Category Archives: culture

No Compromise

Posted on by
Reply

Not even a little bit. That would be the outcome of a Progressive-Democratic Party majority in the next Senate as that majority eliminates the filibuster. One outcome of that refusal is demonstrated by Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris in a Tuesday interview with NBC.

Q: What concessions would be on the table? Religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider with a Republican-controlled Congress?
Ms Harris: I don’t think that we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.
Q: To Republicans like, for example, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, who would back something like this on a Democratic agenda, if, in fact, Republicans control Congress, would you offer them an olive branch, or is that off the table? Is that not an option for you?
Ms Harris: I’m not gonna engage in hypotheticals, because we can go on with a variety of scenarios. Let’s just start with a fundamental fact: a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body, and that cannot be negotiable—which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v Wade. And that is it.

Leave aside Harris’ cynical distortion of the legal fact (cynical because as the talented prosecuting lawyer that she is, Harris knows better): there never has been a fundamental freedom for a woman to have an abortion. There has been a Supreme Court opinion that a woman can have an abortion under some conditions. Court opinions have the force of law, but they are not law: only Congress can make laws under our Constitution. In the present case, that Court opinion was rescinded under Roe.

The larger matter here is what it is women should be allowed to do—what their fundamental right is—under a Harris administration. That fundamental right is a woman’s “right” to kill the baby she’s carrying. To deny even a religious exemption to that is to deny a fundamental right that actually exists: the baby’s right to life.

Another Reason for School Choice

Posted on by
Reply

Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools pushes its LGBTQ curriculum on its children down through pre-kindergarten—expose[ing] children as young as 3 to “Pride storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions, and elementary-age same-sex romance—the school district refuses to notify those children’s parents when this happens in particular classes, and the district refuses to allow those parents to opt their children out of such “lessons.” The 4th Circuit court upheld that atrocious and abusive behavior, so a coalition of parents across a range of religions is petitioning the Supreme Court to take the case and uphold the parents, reversing the 4th Circuit.

A plethora of friend-of-the-courts briefs are flowing in encouraging the Court to take up the case.

And

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe schools should hide a student’s gender change at school from parents, according to a recent poll of over 2,200 likely voters.
…
The poll shows that almost three-quarters, 71%, of likely voters said a teacher should notify parents if their students say they want to go by a different gender.

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision and subsequent ruling, if it takes the case, the way forward is clear. The 4th Circuit’s egregious error and MCPS’ enthusiastically aggressive child abuse and disregard of parents’ wishes illustrate the difficulty of getting public K-12 schools to do their job. Those schools no longer are worth the trouble or our tax money. Instead, this is just one more reason for parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of charter or voucher schools and homeschooling. And for pushing for more charter and voucher schools.

Has FEMA Gone Racist and Sexist?

Posted on by
Reply

The Biden-Harris’ Federal Emergency Management Agency has gone from aiding Americans in regional emergencies to emphasizing Americans who happen to be black or female for such aid before it gets around to helping other Americans in the same emergency region.

[A] closer look at FEMA’s recent internal documents, spending, and public actions shows that FEMA has broadened its focus to handling the flow of migrants into the US and attempting to double down on DEI initiatives on gender, sexuality, and race.

FEMA’s strategic “plan” for the period 2022-2026—we have far too long yet to go under this piece of work—makes the agency’s bigotry clear:

In its first goal, the plan promised to “Instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.”
Its second named priority is to “lead whole of Community in climate resilience.”
FEMA’s “readiness” comes in as the third goal in the plan.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion cannot be optional; they must be core components of how the agency conducts itself internally and executes its mission[.]”

This is an agency that badly wants a complete revamp, with wholly new personnel in supervisory positions. The bigotry of those managers has gone entirely too far, and their redemption isn’t possible from within government positions.

A Subsidy

Posted on by
Reply

It may be that the People’s Republic of China will start subsidizing mainland Chinese families who have more than one child, to the tune of 800 yuan per child for a family’s second and third children per month. Is that a little, or a lot?

The PRC’s 2024 per capita GDP in nominal terms is a bit over $13,000, which works out to 92,300 yuan, or 7,700 yuan per month. Those 800 yuan are roughly $113.

Using data from just before the Wuhan Virus Situation, per capita household electricity consumption was some 750 kilowatt-hours per month. That consumption cost $0.083 per kilowatt-hour; that works out to roughly 425 yuan per month.

Food consumption cost mainland Chinese roughly $270, or 1,915 yuan per month for a family of three, rising (in a naïve estimate) to $360 per month, or 2,555 yuan for a family upsized to four.

In those broad strokes, it seems that electricity and food consume that subsidy before getting to housing, which already is badly under water, for all that the housing industry may be—may be—turning around.

Given the decision of mainland Chinese families not to have more than one child, even after the murderously enforced one-child edict was lifted, this likely won’t increase family size in the PRC. And that’s separate from the editors’ note that child subsidies have never worked anywhere.

Fact “Checking”

Posted on by
Reply

USA Today now is claiming that Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has visited our southern border twice. Harris has visited US southern border twice as vice president | Fact check goes the paper’s headline. The outlet even cited the El Paso Times (it’s necessary to look to the byline under the headline to see that the article is from the live reporting of Times‘ writers).

That live reporting, though, carries only reporting of Harris’ visit to the Customs and Border Protection processing facility that sits well back from the border. Times writers do make passing references to Harris “heading to” the Paso del Norte International Bridge and her claimed intention to “tour” the border fence, but there’s no reporting by these on-scene writers that she actually arrived or toured—which surely they would have done had she done so.

My rating of USA Today‘s fact “check:” FALSE

USA Today misleads again.

O the other hand, even if she has visited the border twice, that’s still breathtakingly few times for the Border Czar to have visited it over her three-and-a-half years of being charged with dealing with her and Biden’s border crisis and the flood of illegal aliens pouring in.

The spacing of Harris’ visit(s) is illustrative of her own lackadaisical attitude toward our border. Her first visit, if it occurred, was ‘way back in June 2021. She’s been nowhere near our border (though she has successfully made it to Europe) since then until this campaign season when she made a campaign stop to visit the Arizona border (actually, this time) last September.