Father congratulates son at graduation.
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I am about one third through Mona Charen's: "Sex Matters." It is her version of The Feminist- Sexual Revolution story/period.She dates the second phase to 1960 and attributes it to a variety of influential women namely:Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem and Barbara Ehrenreich among others.
In citing their backgrounds, most of the above came from families racked with serious and discordant issues, some even lied about their backgrounds and yet these women set the tone for what the world embraced.
I believe the Feminist Movement has two aspects to it. First, there was a legitimate, overdue one involving economics and the freeing of women to pursue careers, earn comparable livings and you know the rest.
The second, either an outgrowth of the first or one unto itself, was the freeing of women to engage in freer sexual behaviour patterned after men.
The Women's Movement was driven by a series of neurotic ideas and based on, what subsequently came to be, false premises and out of bound concepts. Ideas of Karl Marx, Freud, Spock and hatred of men formed much of the basis of The Movement, as it were.. Of late,The Movement has morphed into denial of physiological and psychological differences.
Visually and anatomically there are differences between men and women, and sexually there are differences between men and women. Even when it comes to the composure of the brain there are differences between men and women. Statistically speaking and related to a variety of interests, reactions, feelings, proclivities etc. there are differences between men and women.
So why the demoniac need to deny reality? Is it so important women be on par with men in every category in order for them to feel at home with their person? Must women bring man down in order to rise? If Charen has answers I have not gotten to them but maybe she will address these questions later in the book.
One thing we know, women have gained meaningful advantages but lost a great deal as well. Again, turning to statistics large numbers of women are unhappy with their lot, they are afflicted with health issues they never experienced, they are confused about their role in society, particularly their role as a mother versus a bread winner and most particularly their role as sexual creatures. Lesbianism is growing, alcoholism is increasing and they remain confused about sexual acceptance particularly what role sex plays when they start dating and/or go off to college and become liberated.
(If this was only the case See 1 below.)
I have always said there is a price to pay for change. That does not mean change is bad, change should be avoided etc. just with change comes demands for adjustment.
I asked Lynn what impact the Women's Movement had on her. She said very little because she always thought she knew who she was, her family was stable and her father loved her. I believe Lynn is one of the most well adjusted, sensitive, common sense women I have ever known. She does not like controversy but will stand her ground when principles are involved. She is very social, genuinely enjoys friendships and, I believe, is easy to be with and gets along with a variety of people. She is a great cook, loves to entertain at home and has been a fabulous mother to our children and step-mother to my/our children. When we first met she was a school teacher but did not feel her role as a stay at home mother was demeaning in any way. In fact, she is grateful for having had the chance.
Why she ever chose me is most mystifying but I remain the happy beneficiary.
I would argue the world would be a better, saner less contentious place if there were more women like her.
As for myself, I was raised in a period when children had a minor role in the family,"were seen not heard" and the Women's Movement and even the Sexual Revolution demanded a lot of adjustments. I was taught to respect women, to open doors, allow them to leave first, take off your hat etc. To think of them as equals yet treat them lesser was conflictual. They call it being old fashioned. I call it being Southern.
I believe the extreme aspects of the Women's Movement, The Sexual Revolution has brought mixed blessings and the roles between women and men has been ruptured in ways that will never be the same. I believe freeing women so that the world benefits from their talent and creativity if marvelous. Freeing them to become confused as to who they are is sad and tragic. Even worse is the negative impact the changes in women has caused in the changes upon men. Man, by nature, is the stronger, the protector, the earner, the hunter and the various social movements have, in a sense, "castrated" man and we have yet to know the problems that will cause but we are soon to find out as we go through the current period of identity confusion.
What bothers me most is the foundations of the Woman's Movement and Sexual Revolution are based on much flawed thinking and even science. The spread of social media is helping create further dislocations.
Also, the more uneducated we become and the less we are able to reason the more we become incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy. Repeating something often enough does not validate. (See 1a below.) .
You decide.
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I tried to listen to the Kavanaugh Hearings but got turned off by the efforts on the part of Democrats to obfuscate the role of the Senate. Kavanaugh is qualified so the Democrats should probe why he is not. Instead, they are trying to suggest they do not have enough documents on which to make a decision. How pathetic.
Until recently The Supreme Court sought consensus but that was not good enough for Justice Brennan who pushed his other liberal justices to assert their own view more forcefully thus resulting in more 5 to 4 split decisions.
Pay back time is now looming over the Democrats and they are screaming "fowl" because they are chickens and we know what chickens are full of. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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In The Weekly Standard Sept. 10 Issue on p7, there is an article entitled "Ballot Bandits." The article does not support Trump's claim there are millions of illegal voters voting but it does confirm the fact there is a growing body of academic evidence the issue is bigger than the mass media are willing to admit and as the growth in illegal immigrants expands it is hard to square Democrats opposition to voter ID Laws. Something I have been pointing out for years.
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Puns are the lowest form of humor but these are also quite clever:
| PUNS INTENDED ... |
| 1. Marriage is the mourning after the knot before. |
| 2. Practice safe eating - always use condiments. |
| 3. Energizer Bunny arrested - charged with battery. |
| 4. A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking. |
| 5. When you dream in colour, it's a pigment of your imagination. |
| 6. Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion. |
| 7. Those who jump off a Paris bridge are in Seine. |
| 8. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. |
| 9. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? |
| 10. A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat. |
| 11. You feel stuck with your debt if you can't budge it. |
| 12. Marathon runners with bad footwear suffer the agony of defeat. |
| 13. Local Area Network in Australia is the LAN down under. |
| 15. A pessimist's blood type is always b-negative. |
| 16. A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. |
| 17. Shotgun wedding, a case of wife or death. |
| 18. A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two-tired. |
| 19. What's the definition of a will? (Come on, It's a dead giveaway!) |
| 20. I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded. |
| 21. If electricity comes from electrons... Does that mean that morality comes from morons? |
| 22. A hangover is the wrath of grapes. |
| 24. Is a book on voyeurism a peeping tome? |
| 25. Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play. |
| 26. Sea captains don't like crew cuts. |
| 27. A successful diet is the triumph of mind over platter. |
| 28. A gossip is someone with a great sense of rumor. |
| 29. Without geometry, life is pointless. |
| 30. Reading while sunbathing makes you well-red. |
| 31. Dijon vu - the same mustard as before. |
| 32. When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I. |
| 33. A backward poet writes inverse. |
| 34. In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes. |
| 35. A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion. |
| 36. If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed. |
| 37. With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress. |
| 38. Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft, and I'll show you a flat minor. |
| 39. When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds. |
| 40. The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered. |
| 41. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blown apart. |
| 42. He often broke into song because he couldn't find the key. |
| 43. Every calendar's days are numbered. |
| 45. He had a photographic memory that was never developed. |
| 46. A plateau is a high form of flattery. |
| 47. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large. |
| 48. Once you've seen one shopping centre, you've seen a mall. |
| 49. When an actress saw her first strands of grey hair, she thought she'd dye. |
| 50. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis. |
| 51. Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses. |
| 52. Acupuncture is a jab well done. |
| 53. The poor guy fell into a glass-grinding machine and made a spectacle of himself ____________________________________________________________________
This is no pun. It is from my neighbor who is a dear friend, fellow memo reader and retired Marine. Semper Fi! (See 3 below.)
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I can think of nothing more justified than this. (See 4 below.)
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What I have been writing. (See 5 below.)
And:
As dumb a move as when Coke dropped Coke but then Nike is a Pacific Coasters company. (See 5a below.)
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Dick++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1) Ten Things They Didn’t Tell You at Freshman Orientation Learn how to be a good American, challenge your teachers, study a language, and tackle hard subjects.Welcome to Yale. Please disregard what you’ve been told so far, and follow these instructions.
1. Understand that you’re here to learn how to be good citizens of the United States. Many of you come from Japan or Ghana or France, and we’re glad to have you. But Yale can’t teach you to be a good Japanese citizen; we don’t know how. Nor can we teach you to be a “global citizen” or “citizen of the world,” because there is no such thing. The “globe” has no citizens, because the globe, as such, has no art, religion, music, literature, theater, traditions, folk songs, heroes, traumas or TV stations; no tastes, fads, styles, treasures or shared experience. So you might as well learn to be good Americans for now.
Like all nations, America is defined by its shared experience, and by the enemies it’s made: the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Japanese imperialists and the Soviet Union, among others—in just the past century or so. We are the one nation that always marks itself “C-minus: room for improvement!” Americans work constantly to clarify, concentrate and distill our principles and become more like ourselves—more like the luminous city on a hill to which all nations look up.
2. You are now a part-owner of Western civilization. This should be no surprise: You have come, after all, to one of the country’s leading schools for training Western leaders. You can tell this and other American colleges are Western because they are dedicated to noisy public argument about the truth, to the teaching of history without chauvinism, factionalism or (theoretically) self-hatred, and to competition among everyone over everything. Furthermore, we love sports more every year, starting at age 2, until at last we die of sheer boredom.
3. Now that you are a college student, learn skills. Everything else can wait. Learning science, mathematics or engineering centers on learning skills. Much of the arts, letters and history is centered on skills too. Learn as much music as you can. Master at least one foreign language completely. Reading and writing English are the most important skills of all.
4. Listen skeptically. Grade-school education is built on the myth that the teacher knows what he’s doing. Here, things are different. Never close your mind to the possibility that your teacher—despite his authoritative tone, his many books, papers, patents, theorems or epic poems, his international reputation and his world-wide following—might not know what he’s talking about.
5. Remember that a professor has no business mentioning his personal politics in class, ever. Teachers must not abuse their positions of authority for the purpose of propaganda. We’re all human, and our biases slip out occasionally no matter how careful we are. But if they keep slipping out, the professor should be in a different line of work, and you should be in a different class.
6. There are only two oppressed minority groups on campuses today—practicing Jews and Christians. They are not badly oppressed. But you will hear them mentioned with a caustic disrespect that is strictly forbidden with respect to all other groups. The damage is minor; caustic disrespect is what college is for. But if contempt for Jews and Christians is OK, any group should be fair game.
7. If you want to be educated, you can’t skip the hard subjects. You must master at least a year of college-level biology and a year of physics—and you’d be foolish not to take a term of computer science. You must know contemporary history from the start of World War I, and Western history from the start of the Renaissance.
8. You must know the Bible and Shakespeare. They used to be the shared heritage of all educated Anglo-Americans, and Western civilization still takes them for granted. If you don’t know them, you won’t even know what you’re missing. For a similar reason, you must learn to read French. Until recently, all educated writers assumed that you could, so you must. For the past few decades, ignoramuses have argued that because children are more likely to hear Spanish on the streets than French, they should forget French and learn Spanish. But we’re not teaching street skills here. We are trying to produce cultured men and women.
9. Don’t expect to be guided in your social life by the behavior of older students. Most of your peers have no clue how to lead their lives, in part because the older generation hasn’t bothered to give any real guidance. Of all the ways in which we old people have failed you young ones, this is the worst. Many students are miserable—more than you would ever guess. If you can find one older person anywhere in the world whom you trust and can talk to, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Ask yourself what you want, not what people expect. This is one of the hardest questions you’ll ever face.
10. Relax—you, your fellow students and your professors already agree about nearly everything: President Trump, taxes, environmental policy, military spending, federal regulation, gun rights, voting rights, voting fraud, China, Brexit, immigration, religion in American culture, Ukraine, Putin, school vouchers, public-school spending, corporate average fuel economy, Supreme Court appointments, the space program, urban transportation, highways, Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Iran deal, affirmative action, school violence and many other topics. But now you’re adults. Why not disagree just once, so you can tell your grandchildren about it?
Mr. Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Dittach LLC.
1a) Environmentalists Need to Get Real
By Walter Russell Mead
The problem isn’t climate-change denial. It’s doubt that activists have the answers.
Last week French environmental minister Nicolas Hulot, once a prominent supporter of President Emmanuel Macron, threw in the towel. “I don’t want to lie anymore. I don’t want to create the illusion that my presence in the government means that we are on top of [environmental] issues,” he said during a live broadcast announcing his resignation.
Mr. Hulot is not alone among environmentalists in denouncing the hypocrisy and inadequacy of government action on climate change. The Paris accords are “a fraud, really, a fake,” said climate activist James Hansen in 2015. “There is no action, just promises.”
Three years later, Mr. Hansen’s words look prescient. Even ostensibly committed countries like Germany and France are on course to miss the voluntary 2020 targets they announced to such fanfare in 2015. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that only Morocco and Gambia are on a “Paris agreement compatible” path.
The climate-change movement is stuck, even after a scorching summer elevated the issue across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It is powerful enough to command lip service from politicians, but too weak to impose the policies it says are needed to prevent catastrophic change.
Many environmentalists fail to grasp that the real problem isn’t skepticism that the climate is changing, or even that human activity is a leading cause of the change. Millions worry about climate change and believe human activity is in large part responsible. But they do not believe that the climate movement has the answers for the problems it describes. Green policy blunders, like support for ethanol in the U.S. and knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power, erode confidence that environmental activists—who too often have an anticapitalist, Malthusian and technophobic view of the world—can be trusted, to as they often say, to “save the planet.”
For center-right politicians and people who support both free markets and a healthy environment, the status quo is also a problem. In the U.S. and abroad, market-friendly politicians cannot embrace the stagnant, statist and rent-seeking policies often proposed by environmentalists. Yet neither do they wish to turn a blind eye to a consequential problem that voters care about.
The world needs a green movement that can command more than lip service from politicians. Such a movement would be tech-positive, pro-science and pro-growth, recognizing that capitalism can deliver technological and social changes that offer humanity’s best hope of a greener and cooler future. A realistic green movement would not only embrace zero-carbon nuclear power as part of the solution to the climate problem; it would embrace the broader potential of the information revolution to raise living standards around the world while reducing humanity’s carbon footprint.
One example would be the promotion of telework and other changes to the way people commute. The daily trek of hundreds of millions of commuters around the world is a major contributor to world-wide emissions. Commuting’s pernicious influence will grow as developing countries continue to urbanize. Promoting telework—substituting the movement of data for the movement of people and cars—will bend the carbon curve even as it saves time and money. The shift to autonomous cars can have a similar impact and reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
Videoconferencing is already making inroads in the business world. Instead of $100 billion boondoggles like California’s struggling high-speed rail project, policy makers should encourage the development and deployment of this technology—reducing emissions and saving taxpayer dollars.
A smarter green movement also would embrace the development and use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. Tweaking the genes of specific crops can raise yields while shrinking humanity’s carbon footprint. A field of “tweaked” soybeans that need little or no fertilizer or pesticides is the real killer app for solar power. Human ingenuity plus sunlight can dramatically reduce the need for fertilizer and pesticides with all the greenhouse-gas emissions and other environmental damage they entail.
These ideas are neither Malthusian nor anti-capitalist. For that reason, many green activists will shun them. Some would rather see the planet perish in a runaway greenhouse effect than see gene-tweaked soybeans in European grocery stores—just as they would rather risk catastrophic flooding than accept nuclear power. But market-friendly, pro-science think tanks, researchers and politicians should not be deterred. Developing a green agenda that is high tech but not hair shirt is a crucial project if the world is to break the dangerous gridlock on climate change.
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2)The Kavanaugh Hazing By
The EditorialBoard
Democrats fear the High Court will no longer be a liberal legislature.
The Senate Judiciary Committee opens confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Tuesday, and don’t expect the “bipartisanship” that everyone extolled at John McCain’s memorial services last week. Democrats are out to tarnish the nominee even if they fail to defeat him, and the main goal is to drive voters to the polls to elect a Democratic Congress in November.
Toward that end, you will hear that the 53-year-old judge will join four other conservatives on the High Court eager to eviscerate the rights of Americans. You will hear they want to require back-alley abortions, deny contraception to women, end gay marriage, strip voting rights from minorities, empower corporations to crush workers, and remove constitutional checks and balances on Donald Trump so he can reign supreme.
Have we missed anything?
The hyperbole of the attacks is self-refuting. No Court with Chief Justice John Roberts as the swing vote is going to overturn precedents willy-nilly, even if an originalist interpretation of the Constitution suggests that it should. The Court has other things to consider, such as how deeply precedents have become embedded in law and social practice.
A classic example is the Miranda warning when police arrest a criminal suspect. Justice William Rehnquist was a critic of that 1966 decision, but in 2000 he refused a chance to overturn the ruling because the warning had been universally in use for so long. Likewise, a conservative Court will not overturn thousands of legal same-sex marriages.
The real reason Democrats are furious about a Court with five conservatives is that it may no longer be an engine of progressive policy. If liberals want to guarantee a minimum income or a right to suicide, they will have to persuade voters and pass it democratically. No longer will five or six Justices be able to find such rights in the “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Constitution.
Or at least that is our hope. No one can know how a Supreme Court Justice will rule, and some Justices change as the decades go by. Sandra Day O’Connor began as a conservative but moved left over the years on race and other issues. Some conservatives fear that Judge Kavanaugh, as a denizen of the Beltway, will also be pulled left by the forces of liberal social conformity.
He will suddenly have a new set of courtiers, and the media will treat him like one of B.F. Skinner’s pigeons. They’ll assail him as they now do Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito when he rules the way they dislike, while rewarding him as they did former Justices Anthony Kennedy and O’Connor if he moves their way. Judge Laurence Silberman on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals calls this “the Greenhouse effect,” after a liberal reporter who covered the Court.
Our sense from reading Judge Kavanaugh’s essays and opinions—he wrote more than 300 on the D.C. Circuit—is that he has the personal and constitutional grounding to stand up to such hazing. There is also now enough of a conservative counterculture in the Federalist Society and courts that he will get some reinforcement for originalist rulings.
On this point, one question is what Judge Kavanaugh thinks about issues that divide legal conservatives these days. Is he closer to J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit who roundly criticized the Heller gun-rights ruling as conservative activism? Or is he more like Justice Thomas in a willingness to revisit doctrines that prevailed before the era of liberal judicial activism of the 1960s? GOP Senators might try to elicit some insight from Judge Kavanaugh on these questions this week.
By the way, readers can ignore the Democratic protests about the GOP failure to produce more documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s tenure in George W. Bush’s White House counsel’s office. The Trump Administration decided to withhold some 101,000 document pages entirely under executive privilege and allow Senators and their staff to view 147,000 or so in a secure room on Capitol Hill.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar said Sunday that this is “not normal.” She must be running for President, because the process is similar to how the Obama White House handled documents related to Elena Kagan. We’re told no Democratic Senators had bothered to look at the documents by Monday. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley also said he’d support Senator Klobuchar’s request to make some of those documents public if she wishes. She has not done so—which suggests how little of political consequence is in those pages.
As long as Republicans stay united, they can confirm Judge Kavanaugh without a Democratic vote. But if it looks as if confirmation is assured, don’t be surprised if Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gives a pass to some of the Democrats running for re-election in conservative states this year. Mr. Schumer wants to show he is fighting as hard as possible to defeat Judge Kavanaugh, but he wants to be Majority Leader even more.
2a)
Kavanaugh Confirmation Circus: Daughters Rushed Out
By TTN Staff
The Kavanaugh confirmation has become a political circus. Interruptions and protests have plagued the hearing and have caused the nominee's young daughters to be rushed from the room.
According to the Daily Wire: The Dems have organized chaos and disruption. This seems to be their tactic of choice to oppose a nominee so highly qualified as Brett Kavanaugh.
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A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases. 1. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
2. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
3. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
4. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
5. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.
While this thought is still fresh in our brain... let's take a look at New Orleans ... It's amazing what you can learn by using some simple division. Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D-LA) was asking Congress for 250 BILLION DOLLARS to rebuild New Orleans . Interesting number.. What does it mean? 1. Well .. If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman and child) you each get $516,528
2. Or... If you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.
3. Or... if you are a family of four... your family gets $2,066,012.
Washington, D.C. HELLO! Are all your calculators broken?
TAXES COUNT THEM
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax Cigarette Tax Corporate Income Tax Dog License Tax Federal Income Tax (Fed) Federal Unemployment Tax (FU TA) Fishing License Tax Food License Tax Fuel Permit Tax Gasoline Tax Hunting License Tax Inheritance Tax Inventory Tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax) IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax) Liquor Tax Luxury Tax Marriage License Tax Medicare Tax Property Tax Real Estate Tax Service charge Taxes Social Security Tax Road Usage Tax (Truckers) Sales Taxes Recreational Vehicle Tax School Tax State Income Tax State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) Telephone Federal Excise Tax Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax Telephone State and Local Tax Telephone Usage Charge Tax Utility Tax Vehicle License Registration Tax Vehicle Sales Tax Watercraft Registration Tax Well Permit Tax Workers Compensation Tax(And to think, we left British Rule to avoid so many taxes) STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY? Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago... and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt. We had the largest middle class in the world and Mom stayed home to raise the kids. What happened? Can you spell politicians? And I still have to Press '1' for English. What the heck happened to our Country?
Let's hope Trump can fix it. Like him or not, he is no Politician.
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4) For U.S. to Stay in WTO, China May Have to Leave Instead of unilateral tariffs, the U.S. and its allies could use the World Trade Organization to force China to alter its trade-distorting behavior—or leave
The intensifying trade fight between the U.S. and China didn’t come out of the blue. American frustration has long been building over China’s failure to live up to its commitments when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
But President Trump’s unilateral tariffs risk a Pyrrhic victory that damages global trading rules that have broadly served U.S. interests. There may be a more effective solution: threaten China with expulsion from the WTO.
Calling this the nuclear option doesn’t really do it justice since the nuclear weapons don’t even exist. The WTO lacks a formal mechanism to throw out a member. But its founding charter, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, includes a section, Article XXIII, that can achieve the same thing. It allows a case to be brought against a member for behavior that doesn’t specifically violate the treaty but “nullifies or impairs” the benefits every other country expects to derive from the WTO.
“China’s economy is structured differently from any other major economy…in ways that were not anticipated by WTO negotiators,” Jennifer Hillman, a Georgetown University law professor told Congress’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in June.
WTO rules don’t deal well with the extensive overlap between China’s government, ruling Communist party and companies. Article XXIII, she said, was designed “exactly for this type of situation.”
China is more open and market oriented today than before it joined the WTO. It has generally adhered to the letter of WTO decisions, including when it loses cases there. And it argues much criticism aimed at it is unfounded. For example, no formal laws force foreign companies to transfer technology to Chinese firms, it says.
But as Ms. Hillman, a former member of the WTO’s top dispute-settlement panel, shows, that misses the many ways China violates the commitments it undertook when it joined the WTO. In the 1994 Marrakesh declaration, which led to the WTO’s creation, members agreed to a trading system based on “open, market-oriented policies.” Yet market forces in China are retreating as the state expands.
Foreign companies report they are routinely compelled to transfer technology to Chinese companies to do business there, in violation of Beijing’s commitments. Ms. Hillman notes that even unwritten measures can be challenged at the WTO.
China’s discriminatory licensing treatment and its failure to better police the theft of foreign intellectual property both violate its obligations under the WTO’s side agreement on intellectual property.
China, like all WTO members, is supposed to publish all of its subsidies so that others can respond to them. It doesn’t, because many take the form of low-cost loans, raw materials or other inputs to or from state-owned enterprises.
China isn’t sued more often for such transgressions, Ms. Hillman says, because such cases can be hard to win. Foreign companies are reluctant to provide evidence because they see foreign competitors as intertwined with the Chinese government, which can retaliate, for example by blocking their expansion. Many countries won’t bring cases against China on their own for the same reason, says Chad Bown, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. No such fear exists about suing the U.S.
Related Video
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China has pledged to retaliate against U.S. tariffs in “equal scale and equal strength.” In addition to tariffs, here are three ways Beijing could hit back at Washington. Photo composite: Adele Morgan/The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Hillman says this is why other countries should bring a “big, bold” case based under Article XXIII; by addressing China’s systemic violations, such a case would depend less on proving smaller, specific violations.
If the U.S., European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico and South Korea brought the case jointly and won, China would either have to change its policies, or face WTO-sanctioned penalties on almost all of its exports. Ms. Hillman goes further: The findings could be used to amend the WTO charter to explicitly prohibit the offending policies. If China couldn’t abide by amendments, it would effectively withdraw from the WTO.
Ordinarily the WTO acts by consensus, so China could just veto the amendments. But Ms. Hillman notes that if consensus can’t be reached, the WTO allows amendments with a supermajority of members.
All of this is risky and unprecedented; only a handful of WTO cases have been brought under Article XXIII. (Ms. Hillman says they were much narrower and not relevant to the China situation.) No country has left the WTO, much less been expelled.
Putting together a case would take a long time and require the U.S. to work with allies it has alienated with tariffs. The Trump administration has little love for the WTO and has reportedly weighed withdrawal, while blocking appointments to its dispute settlement body.
Yet some administration officials are willing to entertain this strategy. Does China “want to be a part of the WTO and just behave like everybody else, or don’t they?” Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on Fox Business Network last week. “And if they don’t, then we, the community of nations, are we going to let them stay in the WTO?” Before he became Mr. Trump’s trade ambassador, Robert Lighthizer proposed bringing a case against China under Article XXIII.
Japanese and EU trade officials are meeting with their American counterparts in Washington Friday to discuss China. They already have their own reasons for wanting China to change, but now they have another: forcing China to act like it belongs in the WTO may be necessary to keep the U.S. from leaving.
Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com
5)Self-Driving Technology Threatens Nearly 300,000 Trucking Jobs, Report Says
Impact would come over 25 years, with projections for lighter job loss seen than other forecasts, but higher-paying trucking work could take a hit
Autonomous driving technology could replace some 294,000 long-distance truck drivers over the next 25 years, a lighter impact than some have predicted but one that could still significantly reshape freight-industry employment, according to a new research paper.
The changes would likely eliminate some of the best-paid positions held by the more than 2 million heavy-duty truck drivers in the U.S., according to the analysis by Steve Viscelli, a sociologist who is a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and a senior fellow at its Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.
Using autonomous vehicles for long-haul cargo runs, the most likely near-term scenario, would also spur increased demand for delivery and local trucking jobs, which tend to be lower-paid and often have poor working conditions, the report said.
Many experts believe the trucking industry is a significant market for autonomous-vehicle technology, in part because long-distance highway driving is less complicated than navigating city streets. Trucking companies are interested in the technology because it could help them address high driver turnover and safety regulations that limit truckers’ hours behind the wheel,
Mr. Viscelli, who worked as a truck driver for several months while researching his 2016 book, “The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream,” interviewed computer scientists, startups, carriers, equipment manufacturers and other experts as he studied how self-driving technology might be used in the trucking industry. He calculated the likely job impacts based on industry-reported data on driver headcount and revenue for various trucking segments.
The jobs facing the greatest risk, he said, are those where drivers move cargo over hundreds of miles but perform few specialized non-driving tasks, such as unloading freight, coupling trailers or inspection and maintenance. Although many long-haul truckload drivers work in often grueling conditions for less than $50,000 a year, the at-risk category also includes more lucrative jobs moving goods for package-delivery companies such as United Parcel Service Inc. or for less-than-truckload carriers, which combine multiple shipments on each truck.
“The risk of autonomous trucks is not that there won’t be enough jobs for American truckers, it’s that there won’t be enough good jobs,” Mr. Viscelli wrote in the report, which said job training programs could help drivers adjust to the changes.
The research is being released this week and was commissioned by the Center for Labor Research and Education at University of California, Berkeley, and Working Partnerships USA, a Silicon Valley-based community organization focused on economic inequality.
But mass adoption remains subject to a host of regulatory and other hurdles. Recent fatalities involving autonomous passenger cars have put a spotlight on problems with the technology. New investment in equipment and infrastructure to support self-driving vehicles, such as wireless communications networks for roads, is also needed.Proponents of autonomous technology say self-driving trucks could lower freight costs and improve productivity and safety. Driverless vehicles are being used in controlled industrial settings, such as mining operations. Several companies have tested the use of self-driving trucks to haul freight on public roads.
“It’s not the tech that I think will stop this from being kind of ready five years, 10 years, from now,” Derek Leathers, chief executive of Werner Enterprises Inc., a large Omaha, Neb.-based trucking company, said at a June investor conference. “It’s everything else,” he said, including public perception and the challenge of finding space for facilities such as depots where trailers can be swapped between human drivers and autonomous trucks.
Right now human-to-human platooning, where multiple trucks with drivers save fuel by using automated technology to drive in close formation to reduce wind resistance, “is pretty much ready to go,” Mr. Viscelli said.
5a) Nike Shares Slide on Plans to Use Colin Kaepernick in Ads
The NFL quarterback who led player protests during national anthem will take part in the renewed ‘Just Do It’ campaign
Nike Inc. NKE -2.96% will feature Colin Kaepernick, the National Football League quarterback who led national-anthem protests, in a new advertising campaign, a move that joins one of the NFL’s biggest business partners with a controversial star who is engaged in a high-profile legal battle with the league.
The news sparked some criticism on social media and weighed on shares of Nike. The stock fell 2.9% Tuesday to $79.78 and was the worst-performing member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. For the year, shares remain 28% higher.
Mr. Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, revealed his role in the campaign in a tweet on Monday that was subsequently retweeted by Nike’s corporateTwitter account. A person familiar with the matter said Mr. Kaepernick will be part of a renewed Nike “Just Do It” campaign, and his face will be featured in ads and on billboards.
“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt,” Mr. Kaepernick wrote. The tweet included a black-and-white picture of his face with the words: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
A Nike spokeswoman wrote in an email that Mr. Kaepernick is “among the athletes” being featured in the “Just Do It” campaign, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2018.
“This campaign is a compilation of the most inspirational athletes around sport—athletes who have chased crazy dreams, no matter the obstacle or outcome,” she added.
Mr. Kaepernick is perhaps the NFL’s most polarizing figure. He has gone unsigned since March 2017 and was one of the leaders of player protests during the national anthem, which were meant to call attention to racial injustices and social inequality. He has filed a grievance against the NFL, alleging the league and all 32 teams colluded to keep him unsigned because of his outspoken political views.
While Mr. Kaepernick is engaged in a pitched battle with the league, alleging that he has effectively been blackballed, Nike is one of the league’s biggest partners, with a reported billion-dollar apparel deal as the official uniform maker. The campaign comes months after Nike reupped its partnership with the league.
The NFL didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
Mr. Kaepernick had been signed with Nike when he was an up-and-coming star with the 49ers, who he once led to back-to-back playoff appearances, including a Super Bowl. But following injuries and his absence from the league last season, he hadn’t been featured in Nike campaigns or had any prominent product lines.
Now Mr. Kaepernick has a new, multiyear deal with Nike, according to a person familiar with the negotiations, who said Mr. Kaepernick will be a face of the “Just Do It” campaign. The person described it as a “top of the line” deal for football players.
“Nike’s team recognized that, even with links to the league, that they wanted to be socially conscious and authentic in the spirit of what ‘Just Do It’ meant,” the person said. “Colin was the ideal fit and nobody represents that quite like Mr. Kaepernick.”
The Nike spokeswoman said that the characterization of the company’s decision is “not accurate” and that “Nike has a long-standing relationship with the NFL and works extensively with the league on all campaigns that use current players. Colin isn’t currently employed by an NFL team and has no contractual obligation to the NFL.”
The anthem protests by NFL players have been criticized by President Trump and a hot-button issue on social media. News of Mr. Kaepernick’s role in the ad campaign prompted calls on Twitter for a Nike boycott and images of people damaging their Nike products.
In recent months, Nike has been grappling with the fallout of an internal scandal in which nearly a dozen executives left the company amid complaints of inappropriate workplace behavior. Last month, two former Nike employees filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination and detailing specific accounts of alleged harassment.
Nike has said it “opposes discrimination of any type and has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion.”
Mr. Kaepernick filed his grievance against the league last October. Last week, the arbitrator denied the NFL’s request for a summary judgment to dismiss the case.
Although filing for a summary judgment is often standard operating procedure, the ruling was a win for Mr. Kaepernick’s team because it effectively meant that the arbitrator saw sufficient evidence for Mr. Kaepernick’s grievance to raise a “genuine issue.”
Previously, The Wall Street Journal reported that, in depositions for Mr. Kaepernick’s grievance, NFL owners indicated that President Trump’s attacks on the player protests pushed them to change the rules.
After NFL owners changed the rules regarding the anthem in the spring to require players on the field to stand and “show respect” for the anthem, those rules were suspended after it drew the ire of players.
Negotiations between the NFL and player representatives continue. It is unclear if there will be a formal resolution before the league’s season begins Thursday.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
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