Archive for 2018
February 11, 2018
OUT ON TUESDAY: My latest from Encounter Books: The Judiciary’s Class War, in which I explore the consequences of having one branch of government reserved for people who are wealthy and have post-graduate degrees, and offer some solutions.
MILLENNIALS RUIN EVERYTHING: In Y.A., Where Has All the Good Sex Gone?
Related: Too Much Netflix, Not Enough Chill: Why Young Americans Are Having Less Sex.
DEALS ON Women’s Bras and Underwear.
HERE’S YOUR OPEN THREAD: Dive in like CNN on a North Korean cheer squad.
WAIT, JUST A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I WAS TOLD THEY HAD IT IN THE BAG: Democrats Ought To Worry About The Midterm Elections.
BUT GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE WILL BE AWESOME: Amid crashes, top U.S. railroad official resigns after moonlighting reports surface.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Ways To Stop A Plague Before It Spreads.
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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Universities Are Using Disguised Hecklers To Shut Down Free Speech.
Just as those opposed to a speech cannot lawfully stop it by engaging in illegal conduct – everything from shouting it down to engaging in rioting – schools may not use the threat of wrongful conduct by one group as an excuse to prevent speech by a group with opposing views.
But the First Amendment does generally permit colleges to impose reasonable and limited restrictions on speech provided that they are not based on the content. Such limits – often called time, place, and manner restrictions – can be used to prevent too much noise, overcrowding of facilities, etc. – but they must be neutral and not impose more burdens on those voicing views which are controversial. Otherwise, they would unconstitutionally chill unpopular views.
Knowing that they could not ban controversial Joey Gibson from speaking just because many are likely to object, Washington tried to do an end run around the First Amendment, says Banzhaf.
Instead of banning the speaker, they simply required the student group sponsoring him to pay a huge “security fee” based upon so-called objective criteria: e.g. an analysis of violence and threats to public safety by the invited speaker, attendees at previous events or the sponsoring group, etc. Thus, the university claimed, the restriction was not based directly on a speaker’s or group’s ideology or political positions.
So the students acted in accordance with a motto Banzhaf made famous – “Sue The Bastards” – and took their university to court with the aid of the Freedom X group. A federal judge agreed that this disguised heckler’s veto was an illegal violation of the First Amendment since it would have a chilling effect on controversial groups and viewpoints, while having no such effect on completely inoffensive speech.
But, notes Banzhaf, it is speech which is unpopular, and therefore likely to offend some campus groups and/or the college administration, which needs protection from the university, whereas bland unobjectionable speech usually needs none. Speakers in favor of apple pie and motherhood have little to fear from the administration or unlawful agitators, whereas those who advocate that American women should stay home to bake apple pies for their husbands obviously need such protection, says Banzhaf.
Professor Banzhaf urges more student groups to stand up for their First Amendment rights by suing their university.
I agree.
DEREGULATION PROCEEDS: Administration Imposes Sweeping Limits on Federal Actions Against Companies.
The Trump administration has adopted new limits on the use of “guidance documents” that federal agencies have issued on almost every conceivable subject, an action that could have sweeping implications for the government’s ability to sue companies accused of violations.
Guidance documents offer the government’s interpretation of laws, and often when individuals or companies face accusations of legal violations, what they have really violated are the guidance documents. Defense lawyers say the change in policy gives them a powerful tool to fend off allegations of wrongdoing against their clients.
It also advances a goal declared by President Trump in his first days in office: to reduce the burden and cost of federal rules and requirements. But consumer advocates say the move will crimp enforcement of crucial protections.
The new policy, issued by the No. 3 official at the Justice Department, Rachel L. Brand, is significant because federal agencies have issued hundreds of guidance documents on a wide range of laws covering issues like health care, the environment, civil rights and labor.
Good. “Guidance” is bullshit. Either do a rule making, or stay home.
TRAINING TECHNIQUES AND HISTORY of Old-time Strongmen.
“THIS WEEKEND’S COVERAGE OF NORTH KOREA’S REGIME AT THE OLYMPICS WOULD MAKE EVEN FORMER NEW YORK TIMES JOURNALIST WALTER DURANTY BLUSH:” The Media Sides With North Korea Over The United States At The Olympics.
Ben Shapiro tweets:
As they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Website, “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” The DNC-MSM are really going out of their way to drop the mask this weekend.
Flashback to last year: “Following the lead of CNN’s Brian Stelter, Thursday’s Situation Room touted the spike of sales in the book 1984 and strongly hinted that Americans view the Trump administration as the real-life version of Big Brother portrayed in George Orwell’s classic.”
UPDATE: Speaking of Stelter, as Michael Malice, the author of Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il tweets, “Reminder that CNN was more hostile to an American citizen who made a wrestling gif than to a representative of the most evil government on earth.”
NOT A GOOD LOOK: Rep. Nunes (R-CA) is being accused of creating an “alternative” news site by Politico, and it looks pretty nailed down:
“Resembling a local, conservative news site, “The California Republican” is classified on Facebook as a “media/news company” and claims to deliver “the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis. But the website is paid for by Nunes’ campaign committee, according to small print at the bottom of the site.”
Because the server at www.carepublican.com seems to have crashed, it’s hard to see whether it passes the tests for credibility as a “legitimate” news site. On the one hand, whois records show it uses a real person, not a private secret registration, as fake sites do. By the same token, that person, Alexander Tavlian, according to Politico, runs a company called Sultana Media who allegedly paid Nunes’ campaign $7,773 since July for “advertising; digital advertising management.”
At the moment, that URL is redirected to a Facebook page, and that page does not disclose any masthead, leadership or ownership. That’s usually the sign of a fake news site. Opacity is always bad.
I can’t see any laws being broken here, unless there’s some campaign law I’m missing. And I do believe that everyone who feels mistreated by the press (and Nunes has some genuine gripes in that regard, perhaps even against me) has the right to engage in counter-speech. Koch Industries — the favorite whipping post of the left — has a brilliant spot on their website where they have occasionally taken to task what they feel is unfair reporting. Similarly, Exxon-Mobil used an internet page to challenge a series of news articles with which they took issue. Good for both of them.
The part that’s a “bad look” for Nunes is that the Facebook page has no ownership disclosure, and even if the website has a small print disclosure, pretending that he’s running a “Media/News Company” just doesn’t pass the straight face test. But my grandfather’s caveat serves us all well: “never attribute to malice what you can account for with stupidity.”
Nunes should take a cue from POTUS and get himself a .50 cal Twittergun. There, I fixed it.
RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS: Three Democrats Attended Private Dinner With Iran’s President And Louis Farrakhan.
Three Democratic congressmen attended a private dinner hosted by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, a new report reveals.
Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Andre Carson of Indiana and Gregory Meeks of New York attended the private dinner, along with Louis Farrakhan, a notorious anti-Semite who leads the black supremacist group Nation of Islam.
● Earlier: Establishment Media Bury Obama-Farrakhan Photo.
● The deep meaning of Keith Ellison.
(Classical reference in headline.)
IS CALIFORNIA STARTING TO CIRCLE THE DRAIN?
I was the victim of a clever gang of organized car burglars in the Bay Area who are using sophisticated scanners to copy and boost the key-fob signal for recent model keyless entry and ignition cars. Once you latch on to the signal, the car door unlocks at the touch of your hand, as people with such models know. (I learned about this security flaw subsequently as looked into how this could have happened.) All of the restaurants and retail establishments in my neighborhood have posted printed signs saying “leave no valuables in your car; frequent car thefts in the area.” I have taken electronic countermeasures against this happening again.
This kind of activity is epidemic in the Bay Area right now. There were 30,000 car thefts reported in San Francisco last year (much higher in the Bay Area as a whole). The police are doing very little about it.
Read the whole thing, which includes a lengthy Twitter thread (which would have made a much more coherent blog post, alas) written by someone who “runs a van rental business in San Francisco, about the incredible indifference of the San Francisco police to this problem. It’s quite long, but I reproduce the whole thing here to make it easier to get through.”
As someone who attended NYU in the late 1980s when “No radio, nothing valuable in car” signs were all the rage, the above post by Steve Hayward has a sense of déjà vu about it; recall Kyle Smith’s article in the New York Post at the end of the Bloomberg era on the bad old days, headlined, “NYC, July 1993.”
No matter how badly the Bay Area is circling the drain, I’d love to be wrong, but I can’t see a clone of Rudy Giuliani winning in San Francisco anytime soon.
WHY, YES. SOCIALISM AT A NATIONAL LEVEL. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Vox: The left shouldn’t fear nationalism. It should embrace it. National solidarity is an old, powerful theme on the left.
KNIFE RIGHTS BILLS in Michigan and Virginia.
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JONATHAN ADLER AT THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY: Whatever Happened to Michael Mann’s Defamation Suit (2018 edition)?
It cannot be that once some official body has conducted an investigation of an individual’s conduct, that further criticism of that individual, including criticism that expressly questions the thoroughness or accuracy of the investigatory body, is off limits. By this standard it would be defamatory to express the opinion that George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson is a murderer, even if one also argued that the reason either was exonerated was because of structural racism in the criminal-justice system. After all, each was investigated, tried and found not guilty. Nor is it consistent with existing First Amendment doctrine to suggest that hyperbolic accusations of bad faith or dishonesty against public figures involved in policy debates are actionable. The court’s approach is particularly problematic here because both Simberg and Steyn offered reasoned (if also intemperate) explanations for why they did not credit the investigations and why they believed that these investigations failed to uncover the misconduct they believe occurred. Yet according to the court, the existence of these investigations could be sufficient for a jury to find, by “clear and convincing evidence,” that they acted with actual malice.
Read the whole thing.
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BREAK UP THE BIG FOUR, MICHAEL WALSH WRITES: “Needless to say, a lot of readers begged to differ, citing the big, big savings and ease of shopping Amazon provides. At the same time, however, Amazon is keeping tabs on you, monitoring your purchases, pushing other products on you and, in the form of the hideous Alexa, listening in on you while you sleep. Throw in the electronic snooping of Facebook, Google and your iPhone, and we’re heading for an Orwellian nightmare the shape of which is just now becoming apparent, even on the Left.”
Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating to watch Silicon Valley squander the bipartisan goodwill they had accumulated during the 1980s and ‘90s. As Glenn wrote last month, “It’s not just Google: All of Silicon Valley has a trust problem now.”