Month: August 2018

The Slants Know What it Takes to Win a Supreme Court Case

|||Facebook/The SlantsContrary to popular belief, you probably won’t see any country music stars by simply walking down Nashville’s Music Row. But if you swing by Bobby’s Idle Hour on 16th Street Ave., you just might catch a musician or two. This is where Simon Tam and Joe Jiang of The Slants, an all-Asian-American dance-rock band, perform on Thursday evening.

Tam, the band’s founder, casually mentions his Supreme Court case onstage. “We were fighting against the U.S. government for the right to use our name,” he says.

The bassist was referring to Matal v. Tam, which was ultimately decided in his band’s favor last year. The high court ruled that federal Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) could not prevent the band from trademarking its name, even if it did “disparage…persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” When Tam sat down with Reason‘s Meredith Bragg a year ago, he explained that the group picked its name, in part, to reclaim an old anti-Asian slur. Both the name and the band were designed to put Asian Americans front and center in an industry that often left them in the background.

So what’s it like to win a Supreme Court case? Tam reflects on the legal battle with Reason after his set.

Regulations, he learned, can do more harm than the thing being regulated. For example, the PTO used offensive imagery—even pictures of Miley Cyrus pulling her eyes back to make a stereotypical “slant”—to explain to a group of Asian Americans that they were really the ones disparaging a community. “The government thought they were doing us a favor by denying us rights,” Tam says.

The court decision’s biggest impact, he says, may just be to have ended a legal battle that nearly spanned a decade. He calls the case “the most frustrating thing in the world,” adding that the “system is not designed for you to win.” Tam advises anyone thinking of challenging the government to start “thinking like an artist and an activist.” The politically and legally inclined tend to think within the realm of possibility, he explains, while artists think more creatively.

Earlier this month, the band formed The Slants Foundation, a nonprofit seeking to provide resources to “Asian Americans looking to incorporate activism into their art,” in an effort to help other artists.

Days before entering the Supreme Court, The Slants released their album The Band Who Must Not Be Named on Martin Luther King Day. The band set up an impromptu concert at the D.C. memorial dedicated to the civil rights leader, and there Tam saw a quote from King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Tam agreed, but he also found himself thinking that the arc bends only when people work to bend it.

“It requires people who are intentional. It requires persistence. And it requires a community that’s willing to stand up and say ‘It doesn’t matter how challenging this battle it. It doesn’t matter what kind of hill we have to climb. It is the ultimate goal that’s worth it. Even if it isn’t addressed in our generation, it’s still worth fighting for,'” he says.

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UMich Economic Conditions Worst Since Election As Spending Plans Plunge

Following the preliminary data’s weakness (11-mo lows), the final August University of Michigan Sentiment Index improved modestly (from 95.3 to 96.2) but still the weakest since Jan 2018.

  • Sentiment index decreased to a seven-month low of 96.2 (est. 95.5) from 97.9 in July; preliminary reading was 95.3

  • Current conditions gauge fell to 110.3, the lowest since November 2016, from 114.4 in prior month (prelim. 107.8)

  • Expectations measure decreased to 87.1 from 87.3 (prelim. 87.3)

 

As UMich’s Richard Curtin notes, most of the August decline was in the Current Economic Conditions Index, which fell to its lowest level since November 2016. These results stand in sharp contrast to the recent very favorable report on growth in the national economy.

Consumers’ views of buying conditions have fallen to multi-year lows.

  • Home buying conditions were viewed less favorably than anytime since December 2008

  • Vehicle buying conditions were viewed less favorably than since late 2013;

  • Buying conditions for household durables were viewed less favorably than since late 2015.

The dominating weakness was related to less favorable assessments of buying conditions, mainly due to less favorable perceptions of market prices and to a lesser extent, rising interest rates. Future income and job certainty have become the main reasons cited by consumers for their positive spending views.

This shift from attractive prices and interest rates to income is typical of the later stages of expansions, with references to income and job certainty peaking just before downturns.

The anticipated inflation rate has also increased to its highest level in four years.

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Pat Buchanan: A Cancer On The Papacy

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“Priests who prey on parochial school children and altar boys are not only sinners, they are criminal predators who belong in penitentiary cells not parish rectories….”

This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical.

First came the stunning revelation that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington and friend to presidents, had for decades been a predator-priest who preyed on seminarians and abused altar boys, and whose depravity was widely known and covered up.

Came then the report of a Pennsylvania grand jury that investigated six dioceses and found that some 300 priests had abused 1,000 children over the last 70 years.

The bishop of Pittsburgh, Donald Wuerl, now cardinal archbishop of Washington, defrocked some of these corrupt priests, but reassigned others to new parishes where new outrages were committed.

This weekend brought the most stunning accusation.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Vatican envoy to the United States under Pope Benedict XVI, charged that Pope Francis had been told of McCarrick’s abuses, done nothing to sanction him, and that, as “zero tolerance” of sexual abuse is Francis’ own policy, the pope should resign.

In his 11-page letter of accusations, Vigano further charged that there is a powerful “homosexual current” among the Vatican prelates closest to the pope.

What did the pope know and when did he know it?

Not unlike Watergate, the issue here is whether Pope Francis knew what was going on in the Vatican and in his Church, and why he was not more resolute in rooting out the moral squalor.

Orthodox, conservative and traditionalist Catholics are the most visible and vocal demanding an accounting. Progressive and liberal Catholics, to whom Pope Francis and Cardinal McCarrick were seen as allies on issues of sexual morality, have been thrown on the defensive.

Now, accusations alone are neither proof nor evidence.

Yet there is an obligation, an imperative, given the gravity of the revelations, that the Vatican address the charges.

When did Pope Francis become aware of McCarrick’s conduct, which appears to have been widely known? Did he let his close friendship with McCarrick keep him from doing his papal and pastoral duty?

This destructive scandal has been bleeding for decades. Too long. The Church is running out of time. It needs to act decisively now.

Priests who prey on parochial school children and altar boys are not only sinners, they are criminal predators who belong in penitentiary cells not parish rectories. They ought to be handed over to civil authorities.

While none of us is without sin, sexually active and abusive clergy should be severed from the priesthood. There needs to be a purge at the Vatican, removing or retiring bishops, archbishops and cardinals, the revelation of whose past misconduct would further feed this scandal.

For too long, the Catholic faithful have been forced to pay damages and reparations for crimes and sins of predator priests and the hierarchy’s collusion and complicity in covering them up.

And it needs be stated clearly: This is a homosexual scandal.

Almost all of the predators and criminals are male, as are most of the victims: the boys, the teenagers, the young seminarians.

Applicants to the seminary should be vetted the way applicants to the National Security Council are. Those homosexually inclined should be told the priesthood of the Church is not for them, as it is not for women.

Secular society will call this invidious discrimination, but it is based on what Christ taught and how he established his Church.

Inevitably, if the Church is to remain true to herself, the clash with secular society, which now holds that homosexuality is natural and normal and entitled to respect, is going to widen and deepen.

For in traditional Catholic teaching, homosexuality is a psychological and moral disorder, a proclivity toward acts that are intrinsically wrong, and everywhere and always sinful and depraved, and ruinous of character.

The idea of homosexual marriages, recently discovered to be a constitutional right in the USA, remains an absurdity in Catholic doctrine.

If the Church’s highest priority is to coexist peacefully with the world, it will modify, soften, cease to preach, or repudiate these beliefs, and follow the primrose path of so many of our separated Protestant brethren.

But if she does, it will not be the same Church that over centuries accepted martyrdom to remain the faithful custodian of Gospel truths and sacred tradition.

And how has the embrace of modernity and its values advanced the religious faiths whose leaders sought most earnestly to accommodate them?

The Church is going through perhaps its gravest crisis since the Reformation. Since Vatican II, the faithful have been departing, some leaving quietly, others embracing agnosticism or other faiths.

“Who am I to judge?” said the pope when first pressed about the morality of homosexuality.

Undeniably, Francis, and the progressive bishops who urge a new tolerance, a new understanding, a new appreciation of the benign character of homosexuality, have won the plaudits of a secular press that loathed the Church of Pius XII.

Of what value are all those wonderful press clippings now, as the chickens come home to roost in Vatican City?

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Chicago PMI Beats Expectations As ‘Soft’ Surveys Shrug Off Dismal ‘Hard’ Data

With ‘hard’ real economic data slumping to its weakest since Nov 2017, ‘soft’ survey-based views of the economy have once again surged, ever-hopeful that the real recovery is right around the corner and stagnation in real wages (as inflation lowers the quality of American-dreamers’ lives) is about to end…

And building on that rising ‘soft’ survey data is today’s Chicago Purchasing Managers Index which, despite dropping from July’s 65.5 level, beat expectations of 63.0 and printed 63.6 (only lowest since April)…

Chicago PMI printed near the middle of the forecast range of 61 – 66.2 from 25 economists surveyed.

The number of components rising vs last month was only 3.

  • Business barometer rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

  • Prices paid rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

  • New orders rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Employment rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

  • Inventories rose and the direction reversed, signaling expansion

  • Supplier deliveries rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

  • Production rose at a faster pace, signaling expansion

  • Order backlogs rose at a slower pace, signaling expansion

So production and new orders accelerated BUT employment and prices paid slowed? ok…

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Judge Orders ‘Virtue Signalers’ To Return All $403k GoFundMe Money To Homeless Vet

In what some have called the greatest exhibition of fake ‘virtue signaling’, the “feel good story” of late last year that went really, really bad; now has a silver lining…

As we detailed previously, homeless veteran Johnny Bobbitt Jr. served as an ammunition technician in the U.S. Marine Corps.  After leaving the Marines, Bobbitt worked as a fireman and a paramedic before eventually falling on hard times. 

Last October, Bobbitt came across Kate McClure after she had become stranded on the side of I-95 in a bad section of Philadelphia.  Even though he was living on the streets, he used his last 20 dollars to buy her some gasoline so that she could get home.  To thank him, McClure and her boyfriend Mark D’Amico created a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to help Bobbitt get off the streets.  The original goal was to raise $10,000, but the story went mega-viral and the campaign ultimately raised a total of $403,000.

It was the “feel good story” of the holiday season, and it was covered extensively by the mainstream media.  McClure and Bobbitt even made a joint appearance on Good Morning America, and it appeared that this was one news story that truly had a happy ending.

But it didn’t… McClure and D’Amico never gave Bobbitt the money.  Instead, they took charge of it and bought him the things that they thought he “needed”.

The Philadelphia Inquirer later reported that Bobbitt had only received about half of the funds raised.

And so, as The Hill reports, Bobbitt sued the couple claiming that they had mismanaged the funds, but the couple said they would not give Bobbitt the money because Bobbit had reportedly become drug addicted again.

Bobbitt accused the couple of fraud, alleging that the two committed fraud and conspiracy by taking large amounts of the donations to “enjoy a lifestyle they could not afford” and using the account as “their personal piggy bank,” and asked a judge to appoint a supervisor to manage the money in the fundraising account.

And overnight the verdict came down and a judge on Thursday gave a South Jersey couple less than a day to hand over what’s left of the $400,000 they raised through a GoFundMe campaign for Johnny Bobbitt Jr.

The Inquirer reports that Superior Court Judge Paula T. Dow in Mount Holly ordered Kate McClure, 28, and Mark D’Amico, 35, to transfer the money into an escrow account by Friday afternoon and hire a forensic accountant to review the financial records within 10 days.

“The funds should be removed from [D’Amico’s and McClure’s control] and frozen,” Dow said during a one-hour hearing.

The filing also asks for an injunction that would prevent more of the money from being spent.

Given that the New Jersey couple has until this afternoon to turn over the money, and has already blown through it “enjoying a lifestyle they could not afford,” perhaps they should set up a GoFundMe page for that? If Lanny Davis can do it, and receive cash from people, anyone can.

Good luck raising the cash to pay Bobbit back!

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‘National Sex Trafficking Crackdown’ Nets Zero Sex Traffickers: Reason Roundup

Last week concluded the latest “National Johns Suppression Initiative,” an appropriately draconian name for a coordinated cross-country targeting of sex workers and their customers. This year’s stings netted “hundreds of would-be sex buyers,” the Chicago Tribune reports, “as well as a half-dozen alleged pimps.”

The Tribune headline describes it a “national sex trafficking crackdown.” But let’s do the math from the figures it gives us:

  • 473 people arrested for attempting to pay for sexual activity
  • 6 people arrested for pimping (i.e., profiting off of prostitution)
  • 0 people arrested for sex trafficking

This “national sex trafficking operation” has a zero percent success rate if the goal is, you know, actually catching sex traffickers. Even counting the six alleged pimps, that’s just 1.3 percent of the total arrests report—and that’s without including the sex workers also arrested as part of this operation.

The focus for police here is allegedly on “rescuing children.” But either there’s drastically fewer minors in need of rescuing than they say or they’ve barely bothered to make a dent in the problem, instead squandering resources, attention, and action on shaming adults who seek consensual commercial exchanges with other adults.

In stings that spanned cities across the country for an entire month (July 25 to August 26), 11 teenagers were found to be working in prostitution.

Of the 473 “john” arrests, just 10 are accused of agreeing to go forward with the encounter once an undercover cop posing as a sex worker “admitted” to being underage.

The stings are organized by “abolitionist” Swanee Hunt and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart; this is the 16th annual operation. You might remember Dart from his blatantly unconstitutional war on Craigslist and Backpage for their adult ads, or Hunt from the time she paid Seattle prosecutors to frame the bust of an escort web forum as the takedown of a “sex trafficking ring.”

Hunt, Dart, and their ilk frame these as productive despite the dearth of actual victims because they say they’re “ending demand” for “child sex trafficking.” But as sting after sting like this shows, the demand just isn’t there. Prostitution among adults is popular; paying minors for sex is not, thank goodness. And to the extent that there are people out there seeking such things out and profiting off of them, stings like this don’t work to catch them.

After more than a decade of doing this annual “anti–sex trafficking” charade, it’s time to stop letting zealots like these two not only destroy the lives of innocent people but hijack police and media focus for their weird authoritarian ends.

Some departments are starting to wise up and opt out. For instance, after two years of participation, the McClennan County Sheriff’s Office in Texas decided not to participate. Said Chief Deputy David Kilcrease: “The john suppression effort is…primarily all misdemeanors. We’ve proven we can fill our books with misdemeanor arrests that are time-consuming to do,” but it pulls focus from folks actually instigating exploitation.

FREE MINDS

An interesting essay on Avital Ronell, the New York University professor recently accused by a former student of long-term sexual harassment, was written by another one of Ronell’s former teaching assistants, who asserts that “it is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather.”

Nontheless, writes Andrea Long Chu,

Academic celebrity soaks up blood like a pair of Thinx. A letter to NYU’s president, Andrew Hamilton, a draft of which leaked in June, argued that Avital’s “brilliant scholarship” qualified her for special treatment. The 51 signatories included giants of feminist theory like Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, as well as my department chair—and the professor who emailed to “encourage” me to play nice with Avital. (Butler has since issued some tepid regrets.)

Meanwhile, on social media and on their blog, the queer-studies scholars Lisa Duggan and Jack Halberstam dismissed the blowback against Avital as neoliberalism meets sex panic meets culture clash, straight people apparently being unable to decipher the coded queer intimacy of emails like “I tried to call you a number of times, unfortunately couldn’t get through, would have liked to leave a msg” [sic].

That Avital’s defenders are left-wing academic stars is not particularly surprising if you’ve spent much time in the academy. The institution has two choices when faced with political radicals: Ax them, especially if they are graduate students, or promote them. Make them successful, give them awards, power, enormous salaries. That way, when the next scandal comes along—and it will—they will have a vested interest in playing defense.

This is how institutionality reproduces. Even the call to think critically about power becomes a clever smoke screen. There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean “rules I shouldn’t have to follow.”

Read the whole thing at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

FREE MARKETS

Amazon is the new Walmart, Republicans are the new left:

Big banks purportedly closing immigrant accounts. It’s been going on with other groups that anger the prevailing administration (for Obama, it was sex workers and gun sellers) for years:

QUICK HITS

  • Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith celebrates the end of “insider political journalism.”
  • “Ever wonder why people’s perception of the incidence of crime, terrorism, kidnapping and other violent acts is often much higher than the reality? Why the U.S. is becoming a low-trust society? Why Americans are collectively in a funk?” asks Christopher Mims. Answer: Thanks, Internet!
  • The Verge considers how we should regulate facial recognition tools.

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Italian Bond Yields Are Blowing Up Again

For the second day in a row, the “weakest link” among G-10 bond markets, Italy, is getting hit hard, with the 10Y Italy government bond sliding, sending its yield to session highs of 3.24%, which also is above the highest yield hit during the May mini crisis, is now the highest going back to 2014.

“Lo spread” is similarly getting blown up, with the 10Y Italy-German spread now the widest since 2013…

… meanwhile the short-end is also moving higher, flattening the curve sharply.

The move has erased earlier gains, after reports in the Italian media that Finance Minister Tria is seeking a deficit/GDP ratio of 1.5% in the new budget law, well below the 3% feared by investors.

However, this favorable take was quickly erased following the latest blow out in emerging market bonds, where Argentina bonds took the lead and are being dumped en masse, and contagion is once again starting to emerge. And while US equities remains in a range, the move higher in Italy is being noticed by US Treasurys, whose yields are now down to session lows, just above 2.83%.

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College Bans 9/11 Memorial Citing Muslims’ Feelings

Authored by Molly Prince via The Daily Caller,

A private Wisconsin college banned students from exhibiting a Sept. 11 memorial fearing that it could foster an anti-Muslim environment on campus.

Ripon College ruled against a display by Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to honor the memory of those killed in the 2001 attacks and to help prevent the events from being forgotten, reported The Washington Examiner. It was part of an annual “Never Forget” project on college campuses around the nation.

The administration claimed that the memorial would create an atmosphere where “students from a Muslim background would feel singled out and/or harassed.”

“There is nothing that this poster, in particular, adds to the conversation about 9/11, or about the politics of terrorism, or about national security or responses to it that couldn’t be done easily and more constructively without it,” said Ripon’s Bias Protocol Board, according to the Examiner.

In addition to images of the Sept. 11 attacks, the exhibit also displayed subsequent radical Islamic extremist events such as Islamic State beheadings and the USS Cole bombing.

The college further claimed that Muslim terrorists only “represent a small percentage of the terrorist attacks that happen to this country” and that YAF is only showing “a very small picture of a specific religion or nationality instead of the larger viewpoint.”

YAF quickly refuted the aforementioned claim calling it false and fired back with a fact-check stating “from 1992 to 2017, Islamists were responsible for 92% of deaths caused by terrorism in the United States, and are ‘far and away the deadliest group of terrorists by ideology’.”

“This attempt by Ripon College’s ‘bias protocol board’ to sanitize the truth out of remembering the anniversary of September 11 proves the necessity of YAF’s iconic 9/11: Never Forget Project, as well as the need for bold YAF activists,” said YAF’s spokesman Spencer Brown.

“The administrators’ reliance on feelings rather than facts betrays their intention to cower from the truth rather than highlight the scourge of radical Islamist terror for what it is: evil.”

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“Scapegoated” China Stunned By Trump Tweets “From Some Alternative Universe”

Official newspaper China Daily launched a scathing attack on President Trump in an op-ed, considered a Beijing-by-proxy mouthpiece, blasting his repeated accusations against China on Twitter, proclaiming that his messages are from an alternative universe. 

Claiming that Trump is casting China as a “scapegoat,” after accusing them of hacking Hillary’s e-mail server:

“that will not deter the US president from smearing China’s image as he desperately needs a scapegoat in the run-up to the midterm elections, so he can divert public attention from the troubles the White House has become mired in”. 

The relatively strongly-worded editorial also took aim at Trump directly, commenting:

“To the thinking person, there are few things more disconcerting than a tweet by the US President, as they initially seem to accord to reality but then quickly turn into messages from some alternative universe.“

As The Economic Times reports, The Daily also expressed displeasure with another tweet where Trump blamed the Chinese communist regime for the lack of progress in the rapprochement with North Korea, and underlined that:

“China, against whom he is launching a trade war, is an easy candidate for that role, since it has long been demonised by US politicians.”

The article further notes that Trump indiscriminately uses his Twitter account to unleash his anger at his ‘enemies’

“…there is method behind his twittering… to be fair, it is not just China that Trump is maligning. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice have also had their integrity impugned.”

The straight-from-officials ‘opinion piece’ concluded with a jab at the deplorables:

“Since his supporters have shown a willingness to suspend disbelief, we can no doubt look forward to more such tales.”

As Reuters notes, state media in China have in recent weeks adopted an increasingly aggressive stance against Trump as the world’s two biggest economies have become engaged in an increasingly bitter trade war. That marks a shift from their previous approach of tempering any direct criticism against the U.S. president.

Read the full editorial here…

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J.D. Martinez’s Second Amendment Stance Is Patriotic: New at Reason

Someone recently dug up an old pro-Second Amendment Instagram post by Boston Red Sox star J.D. Martinez, in which the potential Triple Crown winner posted a picture of Adolf Hitler featuring the quote, “To conquer a nation, First disarm it’s (sic) citizens.” Martinez captioned the post, “This is why I will always stay strapped! #thetruth.”

Needless to say, the discovery triggered a torrent of stories about the “controversial” nature of Martinez’s 5-year-old post—because, apparently, disagreeing with a Hitlerian sentiment is now a provocative position. As it turns out, Hitler never said the words in Martinez’s pro-gun meme, although the dictator indisputably embraced a policy of disarming, in both rhetoric and action.

Perpetuating a questionable quotation can happen to the best of us. But as David Harsanyi writes, what seems to really tick off people—and it’s difficult to judge how many average sports fans really care about Martinez’s politics—is the notion that an armed population can be a freer one.

View this article.

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