Tag Archives: responsibilities

Safe Spaces and Clarity of Thought

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As The Wall Street Journal pointed out in an interview with Northwestern University’s President Morton Schapiro, the University of Chicago’s President Robert Zimmer has a view of the nature of safe spaces and the relationship between them and collegiate education.

incoming freshmen [should expect] to expect discomfort—not safe spaces—on his campus.

Schapiro, instead, wants to coddle his pupils as though they’re still two years old.

Northwestern President Morton Schapiro takes a gentler approach.

He believes that because learning is frequently uncomfortable, students need safe spaces—which for him means places where people who share an identity can retreat, relax, and recoup.

Of course, they already have that: their dorm rooms, where students of like mind gather along with the room’s occupants; the school’s student unions, where several groups gather, each one consisting in the main of students of like mind.  Forcing all of that into all of the other places that a school administer deems must be “safe spaces” destroys safety for all—especially those of whom demanders of “safe spaces” disapprove.

And Schapiro had this—and he was serious:

That might mean sharing a meal with students who are all of the same color or religion or watching a movie in a house designated for students from a certain background.

Back to segregation and separate but equal.

The interview continued in that vein.

In the end, though, there isn’t any safer space than the ability to think clearly, even if clear thinking often is uncomfortable.  School administrators who cannot understand both the difference between uncomfortable and unsafe and the critical dependency between safety and clarity of thought are unfit to sit in those chairs.  Their own inability to think clearly renders their entire campuses unsafe spaces.

Yet Another

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…Alinsky-esque distraction by the Ctl-Left.  This one is on the matter of Obamacare subsidies to health coverage providers to compensate them “for reducing out-of-pocket costs for some low-income consumers who sign up for plans on the exchanges.”

The Obama administration paid billions of our tax dollars to these providers, the amount for this year alone looks to be in the neighborhood of $7 billion, with the annual payout looking to rise to $16 billion in 10 years.

The House has sued to block further payments because no funds were appropriated for them, and so they’re illegal.  A number of State AGs are seeking to intervene in the suit.

More than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general took legal action Thursday seeking to preserve billions of dollars in federal subsidy payments….

It’s a fair debate to have in the courts, although, absent appropriation, there’s no money to spend, and so it would seem illegal to spend.

Now comes the cynical distraction.  New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said,

Millions of families across the country—including hundreds of thousands right here in New York—rely on these subsidies for their basic health care[.]

As if that’s relevant to the legality of the matter.  The courts should allow the spending independently of the law because tear-jerking.

Schneiderman is demonstrating the intellectual, legal, and moral bankruptcy of the Ctl-Left’s demands.  They’re wholly unable to present a case, and so they stoop to emotionalism.

It Just Keeps Getting Better and Better

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…or worse and worse, depending on your perspective.  Not only is the Veterans Administration continuing to make bad/false/improper payments, they seem to be getting acceleratingly worse about it.  The Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General reported that the VA made $5 billion in “improper” payments in 2015, and then while that drew attention, the VA increased their improper payouts to $5.5 billion in 2016.

To show how terrible the rates can be, here are some data from James Clark at the above link:

  • the VA Community Care had 75% of their payments as “improper” payments in 2016
  • the Purchased Long Term Services and Support 69% of their payments as “improper” in 2016

You read that right: three out of four of the Community Care’s payouts were wrong, and over two-thirds of PLTS&S’ payouts were…erroneous, and they’re getting worse.  The prior year, those payout rates were “only” 54.77% and 59.14%, respectively.

Since the VA empirically no interest in cleaning up its act, since it insists on wasting money our veterans need for their care, it’s time to disband this miserable excuse for an institution and commit its budget to vouchers for our vets.

No more delay by Congress.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Stuff

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Now The New York Times is jumping on the bandwagon.  The paper is claiming that a James Comey memo has it that President Donald Trump interfered with Comey’s investigation of Trump’s ex-NSA advisor, Mike Flynn.  The following is based heavily on a comment I posted on Grim’s Hall.

First, the paper doesn’t have the memo; it was read to them. By a deliberately unidentified source. If the memo exists.  If the reader exists.

Second, it is, in fact, likely that some such memo exists. Every participant in that sort of meeting (and phone call, come to that) writes up their notes in some form of MFR—those are great memory joggers as well as necessary records. Comey, an inveterate note taker, is not unusual in that regard. It’s also the sort of thing I did when I was in the USAF. It’s the sort of thing every officer does after an important meeting or telecon. Waiting on formal minutes didn’t happen for most of us.

Third, any obstruction of justice was committed by Comey. As a law enforcement officer and as an officer of the court—he is, recall, a University of Chicago(!)-trained lawyer—Comey is legally bound to advise law enforcement—in his case his chain of command up the DoJ as well as his seconds in the FBI—of any suspicion of criminal activity. If he didn’t think Trump was interfering with his investigation, there’s no problem, either for him or for Trump. If he did think so, it’s Comey who’s committed a crime by suppressing evidence of one.

Fourth, however intimidated Comey might have felt over his job security or the sanctity of his investigation—assuming the meeting went down as the NYT claims—that’s all gone now, with Comey free and clear. And he’s still not reporting a possible crime.

Fifth, assuming the memo exists in substantially the claimed form, it’s important to keep in mind the integrity of the leaker, who’s speaking out of turn, releasing stuff he has no authority to release and who hasn’t bothered with his own chain of command or complaint system—including his IG system that the Left thinks is so important in other matters.  How did he even get his hands on Comey’s memo?  What does he say Comey told him when he asked Comey if the latter thought it would be a good idea to pass the memo to the press? How is such a leaker himself believable?

The NYT‘s story is highly suspicious, coming as it does a day after WaPo‘s equally carefully unsubstantiated, equally hysterical claims about Trump’s handling of classified information in a meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and a notorious Russian ambassador.

Neither paper is even pretending to journalistic standards of reporting—stuff like corroborating anonymous sources’ claims with two or more on the record, named sources saying substantially the same thing.  At least National Enquirer and Globe have some minimal entertainment value.

Payback

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Recall that when President Donald Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, he allowed Russian photographers to take pictures but not photographers from the American NLMSM.

Now the Washington Post is claiming that President Trump “revealed highly classified information to [the] Russian foreign minister and ambassador” in that Oval Office meeting.

What’s being ignored in the manufactured hysteria over this is that WaPo very carefully used only anonymous sources for their claims: current and former US officials and officials and a US official familiar with the matter and a former senior US official and an official with knowledge of the exchange and a former senior US counterterrorism official and [a] former intelligence official and on and on.

The WaPo didn’t offer a single named, on the record source.  Not one.

The only personnel present in the meeting, besides the two Russians, were Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, NSA Director HR McMasters, and NSA Deputy Director Dina Powell.

What’s being downplayed by the NLMSM is McMaster’s statement after WaPo published its (to repeat: wholly unsubstantiated) claim:

A brief statement for the record. There is nothing that the president takes more seriously than the security of the American people. The story that came out tonight as reported is false. The president of the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time, at no time, where intelligent sources or methods discussed. The president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known. Two other senior officials who were present, including the secretary of the state, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. Going on the record should outweigh the anonymous sources. I was in the room. It didn’t happen. Thanks, everybody.

Do WaPo‘s “sources” even exist?  Even if they exist, how would they know what was discussed when they were not present in the meeting?  Journalistic standards used to hold that anonymous sources were OK, but their claims had to be corroborated by two or more named, on the record sources.  No more, for the NLMSM.

This smacks of payback because the NLMSM was not included in the prior photo op.  Which demonstrates the uselessness of including the NLMSM in such opportunities.

More importantly, it illustrates the dishonesty and so uselessness of the NLMSM.