North Korea: a high price now or an even higher price later?

Here is Zev Chafets in the Jewish World Review.

ZC is a journalist and author of 14 books. He was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine.

ZC is on target.

People who characterize consequences as "unthinkable" are people who simply refuse to think and address reality.  It's a version of "peace in our time" that ignores that the "unthinkable" can become way worse.

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Israel and North Korea are on opposite sides of the Asian landmass, separated by 5,000 miles as the ICBM flies. But Israelis feels close to the nuclear standoff between Washington and Pyongyang. They have faced this sort of crisis before, and may again.

In the mid-1970s, it became clear to Israel that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was working on acquiring nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Saddam had already demonstrated an uninhibited brutality in dealing with his internal enemies and his neighbors. He aspired to be the leader of the Arab world. Defeating Israel was at the top of his to-do list.

After coming to office in 1977, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin tried to convince the U.S. and Europe that Saddam was a clear and present danger to the Jewish state, and that action had to be taken. Begin was not taken seriously.

But Begin was serious, and in 1981 he decided that Israel would have to stop the Iraqi dictator all by itself. His political opponents, led by the estimable Shimon Peres, considered this to be dangerous folly. Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, the legendary former military chief of staff, voted against unilateral action on the grounds that it would hurt Israel's international standing. Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann, the former head of the air force (and Dayan's brother-in-law) was also against a military option. He thought the mission would be unacceptably risky.

Begin had no military expertise. But his family had been wiped out in the Holocaust. He looked at Saddam, who was openly threating Israel, and saw Hitler. To Begin, sitting around hoping for the best was not a strategy; it was an invitation to aggression. If there was going to be a cost -- political, diplomatic, military -- better to pay before, not after, the Iraqis had the bomb.

In the summer of 1981, Begin gave the order. The Israeli air force destroyed the Osirak reactor. The United Nations Security Council condemned the attack. The Europeans went bonkers. The New York Times called it "inexcusable." But the Israeli prime minister wasn't looking to be excused by the Times or the Europeans or even the usually friendly Ronald Reagan administration. He enunciated a simple rationale that would come to be known as the Begin Doctrine: Israel will not allow its avowed enemies to obtain the means of its destruction.

The wisdom of this doctrine became clear a decade later, during the Gulf War, when Saddam made good on his threat to fire Russian-made SCUD missiles at Israeli cities. The SCUDs landed, and caused some damage and a fair amount of panic, but they were not armed with unconventional warheads. Israel had taken that option off the table.

Similarly, in 2007, Israel confirmed what it had suspected for five years: Syria, with North Korean help, was trying to build a nuclear reactor. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a Begin disciple, sent Mossad chief Meir Dagan to Washington, to ask for American intervention. The CIA chief, Michael Hayden, agreed with Israel's contention that Damascus (with Iranian financing) was constructing the reactor. But Hayden convinced President George W. Bush that bombing the site would result in all-out war, and who wants that?

Acting on its own, Israel destroyed the Syrian site (reportedly killing a group of North Korean experts in the process). Hayden was wrong about how Syria would react, as he later admitted. If Israel had been reasonable and listened to the CIA, Bashar al-Assad would have nuclear weapons right now.

Thomas Jefferson on Government and the General Welfare

Thomas Jefferson was, unfortunately, prescient.  We are no longer free.
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“They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare…. [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

Judge Learned Hand

JLH got it right, unfortunately.

Too many of today's citizens prefer handouts to liberty.
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“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

James Madison in 1788

James Madison got it right - unfortunately.
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“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

Benjamin Franklin knew it back then

Too bad, too many don't know this today.
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“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

John Adams in 1774

We have arrived, too bad.
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“Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. “

Walter Williams scores yet again

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
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A common feature of our time is the extent to which many in our nation have become preoccupied with diversity. But true diversity obsession, almost a mania, is found at our institutions of higher learning. Rather than have a knee-jerk response for or against diversity, I think we should ask just what is diversity and whether it’s a good thing. How do we tell whether a college, a department or another unit within a college is diverse or not? What exemptions from diversity are permitted?

Seeing as college presidents and provosts are the main diversity pushers, we might start with their vision of diversity. Ask your average college president or provost whether he even bothers promoting political diversity among faculty. I’ll guarantee that if he is honest — and even bothers to answer the question — he will say no. According to a recent study, professors who are registered Democrats outnumber their Republican counterparts by a 12-1 ratio (http://tinyurl.com/gpp4svq). In some departments, such as history, Democratic professors outnumber their Republican counterparts by a 33-1 ratio.

The fact is that when college presidents and their diversity coterie talk about diversity, they’re talking mostly about pleasing mixtures of race. Years ago, they called their agenda affirmative action, racial preferences or racial quotas. Not only did these terms fall out of favor but also voters approved initiatives banning choosing by race. Courts found some of the choosing by race unconstitutional. That meant that the race people had to repackage their agenda. That repackaging became known as diversity. Some race people were bold enough to argue that “diversity” produces educational benefits to all students, including white students. Nobody has bothered to scientifically establish what those benefits are. For example, does a racially diverse student body lead to higher scores on graduate admissions tests, such as the GRE, LSAT and MCAT? By the way, Israel, Japan and South Korea are among the world’s least racially diverse nations. In terms of academic achievement, their students run circles around diversity-crazed Americans.

There is one area of college life where administrators demonstrate utter contempt for diversity, and that’s in sports. It is by no means unusual to watch a Saturday afternoon college basketball game and see that the starting five on both teams are black. White players, not to mention Asian players, are underrepresented. Similar underrepresentation is practiced in college football. Where you find whites overrepresented in both sports is on the cheerleading squads, which are mostly composed of white women. If you were to explore this lack of racial diversity in sports with a college president, he might answer, “We look for the best players, and it so happens that blacks dominate.” I would totally agree but ask him whether the same policy of choosing the best applies to the college’s admissions policy. Of course, the honest answer would be a flat-out no.

The most important issue related to college diversity obsession is what happens to black students. Black parents should not allow their sons and daughters to fall victim to the diversity hustle, even if the diversity hustler is a black official of the college. Black parents should not allow their sons and daughters to attend a college where they would not be admitted if they were white. A good rule of thumb is not to allow your children to attend a college where their SAT score is 200 or more points below the average of that college. Keep in mind that students are not qualified or unqualified in any absolute sense. There are more than 4,800 colleges — a college for most anybody. The bottom-line question for black parents and black people in general is: Which is better, a black student’s being admitted to an elite college and winding up in the bottom of his class or flunking out or being admitted to a less prestigious college and performing just as well as his white peers and graduating? I would opt for the latter. You might ask, “Williams, but how will the nation’s elite colleges fulfill their racial diversity needs?” My answer is that’s their problem.

Walter Williams gets it right again

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Here is his column.
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When hunting was the major source of food, hunters often used stalking horses as a means of sneaking up on their prey. They would synchronize their steps on the side of the horse away from their prey until they were close enough for a good shot. A stalking horse had a double benefit if the prey was an armed person. If the stalkers were discovered, it would be the horse that took the first shot. That’s what blacks are to liberals and progressives in their efforts to transform America — stalking horses. Let’s look at it.

I’ll just list a few pieces of the leftist agenda that would be unachievable without black political support. Black people are the major victims of the grossly rotten education in our big-city schools. The average black 12th-grader can read, write and compute no better than a white seventh- or eighth-grader. Many black parents want better and safer schools for their children. According to a 2015 survey of black parents, 72 percent “favor public charter schools, and 70 percent favor a system that would create vouchers parents could use to cover tuition for those who want to enroll their children in a private or parochial school” (http://tinyurl.com/y7d57cbg). Black politicians and civil rights organizations fight tooth and nail against charter schools and education vouchers. Why? The National Education Association sees charters and vouchers as a threat to its education monopoly. It is able to use black politicians and civil rights organizations as stalking horses in its fight to protect its education monopoly.

The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was the nation’s first federally mandated minimum wage law. Its explicit intent was to discriminate against black construction workers. During the legislative debate on the Davis-Bacon Act, quite a few congressmen, along with union leaders, expressed their racist intentions. Rep. Miles Allgood, D-Ala., said: “Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. This is a fact. That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” American Federation of Labor President William Green said, “Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.”

The Davis-Bacon Act is still law today. Supporters do not use the 1931 racist language to support it. Plus, nearly every black member of Congress supports the Davis-Bacon Act. But that does not change its racially discriminatory effects. In recent decades, the Davis-Bacon Act has been challenged, and it has prevailed. That would not be the case without unions’ political and financial support to black members of Congress to secure their votes.

Crime is a major problem in many black neighborhoods. In 2016, there were close to 8,000 blacks murdered, mostly by other blacks (http://tinyurl.com/y8snbfga). In that year, 233 blacks were killed by police. Which deaths receive the most attention from politicians, civil rights groups and white liberals and bring out marches, demonstrations and political pontification? It’s the blacks killed by police. There’s little protest against the horrible and dangerous conditions under which many poor and law-abiding black people must live. Political hustlers blame their condition on poverty and racism — ignoring the fact that poverty and racism were much greater yesteryear, when there was not nearly the same amount of chaos. Also ignored is the fact that the dangerous living conditions worsened under a black president’s administration.

There are several recommendations that I might make. The first and most important is that black Americans stop being useful tools for the leftist hate-America agenda. As for black politicians and civil rights leaders, if they’re going to sell their people down the river, they should demand a higher price. For example, if black congressmen vote in support of the Davis-Bacon Act, they ought to demand that construction unions give 30 percent of the jobs to black workers. Finally, many black problems are exacerbated by white liberal guilt. White liberals ought to stop feeling guilty so they can be more respectful in their relationships with black Americans.

One of the few Harvard undergraduates with a brain

Laura Nicolae, class of 2020, studying applied mathematics, writing in the Crimson.

LN is on target.  Unfortunately, too many of her classmates and the "Young Elite" are not.
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In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.

My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.

My father’s escape journey eventually led him to the United States. He moved to the Midwest and married a Romanian woman who had left for America the minute the regime collapsed. Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones.

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

Statistics show that young Americans are indeed oblivious to communism’s harrowing past. According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.

Perhaps before joking about communist revolutions, we should remember that Stalin’s secret police tortured “traitors” in secret prisons by sticking needles under their fingernails or beating them until their bones were broken. Lenin seized food from the poor, causing a famine in the Soviet Union that induced desperate mothers to eat their own children and peasants to dig up corpses for food. In every country that communism was tried, it resulted in massacres, starvation, and terror.

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

Many in my generation have blurred the reality of communism with the illusion of utopia. I never had that luxury. Growing up, my understanding of communism was personalized; I could see its lasting impact in the faces of my family members telling stories of their past. My perspective toward the ideology is radically different because I know the people who survived it; my relatives continue to wonder about their friends who did not.

The stories of survivors paint a more vivid picture of communism than the textbooks my classmates have read. While we may never fully understand all of the atrocities that occurred under communist regimes, we can desperately try to ensure the world never repeats their mistakes. To that end, we must tell the accounts of survivors and fight the trivialization of communism’s bloody past.

My father left behind his parents, friends, and neighbors in the hope of finding freedom. I know his story because it is my heritage; you now know his story because I have a voice. One hundred million other people were silenced.

One hundred years later, let us not forget the history of the victims who do not have a voice because they did not survive the writing of their tales. Most importantly, let us not be tempted to repeat it.

Restoring the rule of law in the Courts

Ilya Shapiro in the National Review.

IS is on target.

The most important contribution Trump can make is to increase the number of judges who are  capable of interpreting the law instead of writing it.
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When Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court, pundits focused on two aspects of his judicial record: his dedication to textualism in statutory interpretation and his skepticism of the growth of the administrative state. These beliefs align the justice with a growing chorus of lawyers and academics who think the judiciary has become too deferential to executive agencies, allowing bureaucrats to interpret statutes contrary to how Congress wrote them.

Well, later this month the Court will hear a case that, precisely because it doesn’t involve a hot-button issue such as immigration or transgender bathroom access, could be the perfect vehicle for reasserting judicial review of a relatively unfettered bureaucracy. Digital Realty v. Somers involves the question of who gets whistleblower protection under Dodd-Frank, an issue that is clearly addressed in the statute but has nonetheless bedeviled the courts, generating a jumble of contradictory rulings and confusion in the workplace.

Congress passed Dodd-Frank in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the law’s whistleblower provisions provide incentives for employees to report securities violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The goal was to strengthen the agency’s ability to prosecute the sorts of misdeeds that contributed to the crisis. Congress thus defined a “whistleblower” as an “individual who provides . . . information relating to a violation of the securities laws to the Commission.”

The current case involves a Dodd-Frank claim by a man named Paul Somers against his previous employer, Digital Realty Trust. Somers alleges that he was fired in 2014 for reporting violations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (one of the laws covered by Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower provisions) to company management. Digital moved to dismiss this claim because Somers had failed to report the alleged violations “to the Commission” as the law requires.

Not only is this language clear in Dodd-Frank, but different provisions in Sarbanes-Oxley apply to internal whistleblowers. These protections require administrative review before a case reaches the federal courts, and they come with lower potential damages and a shorter statute of limitations. In other words, Congress determined that statutes incentivizing two different activities with distinct policy ramifications — reporting to the SEC versus to company executives or anyone else — should provide different protections.

The law’s plain language should have thwarted any attempt at administrative mischief, but the SEC was feeling particularly inspired as it promulgated rules for enforcing Dodd-Frank. The agency maintained Congress’s definition during the public-comment period of that process, but before the rule became final, the agency surreptitiously decided it could improve on Congress’s work. In the final rule, it expanded the anti-retaliation provision to include individuals who merely reported a violation — without necessarily reporting it to the SEC. The SEC gave no explanation or notice for this change, but simply ruled by fiat.

According to the SEC’s creative interpretation, people reporting protected activity to anyone — local police, their kid’s soccer coach, maybe even a think-tank scholar — qualify for Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower protections if they can claim a nexus between that reporting activity and the employer’s retaliatory behavior.

Some have attempted to justify this kind of overreach by invoking the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. There, the high court held that agency interpretations are due judicial deference when (1) the statute is ambiguous and (2) the agency’s rule is reasonable. Neither condition applies here. Nevertheless, both the district court and the Ninth Circuit cited Chevron in rejecting Digital’s commonsense reading of the statute.

Thus the parties will argue over whether Congress meant to limit Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower protections to persons reporting violations to the SEC when Congress expressly defined a whistleblower as an individual who reports protected activity to the SEC. This case epitomizes how Chevron deference has gone too far. What started as a necessary tool for preventing courts from unduly meddling in administrative decision-making has warped into courts’ refraining from checking the executive branch altogether.

Reasonable people can disagree as to whether Congress got the law right. But it’s not an agency’s role to rewrite laws it dislikes.


The SEC essentially nullified Sarbanes-Oxley and unilaterally expanded Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower provisions. What self-respecting plaintiff’s attorney would pursue a Sarbanes-Oxley claim arising from internal reporting when Dodd-Frank’s easier, more lucrative path beckons? If an agency is entitled to deference under such circumstances — where the text is so clear and the rulemaking process so suspect — it raises questions about the whole enterprise of judicial review.

While Digital Realty has played second fiddle to the flashier cases up this term, it may be the case with the most significant and long-lasting practical effects. Indeed, whether the justices scold lower courts for manufacturing ambiguity to trigger Chevron or call for a broader rethink of judicial deference — just so long as they don’t simply agree with the SEC’s statutory interpretation, which seems unlikely — it will bring us one step closer to restoring constitutional balance among the branches of government.

Sometimes big gifts arrive in small packages. Digital Realty v. Somers, one of this term’s “sleeper” cases, may just be the one Justice Gorsuch and his colleagues were waiting for.