Category Archives: morality

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.

Misleading Headline

Posted on by
Reply

And a misleading article. The headline summarizes the miss:

Israel Said It Was Aiming at Hezbollah. Its Strike Also Killed Dozens of Civilians.

And the lede, which in keeping with newsroom policy across the journalism guild, misleadingly calls the terrorist entity “militants:”

For years, a helpful, middle-aged man lived in the basement apartment of a seven-story residential building on a hillside. Some neighbors in Ain el-Delb said they knew that he was connected to Hezbollah, the militant group. But they said they didn’t think he was important enough to be an Israeli target.

Misleading because what these newsroom writers carefully chose not to mention, at any point in the article other than a passing reference to Israel’s “describing” the building as a headquarters, is that Hezbollah had secreted its facilities and terrorists in apartment building among those civilians, using them as shields. It’s those terrorists who are responsible for the extent of the civilian deaths. It’s those terrorists who maximized the extent of the collateral damage centered on those civilian deaths.

Yahya Sinwar is Dead

Posted on by
Reply

Israel got him in Rafah last Thursday, and the hue and cry in the press, in our government, and in the opposition in Israel is to move quickly to negotiate with Hamas to get hostages back. The “thinking” is that Hamas is running out of leaders to run the terrorist entity and that it’s in a severely weakened state and so ripe for negotiations.

This is badly mistaken.

For one thing, there remain tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists, and included among them are thousands of middle- and senior-level terrorist combat (to use the term loosely and metaphorically) leaders who can be moved up. Hamas also can hire leadership, if only into second echelon levels to get them trained up to Hamas’ methods, from outside: al Qaeda is still a going concern, Daesh is still a going concern, al Shebaab is a going concern. The Muslim Brotherhood continues.

For another thing, Hamas has no incentive for negotiating a release of the hostages they still hold. Releasing them, under any terms however favorable to the terrorists, takes away their last lever over the Israeli opposition. Nor does Hamas have any other incentive for the release: they don’t care about the hostages’ fate or their own; the terrorists only care about the destruction of Israel. One of their senior leaders (not Sinwar) has already promised to repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated, no matter the cost in Palestinian lives or their own.

No.

Hamas is in a weakened state, but that means it’s no time to let up. On the contrary, now is the time to pile on, for the IDF, and for the US to actively support the IDF with our own military forces. Let Hamas come to Israel with a wish to negotiate. It’s Hamas’ war, it’s on Israel to finish it on their terms, it’s on us to help them (France and the rest of Europe be damned) and it’s on Hamas to ask for negotiations. Or to suffer the fate it has promised Israel.

“War Crimes”

Posted on by
Reply

As Eugene Kontorovich’s (of Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum and George Mason University Scalia Law School) in his lede notes,

[A]s Israel fights Hezbollah’s army in Lebanon, it has found a new foe: the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Having failed at its mission of neutralizing the Hezbollah threat, Unifil is now actively interfering with Israel doing the job.

Never mind that, per the UN’s Security Council, UNIFIL’s mandate includes

ensuring that no “armed groups” operate in southern Lebanon

Those barred armed groups include Hezbollah. Instead, UNIFIL

has allowed Hezbollah to entrench itself in southern Lebanon over the years, storing arms in many of the homes and building a network of fully stocked attack tunnels and small outdoor weapons depots in preparation for an Oct. 7-style assault. Israeli troops have found a tunnel about 100 meters from a Unifil outpost.
For 11 months Hezbollah fired more than 8,500 rockets and missiles at Israel, mostly from southern Lebanon, under Unifil’s nose. The area, militia-free by order of the UN Security Council, was soon crawling with the world’s best-armed terrorists. But the peacekeepers said little and did less.

Not just 100m away. In the IDF’s current move into southern Lebanon,

Israeli forces discovered Hezbollah tunnel entrances abutting Unifil posts.

Kontorovich is being generous. UNIFIL has not failed. It has been succeeding, in its internally defined mission to support Hezbollah and to operate against Israel.

Thus, war crimes. UNIFIL, via its conscious decision to abrogate its assignment of keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, and its equally conscious decision to shield Hezbollah politically and lately to attempt physical shielding, is the one committing war crimes. UNIFIL’s guilt is made manifest by its decision to allow Hezbollah to build tunnels for attacking Israel right up against UNIFIL buildings to contribute to those tunnels’ disguise.

UNIFIL is not the only entity guilty of war crimes, though. UN Secretary General António Guterres shares that guilt with his open support for UNIFIL, and for UNRWA, many of whose members are part of the planners for Hamas’ 7 Oct 23 atrocity and ensuing atrocities throughout the last year, and through them his personal support for terrorists and the terrorists’ atrocities.