Monthly Archives: July 2023

Do What I Tell You

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Nice little school you got there. Be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

In response to the Temecula Unified School Board’s decision not to adopt a controversial social studies textbook in May, California [Progressive-Democrat] Governor Gavin Newsom challenged the board’s decision and threatened it with legislative consequences if it does not reverse course.

Here’s Newsom putting it plainly:

If the school board won’t do its job by its next board meeting to ensure kids start the school year with basic materials, the state will deliver the book into the hands of children and their parents—and we’ll send the district the bill and fine them for violating state law.

Nor is it Newsom alone. It’s the Progressive-Democratic Party at large, as illustrated by State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D, 29th District):

The antics of the Temecula Valley Unified School District are intolerable and damaging to its students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed. Book bans betray the most basic of California’s core values. I hope the members of the school board are able to reflect on their decisions and come to make better decisions for our children’s futures.

Aside from the all-too-typical Progressive-Democrat lie—no books are being banned by Temecula—students’ opportunities to grow, prosper, and succeed depend on their being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic instead of being indoctrinated with the racism and the professional victimhood and oppressor class sewage of CRT.

The antics, to use Rivas’ distortionate term, center on protecting our children, and that’s something the Progressive-Democrat Governor and his cronies object to.

A Bogus Beef

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Some academics object to Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott moving to ban TikTok from Texas government devices and from personal devices used to conduct Texas official business. Texas’ legislature passed the bill creating the ban, and Abbott signed it into law last December. Now a New York State-headquartered organization, ironically named The Knight First Amendment Institute, which is a facility of New York City’s Columbia University, is suing Abbott among other governors, over the ban, claiming free speech violations.

The lawsuit said the state’s decision…is comprising teaching and research. And more specifically, it said it was “seriously impeding” faculty pursuing research into the app—including research that could illuminate or counter concerns about TikTok.

This is, to use the legalese technical term, a crock. It’s also, to use a legal technical term, a frivolous suit.

Banning TikTok in no way inhibits what these academics say or collaborate over, nor does it in any way impede those academics’ speech or collaboration; it only bans one tool, a national security risk, from being used for the speech/collaboration. There are, after all, a plethora of communication and collaboration devices available other than TikTok. To name just a few (located after 10 grueling seconds on Bing search):

  • Slack
  • Zoom
  • Miro
  • MindMeister
  • Loom
  • Asana
  • Notion
  • Microsoft Teams

There are, also, freeware tools like Hugo and Scribe.

It’s hard to believe these So Smart persons aren’t aware of these tools. Maybe they should listen more to the students in their freshman orientation courses.

It’s even harder to understand why these Precious Ones insist on leaving their personal information; their research ideas, techniques, and progresses; their speech and thought available for People’s Republic of China government personnel to freely exploit; they should be called to explain that.

Their free speech interference claim is especially pernicious, given that these august personages are of the same guild that so zealously blocks, even with violence and firings, the speech of those with whom they disagree.

Preparedness

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That seems a commodity in short supply these days. Its lack is especially expensive for student loan borrowers in today’s economic climate. The lede pretty much says it all.

Tens of millions of federal student-loan borrowers will soon owe monthly payments for the first time in more than three years. Some of them aren’t ready for it.
The payment and interest pause put extra cash into people’s pockets, but they tended to spend it rather than save it, according to recent research. Some borrowers are now concerned about being able to cover their student-loan bills this fall.

Not being required to make the payments is not the same as being barred from making the payments. Neither is it a block on putting those HIAed loan payments aside against a return to having to repay or to pay down other debts.

Some borrowers took the payment pause as an opportunity to save the extra money or use it to pay down other debts. But the more common response was to spend it….

But we’re supposed to be sympathetic to these spenders, even to spend our money, through our tax remittances, helping them cover the outcomes of their shortsightedness and irresponsibility.

Mark Zuckerberg is a Far-Right Extremist?

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That appears to be what Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a columnist for MSNBC, thinks. In her diatribe against the very concept of physical fitness—it’s a white supremacist, right-wing extremist thing—she pointed out that, after all,

[p]hysical fitness has always been central to the far right. In Mein Kampf, Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu

Zuckerberg both is highly physically fit, and he pursues, with enthusiasm, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Hmm….

Investing in the People’s Republic of China

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Foreign direct investment in the PRC has fallen to $20 billion in the first quarter of this year, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter. This is strongly influenced by, if not a direct result of, PRC President Xi Jinping’s “security” policy that explicitly targets foreign investors as likely spies.

A Xi-led campaign this year has hit Western management consultants, auditors, and other firms with a wave of raids, investigations, and detentions. Meanwhile, an expanded anti-espionage law has added to foreign executives’ worry that conducting routine business activities in China, such as market research, could be construed as spying.

There’s this, also:

A senior official in a county of southern Guangdong province, which earlier this year set a goal of attracting nearly $300 billion in investment in the next five years, told a visiting American trade group recently that the county would reward any US corporate “decision maker” investing there 10% of the value of the promised deal, according to people briefed on the matter.
The trade group turned down the county official’s offer, which in the US would constitute an illegal bribe, the people said.

The Guangdong senior official knew his offer would be a bribe under US law, and he made the offer anyway.

There is no investment in anything in the PRC that’s worth the political, or the legal, risk.

More than that, as long as the PRC continues its genocide (in the present time against the Uighurs, but those people have not been the PRC’s only targets), it’s morally impossible to invest in any way, in any thing, in the PRC.

That’s apart from, and in addition to, the national security risk presented by any trade with or within the PRC, given its present control over our supply chains, particularly in critical items such as the rare earths it embargoed from Japan for a time and its current bar of gallium and germanium export to us.

We, and the West at large, have nothing to gain from investing in or trading with this enemy nation, and everything to lose.