A Crime Syndicate Head, Foreign Agent, Harridan President?

Hillary Clinton is the worst major party presidential candidate in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Obama.  The first election of Obama at least came with a built-in excuse for those of a lame mind and irresponsible nature.  Those who make no real effort to learn about the candidate for whom they vote could claim him as an unknown.  Of course they could not make the same excuse in 2012.

Hillary is a decades long known collectivist, personal power luster, and criminal and crime abettor.   She is now known also as the thief of government e-mails, a paid (through the Clinton Foundation) foreign government lobbyist while Secretary of State, and an effective undercover spy for foreign governments using her highly insecure e-mail server as a drop for our national security information for any foreign government to pick up at their leisure.  Hillary gave up classified documents and much insight into State Department bargaining positions for her convenience in hiding her pay for play schemes through the Clinton Foundation.  Any foreign government, generally friendly to the U.S. or unfriendly, that was not monitoring her e-mails was negligent or incompetent.  It is known that at least five foreign governments did and that some also monitored the e-mails of Hillary's close confidants.  It is likely many more were able to do so without leaving amateurish traces of their snooping.  Hillary truly should be in jail for her effective work as a spy against the national interests of the United States.

Let us not forget that Hillary also defied court orders to turn over the e-mails she stole from the government by destroying them.  Then she testified that she suffered massive memory loss both to the FBI and more importantly to the court when she evaded the answers to many of the Judicial Watch questions the court ordered her to answer.  Can a person with such massive memory loss function as President of the United States of America?  Before her severe memory loss, she failed to take the State Department required course to be able to recognize classified information and to handle it correctly.  Can anyone unable to recognize classified information be entrusted as President, the Commander-in-Chief?

Hillary took a nearly $100,000 payoff engineered through a commodities trading scheme from Tyson Foods and worked for them as a lawyer when Bill Clinton was attorney general and then governor of Arkansas so the state would look the other way as Tyson Foods heavily polluted the state rivers. Tyson Foods was then and still is one of the nation's top polluters.  Then she and Bill contributed to the savings and loan disaster with their Whitewater activities.  As President, Bill Clinton pardoned a top Tyson executive who was imprisoned for trying to bribe the Secretary of Agriculture.  Of course he also pardoned a fugitive from justice, Marc Rich, with the encouragement of Eric Holder.  Rich, a long-time contributor to the Clinton Foundation, was convicted of tax evasion, wire fraud, trading with the enemy, and racketeering.  The Clinton's have also had a long relationship with the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and have often visited him on his island in the Caribbean Sea, known to many as Lolita Island.  The Clintons are very unusually nasty people.  They have close ties with many other corrupt people, including Hillary's brother.

Hillary Clinton was even later than Obama in continuing to support Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), both of which came out of the Clinton administration and deprived LGBT individuals of their individual rights.  The reason for this may well be that most of the major nations providing contributions of money to the Clinton Foundation have laws making sex between two people of the same sex a crime punished by death.  Most also routinely deny women equal rights.

The Clinton Foundation claims that it is a charitable foundation and says on its website that it spends 87.2% of its money on program services.  But you are in serious error if you assume that this means that needy people are receiving 87.2% of the Foundation's contributions.  Almost all of that money is actually used to promote such causes as the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud and the provision of sub-standard AIDS medications made in India and the jetting around the world of Bill Clinton, Chelsea, and their colleagues as they build their world-wide crime syndicate with close alliances with scam artists and dictators around the world.  Now it appears that the Foundation even paid for Chelsea's wedding and a lavish income for her and her husband, the son of a convicted criminal.

Let us take note of Hillary's bad policy positions:

• A national $15 minimum wage, still higher in high cost of living areas, which she wrongly claims will help grow the economy, but which will increase unemployment and force many businesses out of business
• Support for union card check and the outlawing of Right-to-Work laws in the states, forcing many Americans into unions, dues payments, and making contributions to the Democrats many oppose
• Kill off more coal industry and supporting industry jobs
• Decrease or end fracking which provides us with relatively inexpensive and reliable energy
• A 12-week family and medical leave mandate to be paid by increased taxes
• Higher tax penalties to force more people to use the ObamaCare they hate
• She has said behind closed doors that she wants open immigration
• She wants the government to decide whether equal pay for equal work is the case in companies, but not for her staff.
• Free college education, with taxpayers to pay for young people uninterested in learning, but very interested in four years of play
• Increased business taxes, which will increase the cost of goods and services, decrease business investment, and decrease employee compensation
• Supports the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and the false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming
• Spend more money on Medicaid and induce the states to do so also
• Maintain the government monopoly on education, preventing school choice and anchoring the teachers unions as the prime beneficiary of government-controlled education
• More limitations on the right to bear arms
• Campaign limits on freedom of speech for individuals and companies, but not labor unions or other Democratic Party support organizations
• Have taxpayers provide matching money for first-time home down-payments
• Give preferred status to women and chosen minorities for capital access in starting businesses, thereby making it harder for men not in the preferred minorities to obtain capital
• Force taxpayers to pay for more free Internet
• Block efforts to privatize the VA and its medical services
• Expand national service at taxpayer expense
• Prevent options to save for retirement that by-pass Social Security impoverishment in retirement
• Maintain policy to force Christians and others to violate their conscience

Well, Donald Trump is not a gentleman.  He can be childish and indelicate.  He has paid politicians to favor his business.  But, he is not the head of a major crime syndicate and he has not massively shuttled national security information into a drop to be picked up by any old foreign government.  He did not fail to act in Benghazi to save American lives and he did not lie about why those lives were lost.  He may well prove to be a failed President, but with Hillary's political track record and her massively wrongheaded policies, she will certainly be a failure.  Known failures should not be put in office.  If Trump fails, he should be put out of office in four years.  He does have a some good policies, such as

• Supports the fossil fuel industries
• Repeal of ObamaCare
• Reduction of business taxes, making it much easier to U.S. companies to hire and build facilities and plants again in the U.S. and to bring home $2 trillion of money now kept abroad
• Allow private schools to compete with the generally poor government schools
• Bring order to immigration laws
• Oppose the catastrophic man-made global warming scam, saving tens of billions of taxpayer money and ending distortions to the economic markets through crony mercantilism
• Favors term limits on members of Congress
• Freeze government employee hiring
• Reduction of regulations with active effort to retire many
• Allow energy infrastructure building to provide less expensive, safer, and more reliable energy
• Cancel many of Obama's unconstitutional executive orders
• Allow veterans to see private doctors rather than travel long distances to VA Hospitals and provide them timely service
• Seriously investigate fraud in the VA
• Overhaul the IRS with its attacks on freedom-favoring tax exempt organizations
• Reduction of personal income taxes
• Repeal the death tax
• Supports the right to bear arms

I do not like Trump and since he will not win in Maryland, I may not vote for him.  But, he is clearly the lesser of two evils and it is not even close.  Trump is not a principled defender of individual rights, but neither is he a fully committed collectivist as Hillary Clinton is.  He probably has some respect for productive people operating in the private sector, which Hillary clearly does not.  He may prove a rascal as so many politicians do, but it may also take him time to become so corrupted and to learn the usual political paths to scamming the People.  If he disappoints us, as Hillary surely will, we should be happy to throw him out in 2020.

Hillary says "We are Stronger Together."   What she means is "I am stronger when you jump to it and do what I tell you to."  I for one do not want this not very intelligent, power-hungry person telling me what values I must choose and micromanaging my life.  She is incredibly presumptuous and would be even if she knew me, which she most certainly does not.

I am appalled by the number of Americans supporting her authoritarianism.  I note that this includes the majority of American women, who clearly do not wish to protect the rights of the individual against the force of government.  The use of force should be minimized in our society, not made rampant and placed in the hands of a corrupt, unknowing, uncaring harridan.

Prof. Walter E. Williams on Cruelty to Black Students and Freedom of Speech in Colleges

My undergraduate college, Brown University, is tooting its horn that its new freshman class is nearly half "people of color."  I earned my Ph.D. in Physics from Case Western Reserve University, which is mentioned in the second Prof. Williams column below for the ignominy of having safe spaces to protect students from ideas that make them uncomfortable.  Brown University is no better than Case Western Reserve University in discouraging freedom of speech on campus.  Along with most universities and colleges, they have forgotten their true mission, which should be encouraging students to think rationally, creatively, and independently while learning substantial portions of the knowledge of mankind.

In his first column, Prof. Williams points out that "the average black student 12th-grader has the academic proficiency of a white eight- or ninth-grader."  He notes that this may cause many black college students to feel discriminated against just as a group of average white eighth- or ninth-graders would feel if they were shoved into a college with average white twelfth-graders.  They really are not prepared to compete.  The failure of education was long before college and that failure must be addressed much earlier in the education system.  Colleges that try to pretend the failure is redeemable with affirmative action are only doing further harm to the unprepared students they are admitting.  They are humiliating them so that the college administrators, faculty, and alumnae can all falsely claim they are remedying past discriminations.

As is so often the case, Prof. Williams wants his readers to deal with reality and he will rub their noses in it no matter how much they want feelings of  moral superiority purchased by denying reality. Please read his columns and do his bidding - think about them.

Free Speech is Mostly Restricted in American Colleges and Universities

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has just produced its newest evaluation of the speech codes and policies of American Colleges and Universities.  FIRE has a list of the ten worst colleges and universities for free speech.  They are:

Mount St. Mary’s University  
Northwestern University, where a high school friend is an Economics Professor and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education  
Louisiana State University  
University of California, San Diego  
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota 
University of Oklahoma, from which a sister earned a BBA degree  
Marquette University  
Colorado College  
University of Tulsa, from which the same sister earned a Master of Taxation degree  
Wesleyan University

Because I have many family members and old high school friends who live in Oklahoma, the fact that the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa are on this list is particularly distressing.  I would occasionally deal with the boredom of high school by playing hooky so I could spend 10 hours reading in the library of the University of Tulsa.  The Oklahoma State University also lowered its freedom of speech rating from a Yellow Light rating to a Red Light rating.  Apparently Oklahoma's academic professionals are playing catch-up with those of the longer established commitments to socialist elitist indoctrination, political correctness, and the belief that some groups are incapable of rational thought and forever governed by irrational emotions.

But, FIRE has been successful in creating a trend in the direction of more free speech in our colleges and universities.  The improvements have been slow and have required many a hard fight to bring about.  There are now 23 colleges and universities that have earned a good Green Light evaluation by FIRE of their speech codes, namely codes that guarantee free speech on the college campus.  This is up from 18 colleges and universities out of 440 which are evaluated.  Twenty-two are listed here, and the University of Maryland - College Park has just been added to those with a Green Light freedom of speech evaluation.  The good, free colleges are:

Arizona State University
Black Hills State University
Carnegie Mellon University
Cleveland State University, where my wife took some courses to prepare for a change of major for graduate studies
Eastern Kentucky University
George Mason University, with a great Economics Dept., but many scientists who want to suppress the free speech of scientists who reject the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis
Mississippi State University
Oregon State University
Plymouth State University
Purdue University
Purdue University Calumet
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
The College of William and Mary
University of Florida
University of Maryland
University of Mississippi
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
University of North Florida
University of Pennsylvania, the only Ivy League School with a free speech policy!
University of Tennessee – Knoxville
University of Utah
University of Virginia
Western State Colorado University

Unfortunately, the really awful Red Light evaluations still apply to 49.3% of the colleges and universities evaluated for the 2014-2015 academic year.  But this is a considerable improvement compared to the 75% of Red Light universities in the 2007-2008 academic year.  So, which American Universities that I have attended, my family members have attended, or my friends have attended are so inclined toward totalitarian free speech restrictions that they have landed on the FIRE Red Light list?

Brown University, where I earned my Sc.B. degree in Physics
Case Western Reserve University, where I earned my Ph.D. in Physics
Columbia University, where one of my daughter's earned her MBA
Franklin & Marshall College, where a colleague earned his B.S. in Chemistry
Georgia Institute of Technology, where a son-in-law earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a niece is pursuing an engineering degree
Johns Hopkins University, where two colleagues earned their Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry or Materials Science and Engineering
Lehigh University, where a colleague from the past earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry
Ohio University, where a fellow graduate student is now a Physics Professor
Oklahoma State University, which two sisters and my brother attended, as well as many high school friends
Pennsylvania State University, where an old colleague teaches
Princeton University, where a friend from Brown University earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where a graduate student friend earned his B.S. in Physics
Ohio State University, where many of my wife's family earned their degrees
University of Cincinnati, for whose faculty and graduate students I have provided many analyses
Dartmouth College, where two high school friends earned undergraduate degrees
University of North Carolina - Greensboro, where a sister lives
University of Texas at Austin, from which a daughter earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering
University of Tulsa, from which a sister earned a Master of Taxation degree

When Brown University and Case Western Reserve University ask me for donations to their "educational" endeavors, it does not endear them to me that I know that they are not primarily interested in helping their students to learn thinking skills and to develop independent minds.  They are largely in the business of producing socialist elitists in a carefully controlled environment with very limited freedom of speech.  Neither does it give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to think of the fortune my wife and I spent to send a daughter to one of these schools.  She compounded the indoctrination problem by earning an MBA at another of these strictly controlled indoctrination schools.

At least the generally dismal condition of our American colleges and universities is slowly improving on the whole.  Instead of giving donations to Brown University and Case Western Reserve University, I will give the money I might have given to them to institutions interested in studies and educational efforts that benefit individuals who value liberty and rational thought.  FIRE is one such organization.

Ideological Reeducation in the Education System

This is the time of year when many high school seniors are applying to colleges for admission.  Many of these seniors have already undergone extensive instruction in the government-run schools they have attended on politically correct thinking.  Teachers recommendations for college admission are often heavily influenced by their assessments of the politically correct thinking of the candidate student.  With massive grade inflation, extra-curricular activities and teacher recommendations become more important than any actual accomplishments of learning and thinking in many cases.  In some states, there are mandatory requirements for public service to graduate.  Even in high school, the coercive forces pushing students into accepting and swearing allegiance with politically correct viewpoints are massive and well beyond the ability of many students to resist with an independent mind.

It only gets worse in colleges today.  The worst and most blatant case to my knowledge was the extremely overt coercive reeducation program in 2007 at the University of Delaware.  The politically correct viewpoints in force there are found on many college campuses today, though the systematic effort to coerce students into accepting those viewpoints is somewhat relaxed.  I would strongly advise students trying to select a college to review the freedom of conscience at a college by reviewing its codes and requirements at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE as it is commonly called.

The reeducation program at the University of Delaware required all students not living at home to attend meetings in their university housing.  They were required to attend a meeting about every two weeks, managed by a Residential Associate (RA).  Among the requirements was a "diversity facilitation training" session in which students were to be forced to acknowledge that

[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system.  The term applies to all white people ( i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.

This is nonsense.  There certainly are white racists, but so too are their black, Hispanic, and Asian racists.  What is more, if the definition were true, there is little value in attending any sessions managed by any white person.  What is still worse, what is the point of any white student attending such a session if he or she is doomed forever to be a racist anyway?  Are they supposed to become less racist, yet have no chance of being free of racism?

This definition has one purpose only.  It is to subjugate all white people by designating them as inferior racists.  Once a white person acknowledges that he is and will always be a racist, he is supposed to become more compliant to the arbitrary wishes of those who are defined as non-racists.  Non-racist or simply non-white people are not obliged to make any effort at all not to brand all white people as inferior.  Indeed, they are actually required to view all white people as inferior because they are all uniquely guilty of racism and incapable of escaping their racism.

The University of Delaware RAs were required to ask students "When did you discover your sexual identity?"  This is certainly a question many students would not care to answer and a violation of their reasonable privacy.  What is more, at the age of a university student, most still are developing their sexuality, though such a fact was likely unappreciated by many RAs and even by those who were managing them.  Some of the RA-run sessions told students they had to act as though they were gay during the sessions.

Among other purposes of the University of Delaware program were:

• "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society."
• "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression."
• "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality."

Presumably, recognizing the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression would require all political offices to be held by non-whites since any white person is a racist by definition.  Every manager in every company would have to be a non-white person.  All non-commercial organizations would also have to be run by non-white people.  This is immediately the logical conclusion of accepting the combination of all white people are racists and all systems of oppression should be dismantled.  How odd it is that people actually go to a university for an education and to further develop their minds when the institution holds such nonsensical ideas and is clearly in violation of its own moral standards that all faculty and managerial administrative positions must be filled by non-whites!

To see how oppressively the reeducation system at the University of Delaware was operated, see this article.

Let us take a moment and examine Brown University, from which I graduated before politically correct thought was fully cemented in place.  Brown has a very restrictive definition of sexual harassment, as just one of its restrictions on freedom.  Of course Brown is not a public institution, but a private one, so it does have a right to restrict student freedom in a way a public colleges would not have.  This does not mean that freedom-restrictive policies are rational and conducive to the development of inquisitive minds, however.  Brown University says:

Examples of sexual harassment include:

* Uninvited touching or hugging

* Requesting sexual favors for rewards related to school or work

* Suggestive jokes of a sexual nature

* Sexual pictures or displays

* Continuing unwelcome flirtation or propositions

* Obscene gestures or sounds

* Written notes of a sexual nature

So much for Brown students learning to write love sonnets!  As for uninvited hugs, a certain young scientist who sometimes visits my lab, always gives me a hug.  I never invited her to do so, but fortunately for both of us, I enjoy her hugs.  She had best stay away from Brown!

Examples of the kinds of conduct that may constitute sexual harassment include, but are not limited to:

1. Unwelcome sexual propositions, invitations, solicitations, and flirtations. …

3. Unwelcome verbal expressions of a sexual nature, including graphic sexual commentaries about a person’s body, dress, appearance, or sexual activities; the unwelcome use of sexually degrading language, jokes or innuendoes; unwelcome suggestive or insulting sounds or whistles; obscene phone calls.

4. Sexually suggestive objects, pictures, videotapes, audio recordings, computer communications, or literature placed in the work or study area, that may embarrass or offend individuals.

…

Important: Sexual Harassment need not be intentional. Under Brown’s sexual harassment policies, the intent of the person who is alleged to have behaved improperly is not relevant to determining whether a violation of Brown’s policy has occurred. The relevant determination is whether a reasonable person could have interpreted the alleged behavior to be sexual.

Note that intention is not of significance in Brown's policy.  Neither is an accused offender given the refuge that he is not a sexual offender if a reasonable person might not have interpreted the alleged behavior to be sexual.  This is an important difference which would in most cases of law be recognized.  Of course Brown is a private institution so it has the right to have the policy it has, however irrational it may be.

How can one ever be sure that someone you request sex from will welcome your request?  People have free will and they are complex and often hard to understand.  So anyone going to Brown really ought to be asexual and determined to pass through its ivy-covered halls without experiencing sex.  It is simply a very dangerous proposition at Brown University.  Yet Brown University has something called Sex Week which is by all reports a time of rather free sex and at the least a week of many sexual flirtations.  Is Brown University simply a massive example of Progressive Elitist hypocrisy?

Pennsylvania State University and many other state universities have similar ideas of what constitutes impermissible sexual harassment.  These policies restrict freedom of speech, the exchange of significant ideas, and learning about one of the most complex and beneficial aspects of life on Earth.  Young people in college are still very much of an age in which their sexuality is in need of development and understanding.  In that complex process, errors will be made.  Such errors should not be too easily labeled sexual harassment and should not be facilely made fatal.  Mind you, I say this as the father of three daughters and one who as a young man was gentlemanly to a fault with the young ladies.  In fact, much of the Brown guidelines are based on reasonable ideas of good manners and their violations in some cases are sexual harassment.  The problem is that the package is excessive, it fails to account for numerous reasonable exceptions, and it makes a hanging offense of petty larceny.

Yes, Brown and the University of Delaware are on a mission to populate the world with Progressive Elitists.  And as you know if you have read many of my posts, I see nearly all Progressive Elitists as hypocrites.  It is very difficult to find a university these days which is not dominated by Progressive Elitists and which does not regard its mission as the indoctrination of students so that they will also become Progressive Elitists.  To be sure, those that are highly selective colleges try to eliminate students with very independent minds in their admissions policies.  It is much easier and a more certain outcome is likely when the student is somewhat bright, but highly docile and easily programmable.  To Brown's eternal shame, I was neither docile, nor programmable and at least a little too bright.  With me, Brown failed in its mission.

Our Mind-Closing Universities and Conformity

A short post by William Murchison entitled When Higher Ed Shuts the Door on Taxpayer's Right to Know discusses the increasing trend to secrecy on the part of university boards and presidential selection committees.  Murchison says:

The Columbia Journalism Review scores the “increasingly closed-door culture” of university boards, such as Kent State University’s, which not only conducted a secret presidential search recently but “admitted to shredding documents to cover their tracks.”  How about the boards of Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, which not only kept their searches secret but suppressed the names of the finalists until both were hired. Then they told the world!

One can see that given the state of commitment to Progressive Elitism and to political correctness on college campuses that it must be very nearly impossible to conduct the managerial affairs of a public college in the open.  If the board and selection committees maintain political correctness and promote Progressive Elitism as they are expected to by student activists and most faculty members, many taxpayers will be appalled to see what is going on.  If the board and other college controlling committees do not do as expected by student activists and faculty, they are also in very hot water.  Nay, boiling water surrounded by drooling cannibals on most campuses.  Given the culture of the college campus today, such public institutions of Progressive Elitist indoctrination are in a dilemma in all but the most socialistic of states.

Private universities generally only need to satisfy their alumni, students, and faculty, despite raking in huge sums of research grants from the taxpayers.  This is a less tough nut to crack, especially in the Ivy League and equivalent schools, where the alumni have long been very successfully indoctrinated in the Progressive Elitist viewpoint.  These Ivy League schools are very assured that virtually all of their graduates are fully committed to Progressive Elitism, partly because they select for that in their admissions and partly because the on-campus commitment to this indoctrination has long been so thorough.

So how did I escape becoming a Progressive Elitist at Brown University?  By never tiring of pitched debates with up to a dozen Progressive Elitists at a time.  By never being intimated, because I was able to shake the very foundations of their belief, at least for a few hours.  After which they would return as though the discussion never occurred, but with no better ideas than those ideas that had failed so miserably but hours earlier.  Progressive Elitism is definitely a religion for almost all such persons and they refuse to allow that religion to be evaluated and assessed by reason.  But being fully committed to reason, I at least was not susceptible to their religious conformity.

Just as most people in many communities become captured by their desire to belong to a particular dominant religion, whether Christian, Hindi, Islam, or Buddhism, so too do most people in a community dominated by the Progressive Elitist religion just have to be Progressive Elitists so they will belong.  So while people are complex and highly differentiated individuals, most still have a great desire to conform so they will be accepted into a community of people.  If this means denying reality, including their own natures, well then reality will generally be denied.  The human suffering that results knows few bounds, which is why our culture has become more and more cheerless and more and more nihilistic.

Only a community committed to reality, reason, productivity, and individuality can achieve man's greatest needs of security, freely given and valued friendships, real cooperation in mutual endeavors and relationships, the freedom to pursue our highly differentiated values generally according to our individual natures, and hence the freedom to pursue our own happiness.  Such a community is rich in its choices and possibilities.

Unfortunately, those people with already low self-esteem are fearful of that very richness of choices and possibilities.  The less free a society becomes, the larger the number of people with such low self-esteem and the more fearful the society becomes of individuality, choices, and possibilities.  Universities, far from opening young people's eyes to the joy of pursuing life in such a rich, reality-driven society, have long been indoctrinating them to choose a conforming, low-choice, hierarchically managed society that denies them their very individuality.