RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Veterans Administration hospital scandal that has claimed the lives of at least 40 U.S. military veterans continues to expand, adding to the image of a president who neither knows nor cares what happens to those who shed their blood on the battlefield for their fellow Americans.

With a little under six months before the crucial midterm elections, it is a helpful reminder to voters of the horrors that are not glitches, but essential features, of government-provided health care. The problems at the VA are omens, sneak previews of what the delivery of all health care in America will look like under Obamacare, and so it is fortuitous that the scandal should surface now.

President Obama is predictably, perfunctorily, outraged about these bad things that have been happening in the government he controls. He is shocked and promises to get to the bottom of the issue and do better in the future. It is tedious stuff.

The happenings at the VA are also more evidence, Obama critics say, that the president despises the military. Obama has been moving to reduce soldier pay and benefits and hollow out the military to mid-century staff levels. He has also been going on a human resources rampage, firing flag officers at a rate that alarms military observers. And like any good leftist, Obama believes that the only good American soldier is one who is functioning as a social worker, not a war-fighter.

Meanwhile, Obama VA officials have been working overtime covering up the various waiting list atrocities that have been popping up cross the country.

A whistleblower who exposed the waiting list scandal in Fort Collins, Colorado, says she was suspended after she refused to falsify records.

Lisa Lee, who was employed at that clinic, said she was placed on two weeks of unpaid leave for not following a directive that involved “cooking the books” on scheduling medical appointments to create the false impression that appointments were made closer to the time veterans requested.

“Why are they throwing me under the bus when I’m trying to say what the problem is?”

At least 40 U.S. veterans have died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix, Ariz., Veterans Affairs Health Care system, CNN reported April 30. Many of the dead had been put on a secret waiting list.

We’ve long known the economic case. The humanitarian case is even stronger.
The economic case against the minimum wage exists, and has been made by me and others often enough. But there’s another, even stronger case against the rule. That is the humanitarian case. And until that case, too, receives consideration, the debate will always be a lopsided one.

Consider the current employment culture. Sit down with an employment officer at the company where you hope to work, and something feels strange. After a while, you realize what it is: The party on the other side of the desk is not a company executive, it is Jacqueline Berrien, the head of the EEOC. The process moves in similarly creepy fashion when you are the one offering the job: Sure, your future hire is there in the flesh, but you might as well be talking to Thomas Perez. That is, the rules the United States secretary of labor enforces determine the course of your conversation more than anything you, or the new hire, might feel like saying.

It was not always thus. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, many employers and employees believed that their relationship, the two-party one, was key. Outsiders — regulators, unions, lawmakers — were intruders. That privacy of employer and employee often yielded negative results. The employer might exploit the employee. But the two-party dynamic often succeeded. Because the employee-employer pair set their terms together, they trusted each other. From time to time, they also helped each other.

Example: It’s hard to find employers more vilified in the annals of American history than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick. These gentlemen hired the Pinkerton men who shot at the workers during the steel strike over, yes, wages at Homestead, Pa., in 1892. What is mostly forgotten is that the workers also shot at the detectives. What is entirely forgotten is that Carnegie and Frick did much for workers, precisely because they felt responsible to their counterparty. The exploiting Robber Baron Carnegie endowed more than 1,500 public libraries up and down the Atlantic seaboard and out west, and many more around the world. Carnegie’s aim was to dare workers like those who tackled the Pinkertons to improve their skills, so that they might rise as Carnegie himself had. “He that dare not reason is a slave,” reads the motto at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. Many immigrants after Carnegie did reason, and did rise.

“Trigger warnings” are the latest trend in political correctness — and they’re madness.

Trigger warning: I am going to make fun of “trigger warnings.”

Of course, if you’re the sort of person who takes trigger warnings very seriously, you probably don’t read this column too often. So maybe my mockery will miss its target, sort of like making fun of the Amish on the Internet — it’s not like they’ll find out.

In fairness, the Amish are actually very impressive people. Even though some Amish communities are more tolerant of technology than the stereotypes suggest, their Anabaptist puritanical streak leaves me cold. On the whole, I like modernity. I may not love every new fad of the last few centuries, but mark me down as a fan of refrigeration, Netflix, modern dentistry, universal suffrage, the internal-combustion engine, and all that stuff.

Here’s another thing about the Amish. They don’t expect everyone else to pussyfoot around them.

You can’t say the same thing about the trigger-unhappy folks making headway on college campuses. Before I continue, I should explain what a trigger warning is.

It started on left-wing and feminist websites. Like a spoiler alert in a movie review or a more specific version of the movie-rating system, trigger warnings are intended to alert very sensitive people that some content might set off, or trigger, their post-traumatic stress disorder or simply offend some people. According to most accounts, this was a conscientious accommodation of people who’d been raped or otherwise horribly abused.

But soon the practice metastasized. Trigger warnings were provided for an ever-increasing, and ridiculous, list of “triggers.” For example, one website offers a trigger warning that it contains images of small holes, lest it terrify people suffering from trypophobia, which is — you guessed it — a fear of clusters of small holes. Another website warns visitors that it will not tolerate any debate over the validity of its trigger warnings for, among many other things, trypophobia, pictures from high places, audio of snapping fingers, or images or discussion of spiders, food, escalators, or animals in wigs.

Now, the Internet is a very big place, and there’s nothing wrong with obscure websites catering to the boutique anxieties of troubled people.

But now the cancer has spread to the college campus. At UC Santa Barbara, the student government has formally requested that professors provide trigger warnings on their syllabi. The idea was initially suggested by a student who had been the victim of sexual abuse. Her class was shown a film that depicted a rape, and while she herself was not “triggered” by it, she felt she should have been warned.

Vibrating capsule helping constipation sufferers
‘It’s completely novel,’ says gastroenterologist
HOW PILL WORKS

Yishai Ron, the research leader and a gastroenterologist at the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said the capsule is designed to pulsate three times a minute, roughly the same pace the colon contracts to move waste products through. It starts vibrating 6-8 hours after being swallowed — roughly the time it takes for food to reach the lower part of the digestive system — so the vibrations are not perceptible, he said.
• Patients in the trial took the capsules twice a week for two weeks. It is too early to know how much the pills will cost or how long a patient would need to take the single-use capsules to clear up constipation.

Millions of people suffer from constipation — sometimes so bad it can go on for months or years. Medications are effective, but as many as half of all those with chronic constipation get little relief or suffer significant side effects, studies show.

Now an Israeli company, Vibrant, is testing a capsule that would vibrate in the colon, rather than deliver medications.

Adding movements inside the lower intestine mimics peristalsis, the biological process that pushes waves of waste through the bowel. The researchers hope it will break up clumps of waste and encourage the system to work more normally.

They have only just begun to test the multivitamin-sized pill, releasing results Saturday showing it was safely tested in 26 patients who have bowel movements just twice a week on average.

Trigger warning: This essay was written by one who feels no need to check his gender, race and class, and who does not apologize for offending readers who may suffer feelings of inferiority due to racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, or other issues of oppression.

For more than a decade, feminist blogs and forums have used the term “trigger warning,” or simply “TW,” to alert victims of sexual abuse that they may want to avoid certain articles or pictures online. While concerns about trigger warnings have been around for a while, what prompted the recent spate was a disturbing letter from Dylan Farrow, adoptive daughter of Woody Allen, accusing him of sexual molestation when she was seven years old. The letter was printed in the New York Times on February 1. Six days later Mr. Allen wrote a denial, claiming her memories were “implanted” by her mother, Mia Farrow. I have no idea who is telling the truth and that isn’t the purpose of this note. What was interesting is that following publication the blogosphere became inundated with tweets – varied in terms of where responsibility lay – but consistent in that all suggested the letter should have been preceded with a “trigger warning” label, the contents might prove sensitive to those who had experienced such molestation.

The desire to protect children against depictions of violence and explicit sexual encounters is endemic to parenting. At the same time, fascination with the forbidden is as old as mankind. Nevertheless, despite hands thrown in the air in despair, generations of young have matured into emotionally healthy adults – or, at least, reasonably so. Our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers, in some cases) returned from the Pacific and Europe following World War II, having witnessed brutality on an unprecedented scale. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was then called “battle fatigue” or “combat neurosis.” Many returning vets had trouble adapting, but most did not. They simply chose not to speak of what they had seen. Could modern psychiatry have provided better tools that would have allowed these people to live more productive lives? Perhaps. However, those returning vets helped power the American economy become the biggest and most powerful in the world. They were instrumental in the passage of Civil Rights legislation. They helped lay the foundation of a society richer and more inclusive than the one they inherited. Tom Brokaw dubbed them the “Greatest Generation.”

Not surprisingly, the UK’s main “progressive” newspaper, The Guardian, has provided its readers with a thoroughly Marxist analysis of Boko Haram’s recent kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Yes, revolutionary socialism may be almost dead in the UK; but Marxist theory is still alive and kicking.

So why Marxist? Well this newspaper has blamed Boko Haram’s actions on the economic and social problems supposedly caused by man-caused global warming in Nigeria. In other words, the Guardian doesn’t blame Boko Haram for the actions of Boko Haram; it blames global warming. In fact I will argue that it ultimately blames Western capitalism.

The Guardian’s position isn’t a surprise. This newspaper doesn’t blame acts of terrorism on the terrorists who commit those acts either. (Unless the terrorist is white, right-wing and goes by the name of Anders Behring Breivik.) The Guardian, instead (depending on the article and the time of day) blames Islamic terrorism on: unemployment, the Iraq War, Islamophobia, racism, oil, the Danish cartoons, anti-Islamic films, the banning of the burkha, Westerners in Saudi Arabia, The Satanic Verses, Israel, 1967, the Balfour Declaration, autocratic Arab regimes (which are, of course, “propped up by the West”), the “far right”, “anti-terrorism legislation”…

Come to think of it, Noam Chomsky (much loved by Guardianistas) also blamed the Syrian war on global warming. He once said:

“There was a drought of unprecedented scale in Syria… Therefore, the tragedy that has unfolded in Syria is partly a consequence of global warming.”

The Guardian article in question (written by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed) partly relies on a study by the United States Institute for Peace (which is funded by Congress). More specifically, the Institute “links climate change with violence in Nigeria”. In terms of detail, it states that

“…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict.”

Three things are taken for granted here:

In a graduation season when distinguished guests such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Condoleezza Rice, Christine Lagarde, some state senator from Colorado and a camel in Minnesota have all been bounced from campus by student protests, John Kerry somehow managed to slip through the net and deliver his speech to Boston College students. Can you guess what it was about, boys and girls?

Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduates of Boston College on Monday that they have doom and destruction to look forward to if they don’t take climate change more seriously than previous generations.

‘And I know its hard to feel the urgency as we sit here on an absolutely beautiful morning in Boston,’ Kerry said, ‘you might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your communities or your families.

‘But let me tell you, it is.’

If the U.S. does not act, ‘and it turns out that the critics and the naysayers and the members of the Flat Earth Society – if it turns out that they’re wrong, then we are risking nothing less than the future of the entire planet.’

This is apparently the one speech you’re still allowed to give at American universities.

A thousand minutes — give or take, just past midnight to 7 p.m. — may seem like a long stretch to sit in silent vigil at the doorstep to the White House in Lafayette Square, but not so much for a Marine vet who has been on some grunt shifts in his life.

Thus Terry Mahoney, who served as a sergeant in the Marine Corps, didn’t think twice about the extended vigil, in which he tried to imagine what it felt like for Amir Hekmati passing his 1,000 days in a tiny cell in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.

He tweeted selfies in the still of the Washington night, greeted the sun with a standard parade of joggers rushing past, and saw the runners replaced by droves of suits wielding smartphones.

And as every moment of everyday life unfolded in the square, nothing changed for a Michigan man falsely accused by the Islamic Republic of conspiracy to commit espionage.

Monday’s vigil brought the Hekmati family to Washington to meet with lawmakers, give a hug or two to all of the players who’ve helped try to bring Amir home, and alert a passerby or two in the park to a cause they may have known nothing about — a proud first-generation American and Iraq war veteran who went to visit extended family in Tehran for the first time, only to find himself arrested without due process and facing a death sentence at one especially harrowing time during his lengthy incarceration.

“If someone would have pulled me aside and whispered in my ear the challenges that were awaiting me, I would have never believed them. If they would have told me that my brother would have been captured by Iranian intelligence officials and held in Evin prison, I would have thought that they had watched too many movies. If they would have told me he would be sentenced to death, I would have thought they were crazy, and if they would have told me this death sentence would be overturned but he would be kept in solitary confinement, away from his family, attorney and the outside world, I would have thought they were out of their minds,” Amir’s sister Sara told a crowd assembled on the lawn.

The British government should deny its enemies the opportunities for exploitation presented by the International Criminal Court and withdraw now from the process. Any other course would represent an unprecedented and historic betrayal.

Today the United Kingdom sits alongside Libya, Darfur and Sudan as the International Criminal Court [ICC] launches an investigation into alleged war crimes by the British Army in Iraq.

This perversion brings to mind German Pastor Martin Niemoeller’s powerful words at the end of the Second World War:

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It was not long before they came again for the Jews – this time in the newly established Jewish state. And over the years, Israel’s enemies, unable to destroy her in battle, have used “lawfare” – the abuse of Western laws and judicial systems – to try to undermine and delegitimize her.

The main building of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Vincent van Zeijst)
A leading player in this unremitting assault has been the UN Human Rights Council [UNHRC], which has passed resolution after spurious resolution against Israel while ignoring horrific human rights abuses around the world. The fundamentally flawed Goldstone Report, which concluded that Israel had been guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the IDF’s defensive operation in Gaza in 2008-09, is an example of the UNHRC’s distortions of reality.

To their credit, the United States and five European countries opposed the UNHRC’s resolution to endorse Judge Goldstone’s assault on the Jewish state. Predictably, the United Kingdom declined to vote. This is characteristic of Britain’s refusal to speak out when Israel, one of the West’s staunchest allies, comes under attack, whether by rockets from Gaza directed against her civilian population or by lawfare, directed against her government and armed forces.

And now another instrument of the “international community” is coming for Britain. In the latest of a barrage of legal attacks against British forces in recent months, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s preliminary examination will look into allegations that British troops abused detainees during the Iraq conflict between 2003 and 2008.

Bensouda will decide whether or not Britain is making genuine investigations into these allegations and whether prosecutions are likely to be brought against individuals if the evidence warrants it. If Bensouda is satisfied, she will then lay down standards to be followed by the British judicial system and monitor progress and performance against those standards.

Property rights must be treated as integrated with other individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. To divorce any or all these rights is to pose a perilous dichotomy.

The Guardian of Every Other Right: Part V

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” – Ayn Rand, 1963*

Chapter 7 of James Ely’s book, “The New Deal and the Demise of Property-Conscious Constitutionalism,” chronicles the Supreme Court’s timid retreat from a semi-efficacious defense of property rights, unsure of the propriety of property rights unless linked to the “public good,” browbeaten by “public opinion,” and savaged by the Progressives.

The new political outlook emphatically rejected the laissez-faire philosophy. Justice Louis D. Brandeis expressed this reform sentiment when he declared in 1932, “There must be power in the States and the Nation to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs.” (Italics mine; p. 125)

“Experimentation” meaning that Progressivism was basically a John Dewey-esque program of applied political and economic Pragmatism. While “constitutionalism” relied on a strict interpretation of the Framers’ principled meanings – an “ideology” regarded with hostility by Progressives and others of a collectivist stripe – Progressivism is an ideology empty of any principles except a desire and commitment to control, rule, and “harmonize” the whole country and make it fit into an authoritarian straightjacket. If a new” sin” tax or regulation of manufacturing or a new levy on corporate profits doesn’t work here, maybe it’ll work over there, and if it doesn’t, we can try something else. Never mind the inconvenience to property owners and the dislocation of market forces the experiment produces. You can’t achieve an omelet of “social equity” without breaking some eggs. Or some heads. Theories and principles and definitions just get in the way.

Borrowing from the Progressive legacy, President Roosevelt’s New Deal program was grounded on the notion that government had an affirmative duty to promote the general social welfare….Congress and the states enacted an extraordinary array of measures that greatly enlarged governmental supervision of the economy and sought to redistribute wealth and economic power. This social welfare approach flatly contradicted the insistence on limited governmental activity, marketplace competition, and respect for property rights that were at the heart of traditional constitutionalism. (Italics mine; p. 125)