Category Archives: ethics

The Draft

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A correspondent to The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday’s Letters wrote of the consequences of ending the military draft and of the need for reinstating it.

He’s spot on, including his call for keeping exemptions to a bare minimum.

If we are to reinstate the draft, exemptions must be few and confined to medical reasons. American youth deserve fairness if they are to respond to the call of freedom.

I agree with reinstating the draft, but I would add two opportunities for delay by one drafted.

College/trade school students who are drafted should be allowed an opportunity to finish their degrees/certifications before heading to boot camp. That opportunity, though, should come with its own limit. College degrees take four, or at most five years, and trade school programs take two, or at most three years. A drafted student’s delay clock should start from the first year of his time in school, and the delay should expire at the end of those four/five years or two/three years, whether he’s finished his program or not.

Graduate students would have no such delay; they should be required to report on the specified date.

The other delay—which could convert to an exemption—should apply to those enrolled in ROTC programs. When I went through USAF ROTC some while ago, the program proceeded in two phases. The first was a General Military Course, which lasted for two years, and at the conclusion conferred no obligation to enlist. Any student could enroll in the GMC. The second phase, the Professional Officer Course, was open only to those who had completed the GMC (the requirement could be waived, but that was only rarely done), and enrolling in the POC involved formally enlisting in the Air Force as an NCO. Cadets could resign from the POC at any time, but they were then expected to report for duty at their NCO rank (a requirement that, in the realization, wasn’t always enforced.)

A draft/delay exemption would apply to ROTC enrollees in this way. Their draft delays would date from their enrollment in the GMC. Resigning from the GMC, or declining to subsequently enroll in the POC would require the draft-delayed student to report to boot camp on the next available date. Students who resign from the POC would be required—with no exceptions—to report for duty at their NCO rank. A cadet who completes the ROTC program and is commissioned would see his draft status OBE.

Misguided

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The Wall Street Journal‘s subheadline summarizes the error.

Biden administration, rocked by a wave of protests at college campuses, needs Israel to cut a deal to stop the fighting

The article centers on Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Israel, among other visits in the Middle East, and Blinken’s Presidential charge to cut a deal with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in order to distract (my term) from the turmoil on so many American college and university campuses and that turmoil’s negative impact on Biden’s reelection chances.

The “deal” is this:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is beginning a visit to Israel to press for a cease-fire deal in the Gaza Strip….

Its relationship with campus turmoil is this:

…as protests against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip spread across US college campuses. Biden needs the Israeli leader to deliver a halt in fighting that could ease domestic pressure over the conflict.

No. The two are wholly unrelated, beyond the tangential point of contact between the disruptors’ claimed purpose and the war Israel is fighting for its own survival against the terrorist gang operating out of the Gaza Strip.

The disrupters—they’ve long since crossed the line between legitimate protest to disruption with their violence, vandalism, threats to murder “Zionists,” active blocking of students from attending class, demands (a toddler’s temper tantrum) that their positions be satisfied entirely and immediately—either are actively supporting the terrorists of Hamas or are toddlers (never mind chronological ages) throwing temper tantrums, and in either case, they are acting out their antisemitic bigotry.

College and university management teams need to stop condoning, if not actively supporting, these terrorist supporters’, bigots’, and toddlers’ behavior, and instead call in the campus and city police to eject them from campus, arrest them, and bring them to trial for their violence and threats of murder and their vandalism.

As a University of Florida spokesman said as UF started just these actions,

This is not complicated. The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children—they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.

Not complicated at all. It may be that some managers are starting to do that, but it’s far too soon to say with any confidence.

With Israel engaged in its war for its existence, Biden needs to get out of Israel’s way and instead actively support it as it goes into Rafah and a couple of nearby villages to finally destroy Hamas, the terrorist gang that has promised an endless repetition of October 7s.

It’s a Start

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Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY) has proposed three things that need to be done in response to the antisemitic bigotry and pro-terrorist disruptions currently running rampant at colleges and universities across our nation.

  • go[] after nonprofits that are funding the protests
  • go[] after the tax status of universities that do not crack down on the protests
  • hold[] students and professors accountable for the protests

Regarding what constitutes holding folks accountable, Tenney added this:

Expel these students, deport the students who are foreign students who are acting in this way, and get rid of the professors.

Absolutely.

However.

There are two things that need to be added to Tenney’s list. One is to cut off all Federal transfers to those colleges and universities: all subsidies, all research or other grants, all student loan guarantees. Don’t just stop with tax status moves.

The other thing is to actually do these four things. A Critical Item first step here is to get relevant legislation proposed in both houses of Congress. And then follow through on that legislation.

“We are the source of truth for most questions about the elections we run.”

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Maricopa County election officials and the Arizona Secretary of State are colluding with social media to control what gets said about elections and election procedures in the county. But do not fear, it’s for the voters’ own good.

The offices of both the Maricopa County recorder and the Arizona secretary of state work together with third parties to censor social media content that they believe is mis- and disinformation, including drawing up plans to ban social media users from the county social media accounts and using influencers to spread their message, according to public records obtained from both Maricopa County….

The Gavel Project obtained a number of documents from the county and from the State SecState that make this plain.

Some of those documents amply the breathtaking arrogance of the county and SecState officials and their just as appalling contempt for the average Americans resident in Maricopa County. Here’s Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer:

I posit that the gravest threat to voting rights and our elected form of government is no longer the systematic disenfranchisement of a particular class of people, but instead the undermining of the entire election system through lies and disinformation. And it is in this respect, that the Constitution today is in some ways a thorn in the side of my office. Specifically the First Amendment.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates:

We are the source of truth for most questions about the elections we run.

Trust us. We’re from the government.

Backwards

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The arrogance of the Biden-Garland DoJ is on full display with its continued refusal to provide the audio tapes of the Hur-Joe Biden interviews.

The Biden-Garland refusal, through Garland’s Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte, in their letter to the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that require the tapes:

We have repeatedly invited the Committees to identify how these audio recordings from law enforcement files would serve the purposes for which you say you want them[.]
We have also repeatedly urged the Committees to avoid unnecessary conflict and to respect the public interest in the Department’s ability to conduct effective investigations by protecting sensitive law enforcement files. The Committees have repeatedly failed to explain your needs or to demonstrate respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions[.]

Nor Congress nor any of its committees have any obligation to satisfy the demands of the DoJ. The obligation runs in the opposite direction: the DoJ must satisfy the Congress and its committees of the reasons why it cannot—not does not want to, but cannot—turn over the materials called for by the Congress or any of its committees.

If Biden-Garland are truly interested in avoiding unnecessary conflict, they will instruct the DoJ to stop forcing one and turn over the tapes. If they continue to refuse, then the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees must formally subpoena the tapes, if they have not already, promptly move to hold AG Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over this refusal, and then withhold funding, including salaries, from the Office of the Attorney General and from the White House Office until the contempt is satisfied.

Regarding respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions, this is especially risible. If the Biden-Garland DoJ wants to be respected and wants its law enforcement functions to be respected, they must behave respectably. The former would begin by turning over the tapes without any further stalling. The latter cannot begin to behave respectably until there’s a complete replacement of those functions’ top managers, teams that variously lie to or condone lying to FISA courts, and who have accused traditional Catholics of dangerous extremism, accused mothers objecting to school board woke policies of being terrorists, and on and on.