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November 2017

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Sydney M. Williams “Markets”

By on November 27th, 2017

The Law of gravity has not been repealed. What has risen will, at some point, decline. But, when? Hundreds of people are paid millions of dollars to predict the unpredictable. Yet, the best advice about the direction of the market over the short term I have ever read was given by J.P. Morgan. The story may be apocryphal, but it was re-told by Benjamin Graham in The Intelligent Investor (1949); it still resonates. Asked by his lift boy, in 1901, what will the stock market do? He replied, “it will fluctuate.”

The past year has seen establishment-types in Washington, mainstream media and coastal elites trying to undo last year’s election. Has the market’s positive performance deepened their denial and made more passionate their hysteria? Would they have been so relentless had stocks done as Paul Krugman (economist and New York Times columnist) predicted when news of Trump’s election was clear? Krugman wrote as stock futures plunged early before trading began on Wednesday, the 9th of November. As to when they would recover, he opined: “a first-pass answer is never.” The DJIA rose 257 points that day.

The performance of U.S. equity markets since the election of Donald Trump has been remarkable. He came after a President who entered office following the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Stocks were at five-year lows. Mr. Obama’s two terms saw the market (DJIA) rise 151%; he left office with an approval rating in the mid 50% range. In contrast, Mr. Trump was elected with stocks near all-time highs, and he has the lowest approval numbers in memory. However, those ratings run counter to optimism seen in polls like the IDB/TIPP Poll: Economic Optimism Index – a mixture of consumers, workers and investors. Over the first sixteen years of this century, the Index averaged 49.3, or slightly negative. Today, it stands at 53.6. During the last year of Mr. Obama’s Presidency, the number was under 48.

Benjamin Graham, considered the father of value investing, explained his concept of investing this way: “In the short term, it is like a voting machine – tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, it is like a weighing machine – assessing the substance of a company.” Is a year a long enough period to measure Mr. Trump? Is the market reflecting his popularity, or is it weighing what he has accomplished, in restoring cost-benefit analysis and undoing restrictive regulations in federal agencies like the EPA, FDA, FCC, Transportation and the Department of Education? Is it measuring Betsy Devos’s focus on making public school more competitive through vouchers and Charter schools? Is it weighing Mr. Trump’s appointment of originalists as judges, ones more predictable, as they are aligned with the Constitution and less governed by politics or relativism? Does it see an end to authoritarianism at the CFPB?

I don’t pretend to know why markets have done what they have. And I know they will correct, but when and by how much? So, what should investors do? There are no simple answers. The needs of each is individual. The future is like peering through a windshield in driving rain. Clarity is confined to the past.

But, in my experience, market timing is only accurate in retrospect. What I do know is that over the long term – two, three or four decades – stocks have risen. They should continue to do so. If one had bought stocks on September 3, 1929, the day that year the DJIA peaked, one’s compounded annual return, through today, would still have been 4.8%, even though stocks did not exceed those 1929 prices until 1954.[1] If you had reinvested dividends your total compounded annual return would have exceeded 6%. On my birthdate, January 31, 1941, the DJIA was roughly one third of what it had been twelve years earlier. If my grandparents had given me a $1000 as a birth gift, and if I had been smart enough to leave it invested, it would be now worth $187,000, or a 7.01% CAGR. Over the 48 years I spent on Wall Street annual returns compounded at 6.3%, despite stocks being lower fifteen years after I got into the business.

Mr. Obama became President at a fortuitous time. During his eight years in office, the DJIA compounded at an annual rate of 12.1%. But, had you bought stocks on the dawn of the new millennium, on January 3, 2000, your compounded return would have been only 3.9%. That modest performance reflects the bear market that began in March 2000 and ended in March 2003; and the one that began in October 2007 and ended in May 2009. If one goes back 100 years, stocks, as measured by the DJIA, have compounded at 5.9% – a reasonable assumption for future prospects, considering what the last century saw: a world-wide depression, two world wars and numerous smaller ones, a cold war that lasted forty-five years, the deaths in office of three presidents (one by assassination), a bout of inflation that sent Treasuries to 20% yields, the first attack on American soil since the war of 1812, and a credit crisis that nearly sent financial markets into a tail spin. But it was also a period that highlighted American creative genius, that saw the Country land a man on the moon, and which witnessed revolutions in farming, manufacturing, transportation, merchandising, electronics, computing and communications.

There have been structural changes in markets. Among them has been the shrinking of the number of publically traded stocks, and the concomitant increase in value of those that survived. According to the Carlyle Group, there are 3671 companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges today. Twenty years ago, there were about 7300, yet the value of publically traded stocks today – about $27 trillion – is double the value of all publically traded stocks in 1997. What happened? Private equity allows start-ups to wait longer to go public. Mergers and bankruptcies caused the disappearance of many micro and small-cap stocks. Also, passive strategies have limited the number of shares available for trading. Since the millennium, about $1.7 trillion has been invested in index funds, ETFs and other similar strategies, while funds actively managed have seen about $1.4 trillion in outflows. Equity derivatives have affected valuations, altering the nature of risk. And, over the past eight years, the Fed purchased over $4 trillion in government and agency debt. That has ended. The yield on 30-day Treasury Bills has risen from 0.26% on September 30, 2016 to 1.29% now. Over the same time, the spread between Investment Grade Corporates and the 10-Year Treasury has narrowed from 191 basis points to 137 basis points, implying a willingness to assume more risk.

In response to Mr. Buffett’s quote in the rubric at the top of this essay, I suspect people are neither greedy nor fearful. They are somewhere in between. But, keep in mind, investing is for tortoises, not hares. Avoid being cute or believing every seer. Think long term and maintain perspective.

The only addition I would add to the wisdom of J.P. Morgan quoted at the start of this essay is that over the long-term stocks rise; though returns can be negative for a decade or more. The caveat: our democracy, entrepreneurship and capitalism survive. Warren Buffett recently predicted the DJIA will hit 1,000,000 in the next hundred years. One’s first reaction is that the Wizard of Omaha is losing it; but 1,000,000 on the DJIA from the current level implies compounded annual returns of 3.7%, easily doable, as long as our democracy stays strong. My guess is that my great grandchildren will see that happen.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Hannah Arendt on Eichmann:A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial is involved in the fact that it… Norman Podhoretz 1963

By on November 27th, 2017

One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial1 is involved in the fact that it should have been serialized in the New Yorker so short a time after the appearance in the same magazine of James Baldwin’s essay on the Black Muslims. A Negro on the Negroes, a Jew on the Jews, each telling a tale of the horrors that have been visited upon his people and of how these horrors were borne; and each exhorting the prosperous, the secure, the ignorant to understand that these horrors are relevant to them. The two stories have much in common and they are both, in their essentials, as old as humankind itself—so old and so familiar that it takes a teller of extraordinary eloquence, or else of extraordinary cleverness, to make them come alive again. Baldwin is all eloquence; there is nothing clever in the way he tells the story of the Negro in America. On the one side are the powerless victims, on the other the powerful oppressors; the only sin of the victims is their powerlessness, the only guilt is the guilt of the oppressors. Now, this black-and-white account, with the traditional symbolisms reversed, is not the kind of picture that seems persuasive to the sophisticated modern sensibility—the sensibility that has been trained by Dostoevski and Freud, by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, by Eliot and Yeats, to see moral ambiguity everywhere, to be bored by melodrama, to distrust the idea of innocence, to be skeptical of rhetorical appeals to Justice. And indeed, not even Baldwin’s eloquence, which forced many of his readers to listen for once, could overcome the dissatisfaction many others felt at the moral simplicity of the story as he told it. For as he told it, the story did not answer to their sense of reality; it was an uninteresting story and a sentimental one.

Precisely the reverse is true of Hannah Arendt’s telling of the story of how six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. If Baldwin is all eloquence and no cleverness, Miss Arendt is all cleverness and no eloquence; and if Baldwin brings his story unexpectedly to life through the bold tactic of heightening and playing exquisitely on every bit of melodrama it contains, Miss Arendt with an equally surprising boldness rids her story of melodrama altogether and heavily underlines every trace of moral ambiguity she can wring out of it. What she has done, in other words, is translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to the sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the “banal” Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the “collaboration” of criminal and victim. The story as she tells it is complex, unsentimental, riddled with paradox and ambiguity. It has all the appearance of “ruthless honesty,” and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?—and, in addition, it carries with it all the authority of Miss Arendt’s classic work on The Origins of Totalitarianism. Anyone schooled in the modern in literature and philosophy would be bound to consider it a much better story than the usual melodramatic version—which, as it happens, was more or less the one relied upon by the prosecution at the Eichmann trial, and which Miss Arendt uses to great effect in highlighting the superior interest of her own version. But if this version of hers can from one point of view be considered more interesting, can it by the same token be considered truer, or more illuminating, or more revealing of the general situation of man in the 20th century? Is the gain she achieves in literary interest a matter of titillation, or is it a gain to the understanding?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas Lecture, Hector, Badger, Brainwash

By on November 27th, 2017

Just once I’d like to visit a museum, hear a symphony or watch the ABC without being subjected to a tacked-on politically correct sermon because, well, the creatures of the Gramscian Left have colonised those institutions and are devoted to ramming their effluvia down all our throats.

Australians are all undergoing an immersion experience, washed over by a sea of taxpayer-funded “progressive” propaganda. It is so pervasive that we may hardly notice it. For young people, the Left memes are as self-evident as gravity. What follows are a few samples. I’m sure Quadrant subscribers, who all enjoy online posting rights at this site, can add their own to the comments thread below.

ABCTV 7pm News Victoria– Monday’s show (20/11) had an item on a counter-terrorism report by ex-Police Commissioner Ken Lay and former Supreme Court Judge David Harper. The footage focused on Bourke Street Mall, where Demetrious Gargasoulas is accused of driving at reckless and breakneck speed on January 20. Six were killed and dozens injured. His trial is in progress.

ABCTV reporter Melissa Brown said the new counter-terror report “makes 26 recommendations to better protect Victoria and respond to religious and right-wing extremism.” Gargasoulas doesn’t fit the ‘right-wing’ bill. Indeed, he told a magistrate last April, “Your Honour, did you know the Muslim faith is the correct faith according to the whole world?” Police say he has a history of drug use, family violence and mental health problems.

In reporter Brown’s reference to “religious and right-wing extremism”, we once again see the ABC’s near-total inability to utter “Islam” in any context other than the most laudatory. Inside the ABC’s green-left bubble, there is also inability to mention left-wing extremism, of which there is plenty in Victoria, with Antifa’s thugs to the fore.

Indeed, the ABCTV report shamelessly distorts the Lay-Harper report which says on its second page (emphasis added),

Terrorist organisations continue to develop and distribute violent extremist propaganda to influence people that may be vulnerable to radicalisation – whether it be from the far-right, far-left extremism or extremist Islamist ideologies.

Those were the report’s only references to Left and Right ideologies. What’s up, Ms ABC Reporter Brown, can’t you read?

Australian Story: Up next on ABCTV was Australian Story, which covered the tragic death in July of Australian expat Justine Damond Ruszczyk, who was shot by a Minneapolis cop firing across his partner from the front passenger seat of the police car which responded to her call for help about suspicious noises.

It is 20 minutes into the 30-minute program before the ABC lets us know the cop’s name was Mohamed Noor, and its two references to Somali-born Noor involve all of ten seconds (20.20 minutes to 20.30). The program showed total lack of interest in Noor’s background – which would definitely not be the case if the shooter were, say, a Trump flag-waver, or an evangelical pastor.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

U. Michigan students involved in BDS motion: ‘Jews not a nation,’ Zionism a ‘dirty ideology’

By on November 27th, 2017

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor students involved in the finally-after-15-years-passed Israel divestment measure were caught on a clandestine recording rejecting the nationhood of Jewish people and preventing a Jewish student from joining a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/39303/

Obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, the footage also shows students concurring that Palestinian activists should reconsider their “past nonviolent stance.”

Students Allied for Freedom and Equality’s Ahmed Ismail says repeatedly that “Jews are not a nation,” as well as “There’s no nation called ‘Judaism,’” and “Where on the map is there a country called ‘Jews’?”

Ismail continues with “Zionism is a dirty political ideology,” and adds “[a]ny person who is a Zionist believes in the State of Israel, even though it oppresses and kills millions of Palestinians—which I call terrorism.”

“Most Jews are Zionists,” he says.

From the story:

As proof, though, that Zionism has no inherent tie to Judaism, Ismail said there are more non-Jewish Zionists than Jewish Zionists. Ismail noted that he has “lots of Jewish friends,” and that “terrorism in Israel has nothing to do with it being Jewish.”

He said that his views were formed by literature given to him by SAFE, and his experiences growing up as a Muslim in Egypt. He said he has never taken a class on Zionism or the history of Judaism.

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BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Secret War Against Terrorism’s Financiers A new book explores Israel’s daring covert operations against terrorism’s enablers. Ari Lieberman

By on November 27th, 2017

Harpoon
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel Katz
Hachette Books, 308 pp.

Mohammed al-Ghoul had no idea that loading cash-stuffed, leather suitcases into the trunk of his sedan would be one of the final acts of his life. Al-Ghoul was Hamas’s money man, responsible for distributing cash to the terror group’s members.

It was August 24, 2014 and the Gaza War wasn’t going well for Hamas. The Israeli Army (IDF) was wreaking havoc on the terror group, systematically knocking off its field commanders with unprecedented intelligence and accuracy. Hamas terror tunnels, some of which had taken years to construct, were being uncovered and destroyed by the IDF while the terror group’s rocket arsenal was dwindling rapidly.

But of even greater import for Hamas was the fact that its operatives weren’t getting paid. Some of its members hadn’t been paid for a month. Those that weren’t killed, wounded or captured began contemplating desertion. It was an untenable situation for Hamas.

Wiring money to Gaza wasn’t an option. Banks were on notice that wire transfers to the terror entity was a venture that carried high risk and little reward. But al-Ghoul had a plan that would provide a lifeline for Hamas.

Thirteen million dollars, secured from a friendly Muslim country, would be wired to the account of a moneychanger in Sinai. Once the moneychanger received confirmation that the funds were safely in his account, he would give a courier the cash. The courier would then smuggle it into Gaza via one of the many smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to northern Sinai. Once in Gaza, the cash could be distributed to the fighters to stave off sagging morale and desertion.

Everything went according to plan. The courier delivered the cash to al-Ghoul, who along with his bodyguards began loading the trunk. Unbeknownst to al-Ghoul however, Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the entire sequence of events.

Lurking beyond visual range was an IDF AH-64 Apache Longbow armed with Hellfire missiles. A missile struck home instantly transforming al-Ghoul’s vehicle into a ball of flame and the car’s occupants into smoldering corpses. More importantly, most of the cash vaporized or otherwise became unusable. Hamas was unable to pay its fighters. Forty-eight hours later, Hamas, after losing 1,000 of its men, agreed to a ceasefire without a single of its demands being met.

Israel’s approach to combating terror has always been somewhat unorthodox but effective. The myriad of terror threats facing the Jewish nation is like no other in the world and compels those on the forefront of combating terror to adopt novel, cutting edge methods to defeat the threat. Harpoon, a new book co-authored by counter-terrorism expert Samuel Katz and human rights attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, of the Israel Law Center, provides us with intriguing insight as to some of those unique but very effective strategies.

In the early-1990s a few maverick-minded security officials understood that cash was indispensable to organized terror networks. They argued for the need to set up a special task force dedicated to identifying and tracking sources of terror financing and methods employed by terrorism’s financial enablers. In 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sanctioned the creation of a special unit, code-named “Harpoon,” tasked to do just that. The unit was headed by Sharon’s old army buddy, Meir Dagan, who had held various security posts in the past and would end up becoming head of Israel’s vaunted Mossad intelligence organization.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Taqiyya, Ahmadi style Even Islam’s “good guys” lie about Islam. Bruce Bawer

By on November 27th, 2017

Founded in 1889 in British India, Ahmadiyya is an Islamic sect that actually preaches everything that Islam as a whole pretends to stand for: love, peace, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of all humankind. It rejects terrorism, violent jihad, and the concept of “abrogation” whereby later, nastier passages of the Koran are considered to trump earlier, nicer bits.

That’s the good news about Ahmadiyya Muslims – or Ahmadis, for short. The bad news is that they make up only about 1% of the world’s Muslims. Almost all of the other 99% regard them as infidels. In India they’re officially categorized as Muslims and allowed to worship freely, but that’s an exception: in Pakistan, which has the largest Ahmadi population on earth, they’re considered non-Muslims, they’re not allowed to call themselves Muslims, and they’re banned from non-Ahmadi mosques. In Saudi Arabia, in the Palestinian territories, and in several other countries in the Islamic world, Ahmadis are brutally persecuted both by authorities and by their non-Ahmadi neighbors.

A wildly disproportionate number of the Muslims in North America and Europe who have organized anti-terrorism rallies have been Ahmadis. At these events, they routinely give speeches declaring fervently that terrorism is un-Islamic; that jihad, properly understood, means inner struggle and good works; and that Islam teaches sexual equality, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state. Again, Ahmadi Islam does teach all these things. But mainstream Islam doesn’t. Indeed, a big part of the reason why mainstream Islam abhors Ahmadi Islam is that the sect’s beliefs are utterly at odds with the tenets of Sunni and Shia Islam.

So, yes, hurrah for Ahmadi Muslims. If they were the 99% and Sunni and Shia Muslims were the 1%, we could stop worrying so much about Islam. But alas, that’s not the case. Hence, even though Ahmadi Muslims’ beliefs are admirable, it’s problematic when they step in front of crowds of Westerners and present their own version of Islam as if it were the Islam of the majority. Sure, one assumes that when they do this sort of thing, they see themselves as fighting against what they consider the misinterpretations of Islam that are spread by the 99%. But what they’re actually doing, whether they intend it or not, is whitewashing mainstream Islam.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Science Needs a New Paradigm By Robert Arvay

By on November 27th, 2017

“When scientists resort to fantasy instead of observable, repeatable experiment by skeptics, then we have abandoned reason.”

Science and politics used to be very separate institutions. Where they did overlap, science was nonpartisan. The role of scientists was to provide objective evidence — and dispassionate, nonpolitical interpretations of that evidence. Indeed, one rarely if ever could detect the political leanings of any particular scientist. Also, science and religion used to get along, at least for the most part.

Today, that has changed, and the results include significant dangers for society. For example, the topic of climate change has produced the myth of “settled science.” Science is never settled. While we all may agree that the climate does change, there is an anti-capitalist agenda behind the claims of many scientists — that we must radically reduce our standards of living to prevent climate catastrophe. Politics and ideology, not science, promote that so-called scientific view.

But there is an even deeper and darker implication involving the politicization of science. Its first major public confrontation was in a state court case, dubbed the Scopes Monkey trial, which tested a law that forbade the teaching of Darwinian Evolution theory in public schools. On a legal maneuver, Darwinism technically lost that particular trial, but all subsequent federal court rulings since then, have upheld the theory of evolution as accepted fact. Contrary theories are essentially forbidden. Evolution is “settled science.”

It is not the purpose of this commentary to litigate the theory of evolution, or any other particular scientific theory. Rather, it is to examine the cultural fallout from that theory. The late paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, is quoted as having said that, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.”

What Darwin and Simpson have done, along with others, is to introduce into society the physicalist paradigm, the one that holds that nothing exists except stuff, that is, material reality. According to physicalism, there is no spirit, no God, no eternal afterlife. By extension of that paradigm, you and I are nothing more than stuff, that is, the atoms that make up our physical bodies. If that is to be considered true, then it necessarily must follow, at least eventually, that we have no inherent right to be treated as anything more than protoplasm, nothing more than just another species of animal.

That paradigm is, of course, dangerous. It contradicts not only the Bible, but also the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our nation, which states that we are endowed by our Creator — repeat, by our Creator — with certain inalienable rights, including life and liberty.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

World War II Islam and Modern Islam: Know Thy Enemy By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on November 27th, 2017

At the end of his eminently important and succinct book, titled Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, author Dr. Sebastian Gorka includes the original secret telegram written in 1946 at the onset of the Cold War, wherein the American diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan explains “how the behavior of the Soviet Union cannot be understood unless an individual understands the totalitarian ideology that drives it. This ‘fanatical’ ideology of communism is absolutist and global and will not countenance peaceful coexistence with America or any democracy.” Keenan describes how “Democratic-progressive” elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.”

In a book purchased in the USSR in the early 1960s, titled Face to Face: The Story of N.S. Khrushchov’s Visit to the U.S.A., a young American, who later became my husband, came face to face with the propaganda of communism when he read “that with great patience and persistence, the head of the Soviet Government continued to discharge the great mission he had undertaken, to remove the ice piled up by the ‘cold war,’ to open the eyes of people deluded by malicious [American] propaganda, to explain to them the essence of the idea of peaceful coexistence to blaze the trail to peace and friendship among all peoples irrespective of what social system they live under.” Only one problem: the book neglected to mention the 50 million people who would perish under communism or this so-called peaceful coexistence. Just ask the Victims of Communism.

And almost sixty years later, as American leftists align themselves with communist ideology, we can see that they act, not in the interests of America, but in the interest of an ideology that has always sought to destroy America.

And, horrifyingly, as W. August Mayer has written in Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism and the Transformation of the West, “the morphing of the Democrat party over the last century from the conservative, traditional liberalism of President Grover Cleveland to the statism of Barack Hussein Obama” is a “downward slope to totalitarian rule towards which political gravity irresistibly draws us ever nearer.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Teachers Attend ‘LGGBDTTTIQQAAP’ Sensitivity Training By Megan Fox !!!!?????

By on November 27th, 2017

Gather ’round children! The Canadian Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario has some super interesting new information for you! First, we’re going to learn a new acronym. Can you say, “LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP?” Let’s try it to the tune of “Old MacDonald!” Everyone sing along! Next, we’ll learn what these letters mean. Are you ready?

L — Lesbian (everyone knows what this is, right?)

G — Gay (and I’m sure I don’t need to explain this to you smarties!)

G — Genderqueer Now this one is new. So let’s make sure we all understand what this means. “Genderqueer; denoting or relating to a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders.” That’s easy, isn’t it, kids? Basically, this is a person who has no idea who or what xey are, okay?

B — Bisexual (That’s self-explanatory, isn’t it?)

D — Demisexual Oh boy! Another new one! Let’s get out the ever-expanding queer dictionary to figure it out! “A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone.” This used to be known as monogamous love. But now we throw the word “sexual” on it to make it attractive to the kids. Got it?

T — Transgender (You all know all about this one! These are boys or girls who dress up like the opposite sex and want everyone to pretend not to notice!)

T — Transexual (You are familiar with these people too! Same as above, only they’ve gone through irreversible surgery to remove healthy body parts because feelings. Let them in your bathroom. Everything is fine.)

T — Two-Spirit Oh my goodness! How exciting! It’s another category no one on earth has ever heard of! This one is complicated, dear ones. For sure you have to be a Native American. And smoking a lot of peyotes could only help to understand what the heck a two-spirit is. It appears to be a third gender not yet discovered by science and only found in the Native American community by gender studies majors who take adventure vacations and hang out in sweat lodges.

I — Intersex (This is that very rare condition that we used to call hermaphrodite, where a child is born with both sex organs of male and female. It is very rare, as in, hardly ever happens. It is a birth defect.)

We are just motoring through all these new terms and if you need a snack to recharge, choose something high protein! We are going to need those brains functioning at peak capacity for this one!

Q — Queer Just when you thought you couldn’t use the word “queer” because it’s an insult, think again! It’s back! Queer is an umbrella term designed to describe all people who aren’t normies. I think. It’s hard to tell. These things do change on an almost daily basis.

Q — Questioning is a term used for people who are still deciding where they are going to fall on this list. It seems contradictory to the “born that way” theory—to have a bunch of people still questioning their sexuality—but the LGBTQWTF brigade says it’s fine, so rest assured, there’s nothing to question about questioning.

A — Asexual people have no interest in sex. This also used to be known as people who are married with kids. See the classic TV show “Married with Children” for an example.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Patents and Property at the Supremes The Justices will decide if Congress can let the executive revoke patents.

By on November 27th, 2017

Can government bureaucrats vitiate private property rights without a jury trial and fair compensation? That’s the question the Supreme Court will consider on Monday in what could become a landmark patent case, Oil States Energy v. Greene’s Energy.

At issue is the inter partes review that Congress established with the 2011 America Invents Act to curb abusive patent litigation. Owners of low-quality patents—e.g., abstract ideas or processes with broad applicability—extort businesses with infringement lawsuits that are often cheaper to settle than fight. This can deter innovation. Inter partes review allows anyone to challenge a patent at any time. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board, composed of administrative judges appointed by the Commerce Secretary, then decides whether to grant a review and perhaps revoke a patent.

Oil States lost an inter partes review challenge after suing Greene Energy for infringement. The company then claimed that inter partes review violates the Constitution’s Article III and the Seventh Amendment because it allows an administrative agency to revoke patents without a jury trial. Article III sets the qualifications for the federal judiciary—that is, judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate. They also have lifetime tenure. The Seventh Amendment guarantees a jury trial in suits involving common law such as private property, contracts and trademarks.

Congress has increasingly ceded authority to administrative bodies over disputes involving public rights—those between the government and individuals that don’t have a basis in common law. But private rights are strictly the domain of the federal judiciary. This distinction is crucial since Article III judges are intentionally insulated from politics and the two political branches.

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