A few days ago, a nineteen year old psychopath shot and killed seventeen people at the school in Florida that he had been expelled from. He entered the school, set off a fire alarm, and shot randomly into crowd streaming out of the classrooms.

How to prevent such a crime?

The Left’s solutions are not solutions at all:

Pass a law making it harder to obtain guns? Criminals by definition do not obey laws.

Confiscate all privately owned automatic and semiautomatic guns and shotguns? A gift to criminals.

Defy or change the second amendment to the constitution so no citizen who is not in the armed forces or the police is allowed to carry a gun? A help to would-be tyrants, most notably and threateningly those of the “community organizing” kind.

What then?

Let’s start with the proposition that central planning is always a bad idea.

What non-governmental action might work?

Jeff Deist writes (in part) at the website of the (libertarian) von Mises Institute:

There are no top-down political solutions available from Washington. Gun control doesn’t actually prevent crime, but it does provide the political class and media with another diversionary bitter cultural debate. Americans are deeply divided on guns, just as they are deeply divided on abortion and climate change and scores of other issues. …

Contrary to popular belief, the Second Amendment neither “federalized” gun laws nor created a right to private ownership of firearms. It simply enshrined the notion that “the people” need to be armed to defend themselves potentially against the state itself. …

The libertarian response to mass shootings, in particular school shootings, is to allow teachers and other personnel to carry weapons on campus. In fact, the broader libertarian program is to have most people armed, or at least potentially armed, to create a safer (not to mention more polite) society. If we cannot snap our fingers and produce crime-free cities and neighborhoods where nobody needs to carry a gun, then at least we allow everyone the ability to dissuade or defend against criminal shooters.

This is all well and good, but ignores the market impulse to outsource services to specialists. This is why neighborhoods hire private security patrols, and why celebrities hire professional bodyguards. Not everyone wants to carry a gun or train themselves in gun proficiency. And there is the issue of scale, where individuals might find themselves arrayed against organized criminal gangs.

Rather than endlessly debate the fraught political process of crafting illiberal gun control laws, we ought to think about private-market solutions that focus on controlling crime.We should think in terms of market economics, where private property and correct incentives give us what government and laws cannot: a mechanism to determine possible harms and the cost of protecting against or preventing those harms. People want safe neighborhoods and schools, which is just another way to say there is a market for them.

Generally speaking, the US legal system imposes premises liability on property owners whose negligence (or willful conduct) results in someone getting injured on that property. This arose conceptually through common law courts and juries applying general negligence concepts.

We accord different degrees of legal responsibility (“duty”) to landowners based on the identity of the injured party: a trespasser, for example, has less recourse to sue for injury than a business invitee (i.e., a customer). The law considers whether the injured party had a legitimate purpose being there, and in some cases whether they contributed to their injury through their own negligence.

The duty to make one’s property safe from a particular harm relates to, and in a sense hinges on, the foreseeability of that harm. Leaving spilled milk in a grocery aisle too long could well subject the owner to paying damages for a shopper who suffers a fall — a fall that was quite predictable and clearly caused by the wet floor. But intentional criminal acts by a third party … generally absolve the property owner of liability. After all, no shooter ever entered the grocery before, so why must the owner guard against this most unlikely event?

But should a public school district have a higher duty to keep students safe than the grocer has for shoppers? Arguably yes, in that society values children’s lives, well-being, and innocence perhaps more than adults’. And we force children into school attendance via truancy laws and meddling protective services agencies.

Furthermore, are school shootings now foreseeable even though they remain exceedingly rare? Does the media attention and notoriety given to such shootings change the calculus? At some point, perhaps today, school shootings could become foreseeable in the eyes of a jury.

We can’t necessarily draw conclusions here, but the question is whether the owners of public schools — generally municipal or county school districts — should be immune from lawsuits for school shootings simply because they are political subdivisions of states? Should sovereign immunity apply to them, or should they be forced to consider security measures just as private owners must? After all, it seems clear that a mass shooting at a prestigious private school would result in litigation.

It seems clear that imposing tort liability on school owners and operators, even government owners, would both improve security and provide a ready source of compensation for the families of victims. Private security agencies, which have a market reputation to develop or protect, almost certainly would provide more efficient service than government police — for the simple reason that more crime punishes their bottom line, while it often creates calls for increased police budgets.

To put it another way: Private security businesses must maintain a good record of keeping their clients safe, or they lose business and lose money; whereas government agencies such as the police can blame their failures on insufficient funding, so the more they fail the more money they get.

And private security models like Disneyland benefit from wanting to create a peaceful and happy environment, where security forces have every incentive not to escalate situations or incur liability.

Furthermore, private insurance models could help schools rationally allocate funds relative to the risks involved. Since school shootings are rare, premiums to cover such an event should be constrained. But other lesser types of crime in schools could be insured against as well, helping administrators better understand what they’re up against. And insurance companies would bend over backward to offer advice on avoiding shootings, since they would bear the cost of liability payments.

Admittedly, public schools using taxpayer funds to hire private security and pay insurance premiums muddies the waters. But at least it moves all of the parties involved — school districts, administrators, teachers, security providers, and parents — toward a market-based approach to safer schools. Tort liability, however imperfectly administered by government courts, offers one way to align the interests of parents and school owners in preventing further horrific events.

To sum up the message: Let school administrations choose to buy protection, the best the market can provide, at a price a competitive market puts on it.

(Hat-tip to Don L for the link to the Jeff Deist article)

San Francisco and Los Angeles are extremely expensive slums.

Years of rule by Democratic Party Progressives have made them so.

NBC reports on the Diseased Streets of San Francisco:

How dirty is San Francisco? An NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals a dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces throughout downtown San Francisco. The Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of the city – the more than 20-mile stretch includes popular tourist spots like Union Square and major hotel chains. The area – bordered by Van Ness Avenue, Market Street, Post Street and Grant Avenue – is also home to City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station.

The Investigate Unit spent three days assessing conditions on the streets of downtown San Francisco and discovered trash on each of the 153 blocks surveyed. While some streets were littered with items as small as a candy wrapper, the vast majority of trash found included large heaps of garbage, food, and discarded junk. The investigation also found 100 drug needles and more than 300 piles of feces throughout downtown.

“If you do get stuck with these disposed needles you can get HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, and a variety of other viral diseases,” said Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at University of California, Berkeley. He warned that once fecal matter dries, it can become airborne, releasing potentially dangerous viruses, such as the rotavirus. “If you happen to inhale that, it can also go into your intestine,” he said. The results can prove fatal, especially in children.

Riley has researched conditions across the poorest slums of the world. His book, titled Slum Health, examines health problems that are created by extreme poverty. Based on the findings of the Investigative Unit survey, Riley believes parts of the city may be even dirtier than slums in some developing countries.

“The contamination is … much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India,” he said. He notes that in those countries, slum dwellings are often long-term homes for families and so there is an attempt to make the surroundings more livable. Homeless communities in San Francisco, however, are often kicked out from one part of town and forced to relocate to another. The result is extreme contamination, according to Riley.

The solution that the ruling Democratic Party Progressives come up with is more of the same that caused the problem in the first place: providing for bums. 

“Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen. “We’re losing tourists. We’re losing conventions in San Francisco. All of this is happening because we aren’t addressing the root cause, which is we need more temporary beds for street homelessness.”

Ronen believes San Francisco has been too focused on permanent housing for the homeless and that the city has neglected to provide enough temporary shelter, which can provide the homeless a respite from the streets. The city currently has about 2,000 temporary beds. Ronen, however, believes an additional 1,000 are needed, at a cost of about $25 million.

Oh, it will cost much more than that. As soon as the word spreads that there will be more “temporary beds” for the “homeless”, more “homeless” will pour into your city, Mr. Ronen. You didn’t think of that did you? Or did you? Is that what you actually want?

“We need to find a source of revenue,” said Ronen. “Whether that’s putting something on the ballot to raise business taxes or taking a look at our general fund and re-allocating money towards that purpose and taking it away from something else in the city.”

Yeah –  make it a priority. Raise your enormously high property taxes even higher. That will mean more property tax paying home owners will leave the city. But don’t think about that.

Until the problem is fixed, Mohammed Nuru, the Director of the Public Works Department, is charged with the towering task of cleaning the streets, over and over again. “Yes, we can clean, he said, “and then go back a few hours later, and it looks as if it was never cleaned. So is that how you want to spend your money?”

The 2016-2017 budget for San Francisco Public Works includes $60.1 million for “Street Environmental Services”. The budget has nearly doubled over the past five years. Originally, that money was intended to clean streets, not sidewalks. According to city ordinances, sidewalks are the responsibility of property owners. However, due to the severity of the contamination in San Francisco, Public Works has inherited the problem of washing sidewalks. Nuru estimates that half of his street cleaning budget – about $30 million – goes towards cleaning up feces and needles from homeless encampments and sidewalks.

Even without actually doing it? Well, it’s not easy:

A single pile of human waste, said Nuru, takes at least 30 minutes for one of his staffers to clean. “The steamer has to come. He has to park the steamer. He’s got to come out with his steamer, disinfect, steam clean, roll up and go.”

A Herculean task. Mission almost impossible.

Asked if he’d be willing to give up part of his budget and allocate it to more directly addressing the homeless problem – which would likely alleviate his cleaning problem – Nuru said, “The Board of Supervisors, the mayor – those are decisions that they need to make.”  He added, “I want to continue cleaning and I want to be able to continue to provide services. The Public Works Department provides services seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

An attempt at a clean-up in San Francisco

And this is from the Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles County’s homeless population is increasing faster than the supply of new housing, even with the addition of thousands of beds in the last two years and millions of dollars beginning to flow in from two ballot measures targeting the crisis, according to a long-awaited report by the region’s homelessness agency.

The report showed that officials two years ago far underestimated how much new housing would be needed when they asked city and county voters to approve the tax measures.

It has simply never occurred to them, that the more free housing they provide, the more they will need to provide. Demand will grow exponentially.

As a result, a $73-million annual shortfall in funding for the county’s comprehensive homelessness program could more than triple …

Providing permanent housing for the county’s chronically homeless population would require more than 20,000 new units, about 5,000 more than projected two years ago, the report said.

The estimated shortage of emergency shelter and short-term rental subsidies also increased by double-digit percentages.

The report, known as the Housing Gaps Analysis, offers the latest sober assessment of the years-long surge in homelessness, marked by widespread tent encampments and rising demands for urgent action to curb the problem.

Curb? Not cure?

In a departure from its previous report, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority provided no analysis of costs associated with the needed housing in the revision released last week. …

Peter Lynn, executive director of the homeless authority, said Friday that new cost figures had not been calculated …

“Now,” [he said], “we have a plan for deploying new permanent supportive housing through Proposition HHH and Measure H. That does give us a way forward.”

The original analysis was prepared to quantify the difference between the housing and services existing at the time and what would be needed to get all the chronically homeless off the streets and quickly restore housing for those falling into homelessness.

Ah, that will fix it. Sure. No more “homeless” after that. Dust the problem off your hands. Get this lot tidily tucked away and you will not be expected to provide free permanent housing for anyone ever again.

The report became the basis for both Proposition HHH, the homeless housing bond approved by Los Angeles city voters in 2016, and the countywide Measure H sales tax for homeless services approved last year. …

When the supervisors review the budget in June they’ll face hard choices.

Phil Ansell, director of the county’s homeless initiative, acknowledged that the rising demand for housing and services will influence those deliberations, but he said that nothing in the report should deter the county from fulfilling its promise to voters.

“During the Measure H election we projected that Measure H would enable 45,000 families and adults to move from homelessness into permanent housing in the first five years of expanded services and that an additional 30,000 families would avoid becoming homeless,” Ansell said. “We are on track to achieve those targets.”

The 2015 homeless count, on which the previous analysis was based, put the number of people living on the streets across the county at just under 29,000.

Last year, the annual January count raised the number of unsheltered homeless people to nearly 49,000 …

The analysis released last week projected that more than 20,000 new units of supportive housing are needed to establish homes for chronically homeless people.

The earlier report had set the number at about 15,000, two-thirds of which the city was expected to provide with new construction funded by Proposition HHH. The rest would come from long-term rental subsidies funded by Measure H to supplement federal rent subsidies. …

The gains in housing, however, were outstripped by the rising homeless population.

What a surprise!

The earlier report projected a reduction of 14% each year. If that had occurred, the total homeless population — including unsheltered and sheltered — would have dropped to 41,323 last year.

Instead, it climbed to nearly 59,000.

But of course Hollywood celebrities, those ardent Democrat Progressives with hearts perpetually bleeding for the poor, will help to alleviate the problem by offering a few rooms in their mansions to “homeless” persons or families.

Goes without saying.

Los Angeles

… to make America Muslim:

Published February 14, 2018

… could happen to you wherever you may be in the USA.

It is a story of a public-private partnership in crime that went on for years; of state-sanctioned exploitation of the old; the deprivation of their liberty; abduction, theft, and callous cruelty.

This is a summary, in our own words for the most part, of the true story told by Rachel Aviv and published (somewhat surprisingly to us) in the (usually all too politically correct) New Yorker magazine on October 9, 2017. The original needs to be read in full, so please read it if you have strong nerves and are thoroughly acquainted with injustice and cruelty posing as “caring”. 

Mr. and Mrs. North – Rudy and Rennie – lived in a nice well furnished house they owned in Las Vegas. They were in their seventies, retired. Although Rennie was frail, they both enjoyed life. They  read a lot, Rennie fiction, Rudy philosophy, science and much more. They were both comfortable and happy, though Rennie needed some practical help, which was given by a nurse who came in five days a week.

One Friday in 2013, just as the Norths were finishing their breakfast, the nurse arrived as usual and a few minutes later another woman turned up. She introduced herself as April Parks, a “private professional guardian”. With her were three other people who did not give their names. Parks informed the Norths that she had an order issued by the Clark County Family Court to remove them to “an assisted living facility”, and their consent was not required.  

They protested. The intruders threatened to call the police and have them moved by force. They were given about half an hour to pack a few personal things. In her confusion and distress Rennie forgot to take the cellphone. They were driven away from their home in a car marked “CRT-GRDN” (“Court Guardian”).

Parks returned to the house with another woman, Cindy Breck, whose company – called “Caring Transitions” – “relocates” elderly persons, and arranges the sale of their belongings. Here again, consent was not required. The “relocated” persons were simply robbed of the things they had acquired through their long lives and wanted to keep in their old age. So as soon as the Norths’ had been “transitioned”, all their possessions – their furniture, books, everything they had not been able to fit into the small bags they took with them – were assessed for sale value by caring Cindy Breck. Parks herself took documents (birth certificates, insurance policies) and valuables (a coin collection, a watch).

The Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, a fifty-three-year old married woman, with three sons, who ran a business with her husband, arrived as she did almost every day to visit her parents and found them gone and the house locked up. She tried calling their cellphone and got no answer. She called hospitals to enquire if they had been brought in from an accident. She concluded that her father and mother had been kidnapped. She revisited the locked house again later and found a note on the door with the name and number of April Parks, “guardian”, who could be contacted “in case of emergency”. Through Parks Julie learnt that her parents had been taken to a “facility” in Boulder City. Julie protested, “You can’t just walk into somebody’s home and take them!” Parks replied, “It’s legal.”

Julie drove to the facility in Boulder City. There her parents were lodged in a small room with a “kitchenette” and a view of the parking lot. Rennie was in a wheelchair. They had no phone in the room.

Mr. and Mrs. North no longer controlled their own money. Their estates were in the hands of April Parks. Each time Parks looked in on the Norths, however briefly, she charged them a fee “per hour”. How much she deducted from their funds was not limited by the court. She charged $24 for one eight-minute phone call that Julie put through to her.

It gets worse.

Parks applied to Clark County Family Court to have her guardianship of the Norths made permanent. Meet the Clark County guardianship commissioner, Jon Norheim. Officially he works “under a judge”, but what he orders has the weight of a judge’s ruling. Parks made all her guardian applications to Norheim. Norheim granted them – about once a week. The Norths had no one speaking for them. No lawyer represented them. So at the ten minute hearing, the Norths were made permanent wards of the court under Parks’s guardianship for life.

Their possessions were sold by another “transitions” firm, Even Tide Life Transitions. Their 2010 Chrysler was sold for under $8,000. Two Renoir lithographs fetched $3,800. A Brancusi table, $12,050. Other valuable things went for the same sort of song. Some pastel drawings made by their son who had died at the age of thirty-two were crumpled up and thrown away, though Rennie often asked for them. Their cash savings of $50,000 in the Bank of America were transferred into an account in April Parks’s name. 

Similar stories were told by other inmates, ten of whom were also under Parks’s guardianship. Some had been deprived of considerable wealth. They were even deprived of most of their clothes. When Rennie wanted to go shopping for clothes, Parks found out, forbade the expedition, and took $108 as a fee “for the conversation”.

Julie tried to get legal guardianship of her parents. Parks told the court that she was unfit, a “reported addict” who “had no contact” with her parents. Julie had no chance to challenge Parks in court and only found out about the lies much later.

It gets worse still.

Meet Jared Shafer. He is the super Guardian who trains the lesser guardians. He has thousands of wards and estates in his “care”. In 1979 he was appointed “public administrator”, in charge of the estates of county wards for whom no private guardian, such as a relative, was available. In 2003 he set up his own private “guardianship and fiduciary”  business. The racketeering operation was moved over from local government and Jared Shafer to Jared Safer alone – though he still kept his government listed phone number, and still had friends in official positions.

A relative of one of Shafer’s wards, Terry Williams,  took the shocking story of what had happened to her father to the Las Vegas police. She listed 23 statutes that had been violated. But the police returned her statement stamped “Not a police matter”.  Apparently the Las Vegas police never accepted complaints about the treatment of wards.

Next Terry Williams  tried bringing a civil suit against Shafer for racketeering. The US District Court of Central California heard the case in 2009. Terry Williams explained how people were “deemed incompetent” and then had their assets taken away from them.

The US District Court of Central California dismissed the case. Numerous other such cases were also dismissed by district courts.

Jared Shafer goes to some lengths to prevent wards appealing to the courts. One who made it to a hearing found himself before Jon Norheim. He asked to be allowed to live with his daughter. Nevada law requires courts to favor relatives over professional guardians, but Norheim dismissed his appeal. Anecdotes demonstrate how much influence Shafer has over Norheim –  and over  politicians. He boasts, “I wrote the [guardianship] laws”.  It is not untrue. In 1995 he got the Nevada Senate to allow his county (in effect himself?) to be the beneficiary of interest earned on the money of his wards that he invested. Another of “his” laws was one that permitted him – and other public guardians – to take control of wards’ property without a court order.

He restricts visits to confined wards by relatives and life-partners. Months go by without a visit being allowed by him.

He has the power to arbitrarily remove anyone from the position of co-guardian. He managed to do this even to the daughter of a ward who was herself a professional psychiatric nurse and a specialist in geriatric nursing. She appealed – to Norheim – not to have Shafer left as her father’s sole guardian on the grounds that Shafer was abusive. Norheim said he trusted Shafer completely – and dismissed the appeal.

What became of the Norths? Parks changed their health insurance to an insurer of her own choice. Then both Rudy and Rennie were dosed with mind-numbing drugs. Their daughter finally found out what the drugs were when a new director, Julie Liebo, took over the facility and, against Parks’s “orders”, allowed families to be given information about the medical treatment given to the wards. In retaliation Parks threatened the director with arrest and deprivation of her license. And she began to remove her wards from the facility. One who announced with some excitement that she was being allowed to go to a hair salon went out the door and never came back. Another  was “taken away in a van, screaming”. The director tried to get the state to stop this sort of thing happening, but failed. She went to the Clark County Family Court (Norheim?), the Department of Health Services, the Bureau of Health Care, and Nevada Adult Protective Services. “Each agency told her that it didn’t have the authority or the jurisdiction to intervene.”

The turn of the Norths came. Without giving them time to say good-bye to the friends they had made, Parks had them suddenly moved by Caring Transitions (remember Cindy Breck?) to a cheaper facility. When their daughter Julie heard of the plan to move them she rushed to see what was to be done with them, but when she got there they were gone. Julie gave vent to her fury,  shouting at Parks’s assistant Heidi Kramer, “April Parks is a thief.” Kramer called the police. They came, and a police officer told Julie Belshe that she “had no rights”. Julie Liebo, the director, had to admit that was true.

Julie Belshe drove, weeping, to the “cheaper facility” in Las Vegas. But Parks was there and would not let her see her parents. She ordered Julie to go away, and when Julie did not obey she too called the police. Julie tried begging them to let her see her father and mother. Their reply was a citation for trespassing, and a warning that if she came back to the facility they would arrest her.

The Norths had an even smaller room in the new facility. They found themselves among the hopelessly incapacitated. Rennie was dosed with a drug used for the pacification of schizophrenics.

Then Julie Belshe went to the local press. The Voice had already published a warning about Clark County guardians, that they “had been lining their pockets for a very long time”. One of its  editors, Rana Goodman, visited the Norths, and got up a petition demanding that the laws to do with guardianships be changed by the Nevada legislature.

Another paper, the Review-Journal, brought out a report on Jared Shafer and the complaints that had been made against him through many years.

And so, when at last the Norths got to a hearing – before Norheim – the court was full of journalists. Norheim underwent a dramatic change. He found that the Norths’ confiscated possessions had been sold without court permission. (He had let Parks get away with that racket for years.) He also suspended Parks as the Norths’ guardian. That had never happened to her before.

In March 2017, Parks was indicted for theft and perjury among other charges. The extent of the racket she had run came out in a summary of the investigation. “Parks went to hospitals and attorneys’ offices” to “generate more clients”. She had “secured a contract with six medical facilities … to refer patients to her”. She “often gave doctors blank certificates and told them exactly what to write in order for their patients to become her wards”. Needless to say, they were usually the wealthier patients.

April Parks is to go on trial in 2018. But Jared Shafer has not been indicted and “is still listed in the Clark County court system as a trustee and as an administrator”. And Jon Norheim has been merely transferred to another court “where he now oversees cases involving abused and neglected children”.

The Norths now live with their daughter Julie and her husband in California. They have no money. Parks used up all their cash, and all that she derived from the sale of their possessions, on their alleged monthly bills and fees to herself. She would of course have preferred them to be richer, and probably miscalculated what they were worth when she targeted them.

In their room, Rudy and Rennie have two pictures by their son. Julie had fished them out of the trash bags in which Cindy Breck’s Caring Transition staff had dumped them the day she helped “transition” the Norths.

They are restored to psychological health, though Rennie still has nightmares about what happened to them. And their daughter still fears that “guardians” might appear to snatch them away again at any moment.

She is right to fear it.

The Fight of Our Lives – Defeating the Ideological War Against the West, is a hard-hitting new documentary film by Gloria Z. Greenfield that examines the internal and external threats facing the West. The 66-minute film is scheduled for release on 2/19/18.

Heres’ the trailer:

While women in Iran were risking imprisonment by casting off their hijabs – the symbol of their subjugation to Muhammad’s male minions – the grandees at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) handed them out to their female staff on “World Hijab Day” in the hope that they would not just try them on, as they suggested with crocodile grins, but keep them and wear them. (How do we know that this is their hope? Because the FCO was long ago captivated by the charms of Islam. Because successive generations of FCO civil servants worked long and hard – in co-operation with other European foreign ministries – for the Islamization of Britain and Europe, and now see their goal within reach. Because the FCO is famously the enemy of Britain, just as the State Department has long been and even now still is the enemy of America.)

What is new, or at least newly apparent, is that Western feminists long to be subjugated.

How do we know that this is their desire? There are proofs aplenty.

Take Sweden for example. Sweden boasts of having “a feminist government”. There are twelve women and eleven men in the ministerial posts, all of them self-declared feminists.

Bruce Bawer writes at Gatestone:

“Sweden has the first feminist government in the world,” brags the Swedish government on its official website. …

[Sweden’s] feminism … is “intersectional” feminism. What is “intersectional” feminism? It … accepts a hierarchy whereby other “victim groups” – such as “people of color” and Muslims – are higher up on the grievance ladder than women …

This means that “intersectional” feminists must be culturally sensitive and culturally relative, recognizing and privileging culturally predicated values other than sexual equality. They must be feminists who understand that while no expression of contempt for the purported tyranny of Western males can be too loud, overstated or vulgar, they must, in their encounters with less feminist-minded cultures, temper their devotion to female equality out of respect for those cultures’ different priorities. In practice, this compulsion to respect the different priorities of other cultures is most urgent, and the respect itself most cringing when the culture in question is the one in which female inequality is most thoroughly enshrined and enforced. …

In no country have the precepts of “intersectional” feminism been more unequivocally endorsed by the political and cultural establishment, and more eagerly internalized by the citizenry, than in Sweden. Case in point: one of the consequences of “intersectional” feminism is a severe reluctance to punish Muslim men for acting in accordance with the moral dictates of their own culture; and it is precisely because of this reluctance that Sweden, with its “feminist government”,  has … become the “rape capital of the West”. Moreover, it was “intersectionality” that, last year, led every female member of a Swedish government delegation to Iran to wear head coverings and to behave like the humblest harem on the planet. “With this gesture of subjugation,” observed one Swiss news website, “they have not only made a joke of any concept of ‘feminism’ but have also stabbed their Iranian sisters in the back.” …

Every single action [of this sort on the part of Swedish government officials, police and civil servants] has been rooted in a philosophy that they thoroughly understand and in which they deeply believe. They are, as they love to proclaim, proud feminists through and through. It just so happens that, in deference to the edicts of “intersectionality,” their ardent belief in sisterhood ends where brutal Islamic patriarchy, systematic gender oppression, and primitive “honor culture” begin.

In the same article, however, Bruce Bawer points out that this feminist belief is “not confined to Sweden”.

Last year, on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, it was on full display in the United States at the Women’s March, where the new President was universally denounced as a personification of patriarchy, while Linda Sarsour, a woman in hijab and champion of Islamic law (sharia), became an overnight feminist heroine.

What is Sarsour promoting? Under sharia law, a woman is expected to be subservient and obedient. Her testimony in court is worth half that of a man, because she is “deficient in intelligence”. A daughter should be given an inheritance only half that of a son. A man is not only permitted  but encouraged to beat his wife if she is insufficiently obedient. A man may take “infidel” wives, but a woman may not wed outside the faith. A man may have up to four wives, but a woman can have only one husband. A man can divorce his wife simply by uttering a few words; a woman, if she wants a divorce, must subject herself to a drawn-out process at the end of which a group of men will rule on the matter. A man is entitled to have sex with his wife against her wishes and, under certain circumstances, other women as well. And that is just the beginning.

Sometimes, when one points out these rules, people will respond: “Well, the Bible says such-and-such.” The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that [some 1.5 billion] people still live by them.

Sarsour was passionately applauded.

… That is “intersectional” feminism raised to the point of self-destruction.

The ardently feminist Huffington Post urged American women to don the hijab. About which, Pamela Geller wrote at Breitbart:

The Huffington Post published an article … entitled The Beautiful Reasons Why These Women Love Wearing A Hijab. …

The Huffington Post asked women from all over the Internet to show just how beautifully diverse the hijab can be using the hashtag #HijabToMe. This was followed by photo after photo of Muslimas in headwraps. How is that beautifully diverse? Their heads are all covered. They’re all subjugated. …

The real news angle regarding the hijab is not that women from different areas wear it. The real hijab news angle concerns the women and girls who suffer brutal beatings and are sometimes even killed because they dare to say out loud that they don’t want to wear it. It is women who don’t wear the cloth coffin, the ambulatory body bag (aka the burka) in Muslim countries under the sharia who are beaten, arrested and at times killed. Even in Western countries, girls such as Aqsa Parvez in Canada, Jessica Mokdad in Michigan, Noor Almalaki in Arizona have been honor murdered for not wearing hijab. Other girls such as Rifqa Bary have been beaten by their Muslim parents because they refused to wear Islamic garb.

This kind of thing happens around the world. Amina Muse Ali, a Somali Christian, was murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab. Alya Al-Safar’s Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized for her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told that they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Chechen women were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab. Elementary school teachers in Tunisia were threatened with death for not wearing hijab. Syrian schoolgirls were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab. Women in Gaza were forced by Hamas to wear hijab. Women in Iran protested against the regime by daring to take off their legally-required hijab. Women in London were threatened with death by Muslim thugs if they didn’t wear hijab.

And in Saudi Arabia, schoolgirls escaping from a building on fire were forced back to their deaths in the flames because they had emerged without the required Muslim covering of their heads.

The outraged protests of feminists all over the West were – not reported. Is it possible there weren’t any?

Our guess – there weren’t any.

L’Oréal, which manufactures products for enhancing the beauty of women’s hair, recently advertised their products with a picture of a woman with her hair completely covered by a hijab.

Someone protested. Could it possibly have been a feminist? Our guess – no.

In our town, and almost certainly in your town, and most of the towns (cities) of the United States, tall buildings are springing up at or near railway and bus stations, consisting of hundreds of very small living-units for single occupants. No areas are provided for cars, though there is accommodation for a limited number of bicycles. Occupants are encouraged to use public transport.

The living-units we have seen contain a narrow bunk bed, a small wardrobe and a couple of drawers to hold a few (standard issue) clothes, a desk big enough for a (frequently called-in and replaced) lap-top computer to stand on, a shelf where a very few books or a framed photograph or two might be displayed. And there is a narrow shower-closet, with the usual facilities, where the luxuries of rationed soap and toilet tissue may perhaps be enjoyed in the hours when the water is centrally turned on. We do not know for sure that there are recording devices hidden here and there, but we very reasonably suspect there are.

These buildings are part of the implementation by your local council of Agenda 21.

A video, issued in January 2009, explains what Agenda 21 is:

So families are to be broken up or never formed. That’s why the new living-units are for single people only.

Yes, the single persons will be lonely. That’s a vital part of the plan. 

The British Prime Minister (by what accumulation of errors?) Theresa May is the first political leader to appoint a Minister of Loneliness. Her name (it would of course be a woman) is Tracey Crouch. She is also the Minister of Sports (and “Digital, Culture, and Media”) who knows everything about team work, uniforms, mass transport, rules, penalties … Good choice, Theresa!

So as not to offend the Muslim community – which must never be offended even if its members rape and murder that little daughter of yours who has been taken away to be educated in group-think – males and females will be separated for all communal activities (pretty well the only kind of activities that will be allowed).

But also not to offend the LGBQTetc communities, there will have to be further separation for sports teams, work forces, organized social gatherings … Public toilet facilities, however, will be as open to all-comers as the borders of the late nation-states.

The human race will be relieved of the sin of private ownership. And of the burden of self-support. And of the responsibility of family support.  And of any cause to envy your neighbor.

Oh, brave new low-CO2 world that has such collectives in it!

… Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee colluded with Russian “novelists” (fake news disseminators), who were accessed through a “freaky Brit spook”, in conspiracy with top law-enforcement officials in the intelligence services and Obama’s Department of Justice. 

John Nolte writes at Breitbart:

Here are 16 things the media do not want you to know about the Nunes memo:

1. The so-called Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document — namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
2. Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a wiretap to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent — the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.
3. It should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to wiretap a presidential campaign defies  belief. Why Obama’s FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the wiretap.
4. Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama’s DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.
5. According to the Nunes memo, an “essential” part of the FISA wiretap application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.
6. So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
7. Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly “salacious and unverified”. We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.
8. According to the Nunes memo, “Steele told [former FBI official Bruce] Ohr, he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’”
9. Ohr, who was part of the FBI’s anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.
10. Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was “salacious and unverified” c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator’s own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent.
11. In order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court — an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.
12. Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was “salacious and unverified,” the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier.* The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.
13. Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.
14. Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a “salacious and unverified” narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from — meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:

We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

– And whose areas of expertise include cybersecurity and the Russian language. (Is she a Russian agent?)

1. All of this dishonesty occurred under Comey, the man our media now hold up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw those committing the above abuses, he leaked classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.

And finally…

16. Much of the “salacious and unverified” material in the dossier came from the Russians. In other words, those disgusting dossier lies about Trump’s personal behavior came from Russian operatives. So there is no question that it was the Clinton campaign, Democrats, Steele, the FBI, and DOJ who colluded with the Russians to rig a presidential election.

Yes, there was collusion with the Russians, and those in our government currently investigating Trump in the hopes of overturning a presidential election are the colluders.

*As Mark Steyn puts it: “They did, however, argue that the dossier had been independently ‘corroborated’ by a September 2016 story in Yahoo News – even though that Yahoo story came from the same guy who authored the dossier: in effect, the Government got its surveillance warrant by arguing that its fake-news dossier from Christopher Steele had been independently corroborated by a fake-news story from Christopher Steele.  … The two choices here: either ‘the world’s premier law enforcement agency’ was manipulated by one freaky Brit spook, or ‘the world’s premier law enforcement agency’ conspired with the freaky Brit spook to manipulate the judge.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence today made public a committee memo with information on abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Chairman Nunes issued the following statement:

The Committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another. It is my hope that the Committee’s actions will shine a light on this alarming series of events so we can make reforms that allow the American people to have full faith and confidence in their governing institutions.

 

January 18, 2018

To: HPSCI Majority Members

From: HPSCI Majority Staff

Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Purpose

This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.

Investigation Update

On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.

The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §,1805(d)(l)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.

Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard—particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.

1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

1. a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.
2. b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of—and paid by—the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.

2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News—and several other outlets—in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington D.C. in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.

1. a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September—before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October—but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.
2. b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling—maintaining confidentiality—and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.

3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files—but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.

1. a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.

4) According to the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was—according to his June 2017 testimony—“salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.

The investigation into the alleged ties to Russia of presidential candidate Donald Trump by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is itself the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree, and anything it finds is also poisoned. So will it be called off?

Are the FISA court judges to be held to account for accepting a fraudulent case for the surveillance of a US citizen?

Is there a constitutional crisis as a result of this dirty conspiracy entered into by top law-enforcement agents?

Which would you rather be able truthfully to claim:

“I have a right to …”

or

“I am free to …” ?

There has been some discussion in the comments section of our post The Colossus … and the enriching of America (29 January, 2018) about whether government is necessary for the protection of a citizen’s rights or the protection of his liberty. I say, for the protection of his liberty. That is what defines “a free country”. In the United States of America, there are certain “rights” granted in law that are themselves protective of the individual’s freedom. The ultimate aim of the Founders in granting those rights was the protection of liberty.

*

“Freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization”

– Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chapter Four.

To be for freedom to do what one wants to do is not to be for unbounded liberty. (I use the words “liberty” and “freedom” interchangeably, as they are synonyms.)

What then are the bounds of liberty?

Ideally, my liberty is limited by nothing except everyone else’s liberty.

Sane, sober, sensible self-interest tells me that if I don’t want to be bonked on the nose by my neighbor, I would do well not to bonk him on his nose. But I cannot trust everyone else – or even myself – to be always sane, sober, and sensible.

If I live in a time and place when and where I have to fear continually that I will very likely be assaulted, injured, killed, and that the things I have acquired to sustain my existence, comfort, safety, and pleasure may be forcefully taken from me, I am not free. I am constrained to be perpetually on my guard against attack. I must never venture abroad unarmed. I must carry my possessions with me or stay with them. I am burdened with anxiety. I am severely hampered.

But if my freedom is protected by law and the apparatus of law-enforcement – police, judicial courts, prisons, gallows – I can take the safety of my person and my things for granted, and go lightly about my business among my fellow citizens. (Which is not to argue that it’s unnecessary to insure my house and its contents, or register my intellectual property. These are, it is true, private protections taken on by personal choice, but available to me only in a society governed by the rule of law.)

The city-states of ancient Greece embodied the idea of a society made up of people from many different countries, nations and tribes, all governed by the same rule of law. Your willingness to obey the law made you a worthy citizen, regardless of what region of the earth you derived from. The idea that people of many different nations could melt together into one nation ruled by law (“e pluribus unum”) was lost and forgotten for centuries and was not applied again until the eighteenth century with the founding of the United States of America.

However, the idea of a nation governed by the rule of law rather than by a monarch, re-emerged earlier than that, in England, with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. By signing it, King John conceded the principle: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you.” It was intended to be a “charter of liberties”, not a bestowal of “rights” on his subjects or on any one class of his subjects such as the barons. Clause 60 declared: “all the customs and liberties which we have granted to our own men shall be observed by all of our men, both lay and clerk [cleric], to their own men”. In other words, just as the king pledged liberty to the barons, so the barons, by the same token (the Charter) pledged liberty to their tenants.

Magna Carta affirmed the vital principle of freedom under the law. Clause 39 of the Charter said: ‘no free man shall be imprisoned or deprived of his lands except by judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’.  Clause 40 said: ‘To no one shall we sell, delay or deny right or justice’ (“right” in the sense of what is right, not “a right”).  Before Magna Carta, the king had been able to do pretty well whatever he liked – and did.  After the making of the charter of liberties, the king was as firmly subject to the law as everyone else.

(It is true that the monarchs of England nevertheless went on for centuries having too much arbitrary power. But it would be a mistake to believe that the continuing existence of an English monarch now means that the people are not as free as the American people. [The British have recently become less free, but not for that reason.] Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange and his wife Mary became the constitutional monarchs of the United Kingdom, the reigning king or queen is the nominal and ceremonial head of state, not the power of the state. The present Queen has no choice but to sign the acts of law that Parliament passes. The people are “subjects” in name only.)

A free country is one in which the people are free to do anything that is not specifically prohibited by law. Most of its laws proscribe rather than prescribe. They say you must not do this and that, such as murder, steal, perjure yourself. While there  are some that say you must do – for instance, the laws of the fisc: you must pay your taxes – the fewer “must” laws there are, the freer the people.

Now let us suppose that legislators decide that the law should specify everything you may do. Those would be your rights. It would be an infinitely long list, never exhaustive. So the enterprise would be impossible.

Does that mean that there can be no such thing as a “right” granted by law? No, it does not mean that. The law, and only the law, can grant a right. Even if one believes in a god, and makes the claim that the god bestowed certain rights on every human being ever born – the right to life, say – it would be meaningless if it were not recognized as a right, and protected, by the law.

Only the law can grant a right. The rights the laws of a free country can grant are very few. And there is a danger in granting any: that some governments, having granted a few, may claim that what those few permit you is all that you are permitted.

Why can governments only grant a few rights? Because no one can have a right that puts an obligation on someone else.

That is why it is nonsense to speak of a “right” to health care; a “right” to an education, a “right” to a house, a “right” to a minimum income, a “right” to equality of pay; a “right” to social security; a “right” to an abortion; a “right” to contraception; a “right” to a sex-change operation; or, the crowning stupidity, a “right not to be offended”. That takes away the essential freedom on which all the rest depend – the freedom to speak. And it is in itself a deeply offensive notion.

If your “right” compels the labor of someone else, it is not a “right” but a privilege – and what is worse, the indefensible privilege of the parasite.

What of your “unalienable”[1] rights named in the Declaration of Independence as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”? They do not put an obligation on someone else, so aren’t they good rights? You are declared to be endowed with them by your “Creator”, “Nature’s God” – which is a way of saying that they are yours simply because you exist. And many there are who believe that because they exist, they have a right to exist.

If you believe that God or Nature granted you the right to live, to be free, and to pursue happiness, you may also believe that God or Nature will protect those rights of yours. But in fact Nature guarantees you nothing. You have no natural rights. You can call them natural, you can call them God-given, but unless they are recognized and supported by the law, you may find that they are not dependable.

So what rights can the law grant – and sufficiently protect to make the granting of them more than just the wistful thought of a somnolent parliament?

These: The right to speak freely. The right to a trial if you are accused of breaking the law. The right to safeguard yourself, your property, your reputation. They are among the rights granted by the US Constitution in the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights), and all of them can be, and are, protected by the law. By protecting them, the law – or say the government – is protecting your freedom.

That is what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are all about: realizing the idea on which the USA was founded – the idea of liberty.

Jillian Becker   January 31, 2018

[1] “Unalienable” means the same as “inalienable”: that which cannot be taken away.