Author Archives: eehines

Testing?

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Some folks think that Baby Kim, the gang leader of northern Korea, is beginning to question the loyalty of the youngest adult and near-adult cohorts in that area.

He is particularly worried about the foreign media trickling into his information-repressed country….
At risk is Kim’s ability to maintain the illusion of North Korea as a socialist paradise, which is key to his ability to maintain power. And no group is more vulnerable to ideological slippage than North Korea’s youngest citizens.

Thus,

That is why Kim has handed a central propaganda role of late to the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade. …hailed as national heroes for helping to rebuild a western border region leveled by summer floods. Over four months, they erected 15,000 houses, schools and hospitals, the country’s state media claimed.
…
The construction work, Kim was quoted as saying in state media, had represented a “good opportunity for training our young people to be staunch defenders and reliable builders of socialism.”

That’s one test. Baby Kim also has sent 12,000 soldiers to fight on the side of the Russians against Ukraine. Those soldiers, despite their claimed reputation for prowess, are performing extremely poorly, even after accounting for the Russian tactics they’re expected to operate within.

Could Baby Kim be testing Ukraine as his version of being sent to the Eastern Front? It’s true enough that a severely wounded northern Korean soldier kills himself rather than risk capture, or his comrades murder him to prevent that capture, even as they run away from the battlefield. Those incidents, possibly representing a newly claimed loyalty in an attempt to protect the family left behind, are quite rare, though, compared to the casualty rate they’re experiencing.

Imaginary Risk

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Mark Zuckerberg, Meta‘s boss, has said he’s opening his Facebook and Instagram to free speech and no longer managing what advertisers’ spots appear alongside postings. Advertisers are concerned.

Advertisers have expressed concerns over the past few weeks—in meetings with Meta as well as with their own agency partners—that Meta‘s tools might not be enough to stop ads from showing up near offensive content as the new content-moderation approach comes into effect, and that user feeds could become inundated with misinformation.

Advertisers’ concerns are wholly unfounded. Any serious risk is entirely in their own timid imaginations. There always will be folks who manufacture objections and smears based on the appearance of an ad alongside a posting that someone decides to find objectionable. As long as those timid ones accede to those someones’ manufactured ire, their reputation—the safety of their brand—will be in the wind. Were they to find, instead, the backbone to ignore the someones and their artificial beefs, those someones would remain the vast minority of viewers, potential customers, and customers who might see the pairing, and the advertisers’ brand safety would remain soundly tied to the quality of their product and to nothing else.

The someones are just bullies, and they’re best dealt with by ignoring them and second best dealt with by directly confronting them and pushing back, hard. Their mis- and disinformation is best handled, not by running away from it, but by answering it with actual facts and logic.

Incomplete Progress against DEI

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As a result of President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order regarding Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in the Federal government and government contractors, nearly 400 bureaucrats have been “sidelined:” put on paid leave. Additionally, some $420 million in related contracts have been canceled.

There remains, though, a question that shouldn’t be a question.

It is not yet clear when or if they [those bureaucrats] will be terminated.

Charles Ezell, Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management, though, seems clear on the matter.

[A]gency heads were required to submit to OPM a written plan for executing a reduction-in-force action regarding DEI employees and a list of all contract descriptions or personnel position descriptions that were changed since November 5, 2024, to obscure their connection to DEI programs.

That plan was due by COB last Friday. It seems simple enough, and mostly clear: all of those employees should be RIFed. More to the point, since their positions have been eliminated, there’s not even any need to RIF them; they already have no jobs. Send them to the private sector where their vasty experience will stand them in good stead in their job search. The only reason for a formal RIF would be in the event that’s the mechanism to prevent them from being reassigned elsewhere on the Federal—which is to say our tax funded—payroll.

No They Haven’t

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the press-alleged difficulty of putting into action President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order specifying that the number of human sexes are two—male and female—the authors wrote this opinion masqueraded as received fact:

As social norms around gender have grown more fluid in recent years….

No, they haven’t.

Their subheadline pushes matter:

Executive order requires changes to passports, prisons and other areas of American life

The implication is that enforcing the outcomes of only two sexes will be very difficult. Never mind the simple fact that difficult means doable.

It won’t be that hard to undo what the Biden administration inflicted over its short term. Passport changes can be reversed as easily as they were inflicted on us, prisons can easily undo the assaults on its female prisoners simply by no longer putting male prisoners in the same prisons as female prisoners and (re)transferring existing male prisoners (back) to male prisons, “other areas of American life” won’t require much change beyond the existing—and vastly incomplete—moves to eliminate DEI bigotry from our institutions.

Not much change will be required because it’s eminently legal for men and women to live their lives as though they were the opposite sex, except where mingling would be inappropriate: males in females’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and the like.

The vast majority of Americans know biology better. We understand full well that in human (for instance) biology, beginning with genetics, there are only two sexes, and which one defines a particular individual is immutably specified at conception—that’s when the chromosomes come together as XX or XY.

It’s true enough that biological mistakes do, rarely, occur and a child gets an XXY or an XYY combination, but those are extremely rare. It’s also true that gender identity disorder (which the authors of the politically written DSM-5 were pleased to relabel gender dysphoria), which is generated primarily by hormonal developments that mistakenly contradict biology and by cultural aspects, occurs, but GID also is an extremely rare occurrence. It’s instructive that GID didn’t become a political matter until the last few years, when identity politics pushers, taking advantage of adolescent hormonal confusion, began pursuing their demand for ever more identities to push and for which to collect government monies and “protections.”

Social norms around gender have not at all grown more fluid except as the Leftist press pushes the narrative created by those activist identity politics pushers. We remain a nation that knows biology better than that.

A Plenty Good Enough Reason

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President Donald Trump (R) is preparing a series of sanctions against the anti-Semitic International Criminal Court and the bigots populating it. Naturally, those…persons…are unhappy. One carefully anonymous official:

The concern is the sanctions will be used to shut the court down, to destroy it rather than just tie its hands[.]

After all, as Ellie Grant wrote at the link,

Such a move, they say, could bring the court to a standstill, severely hindering its access to the services it depends on to function.
One of the most significant risks posed by sanctions would be the disruption of the court’s ability to access banking and payment systems, IT infrastructure, and insurance providers. A complete block on these services, including US-based companies, would apparently cripple the court’s day-to-day operations.

Since this institution spends so much of its time, funding, IT work, and insurance proceeds attacking Israel and the men and women of the Israeli government on trumped up complaints, these are sufficient, and necessary, reasons for applying the sanctions and shutting off, and shutting down, the nakedly biased institution.