No, wait. That was somebody else. What John Kerry said, in his fevered update to an almost as out of touch queen’s offer, was
Africans without electricity must select “the right kinds of electricity[.]”
Because they have the same freedom of choice and the same level of wealth as those French sans-culottes.
That’s how the news writers at The Wall Street Journal characterized Mexico’s drug and illegal alien trafficking (and sex trafficking, I add) cartel problem. Their lede:
President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries.
Set aside, for this post, the fact that it isn’t “illegal migration;” it’s illegal alien trafficking. Those folks ceased to be migrants the moment they entered Mexico illegally under Mexican law, and those who skipped Mexico enroute to illegally entering our nation ceased to be migrants at the moment of their illegal entry here.
The news writers added this:
Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the US.
This is just silly. Mexico’s greatest weakness has not been its historic inability to confront the drug cartels; the greatest weakness is its conscious decision to not confront the drug and trafficking cartels, it’s timidity in taking on the cartels and destroying them.
Then there’s the writers’ victim-blaming sewage: it’s the addict’s fault that he’s addicted. True, no one stuck a gun in any American’s ear and forced him to take the drugs. Too often, too, the addiction results from taking seemingly innocuous drugs that have been laced with the addictor for the explicit purpose of creating the addiction and so the market. But once addicted, the only truly effective way to break the addiction and bring it under that individual’s control is through withdrawal—and that is achieved by cutting off the supply.
That brings me back to the cartels and the Mexican government’s decision to accept them as a fact of Mexican life and of Mexican governance power. It’s straightforward enough, although difficult, to reverse that decision. Cut off the supply by sealing Mexico’s northern border against the cartels and by blocking the importation of drug precursors (vis., from the People’s Republic of China), and by destroying the cartels and their drug labs.
The problem is not intractable; that’s just a chicken’s copout. Hard, certainly, very much so. But hard means possible. All that’s necessary is for the men and women of the Mexican government to have the courage and the integrity to end their collaborationist relationships with the cartels and lead an effective, and necessarily deadly for cartel membership, campaign against them. And to seal their southern border and their ports against “migrants” along with sealing their northern border with us, instead of holding the doors open for the continued flow of drugs and illegal aliens into our nation—doors held open at the behest of those so-favored cartels.
Certainly that’ll be expensive for the Mexican government to do, but it’ll only become even more expensive for Mexican citizens as the government lets the nation continue to sag into a failed, gang-run geographical area. That’s a terrible price for a government to choose to inflict on its people.
Alan Dershowitz, a defense lawyer of some skill and renown, as well as a Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus, is assembling a dream team of defense lawyers to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant against the scurrilous charges of the International Court of Justice and associated ICC international arrest warrants.
The question is what would be the point. That Dershowitz’ team will make a strong—essentially irrefutable—legal case against the ICC is neither here nor there. The ICC has already arrived at its guilty verdict, as demonstrated by its continued use of a well-known Israel hater as the court’s lead prosecutor in this sham case.
This is why the case must be mounted anyway:
It will also be tried in the court of public opinion, both in the US and throughout the world.
However.
Even with resounding acquittal in that public court, the ICC’s guilty verdict will stand as the “official” outcome. This will necessitate physical protections for Netanyahu and Gallant against those arrest warrants, which will remain extant. The only way to get those undone is to disband the ICC, which has irretrievably poisoned itself, with those charges and arrest warrants, as a court of justice.
Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Ken Martin is upset that his Progressive-Democratic Party lost the just concluded (mostly—California is still trying to figure out the votes Party needs in two districts, and an Iowa district is in the same delaying boat) national elections. Martin in an interview with Jake Tapper:
For the first time, the majority of Americans believe that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party represents the interests of the wealthy and the elite.
Tellingly, though, he added this, as summarized by Just the News at the above link:
He told Tapper that the current Democratic Party needs to prioritize “every race in every zip code.”
This is how deeply embedded racism is in Party. Perhaps they should prioritize every voter in every ZIP code instead. The rest of America—us average Americans, us working class and poor Americans—have moved on from this elitist Party’s tacitly racist identity politics of segregation.
The headline suggests it.
How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics
Science hasn’t lost our trust, not by a long shot. What—who, really—has lost our trust is government bureaucrats who happen to have science degrees. The misapprehensions begin early in the article.
The rise of Robert F Kennedy, Jr, from fringe figure to the prospective head of US health policy was fueled by skepticism and distrust of the medical establishment—views that went viral in the Covid-19 pandemic.
No, it wasn’t. It was fueled by distrust of the government’s bureaucrats who held medical degrees.
People once dismissed for their disbelief in conventional medicine are now celebrating a new champion in Washington. Scientists, meanwhile, are trying to figure how they could have managed the pandemic without setting off a populist movement they say threatens longstanding public-health measures.
Some did have a disbelief in conventional medicine. However, what most of us began to disbelieve was not conventional medicine but the non-conventional positions of those medical degree-holding bureaucrats in our medicine-centered agencies and their naked power grabs via their diktats of how us average Americans must during—and after—the Wuhan Virus situation, with their credibility further damaged by their manufactured hysteria about the severity of a virus whose lethality was a small fraction of one percent except for the slice of our population already afflicted with severe comorbidities or who were very old.
Those bureaucrats’ contemptuous dismissal of us and their equally contemptuous dismissal of a range of paliatives and alternative cures—many of which actually did, and do, work, and many more of which, if not effective, also did no harm. We insisted on following actual science, while those bureaucrats pursued their personal power, and in some cases, their pocketbooks.
Those bureaucrats also too often dismissed research that supported those alternative treatments and with equal disdain research that called into question the risks of the Wuhan Virus vaccines on offer. Many (most?) of those researches were, in fact, highly questionable. Some were quite sound, though, and the bureaucrats’ shotgun dismissal of all of them—generally without explanation, holding us average Americans as too grindingly stupid or ignorant to understand—further damaged their credibility.
Nor did those degreed bureaucrats care a farthing about our children—the portion of our population uniquely immune to the virus. Lock them out of school these Know Betters demanded, then required, isolate them from their peers, friends, adults other than their parents—even from their grandparents, uncles, and aunts. We’re seeing now the damaging outcomes of that isolation in lost education and especially in their inability to get along with each other.
No, we trust science. We insist that government bureaucrats trust science, as well, and until they demonstrate that they do, those bureaucrats are demonstrating that they cannot be trusted by us.