Daily Archives: 1 July 2025

Worth a Shot

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President Donald Trump (R) is looking to sign an Executive Order lifting in large part sanctions currently extant on Syria. The sanctions were levied when Bashar al-Assad still reigned; he has since been tossed by an ex-Daesh terrorist middle manager and his cohort that had been operating in Syria after that middle manager had estranged himself from Daesh.

It may be that that ex-middle manager and now Syrian strong-man Ahmed al-Sharaa has, in fact, renounced his terrorist ways of his past and truly wants a more stable political and economic environment for the Syrian peoples [sic]. That remains to be seen.

This move may blow up in our face, just as welcoming the People’s Republic of China into the WTO and granting it US Most Favored Nation status ultimately blew up in our face. Or it might be a sound move, easing friction throughout the Middle East, supporting opportunities for prosperity for the several peoples resident in Syria, and reducing Israel’s security risks.

It’s worth a shot, although its value would be increased were it far more easily reversed should the move fail than has been reversing our coddling of the enemy nation, the PRC. Nominally, the Executive Order may well be more easily reversed than those moves regarding the PRC.

A Noble Man

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The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.