Category Archives: culture

So Much for Bipartisanship

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, after spending the Biden years ignoring Republican input, have pushed for bipartisanship since President Donald Trump (R) resumed his position in the White House. Other Progressive-Democrat politicians have said maybe not.

Now, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), has made it official. Regarding what he views as “extreme MAGA Republican agenda,”

We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.

This is why nothing a Party Congressman—in either house—can be believed when he claims to want bipartisanship. This Party practice of deliberate obstruction for obstruction’s sake and divisiveness solely in the name of Party, is why it’s so hard for us as Americans or as a nation to have nice things.

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.

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.

Mission Addendum

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I posted a bit ago about the missions of DOGE and Congress. Here are some data that lend concreteness to that post’s claims; these data concern some $162 billion in misspent monies.

That figure is likely an undercount because not all federal agencies follow reporting guidelines.
Under the Payment Integrity Information Act, agencies are required to manage payments by identifying risks, taking corrective measures, and reporting on their efforts. However, the GAO found that some agencies are not fully following the required guidelines for reporting data annually.

GAO’s 2023 report on the matter had this, summarized at the JtN link above (the second one):

10 federal agencies under the Chief Financial Officers Act were noncompliant in fiscal 2022. Additionally, nine of these agencies failed to meet standards for the same programs in 2021 and 2022.
Agencies that remain noncompliant with payment integrity standards for two or more consecutive years must submit additional proposals to the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is key in dealing with improper payments and outlining improvement plans.
The plans must be included in the agency’s annual budget submission….

GAO identified those agencies that are noncompliant for two consecutive years as

  • DoA
  • DoD
  • DoEd
  • HHS
  • HUD
  • DoL
  • DoT(!)
  • VA
  • SBA

GAO then asked for this:

GAO recommended that OMB ensure that noncompliant agencies explicitly include plans of improvement and plans to achieve compliance in their annual financial statements, post the plans on PaymentAccuracy.gov, or communicate them directly to the relevant congressional committees. OMB agreed with the recommendations.

That’s much too soft. Years of such Pretty Pleases are how we got to these billions of misspent—and willfully unreported—dollars. The management personnel below President Donald Trump’s (R) replacing appointees who remain after those appointees are installed need to be terminated for cause and reallocated to the private sector. Those agencies’ budgets also need to have portions of their budgets equal to the un- or misreported expenditures withheld until reporting and actual spending is brought into compliance.

Given DoD’s blatant disregard for spending requirements, it’s necessary to be especially draconian with that bunch—their refusals to comply cost lives and endanger our national freedom. It’s true enough that DoD’s contractors contribute to the money failures, and they need to be dealt with including contract cancelation, but the overarching failure here is DoD’s decision to not bother with enforcing the financial reporting requirements of those contractors.