On Tue, 02 Jun 2020 06:08:18 -0700, clinically insane, pedophilic, serbian
bitch Razovic, the resident psychopath of sci and scj and Usenet's famous
https://jonathanturley.org/2020/06/01/two-new-york-attorneys-arrested-for-throwing-molotov-cocktail-at-police/
Can you spell D-I-S-B-A-R-M-E-N-T?
Can YOU spell j-e-w-s-h-y-s-t-e-r-s?
Can YOU spell c-l-i-n-i-c-a-l-l-y i-n-s-a-n-e a-s-s-h-o-l-e, you
clinically insane asshole?
The mangina ought to try being wonderfully hungry.
Then he can be rapture ready!
Jeff Jacoby writes about several subjects.
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The Boston Globe
Arguable - with Jeff Jacoby
Monday, June 1, 2020
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Indecent cops, indecent rioters
“There are two races of men in this world,” wrote the psychoanalyst Viktor
Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning , the profoundly influential book he
published about his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. “Only these
two — the ‘race’ of the decent man and the ‘race’ of the indecent man. Both
are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group
consists entirely of decent or indecent people.”
Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who used his knee to press
George Floyd’s neck to the ground until he died in agony, belongs to the
race of the indecent. So do Gregory McMichael — an ex-cop — and his son
Travis McMichael, the two Georgia men who pursued and gunned down an unarmed
Ahmaud Arbery after seeing him jog past their home. So does any police
officer who deliberately uses deadly violence against someone who has no
weapon and poses no threat.
The race of the indecent does not include men and women who are infuriated
at the sight of injustice or police brutality. It does not include those who
respond with nonviolent protests, demonstrations, marches, or civil
disobedience. There is nothing indecent about those who cry out in horror
and anger at the death of Floyd and Arbery, or demand political change to
prevent such atrocities, or insist that the full weight of the law be
brought to bear against those responsible for committing them.
But the legions of the indecent most certainly do include those whose
reaction to the terrible violence inflicted against Floyd is to inflict
their own violence — smashing, burning, robbing, and even killing— against
others. There is nothing decent about the riots that erupted in dozens of
cities over the last few days. There was only pointless destruction and
inexcusable lawlessness. More lives were lost and countless businesses
ruined. If the killing of Floyd was a sickening illustration of what the
“race of the indecent” are responsible for, so is the anguish of black
business owners, weeping to see their life’s savings reduced to rubble and
ash.
Sickening, too, are those on the sidelines cheering as neighborhoods go up
in flames, such as the filmmaker Michael Moore extolling the “good citizens
burning down the evil police precinct,” or Essence magazine publishing a
column urging rioters to “Burn It All Down.”
During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which scores of people died and
hundreds of millions of dollars in damage was inflicted on mostly
Korean-owned businesses, the rap artist Sister Souljah was one of those
cheerleaders. In an interview with the Washington Post, she applauded the
“rebellion” that was shattering much of the city and endorsed even more
bloodshed:
I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and
kill white people? You understand what I'm saying? In other words, white
people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that
black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if
you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not
kill a white person?
The most memorable response to Souljah’s incitement came from Bill Clinton,
the Arkansas governor who was then running for president. Speaking before
Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in June, Clinton condemned the rapper’s
words . He quoted her poisonous comments to the Post and an earlier
interview in which she said all whites have a “low-down, dirty nature” and
that “if there are any good white people, I haven’t met them.” Clinton told
his audience: “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed
them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”
Clinton took some heat for his rebuke — Souljah called him a racist and
Jackson defended her. But most Americans appreciated his public stand
against extremism. The phrase “Sister Souljah moment“ entered the lexicon as
a reference to the repudiation of extremists, even when that repudiation
might rub one’s allies the wrong way.
America today, far more bitterly polarized than it was in 1992, could really
use some Sister Souljah moments. But there is little inclination in
political circles, and even less among the media, to cool the fevers of
racial grievance.
No one thinks that what happened to George Floyd was anything but horrifying
and enraging. In a society where almost everything is bitterly disputed, the
revulsion over Floyd’s death, and the desire to see his killers brought to
justice, is practically universal. This is not a country that thinks it’s OK
for police to kill black men. “I hope these cops are dealt with good and
hard,” conservative talk host Rush Limbaugh told his huge radio audience .
What they did to Floyd, he said, “makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”
Tremont Street in Boston Sunday night.
There was a time in this country when black men could indeed be killed by
whites with impunity, and when those witnessing their deaths were apt to be
celebrating them. Morally, psychologically, and politically, we are light
years removed from that era. Yet it has become politically incorrect to say
so. Anyone who tries can expect to be shouted down by loud voices insisting
that slavery and Jim Crow stamped America forever, leaving it irremediably
racist to the core.
Police brutality is too common in this country. Some people have no business
being entrusted with a gun, a badge, and the power to arrest. All the same,
the Washington Post noted last year, killings by cops are “rare outcomes” in
a nation with “millions of encounters between police officers and the
public.” When those rare outcomes do occur, according to the Post (which has
been tracking the data since 2014, when Michael Brown was killed by police
in Ferguson, Mo.), the racial breakdown is surprisingly consistent: “45%
white men; 23% black men; and 16% Hispanic men. Women have accounted for
about 5% of those killed, and people in mental distress about 25% of all
shootings.” In the overwhelming majority of cases, the person killed was
armed; only 4% had no weapon. The killing of George Floyd, in other words,
was an exception, not the rule. Saying so doesn’t make his fate less
appalling, it makes it more so. To see such a thing happen to a fellow
citizen is especially harrowing because it is such a desecration of what
America stands for.
It was an intolerable killing, and no one is tolerating it. The men
responsible were fired within a day. Chauvin has been charged with murder.
But just as intolerable is the stupefying mayhem being unleashed across the
country in Floyd’s name.
“I am heartbroken. Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would
be something that would devastate Floyd,” his fiancée Courteney Ross told
the Minnesota Star Tribune. She described him as the most spiritual man she
ever knew — “he stood up for people, he was there for people when they were
down, he loved people that were thrown away.”
His employer, Jovanni Thunstrom, felt the same way: “He didn’t
discriminate,” Jovanni said in an interview. “Whether you were Hispanic,
you were black, you were white — he treated everybody with respect and that’s
what I love about him.”
As Viktor Frankl might have said, Floyd was of the race of the decent man.
It only compounds the indecency of his death that it is being used as a
justification for riots.
June 4’s enduring significance
If there were any remaining doubts that China’s communist regime intends to
wipe out Hong Kong’s economic and democratic freedoms, they were dispelled
for good last week. On Thursday, the National People’s Congress in Beijing,
the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, approved a resolution calling for a
new security law to ban “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorism,” and “foreign
intervention,” and to allow mainland Chinese security agencies to operate
“as necessary” in Hong Kong.
“Early signals from the Chinese authorities point to a crackdown once the
law takes effect, which is expected by September,” reported the New York
Times . “Activist groups could be banned. Courts could impose long jail
sentences for national security violations.” Unless international pushback
against the coming onslaught is loud, insistent, and backed up with economic
and diplomatic muscle, Hong Kong’s existence as an oasis of freedom on the
edge of mainland China’s vast despotic desert appears to be nearing its end.
When Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control in 1997, Beijing promised
that economic and political rights in the formerly British-ruled enclave
would continue undisturbed until at least 2047. In a binding Joint
Declaration , it stipulated that freedom “of speech, of the press, of
assembly, of association, of travel, of movement, of correspondence, of
strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research, and of religious
belief” would “remain unchanged for 50 years.” This was the so-called “one
country, two systems“ principle — the pretext on which Britain relied to
justify putting millions of people under the sovereignty of a brutal
tyranny.
Tiananmen Square, 1989: The Goddess of LIberty vs. Mao Zedong.
It was all a lie. China’s communist rulers never intended to preserve Hong
Kong’s civil liberties for one minute longer than they felt they had to.
Britain’s surrender of Hong Kong, negotiated by Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and implemented under Prime Minister Tony Blair, was a shameful
betrayal, and there were those who said so at the time.
In the face of last year’s enormous pro-democracy demonstrations in the
streets of Hong Kong, Beijing backed down from plans to push through a law
authorizing extradition of Hong Kong residents to mainland China. But this
time, China’s rulers show no inclination to retreat. On Wednesday, Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo — who is required by law to report annually on the
situation in Hong Kong — formally notified Congress that “no reasonable
person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy
from China, given facts on the ground.”
The coming death of Hong Kong’s vaunted liberties recalls the terrible
events of 1989 — 31 years ago this week — when the prospect of freedom and
democracy that had been surging across all of China were suddenly and
bloodily crushed. The Tiananmen Square massacre, which began on June 4,
1989, was a defining moment in the history of Chinese communism. What is not
often remembered is that the exact same day was also a defining moment in
the history of European communism. In a 1996 column I reflected on the
significance of that dual inflection point:
Two roads diverged in the course of human liberty, and seven years ago
history took them both.
On June 3, 1989, Europe's eastern half was still locked in the deep freeze
of communism. There was a hint of a thaw only in Hungary, where barbed wire
along the Austrian border was coming down; and in Poland, where the
Communist Party was letting some seats in Parliament be contested by Lech
Walesa's Solidarity movement. But Hungary's Communist rulers were not about
to loosen their grip on power, and no matter what happened at the polls, it
seemed highly doubtful that Poland's would, either.
One continent away, however, freedom seemed poised for a climactic victory.
For weeks, China had thrilled to an intense outpouring of pro-democracy
fervor. In Beijing and 80 other cities, millions of Chinese had taken to the
streets in a dazzling plea for liberty and political reform. The protests
had begun in mid-April, when thousands of students thronged Tiananmen
Square, calling for minzhu — democracy — and an end to censorship. To show
that self-rule and freedom are worth suffering for, thousands embarked on a
hunger strike. Across the nation, citizens from every walk of life —
mechanics and teachers, railway workers and civil servants, policemen and
journalists, high school kids and old men — rallied to the students'
support. In the heart of the square rose a 30-foot-high “Goddess of
Democracy,” a handmade papier-mache version of America's matchless beacon of
freedom and enlightenment.
The world watched, with astonishment and awe, the greatest demonstration in
Chinese history. And when convoys of People's Liberation Army troops moved
on Beijing on the morning of June 3, only to be driven back, it appeared
that communist rule in Asia was about to implode.
But 24 hours later, everything had changed.
On June 4, 1989, Poland voted. It was the first free election in more than
half a century, and the Communists lost every contested seat. No one knew it
then, but a wrecker's ball had crashed into the Iron Curtain. Within two
months, a leading Solidarity activist had become Poland's prime minister. By
autumn, Hungary's Communist Party was dismantling itself, East Germans were
holding weekly protest vigils, and the Soviet-occupied Baltic states were
aflame with secessionist fever. At year's end, Berlin was one city, Vaclav
Havel was Czechoslovakia's president, and the Butcher of Bucharest, Nicolae
Ceausescu, was a corpse.
Europe's Communist nightmare was over.
China's had resumed.
By midnight on the morning of June 4, tanks and armored personnel carriers
were making their way down Changan Avenue — the Avenue of Eternal Peace —
toward Tiananmen Square. This time, they didn't turn back. Troops fired into
the crowds that gathered at every intersection. Unarmed demonstrators — men,
women, teen-agers — were cut down by the hundreds. As Western journalists
rolled tape, the People's Liberation Army aimed automatic weapons into the
knots of protesters and pulled their triggers. “There were pools and smears
of blood up and down the avenue as well as bodies of the dead,” one American
reporter wrote. “Most of the wounds were in the chest and stomach.”
In a moving documentary, “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” filmmakers Carma
Hinton and Richard Gordon powerfully captured the awful horror of that
event. I wrote about the picture shortly before it aired on PBS:
From the opening shot of that unknown hero who stared down a column of
tanks, the film is filled with scenes of aching emotion: The very first
protesters, petitioning for reform on their knees at the Great Hall of the
People. The young hunger strikers, fainting with heat and exhaustion. The
Goddess of Democracy being toppled amid the blood and smoke of the Square
before dawn on June 4.
The meaning of such moments, as the film notes, “was clear: Here was human
hope and courage challenging the remorseless machinery of state power.” When
the tanks rolled and the guns fired in Beijing, human hope and courage
died — only to be rekindled throughout Eastern Europe. Soon the tanks would
roll and the guns would fire in Bucharest and Vilnius and Timisoara, and the
people would rally on. Then it would be the dictators, not their abused and
wretched subjects, who would have reason to be afraid.
We take our liberty for granted, we Americans. . . . The men and women of
June 1989 took nothing for granted — except the moral authority to call an
evil government to account. No act is more fraught with danger. No act is
more brave.
Seven years ago next week, two roads diverged and history took them both. In
Eastern Europe, the doors of freedom were forced ajar. In China, they were
nailed shut. The enduring meaning of June 4 is that tanks and guns cannot
keep despots in power forever. The Goddess of Democracy may be rubble today,
but so is the Berlin Wall. The Goddess will rise again.
The late Milton Friedman is alive and well
Writing in the New York Sun recently, Ira Stoll observed that Joe Biden
appears to have something of a fixation with Milton Friedman, the brilliant
American economist and champion of capitalism who won the Nobel Prize for
economics in 1976.
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden told Politico’s
Michael Grunwald , by way of explaining why he wants Congress to pass an
enormous new stimulus bill, one “a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2
trillion CARES Act passed in March. Biden wants to pour a trillion dollars
into infrastructure spending, lavish several hundred million more on aid to
the states, and fund “investments in light rail, clean drinking water, and
half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways.” He wants
to repeal most of the 2017 tax cuts signed into law by President Trump. And
he is rooting for a post-pandemic “backlash against big corporations” and
against “anti-government political thinking.”
Biden has invoked Friedman as his bête noire on other occasions, too.
During a fundraiser in Wayland, Mass., last fall, CNN’s Sarah Mucha
reported, Biden expressed his disdain for the Nobel laureate. “When did
Milton Friedman die and become king?” he demanded, with a mangled rhetorical
question that nonetheless conveyed his disapproval.
For Biden, as Stoll writes, Friedman seems to be the go-to archetype of an
influential exponent of free-market ideas. In truth, it would be hard to
think of a better one. Of Friedman’s intellectual and theoretical chops,
there can be no question: His scholarly output was world-class, and he spent
30 years at the University of Chicago, an anchor of the famous Chicago
school of economic thought . But Friedman also had an amazing gift for
popularizing his economic views. For 18 years he wrote a regular column for
Newsweek magazine, and his television series “Free to Choose” extended his
reach to a huge broadcast audience as well. A spin-off book based on the
series, also called Free To Choose, was (according to Wikipedia) the
bestselling nonfiction book of 1980 and has been translated into 14
languages.
Milton Friedman, who died 14 years ago, was arguably the most successful
teacher of economics of the last two generations
Certainly little of Biden’s program would fit with the worldview of
Friedman, who eloquently made the case for lower taxes, smaller government,
and more robust market freedoms. Then again, remarks Stoll, who edits the
Future Of Capitalism blog, in some ways Friedman “really is running the
show, no matter how much Biden insists it is not so.” He offers some
examples:
Perhaps the most significant way is the use of monetary policy — the Federal
Reserve increasing the money supply and cutting interest rates — to fight
the economic effects of the novel coronavirus and of the lockdowns used to
respond to it. Friedman’s 1963 book with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History
of the United States, 1867-1960, argued that Federal Reserve inaction had
contributed to the Great Depression. Subsequent Fed chairmen have been
determined not to repeat that policy error.
Binyamin Appelbaum’s 2019 book The Economist’s Hour credits Friedman for
helping America move from a military of drafted conscripts to an
all-volunteer force. “In Friedman’s view, it was the same system of forced
labor Egyptian pharaohs had used to build the pyramids,” Appelbaum writes.
Bringing back the military draft has not been a big campaign agenda item for
Biden, who reportedly avoided Vietnam-era enlistment with student deferments
and a medical history of asthma.
Even on the policy issues where Friedman’s victories were less clear-cut,
the debate is still being fought on terms he defined. President Trump [has]
described the US Postal Service as a “joke.” Friedman in 1986 proposed
privatizing the mail-delivery business.
Trump has advocated for tax credits to fund scholarships that would allow
some families to choose private schools instead of government-run public
schools. Friedman has been described as the grandfather of school vouchers.
Friedman died in 2006, so Biden is free to take jabs at him without fear of
being rebutted. But there is little chance that Biden’s intellectual output
and influence, even if he becomes president, will have anything like the
enduring power of Friedman’s, whose ideas and teachings to this day continue
to open minds to the extraordinary good that can result when government
promotes individual liberty and restrains its impulse to control every
detail of economic life.
Full disclosure: I am a huge Friedman fan, and my first encounter with his
work was one of the most intellectually memorable moments of my youth.
I still remember that encounter vividly. I was a freshman at George
Washington University, just beginning my first semester on a college campus.
I was enrolled in a course called “Politics and Values,” and the assigned
reading was heavy on political economy. There were books by John Kenneth
Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, Louis Kelso, and two or three other
economists. We were reading them at the rate of about one a week. Whatever
impressions most of those books made on me at the time faded away long ago.
But one book was different. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom
electrified me. I was riveted by it. Like someone viewing a fireworks
display for the first time, I was dazzled and exhilarated by Friedman's
ideas — the genius of markets, the power of prices, the link between
prosperity and liberty, the miracles made possible when individuals can
choose freely. The sensation was almost physically thrilling. I can still
see myself sitting at a study carrel in the GW library, devouring the book's
chapters, intoxicated by their insights, awash with the pleasure of
learning. I was experiencing something new — the elation of intellectual
discovery. Capitalism and Freedom changed my understanding of the world and
how it works.
Friedman changed many people’s understanding of the world. Capitalism and
Freedom — already 15 years old when I started college — is one of the modern
classics of economics. Between his books, his TV series, the Newsweek
column, and the advice he provided political leaders like Barry Goldwater
and Ronald Reagan, Friedman arguably educated more people and shaped more
minds than any other economist of the last two generations.
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” says Biden dismissively.
Maybe not, but Biden would do himself a world of good if he were to study
Friedman’s work instead of waving it off as outdated. Even now, 14 years
after Friedman’s death, his insights into liberty, markets, and the seeds of
prosperity remain keen and humane. Perhaps Biden will win the White House
and perhaps he won’t, but Milton Friedman’s work will go on expanding minds,
making the case for freedom, and riveting new readers for years to come.
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ICYMI
In my latest column , I argued that there was no real justification for
“Operation Varsity Blues,” the sweeping federal prosecution of well-to-do
parents — including a couple of well-known actresses — who paid bribes to
get their children admitted to some elite universities. What the parents did
was crooked, but that didn’t justify treating this as a federal case. There
is no shortage of crimes that genuinely threaten the American public and
require the intimidating resources of the federal government to suppress —
everything from opioid smuggling to human trafficking to public corruption.
But to nail some rich couples who cheated so their children could attend
tony colleges? Was this about justice, or about generating juicy headlines?
The “Varsity Blues” parents behaved badly, but this was overkill.
My subject last Sunday was the possibility that Israel may formally annex
about 30% of the West Bank, applying Israeli civilian law to the Jordan
Valley and Jewish settlements established after 1967. Within Israel’s
government, there is a solid consensus in favor of annexation, but much of
the world has reacted with predictable condemnation. In my view, Israel
should ignore the naysayers. The Jewish communities to be annexed have long
been understood as destined to remain part of Israel in any final peace
deal. Annexation would still leave more than two-thirds of the West Bank,
plus all of Gaza, for a sovereign Palestinian state — assuming the
Palestinians ever decide they care more about building a state for
themselves than about destroying the Jewish state.
The last line
“The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to
victory. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill
in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck: and let
us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble
undertaking.” — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech broadcast to American
troops on the eve of D-Day (June 5, 1944)
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