RUTHFULLY YOURS

As 10,000 Israeli basketball fans traveled to Italy on Sunday to root for Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Euroleague championship game against Real Madrid, an estimated 1,000 American troops arrived in Israel for a very different sort of gathering.

Due to the jubilation surrounding Maccabi’s stunning overtime victory, with crowds cheering the players and fireworks and celebrations bursting out all over the country, even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took time out to take pride in his country’s national team.

For this reason, little attention has been given to the presence of the U.S. soldiers, who have come to participate in “Juniper Cobra,” a five-day exercise with the IDF.

The joint training exercise is aimed at testing Israel’s missile interceptors — the Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow — all of which were developed with the financial assistance of the United States. So far, these interceptors have been put to the test, mostly successfully, against rockets fired from Gaza.

But it is clearly the more existential threat — directly from Iran, not via its Arab proxies — that necessitates such an extensive exercise on the part of the “Great Satan” and the “Small Satan,” both explicit targets of global jihad.

And though both the American and the Israeli defense establishments have asserted that this week’s battle-dress rehearsal does not indicate a heightened alert in relation to the Islamic Republic — pointing to the fact that these drills have been undertaken every two years since 2001 — the truth is that talks with Tehran have been going nowhere.

Other than Vienna, that is, where American, Russian, Chinese, British, French and German negotiators continue to engage in a charade with their Iranian counterparts that is enabling the ayatollah-led regime to forge ahead fast with its nuclear program.

On a short visit to Israel last week, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to prepare for what the former called the largest drill for U.S. troops under the European Command. During his two-day stay, Hagel reiterated “America’s commitment to a strong and secure Israel … [that] has not and never will be anything but complete and unwavering.”

The latest politically correct fashion on college campuses is just insipid enough to catch on.

It is the so-called trigger warning applied to any content that students might find traumatizing, even works of literature. The trigger warning first arose on feminist websites as a way to alert victims of sexual violence to possibly upsetting discussions of rape (that would “trigger” memories of their trauma) but has gained wider currency.

The student government of the University of California, Santa Barbara, passed a resolution calling for professors to include trigger warnings in their syllabi. The New York Times reports that students at schools from the University of Michigan to George Washington University have requested the warnings. A student at Rutgers University proposed a trigger warning for The Great Gatsby about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive, and misogynistic violence” (not to mention binge drinking, reckless driving, profligate spending, and gross social climbing).

Oberlin College, long the nation’s leader in the earnestly ridiculous, seeks to be the FDA of political correctness, with warnings about classroom material nearly as comprehensive as the litany of side effects included in advertisements for a new drug. The school’s Office of Equity Concerns published a document for faculty (since pulled for more work after professors complained) urging them to “understand triggers, avoid unnecessary triggers, and provide trigger warnings.” It exhorts professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism [i.e., prejudice against the transgendered], ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”

Yes, the Chinua Achebe anti-colonial novel Things Fall Apart is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” according to the guide. But there’s a downside — it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”

By this standard, most of literature is “triggering.” Beloved is triggering for anyone who has lived in a haunted house. Mansfield Park is triggering for anyone who has been sent to live with wealthy relations and subsequently encountered messy romantic entanglements. Les Misérables is triggering for anyone who has ever shoplifted bread. The Aeneid is triggering for anyone who has ever been caught in the whirlpool of Charybdis, or on the island of the Cyclops.

The news website Tout Haiti reported last month that two prominent lawyers have petitioned Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, demanding an audit of Bill Clinton’s management of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). There are powerful interests that won’t want to see the petition succeed and it may go nowhere. But the sentiment it expresses is spreading fast. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, Mr. Clinton has gone from hero to goat.

Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the IHRC, are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.

Haitians are angry, frustrated and increasingly suspicious of the motives of the IHRC and of its top official, Mr. Clinton. Americans might feel the same way if they knew more about this colossal failure. One former Haitian official puts it this way: “I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former U.S. president in charge, and get this outcome.”

Allow me to hazard a guess: While Mr. Clinton was running things for the IHRC, and the U.S. was leading the reconstruction effort, Hillary Clinton was the U.S. Secretary of State, which means that Mr. Clinton was reporting to his wife. Cheryl Mills, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff and counselor to the State Department (an adviser and consultant to the secretary), traveled to the country an estimated 30 times in four years. A State Department spokesman told me that “reflected the high priority the United State places on Haiti’s recovery and development.” Requests for comment from Mr. Clinton, through the Clinton Foundation, about the petition and his IHRC record went unanswered.

The Metropolitan Council’s plans include making sure there is a proper mix of races and incomes in each suburb.

Minneapolis

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.”

The Met Council, as it’s known here, was founded in the 1960s to coordinate regional infrastructure—in essence, to make sure that sewers and roads meet up. Over the years, its power to allocate funds and control planning has expanded. Now, under Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton—who appointed all 17 current members—the council intends to play Sim City with residents’ lives.

Thrive MSP 2040 is part of a nationwide movement called “regionalism.” Regional planning of infrastructure is important, of course. But regionalism, as an ideology, is about shifting power away from local elected officials and re-engineering society on behalf of “equity” and “sustainability.” According to regionalist guru David Rusk, author of the book “Cities Without Suburbs,” federal programs that promote regionalism should strive to produce “racially and economically integrated and environmentally sustainable regions.”

While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and “high opportunity clusters.” The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area.

Reading can be dangerous, some young people seem to believe.

“Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as ‘trigger warnings,’ explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans,” the New York Times reports.

The Times notes that the warnings “have their ideological roots in feminist thought.” At first glance this looks like just the latest politically correct excess, but it’s distinct in some ways. For one, the faculty is resisting: “The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate.” Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells the paper: “Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom. . . . The presumption . . . that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.”

Students have demanded trigger warnings at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and George Washington University as well as UCSB. The Times reproduces an excerpt from an Oberlin “draft guide,” which reads: “Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other Issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” (“Cissexism” refers to prejudice in favor of men and women who identify themselves, respectively, as men and women.)

In a recent piece for The New Republic, Jenny Jarvie writes that “some consider [trigger warnings] an irksome tic of the blogosphere’s most hypersensitive fringes.” They started “in self-help and feminist forums to help readers who might have post traumatic stress disorder to avoid graphic content that might cause painful memories, flashbacks, or panic attacks.” They’ve “been applied to topics as diverse as sex, pregnancy, addiction, bullying, suicide, sizeism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, slut shaming, victim-blaming, alcohol, blood, insects, small holes, and animals in wigs. . . . Even The New Republic”–actually a TNR writer named Molly Redden–“has suggested the satirical news site, The Onion, carry trigger warnings.”

But trigger warnings have come in for criticism and mockery even on the left. Jarvie concludes her piece with this sensible observation: “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.” She reports that the feminist website Jezebel, “which does not issue trigger warnings, raised hackles in August by using the term as a headline joke: ‘It’s Time To Talk About Bug Infestations [TRIGGER WARNING].’ ” And Susannah Breslin provoked outrage in 2010 when she “wrote in True/Slant that feminists were applying the term ‘like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan.’ ”

The Times reports that targets of campus trigger-warning demands include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (for “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence”), Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” (suicide).

Into the Fray: If a Palestinian state were established, the full weight of the horrors of the Arab world would come pressing down on Israel, from indefensible borders, infinitesimal distances from major population centers.

As I mentioned in my previous column, following my participation in The Jerusalem Post Conference in New York last month, I received an invitation from Russell Robinson, the CEO of the Jewish National Fund, to make a telephonic address to major donors across the United States, assessing the status of the “peace process.”

My column last week was devoted to the first part of that address, delivered on the eve of Israel’s Independence Day. In this week’s column, I share with Jerusalem Post’s readers the remaining topics I raised – with some minor modifications and editorial “tweaks” – which as before, have been made to accommodate the transition from oral to written form.

To recap briefly

As readers will recall, in Part I of my address, aided by a citation from Shakespeare’s Richard II, I argued that the entire peace process, from its inception, was founded on the self-delusion of its architects, and their denial of the harsh realities of the region.

I pointed out that there is a growing awareness of the futility of endeavors to reach a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. This has resulted in an alarming erosion, over recent decades, of Israeli positions, which I illustrated by excerpts from public proclamations of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. The spreading sense of futility has led to increasingly desperate proposals for dealing with the situation – some of which I shall elaborate on this week.

I argued that for Israel to survive over time as the nation-state of the Jewish people, it needs to address a twin imperative: geographic and demographic, and that the two-state paradigm does not contend adequately with the geographic imperative while the one-state paradigm does not contend adequately with the demographic imperative.

I concluded by elaborating on why the withdrawals necessary for the implementation of the two-state paradigm would leave Israel’s principle population centers and strategic installations hopelessly exposed to attack. All these would be in range of weapons being used today from territory relinquished by Israel, creating a situation in which it would be impossible to preserve the nation’s socioeconomic routine that could be disrupted at will by regular forces or irregular renegades, deployed in the areas transferred to Palestinian control. Today, this nightmare scenario can no longer be dismissed as “right-wing scaremongering,” as it is no more than a plausible extrapolation of the precedents.

Now I turn to the remaining issues I raised in my address.

Arab Spring as threat multiplier

The dangers entailed in the creation of a Palestinian state are greatly magnified by the ongoing events in Israel’s immediate geo-political environment. Once the “lid” of dictatorship was removed, all the horrific realities that permeate – some would say, characterize – the societies in the Arab world, were graphically exposed.

Clearly then, if a Palestinian state were created, the full weight of the horrors of the Arab world would almost certainly come pressing down on Israel, from indefensible borders, infinitesimal distances from major population centers – raising the already unacceptable risks involved in such a measure to even more intolerable levels.

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted in last week’s Remembrance Day speech, referring to Syria: “A few kilometers north of Jerusalem a massacre is occurring that has killed tens of thousands who do not have the power to defend themselves. Who would doubt that that would be our fate…”

READ ALL FOUR PARTS HERE:

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/05/14/edward-cline-the-guardian-of-every-right-part-one/

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/05/15/the-guardian-of-every-other-right-part-ii-by-edward-cline/
“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*
James W. Ely, Jr.’s chapter, “Progressive Reform and Judicial Conservatism, 1900-1932,” details the clash between a noisy, generational cadre of Progressives and the dwindling grasp of individual and property rights in the American judiciary and especially on the Supreme Court. Lately, in our own time, the Court has been called the “Supine Court,” so characterized because of Chief Justice John Roberts’s bizarre, pretzel-like explanation in the majority opinion in June of 2012 for upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) as a tax levied by Congress, as opposed to Congress’s power to “regulate commerce,” in this instance, the power to compel “commerce” between an individual and health insurance companies. As the New York Times reported:
“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”
At the same time, the court rejected the argument that the administration had pressed most vigorously in support of the law, that its individual mandate was justified by Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The vote was again 5 to 4, but in this instance Chief Justice Roberts and the court’s four more conservative members were in agreement.
The majority opinion on the other hand ostensively rejected the Administration’s contention that the ACA’s constitutional status was sanctioned by the commerce clause. Whether or not the mandatory transaction takes place within or across state lines is in fact irrelevant, even though most states forbid buying virtually any kind of insurance from an out-of-state company. The “individual mandate” crosses every state line, it’s a federal mandate or compulsory “economic activity,” ergo, “interstate.”
Significantly, Roberts wrote (and in the meantime impugned the character of the Framers):

“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*
As a final note on James W. Ely, Jr.’s chapter, “The Development of Property Rights,” where we left off in Part II of this review, something should be said about the status of intellectual property and patents. Ely wrote:
Patent and copyright law also raised important issues of property rights and community interests during the antebellum period. The Constitution authorized Congress to grant limited monopolies to inventors and authors for the purpose of encouraging technology and literary production. In 1790 Congress passed legislation securing both copyrights and patents. Under these acts, copyrights lasted for a renewable term of fourteen years from the date of publication. Patents, granted on application for novel and useful inventions had a duration not exceeding fourteen years. once copyrights and patents expired, the work fell into the public domain. (Italics mine; p. 81)
Ely does not discuss the status of trademarks, however.
The Supreme Court’s first ruling on the law of intellectual property was Wheaton v. Peters (1834). Concluding that there was no common law copyright, the Court held that a statutory copyright could be obtained only by strict compliance with the terms of the 1790 act. Reflecting the Jacksonian hostility to monopolies, the Wheaton decision established that copyright protection was designed to benefit the public and was therefore confined to the narrow limits set by Congress. (Italics mine; p. 81)
Ironically, Wheaton v. Peters concerned the status of copies of the Supreme Court’s deliberations as recorded and managed by a Court reporter, Henry Wheaton. Supreme Justia.com carries the opinion of Court:
In the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution of the United States it is declared that Congress shall have the power “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing, for a limited time, to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and inventions.”
The word “secure,” as used in the Constitution, could not mean the protection of an acknowledged legal right. It refers to inventors as well as authors, and it has never been pretended by anyone either in this country or in England that an inventor has a perpetual right at common law to sell the thing invented.
Henry Wheaton had filed a copyright claim to the Court’s reports, and transferred publication rights to another person, while renewing the copyright for himself for another fourteen years. In the meantime, his successor as Court clerk, Richard Peters, published an abridged version of Wheaton’s 24-volume work. While Peters’s six-volume abridged version was based on Wheaton’s work, Wheaton was not paid anything from the sales of Peters’s version, which was a financial success. Procedural details governed the outcome of the case, as well, concerning whether or not Wheaton and others had complied with the terms of the 1790 law. My point here is that it was the “public” that was deferred to as the prime beneficiary of intellectual property, not the creator, not the individual who had a first claim to his intellectual or patented idea. This theme governed Court decisions well into the 20th century. The opinion stated:
That every man is entitled to the fruits of his own labor must be admitted, but he can enjoy them only, except by statutory provision, under the rules of property, which regulate society and which define the rights of things in general.
We now move on the post-Civil War “Gilded Age and the Challenge of Industrialization.” This era saw the initial disintegration of any protection of property rights, which would reach a climax with the debut of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930’s.

Leave it to President Obama and Democrats in Congress to enact “comprehensive” health reform and overlook the plight of 8.5 million veterans. That’s what they did in 2010 when they passed ObamaCare.

It provides coverage for convicts and even for newcomers to this country with no waiting period, but it does nothing to help the nation’s veterans, who have suffered on waiting lists for care in the VA system for over 20 years.

This injustice can be fixed with a one-page bill that Congress should pass this week. ObamaCare already offers bronze, silver, gold and platinum plans. Congress should add the red/white/blue plan for vets only, with no premiums or deductibles for any vet who has been in combat.

Trapped vets waiting months for VA care shouldn’t get their hopes up based on Congressional investigations, hearings and empty promises that the backlog will be fixed.

They need care, and for some now waiting for it, their lives are at stake. Give them the option of enrolling in ObamaCare at no cost, so they can go outside the broken VA system for a civilian doctor and hospital. ObamaCare eventually should be repealed, but whatever reform replaces it should also guarantee combat vets a no-cost escape from the VA.

In April, the nation heard about dirty tricks used at the Phoenix VA medical center to conceal long waits for care. Whistleblower Dr. Sam Foote exposed how more than 1,400 vets had lingered on a secret waiting list, and 40 had died there.

Since then, more whistleblowers have reported harmful wait times and corrupt practices to conceal them at VA medical centers in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Waco, San Antonio and Austin, Texas.

The American Legion and members of Congress have called for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation. President Obama says he stands behind him. Ridiculous. Though the deadly waiting predates Shinseki, he has led the department since 2009, long enough to have fixed it. The secretary needs to go, but that won’t save the lives of waiting vets.

There is a relentless driving sound in America. It is a pneumatic drill pounding away at the nation’s moral anchors. The mediating structures that maintained equilibrium are the targets.

Schools that once transmitted knowledge about the republic are now repositories of ignorance, even hateful ignorance about America’s “malignant” role in the world. The flag once a synecdoche of what our citizens believe and admire has been transformed into a symbol of evil. On top of the misguided and one-sided treatment of the past, is the dumbing down of the population so that very few Americans can find Egypt on a map or calculate 8 times 9 without a calculator. We spend more for less effect each year. Teachers claim they need additional funds, but attainment lags. It is an odd economic model in which new resources achieve predictably dismal results.

The family – the bedrock of the Republic – is in dire shape. Divorce is still at an all-time high level and illegitimacy is a staggering proposition of new births, e.g. 72 percent of black children are the products of out of wedlock homes. Gang leaders are surrogate fathers in many ghetto communities. This isn’t Boko Haram in Nigeria which kidnaps children from parental lairs; these are children ensnared by men who offer guidance and friendship. But the result isn’t so different.

Churches once established the moral parameters for behavior. They were a guide to right and wrong, the superego for young minds searching for existential truths. How quickly they have been submerged in the tidal wave of relativism. Truth is now what you want it to be and morality is a question of sentiment. The tablets of natural law frozen in the sphere of human existence crumbled like pie crust. Even the Ten Commandments have become the Ten Recommendations. If there is a God, he should be held secretly within the cavity of one’s heart. Public displays of religious sentiment have been largely banned through the avatars of church-state separation.