Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Robbie Suave, associate editor at Reason.com. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Robbie. Thanks for having me. So the first question here, Aaron wrote the first question, and I think it's a good way of starting out our entire theme of this. And for the record, before Aaron and I went to see you bolder together at a time that we might have thought this was a pretty crazy place, but things are getting crazier.  Yeah, we've seen over the last few years, I think, a major upswing in these high-profile instances of students censoring each other, professors being punished for saying the wrong thing, administrators taking actions against students, students calling on administrators to take actions against people they don't like. And that's been the major change, I feel, over the last couple of years it used to be, and if you talk to Greg Lukianoff at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, he'll say the same thing. It used to be that the administrators were doing this to students. They were violating their rights. They were not respecting their free expression rights. But now the students actually kind of want the censorship that administrators are capable of giving them. That's among their demands, among their pressing demands. You've seen that at Mizzou and at Yale and then the bunch of other places of students saying we don't like this kind of thing, we don't like maybe offensive Halloween costumes or theme parties on campuses or various organizations that we don't like or professors that have said something in classrooms that have bothered us and we demand the power for you to punish those people or stop those things from happening. So what's changed?  Or at least one of the multiple. Maybe Madison. Or Berkeley. But I mean, and there is none of this.  But nothing like this.  But something's happened. Yeah. So I have an answer to that that I think a lot of people aren't aware of. And it's actually, I blame sort of explicit government guidance that came out in 2011. So I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2010. My college experience was pretty good. There was not, you know, these things have always been happening. There have always been kind of a minority of very active, angry liberal students who kind of want some variety of censorship and are mad at people. That's always existed. But in the last five years, ever since 2011, these students, they haven't grown in number. They've just gained institutional power on campuses. And they've done that because the federal government started giving out guidance in 2011 the Education Department, specifically the Office for Civil Rights, which administers Title IX, which is that gender equity law you hear so much about in the trans-bathroom debate saying that there has to be a quality of between the sexes in education. But the Office for Civil Rights interpreted that guidance, it began interpreting it in 2011 to hold that all forms of harassment had to be very vigorously policed on campus. The administrators had a responsibility under Title IX to protect students from everything that would bother them. They were kind of changing the definition of what constitutes harassment to be. It's no longer offensive to an objective person. It has to be severe and pervasive. They're saying, this is a subjective standard.  You have to investigate these claims. And it's transferred a lot of power, I think, to the students. I think they get it now. I think this is, you know, this happened five years ago and over that time period they figured out they know what Title IX is. They cite it all the time. They say, I have this Title IX right to be protected from things that offend me. They say that all the time. And the administrators kind of think that too, even if that's not actually what Title IX really means, they're just, they're worried they're going to lose federal funding if they don't take their students' claims very seriously. But you mentioned that, so there's always been this small group of the angry activists students who think no one should ever say anything they think is mean. So they've been empowered. But does this mean that the, so one of the things that's hard from outside, from sitting here not on a college campus, is to get a sense of how big this movement is versus just being fairly vocal or being juicy stories in the sense of being ridiculously dumb and so fun to report on versus this is some sort of growing movement. So is this really like on the college campuses are more students buying into this than used to or is it just this empowered always minority? Yeah, question reminds me of kind of like sometimes my dad always taught, he went to college in the 60s and my friend, one of my, asked him at some point, like weren't their hippies just everywhere. I have this image of going to college in the 60s.  They took, the image became entirely hippies, but like they were quite rare. So like on Aaron's point, is this being overblown or do you think it's becoming more and more widespread? Yeah. So these, these are very difficult things to measure for exactly those reasons because now in today's world, we have social media, we have someone can do something stupid on campus and all of a sudden, we're all talking about it on Twitter, I'm writing about it bigger news outlets than I are covering it. And then it seems like it's a trend that, oh, this is getting, you know, so much more common when really this has always been happening. So in a sense, yes, it is overblown. However, it's definitely true that the kinds of things that students are complaining about are different. Students are more safety obsessed than ever before. Their concerns come from a place of the language they use to express their grievances is much different. And I would argue much more of a threat to a classically liberal society, to a free speech, a pro speech society. The language they use is one of, of I have a right to be not offended, to be protected, to be that, that if I were provoked on this campus, that would be the same thing as threatening my physical safety, that physical safety and emotional safety are the same. I mean, they're on a spectrum. They're similar things. They're all things that authority figures have, have not just a right, but a responsibility to, to create a safe, this is the safe space idea. It's easy to mock, but it's very powerful. It is very powerful. There are a lot of students who have bought into that kind of thinking. Now, it's still just a minority of students, I say, and I, I've tried to measure whether the vast swaths of students, whether their attitudes about the First Amendment are changing. There are some surveys on this. They're kind of mixed. There's some support for the position that, yes, their, their attitudes are getting, I would say, slightly more hostile to free speech. It's a really difficult thing to measure because you guys know people give very contradictory answers to, do you support the First Amendment? Well, but do you support it if, you know, people, religious people are offended about a cartoon? You know, people, people get confused. So we're, so we talked about Title IX, and, and I know you're not saying that this, you know, kind of sprung out of the government without any backing because the very ideas that the, the, it was a letter, correct? A guidance letter. Yeah, a dear colleague letter. Those very ideas about what constitutes harassment have been percolating for quite a, like a broader, looser definition of harassment for interpersonal harassment, bringing in things like microaggressions and the, how language perpetuates, I don't know, class struggle. I'm trying to, Aaron and I took classes about things like this and we learned about, you know, from people claiming that things like, you know, the phallic nature of airplanes was oppressing them in some nature or things like, like, like seeing this everywhere. So that's been around for a while. Did it just get up to the fact that someone in Department of Education decided that it was one of these people who believed that all these things are microaggressions and problems and therefore put this letter out and then, but also people on campus have been learning this though, I mean, they have been learning things about how oppressive words and attitudes are. Yes. And if you talk to these students, they, they think that everyone should basically be required to study that. That's the thing they want to study. They don't, they've already made up their minds that that's the case, that they're horribly oppressed, marginalized people. And, you know, in some cases they are, but in general, college students. And generally, if you're on a college campus, you're among the more... I mean, I think horribly oppressed and marginalized is a bit of a stretch, but I see your point. You're probably a privileged person if you've managed to go to Yale or Princeton or something. But these students think, if you talk to them, they don't think they're in college to be changed. They have all their ideas already in their head. They think they're here to educate you.  They want more... But diversity classes, you mean classes about specific groups and races of people. Yes. They want entire college departments. At Western Washington University, this was one of the demands of students. They wanted a college of power and liberation. That's what they were going to call it. Where everyone would essentially be trained. And again, it's fine to study these issues. Like, I don't have a problem with that if professors want to teach them. If you should have a wider range of classes in college, that's fine. But they don't actually want it to be an educational thing. They want it to be like the mission of the universe. Yeah, they want, and they want it to be an activist model. They essentially want training. They want everyone to be trained to be a social justice activist, not, not someone to like dissent or question or, or kind of think intellectually about social justice and what that means. They have it in their heads, what it means. They want everyone kind of, and they want everybody to, to live and breathe it even in the residence halls. They think they think it's not just in the classroom where you can actually challenge your professors. If, ideally, you can challenge your professors if they're saying something you disagree with. But they want it in the, the residence halls where it's much harder to, it appears, I think, to the average student that, well, I have to accept kind of this ideology being forced on me or I'm going to be like kicked out of my dorm or something, which is not a healthy, conducive environment for a dialogue. So this story you're telling sounds familiar in the sense that in the 90s and the early 2000s in particular, we, there were a lot of stories of conservatives upset that they would, you know, kids would go to college campuses and they would have to take courses that touched on queer theory or feminist theory and that these things were anti-American or in some way disrupted their socially conservative priors. So is this, is this related? Is this, is that a, is that a precursor to this? And this is kind of the same thing going on on the left or are these distinct? I would say, I would say it's related, but, but now you could, you know, you, it's not just like hyper offended liberal students. There are conservative students bothered about all sorts of things and that are going, that have begun and will in the future. I absolutely believe this is going to be the next big trend is conservatives saying, well, we're actually marginalized on campus. No one shares our views and they'll actually have a better case because kind of everyone on campus shares the, the offended left students views in, in, in some sense, they're all their entire faculty does. So the conservative students are going to start saying, well, wait a minute, our ideas are not represented. We don't have anyone who thinks like us. What about, what about this kind of diversity? We need the, we need the coddling, the protection. Our, our ideas are under assault and I, I think there will be no sort of argument against that. Well, there won't be a principle. Yeah. I mean, they'll just be playing the same game. But Aaron, were you asking about the first wave of the PC stuff? Well, that seems, the first wave seems a bit because we had, we had the political correctness. Yeah. Right.  Like Trump uses it to note this huge thing. But I think we're talking about like Dinesh just uses a liberal education and a shadow university, which is what. But that, that first, that first explicitly PC movement is interesting in light of this second wave PC movement, because that one ended, I mean, it, it was a big thing and then it just became a subject of ridicule that we published like the politically incorrect bedtime stories book. I remember it was the best seller for a while. And it just, it became something you made fun of people for using these dumb PC terms or whatever and it died out. So does that, does that prior PC wave tell us anything about this one in particular, like how this one might play out? I, I think it tells us that this is kind of cyclical on its own and, and we're, I, I think maybe at a high watermark for this current phase or, or will be soon, hopefully. But then what, what are you going to write about? Yeah, no, I, I've perverse incentives, man. I have nothing ever to say. But is it cyclical in the sense that people paying attention to it or that there's actually the student outcry itself is cyclical? Like the actual. I mean, the student, I think the student protest movement is, is kind of cyclical. They're, they're right. There are more student protests now. They're, they're having, or, and it, it's certainly the case that they're having a more pronounced impact on the university. They're actually getting people to resign. They're, they're actually, administrators are at least pretending to try to meet their demands. I mean, they, they do have a bit of power at this moment. They, they, and they can invoke investigations of faculty members. That's a really, that's a big power. I mean, the, the balance between what students can do and what professors can do is really shifted in the last, I would say like two years with the kind of Laura Kipnis stuff. That's just, you know, the most well-known, but there are so many. Can you tell a little about what she is? Sure, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis had written some article actually complaining about Title IX. She'd written it for the Chronicle of Higher Education talking about how Title IX just kind of messes up normal relationships between, between students and faculty or the kinds of relationships that were, existed between students and faculty when she was a student. And she talked about kind of some of the Title IX cases. Title IX also compels of sexual assault investigations in universities and, and, and very illiberal ones. Student, her students, students of the campus were so outraged by the article they disagreed with it. They filed a Title IX complaint against her that she had, that she had violated Title IX by talking about it essentially. And even though that's absurd, the university still has to appear like it's taking this seriously. So it has to do something. So it subjects her to an investigation where she can't have a lawyer. It flies in a team of lawyers. She doesn't get a lawyer. She gets a support person. Her support person, that person's advocacy on her behalf also caused people to file Title IX complaints against that person. So he had to be removed. So she can't defend herself against Title IX claims without violating Title IX, like some people believe. It's totally like a catch 22 of, it's the modern catch 22 of higher education that what it, everything that falls under it makes it so you can't even talk about it or discuss it. And, and you know, eventually she's cleared nothing bad happened to her, but that was after weeks of uncertainty. And, and certainly you would, if you had followed this, you would, and were a professor, you would take away from it.  And I hear this from professors all the time, professors who are afraid of trying to teach their students. Well, so the, the interaction there is interesting. And it goes back to what you were saying at the outset about Title IX or at least the current DOE's interpretation of the, through the dear colleague letter, but in interviews and research you've done in terms of the administration itself, how much have you found like that kind of, is this just extreme risk averseness? Like we might get sued by the government or is there actually communication going on between people in the DOE and on university campuses saying you need to investigate this? Because you, I mean, they seem to go gung-ho on this, but are they just afraid? Or are they zealots? Or is it a mixture of both? It's all, it's, it's three things.  I mean, it's just sort of bureaucratic mission creep. We can do more stuff. We can, we can prevent more people. We can interfere in more people's lives. Often their title is like the administrator in charge of diversity and inclusion on campus. I mean, that's like, yeah, that's it. Dean of the Office of Inclusive Excellence and yeah, diverse sustainability and I mean, what else is this guy gonna do? I could just see him like clapping his hands being like, all right, here we go. We finally got something to do, boys. Yeah, so it's that it is also extreme risk averse. Universities just are that way. They're big institutions. They're always afraid of their brand that somebody's gonna cause them public relations disaster. The students are gonna do that. And then also, but also it is yes, very explicit guidance from the government. The government is investigating more than 100. I think it's nearly 200 at this point universities for violating Title IX. It just tells you, we're investigating you for violating Title IX. It tells everyone it's a public list that you're under investigation and that you could lose federal funding. I don't think it actually has deprived anyone of federal funding and maybe very, almost never at least. But as part of your settlement for the investigation, it says, okay, you must implement all these things. And then the university agrees to change its harassment procedures.  The Office for Civil Rights has said, for instance, that you have to use a preponderance of the evidence standard when you're having a sexual assault dispute. Which is 50% plus one, what would they get? Small thumb, 51%, yeah. And the defense of that is that, well that's the standard you would have in like a civil procedure. But they don't mandate any other aspect of the civil procedure. So for instance, you don't necessarily have cross-examination rights. And in fact, in several of these settlements, at least two of them, the Office for Civil Rights has said, you may not allow cross-examination. So why would the reasoning be for that?  These are victim-focused proceedings.  Which of course assumes that they are actually. Well, the language they use always assumes it because they say survivor, they say they say. Potential survivor. I mean, it assumes the accuracy of that. So the procedure assumes the outcome in its structure, the outcome that the procedure is meant to determine. You're no longer even, you're not guaranteed a hearing. Actually, OCR's kind of preferred method now is a single investigator model where, so there's a dispute. It is handled by one administrator who investigates it, who decides which witnesses to interview, if any, who to talk to, decides whether there's a finding, not a finding of guilt, it's a finding of responsibility and then determines the suitable punishment. And one person does this instead of a panel or a hearing of three people. Do they have to inform the person accused that he, probably usually he, but not always, is under investigation or give him an opportunity to present evidence to? They don't have to do anything. They're the investigator. Actually, I covered one case. I think it was Colorado State University Pueblo, I think. What is the college in Pueblo, if you can remember? That's what it is. Yeah, CSU Pueblo. Yeah, CSU, it's CSU Pueblo. And this was a sexual misconduct dispute between two students who were basically dating. There was no actual, there was no actual, so someone else reported. Yeah, this is, you were talking about this. Someone else reported that she had been assaulted by him. She was a trainer, he was an athlete. Trainers and athletes aren't supposed to date, but like, I mean, you can, it's a free country. But someone else found out about the relationship and said he had assaulted her. When she was asked, she said, no, no, no. I was not raped. Those were her literal words. I was not raped. We're just trying to keep our relationship secret. She told her coach, there's nothing to report here. Everything's fine. They said, well, so you say, the Title IX people will sort that out. And the person, so they were forbidden from seeing each other while this investigation was proceeding. And again, there's no dispute between them. None whatsoever. So these are just, this is just like, almost like the government coming in and being like, we're going to investigate your relationship and decide whether or not we think. Yeah, yeah, we will let you know whether you were raped or not. Yes, exactly. And it was a friend of hers who reported it as an sexually assault. It was some other trainer, yeah. There might have been some jealousy component or something, or just wanted to get them in trouble. He was found responsible. And I'm not clear whether they actually interviewed him or her because it's, and he had other people he wanted to be interviewed. But the investigator said to him, I am the investigator.  And he was found guilty. He was, I believe it was a two-year suspension from the university. And there are, I mean, in some of these, there are some lawsuits that have been. Yeah, so he's filing the lawsuits. Yeah, how have any of these played out? I mean, have any of these been resolved? In recent months, there have been a number resolved in favor of the student alleging that he was wrongfully disciplined, either because the case was far-skill or his due process was violated. And now there is actually going to be a case that was just filed alleging actually that naming the education department as a defendant because it has advised these universities. It has forced them to do things that violate the due process rights of students. It's a University of Virginia law student who has filed a suit and his suit says, it's kind of an interesting little argument that, you know, are you familiar with the Administrative Procedure Act? I am, yes. We're both lawyers, kind of. Right, of course you are, not really. You actually probably know it better than I am. I'm actually, I'm trying to read this lawsuit and understand if it makes sense based on this. But so the new OCR guidance that came out in 2011 was never. Rule, it was never rulemaking, yeah. Right, it was never subjected to this law that says if you're gonna do a totally new rule you have to have the public weigh in. And the preponderance of evidence standard is a totally new rule, at least you can argue. It was never required before and this is kind of a sizable different thing. And because the preponderance of evidence standard was used in this UVA student's case, he was found responsible. Actually the person, the single investigator who did it said I would not have found you responsible if under a higher evidence standard. So he has a good argument. But in the past, we know we've had, we've had concerns or there are concerns about sexual assault on campus and there are concerns about people feeling marginalized on campus. I mean this has been going on for a while and they're not completely unfounded. Not at all. So what should we be doing about this if not investing everything to the absolute fullest degree? I think this Stanford case, the rape assault at Stanford, Brock Turner was the perpetrator. The swimming kid. The swimming kid. As horrific as this case was, he committed a terrible crime. This is a good model for how these things should be handled. And his punishment was too lenient. I think that argument makes sense.  He is being punished even though he should technically serve more jail time. But this is how these things should be handled, these sexual assault cases. This is, he was, the police were called. He gave an incriminating statement to police that he later contradicted. It went before a jury, a jury decided, 12 person jury decided beyond any reasonable doubt that he was absolutely guilty because he was guilty. And now we have faith in the outcome. We don't need to question, he's not, if this had been handled by Stanford, he'd be suing Stanford for depriving him of due process and we'd be hearing now how he's the victim of this process. And he would be if Stanford uses bad procedures for handling these things. But it's just, it's so obvious to me that you have to have the normal, warts and all, the normal criminal justice system deal with these things because that's the only way we can be certain of the outcome that we can be confident that this person actually did it, that justice is being served and that it's not going to be overturned in one of these lawsuits. Let me push back a bit on the criticism, not so much of the sexual assault issues but the speech and trigger warnings and safe space concerns. So one way you could approach that is to say, look, these students are being charged an extraordinary amount of money to go and spend for however many years getting their undergraduate degree. And this is a market and the provider should be providing what the customers want. So there's what's wrong with the students saying, look, I came to college for reasons X, Y and Z and we as outsiders or old people who went to college before this stuff was hip, I think those are stupid reasons but the customer's always right. So this is the college is just meeting market demand. Sure, that is an argument that is not totally wrong. I think the tremendous universities are public but sort of private, they operate independently but they have even the private ones have all this public funding and then it's sort of like taxpayers are on the hook for this institution that is then violating the rights of most of the students who go there just because some students want it. So it's so divorced from a true consumer. You deserve what you pay for kind of model that I think that breaks down. I mean, most of the students at these institutions just wanna go there and get a good education and take advantage of their First Amendment rights and hear interesting speakers and then you have this small minority of students that are shouting down everyone they disagree with and getting people like disinvited from the college. I mean, what if this is gonna be your only opportunity in life to hear controversial, interesting people? Like I remember when Bill Ayers came to my campus University of Michigan, I got to interview him for the paper, this was a really exciting experience for me as someone who wanted to be a journalist. You know, what if he was disinvited from campus because these offended students didn't want someone like him there. This would have hurt my education because I'm paying, I want a good education. So that's kind of my problem with that. Well, Aaron raises an interesting point because it's with the Title IX influence, you think of schools like Hillsdale and Grove City, which I believe are the only two schools that take no federal funding of any sort. Yeah. And they're both very conservative, of course. And they don't even take student loans from that are subsidized by the government because I think if you do that, that's the trigger that pulls you in. And that's two out of however many institutions of higher learning there are in America. And there's places like Liberty University which say to you, we put some other value on a higher pedestal than free expression. Our Christian identity comes first. And they're letting you know that. So don't go there if you want kind of your garden variety, liberal, classically liberal, maximum free speech, kind of post-enlightenment education. Which is, in a education funding system, I think all of us would support or at least something with so much of the government's foot on the neck of these universities. You could start a school that advertises itself as a safe space you're not gonna hear. Hillsdale kind of says, you're gonna get a conservative libertarian education or you're not gonna hear any of those neoliberals or anything, it's just gonna be Marxism and saying, but of course that's not the case. But which is the interesting question of what they're trying to do here because your discussion about the sexual assault prosecutions, I'm putting that in scare quotes. I mean, really, they're not criminal on these level, but it's like they flipped the entire Blackstone better than one, what is it? One guilty man go for it. Yeah, absolutely. 10 guilty men go for it and one innocent man is jailed. I mean, I feel like that they're actually substantively arguing against, tacitly if not explicitly, that they actually think it's better if they convict people erroneously as long as they can change the fundamental institutions of society. Because a lot of this in terms of the sexual assault is about a social construction theory of society, how we need to change the way people view sex, men in particular view women, and we can only do that with extreme force in prosecuting how they deal with women sexually in all these sort of situations. So it's actually better if we convict people, innocent people, accidentally because we're trying to change society fundamentally. Right, and I just thought that was sort of a bedrock, liberal, classically liberal view that no, it's better to let however many people go for it. Well, whatever it is, it's hard, why is that so hard to say at night? 10 guilty men go for you than one innocent man jailed. But I've been shocked by how many liberal commentators, liberal activists, people who otherwise you would expect them to say no, to be opposed to like torture or Guantanamo Bay or presuming people are terrorists, all that sort of good stuff that I agree with, have kind of thrown that out the window when it comes to these sexual misconduct disputes. They imagine that the person is always guilty and if they're not, they might as well be guilty and we should proceed like that. And it's people like, as recline have wrote articles saying that the affirmative consent standard, the different consent standard that requires that you have like a verbal yes to each and every sexual activity is necessary even though it makes no logical sense and would be bad.  Right, just because, even though this is gonna result in people who really didn't do anything wrong, getting punished, even though this is going to have, likely have a disparate impact on communities who already suffer from excessive rules and regulations and criminal codes. We know that when I talk to a lot of professors, they say more of the accused students are students of color, which is not surprising because we know that these kinds of systems of justice mistreat these people. And the left is often correctly outraged about these things in other contexts, but not in this context, the left community, I guess, is much more divided. Well, it seems to raise another potential way to defend this, what we would call illiberalism, which is, so you've got the college professors who are on campuses now or are largely the product. They were on the universities in the late 60s, early 70s. They were part of very large student movements that were important and successful in meaningful ways and came out of a society where the young people changed the world, or at least they perceive it that way. And they've identified maybe these problems, like one of the things that's happened at universities over the last half century or so is groups that had been marginalized have more access to the university. And sometimes that's for very good reasons, and sometimes that's for reasons that we might think are not so good, but there are more of these marginalized groups, whether that's women who now often make up major reasons. By now it's substantial, like 58% or something like that. Or, but racial minorities, ethnic minorities, and that these groups have been over the course of US history systematically disempowered compared to the elites who still largely run things and make up the bulk of the stuff that you learn on campus is like the perspective of these elites, at least the story goes. And so you can say like this marketplace of ideas is great, like you ought to hear controversial things, like what's the answer to bad speech is more speech sort of argument, but that that's only really works when the sides have some equality and power. But when your voice has been marginalized for so long, then the powerful people speaking their speeches significantly more weighty than yours. And so what we need to do to correct these things, and the way we correct them is that this young people, student level who are gonna be the future leaders of America is to put a thumb on the scale to push out the speech of the powerful so that the speech of the marginalized, which is just as true, if not more true than what the powerful is saying, can be elevated. Yeah, this idea, you're absolutely correct. This idea is very popular among students. It's punching up, punching down, dichotomy is another way of putting it, that yes, we don't have, even if we all had equal free speech, it wouldn't be equal free speech because some people have more institutional power, have more wealth, have more privileged status by virtue of their birth, and so their speech is counting for more, and so yeah, First Amendment is not all that great because that's just giving more power to the people who already have it if we're just all gonna have equal free speech. So it's just as you say, they want some kind of, so that is one of the arguments they use to combat the idea that free speech by itself is so great. So what's wrong with that? I mean, it's interesting because I think you have to get down to the core. First of all, these people are not liberals. I mean, they're no meaningful sense of liberal. I mean, they're basically collectivist Puritans, and they're adopting, the Puritans wouldn't say, oh, I believe in liberalism, like in the classic sense, they wouldn't have, the pilgrims would have been like, they were not places of religious tolerance. They were like, no, we're going to socially engineer society because of one, there's one thing that matters here, and that's relationship to God, for example. And we're going to socially engineer sexual relations. We're going to make sure women don't show their ankles. We're going to, all these things, we're going to have heresy, microaggressions, whatever, that's all the same. It's a tendency of human society. So first of all, say like, so they have this idea, but now what's wrong with it? Well, I would say what's wrong with it is that it's not, it's never neat who has the power in the situation, and they're kind of very warped about who is the powerful. I mean, someone who has the power to like, crucify you on social media might actually have more power than someone who's ostensibly wealthy and works for an important organization but doesn't have the same social media following, or you could have, I mean, even on these campuses, like I'm thinking of Gawker attacking that. Like Gawker used to think of itself as talking truth to power, but like Gawker is incredibly powerful, although now they've made, this is, let's post it, let's pretend I'm talking about this like one year ago. But so it's not always clear like who is actually the punching up, punching down party to me. And in these campuses, a lot of the times, the people who are claiming to be the most marginalized, most oppressed, most traumatized, most emotionally turmoil people are the like wealthiest, most privileged people. And keeping in mind that everyone already on the campus usually is filtering through some degree of privilege. But the students who have a much better case to say that they've had, they're marginalized, they've had very difficult experiences. Maybe they're students of color, maybe they're some other identity group. I hear, I've seen cases where these students are actually the ones who are being censored or whose speech is causing the more privileged students to say I'm offended, you shouldn't, I've heard of students being run out of like anti-war meetings cause a student who said like, we need to man up and confront this war. And he didn't, he was a less privileged student and didn't understand why that was politically incorrect language. You know about man up? Yeah, okay. So I have to continually update my dictionary of what's not okay. So man up is not okay, I guess. Here's another one for you. I just saw on Colby College's bias incident spreadsheet that a student reported another student for using the phrase on the other hand. It was filed under disability. So I must presume. Are they just trying, I mean that is like the joke stuff from the way. I don't think so, I don't think so. I think you're probably right, which is terrifying. I mean like that was the thing that was the joke books. Yeah, when the first political pressures were moving. I'm high challenged and all those like jokes were coming out. Yeah, they're not really jokes anymore. Also on this list, a funny one was someone had apparently carved a swastika into a pumpkin but then there was an asterisk. Upon further evaluation, it was not a swastika. So is that what you do every morning as you go read the incident report? Do you have a few colleges you like? Yeah, I search for, yeah. Yeah, you can just search for these. And these bias incident reports by the way are terrible. This is, these are panels of administrators who are just like their job is to wait for somebody to complain that somebody said something else they don't like and then they hold a conversation with that person and consider additional disciplinary measures for professors, for students, for, and these are in place in a hundred different campuses. Now, I mean, but maybe what we need to be doing after Aaron's question about power relationships and what we're really working with here because we've all, if you've grown up since the 80s, we've all kind of grown up in this sort of emerging power narrative, I would just sort of call it, we added a bolder and it's something you can't totally disregard. I mean, for me. Post-Fuco world. Post-Fuco world, yeah. For me and even for libertarians, like that idea of a class of warfare or something, a proto-libertarians sort of came up with that power matters. But maybe, I mean, it seems that what we need to be doing is A, realizing that people are not liberals, I mean, and not let them use that word. And B, defending liberalism, like for what it means. It's because they're pretending they're doing it, but they're completely not. Yeah, and I would argue that they're wrong about power and free speech. I would still argue that absolutely maximum free speech on a place like a college campus is an advantage to the less privileged, is an advantage to the people who don't have power. The people who have power actually don't need these kinds of protections, because they can get their way regardless. They can game the system, they already have advantages. They have other advantages.  So then in light of that, what do you think of the kind of non-administrative counterpart to these restrictions on free speech, which is the public shaming that we see so often. So you're not like, okay, we're not going to restrict your speech. We're not gonna prevent that person from coming to campus.  Is that kind of a fair way to address this without being as bad, or is that as bad? Yeah, I think the actual dedicated principle classical liberal has to be very careful here, because publicly shaming someone is a former free speech. I mean, protesting is a form of speech. You can protest a speaker you don't like when they come to campus, that's fine, you should do that if you don't like them. So I try to be very careful not to discourage speech. I don't like still is, and even speech calling for less speech is still speech, right? So I must assert that you have this right even to call on free speech to be restricted. So yeah, and public shaming is obviously a better tool for bringing about desirable social change than prohibiting people from doing something you don't like. So yes, I would not, I think we have to walk a fine line when we criticize these students who are saying they're offended. You can say you're offended, things are offensive. That's not necessarily a bad thing. How much has social media played a role in this movement? Because you placed it at what was it, 2011, you said. But in the last five years, social media has exploded as well, and often if you've got these small activist groups on campus, they used to be fairly isolated, but now they can feel like they're an enormous nationwide movement. So has social media accelerated this? Yeah, it's made it much easier for activist students to find other activist students to organize under hashtags to identify people who agree with them on other campuses to appear like they really have something going for them. Like they're in the zeitgeist, things are going their way. So I think it's definitely helped spread. And like I mentioned earlier, it's also made it easier to pick on them, to kind of identify the outrage incidents. So it's having, I might be having a distorting effect on how much of a factor this actually is on college campuses. When it comes to the shaming incidents, I mean, I agree you have to support people's right to even talk about not supporting your rights or other people's rights, that is what it means. But I mean, should we at least be encouraging these students to listen to the other side? I mean, that's the thing here that's terrifying. And to me is that I think that liberalism in the correct definition of the word rests on a pretty thin read quite often. Most of history, people are not liberal. Most people in the world today are not liberal. The supporting, the freedom for the idea you hate is not a common thing. There are little bubbles throughout history, but most people tend to some sort of totalitarianism, control, collectivism of some other people.  I feel like this should be terrifying to us. It is terrifying and I think it's too late to address it by the time they're in college. I think, actually what I think is a big problem is that a lot of these college students are just demanding the same kind of coddling and emotional protection and sort of illiberalism they've grown up with in 12 years of public schooling where I mean, these things are little police states now, these elementary schools are. People are disciplined for nonsense. There are police in half of all public schools now. So every disciplinary matter is immediately becomes a police matter. You can't have, if you punch someone on recess, you used to be, you'd get like detention or something for a week. Now you might be going to juvenile because there's a police officer in the school and they're gonna involve. So these kids, I think a lot of them have been conditioned in a growing up, going to school in a post-columbine country where everything is dangerous and there's gonna be mass shootings all the time and we take safety, safety first, safety first, schools are so unsafe. Punished Pop-Tart, punished the kid who chewed his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun because he's probably some deranged mass killer. This is the environment they grow up in and then they go to college and then they have actual freedom for the first time and I think that is terrifying to some of these kids. I think they've been taught that the purpose of education is to protect you emotionally, physically and it's kind of hard to say no, no, you're here to be exposed to things that are uncomfortable.  Lack of safety can be good, can challenge you because it's healthy to your growth but that's not how they've been raised. That's institutionally and formally not how our education policies have worked over the last dozen years. So the answer to this might be that it's, this movement is too new to know but do we have any data on what they do once they graduate? Like do they go on to their first jobs and demand similar coddling and complain to bosses when a coworker says something mean? So I can only answer that anecdotally but there have been, I think it was a New York Times article or something about them entering the workforce and kind of thinking they have the right to sort of critique higher up people's like imperfect speech or sort of, yeah it is kind of, it should be a safe space environment and it's kind of funny but I can't imagine that sort of being a sweeping trend because I just can't imagine that working out very well for most students who try that and a lot of them, I mean then there's some who just probably adapt to the entrepreneurial world of being out of college. Others I think kind of want to stick around college like as long as they can and sort of- Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, well, do you see that, in my experience and Aaron's too, I think in Boulder, I was libertarian there and Aaron was eventually too and the, I was aware of what was around me and I either, I did speak out, I mean it's me, I spoke out more but I knew people around just sort of like, just sitting watch the people yelling and saying, okay well they're doing this but like the silent majority is actually against them or is this more liberal kind of mindset. Could that be the case here? Is there, I mean, I know that some groups have been starting creating pro free speech groups on campus that's been growing and things like this so could there be a kind of silent majority right now that we don't have to be terribly worried about? Well, it's interesting because a lot of the opposition to this kinds of craziness going on is, well, it's partly, it's libertarian based and a lot of sent their libertarian student groups who are kind of, who are admirably fighting this kind of environment and conservative student groups. However, I can't, sad to report that it's also taking on like a pro Donald Trump bent because Donald Trump is the person the high profile person most addressing this with his invectives against political correctness that I think are stupid and totally wrong in like every sense except the campus sense where like the college is the only environment where you can make a solid case that there is like left wing censorship punishing people institutionally. That's true. That is happening at a lot of college campuses. That's not true for society at large. The rest of it is all nonsense. But I think a lot of Trump people, they send their kids to these places, they see what's going on, they maybe they read my articles at Reason Magazine, maybe it's my fault and they go, man, this is nuts and he's the one denouncing it. And then there's been lots of kind of semi ironic but I wonder how ironic pro Trump student groups now, they're chalking Trump 2016, they're saying build the wall. And again, they're doing it, part of it is just a free speech stunt and I'm okay with free speech stunts but it's a little, I don't know, it's not ideal for making a like a philosophically sound pro speech, classically liberal argument when like Trump is your spokesperson for that. I so wanted you to say yes to my question and you just made me even more. I want you to say yes, Trevor, there is a silent majority of free speech and then you just had to say the T point. You had to say the T point. We haven't banned it from free thoughts but I'm thinking about it. Well then, so how do you see this playing out over the next five, 10 years? I think the legal regime is going to face serious challenges. I think the sort of Title IX enforcement is going to come under additional scrutiny if not because of this lawsuit I just alluded to, other ones, I still think they'll have a lot of time to kind of, especially assuming that Hillary Clinton is president, I expect her appointments to this office to, because she has made more explicit promises to the activist community who wants the kind of bonkers Title IX enforcement than the Obama administration or anything. President Obama is actually kind of, at least says the right thing, good things about safe spaces being bad and all that, even though his administration has done, I think he's just probably not aware of what this undersecretary is doing. I think Hillary Clinton is aware or is more aware and has made promises and I think it could actually get a lot worse from a formal government administrative standpoint for a while, but like I said, it's cyclical. Do I think this is the end of American education? I don't know, maybe it might be the end, American education might be ending, of its own it might be become so expensive, everyone's going to take online courses or something, people might be waking up to the fact that it's not a guarantee of a job and if you have to take out all this money just to study like oppression studies, there's no point, so I'm not a pessimist about the long-term future of education or even free speech, but certainly in the short term and by short term, I mean the next couple of years, this madness might subside, but there's many reasons to think it might get a lot worse. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy free thoughts, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Mark McDaniel and Evan Banks. To learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


Live from NASA. Live from NASA in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polymath. Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage live in the Bahamas for Polygon 18. This is where all the action is. Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, blockchain, you name it. Token economics, a paradigm shift of epic proportions. This is a decentralized internet. It's impacting the world. Missions, technology applications in all sectors.  No one's doing it, he's doing it. Lending cash for Bitcoin and currency. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's going to be here. You know, there's two things that I love.  That becomes billion-dollar opportunities. Then something that's so simple and obvious that no one does because either a baggage or dogma or other interests. You're in kind of both. You've got the simple idea, lending. Take a minute to talk about Salt Lending and your innovation that you guys do on the business side. Yeah, you got it. So, you know, everybody here at these conferences are hopefully people that are watching have some interest in cryptocurrencies or blockchain and probably accumulate some value in that currency or the asset class. So once you do, then you have options that you can either continue to hold that or you can sell it. We're opening up a new market for the ability to see that as property and borrow against it. And in fact, the technology makes a perfect form of collateral where you have all this ability to program in smart contracts. You can write in the rules. You can make it highly secure. Yet nobody is doing it.  Somebody's got to bridge that gap. So we're building technology that ultimately could be used or should be used by banks or financial institutions to bring this together to where you have the ability like you would with any other type of property. You know, if you look at any other type of property you can lend against it. Somebody's figured out how to, whether it's minerals, whether it's land, whether it's cars. So really now we're doing that for cryptocurrency. Salt Lending stands for a secured, automated lending technology. So it's very much a technology driven company. Yet it's foundational and lending is just very simple to understand because it's the oldest business known to man. Yeah, you know, we cover cloud computing from the day one and it's interesting. Automation wins the day. So we're seeing a lot of things where, you know, automating M&A process. We talked to those guys at Legsit. You're doing something here with lending. It's just so simple. Now, here's the question. If I have Bitcoin, and there's a lot of whales walking around here, people billions of billionaires, millionaires. A lot of people have made money over the past couple of years. Certainly, if you were in it 2011 after you're a whale, they got value. I put it up and I get cash. Is that how it works? That's right. So everybody has assets that they want to hold on to. And they're precious to them, whether it be gold, heirlooms, art, Bitcoin. And then they have currencies that are things that they want to spend quickly and or just don't even think twice about it. I'll pay for a cup of coffee, a bottle of water, whatever. And as the world moves into the blockchain era, as all value can be recorded on distributed ledgers, in blockchains, you have this new way of thinking about everything. So you can imagine a wallet where you have all the things you really care about, and you can dynamically decide what your currency is based off where you're traveling, where you want to spend, what you think is happening with inflation, depending on what your interest is, right? And maybe it's video game points you want to spend in the future. And however, having that scale and saying at any point in time, I want to hold onto this and I want to spend more of that, well, there's a partnership, right? So a really easy way to think about that is how can I leverage what I have, which is portfolio lending or any type of lending, into more of the currencies I need, whether it's I need to go buy a house, I need to buy a car, I want to buy more investments. So we see it as a very powerful tool and almost a necessity, but then on top of that, just extremely cool in how you can imagine the future of finance in this world. Yeah, it's a total game changer. I love what you're doing. And I think getting the fiat conversion really gets immediate liquidity in a currency that people can spend. So if someone says, hey, I don't want Bitcoin, great. I want to buy a boat or start a business and I need to get some fiat, I pledge up my coin. That's right. Now you get valuation issues. So I'm assuming you have math behind this that says, hmm, what if Bitcoin drops? Yep, yep, that's the thing. So we really solve a couple fundamental pieces of the blockchain that at its core are difficult for people to do well. One is security and the other is user interface. So when you wrap that into a product and you kind of build out the user interface and the security suddenly becomes a lot easier. So when it comes to the risk mitigation, it's simply over collateralized. We're going to pitch you as a borrower and say, you're already probably storing all this somewhere anyway in a wallet. Why not put it in a secure wallet? Drive the loan to value ratio way down so you're only borrowing what you need when you need it. You don't bring out these giant loans for no good reason, you just borrow what you need. The interest rate becomes a lot lower and then you have extra collateral for the volatility. Ideally, that's the scenario. Now if in a world where it's very volatile and you're at a higher loan to value rate, then that's where we give you options. We say, hey, would you like to sell some of this or would you like to add more? Would you like to prepay your loan, if not? So there's always the option for somebody to kind of just correct the loan instrument, but that's the other really cool part about a smart contractor, a smart written language around the instrument itself, is that you can get a little more creative instead of just having legal paperwork. You can say, let's put this into the code. So it becomes very dynamic in the ability for it to cure the instrument itself to stay course. Yeah, software money, I love this. So let's go down and talk about the token that you have solved. Yep, token. And that's for the borrower or the lender? It's right now the borrower, although it will expand into all uses. So it's effectively, as people say, it's powering the network or it's the gasoline behind it. It's our internal currency. It acts as a store value in the regards of how you would think about a serial code or a serial number. So if I have Microsoft Office and you buy a serial number, that's the key that lets you in. And it tells you how much of the product you have. If you have 20 or 30 of them, you can give them to your employees or you could redeem it for some other value. So we just think that tokens actually do a better job of that recording, because it's now put on a permanent ledger and you have the permanent audibility of it, then just a serial number and a private database. I think you got a great solution because the alternative to not having it is essentially get it liquid on an exchange what some people might not want to do. Exactly. And then also, where do you do it? So there's all kinds of dynamics on the exchange side. That's right. Here I'm saying, hey, I'm long on Bitcoin, but I need to get some work in capital for whatever the project is. So you're there. Now, is there any competition? Is anyone else doing this? There's no competition yet. You know, there's definitely some people that are out there saying that they are and I would be careful. Some of them may be legitimate. We've seen a few that are scams, so always be protected and be wary. Give an example of what a scam would look like for people. A scam would be somebody who says, hey, we're doing an ICO and you start looking at it and it looks exactly like what we've built, except for they're maybe in Russia and you can't actually contact the people and they don't have any banks behind them or any kind of regulatory framework. So they're using your spoofing, your brand. Yeah, we've seen a lot of that. So we've had a lot of kind of phishing attempts and people trying to spoof the idea or the site and that's a little worrisome, but there probably will be competitors. It's a big market. Yeah, I mean, that's gonna happen more and more. You know, more of those spear phishing attacks up too. Yep. Okay, great. And I'll look for you guys. Where are you guys at with the company? Talk about what your needs are, your hiring, what's going on with the operation. Yeah, so we're constantly hiring, looking for anybody who's got great financial background and wants to be in the blockchain space and or developers, constantly looking for blockchain-focused developers, people that either want to learn the space or already know the space, either way is fine. We'd love to talk to you. We've issued $30 million in loans and the states were approved. We're rapidly expanding that genre of where we can lend. We're working to partner with banks. So if you're a bank or your financial institution, there's a lot of capital money at this conference. We'd love to talk to all you guys because there's an opportunity for us to kind of give you an indirect exposure into the market. And it's good for the big whales who have a lot of currency, a lot of value to pay it for in the mission of the community. So they could be lenders too, right? Very much so, yes. Wow, so what states aren't you in? 30 million, that's a good number. What's your top list? The next on the list that we're working towards, we're really close to Texas, we're really close to California, really close to New York, really close to Utah. Those are some big ones. Lots of interest in Puerto Rico, so we're heavily focused on getting there. And it's just kind of a roadmap, a heat map. You know, there's a lot of interest in Europe so we're going over into Europe. Lots in Canada. Sean, thanks for coming on, sharing the project, your success, and love your idea. Again, disruption continues. The Stampede is coming behind us at Polycon, that's their logo. Polymath is the company behind this event. Of course, we're the Cube, we're independent, we're bringing you all the action here at Polycon 18. More live coverage after this short break.


Nickerson Field, formerly known as Braves Field, opened in 1915. As an athletic venue, there was a lot of New England and Boston outside of history that took place here. The 100th anniversary of Nickerson Field has caused an outpouring of nostalgia from Boston University faculty and Boston sports fans. Ralph Evans is a longtime enthusiast of Boston sports history and is a member of the Boston Braves Historical Association. Where I'm standing right now is roughly where a home plate was. Evans points out what portions of the field are original, including most of the grandstand and this walkway that served as an entrance to the historic field. Braves Field was an innovation in its time. The Braves became the first Boston team to introduce Knight Baseball. When the Braves left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953, Boston University purchased the field. Allen Weinberger played soccer on Nickerson Field as a BU student and is now responsible for the oversight of the historic field. He says BU athletes are taking notice of the great players who preceded them. Now that they're learning that it's 100 years old and some of the greatest athletes of all time have played here, it has created some conversations. Some of those great players were baseball heroes Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth as well as soccer legend Pele. Now the field is home to BU soccer and lacrosse and is used for various community and university events. Reporting for BU News on Nickerson Field, I'm Rachel McCubbin.


This is Andrew Feinstein in support of the divest from the War Machine Summit in Washington DC, October 21, 2017. Hello. First, I'm very sorry that I can't be there with you in person, but I'm sure that the summit will be a huge success. The first and most important reason that we've got to think about divestment from the US war machine is the incredibly dominant role that the US plays in the global arms trade and in militarization and militarism throughout the world. In any given year, the United States of America produces anywhere between one third and almost a half of all the weapons systems produced in the world. In addition, the United States of America is involved in more conflicts, in more military action than any other country in the world. The role of US defense contractors, of US military service providers, including what we used to call mercenaries, is absolutely crucial. These are the biggest companies of their kind in the world, and they set the template not only for the manufacture of weaponry around the world, but for the modus operandi in terms of which that manufacture and distribution of weaponry takes place globally. Unless we see change, unless we see a diminution in the size, the power, the influence and the reach of US defense contractors and arms producers, we cannot tackle global militarism in a meaningful way. We cannot tackle the conflicts in Syria, in Yemen, in the occupied Palestinian territories, unless we strike at the heart of the global war machine in the United States of America itself. How do we do that? There are multiple tools. For us, as investigators, researchers, activists, campaigners, the provision of information about what the American war machine, these companies together with the US state, are doing around the world, the majority of people in whose name and with whose tax dollars this is being done will remain ignorant of this reality. But with that information, we have to take action. That action has to take the form of protest, of direct action, in the form that Code Pink has championed for so many years now and so effectively. We need to look to more legal advocacy to ensuring that more companies, more representatives of the state and more individuals are held accountable in courts of law for their actions and for the consequences of the weapons that they produce around the world. But there is another tool, an incredibly powerful tool. A tool that was instrumental in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa, and that is the tool of divestment. As a South African who fought in the struggle against apartheid, who was privileged to be a representative of the South African people in our first parliament. I know only too well the important role that divestment from the apartheid economy and from the apartheid war machine, the impact that that had on bringing about an end to over 350 years of institutionalized and legalized racism. A tool that worked so effectively around the world to bring about that change is a tool that we have to try in the United States context. Therefore, the call from this summit to divest from the war machine, to divest from those companies who produce the weapons and tools of war that are killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians around the world is a call whose time has come. It is for this reason that I, as a South African who fought against apartheid, as a South African who served under Nelson Mandela in that country's first democratic government.  I wish you at the summit every success and I look forward to being a part of this absolutely crucial campaign as it goes forward from the summit.


Welcome to the Hindu News Analysis by Shankar Ayesakarmi. The news articles along with the page numbers are displayed here for your reference. The PDF link of the handwritten notes and the timestamping of the news articles is given in the description box as well as in the comment section. Now let us start our today's news analysis. This news article is related to the organization of Islamic cooperation. The news article says that Pakistan may host a ministerial meeting of the OAC in the month of April in 2020. Pakistan says that the focus will be on Jammu and Kashmir and India's Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. The syllabus relevant for the analysis of this news article is highlighted here for your reference. So in this context, let us discuss in brief about the organization of Islamic cooperation which is formally known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference which was formed in 1969. OIC has its permanent secretary in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. OIC is the second largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states. It has its members from four different continents that is from Asia, then from Africa, then from Europe and South America.  It endeavours to safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony. If you look at the membership of the Organization of Islamic cooperation, majority of its member states are Muslim majority countries such as the Arab countries, while others have significant Muslim populations including several African and South American countries. The important non-Arab member states are Turkey, then Iran, then Indonesia, then Malaysia and Pakistan. Kindly note that the organization has permanent delegations to the United Nations and the European Union. Now we will see the significance of OIC for India. We know that India is home to a significant Muslim population, but still India is not a member or observer in OIC. If you look at the past history, India was invited initially to attend the OIC summit which was held in 1969 in Morocco. But the Indian delegation was forced to return due to the withdrawal of invitation after Pakistan's objection and it was seen as a setback for Indian diplomacy. Now let us come to the 46th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic cooperation. It was held in March 2019 in Abu Dhabi. It had invited India as a guest of honor and our foreign minister had attended this meeting. Note that this happened even when Pakistan was putting severe pressure on OIC. This shows how India was able to reach out to the Muslim world in the last 50 years and this was considered as a huge victory for the Indian diplomacy. Now look at the news article which says that Pakistan has reached out to the Muslim world, especially the Arab world to rise their voice against the changes made by India in the context of Jamun Kashmir. So even if OIC is going to pause a resolution against India, it may not be much important. This could be viewed as a diplomatic setback for India. So in this context we have discussed about OIC and its significance. With this we have come to the end of discussion of this news article. The displayed practice question will be discussed at the end of the session. Now let us proceed to the next news article. This editorial is based on the recent Good Governance Index released by the government. The syllabus relevant for the discussion of this editorial is highlighted here for your reference. In this editorial the author discusses about the positives and negatives of the Good Governance Index. And this index is a uniform tool across the states and union territories to assess the status of governments and to assess the impact of various interventions taken by their respective governments. That is why author is stating it is a nationwide comparative study of states on Good Governance. This topic we have covered in detail in our 27th December Hindu News Analysis video. You can watch the video for better understanding of Good Governance Index. Now since the index is a comparative study, it will incentivize or motivate the states to comparatively deliver on public services to their citizens. They are encouraged to do better service delivery to get the better ranking in the future. So this is one of the positives of the study and the index. In the article says that Tamil Nadu has scored the highest rank among the big states category. See in the process of ranking to ensure rationality and level playing field the states and union territories are grouped into three categories. One is northeast and hilly states under which 11 states are grouped. And the second category is union territories which has the seven union territories except the union territories of Jomon Kashmir and Ladakh. And the third category is named as big states category. So among the big states Tamil Nadu has scored the highest rank. Now the reason for Tamil Nadu scoring the highest score in the category of big states is ability to ensure stable and smooth delivery of services without much trouble which is considered as the strength of Tamil Nadu. Now if you see the other southern states and union territories that is four neighbors of Tamil Nadu have also shown an impressive performance. Now then the next positive is that even the so-called Bimaru states are seeking to catch up with others in development. See Bimaru is the acronym given for four states which were having poor economic performance comparing to other states. These states are Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. But based on the good governance index we can say that they are improving in terms of development. If you look at the composite ranking Madhya Pradesh is among the top 10 of the big states category. Even Rajasthan has been ranked within the top 10 in the five sectors. Now if you look at the first sector that is agriculture and allied sectors all the Bimaru states are within the top 10 category. And the point is that these states can catch up with others in due course of time. The author mentions that it can happen if the political leadership shows the will to overcome historical obstacles and if they focus on development. So these were the positives of the good governance index. Now we will see the negatives or the shortcomings of the good governance index. The main shortcoming is with respect to the indicators. The index has 10 sectors and 50 indicators but some indicators such as farmer's income then prevalence of micro irrigation or prevalence of water conservation systems and inflow of industrial investment have been left out in the calculation of good governance index. Then the next shortcoming is that some indicators have been given disproportionate weightage. For example the indicator that is ease of doing business has been given disproportionately high weightage in the sector of commerce and industries. But the other indicators have been given the lowest weightage. Then the author is noting that there will also be an unending debate over which indicators should get more importance in the design of such a study. That is whether process based indicators should get more importance or outcome based indicators should get more importance. So this is also one of the shortcomings. So to conclude this news article we can say that the good governance index has been developed for the first time by the government. So the government can attempt to improve the index based on these shortcomings so that when the index is released next time it will overcome all these shortcomings. So with this we have come to the end of analysis of this news article. The displayed practice question will be discussed at the end of this session. Now let us proceed to the next news article. This open editorial discusses about the need for people-centric policies and people-oriented employment and income strategy in our country. The syllabus relevant for the analysis of this news article is highlighted here for your reference. So in this contest we will be discussing about bottom up growth model. The author mentions that growth must be bottom up to be equitable and sustainable. Here the term equitable refers to the scenario where the benefits of growth are flowing to the poorer sections of the society than the richer sections of the society. So in a bottom up growth model the growth takes care of the needs of lower income groups as well as middle income groups. To be precisely clear a government in a bottom approach thinks about the needs of the poorest sections of the society. Therefore the bottom up growth model requires the government to have necessary policies so that the benefits of growth equitably flow to the poorest sections of the society. So we can say that bottom up growth model is inclusive and it reduces inequalities of income and also reduces the inequality of purchasing power among the lower, middle and high income groups. A nation that has bottom up growth model will have better indicators in terms of health, in terms of education and inclusion of vulnerable sections. Such a nation will be ensuring accessible, affordable and quality services delivery to its citizens. So in such an economy there will be citizen satisfaction as the needs of citizens will be effectively addressed by the local government and local officials. This means that the officials who are responsible for the delivery of services to the citizens will be functioning effectively so that the number of citizens approaching for appeals or grievances, redressal frameworks will be lesser in terms of number. So in this context the author mentions the example of the government of Singapore where the needs of the citizens are addressed effectively at the local level itself. Therefore in a bottom up growth model the focus of almost all policies will be the pupil with more importance to the vulnerable and marginalised sections. This is the reason why such growth model are called as pupil centric growth model. So in pupil centric growth model the focus will be on development but not on growth rates that is growth rates of GDP and these parameters usually don't give the real picture of various sections of society. This is because usually the data on economy given are in average numbers that do not give the real picture of the vulnerable sections or the low income groups. So we can know the real picture by knowing that what is the real per capita income of an individual belonging to the low income group. So the disaggregated data will give the real picture of the economy and various sections of the society. So we can say that bottom up growth model with the disaggregated indicators will represent a better picture than a top down growth model approach. This is because in bottom up growth model approach there will be a citizen participation in almost all fields and there will be social audit then transparency and accountability then the government will be spending the needed or required level of money for education then for health and other public services to ensure better standards of living. As a result an economy will fare better in indices such as ease of living index then indices for other inclusiveness. In the top down approach you can see that the richer becoming richer and the poorer becoming poorer. In case of top down approach the importance of the government will be on the growth but not on development. The government will be focusing on how to make business policies so that foreign companies can bring money to do business in the country. So the focus may be on ease of doing business index of the world bank and focus may not be seen on countries ranks in the indices with respect to inclusive growth or ease of living. So in this regard the author appreciates the stand taken by India with respect to the proposed regional comprehensive economic partnership deal. India decided not to join the deal as joining this deal will harm small producers and farmers so in a bottom up approach the low income groups and lower middle income groups will have higher disposal incomes or the disposal incomes will increase so if there is higher disposal income then it will increase purchasing power of these people. The higher disposal income or purchasing power will create additional demand in the economy and it will increase the production to satisfy the demand. Therefore the consumption or disposal income will drive a significant part of nation's growth and this consumption will guide the industrial production and once the nation has a stronger industrial system the nation's bargaining power in trade deals will increase. So if the policies are focusing on increasing the disposal incomes and increasing purchasing power of the majority of the people in the country then the economy will run smoothly. So this majority will consume goods and services and there will be growth. Now who is this majority? Here majority refers to all people who are not rich. Obviously the population of richer sections are few in the society that is majority or not in the high income group category. This majority in other words refer to middle and lower income groups. If you see the present slowdown in our economy one of the main reasons is the drop in domestic private consumption. This is because people are not having enough money in their hands to purchase their essentials. Now why people are not having money in their hands? This is because there is an employment. Now we'll see how will the bottom up approach will help in tackling this problem. In a people-centric growth model the government understands what are the people's fundamental needs and these fundamental needs of citizens are mainly to have good source of income and to have a reasonable good job. So the government will have to make policies so the jobs and increase in incomes are ensured for the growing population. In such cases the number of frustrated unemployed or under employed youths in the society will be lesser in number. Now you will be able to get an idea that why the author mentions that India needs bottom up approach where it has to develop people-centric employment and income strategy to guide the industry. And also in a long run the strategies has to make Indian industry stronger so as to guide the trade policies with other countries or group of countries. So with this we have discussed that why there is a need for people-centric policies and people-oriented employment and income strategy for our country. With this we have come to the end of analysis of this news article. The displayed practice question will be discussed at the end of the session. Now let us move on to the next news article. This news article is about the proposal to form an elephant colony in Bandhavgarh forest region of Madhya Pradesh. The syllabus relevant for the analysis of this news article is highlighted here for your reference. Here the elephant colony simply means ensuring a proper habitat for elephants in that region. Now let us know about the state of Madhya Pradesh which is located in central India and is the second largest state in terms of geographical area after Rajasthan. And as per the latest forest survey report of Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Madhya Pradesh is the Indian state with maximum forest cover in terms of area. The total forest cover in the state of Madhya Pradesh is 25% of the total geographical area. Now let us discuss in brief about Bandhavgarh National Park which is located in the state of Madhya Pradesh and it is one of the most popular national parks in India and is located in the Vindin Hills of northeast Madhya Pradesh. The area of Bandhavgarh is known for its large biodiversity that is the most important pieces being royal Bengal tigers, then Indian elephants and white tigers which were initially discovered in this region. Similarly, the park also has the largest breeding population of leopards and other species of deer. Kaili notice that the whole park is filled with more than 20 streams such as Johila, Janad and Bunbay and these streams merge into the Soan river which is an important southern tributary of Ganga river. Now let us discuss in brief about the Indian elephant. Kaili notice that the Indian elephant is known as the national heritage animal of India. The natural habitat for Indian elephants includes the central and southern western gods, then northeast India, then eastern India and northern India and also in some parts of southern peninsula of India. Indian elephant is listed as endangered in IUCN Red List and it is also included in schedule one of Indian Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and also included in appendix one of the convention on international trade in endangered species of flora and fauna that is sites convention. Now, let us understand about the elephant population in the state of Madhya Pradesh and for this, we need to understand the elephant census released earlier in this year by the center. The census was titled as the synchronized elephant population estimation and it was conducted under the ages of project elephant division which comes under Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. And according to the census, Madhya Pradesh had just seven elephants and Karnataka had the maximum number of elephants, that is about 6049 elephants. Now look at the news article which says that elephants are a migratory species and they are known to travel long distance as groups in search of new habitats. And as per the news article, about 38 elephants from North Chittishgarh have migrated to Bandhagur region in the last year. Even now, they are staying back in the same region. Therefore, the Madhya Pradesh government is planning to provide an elephant colony that is habitat for the elephant herd within the Bandhagur region. So in this contest, we have discussed about Bandhagur forest region in the state of Madhya Pradesh and also we have discussed about the Indian elephant. With this, we have come to the end of analysis of this news article. The displayed practice question will be discussed at the end of the session. Now let us proceed to the next news article analysis. This news article is about the portion of your mission and its objectives and approaches to ensure nutritional outcomes across the nation. The syllabus relevant for the analysis of this news article is highlighted here for your reference. The news article says that about 30% of the funds released under the portion of your mission that is national nutrition mission are utilized by the state governments and the union territories since the launch of the mission. Now in this context, let us discuss in brief about portion of your mission. Here portion means nutrition and abeyan means campaign. Portion stands for Prime Minister overracking scheme for holistic nutrition. The mission that is portion abeyan on one hand looks to synergize all the efforts by leveraging the technology to achieve the desired goals and on the other hand, it intends to convert nutritional awareness into a genandolan. Therefore, portion abeyan is a multi-ministerial convergence mission, which means that convergence of multiple ministries towards a shared vision that is to ensure attainment of malnutrition free India by 2022. This portion abeyan mission is implemented by five different ministries, that is Ministry of Human Resources and Development, then Ministry of Women and Child Development, then Ministry of Rural Development, then Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, then Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. That is why portion abeyan is known as multi-ministerial convergence mission. Among these five different ministries, the Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry. It is also implementing Ministry of Portion Abeyan Mission. The portion abeyan mission aims to improve nutritional outcomes for children, adolescents, pregnant women and lactating mothers by reducing the level of stunting, then underweight and low birth weight by 2022. Kindly notice that the portion abeyan program was launched on the occasion of International Women's Day, that is on 8th March, 2018. As we have discussed that portion abeyan mission is based on targeted approach, that is it strives to reduce the level of stunting, then the level of under nutrition, then anemia and low birth weight in children. And the mission also focuses on adolescent girls and pregnant women and lactating mothers. Therefore, it holistically addresses malnutrition in the country. Now, if you look at the three-year targets as per the portion abeyan mission, it has specified three-year targets, that is to reduce stunting, then under nutrition and low birth weights by 2% each year. And it has also mentioned to reduce anemia by 3% each year. The mission also aims to achieve reduction in stunting from 38.4% as per National Family Health Survey of 4 of 2015-16 to 25% by 2022. Now, we'll discuss about financial support for the portion abeyan mission, that is the approved budget of portion abeyan mission for a period of three years is about 9,046 crores and out of which 50% is through government budgetary support and remaining 50% is by the World Bank or other multilateral banks. Now, if you look at the government budgetary support, it would be further shared as 60 to 40 and between the center and union territories with legislature. And in the ratio of 90 is to 10 between the center and northeastern region and Himalayan states. And finally, 100% government budgetary support by the center for union territories without legislature. And this is all about with reference to budget support for portion abeyan mission. Now, if you look at the details of portion abeyan, there is no provision under the portion abeyan to provide nutritious food, but providing supplementary nutrition is a part of Anganwadi services scheme. And portion abeyan ensures the improved utilization of key Anganwadi centers and improved quality of Anganwadi services delivery. And it monitors and supervises and fixes targets and also guide the nutrition-deleted interventions across the various ministries. So we have seen the objectives and targets of portion abeyan mission, but how the portion abeyan ensures nutritional outcomes across the nation. Then what is the targeted approach and convergence involved under this portion abeyan? Kindly notice that portion abeyan is not merely program, but a gen Andolan, which incorporates inclusive participation of public representatives of local bodies, then government departments of the states, then social organizations and the public and private sectors to create awareness about the nutrition requirement and associated problems at the grass root level. So here you can see the picture that is representing the various stakeholders of the mission and various steps to achieve the targeted goals under portion abeyan mission. Now we'll see the different themes of gen Andolan. These 10 key themes of gen Andolan includes anti-natal checkup, then proper diet for pregnant women, then calcium supplementation, then optimal breastfeeding, then complementary food and feeding, then full immunization, including vitamin A supplementation, then growth monitoring and promotion, then anime prevention in children, including adolescent girls, then food fortification, then diarrhea management, then girls' education, then finally hygiene, sanitation and safe drinking water. These are the 10 different themes under gen Andolan. So to summarize this news article, we have seen what is meant by portion abeyan, then about the mission objectives, then about budgetary allocation, then targets and different approaches and the present issues related to proper implementation of the mission, then also about 10 different themes under gen Andolan. With this, we have come to the end of analysis of this news article. The displayed practice question will be discussed at the end of the session. Now, let us start our practice question session. Now, consider this question. This question is with reference to OIC, that is Organization of Islamic Cooperation. They have given two statements and you have to choose the correct statements. Statement one says that it is the second largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations. This statement is correct because it is also intergovernmental organization and it is the second largest intergovernmental organization after United Nations with a membership of 57 states. It was formed in 1969 and its headquarters is located at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Now, look at the second statement which says that only Muslim majority Arab countries can be the members of OIC. This statement is incorrect because OIC has members from four different continents that is from Asia and from Africa, then also from Europe, including South America. Therefore, second statement is incorrect statement. So, for this question, option A, that is one only is the correct option. Second question, consider the following statements regarding Indian elephant. They have given three statements and you have to choose the correct statements. Statement one says that it is the national heritage animal of India. Then second statement says that it has been listed as vulnerable in IUCN Red List. Then third statement says that it comes under schedule one of the Indian Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. Here, all the given statements are correct except second statement because the IUCN status of Indian elephant is listed as endangered category but not vulnerable category. So, for this question, option C, that is one and three only is the correct option. Now, look at this question. This question is with reference to good governance index. Here they have given three statements and you have to choose the correct statements. Statement one says that good governance index is a nationwide comparative study of states and union territories on governance. Then second statement says that good governance day is observed on the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Sri Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Then third statement says that good governance index is released by Niti Ayok. So, in this context, you should know about good governance index which has been developed for the first time by the government of India. It has been jointly prepared by the Department of Administrative Reform and Public Grievances under the Ministry of Personal, Public Grievances and Pensions and the Center for Good Governance which is located in Hyderabad. Good governance index is a uniform tool across states and union territories to assess the status of governance and to assess the impact of various interventions taken up by the respective governments. So, we can say the statements one and two are correct statements whereas thought statement is incorrect statement as it was mentioned that good governance index is released by Niti Ayok. Kindly know that good governance day is observed on the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Sri Atal Bihari Vajpayee. So, for this question option B that is one and two only is the correct option. Now, look at this question. This question is with reference to Portion Abiyan. They have given three statements and you have to choose the correct statements. Statement one says that Portion Abiyan is a nationwide nutritional program which aims to achieve improvement in nutritional status of women, adolescent girls, pregnant women and lactating mothers in a time-bound manner. Then second statement says that it is a central sector scheme. Then third statement says that Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is the nodal ministry for implementation of Portion Abiyan. Now, if you look at Portion Abiyan which is a multi-ministerial convergence mission which means that convergence of multiple ministries towards a shared vision. So, in this case the vision is to ensure attainment of malnutrition free India by 2022. The mission aims to improve nutritional outcomes for children, then for adolescents, then for pregnant women and lactating mothers by reducing the level of stunting, then underweight, then anemia and low birth weight by 2022. The Portion Abiyan program was launched on the occasion of International Women's Day on 8th March, 2018. The mission aims to use of technology and the convergence across the various nutrition related schemes, across various ministries, with a targeted approach of the services at the gross root level. So, to achieve the shared vision of Portion Abiyan, five different ministries, that is Ministry of Women and Child Development, then Ministry of Human Resources and Development, then Ministry of Rural Development, then Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare are working together to achieve the status of model nutrition free India by 2022. Among these five ministries, Ministry of Women and Child Development is designated as nodal ministry for the implementation of Portion Abiyan. Therefore, first statement is correct statement, whereas third statement is incorrect statement because it is mentioned as Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is the nodal ministry for implementation. Now, if you look at the second statement, it is mentioned as Portion Abiyan is a central sector scheme. This statement is incorrect because Portion Abiyan is not a central sector scheme, but it is a centrally sponsored scheme. If you look at the government budgetary support, it would be in the ratio of 60 is to 40 and between center and union territories having legislature and shall be in the ratio of 90 is to 10 for northeastern region and Himalayan states and 100% budgetary support for union territories without legislature. Now, if you look at the total budget support for Portion Abiyan, 50% is through government budgetary support and remaining 50% is provided by World Bank and other multilateral development banks. So, for this question, option A, one only is the correct option for this question. Concerning the practice main's question, the question says that how people centric employment and income strategy can guide the industrial growth of India. This is a 10 marks question and you have to write in 150 words. So, for this question, you can post your written answers in the comment section. The posted answers would be evaluated and suitable feedback will be given for the posted answers. With this, we have come to the end of analysis of today's engineers analysis. If you like the video, please do like, share, comment and subscribe Shankar IS Academy YouTube channel. Thank you.