Category Archives: rights

Rank Cowardice

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Did these European nations learn nothing from WWII, or are they gone soft in their wealth and safety under our American umbrella? Or do they ignore the fresh lessons the nations of eastern Europe—freed from Russian occupation only a generation ago—would teach them?

Some European Union states have floated the idea of giving President Vladimir Putin an off-ramp that would make it easier for him to justify a de-escalation to his domestic audience in Russia, while a peace plan drawn up by Italy proposed autonomy for Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas.

Our own Henry Kissinger—who negotiated our preemptive surrender in Vietnam—is an especial embarrassment. Pontificating in Davos, he actually said with a straight face

…”ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” suggesting that Ukraine should allow Russia to retain the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and swaths of the eastern Donbas region seized by Moscow-backed separatists the same year.

And

pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine … but a new war against Russia itself.

That is Kissinger once again practicing his politics of preemptive surrender, ceding to Russia the occupied territories of Ukraine, a Kissingerian ownership based solely on their seizure by Russia at gunpoint.

It’s certainly easy enough for those far away from the fight for national survival, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, blithely to tell that nation to just give up some land and we’ll have peace in our time.

Never mind that giving away any square inch of a nation’s territory is giving away pieces of that nation’s existence. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had the right characterization of Kissinger’s words.

I get the sense that instead of the year 2022, Mr Kissinger has 1938 on his calendar. And that he thought he was addressing an audience not in Davos, but in erstwhile Munich.

One of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Oleksiy Arestovych, was more blunt:

Get lost with suggestions of this sort, that Ukraine should trade some of its territory. Children are dying here, soldiers are stopping shrapnel with their own bodies, and they’re telling us to sacrifice territory. It will never happen.

And from the second link just above:

they are telling us to sacrifice our land? Bite me, f*ckers.

Indeed.

Red Flag Laws

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Some thoughts on necessary criteria for them, particularly as they’re intended to apply to the mentally unstable.

  1. Define “mentally unstable”
  2. Identify which “mentally unstable” are dangerous and which are not
  3. Identify how the “dangerous mentally unstable” are to be disarmed without disarming—leaving defenseless—those around him
  4. Specify how quickly—including appeals—a court case must be finally decided and the “dangerous mentally unstable” gets his weapons back after successfully defending himself
  5. Specify how the “dangerous mentally unstable” will be made financially whole after winning his court case
  6. Specify how an accusation will be separated into a frivolous one and one made in good faith
  7. Specify the sanctions to be brought against the accuser if the “dangerous mentally unstable” wins his court case
  8. Identify how the “dangerous mentally unstable” gets his reputation and his life back after winning his court case, whether it was brought in good faith or bad

That’s just a start on the idiocy and intrinsically virtue-signaling nature of red flag laws.

Typical of the Left

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And a measure of how radical and extreme our nation’s Left has become, is New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D) op-ed, wherein she advertised her State’s protection of the “right” to abortion as an inducement for businesses to return.

A couple of letter-writers in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section are more accurate.

The humor in the governor’s invitation peaks with her description of the “freedom” and “respect” that New York offers its business communities. High tax, high cost, high crime—surely New York’s reputation speaks for itself? The joke may be on the governor.

But especially this:

New York’s Governor Hochul is angered at the possibility that her newborn granddaughter will inherit a “fight” to save abortion. Yet if she had taken advantage of Roe, her descendants would have avoided this fight simply because they would have ceased to exist. Ms Hochul is not fighting for her descendants to fall victim to abortion. She is fighting for yours to do so.

Just Be Quiet

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…and do what you’re told. We wouldn’t have accused you if you weren’t guilty.

The SEC’s Director of the Division of Enforcement, Gurbir Grewal, doesn’t like it when lawyers defending their clients from SEC accusations get too much in his way.

The SEC also is seeing instances where lawyers repeatedly interrupt witness testimony to lodge frivolous objections….

Of course, it’s Grewal’s definition of frivolous. If he were serious, he’d be in court getting the frivolity sanctioned. And this:

In some instances, lawyers are representing companies and individuals in cases where they have a conflict of interest[.]

If that were true, he’d be objecting in court. Where are his objections?

And some lawyers are asserting legal privilege to shield documents from the eyes of SEC staff in cases where that privilege doesn’t apply[.]

Again, that’s Grewal’s position. And he asserts it as if, because he’s asserted it, it must be so.

And this:

Mr Grewal said he had recently learned about an entity with billions of dollars in assets that produced a mere 200 documents in a six-month period, after being served with a request for customer account and trading data.

Grewal is being disingenuous on two counts with this bellyache. One is that he’s been the Enforcement Director for nearly a year; how is it that he’s only just “recently” learning of this situation? Is he in charge, or isn’t he? If he is, does he read his staff’s input, or doesn’t he?

The other count is his beef that this represents an accused company’s delaying tactic. If he didn’t like it the slow production, why did he allow it to persist for so long? Why wasn’t he trying to force the pace—in court if necessary?

Grewal gave the SEC’s game away with these, as cited by the WSJ:

…[he] called on lawyers to work more cooperatively with the agency….

And

Lawyers who do cooperate in a genuine way with the SEC are better positioned to win credit for their clients in the form of a more lenient resolution of the agency’s investigation

This is one more reason the SEC cannot be trusted. I’ve mentioned another earlier.

Silence is Violence

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That’s what the Left likes to say when folks of whom they disapprove don’t talk/tweet/Facebook post/whatever about events on which the Left casts opprobrium.

There has occurred the firebombing of an Oregon Right to Life facility in the Salem, OR, suburb of Keizer.

It’s been more than a week since that cynically timed for Mother’s Day attack, and Oregon’s Progressive-Democratic Party elected politicians are being determinedly quiet about it.

Governor Kate Brown, Senator Jeff Merkley, and Senator Ron Wyden all declined to respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email from Fox News Digital regarding the firebomb attack….

And

The Twitter accounts of Brown, Wyden, and Merkley also did not mention or condemn the attacks and all three have tweeted about other issues since Sunday, including Wyden, who warned Americans that their geolocation data could be “weaponized” against them if they seek an abortion.

Silence by the Progressive-Democrats. Except when they’re being overtly pro-abortion.

…pro-choice protesters across the country have stormed Catholic churches and some have called for vandalism in the Roe v Wade debate.

Caroline Reilly, of the Rewire News Group, has been particularly explicit (Jerry Dunleavy, of the Washington Examiner, had to retweet Reilly’s call because Reilly subsequently tried to rewrite her history and pretend she’d not called for murder by deleting her tweet):

Rot in the ground. Tweeted out Mother’s Day evening, shortly after the firebombing.

But the Progressive-Democrats are silent on the matter of violence against those who disagree with them.