Monthly Archives: December 2024

Irrelevant

Posted on by
Reply

Or it should be. Biden administration folks, on the way out the door, are jumping to employment at the special interest groups and lobbyists who influenced their decisions while they were in office, and they’re doing it at a higher rate than prior administrations. For instance:

Even though Trump has vowed to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s climate agenda, these relationships will be maintained and could be strengthened as former federal employees under the current administration go to work for climate groups that will continue to lobby the agencies in support of the activists’ preferred policies.

Not necessarily.

If the incoming Trump administration personnel are true to the terms of their selection for nomination, and if the kitchen cabinet DOGE group, with their goal of reducing the size of the Federal government work force (among other goals), has sufficient influence in Congress, those lobbyists and special interest groups should have little influence, especially with fewer bureaucrats available to be…lobbied…and so easier to keep under control by their government bosses.

In an ideal operation, they should be irrelevant altogether. Especially, they should be ignored if they’re employing ex-Biden administration officials, given those worthies’ utterly failed, damaging even, policies.

A Bad Ruling

Posted on by
Reply

US District Judge Richard Bennett (Maryland District) ruled that the US Naval Academy can continue to use race as a “factor” in its admission decisions. Never mind that the Supreme Court recognized in its Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard decision that using race in determining admission fitness is intrinsically racist.

This is a terrible ruling on two counts (at least). One is Bennet’s decision to ignore the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference as a factor in assessing the legitimacy of a regulation or, by extension, a law. Bennett, in his ruling, chose to ignore the Supreme Court’s rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless v Department of Commerce, the two cases the eliminated Chevron Defense as a court decision criterion. Bennett deliberately chose to apply the Chevron technique to his USNA ruling. He closed his ruling with this:

In short, this Court defers to the executive branch with respect to military personnel decisions. Specifically, as noted by Justice Kavanaugh in Austin v United States Navy Seals, “the President of the United States, not any federal judge” ultimately makes such decisions.

Bennett chose to elide in that cite that Austin predates Loper and Relentless, and so any deference aspect of Austin is overridden by them. At least as tellingly, Bennett chose not to disclose that Kavanaugh was writing in the Court’s decision to stay the case pending a lower court’s decision and, more directly to the present matter, that Austin concerned the Navy’s decision to mandate vaccination against the Covid-19 virus; it was wholly irrelevant to any question of the place of race in getting into the Seals (or the Navy or any of the Navy’s training institutions) in the first place.

That’s the technical part of this bad ruling. Bennett also wrote this:

The US Naval Academy is distinct from a civilian university. … During the admissions procedure, which is distinct from that of a civilian university, race or ethnicity may be one of several non-determinative factors considered.

More briefly treated by me, but far more important because it’s on the merits of the matter, is the question of racism in our government institutions. Racism is racism regardless of where it is practiced. That it’s done by our military academies in no way legitimizes it; on the contrary, it deprecates those academies and their ability to train the officers who will lead our men and women in combat. Bennett’s ruling is every bit as racist on this side of the question as was then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) decision to refuse to integrate our military on the other side. Race must be wholly irrelevant in admissions (and everywhere else), neither emphasized in order to block nor emphasized in order to push forward.

This is a ruling that badly wants overruling on appeal.

Go Ahead On

Posted on by
Reply

A person asked MarketWatch whether it would be all right to wear a MAGA hat to work, given that some coworkers had worn Kamala pins to work. Quentin Fottrell’s response was weak. He began with this:

You may be seeking likeminded coworkers, but you could end up creating division instead.

Not at all. Any division associated with wearing the hat or those Kamala pins is “created” solely by the political hysterics who manufacture objection to anything they don’t personally approve.

Then he added this, after a long dissertation on matters only tangentially related:

For you, a MAGA hat could mean more secure borders, but to someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum, it could represent an anti-immigration stance. Similarly, for you it may represent Trump’s survival after he was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, but to a coworker it could bring to mind that the president-elect is, whether you agree with the verdict or not, a convicted felon.

That’s Fottrell’s—and those “others'”—dependence on the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary definition, and his projection of that definition onto the questioner. The actual definition, from American English dictionaries is simply Make America Great Again. Despite Fottrell’s claim, the hat and the slogan mean only support for Trump and for America, neither more nor less. Characterizations of Trump based on that, it bears repeating, are merely figments of the imaginations of political hysterics.

Then Fottrell closed with this:

Don’t jeopardize your paycheck or workplace harmony. You would miss either one after it’s gone.

The former, maybe, if there are actual employer repercussions, which would be illegal, whether or not resisted. Fottrell misunderstood the latter though: the existence of the question demonstrates that the harmony already is absent.

The questioner should go ahead on and wear the hat. On the other hand, it’s foolish to be provocative for provocation’s sake. Maybe the questioner could stick to Trump-supporting jewelry on a scale similar to those Kamala pins or use a Trump-supporting coffee mug.

A Fatuous Argument

Posted on by
Reply

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week concerning a Tennessee law that bans transgender medical procedures for minors. In the course of that session, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made this argument favoring striking the law:

…racial classifications and inconsistencies. I’m thinking in particular about Loving v Virginia [which struck, on 14th Amendment grounds State laws banning interracial marriage], and I’m wondering whether you thought about the parallels, because I see one as to how this statute operates and how the anti-miscegenation statutes in Virginia operated.

This is just Brown Jackson’s attempt to claim a discrimination based on sex, which would make the law harder to sustain. The argument that the Tennessee ban is based on sex discrimination is risible on its face, since regardless of the life style chosen or the drugs and surgeries engaged in to support that life style, the individual remains the male or female he or she was conceived as all those months prior to birth.

Her false equivalence is silly. Trending Politics‘ Collin Rugg:

Yes, because banning a white person from marrying a black person is the same thing as cutting off a 10-year-old’s gen*tals.

Keep in mind, though, that this is the same woman who, at her confirmation hearing, was completely unable to say what a woman is.

RFK, Jr, and Vaccines

Posted on by
1

Robert F Kennedy, Jr, the HHS Secretary nominee, has a strong reputation as an anti-vaccine…person. That reputation may or may not be justified; he is skeptical of them. Related to that, his reputation for opposing to GLP-1 drugs also may or may not be justified. However, taking the particular case of those GLP-1 drugs, Kennedy’s actual position is obscured by this bit of journalist editorial foolishness:

[H]e thinks Americans should eat healthier and exercise to lose weight. That’s fine as far as it goes. But neither exercise nor dietary changes will cure diabetes, and hormonal changes make it difficult for severely obese patients to lose weight without medical interventions.

Both diet and exercise are Critical Items for the health of all of us, and particularly so for diabetics. These won’t cure diabetes? I’m aware of no one who claims they do. There is, though, a rapidly growing anecdotal body of evidence that changes in diet—particularly regarding carbohydrate intake in general and grains more specifically—do in fact beneficially alter individuals’ hormonal environment and mitigate, sometimes eliminate, the effects of diabetes. Those especially morbidly obese may well still need drugs, potentially of the GLP-1 variety, after having improved their diet and exercise regimens.

Or reducing/eliminating carbs, including grains, may not have any general population effect. Government bureaucrats with medical degrees need to get out of the way of science and let the research proceed to confirmation or refutation.

Is diabetes curable by diet and exercise? Probably not, but the metabolic health outcomes cannot be ignored by serious medically-oriented scientists. On the other hand, journalist editorial writings, especially when done completely absent any presentation of data supporting editors’ claims, can be ignored. And yes, that includes editors’ skepticism regarding political nominees whose positions might differ from the editors’.