Monthly Archives: November 2019

How Terrible Is That?

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Jeremy Corbyn, British Labour Party’s MFWIC, has “accused” British PM Boris Johnson of pushing for US-style deregulation of health care.  The horror.

As the UK election campaigns got underway, Corbyn said his rival wanted to “unleash Thatcherism on steroids” once the country was no longer bound by EU trading treaties and regulations.

Channeling our own Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT), Corbyn thinks “capitalism” is a dirty word.

He went further:

Corbyn also said…that Johnson wants to strike a trade deal with US President Donald Trump to sell off parts of the UK’s National Health Service, or make it easier for US pharmaceutical firms and medical companies to sell into the UK healthcare market.

Because all that foul capitalism would lower health costs to British citizens and deprive Government of control over their health choices.

Then Corbyn made plain the breadth of the wicked that the Brits’ way comes:

They want to move us towards a more deregulated American model of how to run the economy.

It’s clear that Corbyn—and his fellow Labourites—think British citizens are just too blind stupid to make their own health decisions; he and his insist those unwashed masses must be led by his Know Betters.  Just like our own Progressive-Democrats.

Ambassadorships

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Unable to make a case against President Donald Trump for anything else that’s remotely impeachable, House Progressive-Democrats now are going to obsess over our erstwhile Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s removal from her post.

There are some questions that won’t be asked on this matter, though, whether by Congressman Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) Star Chamber inquisitors or by anyone in the NLMSM.

  1. Is an ambassadorship a lifetime sinecure?
  2. Who appoints (subject to Senate confirmation) our ambassadors?
  3. For whom does any ambassador work—what’s his chain of command?

And, given accurate answers to those questions,

  1. Why shouldn’t a President remove an ambassador who’s lost the President’s or the State Department Secretary’s confidence?

They’re Only Uighurs

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and his government henchmen are sending their representatives to “sleep with” the wives of Uighurs whose husbands have been interred in the PRC’s concentration camps reeducation locations for the crime of being Muslim.

The excuse for this?

Party officials who are called “relatives” (but not actually related) visit Uighur families every two months, stay for up to a week, and in some reported instances, share a bed with the women, [Radio Free Asia] reported.

Because, says a PRC Government Man,

They help [the families] with their ideology, bringing new ideas. They talk to them about life, during which time they develop feelings for one another.
…
Normally one or two people sleep in one bed, and if the weather is cold, three people sleep together.

Right.  Two on one; the wife is especially helpless.

After all, it’s not like those PRC government men see Uighurs—especially the women—as human beings: they’re just receptacles for those government men’s…fluids.  And with over a million Uighurs locked away, that’s a lot of women available for…comfort service.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D, CA) has the right of this one.

It’s difficult to imagine a more intimate form of political violence against an already terrorized minority.  The United States must speak out about the systemized enslavement and attempted cultural obliteration of the Uyghurs.

More than just talk though.  Maybe we, and the world at large, don’t need to be engaging in any sort of economic trade with such a willfully barbaric nation.

Boeing and Foolish Questions

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In a Wall Street Journal article on the tortuous path to criminal prosecution that prosecutors would have in bringing Boeing to criminal trial over its 737 MAX crashes, Andrew Tangel, Jacob Gershman, and Andy Pasztor asked what seems to me to be a very narrow, short-sighted question.

Should prosecutors weigh Boeing’s importance to the economy and national security when deciding how to proceed with a criminal case over the 737 MAX crashes?

Of course prosecutors should—must—not. What’s truly important is the concept of weighing the risks to liberty and to national security of criminals being too big to be punished. We can never allow such a thing to enter even the run-up to criminal prosecutions.

If criminal actions can be seriously alleged against Boeing—based on the company’s behaviors—the company must come to trial. Only if found guilty, so there’d be a criminal sanction phase, could Boeing’s importance to our economy and our national security legitimately be considered—and then, not on the magnitude of the penalty(s), which absolutely must fit the crime(s), but only on the penalty(s)’s schedules of application, with interest accruing on any fiscal penalties not paid “promptly.”

The question of criminal trials for various individuals of Boeing’s management (and its aircraft testing function?) is an entirely separate matter.  The company’s importance to anything is wholly irrelevant here; the company can easily survive any number of its managers being locked up in a Federal hoosegow.

Separating Blue and Red America

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A growing number of local television stations across the country are reviving an older practice of broadcasting our national anthem once a day, pairing it with all-American imagery that further celebrates our nation.

Gray and Nexstar executives [two of the companies whose stations have revived broadcasting our anthem] said the reason to bring back the anthem was simple: encouraging national unity at a time of deep division in the country[.]

The stations broadcast our anthem in the wee hours of the morning, reminiscent of how our stations used to sign off for the night around midnight, broadcasting our anthem and showing imagery as part of the sign-off.

The New York Times disagrees; it says this is a divisive thing to do; it divides Blue America from Red America.  That’s the message of their Julia Jacobs in her column last week.

The decision to revive the anthem tradition comes at a time when overt allegiance to “The Star-Spangled Banner” has become one of the lines that separate blue and red America[.]

The NYT isn’t alone.  Here’s a University of Michigan music professor, Mark Clague:

It is somewhat provocative to bring the anthem to the fore in a new way at a moment of tension in this country[.]

Divisive, provocative to play our national anthem, to celebrate our great nation.  Wow.

This piece was published a week ago, and still not a single Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential or Congressional candidate has objected to the NYT‘s, or to Jacobs’ (or Clague’s), claim that playing our national anthem is bad.

That’s highly instructive, and it should inform our voting decisions in a year.