My latest effort, a pamphlet on the American legal system (because I don’t lack for ego), A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law, has been released, and it can be found on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2L4iVXx . Links also can be found on my Books page.
Our legal system is explicitly founded on natural law through our Creator’s endowment—the origin and source of our fundamental principles.
This, from no less a Liberal outlet than the Chicago Tribune. John Lott, Jr, Crime Prevention Research Center President, provided some gun-related killings statistics for the Tribune. He began by defining what constitutes mass killings, a term too often bandied about without definition. The FBI’s definition is what he used.
Charges related to female genital mutilation were dismissed last week against Detroit doctor Jumana Nagarwala, who has a history of performing such “surgeries.” Federal District Judge Bernard Friedman, of the Eastern District of Michigan, ruled that Congress had overstepped its authority in passing a law banning this FGM.
Sadly, the judge was right. That law, passed in 1996, was done under our Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce (along with trade with foreign nations and with the Indian Tribes).
However, Friedman wrote,
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is on the verge of issuing actual rules (not “guidance” letters) directing the way in which colleges and universities must handle accusations of sexual assault. These rules will include
You can’t wear the clothes you can afford to buy, that are good quality, and that look nice without being ostentatious (you can’t wear your ostentatious rags, either, come to that). That’s bullying, don’t you know.
That’s the attitude of the Church of England’s Woodchurch High School in northwestern England (it’s across the Mersey from Liverpool—yes, that Mersey). They’re pretending to “poverty proof” their school, so they sent a letter to their students’ significant overseers (the institution actually refered to “parents/carers”:
As you are all aware from an email that was sent out yesterday, pupils will not be permitted to bring in Canadian (sic) Goose and Monclair (sic) coats after the Christmas break.
Many in the medical profession have gotten their panties in wads because, on the matter of guns and gun rights, someone was impertinent enough to suggest that they’re really not that expert. The National Rifle Association, it turns out, had demurred from an American College of Physicians paper calling for ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who are a threat—with “threat,” of course, defined by the ACP.
The current iteration of the Federal Reserve Bank Board of Governors, with several President Donald Trump appointees, is proposing a rule that would significantly ease the amount of cash big banks must keep on hand to cover bills due within 30 days. The savings from this are expected to aggregate to $77 billion per year—not a lot compared to the total of liquid assets held by those banks already.
There is a rumbling, though. An Obama appointee to the BoG, Lael Brainard, is objecting to the regulatory easing.
She added that banks are “providing ample credit and earning ample profits” under current liquidity requirements.
At least in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights ruled last Thursday that it’s impermissible to make crude remarks about Islam’s Muhammed if those remarks fall outside what Government deems acceptable. It seems that, in the course of a 2009 seminar, a woman commented on Muhammed’s marriage to his child bride:
[Muhammed] liked to do it with children…. A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? … What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?
The ECHR ruled that remark unobjective, lacking historical background, and intended to disparage Islam.
Alexander Acosta, Steven Mnuchin, and Alex Azar, respectively Secretaries of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, are in the process of offering one. They’re putting together a rule that would expand HRAs, Health Reimbursement Arrangements. These are plans that allow employers to reimburse employees for certain qualified health expenses. Their expansion consists of two parts:
Chao Deng’s piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal chronicled the failure of People’s Republic of China rampant infrastructure spending to stimulate economic activity.
China bolstered economic growth for decades by pouring trillions of dollars into roads, factories, railroads and more, and doubled down to protect the economy from the global financial crisis of the last decade.
Deng went to lengths to point out that, for all those trillions, businesses did not appear, factories remain unused, roads and railroads are only lightly traveled, and even the high rise apartment buildings remain largely empty.