Monthly Archives: February 2024

Kick the UN out of New York City?

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That’s what Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren suggests we do following exposure of the UN’s UNRWA’s active participation in the Hamas terrorists’ butchery in Israel last October and the UNRWA’s ongoing active participation in support of Hamas in the war that Hamas is continuing following that attack.

I think it’s high time that the United States told the UN that it’s “persona non grata” in the city of New York.
I don’t understand why New York should host an avowedly antisemitic organization. They should relocate to a more minimal place like Damascus or Tehran.

I agree with Oren’s reasons, but I don’t agree with his solution.

We should continue to keep our enemies close, and that includes keeping the UN in New York City. Aside from having these enemies speaking nearby where Americans can hear them despite the press’ efforts to put lipstick on those pigs, those diplomats and their associated spy personnel represent an equally nearby opportunity for intelligence collection by our intelligence agencies.

That’s worth the cost in irritation over the UN’s blatant bigotry.

That Isn’t the Problem

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Gen-Z males (on the admittedly limited basis of this article, I can’t call them men) think they have a dating problem, and The Free Press‘ news writer thinks it’s a demographic problem. “Sam,” an otherwise unidentified DC graduate student (unidentified because he’s that timid, see the following), had this:

“Dating right now is just walking on eggshells, honestly,” Sam, a 25-year-old graduate student in DC, tells me.
He said he hides his pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republican leanings by default—out of fear his dates, who are almost always on the left, might ghost him.
“You just have to assume that most girls are progressive and constantly try to make sure you don’t say the wrong thing[.]”

No, that’s not the problem. Unless “Sam” is just looking for a hookup with a flesh and blood f*k doll (in which case, ghosting is a non sequitur), his problem is that he is, to use the clinical term, a chickenshit. If those women are going to ghost him (the horror) over his right-leaning beliefs or over the differences between his and those women’s beliefs, they’re too shallow or too intolerant, or both, and in any event they’re not good enough for him. He should welcome their departure from his present and future company.

To the extent the news writer’s feverish characterization is accurate, it’s because these Gen-Z males are such beta and gamma males.

They’re also an insult to pro-life, non-MAGA, traditional Republicans, being as they are too weak to stand by their leanings.

This IRS Needs to Go

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First, it was the Internal Revenue Service targeting Conservative organizations that were applying for tax-exempt status by slow-walking approvals or outright denying approval on purely political grounds. Then it was the IRS “leaking” of a plethora of Conservative and Republican Americans’ personal tax information. There were, too, a host of similar IRS failures between those and since.

Now we get the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration report that shows that this IRS misbehavior is longstanding and a feature of the agency. Here are a few of the things TIGTA found.

  • 19 contractors’ most recent background investigations were not favorable as of July 13, 2023. However, these contractors still retained their access to one or more sensitive systems because the IRS did not take action to suspend or disable the contractors from the IRS’s systems, as required
  • 279 contractors and employees no longer with the agency still had access to at least one sensitive computer system. “Actions were not always taken to timely remove users once they separated from the IRS”
  • For some sensitive systems, the IRS does not have adequate controls to detect or prevent the unauthorized removal of data by users

The IRS managers don’t even know what systems they have in operation.

  • the IRS struggled to come up with a complete list of sensitive computer systems, eventually identifying 319.
    To perform this evaluation, we [TIGTA] requested information from the IRS that identifies all sensitive systems. However, our ability to obtain a complete and reliable inventory of its sensitive systems was an ongoing challenge throughout this evaluation.

In fine, as TIGTA put it,

The fact remains that for some sensitive systems, the IRS does not have adequate controls to detect or prevent the unauthorized removal of data by users[.]

Plainly, the IRS’ managers aren’t even pretending to try to install controls.

We need a Federal Revenue facility to oversee Federal tax collection and collected revenue handling, even under a vastly simplified Federal tax code. But this agency is beyond repair. It must be disbanded entirely with its personnel returned to the private sector—most especially not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government—and replaced with a new, streamlined Federal Revenue facility.

TIGTA’s report can be read here.

Freed Hostages

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Israeli forces—the IDF, Shin Bet, and a police counterterrorism unit—successfully raided a specific target in the Gaza Strip southern edge city of Rafah and rescued two hostages that were being held by the terrorist Hamas.

This came while Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden stepped up his pressure on the Israelis to not go into Rafah, unless they have a plan to protect the civilians, even though Biden has no evidence that the Israelis aren’t already taking extreme measures to protect civilians, measures that include telling civilians where the Israelis intend to strike next and when—measures that also give the terrorists time to leave the target zone. Nor does Biden have any evidence that the Israelis haven’t been taking such measures all along in this war that the terrorists have inflicted on Israel.

This is the level of the brilliance in the Biden White House.

Don’t Destabilize the Alliance

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That’s NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s request of Republican Presidential Primary candidate Donald Trump over Trump’s continued, bluntly phrased, pressure on NATO members to meet their spending commitment of 2% of GDP to NATO.

It isn’t Trump’s rhetoric that risks NATO destabilization, though. When Trump was President, he threatened US withdrawal from the alliance if the other member nations didn’t start meeting that commitment. At the time, only a handful aside from the US were meeting the commitment, and after his threat, a few more stepped up and met theirs. This after 50 years of “pretty please” had fallen on deaf freeloading ears.

Now, with renewed pressure from likely Republican Presidential candidate Trump, more are meeting their commitment. According to Stoltenberg, 18 of the 31 members are “on track” to meet their commitment (meaning they still haven’t, but now are saying the right words in their respective legislatures).

That leaves 13 members who are shirking their duty. That leaves 13 members who are betraying their fellow members by rendering themselves incapable of meeting their Article V commitment to those members in any concrete way. That leaves 13 members who are imposing risks on their fellow members by rendering themselves so plainly incapable of resisting an attack on themselves that they tacitly invite one, requiring their fellow members to spend their blood and their treasure to rescue them.

That leaves 13 members who are the ones risking destabilizing the NATO alliance.