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HAPPY 118TH BIRTHDAY TO PHYSICIST ENRICO FERMI:  In 1942, he conducted the first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at Stagg Field on the campus of the University of Chicago.  It was the Manhattan Project’s first major step toward creating the atomic bomb.

You might want to ask why they did this in the middle of the country’s second largest city.  Why not a lonely desert somewhere?  The answer is that those in charge trusted Fermi’s calculations, which indicated that it would be safe.  I’m … uh … glad he was right.

HOOVER DAM: On this day in 1935, Hoover Dam was officially dedicated.  At the time, it was the most expensive public works project in American history. Today it continues to supply power for over a million homes (and reliable water too). I am told my house in San Diego is usually one of them.

Just starting on this epic undertaking required building a railroad from Las Vegas to the site, constructing an entire town—Boulder City—to house the workers, and temporarily diverting the Colorado River through four diversion tunnels. All of this had to be done in a place where summer temperatures frequently top 110 degrees.

Among the many thousands of workers were the so-called “high scalers”—some of whom had been circus acrobats.  Their job was to climb down the canyon walls on ropes and remove all loose rock in preparation for building the actual dam. Jackhammers and dynamite were their tools.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation web site tells this story:

Perhaps the most famous feat any of the high scalers ever performed was a daring midair rescue. Burl R. Rutledge, a Bureau of Reclamation engineer, fell from the canyon rim. Twenty-five feet below, high scaler Oliver Cowan heard Rutledge slip. Without a moment’s hesitation, he swung himself out and seized Rutledge’s leg. A few seconds later, high scaler Arnold Parks swung over and pinned Rutledge’s body to the canyon wall. The scalers held Rutledge until a line was dropped and secured around him and the shaken engineer was pulled, unharmed, to safety.

I know I’ll forget by tomorrow, because it’s the 21^st century and it’s hard not to take electrical power for granted. But today at least I’m going to try to remember all those who worked on the dam—including the hundred or so who died—when I flip on a switch and a light comes on.  It’s a tribute to how lucky I am that I am likely to forget even before lunchtime.

WELL, THAT WAS CERTAINLY CONVENIENT. Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing. “The internal properties of the newly revised ‘Disclosure of Urgent Concern’ form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.”

IS THIS WHERE DEMOCRATS ARE HEADED?

LAYERS OF EDITORS, FACT-CHECKERS, AND LIARS:

Damning video at the link.

And it isn’t just CNN. This is from last night, so it refers to today’s front page:

This isn’t a simple reporting error or editing miss. It’s a flat-out lie, right on the front page of one of the nation’s leading newspapers.

I’d say it was shameful, except the people involved are clearly incapable of shame.

UPDATE: First link was wrong before. Fixed now — sorry!

1984 WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOW-TO MANUAL: My Book Defending Free Speech Has Been Banned.

SKYNET REVIEWS ITS PORTFOLIO, SMILES: Vanguard Bets on Robo-Only Adviser.

A state commission, acting at the behest of Michigan's largest hospital chain, voted on Thursday to restrict cancer patients' access to promising, potentially lifesaving treatments.

It's another example of the problems caused by little-known state-level health care regulations known as Certificate of Necessity (or, in some states, Certificate of Public Need) laws. These laws are supposed to slow down increasing costs, but they often end up being used to restrict competition, often at the request of powerful hospital chains.

That's exactly what seems to have happened in Michigan, where the state's Certificate of Need Commission voted Thursday to impose new accreditation requirements for health care providers who want to offer new immunotherapy cancer treatments. Those treatments attempt to program the body's own immune system to attack and kill cancer cells, and they have become an increasingly attractive way to combat cancer alongside more traditional methods, such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

One particularly promising type of immunotherapy involves literally bio-engineering T-cells—the foot-soldiers of the body's immune system—and equipping them with new Chimeric Antigen Receptors that target cancer cells. This so-called "CAR T-cell therapy" is every bit as badass as it sounds:

But under the new rules adopted by the Michigan Certificate of Need Commission, hospitals will need to go through unnecessary third-party accreditation processes before being able to offer CAR T-cell therapies. Even after obtaining that additional accreditation, hospitals would have to come back to the CON commission for another approval—a process that effectively means only large, wealthy, hospital-based cancer centers will be able to offer the treatments.

The new rules were "opposed by cancer research organizations, patient advocates and pharmaceutical companies, who argue it would add an unnecessary level of regulation and deny many patients access to potentially life-saving treatment," reports Michigan Capital Confidential, a nonprofit journalism outfit covering Michigan politics.

In favor of the new rules? The University of Michigan Health System, the state's largest hospital system, which argues that the new rules are necessary for patient safety.

To be clear: It's not a question of patient safety. In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved two CAR T-cell therapies for children suffering from leukemia and for adults with advanced lymphoma. Although the technology is still being developed and other uses of T-cell therapies are yet to be approved by the FDA, the Michigan CON Commission does not do medical testing. Like similar agencies in other states, the extent of its mandate is purely economic, not medical.

Anna Parsons, a policy coordinator with the American Legislative Exchange Council, points out that the safe administration of CAR T-cell therapy does not require hospitals to make new capital investments—which is the only time CON laws should apply. Literally any FDA-certified hospital should be capable of offering these treatments, since all the high-tech bioengineering is done at other locations. The only thing that happens at the hospital is a simple blood transfusion.

Though the specific applications of CON laws differ from state to state, their stated purpose is to prevent overinvestment and keep hospitals from having to charge higher prices to make up for unnecessary outlays of capital costs. But in practice, they mean hospitals must get a state agency's permission before offering new services or installing new medical technology. Depending on the state, everything from the number of hospital beds to the installation of a new MRI machine could be subject to CON review.

As part of that review process, it's not uncommon for large hospital chains to wield CON laws in order to limit competition, even at the expense of patient outcomes.

From 2010 to 2013, for example, the state agency in charge of Virginia's CON laws repeatedly blocked attempts by a small hospital in Salem, Virginia, to build a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), in large part because a nearby hospital—which happened to have the only NICU in southwestern Virginia—objected to the new competition. Even after a premature infant died at the Salem hospital, state regulators continued to side with the Salem hospital's chief competitor, against the wishes of doctors, hospital administrators, public officials, and patients who repeatedly testified in favor of letting the new NICU be built.

Even when the outcomes aren't as tragic as dead babies or untreated cancer patients, CON laws have adverse consequences. In 2016, reseachers at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found that hospitals in states with CON laws have higher mortality rates than hospitals in non-CON states. The average 30-day mortality rate for patients with pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attacks in states with CON laws is between 2.5 percent and 5 percent higher even after demographic factors are taken out of the equation.

When it comes to CAR T-cell therapy, there does not seem to be any compelling reason for Michigan regulators to use CON laws except to explicitly limit which hospitals can provide those treatments.

"We will never know how many more lives this therapy could have saved if the added time and expense these onerous regulations put in place discourage hospitals and clinics from providing treatment in the first place," Parsons wrote this week in The Detroit News.

Under Michigan law, the legislature has 45 days to review and overturn the decisions of the CON Commission. Here is one situation where that is exactly what it should do.

Seven months before the USSR dissolved, a Soviet TV show called The Fifth Wheel aired an unusual episode. The host, Sergei Sholokhov, began by declaring that the program would "shed new light" on the revolution that had brought the Bolsheviks to power. His guest, the writer and musician Sergei Kurekhin, then started spinning an elaborate theory. "I have indisputable evidence," he said, "that the October Revolution was the brainchild of people who'd been taking hallucinating mushrooms for years, and in the long run, mushrooms replaced their personalities, and they turned into mushrooms. So, I just want to say that Lenin was a mushroom. Furthermore, he was not just a mushroom, but also a radio wave."

The allegedly indisputable evidence then followed. Viewers were told, for example, that Lenin's name spelled backward is a word for "a famous French dish made of mushrooms." And a diagram purportedly showed that the flay agaric mushroom is structurally identical to Lenin's car.

Needless to say, the show was a joke. But it was not identified as a joke, and Soviet TV shows were not known for joking about Lenin. "Millions of television viewers found themselves at a loss," the Russian-born, Berkeley-based anthropologist Alexei Yurchak recounts in a 2011 paper for the Slavic Review. "When the program ended, the studio was overwhelmed with phone calls from viewers—some wanting an explanation, some protesting, and some laughing." Sholokhov has claimed that many Russians believed the report was true, though (as Yurchak notes) he has an incentive to exaggerate the extent that his show fooled people. But regardless of whether the prank actually convinced many viewers, it certainly confused a lot of them.

Many moments in Kurekhin's argument will sound familiar to anyone who's gone browsing in occultist bookstores or in supermarket checkout lanes. He invoked Carlos Castaneda, a New Age mainstay. If you've seen people make a big deal of the fact that both the Mayans and the Egyptians built pyramids, you might feel a little déjà vu when Kurekhin goes on about the "frescoes in one of the main Mexican temples" that depict "a certain event from the history of Mexico, which appeared to be very similar to the October Revolution." The very idea that Lenin was a mushroom resembles one of the more bizarre speculative notions of the '70s—John Allegro's theory that Jesus was a mushroom. (Or, if you want to get technical, that the early Christians cooked up the concept of "Jesus Christ" to conceal an esoteric mushroom cult.) The New Age was having a bit of a moment at this point in Russian history, and it's certainly possible that Kurekhin was spoofing it at the same time that he was spoofing Communism, mass media, and the habit of reflexively believing anyone playing the role of an expert and speaking in an authoritative manner.

The whole program is on YouTube but, alas, it isn't subtitled. So if you don't speak Russian, you'll have to settle for the truncated version embedded in two parts below. It is apparently drawn from a half-hour edit that Sholokhov started selling in 1996, but it seems to have been sliced down even further. It also includes at least one scene, in which the two Sergeis break character and start laughing, that Yurchak says was not part of the original broadcast. Oh, well. It's better than nothing, and it's still pretty funny.

Here is part one:

And here is part two:

It would be fun to stop there, maybe with a joke about Kurekhin being a pioneer of that Russian "fake news" we keep hearing so much about. But there's a more sour sequel to the story that I ought to mention too.

Kurekhin died in 1996. (Naturally, there are Andy Kaufman–style theories that he faked his death.) But before that, he took up with Aleksandr Dugin, a co-founder of the National Bolshevik Party—a part-fascist, part-communist group that wallowed in the half-ironic posturing that's found in certain quarters of the alt-right today. "In the fall of 1995," Yurchak notes, Kurekhin "convinced Dugin to move from Moscow to St. Petersburg and to run for a seat in the Duma. He promised to help Dugin in organizing his election campaign, participated with him in several meetings with prospective voters, and organized" a pro-Dugin concert.

As Yurchak points out, some of Kurekhin's contemporaries believed that these activities were yet another deadpan joke and that he was actually ridiculing Dugin. I'm not at all convinced that they're right: Dugin is something of a prankster figure himself, and it's not hard to imagine Kurekhin deciding that they had something in common. Either way, Kurekhin doesn't just have a famous piece of fake news under his belt—he was an early adopter of ironic fascism too. The man may be 23 years dead, but this is his world; the rest of us are just mushrooms growing in it.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

HILLARY 2.0: Elizabeth Warren Hires Lobbyist One Day After Releasing Plan Calling Lobbying ‘Legalized Bribery.’

TRUST US, WE’RE ABOVE-THE-FRAY INTELLECTUALS: He questioned the accuracy of the ‘1619 Project.’ A history professor responded with ‘your mom.’

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Fire sparks mass explosion of semen at cattle breeding center.

(Classical reference in headline.)

News reports often give the impression that human beings have wrecked the earth, the middle class is disappearing, and the world is getting more dangerous.

"We are destroying the planet," Michael Moore says on CNN. MSNBC says that "the middle class is disappearing." The media warn us about things like a "deadly Ebola outbreak."

This negativity comes from the way humans are wired by evolution, says Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

She tells John Stossel: "If you are a caveman who hears a little rustling in the weeds, and you say, 'Oh, it's probably fine,' the other guy who says, 'It's probably a tiger,' that's the guy who lives. That guy was our ancestors."

But our instincts are wrong, she says. We needn't be so scared.

The cover of the August/September 2019 issue of Reason features a glass that's completely full. Inside the magazine, you'll read about how there is less war and more food. And we're healthier, while working safer and more fulfilling jobs.

Mangu-Ward points out that today we have medical breakthroughs that would've once been called miracles. Deaf children receive cochlear implants that allow them to hear for the first time. Artificial limbs "allow the lame to walk."

"These are things that, in another era, would have caused the founding of an entire religion!" says Mangu-Ward.

Stossel pushes back: "What about this constant complaint from the media?…The middle class is shrinking."

"Mostly it's because people are getting richer," Mangu-Ward responds.

She's right. A graph in Reason shows that about 50 years ago, 53 percent of people were middle-income, making between $35,000 and $100,000 per year. Although that statistic has since fallen to 42 percent, the reason is that many people moved into upper-income brackets. The share making more than $100,000 rose from 8 percent to almost 28 percent. (These numbers are inflation-adjusted.)

"Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death are All on the Decline," was the subtitle of another article in the issue.

"You wouldn't know that watching news programs," Stossel said.

"That's right, and yet it's absolutely true," added Mangu-Ward.

Even with the rise in terrorism, she notes, "There are fewer wars and fewer people die in those wars than has ever been true in the past."

Stossel pushes back again: "Lately, life expectancy dropped a bit." 

"Overall, that is the tiniest blip," Mangu-Ward replies. The long-term trend is still up.

An article titled "How Work Got Good"argues that people are more fulfilled in modern jobs.

"A couple hundred years ago, work was dangerous," Mangu-Ward adds. "It was very easy to die at work…work was extremely boring, even for people that had good jobs. Jobs are pretty interesting now, and they mostly don't kill you, and we should be grateful for that."

But there are problems, and Reason's editors understand that. The back half of the magazine is filled with the bad news: misery in Venezuela, threats to an open internet, the new popularity of socialism. 

"Everything that's bad is politics, everything that's good is the market." Mangu-Ward argues. "Life gets better. We have the opportunity to look to a future where those trends will continue—if we can just manage to keep politicians from screwing it up."

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

Criticism of The New York Times' botched story on a previously unreported sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh prompted the paper to answer questions about the editorial process—though not the most important one.

James Dao, deputy editorial page editor, said the story—an excerpt from Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly's new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation—appeared in the Sunday Review section (part of the Opinion pages) rather than the news section because "The Sunday Review is the Opinion section's platform for longer essays as well as excerpts or adaptations from books. Sometimes those books are by Times writers, whose submissions go through the same review process as outside writers. In recent months, the Review has published essays adapted from books by Times news writers like Carl Hulse and Jason DeParle, and opinion writers like Bari Weiss and Binyamin Appelbaum."

Vanity Fair reports that news editors did consider writing about the new details uncovered by Pogrebin and Kelly, but ultimately decided "there wasn't enough juice to warrant a story there, let alone a big page-one treatment."

Dao described the book as "the fruit of nearly a year of research by the authors, [exploring] in a nuanced way the social and cultural forces that shaped Justice Kavanaugh." He said it was important to include details of the latest allegation, which are similar to what Kavanaugh's Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez allegedly experienced. According to Pogrebin and Kelly, Max Stier—a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh's and now president of the Partnership for Public Service—told the FBI he recalled seeing Kavanaugh with his pants down, and that friends pushed his penis toward a woman. Neither Stier nor the women would agree to speak with Pogrebin and Kelly, and the woman's friends told the authors she did not recall it. This important fact appears in the book but was somehow omitted from The Times' version.

Dao did not explain how this happened. On MSNBC last night, Pogrebin and Kelly blamed their editors, saying that the sentence was in the draft they submitted but then disappeared.

Plot thickens.
Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly claim that the qualifier about the other alleged Kavanaugh accuser not remembering an incident at Yale was included in the initial NYT draft but removed. pic.twitter.com/p9wUTnFyM1

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) September 17, 2019

In any case, while several Democratic presidential candidates have called for Kavanaugh to be impeached, House Democratic leadership seems unlikely to move in that direction. "The same Senate that confirmed Kavanaugh is unlikely to remove him," Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) told BuzzFeed.

Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.) said on Monday, "Frankly, we are concentrating our resources on whether to impeach the president."

FREE MINDS

Speaking of terrible New York Times articles, this one is a doozy: The paper of record trashed presidential contender Andrew Yang for daring to mildly dissent from cancel culture regarding SNL's firing of comedian Shane Gillis for making offensive jokes:

But as many "S.N.L." viewers and others across the country clamored for Mr. Gillis to be fired, believing his jokes to be beyond excusable, Mr. Yang's response unnerved those hoping for a more forceful condemnation from him. Perhaps the most pointed criticism has come from the Asian-American community itself, where some have expressed a mix of incredulity and weighty disappointment at the way Mr. Yang has talked about race throughout his campaign.

Mr. Yang took "a position that's very much at odds with the Asian-American community," said Jenn Fang, the creator of a long-running Asian-American advocacy blog, Reappropriate, who tweeted over the weekend about Mr. Yang's comments. "He's trying to let Shane Gillis off the hook so he can cater to other voters that he needs to get to the White House."

Mr. Yang also received significant blowback from people within and outside Asian-American communities for appearing to draw a comparison between how society treats anti-Asian racism and anti-black racism.

It's very easy to find three woke scolds on Twitter and pretend that their complaints about Yang not towing the militant far-left line are somehow representative of the Asian-American community, which is precisely what the Times did here.

FREE MARKETS

The weekend attacks on Saudi Arabian oil fields will probably not raise oil prices for Americans. According to The Washington Post:

That's because if necessary, both Saudi Arabia and the United States could tap their strategic reserves, assuring they continue to meet demand for weeks. And the U.S. is hardly captive to foreign supplies, as it was during the 1970s oil shocks, since it has emerged over the last decade as the world's largest oil producer.

QUICK HITS

• Controversial political advocates Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Bob Bland have resigned from the board of the Women's March. Both were accused of making alliances with anti-Semitic groups like the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan once compared Jewish people to termites.
• Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) warned against U.S. intervention on behalf of Saudi Arabia, saying that she did not automatically trust the Trump administration to tell the truth about Iran's involvement.
• E-cigarette company Juul is hoping a ballot initiative will thwart San Francisco's nanny state tendencies.
• New York public school children have received official permission to skip school in order to protest government inaction on climate change.
• The horror. The horror.

This is what life is now. #DWTS @seanspicer pic.twitter.com/heFCEwfjfT

— Matt Wilstein (@mattwilstein) September 17, 2019

NOW, I KNOW ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS DON’T NEED TO HAVE CERTAIN NUMBERS OF COLUMN INCHES, BUT HOW MUCH CAN YOU WRITE, WHEN THE ANSWER IS “EVERYTHING?”  What the 1619 Project Gets Wrong about Slavery and Economics.

RICHARD STALLMAN RESIGNS FROM MIT. Neither MIT nor the woke mob is getting much sympathy from the Slashdot crowd.

WARNING: THE FDA IS HAZARDOUS TO PUBLIC HEALTH: A Bad Case of the Vapors. By exploiting a bogus nicotine-vaping scare that they fomented (with the help of alarmist journalists), federal and state officials are adopting policies that could shorten the lives of millions of Americans. My piece in City Journal discusses the hype and the harm from the vaping panic — the deadliest example yet of how progressivism has corrupted the public-health profession in America. 

HMM: Gary Larson teases return of ‘The Far Side.’ Don’t toy with me, Gary.

Back in December of 2018, the Wikipedia page about Fat Head was targeted for deletion. It only survived after I started poking the founder of Wikipedia on Twitter and he finally looked into the matter and intervened. This was after Wikipedia articles about Jimmy Moore, Uffe Ravnskov, Malcolm Kendrick, etc., etc., were targeted for deletion.

In May of 2019, Facebook banned a group called Banting 7-Day Meal Plans, which had 1.5 million members. After an uproar, the group was eventually reinstated.

In August, Jimmy Moore’s Jimmy Rants videos disappeared from YouTube, supposedly for violating community standards. It took some doing, but Jimmy finally got the suspension removed.

Also in August, we learned that Google (which owns YouTube), has altered its search algorithms to make it difficult to find diet and health sites deemed unorthodox. At one time, Google’s search rankings were a direct reflection of popularity. If your page and my page were both relevant to the search term and your site had more visitors, your page appeared above mine in the search results. Not anymore. Now Google employees monkey with the algorithm to steer people to the “correct” information – or more accurately, to steer them away from the BAD, BAD IDEAS.

Here are some quotes from an article on that development:

Mercola.com, operated by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is one of the most trafficked websites providing alternative views to medical orthodoxy. If I were researching statins, I would certainly read several of the numerous essays questioning statin use and the cholesterol theory of heart disease. Essays at Mercola.com usually provide references to medical studies. Personally, since Dr. Mercola sells supplements and I am a supplement skeptic, I read his essays—like I read all medical essays—with a grain of salt.

Dr. Kelly Brogan is a psychiatrist who has helped thousands of women find alternatives to psychotropic drugs prescribed to treat depression and anxiety. In her book, A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives, Brogan reports that one of every seven women and 25 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are on such drugs.

For their unorthodox views, Dr. Brogan, Dr. Mercola, and others like them are treated as medical heretics. Dr. Brogan and Dr. Mercola have documented how a change in Google’s search engine algorithm has essentially ended traffic to their websites.

Welcome to the brave new world of “de-platforming” ideas The Anointed don’t like. And it’s not just happening to people who disagree with The Anointed on diet and health — not by a long shot. If you write or say something that offends the sensibilities of The Anointed, there’s a good chance your Facebook group, or YouTube Account, or Twitter account or whatever will be suspended or banned.

If you have a large following and you really piss off The Anointed, they’ll try to destroy your career. They’ll demand bookstores stop carrying your books. They’ll go after advertisers who buy ad time on any TV shows where you appear. If you’re scheduled to give a speech, they’ll try to get it canceled – through threats of violence, if necessary. The message – often stated explicitly – is this: you should not be allowed to spread your harmful ideas to others, so we’re justified in silencing you.

I’ve written about why The Anointed are hostile to free speech several times before (this post includes links to a series), but let’s back up and ask some deep, philosophical questions, such as WHY DON’T THEY JUST MAKE THEIR OWN COUNTER-ARGUMENTS?!  WHAT THE @#$% IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!

There’s plenty wrong with these people, and it begins with their core philosophy, which, unfortunately, many of them acquired in universities — you know, those supposed centers of open inquiry and freewheeling debate and discussion.

To explain how The Anointed operate, I’ve quoted from The Vision of The Anointed by Thomas Sowell, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. They’re all great books. I hope you read them.

But to understand the core philosophy of people who feel justified de-platforming those whose “bad” opinions they don’t like, let’s turn to a philosophy book that I’ve only mentioned briefly: Explaining Postmodernism, by a philosophy professor named Stephen Hicks.

I’ve previously summarized the book like this:

• Objectivist: if it’s true, I’ll believe it.
• Subjectivist: If I believe it, it’s true.

Well, the book goes into a little more detail than that. If you want to know why so many university professors and other members of The Anointed have become big fans of censorship and de-platforming, Hicks explains their mindset pretty nicely.

The book begins by describing what postmodernism seeks to replace: the objectivist philosophy of The Enlightenment, which traces its roots (most of them, anyway) to British thinkers and philosophers: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes (not British), John Locke and Adam Smith. The objectivists believed that:

• Reality exists and is independent of our feelings, wishes, hopes or fears
• Logic and reason are how we discern reality
• The individual is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others

Not surprisingly, The Enlightenment thinkers emphasized rationalism, the scientific method and individual freedom. To quote Hicks:

Modern thinkers start from nature—instead of starting with some form of the supernatural, which had been the characteristic starting point of pre-modern, Medieval philosophy. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature—in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s own character—in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual, seeing the individual as the unit of reality, holding that the individual’s mind is sovereign, and that the individual is the unit of value—in contrast to the pre-modernist, feudal subordination of the individual to higher political, social, or religious realities and authorities.

And later:

If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then that epistemology systematically applied yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science.

Individualism and science are thus consequences of an epistemology of reason. Both applied systematically have enormous consequences. Individualism applied to politics yields liberal democracy … individualism applied to economics yields free markets and capitalism.

If you enjoy living in a prosperous, technically advanced society with a high degree of individual freedom, you have no friggin’ idea (unless you’ve studied a bit of history and philosophy) of the huge debt you owe to The Enlightenment thinkers.

Today, of course, many college professors tell us we can simply dismiss The Enlightenment thinkers as a bunch of dead white males. The irony (which is no doubt lost on the professors) is that postmodernist ideas were also conceived and promoted by dead white males.

The bigger irony is that the subjectivist philosophy that eventually morphed into postmodernism began as a reaction against The Enlightenment to save faith, tradition and mysticism from the onslaught of objective science. If you deeply believe that X is true but logic and reason say X is false, well then, there’s a simple solution: simply declare that reason and logic don’t matter.

One of the most influential subjectivist philosophers was Martin Heidegger. We’ll quote Hicks for a summary:

Heidegger and postmodernism Heidegger’s philosophy is the integration of the two main lines of German philosophy, the speculative metaphysical and the irrationalist epistemological. After Kant, the Continental tradition quickly and gleefully abandoned reason, putting wild speculation, clashing wills, and troubled emotion at the forefront.

In Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition, we can see clearly many of the ingredients of postmodernism. Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:

1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality;
2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;
3. Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;
4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;
5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;
6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.

Later in the book:

Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment world depends upon.… Postmodernism’s essentials are the opposite of modernism’s. Instead of natural reality—anti-realism. Instead of experience and reason—linguistic social subjectivism
Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products.

Declaring reason and logic to be irrelevant of course leads to some interesting contradictions. As Hicks points out, only a subjectivist could believe that:

• All cultures are valid and equally deserving of respect, but Western culture is really, really bad
• All values are subjective, but racism and sexism are really, really bad
• Technology is destructive and bad, but it’s not fair that some people can afford more of it than others

Totally illogical and therefore rather stupid, right? Yes, you’d think so.  But ya see, that’s because you — lacking the deep, philosophical insight that logic and reason are irrelevant — don’t understand that by gosh, I can be totally illogical and still be right … while you can be completely logical and still be wrong. That’s what the postmodernists believe.

So what does this have to do with why The Anointed consider it acceptable and perhaps even necessary to de-platform anyone who disagrees with them?

I don’t want this to be a mega-post, so we’ll get to that next time.

THE NETHERLANDS HITS THE BOTTOM OF THE SLIPPERY SLOPE: Dutch court clears doctor in landmark euthanasia trial.

A Dutch doctor was acquitted Wednesday in a landmark trial that prosecutors and physicians hope will help clarify how the country’s 2002 euthanasia law can be applied to people with severe dementia.

The doctor, who was not named in court, was cleared of any wrongdoing in carrying out euthanasia three years ago on a 74-year-old woman. The patient was given fatal doses of drugs despite some indications she might have changed her mind since declaring in writing that she wanted euthanasia.

The court ruled that in rare cases of euthanasia that were being performed on patients with severe dementia—and who had earlier made a written request for euthanasia—the doctor “did not have to verify the current desire to die.”

The doctor was accused of not acting with due care because, prosecutors alleged, she made insufficient efforts to find out whether the patient still wanted to die. To carry out the euthanasia, the physician drugged the patient’s coffee without her knowledge and then had family members restrain the woman while delivering the fatal injection.

Well, I suppose that’s clear enough.

IT’S SATIRE, BUT IS IT REALLY? Six-Year-Old Saying, ‘Why Don’t We Just Give Everything Away For Free?’ Surges To Top Of Democratic Polls.

GLENN’S MAIL BAG: A longtime Instapundit reader who has lived in Hong Kong for several years reports from the front lines:

I went to two demonstrations last week.

Students held a protest in front of Legco last Monday and Tuesday and about 10,000 students showed up. They arrived around 4 pm and left around 8 pm leaving it as clean and neat as when they had arrived. I noticed one think that wasn’t there – policemen. Didn’t see a single police officer and it went off without a hitch – completely peaceful.

On Sunday, I went to the protest in front of the US Consulate. I think I only saw two police officers there. But I did see hundreds upon hundreds of paramilitary troops there. They had not only pistols but rifles (presumably with rubber bullets, beanbags and tear gas). They were decked out in full body armour, shields, helmets with mirrored face masks, no nametags and no ID numbers.

The march was loud but peaceful and the proceeded past the FCC and back down to Central where people were then going home via the MTR. Then three knucklehead supposedly were causing problems. Rather than arrest the three, put them in a paddywagon and send them off to the police station, they shut down the entire MTR station. They then chased those protesting to Wanchai, where they proceeded to shut down that station. They then chased them to Causeway Bay where they started shooting off tear gas and throwing tear gas even in places where there were no protesters (but plenty of media).

I would note that no damage was done anywhere by protesters until AFTER the MTR stations were shut down. I suspect that the Police did this on purpose. Rather than de-escalate and disburse the protesters at the end of the day, the police intentionally aggravated and incited the protesters. Why? To de-legitimize the protest to the US Consulate. To put the protesters in a bad light making them all appear “violent.” To discourage future protests by giving the appearance that if you show up at a protest, you’ll encounter violence.

How much tear gas did the Hong Kong Police fire between 1967 and 2014 (a period of 47 years)? ZERO.

But in the past three months, the police have fired off over 2,000 rounds of tear gas along with numerous bean bag projectiles and rubber bullets. The Hong Kong police gave training for years to the UK and elsewhere in how to deal with and de-escalate protests. Then about a decade ago, the Police decided to start sending their forces to China for “training.” Since then, the policy has moved from a de-escalation policy to a one of intimidation and fear.

There have been those that note that food requisitions have escalated much higher in the past couple of months, with many now speculating that Chinese PAP troops are now part of the HK Police Raptors Forces.

In sum, the Hong Kong Police of today are nowhere close to the Hong Kong Police of 10, 20 or 30 years ago. I completely sympathize with the average beat police officer today. But top management has decided to gear up a paramilitary force within the larger Police Force and use them liberally and with impunity.

This is not your father’s Hong Kong Police Force, and it is a very sad turn for the worse.

Indeed.

THE COMMISSION WRITES ITS REPORTS FIRST AND GATHERS ITS FACTS LATER, IF AT ALL:  In 2015, the Commission on Civil Rights issued a ghastly report that purported to find egregious conditions at immigration detention facilities.  (Maggots in the food!  Torture!  Or … uh … rather something that seems to us a little bit like torture!)  Interestingly, the draft was written before that anyone from the Commission had visited any of these centers.

I hope you’ll agree that my dissent made it clear just how misinformed that report was.  

The Commission will release an “update” to that report in a few weeks.  This time its members didn’t bother to tour a facility at all.  I had to arrange a tour in my private capacity.

This post is a shout out to the ICE officers who gave me and a USD colleague of mine a tour yesterday morning of the Otay Mesa Detention Facility here in San Diego County.  Thank you!  

I won’t be able to write as much this time.  The Commission has seen to it that I won’t have enough time.  But I will get something out.

With most services, you get to shop around, but rarely can you do that with government-run schools.

Philadelphia mom Elaine Wells was upset to learn that there were fights every day in the school her son attended. So she walked him over to another school.

"We went to go enroll and we were told, 'He can't go here!' That was my wake up call," Wells tell me in my latest video.

She entered her sons in a charter school lottery, hoping to get them into a charter school.

"You're on pins and needles, hoping and praying," she said. But politicians stack the odds against kids who want to escape government-run schools. Philly rejected 75 percent of the applicants.

Wells' kids did eventually manage to get into a charter called Boys' Latin. I'm happy for them. I wish government bureaucrats would let all kids have similar chances.

Wells was so eager for her sons to attend that she arranged to have one repeat the sixth grade.

"That was the moment where I most despised Boys' Latin," the son told me.

But the boys' attitude quickly changed, says their mother. "Before Boys' Latin, I would come home and say, 'Read for an hour, read a book,' and their response would be, 'Why? What did we do?'—like reading was a punishment!"

But after they started at Boys' Latin, she found books scattered around the house. Suddenly, her boys were reading without her pressuring them.

She also was surprised to discover her son on the phone at 10 p.m. at night—talking to a teacher. Boys' Latin teachers often volunteer to help students with homework—even at night.

Other differences: Charter students spend more time in school—from 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m., and they have to take Latin.

"Why?" I asked Boys' Latin co-founder David Hardy. "Nobody speaks Latin."

"We picked Latin because it was hard," he answered. "Life is hard. In order to be prepared, you have to work hard. We want to get that into the psyche of our students."

It works. Boys' Latin students do better on most state tests than kids in government-run schools. Hardy says, "We've sent more black boys to college than any high school in Pennsylvania."

But people who work in government monopolies don't like experiments that show there's a better way to do things. Philadelphia and other cities are rejecting new charter applications. Philadelphia rejected Hardy's plan to open a Girls' Latin.

"They realize that if we continue to take children away, they won't have jobs," says Hardy.

Instead of approving more charters, the education establishment just says, "Give us more money."

But get this: Philadelphia schools already spend $18,400 per child, about half a million dollars per classroom. With that money, they could hire five experienced teachers for every class. But they don't. So, where does all that money go?

Bureaucracy, says Hardy. "They have a director of special ed and assistant director of special ed…director of high school athletics and an assistant…lot of overhead."

The establishment's new attack on charter competition is: Charters drain resources from public schools.

It's a clever argument, but it's a lie. Charter schools are public, too, and Philadelphia, like other cities, gives charters less money than it gives to schools the city government runs. In Philadelphia, charters get only 70 percent as much. So government schools actually save money when a kid leaves for a charter.

Even if charters got equal money, says Wells, "you can't tell me that charter schools take funding from public schools! Every parent pays taxes that fund the school system. If I choose for my child to go to a charter school, then that's where my taxes should go!"

She's right. So why aren't more charters approved?

"It would mean a whole lot less union jobs," Hardy says. "The unions are not going to be for that."

It's not just unions. Education bureaucrats love working in a monopoly where they are basically guaranteed jobs. Bad charter schools close, but government-run schools almost never do—no matter how badly they treat kids.

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THE COBRA EFFECT: Lessons in Unintended Consequences.

In colonial India, Delhi suffered a proliferation of cobras, which was a problem very clearly in need of a solution given the sorts of things that cobras bring, like death. To cut the number of cobras slithering through the city, the local government placed a bounty on them. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution. The bounty was generous enough that many people took up cobra hunting, which led exactly to the desired outcome: The cobra population decreased. And that’s where things get interesting.

As the cobra population fell and it became harder to find cobras in the wild, people became rather entrepreneurial. They started raising cobras in their homes, which they would then kill to collect the bounty as before. This led to a new problem: Local authorities realized that there were very few cobras evident in the city, but they nonetheless were still paying the bounty to the same degree as before.

City officials did a reasonable thing: They canceled the bounty. In response, the people raising cobras in their homes also did a reasonable thing: They released all of their now-valueless cobras back into the streets. Who wants a house full of cobras?

In the end, Delhi had a bigger cobra problem after the bounty ended than it had before it began.

More often than not, “policy” is a dirty word.