This is why the healthcare industry, education and government generally fail. Too many bureaucrats and administrators.
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Mexican Journalist Takes a Close Look at Caravan, Uncovers Horrible Truths Media's Not Reporting
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Hanson on Shane'. (See 1 below.
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Israel is finally achieving acceptance and the Palestinians are becoming more irrelevant except on American College Campuses.
There comes a time when hate and obdurateness will both consume you and defeat you.
The Palestinians have rejected opportunities to live and let live and are now paying the price of their poor leadership whose desire has consistently been to eliminate Israel. The Palestinians also served as convenient pawns when Arab nations surrounding Israel also were of that same mind set. Now that these nations see Israel is strong and the enemy of their enemy, Iran, Israel is preferred over the Palestinians. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Is GM's Bara tone deaf? Nor is it a healthy situation when a president comes down on the way an American Corporation is managed. Truman and Kennedy and now Trump . Bara would have been wise to sit down with Trump before announcing her decision in view of the fact that the American Tax Payer kept GM alive. Oh well, some executives are too big to think about gratitude and protocol because they have golden parachutes to save them when they screw up.
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I invited Wax to come and speak here under the auspices of The SIRC but she let me down. She teaches law at my old college. Ben Franklin, it's founder, must be turning over in his grave. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) How Did Shane End Up?
The gunslinging outsider saved the vulnerable farmers, but they didn’t love him for it.
In director George Stevens’s classic 1953 Western, Shane, a mysterious stranger and gunfighter in buckskin with a violent past, rides into the middle of the late-1880s Wyoming range wars between cattle barons and homestead farmers. The community-minded farmers may have the law on their side, but the open-range cattlemen have the money and the gun-toting cowboys.
Shane enters the mess but decides to settle down, incognito, with a farm family, shed his past as a hired killer, and begin leading a settled and honest frontier life.
Almost immediately, however, he senses his tragic predicament. The West is not yet so civilized. The farmers, the future of civilization, hardly possess the gun-fighting ability to survive against the ruthless cattlemen and their hired guns.
So a reformed Shane is insidiously brought into the fray, as he figures out how to aid his new hosts while, at least at first, playing by their rules of civilized behavior.
Shane ultimately accepts that his second chance life is not sustainable. He learns that his newfound friends, the sod-busters, lack the skills to survive against Wilson, the cattlemen’s psychopathic hired killer.
Sensing that there’s no solution to his dilemma, Shane finally puts on his killer clothes again, straps on his six-gun, and kills Wilson and the brutal ringleaders of the cattlemen.
Stevens’s movie gives us the familiar paradox of the ostracized outsider and savior in tragic literature and film (The Magnificent Seven, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider . . . ). Although they hesitate to say so, the farmers, if they are to survive, must rely on the very antithesis of their own idealistic commitment to law, order, the settled life, and the way of the future. Shane himself wants to reject gun-slinging and stay civilized.
But to do so would mean that Shane’s newfound friends would be killed or driven off by the cattlemen, and their farms returned to the open range — they don’t have the skills to win a range war against cowboys and hired guns. Yet by picking up his gun and going outside the law to take down the evildoers, Shane himself —apparently a former Confederate, Yankee-hating hired gun — loses his recent claim on civilized life.
Even the very farmers whom he will save are uncomfortable with the idea that Shane is willing to shoot someone to save them. Or as one self-righteous farmer puts it when Shane warns the sod-busters about the dangers of the cattlemen’s hired gun, Wilson, “I don’t want no part of gun-slinging. Murder’s a better name.” Shane himself appears impatient with gradual change and seems to believe that he alone, not the distant law, can stop the murderous bullies.
The movie ends in classic tragic-hero fashion: Shane rides into cattlemen’s town alone, wins his gunfights, is wounded, and finally rides off alone into the stormy Grand Tetons — content that he rid the farmers’ valley of the hired guns. The means he used to save the sod-busters are precisely those that must have no place in an agrarian world that, thanks to him, is now peaceful. Only a small boy, Joey, will yell out, “Shane! Come back!”
Stevens leaves the exact fate of Shane is doubt — at least sort of. We do not know the true extent of his wounds. And where will he end up on the trail? As a gunfighter, he can never settle down in the turn-of-the-century, civilizing West that no longer has a place for either him or his enemies.
Or, as Shane puts it at the end of the movie to Joey, the son of his farming hosts:
A man has to be what he is. . . . Can’t break the mold. There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.
In less melodramatic fashion, we see variances of the Shane paradox in all aspects of our lives, and we are now also witnessing something similar to it in the current Trump administration, especially in these confusing and unsettled times after the midterms.
Two years ago, as the 2016 election approached, neither party seemed to have an answer to lots of seemingly insolvable issues: ten years of a stagnant economy, when we failed to achieve the old standard of 3 percent annualized GDP growth; a dangerously open border and massive illegal immigration; serial optional, costly, and indecisive military misadventures abroad; an increasingly defiant, lawless, and ascendant China; a fossilized NATO alliance unwilling to meet its investment commitments; a de-industrialized and written-off red-state interior; identity-politics tribalism as the new norm; and a deer-in-the-headlights impotent political class.
To the degree that either party offered possible solutions, the establishment, like the wary sodbusters, seemed to think that they were even worse than the original problems, whether those solutions meant systematic deregulation, a Neanderthal border wall, less utopian internationalism and more self-interested nationalism, offending Europeans, dreaded tariffs, a taboo interest in the plight of the white lower-middle class, or an ossified idea that immigration should be legal, diverse, measured, and meritocratic.
In early 2015, it looked as though Republicans would nominate the third Bush, Jeb, against the Democrats’ second Clinton, Hillary. In some sense, the public could neither win nor lose: There was little risk that either likely nominee would as president disrupt the status quo, and yet the status quo was also slowly ossifying America.
Neither Jeb nor Hillary would run on “Make America Great Again.”
They’d prefer something similar to the Obama administration’s idea of slow and managed decline, putting the U.S. more on par with other nations — and deservedly so given our relative un-exceptionalism and our horror-filled past.
The idea of welcoming in the gunslinger-outsider Trump was deemed absurd. To the extent that we sod-busters had contemplated something similar (a Ross Perot candidacy in 1992 and 1996) or actually voted in larger-than-life “problem solvers” (Governors Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California), the results had ranged from unimpressive to disastrous.
Then came 2016, and the public turned to Trump, despite his lurid personal history. Voters did not ask too much about Trump’s checkered but admittedly successful business career; they assumed that he somehow had enough skills to become a billionaire, despite having to navigate New York City’s unions, politicians, community organizers, regulators, environmentalists, tax collectors, and tough competitors. So perhaps the fewer questions about Trump’s past, the better. Trump himself joked that he had few good traits, and that had he taken to drink, he would have become “the worst.” (As he put it recently: “I can honestly say I’ve never had a beer in my life. It’s one of my only good traits. I don’t drink. Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be? I would be the world’s worst.”)
Trump himself seemed to welcome the idea of riding into Washington, becoming a settled politician, at least for a while, and standing up for his sod-buster red-state base against the proverbial barons of globalization, the swamp, and the bi-coastal elite.
But Trump had achieved success not by temporizing and splitting the difference, much less by euphemisms and “presidential” comportment. Rather, he was flamboyant, controversial, blunt, often cruel, and apparently indifferent to the controversies and even animus that he inspired in the pillars of the establishment. One of the brilliant nuances in Stevens’s film is that he hints that the smiling, nice-guy Shane is not always such a nice guy, as we glimpse in the retro verbal insult he lobs to provoke a fatal shoot-out with Wilson and his bosses: “I’ve heard that you’re a low-down Yankee liar.”
Trump has often tried to act the part of a president, despite the nonstop media criticism and the 24/7, 360-degree Resistance that has pulled out all the stops, declaring him an ethically corrupt profiteer and authoritarian, physically unfit, and mentally unhinged — in any case, subject to removal by either impeachment or the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
But as the centrists of the suburbs showed in the recent midterm elections, those who saw Trump as necessary in 2016 may now see him as optional in 2018 — and probably because of his successes rather than his failures. In other words, good times allow well-off voters to forget bad times. Success breeds options. They are freed to turn their attention to the controversial means that had achieved for them their desired ends.
The once impossible is now deemed ordinary. The third-quarter 2018 economic and monthly employment reports have set near records.
Between July and September 2018, the U.S. economy expanded at a 3.5 percent clip. That was the first time in a decade that it had exceeded 3 percent growth over a consecutive twelve-month period. In October alone, the economy added a quarter million new jobs. That number included 1,000 manufacturing jobs a day.
Unemployment has dipped to 3.7 percent, the lowest peacetime jobless rate in a half century. There are now more unfilled jobs than the number of those unemployed. Wages grew 3.1 percent in 2018.
The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits fell to just 1.63 million. That was the lowest since 1973, when there were 120 million fewer Americans. The U.S. is now the largest producer of coal, natural gas, and oil in the world.
Trump more or less achieved such success by helping the Congress ram through tax reform. He ignored hysterical criticism as he deregulated on a massive scale and green-lighted the largest energy expansion in recent history. Trump jawboned corporations to stop outsourcing and offshoring. He bullied allies and rivals to trade fairly rather than freely.
In other words, the outsider and gunslinger Trump, as president, used the same brutal and at times unsavory skills he had picked up in the private sector. Daily, Trump tweeted retorts to his myriad of attackers. No one was too small or too big to win exemption: All that mattered was that if anyone drew first on Trump, he would empty his six-shooter back, in a way quite disturbing even to those who had once invited him in.
Two years later, then, the hostile reaction to Trump is a sort of proof of his success.
Recently ex-president Barack Obama barnstormed the country trashing Trump. No longer was he ridiculing the candidate Trump of 2016 as a faker who would need a “magic wand” to get the economy to a promised 3 percent rate of GDP growth. Instead, Obama claimed that Trump was merely running on the fumes of Obama’s own supposedly successful presidency. After eight years of (unimpressive) investment, Trump is unfairly receiving the belated dividends, Obama says, and is being unduly lauded for 44’s unheralded work.
Now we hear that Hillary Clinton, while in Europe, suggested closing borders to the West and admitted that massive illegal immigration is disrupting the social stability of Europe and by implication the United States. Who knows, she may soon talk of a border wall, albeit no doubt dressed with Diego Rivera–like murals and smiley faces.
Only rarely does a naïve but honest op-ed writer confess that Trump’s punitive measures against Vladimir Putin have dwarfed those of the reset Obama administration, or that his energy policy has cut into OPEC and Russian oil profits. In some sense, Trump is Saudi Arabia’s greatest threat, given that fracking and vast new American oil production have weakened the kingdom’s grip over the West.
But mostly the press and the Resistance focus on Trump’s crassness. This past week, they were appalled for the nth time by Trump —because he dared to say that the federal circuit court of northern California is politicized and often used by progressives as a means of stopping Trump, and because he noted that terrible forest management resulted in California’s recent infernos of death and destruction, and because he frankly stated that the status quo, and long engagement with Saudi Arabia, should not be thrown away because of a crown prince’s atrocious medieval murdering of an internal and likely Islamist dissident.
How then did Shane end up?
Likely limping away alone and uncredited back among the sod-busters of Wyoming.
Never has suburban America done better economically. It certainly appreciates that North Korea is not threatening nuclear-tipped missile launches at the West Coast. It likes the idea that the U.S. is producing more oil than either Saudi Arabia or Russia. If polls are an indication, it certainly does not want throngs of illegal aliens crashing through the southern border. And it probably thinks that China has no business cheating its way to world dominance.
But suburban dwellers seem embarrassed, of late, that the solutions to these once intractable dilemmas came from someone with a dubious past and a habit of saying and doing things incompatible with their own suburban norms. And they are learning that Trump can no more stop tweeting or ridiculing than Shane could put down his guns (“There’s no going back”). I don’t think the sod-busters in later years ever put up a statue to Shane, the liberator.
Whether Trump rides out wounded in 2020 or 2024, he will likely do so as a lonely figure — and perhaps he will not be appreciated or even especially missed by the very people he benefited.
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2)
PM: Israel improving ties around world without having to concede settlements
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a Likud faction meeting in the Israeli parliament on November 26, 2018. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Amid visits of friendly leaders and reports of new diplomatic channels with Arab countries, Netanyahu says country’s strength means deal with Palestinians no longer prerequisite.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said recent signs of a diplomatic flourishing for Israel were occurring without Jerusalem having to make any concessions on West Bank settlements, as he celebrated the visit of Chad’s leader after decades of ruptured ties.
Israel has also recently ramped up contacts with a number of Arab countries that, until recently, had shunned any appearance of even informal ties with the Jewish state. Reports Sunday indicated Israel was working toward establishing diplomatic channels with Sudan and Bahrain.
Most Arab countries insist Israel must reach a peace deal with the Palestinians before any normalization can take place. But in recent years attitudes in some parts of the region have seemingly shifted, and Netanyahu said Israel was forging ahead with the ties despite West Bank settlements continuing to grow and peace talks being stagnant.
“We are opening up the world,” he told his Likud faction in public remarks Monday. “Israel is enjoying unprecedented diplomatic flourishing, including in the Arab world… and the Muslim world.”
View of the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Hever, in the Har Hebron Regional Council, April 19, 2015. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Netanyahu stressed that previous leaders had attempted to strengthen Israel’s international standing with “dangerous concessions, including uprooting communities,” referring to the 2005 disengagement plan by former prime minister Ariel Sharon, in which all settlements in the Gaza Strip were dismantled.
“That hasn’t happened — and won’t happen — with me,” Netanyahu continued. “The exact opposite is happening. We are getting the world’s support, including by many in the Arab world, through our strong and steadfast standing.
“We believe in peace out of strength, we believe in alliances born out of Israel’s value as a technological, financial, defense and intelligence powerhouse,” he added. “That’s what we will continue doing, and that’s also how we’ll achieve peace.”
Netanyahu opened his public remarks by hailing visiting Czech President Milos Zeman, for pledging to move his country’s embassy to Jerusalem; and Chadian President Idriss Déby, who, on Sunday, told Israeli leaders in Jerusalem that he wishes to restore diplomatic relations.
The premier said that Déby had invited him to visit Chad and that he had “happily” accepted the invitation.
Déby’s historic visit is part of a campaign to lay the groundwork for normalizing ties with the Muslim-majority countries of Sudan, Mali and Niger, according to a report on Israel’s Channel 10 News Sunday.
Other reports said Israel was also working to normalize relations with Bahrain, as Jerusalem ramps up its drive to forge more open relations with the Arab world amid shifting alliances in the Middle East driven by shared concerns over Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) prepares to shake hands with Chadian President Idriss Déby as they deliver joint statements in Jerusalem, November 25, 2018. (Ronen Zvulun/Pool/AFP)
Netanyahu has for years spoken about the warming of ties between Israel and the Arab world, citing not only Iran as a common enemy, but also many countries’ interest in cooperating with Israel on security and defense matters, as well as Israel’s growing high-tech industry.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) talks with Sultan Qaboos bin Said in Oman, October 26, 2018. (Courtesy)
Oman last month welcomed the Israeli premier in a surprise visit, an apparent sign of Israeli progress in improving ties with the Gulf states.
At a security conference in Bahrain following the visit, Omani foreign minister also offered rare words of support for the Jewish state.
“Israel is a state present in the region, and we all understand this. The world is also aware of this fact, and maybe it is time for Israel to be treated the same and also bear the same obligations,” Yussef bin Alawi bin Abdullah said, according to Reuters.
During a press conference with Déby on Sunday, Netanyahu remarked that “there will be more such visits in Arab countries very soon,” without providing details.
President Reuven Rivlin (right) meets with his Czech counterpart, Milos Zeman, in Jerusalem, November 26, 2018. (Czech Presidency/Twitter)
Earlier Monday, during his visit to Israel, Czech President Zeman expressed skepticism over the possibility of a two-state solution. He told President Reuven Rivlin he was interested in learning more about alternative approaches to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Zeman, an outspoken supporter of Israel, arrived on Sunday evening for a three-day state visit, during which he will inaugurate the so-called “Czech House” in Jerusalem, an office space billed by Prague as a “first step” toward moving the country’s embassy to the city.
In April, Zeman announced the beginning of a process that will move the country’s diplomatic mission from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, though it remains unclear if and when Prague will actually open an embassy in the holy city.
2a) Netanyahu to fly to Chad 'soon' to reestablish diplomatic ties
2a) Netanyahu to fly to Chad 'soon' to reestablish diplomatic ties
By Herb Keinon
The Prime Minister's Office said the ties would be focused on agriculture, water, solar energy and technology, among other fields.
Netanyahu meets with the president of Chad, November 27, 2018 (GPO)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Chad “soon” to formally announce the establishment of diplomatic ties, the Prime Minister's Office announced on Tuesday.
The announcement came after Netanyahu met for the third time in two days with visiting Chad President Idriss Déby, before the latter ended his two-day visit, the first ever by a Chadian president.
According to the statement, the two leaders discussed “common threats” and the war against terrorism.
Chad is on the front lines in Africa in the battle against radical Islamic terrorism, be it in the form of Boko Haram or organizations affiliated with the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. The desire for Israel expertise in fighting terror is believed to be one of the main reasons Déby decided to renew ties with Israel, 46 years after Chad severed formal diplomatic ties.
The PMO statement said the two leaders also discussed cooperation in the fields of agriculture, border protection, technology, solar energy, water and health.
On Sunday, the two leaders issued statements to the press after their first meeting.
“In the last two years I've been three times in Africa,” Netanyahu said. “East Africa and West Africa. Now I'm going to drop a big hint, I hope to come to the center of Africa. And I wish to bring with me Israeli entrepreneurs, Israeli experts, Israeli companies, everything that can improve the life of the peoples of Africa, which is something we believe in. Israel is coming back to Africa, Africa is coming back to Israel.”
Netanyahu went to Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia in July 2016 for the first visit to the continent by an Israeli prime minister in nearly 30 years; to Liberia in June 2017 for a summit meeting with western African leaders; and to Kenya in November 2017 for the inauguration of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
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3) Professor Thinks Banning These Words Would Fix Free Speech on College Campuses
University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax is accustomed to political wrong think.
Wax has a bachelor’s degree from Yale College, a medical degree from Harvard, and a law degree from Columbia. But none of those was enough to exempt her from being on the receiving end of a full-fledged campaign to get her fired. Nor was arguing 15 cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Justice Department, but that’s beside the point.
Wax doesn’t fear being called racist, sexist, or xenophobic, probably because she’s been called many of those names before. Instead of retreating to the safety of her tenure when things get tough, she doubles down—demanding debate, evidence, and accountability.
Students and colleagues alike have attacked Wax for making the apparently offensive case that traditional marriage values lead to better results for children, and for putting forth the radical argument that many of the country’s problems are a symptom of the breakdown of the “bourgeois culture” (the 1940s and ’50s way of life).
In making that argument, Wax addressed the fact that things weren’t perfect back then, but like clockwork, her critics called her “racist and classist” anyway.
The straw that really broke the camel’s back, however, happened when student activists searching for dirt on Wax unearthed a 2017 podcast interview she did with economist and Brown University professor Glenn Loury.
In the interview, Wax said this when addressing the issue of affirmative action: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of [my] class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the first half of my required first-year Civil Procedure course.”
Grades at the University of Pennsylvania are name-blind (meaning the instructor covers up students’ names prior to grading), so Wax says it’d be impossible to discriminate.
Critics jumped on her statement, interpreting it to mean “Amy Wax said black students can’t excel in law school.” Eventually, the University of Pennsylvania Law School relieved Wax of her teaching duties for first-year law students.
In a Nov. 8 speech at The Heritage Foundation, Wax talked about the fallout of her politically incorrect statements in depth, and put forth tangible ideas about how to counter a radical, identity-based grievance culture that’s now rampant in university life.
First and foremost, Wax said, “Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth.” She said:
That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work. But it also is not for the faint of heart. And that is a lesson that is almost never transmitted today. That offense, bruising thoughts, and unpleasant facts simply go with the territory. They are an intrinsic feature of an open society, and they never can be entirely avoided.
Next, Wax argued for censorship of speech—but not in the way you might think.
Here are her ideas, implemented as guidelines in her seminars and upper-level classes, lightly edited for clarity:
No one can be heard to say, ‘I’m offended.’ They all have permission to be offended. But they just can’t express it.No one is allowed to accuse anyone else, in the classroom or out, dead or alive, of being racist, sexist, xenophobic, white supremist, or any other derisive, identity-based label. No slurs or name-calling. These don’t enlighten, educate, or edify. They add nothing. Give us an argument. Tell us why the other person is wrong.No one can complain to administrators—those officious thought police—about anything said in class.Finally, both the government and private donors need to rethink the lavish financial support for higher education, and especially for elite and selective institutions, which serve only a teeny-tiny portion of our population and which in many ways, I’m afraid, have become an anti-Western and anti-American liability.How can we get the rich to see that supporting elite universities today might not be the wisest and more fruitful uses of their hard-earned money? What we need is a list of alternative causes and alternative institutions and goals for their money that help ordinary, average, unspecial people who have been unduly neglected by our elites and our increasingly walled off from them.
Wax expressed doubt that classrooms on college campuses would adopt these guidelines anytime soon.
“The question is whether there’s any hope of such protocols being implemented on a wide scale. In the current climate, I doubt it,” she said.
Until then, she expects the threat against politically incorrect professors will get worse.
“Professors who hold unpopular positions or state inconvenient facts are now considered psychologically toxic,” Wax said, adding:
If their presence causes offense, distress, feelings of insult, fears of ill treatment, that is enough to eject them from the classroom. And of course, these perceptions and feelings are subjective, they are self-confirming, they are immune from challenge. It’s all in the mind of the beholder. And the beholder’s mind reigns supreme.
Hear more from Amy Wax in The Daily Signal’s upcoming edition of “Problematic Women,” where we ask her about #MeToo, feminism, and gender roles.
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