China's badly sagging internally, but that doesn't mean it doesn't pose a threat on the world stage

 Michael Schuman, a Beijing-based writer for The Atlantic, says that years of trying to mix free-market activity (private companies) with heavy-handed statism (industrial policy, regulation) has taken the wind out of China's sails:

China’s jobless college graduates have become an embarrassment to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The unemployment rate among the country’s youth has reached an all-time high, putting the country’s severe economic troubles on display at home and abroad. In August, Xi’s administration decided to act: Its statistics bureau stopped releasing the data.

But Xi can’t hide China’s economic woes—or hide from them. The problems are not just a post-pandemic malaise, or some soon-to-be-forgotten detour in China’s march to superpower stature. The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes.

The news should not come as a surprise. Economists and even Chinese policy makers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.

Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators in recent years, China may never overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy if current trends continue. In fact, it’s already falling behind. 

Once again, we're seeing that central planning is a poor way to gauge what a country is going to need, Over-investing in housing, factory capacity, railways, etc. has resulted in a debt level three times that of the size of the country's economy.

Xi once talked a good game about moving in a sensible direction, but the initiatives he talked about never got off the ground:

Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to accept these imperatives. In 2013, he signed off on a Communist Party reform blueprint that pledged to give the market a “decisive” role in the economy. But the reforms never happened. Enacting them would have diminished the power of the state—and thus Xi’s own power. China’s leader was unwilling to trade political control for economic growth.

The more power Xi has commanded, the heavier the state’s hand in the economy has become. Xi has relied on state industrial policy to drive innovation, and he has imposed intrusive regulations on important sectors, such as technology and education. As a result, China’s private sector is in retreat. Two years ago, private companies accounted for 55 percent of the collective value of China’s 100 largest publicly traded firms, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics; in mid-2023, that share fell to 39 percent.

People's incomes are going in the wrong direction for domestic consumption to take up the slack.

So the way to project an image of continuing power, it seems, is to act like a menace in the western Pacific:

China’s navy has launched its largest-ever manoeuvres with an aircraft carrier in the western Pacific, according to foreign defence officials and analysts, as Beijing flexes its military muscle to push back against the US and its allies.

 

The Shandong, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s second aircraft carrier, was on course on Tuesday to converge with more than 20 other Chinese warships in waters between Taiwan, the Philippines and the US Pacific territory of Guam, said two Asian security officials.

 

“This is by far the largest number of ships we have seen training with any Chinese carrier so far,” said Su Tzu-yun, an analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a defence-ministry backed think-tank in Taipei. “They are expressing their displeasure with the various military exercises that have been under way in their periphery.”

 

Taiwan’s defence ministry counted 20 PLA warships in the waters around the island in the 24 hours to early Tuesday morning. It did not give any detail, but the disclosure followed its announcement on Monday that the Shandong had sailed through the Bashi Channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, into the Pacific. Japan’s military also reported the passage of eight PLA naval vessels into the Pacific via the Miyako Strait, south of Okinawa.

 

One east Asian national security official said the vessels spotted by Japan — six missile destroyers and two frigates — were continuing in a direction that indicated they would meet up with the Shandong. A separate Asian military official said some of the PLA vessels operating near Taiwan were also following the carrier.

When Marxist-Leninists with big egos reach this stage in their fortunes, they aren't too concerned with what international organizations and multinational corporations think. 

This situation is going to continue to get more raw and real for all of us. 

 

The proposed SEC mandate on the ag sector is not a done deal yet, and there's an encouraging amount of pushback

 As if there weren't enough supply-chain hose-ups and factors increasing food prices already, the Securities and Exchange Commission is poised to impose new levels of cost and bureaucratic distraction on the nation's ag sector.

The SEC's pointy-heads seem to be oblivious to how this kind of thing has worked out elsewhere:

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

This would be yet another instance of the big dogs at the top of the supply chain getting all up in the business of the small operations that continue to provide quality product at reasonable prices because they have time to focus on that instead of a bunch of resource-consuming record-keeping:

Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.

“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”

What's driving this is the ESG movement and the institutional investors who think it's the way to go:

The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.

While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinarput on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.

The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.

“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.

Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.

In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.

However, there is an encouraging amount of pushback:

Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”

But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.

Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.

Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

“If the Commission insists on taking the same inappropriate course, we will be ready to act once again,” the letter stated. “We urge you to save everyone years of strife by abandoning the Proposed Rule.”

It's not just Republicans, though. At least one Democrat with his head on straight is concerned as well:

In a Senate hearing earlier this month, Gensler sought to assuage concern over the proposed rule voiced by Democrat Jon Tester, Montana’s senior senator and a lifelong rancher.

“If the public company says, ‘Hey, we need you … to tell us how much fuel you used, how much fertilizer you used, what your inputs were,’ and all that, it becomes an issue, especially for the little guy…” Tester said.

Gensler responded: “That’s not the intent of what we did … that’s the benefit of public comment.”

Just who are these institutional investors? Well, two of them, Ceres and Trillium Asset Management, have been around forty-plus years. They were both founded by Joan Bavaria, who was instrumental in getting this ball rolling as a "pioneer in socially responsible investing."

A network of activist companies like Ceres with large private equity and financiers on board are working to “transform” the economy over climate concerns, according to Ceres’ self-description.

In adherence, farmers will have to recreate their business model.

“Addressing these emissions will require a shift in agricultural production to more sustainable and regenerative methods…” Kate Monahan, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, said in an interview this month with ESG Clarity, a website trafficking in ESG news directed at the financial sector. “It’s imperative that food companies keep improving measurement of their Scope 3 emissions’ sources to be able to prioritize actions that reduce their emissions hotspots.”

Let's hope that, even though the SEC's comment period for this proposal, which was extended for 30 days beyond the standard 60 due to the flood of response, is closed, opposition to this disastrous scheme continues to be loud and resolute.

It will increase the cost of food.

It will be tyrannical ("'transform' the economy").

It will deaden souls. 

 

 

 

 

Infrastructure deal thoughts

 We finally have an infrastructure package.

Let me start on a very general level and say that I'm skeptical as a matter of principle. Even if the 2,702-page, $1.2 trillion bill were meticulously confined to matters of what until this year had been commonly agreed upon as infrastructure, it would merit skepticism. Many are the county-government meetings I've covered during which funding for road-and-bridge projects was shown to be substantially federal, and the question has always surfaced in my mind, why did this money leave our locality in the first place? There's nothing esoteric about the reason. It's been thus for nearly a century. It allows Representatives and Senators to preen about the bacon they've brought home to the district or state.

Now, to the point about how the bill, for all its non-infrastructure provisions, mainly sticks to what it's ostensibly about. 

Really?

Here are a few more examples of things in the infrastructure bill:

• $50 million for Central Utah Project Completion
• $5 billion for low/zero emissions school buses
• $2.5 billion for a carbon storage commercialization program
• $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstrations
• $75 million for the Denali commission
• $14.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission
• $3.4 billion for the Federal Buildings Fund
• $3.5 billion for Indian Health Service

The descriptions of these payouts — I mean, grants — are ludicrous: $250 million for reducing truck emissions at ports. A $500 million grant for the Healthy Streets Program allows cities to "provide funding to deploy cool and porous pavements and expand tree cover to mitigate urban heat islands, improve air quality, and reduce flood risks.”

The bill includes $75 million for the Open Challenge and Research Proposal pilot program, which provides grants for proposals to “research needs or challenges identified or determined as important by the Secretary.” And it proposes a “federal system funding alternative advisory board” that must appoint “advocacy groups focused on equity,” among other things.

As I say, legislators love strokes, and a certain kind of legislator, even in this hyper-tribal age in which most Democrats are progressives to at least some degree and most Republicans are Neo-Trumpists who have moved far from the party's recognizable pillars, revels in wearing the "bipartisan" label, in being seen a being driven by "the interests of the country as a whole.". That is a major factor at work here:

it's important to understand the almost mystical allure of bipartisan dealmaking in Congress, especially in the Senate. In parts of official and high-status Washington, bipartisan deals are seen as a good unto themselves, almost independent of what's in them. And for a certain type of lawmaker, that allure has an even greater appeal now, in the post-Trump era, when one of the Senate's own is in the White House. Biden himself is a true believer in the power of across-the-aisle dealmaking. 

But consider the major players involved in the group that hammered this out. They are not representative of their parties as currently comprised:

. . . the makeup of the gang isn’t necessarily representative of the future of either the Democratic or Republican Party. Four of the five core GOP negotiators voted to impeach Trump this year, and Portman is retiring. On the Democratic side, Sinema and Manchin are increasingly lonely supporters of preserving the legislative filibuster.

You know what this means. This is easy fodder for the Kurt Schlichter/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Dinesh D'Souza crowd. The message writes itself: "This is what you get from effete, spineless pretend Republicans. They sell you out and acquiesce to even more dangerous levels of debt and centralized control of American life." And that point can't be dismissed. And it will ensure that most Republicans running for, and getting elected to, office in the midterms will be Neo-Trumpists. 

Democrats are now emboldened as they set their sights on the even more statist, culture-mutilating and costly budget bill they view as "tandem" legislation:

The measure would expand access to Medicare, balloon paid family and medical leave, create federal child-care programs, establish “free” universal pre-k and community college, impose green mandates on energy producers, increase subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, and impose “fees” on industries that emit carbon and methane gases.

What could have been done differently? It's fun to imagine that Romney, Cassidy, Portman - heck, let's include Sinema and Manchin - could have found it within themselves to dig in their heels and say, "Nope. Still too much irrelevant stuff in there, and still too much risk of ballooning the debt." But what-if games are not a very productive use of anybody's time. 

The reality is not pretty, but that makes it pretty characteristic of 2021 post-America. 

 

 

If Republicans seriously want to foil Biden's statist plans, they're going to need better leaders than yay-hoos like these

 So President Biden is going to Pittsburgh today to unveil yet another exercise in redistribution and central planning on steroids:

President Joe Biden will unveil a $2.25 trillion U.S. infrastructure plan Wednesday -- paid for by steep tax hikes on businesses-- that his administration said will prove the most sweeping since investments in the 1960s space program.

The four-part, eight-year plan dedicates $620 billion for transportation, including a doubling in federal funding for public transit. It would provide $650 billion for initiatives tied to improving quality of life at home, like clean water and high-speed broadband. There’s $580 billion for strengthening American manufacturing -- some $180 billion of which goes to what’s billed as the biggest non-defense research and development program on record -- and $400 billion to address improved care for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Biden’s plan would increase the corporate income tax to 28% from 21%, and set a 21% minimum tax on global corporate earnings. The White House said tax increases will be “fully paying for the investments in this plan over the next 15 years.”

Granted, implementation is no sure thing: 

What is really going on is that many Democrats are hoping to use Biden's presidency to "jam" into law a variety of Democratic agenda items old and new. Their vast ambitions are hampered by the fact that they have a very narrow majority in the House -- so narrow that Democrats are trying to grab a seat in Iowa that has already been certified by state election officials -- and the Senate is tied, 50-50. American voters have not given Democrats the kind of dominant majorities needed to "transform" the country.

But preventing even the partial success of this agenda requires an opposition party able to articulate a consistent body of principles and not clever marketing aimed at "the working class," a strategy that smacks of industrial policy and protectionism, not the free-market economics that ought to be front and center: 

On a flight Tuesday from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne, Ind., two leaders in the House Republican conference discussed a memo that argues that their party's future demands they "embrace our new coalition" because "President Trump's gift didn’t come with a receipt."

Why it matters: The document, titled "Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party," leaves no doubt that Republicans — at least in the House of Representatives — will be doubling down on Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.

The two leaders would be Kevin McCarthy, he of the changing of his tune from shouting into the telephone as the Capitol was under siege on January 6 to the Very Stable Genius, "Do you know who the f--- you're talking to?" to making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with that same VSG, and Jim Banks, whose district includes Fort Wayne and who is proud of the fact that he objected to the certification of Joe Biden's victory. This memo is full of language disparaging corporate donors and Wall Street.

It's pandering of the rankest sort. It's pitting classes of Americans against each other. 

Isn't the point of conservatism supposed to be that it's universally applicable? That it works for people in small heartland towns, suburbs and coastal metropolises? That it's impervious to shifting trends?

Why aren't the tree pillars 

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

still the lodestar for the party seeking to roll back statism?

But McCarthy and Banks seem determined to double down on the GOP's status as the stupid party.

Whether leadership can be wrested from such types is not at all certain. At the least, it's a daunting task, given how large Trump still looms over it. But whether done inside the party or some new vehicle for promulgating actual conservatism, it's going to fall to those who still understand that it is the only viable road forward to see if  actual conservatism can be tried. 

Two now-that-Biden's-election-is-official news items and LITD's take on them

 First up, Pete Buttigieg's nomination to be transportation secretary.

To begin with, nobody's claiming he's some kind of expert on transportation. It's pretty clear that this was a groom-the-next-generation-of-Democrat-up-and-comers move. Well, he did say that he enjoyed riding home from college on Amtrak and that he proposed to his fella in an airport terminal, so we have his generally favorable outlook about the transportation field as a plus of sorts.

The counter-argument is that cabinet-level positions are not the place for farm-team aspirants to the big leagues to hone their chops. You get a portfolio on that level, you're supposed to be ready to handle serious stuff. Oh, well, at least it's not a mega-serious post like Attorney General or National Security Advisor. 

What do we even have a Department of Transportation for, anyway? It strikes me as one of those federal behemoths like the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Commerce, Labor, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development that is fertile ground for pointy-heads who want to implement programs without their germinating in that pesky legislative branch. James Madison is having seizures in his grave.

But in the Biden vision of things that's shaping up, Transportation is going to be a useful tool. Central planning is going to be back on steroids and climate stuff is one of the main areas of focus. Pete did have a record as a guy for whom central planning and climate stuff were turn-ons, and that's no doubt a factor in his being selected. 

He'll definitely be on the same page as John Kerry, who is chomping at the bit to get post-America all involved in the Great Reset, a vision that is incrementally taking shape at meetings of the UN, the World Economic Forum, the Business Roundtable and other organizations of similar odor. Oh, and if you needed further indication of how determined this bunch is to push the utter fiction the the global climate is in some kind of trouble necessitating massive government intrusion into the free market and people's freedom to chose the energy forms that suit them, Gina McCarthy is going to be the "climate czar." (I'm not clear as of yet how that differs from Kerry's lane as "climate envoy.")

The second new item is the dust-up over Joseph Epstein's Wall Street Journal op-ed about Jill Biden's PhD.

Joseph Epstein is an essayist and short story writer of uncommon depth and insight. He's frequently contributed short stories to Commentary that are among the best I've ever read. In 2004, he wrote an essay for The Weekly Standard entitled "The Perpetual Adolescent" that has rightly figured into our ongoing national conversation about the decline of our collective maturity. 

Is it possible, in hindsight, that he would have been better advised to hold off on writing the piece on Mrs. Biden in the form and at the time that he did? Sure. The way he starts out is definitely not lacking in attitude:

"Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter," Joseph Epstein wrote. "Any chance you might drop the 'Dr.' before your name? 'Dr. Jill Biden' sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic."

But the inevitable cases of the vapors exploded on the scene immediately. And of course, the charge of misogyny the main point of the outrage.

The back-and-forth goes on. I'm particularly impressed with Kyle Smith's take at National Review. Smith doesn't mince words, and they're words I resonate with. 

There's this tidbit regarding her motivation for getting the degree:

Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,” Joe Biden has said.

Smith has taken the time to actually read Mrs. Biden's dissertation. He has come away underwhelmed and then some:

Jill Biden’s dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge. It is not a demonstration of expertise in its specific topic or its broad field. It is a gasping, wheezing, frail little Disney forest creature that begs you to notice the effort it makes to be the thing it is imitating while failing so pathetically that any witnesses to its ineptitude must feel compelled, out of manners alone, to drag it to the nearest podium and give it a participation trophy. Which is more or less what an Ed.D. is. It’s a degree that only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific of “Doctor.” People who are actually smart understand that being in possession of a credential is no proof of intelligence.

My friends, I have read this document in its entirety and it is so equally lacking in rhetorical force, boldness of conception, and original research that it amounts to a triple null set, a vacuum inside a blank inside an abyss. If Ingmar Bergman were alive and hired to make a film about this paper, he would say, “I can’t do it, there’s so much emptiness even I cannot grasp it,” and it would sound so much worse in Swedish that suicide hotlines would have to hire extra staff. Gene Simmons has a better claim to be a Doctor of Love than Jill Biden to be a Doctor of Education; after all, Simmons has spent a lifetime demonstrating mastery of his field. As for Biden, she has spent a lot of time teaching remedial English to slow learners in community colleges. Which is like being a rock musician who’s in a bar band. That plays covers. At mixers. Held in assisted-living facilities. Mrs. Biden’s dissertation emits so much noxious methane the EPA should regulate it, Greta Thunberg should denounce it, and Hollywood celebrities should hold a telethon to draw awareness to its dangers.

The point of those who have troubled themselves to get into this matter (and, again, I'm not sure I would have) is that lowering of standards is a major problem in general in our culture. If we kow-tow to those who argue that just  because she spent a lot of time banging away on the keyboard her credential is the equal of anyone else's bearing the honorific "doctor," we further dilute our sense of rigor and make room for a notion of equality that winds up extolling the mediocre.

Taken together, these two items give us a taste of the tone we can expect in media treatment of this new regime. 

Those with viewpoints outside the parameters of that tone had best give some thought to withstanding the slings and arrows that are certainly headed their way.  

 

 

Central planning and the cookie-cutter nature of modern American cities and towns

I'm entertaining a train of thought that has its origins in some local developments but that has definite national implications.

Longtime LITD readers know that one of my gigs is covering local government for a local news organization. In that capacity, I've been reporting on the evolution of a plan to repurpose a moribund mall property on our city's near-northside.

Some background: The mall was emblematic of the dying-mall phenomenon seen around the country. By five years ago, it had considerably more shuttered storefronts than operating businesses. So the city, the city's parks department (which, yes, is a part of the city, but was here operating as an autonomous entity) and the local hospital (or regional-health organization, as it brands itself) "partnered" to form a corporation and buy it.

They heard presentations from several competing design-consultant firms and selected one. That firm has held a series of public-input meetings at each phase of its involvement. Last night, it presented its conceptual master plan.

It's about what I expected: a grand entrance, lots of green space and courtyards, everything from little kitchen areas for nutrition classes to a big fieldhouse for playing all kinds of sports, to some retail space for wellness-related businesses to meeting rooms. The parks department would likely put its administrative offices there.

The plan also calls for prettying-up nearby thoroughfares: bike lanes, decorative fixtures, etc.

The corporation's president gave some opening remarks in which he cautioned the public that it would probably be 2021 before any ground was broken on any part of the project. He'd said the corporation would have to "figure out what should happen when, and with a limited budget."

He said the corporation wants to make sure that in 30 years, citizens say that the people involved had the foresight to create something of lasting value.

And therein lies what I wonder about. American society is going to change so rapidly over the next 30 years that no one now involved can say whether any of these facilities will be relevant then.

What we've done is put government in the role of discerning trends and trying to stay on top of them. The Madisonian, the free-market purist, in me sees this as giving government a role way beyond what it should have.

The rejoinder, of course, is that no one knows how long this 36-acre behemoth would have sat idle until a private investor bought it, and then no one knows whether said investor's idea of what to do with it would result in a community gem or some kind of eyesore. Such an argument gets closed by pointing out that our city has to think always in terms of economic development, as it is in competition with every other municipality in our state, and, really, the nation.

Now, let's go a little  further down my train of thought about all this. At what point did this business of communities having to compete with each other become the all-consuming paradigm?

Pick some year - say, 1870, 1890, or even 1910 - and look at how municipalities, from small towns to metropolises, existed. At that time, they were all, for all intents and purposes still growing. And they all had distinct identities based on their organic growth. Particular industries sprang up within them, due to factors such as geography or the particular entrepreneurial minds that called them home. Chicago became known as the world's meat-packer. Nashville became the country-music capital. Detroit, the car capital.  Battle Creek, Michigan, the breakfast-cereal capital.  Oregon a logging state.  Key West became known as a tourist destination. And so on.

But at some point, cities felt the need to look beyond themselves, to attract activity from anywhere they could. As a result, they forfeited a great deal of their unique identities. A tangible example of the result is the interchangeable nature of the "doorways" these towns and cities have just off their interstate exchanges. They all have the same box stores, chain restaurants, car dealerships and hotels.

And they all have economic development organizations that go on junkets to the Pacific rim to court Asian companies to come build facilities on land that they annex.

As with so much that comes down our sociocultural pike, I don't know that there could be a tidy way back to the old model. Inventors and tinkerers seldom start empires from their garages anymore. Civic life generally has taken a hit. That's what Robert Putnam's 2002 book Bowling Alone was all about.

Still, there's such a whiff of central planning to the way it's done now, that I can't help but ask if there isn't something kind of strange about asking an outside consulting firm to come in and show us how to get that cozy community feel going again, especially since it's all in the name of making us more like all the communities we feel we need to compete against.

I think I'll ask Clyde (my libertarian podcast co-host) if this isn't something we should kick around in this weekend's installment.

Is this way of doing things all upside? I just don't think so.

Republican failure to repeal the "A"CA - first thoughts

A lot of layers of lessons here.

I'll start with a lesson that applies to a number of other issues, particularly how to deal with rogue states' nuclear ambitions. I've said before that the reason we're in such a pickle regarding North Korea and Iran is that no one mustered the foresight decades ago to take requisite preventive measures.  This applies to the health care situation as well. Full-throated defenses of a free-market approach should have been coming from every Republican legislator in both houses of Congress in the early 1990s in response to Hillary Clinton's attempt to steer policy toward a collectivist bias. I put a fair amount of the blame in Bush 43, who readily signed on to the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs. Collectivists, including then-presidential candidate Obama, held the megaphone, since arguments in favor of liberty, choice and competition were relegated to the op-ed pages and some wonky journals. As with the line rogue regimes eventually cross (they become nuclear powers, and there's no going back), once this degree of government involvement in health care became law and got a few years of application under its belt, turnaround faded to the status of an improbability.

Another level it behooves us to look at is the aforementioned wonkery. I'm all for everyone and anyone being as knowledgeable as possible, certainly about the details of health care. And I acknowledge that, regarding health care, that's a pretty daunting task. Everybody concedes that health care policy gets complicated real fast.

But why?

That is not really so complex. The progressive mindset that started infecting American thought just about a century ago - the idea that modern, urban, industrialized life had become too complicated to be addressed by the Constitution and required a battery of specialists and experts in various fields to staff executive-branch agencies to regulate various aspects of life - flourished to the degree that FDR's ridiculous 1944 "second bill of rights," asserting such impossibilities as freedom from want, a guarantee of a job, and, yes, guarantee of health care, found a disturbingly large applauding segment of the public. Then of course came 1965 and the two major programs which have sprawled and grown more insolvent every day since their enactment: Medicare and Medicaid.

So the idea that government was supposed to "do things for us" and "provide services" came to be seen as innocuous and as self-evident as the actual governmental function of keeping us safe.

I'll say it again: freedom is elegantly simple. Government involvement in any aspect of life is the factor that complicates it.

It comes to change the thinking of private-sector players as well. Health insurance companies started talking to their customers in a markedly different way than those in the auto-insurance or home-insurance business, in which the monthly premium is clearly intended to mitigate the risk of unplanned occurrences.

Then there is the inexorable collapse of the "A"CA. Failure to repeal guarantees that millions of Americans will experience a moment of unprecedented shock at some point in the not-all-that-distant future, and waiting to fill the vacuum will be full-fledged socialism:

The bill for Obamacare’s unworkable financial scheme is already overdue, with health care companies fleeing the marketplace and that will leave 40 percent of the nation’s counties with only a single Obamacare-compliant insurer in 2018. Waiting in the wings for the moment of national health-care crisis is Bernie Sanders with Medicare for All, his euphemism for socialized medicine. At an estimated cost of $32 trillion over a decade, Bernie’s remedy would attempt to cure cancer with a draught of hemlock.

Then there is the question of why the Republican Party, even as it enjoys control of all three branches of the federal government and a majority of state governments, has shown that it is not the repository of the kind of clarity needed to provide a path back to freedom.

For that, I don't have a handy, paragraph-sized answer. I suppose a lot of it is all the factors involved in achieving political victory and just getting one's tail end to Washington: the fundraising, the kind of networking and schmoozing that must be undertaken, the risk of being vilified for speaking too plainly in a hostile media climate as society becomes more brittle.

It's a grim juncture at which we find ourselves, but there is no alternative to continuing to defend freedom. If it's foremost among one's values, one can't live with oneself if the only other voices in the national conversation food fight are championing tyranny and dehumanization.

Make Elon Musk play by free-market rules

You ought to be steaming mad after you read Jenny Beth Martin's column at The Hill about government subsidization of the big dreamer's projects:

Musk is, to be sure, an ideas man. Private, commercial space travel? Check. Washington to New York in less than half an hour in what he calls a “hyperloop” train that will travel at 800 miles per hour? Check. A new kind of tunneling engineering? Check. Solar energy? Check. Electric cars? Check, check.

As wide-ranging as these various entrepreneurial ventures may be, they all have one thing in common – not a single one of them would get funding in a competitive private capital market if it weren’t for massive (and I do mean massive) taxpayer-funded government subsidies.

A study published two years ago by The Los Angeles Times revealed that just three of Musk’s ventures – SolarCity Corp. (which manufactured and installed solar energy systems before its 2016 merger with Tesla Motors Inc.), Tesla Motors Inc. (which manufactures electric vehicles), and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX (which builds rocket ships) – had received $4.9 billion in government subsidies to that point in time. By now, Musk’s various ventures have sucked well over $5 billion from government coffers. 

But granting literally billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to Musk’s firms isn’t the worst of it. No, that honorific is reserved for this little gem: In order to induce car buyers to spend their money on electric vehicles, the federal government offers a $7,500 rebate on the purchase price.

Some states enhance that rebate with rebates of their own. In California, for instance, purchasers of electric vehicles get a state-funded rebate of $2,500 more.

There’s a phrase for that – it’s called “crony capitalism.” And it stinks.

It sure does. It's fun to have grandiose visions and act on them when you have government forcibly seizing your fellow citizens' money to provide the startup capital.

This is Exhibit A in what is wrong with

• goofy ideas about energy production
• collectivist notions about transportation
• post-1900 notions about the basic role of government
• the notion that a class of pointy-head "visionaries," "experts" and administrative bureaucrats can centrally plan your destiny

 

A square look at the most glaring manifestation of post-America's cultural rot

Per the post immediately underneath this one, the Most Equal Comrade and his junta are driven by some very mad notions (the post below has to do with their nonchalance about major post-American cities getting incinerated), but this one may top anything so far.

The federal government of post-America no longer recognizes a universe in which human beings come in two distinct genders.

President Barack Obama’s deputies will insert a rule in federal regulations on Friday to prevent federal facilities from operating single-sex bathrooms.

The rule in the “Federal Register” of regulations will open up thousands of bathrooms in federally operated buildings to employees and visitors who claim on any given day to be “transgender” members of the opposite sex.

Now, Target, being a private organization with a keen interest in making a profit, has listened to the public, which responded to this kind of wackiness with an uproar that sent its stock price into a tailspin, has decided to split the difference and "offer more options":

Target thinks it has a solution – they’re adding an extra bathroom to most of its stores.

Target(TGT)CFO Cathy Smith said Wednesday that the company has heard objections to the transgender bathroom policy from some customers, though she said other customers had voiced support. In response, Target has decided to expand its use of a third, single-toilet bathroom at all of its stores, which can be locked by users.

That bathroom can be used by any customer who needs some privacy, including parents with small children of a different gender or those who are uncomfortable with a public bathroom in which a transgender person is allowed. 

Most of Target’s stores already have this single occupancy restroom, but all will be equipped with one by 2017. The project is set to cost about $20 million.

Is an extra, supposedly private bathroom really going to appease concerned parents who are fed up with Target’s social agenda? 

All of this, of course, sweeps under the rug the basic fact that the idea of being able to determine one's own "gender identity" is a fantasy and a tragic one at that:

gatekeeping has been replaced by cheerleading. In the U.K., where records are easier to obtain, clinics are facing an explosion in demand for “gender-identity treatment.” As the Guardian reports: “Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal increases in the number of referrals to all of the UK’s 14 gender identity clinics (GICs) in recent years, with a number of clinics experiencing increases of several hundred percent.”

At one major clinic, referrals quadrupled. At another, they increased 20-fold in ten years. At still another, referrals increased a jaw-dropping 28-fold in eight years. Clinics for children were seeing staggering annual increases: “The Tavistock clinic, the only centre for children and adolescents in England, has seen referral increases of about 50% a year since 2010–11. In the past year it has had an unexpected and unprecedented increase of 100%, up from 697 to 1,398 referrals.” The Guardian — because it’s the Guardian — laments that demand for gender-identity treatment is outstripping the available supply of practitioners, noting that the resulting shortfall is “leaving vulnerable people waiting years for a specialist appointment.”

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal, but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has become something of a clearinghouse for concerns from anguished parents, many of whom note that entire peer groups seem determined to transition together. This letter was particularly poignant: 

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”. 

Parents have no idea how to respond, especially when doctors permit no dissent. Here’s another letter to Dreher: 

My own daughter professes to be a boy. It is a nightmare. It came out of nowhere at age 15 — this is not a case of a girl who always wanted to be a boy, or always acted like a boy. This is a girl who was proud to be a girl until she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen. The nightmare is that doctors and therapists are not allowed to question why she wants to be a boy. The “cult of trans” dictates that her word must be taken or they can lose their professional standing. SO they are ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor. These physical “medical treatments” for her psychological problem are permanent and barbaric. It is against “ethics” for professionals to provide any other treatment. It is a mother’s nightmare. 

To read sites like Transgender Trend (a mainly U.K.-based site that is “concerned about the current trend to diagnose “gender non-conforming” children as transgender) or 4thWaveNow (a blog launched by a “mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a ‘trans man’ after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs”) is to go through the looking-glass — where troubled teens in groups will announce their intention to transition, typically with the enthusiastic (and smug) support of school guidance counselors and other educational professionals.

4thWaveNow is launching its own survey of what it calls “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” seeking input from parents whose children “experienced sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21.” 

Naturally, the Left is furious. Nothing and no one can be permitted to contradict the narrative. Indeed, some on the Left respond to the women in the videos above by claiming that they’re still actually “trans.” To accomplish this trick, they do what the Left so often does — redefine common terms. To prominent trans journalist Julia Serano, “transgender” means people who “defy societal expectations regarding gender.”

But this makes no sense. By that definition, every female but Barbie herself is transgender because no girl has a personality that conforms in all ways to classical, stereotypical femininity. By that definition, Barbie’s boyfriend Ken is thoroughly transgender. What’s “manly” about him?

As I have said before, if you indulged yourself in a time-machine fantasy and brought back some friend of yours - or maybe a parent, sibling or teacher - from, not even fifty years ago, which indeed makes for a bracing exercise, but a mere ten years ago, and show that person 2016 in all its grotesqueness, that person would think you were presenting some kind of fictional vision. You might well be regarded as utterly mad.

I can't think of a front on which the death rattle of Western civilization is more on display than that having to do with the obliteration of basic human nature.

Our universities, our corporations, our municipal governments, our nonprofit civic organizations, are all going to open their doors tomorrow morning. And the day after that.

But the day is coming when they will have been subsumed into the tangled mass of supposedly human life forms piled high, slithering and groping for basic gratifications, humping and gobbling, much like what Moses found when he came down from Mount Sinai and became so enraged that he dashed the tablets inscribed with the basic moral instructions for human living to the ground.

But there isn't likely to be any Moses, no one who will be summoned back to the mountaintop to get a second copy.

File this one under "you can't make this stuff up"

Where does the mayor of one of America's most failed cities go to get her economic-development ideas?

Cuba:

Remember how after Baltimore was half destroyed by rioters last summer Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s made headlines by claiming she gave Baltimore rioters "Space to Destroy?"
She tried to walk back the unfortunate statement—but it only half-worked.In any case, as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, last week she was in (totally destroyed by Communism) Cuba leading a mayoral delegation which also includes Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans (among the murder capitols of the U.S.)
"These meetings and visits will provide U.S. mayors and Cuban officials the opportunity to share best practices for providing city services in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and transportation, according to the story."

Exit question: Which kind of Freedom-Hater is she? The kind who actually congratulates her self on the nobility of her intentions, or the type that is actually in the advanced stages of cynicism and just mouths that crap for the consumption of the cattle-masses?

Sunday roundup

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line exposes the flimsiness of the excuse given by the WaPo's Ruth Marcus for Hillionaire's email troubles, namely, that she was motivated by "scar tissue built up over years of politically motivated attacks." No, Ruth, it's just the way she's always rolled:

We know the explanation is false because Clinton engaged in similar behavior before she came to Washington as First Lady. I’m referring to her handling of her law firm’s billing records in the Castle Grande matter, which I discussed at length here,” in a post based mainly on the evidence developed by the Office of Independent Counsel that investigated “Whitewater.”

Clinton stole and/or caused to be destroyed the records that established her role as the attorney for participants in the fraudulent Castle Grande scheme. She did so to avoid the political price she feared would be exacted if, with candidate Bill Clinton decrying the “decade of greed” that had brought on the S&L scandals, she was exposed as having been the lawyer for a crooked S&L.

For this purpose, Clinton, working with Webster Hubbell and Vince Foster, stole hard copies of the billing records of the Rose law firm where they were partners. They erased the electronic version of these records. One set of the documents was later found in the White House, just outside Hillary’s private office, by an employee. Another set was found in Foster’s attic by his widow, some years after he committed suicide. Clinton’s time sheets (handwritten, as was the practice back in the day) were never found.

The theft of the billing records occurred on March 7, 1992. It was then that a story on Whitewater/Castle Grande by New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth “hit the wire.” That night, Rose Law Firm documents were passed to a Clinton campaign aide in the firm’s parking lot. 

The theft of these documents thus preceded the ugliness of the Clintons’ eight years in the White House. It preceded the “endless investigations” of that era. It helped fuel some of these investigations.

Hillary’s pattern of document destruction seems to have continued during the White House years.  The New York Post reports that in 1999, investigators discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails had been mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server. The hole in the White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when special prosecutor Ken Starr was subpoenaing White House e-mails. 

Homicides are up 52 percent over this time a year ago in Chicago.

The Clean Power Plan was never about combatting "climate change." It was about the federal leviathan usurping ever-more power that ought to belong to states and free individuals and the economic agreements into which free individuals enter.

The theme of my most recent podcast was how willingly signing on to patently untrue narratives has been elevated to a virtue in our society. I didn't include this example, but I certainly could have:

Murray Straus, a researcher in family violence at the University of New Hampshire, died last weekend at the age of 89. He was a man of fierce integrity, and since I covered the social sciences for two national publications, I can tell you that his evidence always checked out. I can also tell you that his memory will not be cherished by gender warriors.

In almost 50 years of research, Straus and the researchers who followed his lead, established beyond any doubt that domestic violence isn’t an instrument of patriarchal control as feminists claim. Nor is it a gender crime as the Violence Against Women’s Act insists it is, but a crime that troubled male and female partners commit against one another at roughly equal rates. Men do more damage than women do, but women conduct and initiate violence as often as men do, and one of three killings by partners is by women.

The frequent claim that women commit violence in self-defense is not borne out in the research. In his 2010 paper, “Thirty Years of Denying The Evidence of Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence,” Straus says the long uproar was fueled by the 1975 National Family Violence Survey, which found a perpetration rate of assault by men partners of 12% and by women partners 11.6%. The rate of severe assaults such as kicking, punching, choking, and attacks with objects was also about the same for men and women (3.8% by men and 4.6% by women). Neither of these gender differences was statistically significant. The response by those who wanted to use domestic violence  as a lever to reduce patriarchal power was furious. Reports that men and women are  equally culpable are not what many wanted to hear.

Among other things, that fury led to dishonest surveys that suppressed evidence of female violence, dropped some findings, blocked publication of some research. faked some statistics, touched off campaigns of intimidation of researchers in the field, and made it risky for graduate students to study under Straus.

Straus had to endure a lot of pressure, demonstrations and death threats. The late Suzanne Steinmetz of the University of Delaware was frequently harassed  for research similar to Straus’s, and a bomb threat was called in at her daughter’s wedding.

British sports venues, music festivals and nightclubs are on high alert in anticipation of ISIS attacks.

At NRO, the great Kevin Williamson examines the full scumbaggery of Katie Couric's role in that sleazily edited gun-policy "documentary."

The real-world effects of gummint's sclerotic involvement in a society's economic life

Perusing the morning's array of news and opinion pieces, I was struck by the parallels between Andrew Browne's WSJ comparison of the regions of China that are in deep recession and those that are humming along, bringing general prosperity and vitality to their inhabitants, and Kevin Williamson's analysis of why Detroit, Michigan died.

In China, because its socialism is more monolithically and ruthlessly applied than is the case in post-America, you have a tier in the economy of enterprises that are actually state-owned. And that's the problem:

China’s economic slow lane is choked with state-owned industrial firms in sectors linked to real estate—steel, cement, coal and construction equipment—all suffering from massive overcapacity. Many get by on bank loans, endlessly rolled over, and orders for boondoggle civil-works projects. They are zombies in a phantom economy. Lawmakers gathered at the Great Hall of the People are likely to review government plans to reduce industrial capacity somewhat and to gradually lay off several million workers while offering them help with relocation and retraining.

Zipping along in the economic fast lane are private companies producing goods and services for a burgeoning consumer market that has taken over from manufacturing as the engine of China’s growth. These corporate leaders are mainly clustered in megacities along China’s eastern seaboard—Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing—linked to global networks of knowledge, finance and talent.

Lopsided growth in a nominally socialist country is an especially thorny problem. Deng Xiaoping resolved the issue by turning Marxism on its head: “Let some people get rich first,” he famously declared. But today’s Internet-empowered industrial workers won’t be treated as second-class citizens. Some hanker for a return to socialism. Others find solace in religions and cults that challenge Communist Party control. Widespread anger at wealth disparities could further sap the resolve of China’s leaders to press ahead with economic reforms—and might even encourage them to launch  military adventures to deflect popular frustrations.

The same basic pattern played itself out in the Motor City:

Detroit is a big city, or at least the ruins of a big city, but it is economically in much the same situation as the poorest parts of Appalachia: Even if you were inclined to open a factory there and create some jobs in the process, you’d have to bring in workers to fill them. The people in Vance, Ala., like the people in Stuttgart, know that putting Mercedes-Benz automobiles together requires a great deal of high-skill work. The people building Toyotas in Texas know the same thing. Nobody is moving to Detroit, because there are no jobs to be had; good jobs aren’t coming to Detroit, because there aren’t enough good workers to be had. The best you’re going to see in Detroit is Shinola workers shoving Swiss-watch movements into Chinese cases and stamping them “Made in Detroit.” Sentimentality is a form of capital, too, when it can be used for marketing purposes. But we’re going to have to do better than that. 

Detroit is a city in which only one in five black men graduates from high school on time — in a city that is 83 percent African American. You think Google is going to move its headquarters there, or invest in a major facility? Tesla? Apple? Does that sound like a place you would invest in?

How did Motown fall so low?

 . . . civic and corporate myopia left Detroit dependent upon a handful of firms whose production undergirded the entire economic ecosystem of Detroit. A combination of factors deformed the economic foundations of Detroit, from governmental protectionism (which made managements thick and lazy) to union rapacity (which diverted potential investment capital into inflated pay and benefits, creating a lot of multimillionaire union bosses) to our national unwillingness to deal with the fact that Germany and Japan — smoking ruins at the end of World War II — would eventually rejoin the modern industrial economy. Rather than finding its way to its best uses through Schumpeterian creative destruction, capital was locked up in poorly performing enterprises such as Chrysler (executive hipster Lee Iacocca was into bailouts before bailouts were cool) and in malinvestments such as unsustainable pension funds. Because most of us lack sufficient imagination, we do not understand what the price of that was. The price isn’t just bailouts and layoffs and factory closings, as painful and convulsive as those have been in Detroit and throughout the industrial communities that inflicted similar problems upon themselves. No, the real cost — the literally incalculable cost — is the lost value that would have been created had all that capital been liberated and put to its best use. We have forgone generations’ worth of compounded returns on investments that we should have made but did not. Another way of putting that: It is far easier to solve the problems of 2016 starting in 1950 than starting in 2016.

Okay, boys and girls, what is the basic takeaway from examining these two scenarios?


It's real obvious, and has been pointed out by those who understand the relationship between economic freedom and human advancement since at least the time of Adam Smith: When the state controls economic activity, no one has any incentive  to think of better ways to do things, or better products to offer the public.

What I find attractive in someone vying for high public office is an understanding that free-market economics is at its core a spiritual matter. Anybody can spew platitudes about "jobs for the middle class" and "surmounting wage stagnation," but that message's ability to inspire pales in comparison to reminding folks that human beings were designed to be marvelous, powerful, inventive creatures and that they will do great things - if they are free to do so.

Why the Department of Education must be dismantled yet tonight and why the odds of post-America being restored to its status as the USA are not good

So much for local control of the introduction of the nation's young tabula rasa to the contour of this wayward universe. And so much for sanity regarding human sexuality. And so much for human freedom.

Ground zero: Chicago:

Illinois' largest high school district violated federal law by barring a transgender student from using the girls' locker room, authorities concluded Monday.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights spent nearly two years investigating Palatine-based Township High School District 211 and found "a preponderance of evidence" that school officials did not comply with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

The student, who has identified as a girl for a number of years, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in late 2013 after she was denied unrestricted access to the girls' locker room. District and federal officials negotiated for months, and a solution appeared imminent as recently as last week, when the district put up privacy curtains in the locker room.

But talks stalled after school officials said the student would be required to use the private area, as opposed to offering her a choice to use it. Although the student said she intends to use the private area or a locker room bathroom stall to change, the stipulation constitutes "blatant discrimination," said John Knight, director of the LGBT and AIDS Project at ACLU of Illinois, which is representing the student.

Ben Shapiro puts the implications in stark relief:

So here, in a nutshell, is the government’s new policy with regard to sex and sexuality among youngsters:

• If you’re a boy who shows a picture of your penis to a girl in your class, you have likely violated both federal child pornography laws as well as local sexual harassment laws. If this happens consistently in your school, the school has violated Title IX.
• If you’re a boy who says he’s a girl, the girl must be placed in position to see your penis and testicles. If the school does not allow this, the school has violated Title IX.
• If you’re an adult who sexually touches a child with the consent of the child, you have committed a crime, since children are incapable of consent.
• If you’re an adult who gives a child hormone therapy or surgery to prevent normal development of the genitals, with the consent of the child, you are a hero.

If this all makes sense to you, you should be working for the federal Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.

This is what happens when a society loses its moral moorings. In its quest to destroy God, the left unhitched its wagon from eternal truths and, instead, decided to substitute its own idea of utopia. To reach that utopia – freedom from social expectations and standards – objectivity itself had to be destroyed, so as to avoid blame. Objective truth lost all meaning; only subjectivity mattered. Science became the enemy, since it establishes provable truths; it had to be quashed and quelled. Language became the enemy, since definitions exclude people and things not covered by those definitions; it had to be perverted and hijacked.

And so we now live through the looking glass, waiting for the next philosophically incoherent ruling from our masters of time and space. Or mistresses. Or whatever.

The death rattle of a stiff-necked people/