MercatorNet: What the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) to religious freedom last week

MercatorNet: What the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) to religious freedom last week

In Hobby Lobby, the Court ruled that a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), applied to the case, and that it covered “any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” The only question that government could consider was not the truth or reasonableness or centrality of the religious belief, but only whether the belief were sincere, which was not doubted in the case of these companies. Interestingly, RFRA had passed in 1993 by overwhelming majorities of both houses of Congress. This is because religious freedom, like free speech, is a vital part of our legal heritage and until recently, viewed as axiomatic.
The Court said that companies were legal persons within the meaning of RFRA, an unexceptional view dating back to the Middle Ages, when the Church, as the Body or Corpus of Christ, was viewed as a corporation with legal personality. Citing William Blackstone, the authoritative expounder of the common law at the time of the American founding, the Court recognized that there were two types of corporations, ecclesiastical and lay, and that lay corporations could also have eleemosynary and religious purposes. (The amicus brief I filed in support of Hobby Lobby for four non-profit corporations made the same point, also citing Blackstone.)
Because of the political firestorm that erupted several years ago when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of corporate free-speech rights in the Citizens United case, which President Obama had denounced in his State of the Union address, this question of the First Amendment rights of corporations, and specifically whether for-profit corporations were legal persons, has become politicized. Even so, two of the liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan, did not join that part of Ginsburg’s dissent that said that for-profit corporations were not legal persons.
As Justice Alito pointed out for the majority, “it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction [that corporations are legal ‘persons’] is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organizations used by human beings to achieve desired ends … When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people.”
Since corporations, or at least closely-held family-run companies, can claim to exercise religion, the law requires that if their religious exercise is substantially burdened, then the government must show both that it is seeking to achieve compelling government interests, and that it is doing so in the least religiously restrictive way possible: a demanding ends and means test. If the government passes the test, the matter belongs to Caesar. If not, then it belongs to God and the religious conscience of believers.
Justice Kennedy concurred by saying that while free contraceptives for women was a compelling government interest, the government had a lesser restrictive alternative in that it could either provide the contraceptive coverage itself or extend the accommodation HHS was already giving religions non-profits, to for-profit closely-held companies with religious objections. Because he was the swing vote, the majority had to assume for the sake of argument that there was a compelling interest in free contraceptives, though the prevalence of exceptions in the regulation for grandfathered companies, companies with less than 50 employees, and Churches and other religious organizations, makes that very questionable. If it’s so important to government, then why is it handing out exemptions like party favors to all those except for-profit companies with religious objections?
And so the majority ruled that the huge fines the families faced for not covering the abortifacient contraceptives did constitute a substantial burden on their religious practice, and that even assuming a compelling government interest in support of the regulation, the government had failed to show that cost-free access to these contraceptives was the least-restrictive means of achieving its desired goal. Either the government could assume the cost itself, or extend the accommodation it already was giving non-profit employers with religious objections to the mandate.
The Court went on to say that its ruling did not necessarily apply to vaccinations or blood transfusions, not did it provide a shield to employers illegally discriminating on religious grounds. Those matters will have to wait for another day.

I was struck by how over-the-top much reaction to the Hobby Lobby case was, as if, all of a sudden, applying a law intended to protect religious freedom to the facts of a particular case were a threat to civil liberties.
Justice Ginsburg, for example, calls it a “decision of startling breadth,” and demonstrates that she is opposed to RFRA, in spite of the careful hedging of the majority’s opinion. In front of the Supreme Court building the Monday that the decision was issued, there were contending demonstrators. The pro-government contingent had a slogan, “My birth control is none of your business.” Precisely. That’s what the companies were saying: Get your hand out of my pocket.
As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s full-page ad in the New York Times asserted, quoting retired Justice John Paul Stevens, “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” Taranto retorted: “Then shut up.” But of course corporations, like the people who comprise them, can be hypocritical too.

No, the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision is not based upon a scientific mistake - The Washington Post

No, the Supreme Court’s <em>Hobby Lobby</em> decision is not based upon a scientific mistake - The Washington Post

There are reasonable arguments to be made against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, but the charge that the decision is based on science fiction is not among them.  The scientific soundness of a religious objector’s beliefs is not at issue in religious liberty cases and, even if it were, there was a reasonable (if not uncontroversial) basis for the specific factual claims upon which Hobby Lobby’s claim was based.

In Hobby Lobby, the Greens and the Hahns (the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, respectively) claimed that providing insurance coverage for four forms of contraception would violate their religious beliefs.  They claimed that this is because they believe the four forms of contraception at issue (“Plan B,” Ella, and two types of IUD) are capable of terminating a pregnancy.  In making this claim, the Greens and the Hahns embraced the view that a pregnancy begins at conception, rather than at implantation (which is how pregnancy is defined by most medical authorities and under federal law).  This is not relevant, however.  They could have also claimed that pregnancy begins when a woman is visited by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that the challenged forms of contraception chase the Spaghetti Monster away.  Under RFRA, a religious adherent’s beliefs are taken as a given precisely because many religious claims will strike non-believers as strange or incredible.  There’s no scientific evidence for transubstantiation, but that would hardly matter to a RFRA claim that imposed a substantial burden on those who wish to partake in communion.

As Bagley notes further, the federal government accepted the plaintiffs’ characterization of the scientific evidence, if not their conclusion that preventing implantation of an egg is the equivalent of an abortion.  The Food & Drug Administration’s website notes that all four forms of disputed contraception may prevent implantation, as do the FDA-approved labels (as noted in footnote 4 of the government’s brief).  An amicus brief submitted at the certiorari stage on behalf of medical organizations disputes whether it is proper to label these contraceptive methods as “abortifacients,” insofar as they all act before the start of a pregnancy (implantation). Yet, as Ed Whelan notes, the brief also concedes the possibility that these contraceptive methods may prevent implantation.
Assuming, as the weight of current scientific evidence suggests, that it is exceedingly rare for any of these methods to prevent implantation or otherwise cause the termination of a fertilized egg, it is not unscientific to adopt a more precautionary position due to religious or moral concerns, and it is hardly “anti-science” for the courts to accept such a religious belief when evaluating a RFRA claim.  The plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby advanced a claim based on religious belief, and that is how all nine justices on the Court treated it.
Science retains substantial authority in our political discourse.  This makes it appealing to tar one’s political opponents with an “anti-science” brush. Yet in their zeal to affix the “anti-science” label to the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby critics have gotten ahead of themselves.  Whatever the merits of other critiques of the Hobby Lobby opinion, this one falls apart.

Things Progressives Know That Just Aren't So, Part I - Greed [WeirdDave]

Things Progressives Know That Just Aren't So, Part I - Greed [WeirdDave]

This is the first in a series of occasional posts in which I will muse upon things that our progressive brothers and sisters take as a given, and why they are so wrong.
Greed. This is one of the big arrows in the prog's ad hominem quiver. "Why are you conservatives so greedy?". "Corporations are greedy.". "The greed of the 1% keeps us sterling OWS 99%ers poor! Wah!". And so on, and so on, and so on. Let's examine this, shall we?
Conservatives are far more greedy than progressives Really? The core of our philosophy is the right of the individual to keep the fruits of their labors. We're not the ones who seek to take more and more money from other people in order to "do good". We don't think that it's right to redistribute wealth by force in the name of "social justice". Conservatives believe "Keep it, you earned it" while progressives say "Gimmie, I can use it better than you can, you don't deserve it, I do". Conservatism is a philosophy of greed while progressives are altruists? In a pig's eye. Greedy conservatives even give more to charity than kind hearted progressives. Which philosophy encourages greed again?
Greed is good? Good old Gordon Gecko. The famous "Greed is good" diatribe, liberal Hollywood's distortion of the words of Milton Friedman, deployed to make the business community look like heartless bastards. The thing is, most conservatives, listening to that speech, find it hard to discount it completely, because it comes so close to expressing the core principles that we believe. Seeing our hesitation, the prog pounces: "HA! You DO think greed is good! Greedy right wing bastard!" and then uses this straw man to dismiss our arguments. Greed is not "good", because greed implies the desire to possess something not earned, something that one is not entitled to. In the climactic paragraph, Gecko says "greed-for lack of a better word-is good". Well, I have a better word, several in fact. If billionaire Gecko could have spent $4.95 on a thesaurus, he might have come out with something that every conservative would embrace and defend without hesitation. Try this:
"Ambition is right. Desire works. Drive clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. An individual's desire to better them self, in all of its forms -- in life, financially, in love, in knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And that drive -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."
Same basic speech, same basic words, but now it's a clear statement of conservative principle that I would be proud to claim as my own. This is tactic # 5 in the progressive playbook: Distort the clear meaning of words to muddy the argument. So, if greed is not good, what is it?
Greed is natural Greed is part of the flawed human condition. Everyone is greedy to a greater or lesser extent. Some people are greedy for money. Some for power. Some for love, some for recognition, some for fame, some for Hummel figurines. Some for all of these things, some for none. The fact of the matter is that greed lives in the human heart, and all of the wailing and moaning in the world won't change that one simple fact. Even progs recognize this, though they're loath to admit it, which brings us to the final point on our journey.
Greed must be constrained And here's where the prog goes completely off the rails, although he winds up in the
same place he always does. His solution to containing greed is to empower the government. More rules, more laws, more regulations. Tighter and tighter control. Gotta reign in those evil conservatives, those nasty corporations, those distasteful free thinking individuals. Tighten the screws, lock down the hatches, Mr. Spock, we need governmentwarp factor 10! You can blow this all out of the water with one simple question, and in so doing the only answer left to the prog is the same sad one that's been repeated throughout human history. "Mr. Prog", you will ask, "What makes you think that people in government are any less greedy that people outside of government?"
Stammering will ensue, but if he's real hard core, he'll give you the only answer left to him: Well, government can train greed out of people. Yup, all we need is total control, we'll teach children not to be greedy, we'll stigmatize greed right out of the human condition. In other words, the solution is to create the New Soviet Man, again. As soon as humans stop being human, why, it'll be Nirvana. Anyone who has studied history knows how that ends.
The conservative knows that in order to constrain greed, we need a system that does it naturally. Fortunately, we have just such a system: The free market. Corporations and governments may both be inclined towards greed, but the market naturally punishes corporations for indulging. How long would Wal-Mart stay in business if it made a habit of screwing its customers, priced its goods exorbitantly or really abused its employees the way leftists want you to believe that it does? Not long. Everybody would go to Target. The market naturally restrains greed. Government, on the other hand, protects greed. Over 1000 vets died so that government workers in Phoenix could get their bonus checks. Nobody went to jail, nobody has even lost their job. Can you honestly say that a corporation that callously killed 1000 folks would walk away unscathed? Of course not. That corporation would be out of business (spare me cigarette companies please, they provide something that an individual uses to kill himself. Different situation altogether. Guns too), people would stop patronizing them. Let me say it again: The market naturally restrains greed. Government, on the other hand, protects greed. Progs believe the opposite.
And that right there is what progs know about greed that just isn't so.

Hobby Lobby wins before the Supreme Court - The Washington Post

Hobby Lobby wins before the Supreme Court - The Washington Post

Text of the decision

Hobby Lobby: The Left Is Weeping Hot, Bitter Tears, and It Should | National Review Online

Hobby Lobby: The Left Is Weeping Hot, Bitter Tears, and It Should | National Review Online

Andrew’s and Molly’s post reflecting the hysterical reaction on the Left to theHobby Lobby decision makes for both entertaining and instructive reading. It’s entertaining because — regarding the issue they claim to care most about, access to contraceptives — the decision blocks exactly no one from obtaining the drugs they choose to purchase. There’s just slightly less free stuff on the market. This is hardlyHandmaid’s Tale territory.
It’s instructive because it demonstrates the extent to which the Left is emotionally and ideologically committed to the power of the regulatory state. For some time, the Left has been selling the public and the courts on the notion that somehow the act of forming a corporation and opening for business operates as an effective waiver of your most basic liberties, including free speech, free exercise of religion, and virtually the entire panoply of property rights. In effect, your business is not “your” business at all, but instead all aspects of its operations exist at the whim of the state, and if the state wants to draft you into its child-killing abortion crusade — or wants to muzzle you during political campaigns – then you best salute and fall in line.
By holding that RFRA protects closely-held businesses, the Supreme Court upheld not just the plain meaning of federal statutes but also common sense.

Dear Emptyheaded Left Wing Writers

Dear Emptyheaded Left Wing Writers

Please stop saying that a corporation is a "fictitious person" as part of your case in chief against the Hobby Lobby decision.
For one thing, you sound stupid. Not because this is untrue, but rather because it is obviously true, and 90% of all literate people not only know "corporations are fictitious people" but in fact have known this since long before you apparently did.

Secondly, and here I fear I will lose you completely because this is going to get slightly abstract and logical, the fact that "corporations are fictitious persons" actually destroys your arguments, rather than strengthens them, which, if you'd bother to have read the Hobby Lobby case, which you have not and will not, ever, you'd already know.
See, a corporation is a fictitious person. It is a made-up designation, created by state law, to permit business concerns to live longer than the lifespan of a natural person.
It is a fictitious person. It is not a real person. Fictitious -- an imaginary construct of the law.
Think about what that means.
This means that in a closely-held corporation -- where five or fewer people control the majority of shares (and in fact usually control all of it) -- the "corporation" does not exist in any real way, except for its listing in the tax records of a state.
In a small closely-held corporation, "the corporation" only means "these five guys right here."
The Supreme Court did not acknowledge that corporations quacorporations (look up "qua" on your own time, idiots) have "religious freedoms." Rather, it recognized the obvious -- that in the case of a closely-held corporation, the corporation being a fictitious entity and all, an imposition of a duty on "the corporation" is in reality just an imposition of a duty on the five or fewer people (often one or two) who own it.Thus, when we say the Hobby Lobby corporation must provide abortifacient drugs to its employees, this is precisely the same as laying this responsibility on the five or fewer individual persons (who definitely have the right to religious freedom) to provide abortifacient drugs to their employees.Given that the corporation is a fictitious entity of no tangible presence (something you seem so delighted to have recently learned), forcing the corporation to provide abortions is precisely the same as forcing the family who owns Hobby Lobby to provide them.
You see? You see what your problem is here?
I mean, one of your problems. You have many, beginning with the facts that 1 you are not terribly well educated and 2 you seem to believe you are extremely well educated.
Now, in a very large corporation, what we call a "publicly traded" corporation, wherein many thousands (or even millions) of persons might have shares and thus ownership interests in this fictitious person, one could very easily make the case that each individual shareholder is so attenuated from actual control of the corporation that to impose a duty on the corporation does not implicate the individual shareholder at all, or implicates him so slightly, so trivially, that we can round down and simply say "Forcing Exxon to provide abortion drugs should not offend the conscience of Exxon's thousands of owners."
We could say in that case that an imposition on the corporation has no real implication for the individual owner. He would own, what, one thousand shares out of over ten million shares of the decision to provide abortion services?
A very diffuse responsibility indeed.
But you cannot make this claim when a family of four owns almost all of the stock in a corporation. In that case, the burdens placed on this fictitious entity are actually burdens on the people -- Unless you idiots want to make the case that this fictitious entity that has so mesmerized you actually has the tangible quality of being areal person whose actions do not implicate its real-person owners.But then in that case you shouldn't keep saying it's a fictitious person-- you should be arguing it's close enough to a real person to be treated as such.You should be arguing that a corporation is so close to real that we should say a burden on it means nothing at all to its owners-- who are just third-parties with barely anything at all to do with the real person being burdened. The real person being burdened (in this argument) is the corporation, which is basically a totes real person, and no other people are burdened at all.

And it seems to me if the courts had ruled that a corporation is a legal human being, it would be illegal to own one.

#12 – "I Prefer Security to Freedom" : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

#12 – "I Prefer Security to Freedom" : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Summary

• True security is an outgrowth of freedom, not an alternative to it.
• Being dependent, instead of being independent, is a move away from true security.
• Read’s observation more than half a century ago that increasing reliance on a welfare state for security would produce financial problems seems positively prescient today. Consider our $17.5 trillion national debt as evidence.
• The real choice is not between freedom and security but between security and insecurity.
• For further information, see these articles:

“Victims of Social Leveling” by Leonard E. Read: http://www.fee.org/files/docLib/SocialLeveling.pdf

“Big Government—Big Risk” by David R. Henderson: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/big-government-big-risk

“Freedom vs. Security: The False Alternative” by Noah Stahl: http://theundercurrent.org/freedom-versus-security-the-false-alternative/

“Liberty or Security?” by Bas Van Der Vossen:http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/06/liberty-or-security/

The Hobby Lobby majority, summarized in (relatively) plain English - The Washington Post

The Hobby Lobby majority, summarized in (relatively) plain English - The Washington Post

1. Congress has decided that religious objectors may go to court to demand religious exemptions from federal laws, when the law makes them do things that they view as religiously forbidden. That’s not required as a constitutional matter under the Free Exercise Clause; the Court decided that in Employment Division v. Smith (1990). But in enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), Congress chose to give religious objectors a statutory right to such exemptions, at least in many cases:

Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion

even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, …

[unless the Government] demonstrates that application of the burden to the person …

is the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.

2. RFRA doesn’t exclude laws which impose a burden on closely held religious corporations. To be sure, a corporation is a legal fiction; it cannot itself practice religion, or for that matter do anything else. It acts only through people.

But — precisely because a corporation is just a legal fiction — when a law requires such a corporation to do something that its owners believe to be religiously forbidden, it burdens the religious freedom of those real owners, and not just of the fictional corporation itself. “[P]rotecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby … protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.”

3. The owners of Hobby Lobby sincerely believe that it’s wrong for them to buy their employees insurance plans that they see as supporting abortion. They have no objection to contraception as such, but they view contraceptives that prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg as tantamount to abortion drugs.

The government acknowledges that its regulations require businesses to pay for such contraceptives (on pain of substantial monetary penalties). Therefore the law substantially burdens the owners’ religious practices, by requiring them to do something they think religiously forbidden.

To be sure, the law doesn’t require the employers to personally get abortions or perform abortions. But the employers sincerely believe that even buying insurance policies that pay for such abortions is religiously forbidden complicity in abortion.

It’s not for courts to second-guess the reasonableness of such judgments about how to define religiously forbidden complicity. “[T]he Hahns and Greens and their companies sincerely believe that providing the insurance coverage demanded by the HHS regulations lies on the forbidden side of the line, and it is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial.”

4. Of course, the legal system has many rules that require people to do what they think religiously wrong (or, the legal equivalent, to not do what they think religiously required). Not all religious exemptions can be granted. RFRA provides that, if denying the exemption is really the least restrictive means of serving a compelling government interest, a court should indeed deny the exemption.

But “[t]he least-restrictive-means standard is exceptionally demanding.” Under RFRA, if the government can — even by changing the way its programs operate, and at some cost to taxpayers — both adequately serve its compelling interests and provide an exemption to religious objectors, then it must do so.

And here, the government can indeed both provide free contraceptives (as the regulations under the Congressionally enacted Affordable Care Act provide) and exempt religious objectors (as the Congressionally enacted Religious Freedom Restoration Act provides).

First, the government could pay for the contraceptives directly. Though that would cost taxpayer money, religious exemptions sometimes do cost money, and the extra cost would be a tiny fraction of the ACA’s $130 billion expense per year. Indeed, RFRA’s sister statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, provides that it “may require a government to incur expenses in its own operations to avoid imposing a substantial burden on religious exercise.”

Second, the government has already exempted some religious nonprofits from the law. Under this exemption, insurers would (1) exclude contraceptive coverage from the employer-paid health plan, and (2) separately pay for contraceptive coverage that the insurer would provide directly to the employees. (The government has concluded this is fair to insurers because the cost to them of contraceptives would be balanced by the savings from lower pregnancy costs and other health costs.) A similar plan is available for self-insured religious nonprofits.

These exemptions could easily be extended to for-profit religious objectors such as Hobby Lobby. Such an extension would mean the government can still ensure that contraceptives are provided at no cost to patients, but Hobby Lobby and similar objectors wouldn’t be required to do what they think their religions forbid.

5. This sort of accommodation is what Congress has mandated. When both the government’s compelling interests and religious objectors’ religious beliefs can be adequately accommodated, Congress said (in enacting RFRA) that they should be accommodated.

But Congress also said that these decisions must turn on the facts of each exemption request, and the options available for accommodating such accommodation requests. In future cases — for instance, ones involving race discrimination in employment, or insurance coverage for vaccination or blood transfusions — the result might be different.

It might not be possible in those cases (as it is in this case) to adequately accommodate both the government interests and the religious objections. If that’s so, then those religious exemptions would not have to be granted. Wisely or not, Congress has required courts to sort through religious exemption requests, granting some and denying others. This is what the Supreme Court has done here.

How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen - Dennis Hollier - The Atlantic

How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen - Dennis Hollier - The Atlantic

Shorthand -- a lost art

Different Races Exist. So What? - Reason.com

Different Races Exist. So What? - Reason.com

Wade does admit that "rapid change must be due to culture, not genetics." Just so. And what does he think has been happening over the past two centuries? Once the set of institutions that more or less define open societies came into existence, they began out-competing societies that did not have those institutions. In his 1991 book The World Revolution of Westernization, the Yale historian Theodore von Laue describes how the spread of Western institutions by means of both arms and intellectual seduction has provoked resistance but is displacing other economic and political arrangements. And Western institutions—with fits and starts—have been spreading and adopted by other human groups.
For example, according to the Fraser Institute's economic freedom calculations, the "average level of economic freedom...has increased from 5.30 in 1980 to 5.76 in 1990 to 6.71 in 2000 and finally to 6.83 in 2010." Freedom House similarly reports that the percent of free countries has risen from 25 percent in the 1970s to 46 percent today, and that the percent of not-free countries has correspondingly fallen from around 40 percent to 24 percent. Clearly genetic changes do not account for these significant shifts.
Wade concludes that his book is an attempt to "dispel the fear of racism" and to "begin to explore the far-reaching implications of the discovery that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional." Undoubtedly future researchers will more finely detail how cultural and genetic evolution have mutually reinforced one another to shape human behaviors. And perhaps the implications of their findings will be "far-reaching." But Wade simply hasn’t the data to back up his speculations.
In any case, whatever those future genetic findings might be, they will not be nearly as far-reaching in their implications as the discovery of the institutions of liberty.

(Mis)reading George Will - The Washington Post

(Mis)reading George Will - The Washington Post

Columnist George Will wrote a column recently that has attracted a tremendous amount of ire, including calls that the Washington Post fire him.  The St. Louis Dispatch has now announced that it’s replacing Will with Michael Gerson. The announcement reads in part: “The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.”
Putting aside for the moment any other concerns that critics may have with Will’s column, the latter allegation, that he specifically suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, is false.
What Will did write was the following:

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

So Will is making two points here. First, that university culture encourages students to perceive themselves as victims, and those that can credibly claim victimhood are sometimes given higher status. I don’t think that’s reasonably debatable, as it’s exactly what the apparently common trope, “check your privilege” is about; students seen as “privileged” by dint of skin color, sex, wealth, etc., should shut up and let the more authentic and wise voices of members of societies’ victim classes proliferate. And the general rule is, if you subsidize something, you get more of it, and there’s  no reason to think this wouldn’t include self-perceptions of victimhood or self-identification as a victim. It’s notable that a recent well-circulated column by a Princeton student taking exception to the “check your privilege” meme took pains to note that the author himself is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, the quintessential victims.

How Physician Licensing Hurts Medicine and Helps Pseudoscience : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

How Physician Licensing Hurts Medicine and Helps Pseudoscience : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, economist Milton Friedman speculated about an economic factor behind public acceptance of quack medicine. Friedman argued that physician licensing regulations created an economic incentive for substitutes to conventional medicine. He argued that licensure drastically cut the supply of medical professionals, driving consumers to unregulated alternatives.
“Whenever you establish a block to entry into any field, you establish an incentive to find ways of getting around it, and of course medicine is no exception. The rise of the professions of osteopathy and of chiropractic is not unrelated to the restriction of entry into medicine,” he argued. “On the contrary, each of these represented to some extent an attempt to find a way around restriction of entry.… These alternatives may well be of a lower quality than medical practice would have been without the restrictions on entry into medicine.”
Friedman explained that if licenses accomplish their purpose—keeping out marginal suppliers of medicine—then, for those who cannot afford a doctor, “the alternative is untrained practice by somebody; it may and in part must be by people who have no professional qualifications at all.” Friedman certainly had a point in 1962, but today, demand for alternative medicine comes primarily from people of greater means. Demand for basic care is inelastic and subsidized by the welfare state, while most alternative medical treatments aren’t covered by Medicaid, and the poor have less disposable income to spend on chiropractors, expensive supplements, and so on. In any case, licensing reduces supply, driving up the price of medical care, making substitutes look more attractive. The field becomes filled with quacks and snake oil salesmen, leading to more unqualified suppliers than would have prevailed under a free market with competitive private certification.
What is significant about the faith healer and the homeopath is not just that they tend to be cheaper than licensed doctors, but that they often fraudulently promise greater benefits for their service than even the best that medicine can provide. This situation would seem to indicate that the constraints imposed on the supply of health care by government may exacerbate the constraints placed on it by reality.
In nearly every case, what alternative medicine is actually selling is the placebo response, which is a real phenomenon that results from positive interactions with people you trust, whether they happen to wear lab coats or magic crystals. At the same time, because of the reduced supply, overqualified doctors spend a lot of time treating minor complaints. Their time is extremely valuable and in demand, creating high opportunity costs for talking with patients. Moreover, because third parties such as Medicare and insurance pay for nearly all health care, there is little competition between doctors, and almost none at all between doctors and less-skilled technicians who could treat simple complaints as effectively and at lower cost in a less-regulated environment.
These facts allow us to make two predictions that I believe are borne out. First, given the barriers to entry and cartel status of physicians, the quality of doctors' personal interactions with patients is likely to be lower than it would otherwise be. (For instance, one study found doctors listen to patients for just 23 seconds before interrupting them.) Second, people selling alternative and substitute services will compete on this margin by being friendlier, listening more, and promising extremely optimistic outcomes. The result for the patient is a placebo effect, and for society, a vast industry of well-intentioned but unqualified “alternative” providers.

George Will responds to senators on his sexual assault column - The Washington Post

George Will responds to senators on his sexual assault column - The Washington Post

Editor’s note: On Thursday, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Robert Casey (D-Pa.) sent a letter to Post columnist George Will objecting to his column published online last Friday about sexual assault on college campuses. Today, Will sent the senators a response. Here is an excerpt:



Dear Senators Blumenthal, Feinstein, Baldwin and Casey:

I have received your letter of June 12, and I am puzzled. You say my statistics “fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.” You do not mention which statistics, but those I used come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults.

The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.

I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”
As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.


Read the senators’ letter here, and Will’s response in full here.

Jon Stewart says those who watch Fox News are the "most consistently misinformed media viewers" | PolitiFact

Jon Stewart says those who watch Fox News are the "most consistently misinformed media viewers" | PolitiFact

• February 2007 Political Knowledge Survey. Pew asked respondents 23 questions, such as who the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit. The ability to answer 15 of these questions correctly earned the respondent a place in the "high knowledge" category.
Pew then categorized various media sources by the percentage of their followers who earned a high knowledge rating. The media outlets fell into three categories -- those that had 50 to 54 percent in the high knowledge group, those that had 40 to 49 percent in the high knowledge group, and those that had 34 to 39 percent in the high knowledge group.
In descending order, the 50-to-54 percent group included The Daily Show and its Comedy Central cousin, The Colbert Report; major newspaper websites; the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer; Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor; National Public Radio; and Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio talk show.
The 40-to-49 percent category included national newsmagazines; television news websites; local daily newspapers; Internet news sources like Yahoo and Google; and CNN.
Finally, the 34-to-39 percent group included the network evening news shows; online news discussion blogs; Fox News Channel; local television news; and the network morning shows.
Now, let’s analyze the data.
Fox isn’t last on the list, although it’s close -- 35 percent of Fox viewers earned a high knowledge rating, which was tied with local television news and was one point ahead of the network morning shows.
However, Fox’s 35 percent score places it exactly at the national average. This seems paradoxical -- Fox ranks near the bottom of a long list of media outlets, yet it sits right at the national average. But there’s an explanation. Lots of respondents reported following none of the media outlets they were asked about, and those respondents did quite poorly on the knowledge quiz -- not surprisingly. That meant that the non-media-using respondents brought down the national average, but they didn’t constitute a separate category that ranked lower than Fox on Pew’s chart.
Since Stewart was referring to "media viewers," this doesn’t undercut his point. However, the data includes an important counterpoint to Stewart’s claim: Viewers of at least one show on Fox scored quite well -- The O’Reilly Factor, of whom 51 percent made it into the high knowledge group. That made it equal to National Public Radio -- a longtime target of conservative complaints about liberal media bias -- and only three percentage points behind Stewart’s own show, at 54 percent.
• April 2008 Media Survey. Compared to the 2007 survey, the 2008 survey looked at a wider variety of media outlets but used a narrower selection of questions designed to test the respondent’s current-affairs knowledge. The pollsters asked three questions: "Do you happen to know which political party has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives?" "Can you tell me the name of the current U.S. Secretary of State?" And "who is the current prime minister of Great Britain?" Anyone who went three-for-three earned the high knowledge designation.
Here, the range of results was much wider. Once again, Fox News was just about at the national average -- 19 percent of Fox viewers scored in the high knowledge category, compared to 18 percent of all respondents -- but this time a handful of news outlets scored lower than Fox did. With scores ranging from 17 percent all the way down to 9 percent, they were CNBC, local television news, network news, morning news shows, television newsmagazines, personality magazines, religious radio, the Weather Channel, CBS News, Access Hollywood and similar shows, and in last place, the National Enquirer.
And once again, particular Fox shows scored well above the average. Hannity & Colmes was one of only four choices to exceed 40 percent -- the others were the New Yorker/the Atlantic, NPR and MSNBC’s Hardball -- while The O’Reilly Factor scored 28 percent, or 10 points above the national average. (Hannity & Colmes even exceeded Stewart’s Daily Show in this poll, 42 percent to 30 percent.)
In all, this poll undercuts Stewart’s position even more than the 2007 poll did.

After a Year of Delays – IRS Says They Lost Lois Lerner’s Emails in Computer Crash | The Gateway Pundit

After a Year of Delays – IRS Says They Lost Lois Lerner’s Emails in Computer Crash | The Gateway Pundit

The IRS Conservative Targeting Scandal involved:

• Hundreds of conservative groups were targeted
• At least 5 pro-Israel groups
• Constitutional groups
• Groups that criticized Obama administration
• At least two pro-life groups
• An 83 year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor
• A 180 year-old Baptist paper
• A Texas voting-rights group
• A Hollywood conservative group was targeted and harassed
• Conservative activists and businesses
• At least one conservative Hispanic group
• IRS continued to target groups even after the scandal was exposed
• 10% of Tea Party donors were audited by the IRS
• And… 100% of the 501(c)(4) Groups Audited by IRS Were Conservative

Now this…

After a year of delays the Obama IRS says it lost Lois Lerner’s emails in a computer crash.
From the Ways and Means Committee website, via Human Events:

Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011.Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.

CNN reduces school gun violence by 80% « Hot Air

CNN reduces school gun violence by 80% « Hot Air

Well, not really, but what CNN did do was determine that 80% of the claim made by Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group is bogus. Erika noted yesterday that other analyses show that it’s more like 90%, but give credit where it’s due. CNN decided to do what most media outlets skipped, and looked at the actual data:

So on Wednesday, CNN took a closer look at the list, delving into the circumstances of each incident Everytown included.

Everytown says on its web site that it gleans its information from media reports and that its list includes school shootings involving a firearm discharged inside or on school grounds, including assaults, homicides, suicides and accidental shootings.

CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon — a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school. That works out to about one shooting every five weeks.

Some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals.

While 15 school shootings is still 15 too many, it’s a far cry from Everytown’s claim of 74. Those were violent incidents as well, but they had other causes and weren’t the kind of mass shootings seen at Sandy Hook. Furthermore, the Santa Barbara massacre was not just a shooting either, and didn’t all take place in a school.

‘Wow’: Journalist Attempts to ‘Debunk’ Anti-Gun Group’s List of ‘School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook’ — Here’s What He Found | TheBlaze.com

‘Wow’: Journalist Attempts to ‘Debunk’ Anti-Gun Group’s List of ‘School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook’ — Here’s What He Found | TheBlaze.com

Everytown for Gun safety, an anti-gun group formed by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and prominent gun control advocate Shannon Watts, released new data on Tuesday suggesting that there have been an average of 1.37 school shootings every single week in the U.S. since the deadly 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.

The anti-gun organization cites a total of 74 school shootings since Dec. 14, 2012. However, several of the shootings have come under scrutiny as some of them appear to have occurred off-campus and at least one may have been an instance of self-defense.

Journalist Charles C. Johnson dug deeper into Everytown’s data on Tuesday and published his findings on Twitter. He also criticized the fact that the group classified violent disputes and gang-related violence as “school shootings.”

“It’s not a school shooting when someone goes and shoots a specific person on campus. It’s a shooting that happens to take place at school,” he wrote.

And in the comments we can find....

zapparules -Jun. 11, 2014 at 1:23am

“It’s not a school shooting when someone goes and shoots a specific person on campus. It’s a shooting that happens to take place at school,”

Does this guy do stand-up comedy? If that comment wasn’t so sad it’d be funny.

With that kind of logic I guess one could argue something like: It’s not domestic violence when a spouse goes and abuses the specific other spouse or specifically their children. It’s violence that happens to take place at home, within the family unit,”

Amazing. Simply amazing.

fortherecord -Jun. 11, 2014 at 3:23am

It’s also a “school shooting” when some gang banger shoots a rival gang banger using a gun that was smuggled in illegally from South of the border.
No new anti 2nd Amendment laws, will ever have an effect on that, but strict enforcement of the protection of our borders, would.
So would a crackdown on gang violence.

mikechga -Jun. 11, 2014 at 8:14am

zapparules – I love the way you prove the OPPOSITE point. Although your example rambles, it seems to say, “It’s domestic violence if it takes place in the home.” Well, a burglar comes into your house and you beat them down, it is NOT domestic violence. You and your friend get in a fight over the Spurs game … that is NOT domestic violence. Just because it takes place in your domicile does NOT make it domestic violence.
Likewise, if Al Qaeda shoots up a school yard, it is NOT a school-shooting. If a B-1 accidentally drops a bomb on a schoolyard, it is NOT a school-shooting. And gangsters shooting at each other at 9PM is NOT a school-shooting. This Bloomberg group is trying to imply that someone shoots up a schoolyard 1.37 times a week and that is NOT what’s going on. And you need to know, they are aiming at people like you who can’t tell the difference.

Robert Bryce: Dreaming the Impossible Green Dream - WSJ

Robert Bryce: Dreaming the Impossible Green Dream - WSJ

Mr. McKibben is among the world's most famous environmentalists. He's written or edited 15 books and been awarded honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. He is also the founder of 350.org, whose goal is to reduce atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels to 350 parts per million from the current level of about 400 parts per million. To achieve that goal, he's written that "we need to cut our fossil fuel use by a factor of twenty over the next few decades."

But what are the actual implications of cutting fossil fuels 20-fold? Let's "do the math," as Mr. McKibben is fond of saying.

Global hydrocarbon consumption is now about 218 million barrels of oil equivalent energy a day, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which includes 83 million barrels of oil as well as about 75 million barrels of oil equivalent from coal and about 60 million barrels of oil equivalent from natural gas. Reducing that by a factor of 20 would cut global hydrocarbon use to the energy equivalent of 11 million barrels of oil a day, roughly the amount of energy now consumed by India, where 400 million people lack access to electricity.

In 2012, the average resident of planet Earth consumed about 1.3 gallons of oil-equivalent energy a day from hydrocarbons. If Mr. McKibben's plan were enacted—and we shared those available hydrocarbons equally—-each of us would be allotted about eight fluid ounces of oil-equivalent energy from hydrocarbons a day. Today, the average resident of Bangladesh uses about half a liter of oil equivalent—slightly less than 17 ounces—a day. Under Mr. McKibben's prescription, the average Bangladeshi would be required to cut his hydrocarbon use by about half.

Like many others among the green left, Mr. McKibben insists that the prospect of catastrophic climate change means we must rely solely on renewable energy (and no nuclear power, either). What would that mean? Again, let's "do the math." And to keep it simple, let's ignore oil (even though it accounts for about a third of all energy consumption) and focus solely on electricity.

Over the past three decades, according to the BP Review, global electricity demand has been growing by about 450 terawatt-hours a year. And the International Energy Agency expects power demand will continue growing by about that pace for the next two decades.

What would be required if we relied on solar energy to keep up with expected growth in electricity demand? Let's look at Germany, which has more solar capacity than any other country, about 33,000 megawatts. In 2012 those solar facilities produced 28 terawatt-hours of electricity. Thus the world would have to install about 16 times as much photovoltaic capacity as Germany's entire installed base, and it would have to do so every year.

Wind? Merely to keep pace with the global growth in electricity demand would require the installation of about 280,000 megawatts of new wind-energy capacity every year. According to several academic studies, the areal power density of wind energy—that is, the amount of power that can be derived from a given amount of land—is about one watt per square meter. This means that installing the requisite additional wind capacity would require covering about 280,000 square kilometers (108,000 square miles of land)—an area nearly the size of Italy—with wind turbines, every year. (For comparison, the areal power density of nuclear power is more than 50 watts per square meter. The productivity of oil and gas wells vary, but even marginal wells have power densities of about 27 watts per square meter.)

Late last month I emailed Mr. McKibben, asking for his calculations regarding the energy-supply, land-use, or economic implications of his 20-fold reduction plan for hydrocarbons. His response included no math on the quantity of hydrocarbons available, nor any numbers for expected land use, or costs. Instead Mr. McKibben pointed mainly to a report earlier this year by Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University, which claims that wind, water and solar could meet all U.S. energy demand by 2050.

That document, in turn, refers largely to a 2010 paper Mr. Jacobson published in the journal Energy Policy, which rests heavily on the assumption that some type of electricity-storage system will be invented so that we can store the intermittent energy harnessed from the wind and sun. How reasonable is that assumption? Energy storage, Mr. Jacobson writes, "is a critical area for new research."

My email to Mr. McKibben also inquired about the need for refined petroleum products in transportation and aviation. His response ignored aviation but replied that "we've made great strides in electrifying vehicles." The energy he collects from the solar panels on his house, he wrote, can power his Ford C-Max on "most days."

Here's a suggestion: As a test of his scheme to cut hydrocarbon use 20-fold, Mr. McKibben and his allies making the pilgrimage to the September climate-change march, should be required to travel to New York City in solar-powered cars. If there aren't enough of those, they should be required to walk to the Big Apple.

It will be a good test. For if policy makers implement Mr. McKibben's energy plan, we'll all be walking. A lot.

Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware | Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project

Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware | Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project

In the months since the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in December, the public is paying close attention to the topic of firearms; according to a recent Pew Research Center survey (Pew Research Center, April 2013) no story received more public attention from mid-March to early April than the debate over gun control. Reducing crime has moved up as a priority for the public in polling this year.

Mass shootings are a matter of great public interest and concern. They also are a relatively small share of shootings overall. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics review, homicides that claimed at least three lives accounted for less than 1% of all homicide deaths from 1980 to 2008. These homicides, most of which are shootings, increased as a share of all homicides from 0.5% in 1980 to 0.8% in 2008, according to the bureau’s data. A Congressional Research Service report, using a definition of four deaths or more, counted 547 deaths from mass shootings in the U.S. from 1983 to 2012.2

Looking at the larger topic of firearm deaths, there were 31,672 deaths from guns in the U.S. in 2010. Most (19,392) were suicides; the gun suicide rate has been higher than the gun homicide rate since at least 1981, and the gap is wider than it was in 1981.

....

U.S. Firearm Deaths

• In 2010, there were 3.6 gun homicides per 100,000 people, compared with 7.0 in 1993, according to CDC data.
• In 2010, CDC data counted 11,078 gun homicide deaths, compared with 18,253 in 1993.5 Men and boys make up the vast majority (84% in 2010) of gun homicide victims. The firearm homicide rate also is more than five times as high for males of all ages (6.2 deaths per 100,000 people) as it is for females (1.1 deaths per 100,000 people).
• By age group, 69% of gun homicide victims in 2010 were ages 18 to 40, an age range that was 31% of the population that year. Gun homicide rates also are highest for adults ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 40.
• A disproportionate share of gun homicide victims are black (55% in 2010, compared with the 13% black share of the population). Whites were 25% of victims but 65% of the population in 2010. Hispanics were 17% of victims and 16% of the population in 2010.
• The firearm suicide rate (6.3 per 100,000 people) is higher than the firearm homicide rate and has come down less sharply. The number of gun suicide deaths (19,392 in 2010) outnumbered gun homicides, as has been true since at least 1981.

U.S. Firearm Crime Victimization

• In 2011, the NCVS estimated there were 181.5 gun crime victimizations for non-fatal violent crime (aggravated assault, robbery and sex crimes) per 100,000 Americans ages 12 and older, compared with 725.3 in 1993.
• In terms of numbers, the NCVS estimated there were about 1.5 million non-fatal gun crime victimizations in 1993 among U.S. residents ages 12 and older, compared with 467,000 in 2011.

Here are 33 Questionable Entries on the ‘Viral’ Everytown Map of All School Shootings Since Newtown

Here are 33 Questionable Entries on the ‘Viral’ Everytown Map of All School Shootings Since Newtown

Here's the map...


After listing the cases that really don't fit,

Whether or not one wants to dismiss all this and say these cases “technically” fit, gang-related violence and suicides are not really what people have in mind when it comes to “school shootings.” In other words, this list was compiled to give the public an exaggerated impression of how many school shootings have taken place.