor, who was fired last May for exceeding her authority in providing these drugs. Kontor had reportedly ignored several notices urging her to stop the practice.

“HRT is not a luxury that people just want — they need this. It’s a medication,” Natasha Amadasun, a student at the protest who identified as non-binary and transgender but does not take HRT, told the Democrat and Chronicle. Amadasun works at the Q Center, an LGBT establishment on campus.

“A lot of students come into the Q center with questions (about access) and we can’t really help them because we don’t have much information,” Amadasun, who goes by the pronoun “they,” told the paper.

Since the on-campus center no longer provides HRT, students who identify with the gender opposite their birth sex go to either Trillium Health or the University of Rochester Medical Center, both of which have long wait lists and can be difficult to access without vehicles, the Democrat and Chronicle reported.

Kenji Vann, a biological woman identifying as a man, reported on relying on parents and friends to drive him to Strong Memorial Hospital for HRT appointments. Having hormone treatments available on campus “would be so much more convenient for scheduling,” Vann said.

“Students are tired of waiting and feeling kind of invisible, especially on a campus with such a large queer presence,” Taryn Brennan, president of the LGBT group OUTspoken, which organized the protest, told the Democrat and Chronicle. The protest also complained about the policy on gender-neutral bathrooms on campus, and demanded more accessible information for LGBT students.

Perhaps ironically, RIT has a reputation for championing LGBT identities, including offering “gender-inclusive” housing.

Despite this stance, the school insisted that Dr. Kontor did not have the proper authority to provide HRT. In a letter firing Kontor, Dr. Wendy Gelbard, the college’s associate vice president of Student Health, Counseling and Wellness, wrote, “The Student Health Center’s practice prohibits prescribing hormone therapy for the purpose of gender transition.”

Gelbard later repeated that administering and monitoring HRT for the purpose of gender transition was “beyond the scope of practice of the Student Health Center.” She also wrote that Kontor had ignored several notices not to provide hormone therapy to transgender students — notices Kontor denied receiving. CONTINUE AT SITE

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Vanishing ‘Caravan’ You can relax about that invading horde of poor Central Americans.

Posted By on April 6th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-caravan-1522970881

President Trump can’t seem to decide if his border-control plan is a success or an imminent national crisis.

Not long ago he was touting fewer apprehensions at the Southwest border. Then he jumped on the story, from BuzzFeed and Fox News, that an immigrant “caravan” was heading from Central America through Mexico for the Rio Grande. He treated this like a Russian invasion, first saying he’d send “the military” to the border and then signing an order to deploy the National Guard.

There was no need. By Thursday the invading horde had largely dispersed before it reached even Mexico City. It isn’t clear most were even heading to the U.S. Mr. Trump conceded on Twitter that “The Caravan is largely broken up” and he credited Mexico’s “strong immigration laws,” which he usually derides.

He was also back to touting his border-control success: “Because of the Trump Administrations [sic] actions, Border crossings are at a still UNACCEPTABLE 46 year low.”

Apprehensions were down in fiscal 2017 to 310,531, the lowest since at least 2000. But they were up year over year in February and March, and our guess is that’s due to the strong U.S. economy pulling in more migrants coming for work.

This underscores the contradiction in Mr. Trump’s economic agenda. Faster growth from tax reform and deregulation means a tighter labor market that attracts more migrants. Mr. Trump would be wise to trade border security for reform that allows more legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs. Then he wouldn’t have to pull stunts like hyping a band of poor migrants as an invading army.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Pruitt Test The President needs to show some loyalty to his leading reformer.

Posted By on April 6th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-pruitt-test-1522970943

Donald Trump demands loyalty up the chain of command, but loyalty down has been another matter. The latest test of loyalty down will be whether Mr. Trump stands behind Scott Pruitt as Washington’s green political machine tries to oust the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator for supposedly grave ethics offenses.

Mr. Pruitt’s real sin is that he is one of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive reformers, taking on green idols that others would bow before. In a year he has rescinded the waters of the U.S. rule that sought to regulate every pond in America; proposed to repeal the Clean Power Plan rule that sought to put coal out of business; urged the President to withdraw from the Paris climate pact; made a priority of cleaning up genuine pollution problems like Superfund sites; and this week began revising the destructive Obama-era fuel-economy standards.

If there has been a more consequential cabinet official, we haven’t seen him.

All of this has made Mr. Pruitt a target of the ruling iron triangle of bureaucrats, interest groups and the press. They’re creating smoke about his spending and ethics to get him fired because he is a political liability, as if they care about Mr. Trump’s liabilities.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

5 Things to Watch in the March Jobs Report The unemployment rate could reach a new low, but the pace of hiring is expected to coolBy Eric Morath

Posted By on April 6th, 2018

https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2018/04/05/5-things-to-watch-in-the-march-jobs-report-4/

The Labor Department releases its broadest look at the U.S. job market for March on Friday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect employers added 178,000 jobs during the month and see the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.0%. Here are five things to watch in the report.

1. A fresh low

Economists project the jobless rate will fall to 4% for the first time since 2000. (They expected it to happen in February, too, but the rate held at 4.1% for the fifth straight month.) An unemployment rate of 4% or less is extremely rare in the past 70 years of modern record-keeping. It has only occurred in the immediate aftermath of World War II, again when young men were being drafted into wars in Korea and Vietnam, and briefly at the end of the 1990s tech boom. The question, if the rate falls, is can a pattern be maintained for several years? Or is it a sign the economy is starting to overheat?

2. Still-hot hiring?

Employers added 313,000 workers to payrolls in February, the best month for hiring since July 2016. Despite a low unemployment rate suggesting a shortage of available workers, employers are hiring at a faster rate–adding more than 200,000 workers in four of the prior five months. Watch to see if employers can maintain that pace, even as economists project hiring to slow.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’ Dangerous Missile Defense Delusion Andrew Harrod

Posted By on April 6th, 2018

“Missile defense needs to be part of the United States’ strategy” against North Korean nuclear threats, conceded even a February 11 New York Times editorial in an incoherent anti-missile defense rant. Yet the Times still derided vital missile defense efforts like Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), a continuation of the leftist Gray Lady’s longstanding dangerous folly of opposition to protecting America’s homeland from nuclear attack.

The Times probably would have preferred that President Donald Trump had kept his initial Fiscal Year 2018 budget request with the missile defense spending levels of his predecessor, Barack Obama. However, growing North Korean nuclear threats prompted Trump and legislators to add $368 million to missile defense, reflecting a growing missile defense commitment noted on March 7 before Congress by undersecretary of defense John C. Rood. The Alaska- and California-based GMD is central to these missile defense efforts. As the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) notes, GMD “is currently the only U.S. missile defense system devoted to defending the U.S. homeland from long-range ballistic missile attacks.”

Nonetheless, the Times simply repeated decades-old sophistries about missile defense’s futility, something that “will never provide a foolproof, comprehensive shield against a nuclear adversary.” “After more than 30 years of research and more than $200 billion, the nation’s ballistic missile defense program remains riddled with flaws, even as the threat from North Korean missiles escalates,” the Times wrote. The Times cited a 2016 Pentagon report that supposedly “faulted” missile defenses (it actually describes GMD’s “limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland”).

MEDIA Comments turned off

The American Cultural Revolution By Erick Erickson

Posted By on April 6th, 2018

Kevin Williamson has been fired by The Atlantic. Williamson is one of the great conservative intellectuals of our times. He has a keen wit and frequently engages in heterodox opinions that make his writing and thinking intriguing. For a decade he wrote at William F. Buckley’s National Review until hired away last week by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic.

The Atlantic fancies itself a place of intellectual diversity where the best writers across ideologies can share their views. But Williamson’s hire drew burning rage from the left. Williamson’s birth came from an unplanned pregnancy. Instead of aborting him, his birth mother gave him up for adoption. As you might imagine, Williamson has strongly held views on the matter of abortion. A week after hiring him, Jeffrey Goldberg bowed to the leftwing mob and fired Williamson for, in part, how he might make the pro-abortion women in the office feel.

Never mind Williamson’s feelings on abortion and that he could have been aborted himself, the editor took the brave stand of worrying about the hypothetical feelings of pro-abortion women in the office. The left told us that the purges happening on college campuses were contained to the campus. Yet here we are today with one of the best voices of conservatism fired from a job for his conservative views.

It will only get worse. Just a few years ago, a liberal reporter walked into an Indiana pizza parlor to see if that parlor would cater a same sex wedding. The owner said he was a Christian so he could not do that. The news set off a wave of antagonism against the pizza parlor, which had to close down for several days. It faced harassment online and in the store for the owner having the audacity to answer a reporter’s hypothetical question.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Review: ‘Ready Player One’ Is Spielberg’s Best Film In A Decade Mark Hughes

Posted By on April 5th, 2018

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2018/03/29/review-ready-player-one-is-spielbergs-best-film-in-a-decade/#48c5064a7081

With the official summer box office season fast approaching, the current spring of tentpole contenders continues apace with the arrival of cinema’s grand master of blockbuster franchise filmmaking. Steven Spielberg returns to theaters with Ready Player One, the sort of big-budget action-adventure extravaganza that turned the director into one of the most successful, beloved, and acclaimed filmmakers of all time. Can he work his magic again after many years away from the tentpole game?

With Ready Player One’s domestic opening weekend shaping up for $40-50 million, international markets will provide a welcome boost expected to exceed $100+ million over the Easter holiday. Some tracking suggests interest in the film is slowing a bit as we head into the weekend, but don’t be surprised if the numbers tick upward as the weekend progresses.

An average run would see a $150+ million global bow translate into perhaps $300-350 million range. If word of mouth is strong, however, then the initial relatively modest opening numbers (particularly in North America) could give way to solid holds and long legs that carry the film toward $400+ million territory.

With terrific critical reviews pushing it over 80+% at Rotten Tomatoes, a best selling novel to provide branding, Spielberg’s name recognition, and the story’s mix of video games and ’80s-90s nostalgia, there’s good reason to expect audience word of mouth to drive attendance for Ready Player One. It lacks any big-name stars who could attract an additional fanbase, but these days only a few performers really deliver that sort of star power anyway.

Spielberg used to be the poster boy for blockbuster box office results, as his films through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s regularly racking up several hundred million bucks apiece. After the turn of the century, Spielberg slowly turned his focus away from franchises and big mainstream crowdpleasers, and toward more serious dramatic fare. As a result, the box office revenue from his pictures declined significantly — which, of course, is fine for movies made without need for massive box office results.

Ready Player One will be Spielberg’s highest-grossing movie since at least The Adventures of Tintin, and more likely his biggest box office success since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s also one of only six of his post-2000 films to top 80% at Rotten Tomatoes, out of 13 total pictures he’s directed during that 18 year period. It could also become his second-best domestic performer in a decade, possibly behind only Lincoln, which took $182 million stateside).

So, why do I think audiences will reward Ready Player One with good word of mouth and long box office legs? Read on and find out…

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

AUSTRALIA JOSH FRYDENBERG M.P. MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY KOOYONG

Posted By on April 5th, 2018

THESE ARE EXCERPTS FROM JOSH FRYDENBERG’S IMPRESSIVE FIRST SPEECH AS AN ELECTED OFFICIAL IN 2010

Standing before the parliament of our great country, I see my journey to this place in the continuum of my family’s story.

My grandparents on both sides were migrants from Europe. In the late 1930s Morrie and Leah Frydenberg came from Poland to Australia to seek a better life. They arrived while Europe was plunging into darkness.

The experience was different for my maternal grandparents, Sam and Ethel Strauss, and their young daughters, including my mother, who were interned in the Budapest ghetto by the Hungarian fascists. They survived and eventually made their way through displaced persons camps to Australia.

My great‐grandparents, and many relatives on both sides, perished in the Holocaust, but one who survived is with us today.

My great‐aunt Mary Frydenberg spent two years at Auschwitz. She was transferred back to Germany by the Nazis and then sent on a death march, but she escaped with the assistance of a humane German guard. In her run for freedom, she was given shelter by a Catholic priest—at great risk to him—before making her way to Australia.

Mary’s story serves us all as a constant reminder of hope, even in the presence of tragedy.

What drives us as Liberals are notions of individual liberty, individual responsibility and a fairness borne out of a particular kind of equality.

The equality which Liberals seek in a society is the equality of opportunity, not the other kind of equality—the equality of outcomes.

By mandating outcomes, the state removes responsibility from individuals and denies the worker, the student and the patient the opportunity to be the best that they can be. It seems to me that these two notions of equality reflect the fundamental fault lines between us and the members opposite. It is not a thin divide.

“How can we all be better off when the government targets independent and Catholic schools merely because parents are exercising choice?”

“The opportunity to prosper is given its best chance through competitive markets—the insight reached by Adam Smith more than two centuries ago.”

“It may appear a paradox but the first of my large thoughts is that we need to limit the government. Our government is too big.”

“We must always remember that whenever we create a new arm of bureaucracy or expand a field of activity, we are not spending our own money; we are spending the money of our citizens who look to us as the guardians of their wealth.”

“The reduction of our per capita consumption of energy and non‐renewable resources is necessary … but part of being responsible is knowing what it will cost, who it will impact and how communities and businesses will need to react.”

“There has never been a better time for innovative technologies, practices and solutions.It seems inexplicable that in Australia we have yet to have a constructive and thorough debate about nuclear power, the only baseload, carbon neutral energy source.”

“How can we all be better off when the government discourages private health insurance at a time when the public system is overburdened?

“Our alliance with the United States is the cornerstone of our national security strategy. It must be protected and defended by both sides of the House.Our friendship and common purpose rests upon more than Realpolitik; it reflects our values, traditions and commitment to the democratic ideal.”

My vision is to achieve what Menzies termed ‘civilised capitalism’, unleashing the power of the individual and his enterprise while always providing a safety net for those who despite their best efforts are unable to cope.

These are my motivations, my cause and my way, and they not negotiable.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump is Cutting Old Gordian Knots By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 5th, 2018

The proverbial knot of Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed.

When Alexander the Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he pulled out his sword and cut through it. Problem solved.

Donald Trump inherited an array of perennial crises when he was sworn in as president in 2017. He certainly did not possess the traditional diplomatic skills and temperament to deal with any of them.

In the last year of the Barack Obama Administration, a lunatic North Korean regime purportedly had gained the ability to send nuclear-tipped missiles to the U.S. West Coast.

China had not only been violating trade agreements but forcing U.S. companies to hand over their technological expertise as the price of doing business in China.

NATO may have been born to protect the European mainland, but a distant United States was paying an increasingly greater percentage of its budget to maintain NATO than were its direct beneficiaries.

Mexico keeps sending its impoverished citizens to the United States, and they usually enter illegally. That way, Mexico relieves its own social tensions, develops a pro-Mexico expatriate community in the U.S. and gains an estimated $30 billion a year from remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.

In the past, traditional and accepted methods failed to deal with all of these challenges. Bill Clinton’s “Agreed Framework,” George W. Bush’s “six-party talks” and the “strategic patience” of the Obama administration essentially offered North Korea cash to denuclearize.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is Trump About to Repeat Obama’s Worst Mistake? by Malcolm Lowe

Posted By on April 5th, 2018

Should American personnel be removed from Syria, President Erdogan will be able to use his tanks and airplanes to revive the Turkish genocidal tradition by expelling the Syrian Kurds from their towns and villages along the entire border with Turkey. These are the same Kurds — remember Kobani? — who drove out ISIS from its Syrian “caliphate” and enabled other Syrians to regain their freedom and return to their own homes.

In early February, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman begged Turkey to cease its assault on Afrin, claiming — truly enough — that “the continuation of Turkey’s military operation will facilitate the return of instability and terrorism to Syria.” Indeed, deprived of American protection, the Kurds will hardly find anyone else willing to rescue them apart from Iran. If that happens, the Kurds will reward Iranians with same loyalty and devotion that they showed hitherto to Americans. Understandably, since they will owe their lives and homes to Iran, not to the United States.

Even if the implications of the massacre in Afrin were not so clearly evident, President Trump should remember the worst mistake of Obama’s presidency in the area. This was Obama’s precipitous and petulant decision to withdraw residual American military forces from Iraq. So, Mr. Trump, we beg and urge you not to copy Obama, who made his big mistake and reversed it, but to reverse your mistake before you make it.

The terrified dire warnings that greeted Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States have proved to be mostly exaggerated or imaginary. In some cases, like his decision to terminate absurd diplomatic antics about the location of Israel’s capital, he has put an end to nonsense perpetrated by politicians throughout the world, including all recent American presidents. Very sadly, extremely sadly, he now seems inclined to repeat the worst mistake of his predecessor, President Obama.