Yet Another Reason…

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…for moving our supply chains out of the People’s Republic of China, and for no longer doing economic business at all with the PRC. In response to the Biden administration’s lately decision to further restrict the export of advanced computer chips to the PRC, that nation has restricted the export of critical computer-related minerals to us.

China announced Tuesday the banning of exports to the United States of chemical elements and other essential high-tech materials, in apparent retaliation for the US limiting semiconductor-related exports.

Those elements include gallium, germanium, antimony and certain other extremely hard materials to the US. So far, that’s just the ordinary progress of war, including the economic war the PRC has been waging against us for years.

However.

We shouldn’t be dependent on an enemy nation for materials critical to our economic function or our national security. That we are was driven home by the supply chain disruptions caused by the Wuhan Virus Situation; that this administration has chosen to do nothing about it, that our private enterprises have chosen to do nothing about it—each is shameful in its own right. That continued dependency only facilitates the PRC’s war against us and our economy.

We have these elements, along with nearly all of the rare earth elements and other extremely hard materials, in the ground within the political boundaries of our nation as well as within the boundaries of friendly nations. If it costs more to supply from those sources—and it will cost a pretty penny at this stage to guts up the necessary mines—that’s the cost of national defense and of our status as a free and sovereign nation.

Biden Administration Newspeak Dictionary in Action

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The Supreme Court is hearing, this week, the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration’s argument that the Tennessee law (and by extension the similar laws of nearly half the States of our Union) that prohibits the administration of

medical treatments to minors if the purpose is to enable a gender transition or to address “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity[]”

is somehow unconstitutional. The case to watch is US v Skrmetti.

The administration’s case is centered on this:

A teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot.

The lawyers arguing for this go on to insist that this represents a violation of our Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

No.

Babies aren’t assigned anything at birth. They are born with the characteristics they gained at egg fertilization; in the present case their male or female sex characteristic is demonstrated by their possessing XY chromosomes or XX chromosomes from that moment.

It’s illustrative of the hypocrisy of this administration that so many members chant “follow the science” and then proceed to ignore it. “Follow the science” to these worthies plainly is just a voodooist’s incantation cynically applied for street cred with the far left of our society.

Far more importantly, though, this use of the administration’s Newspeak Dictionary in lieu of a dictionary of American English is nakedly dishonest. This use of the administration’s Newspeak Dictionary in lieu of the Supreme Court’s long-standing (since Lynch v Alworth-Stephens Co) injunction to use the plain, obvious, and rational meaning is naked contempt for our court system.

The Tennessee law needs to be upheld in no uncertain terms, and these administration lawyers need to be severely sanctioned for their insistence on bringing this frivolous case and for their contempt of court premise.

A Bureaucrat with an MD…

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…chimes in. Robert Califf, MD, two-term US FDA Commissioner, and long-time government bureaucrat wants the government’s bureaucracy left alone.

As the world’s largest bureaucracy, the US government has ample room for improvement.

Awfully decent of the old boy to acknowledge some minor issues. Then he writes this in his Letter:

…a broad call for support from the workforce would be much more likely to succeed than castigating the workers who have chosen to serve the American public. Instead of suggesting “large-scale firings” and asserting that “if federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy would be well-served to inspire the workforce to work with them to become more efficient.

This is an example of why bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees must have their words taken only skeptically.

No one is castigating the workers; Musk and Ramaswamy instead are insisting that those let go not be stigmatized by that while insisting they be given generous severance packages and plenty of notice to find other work before their government jobs end.

Government isn’t the only place employees need to resume working from workplace offices or cubicles—corporate America also is waking up to the need for in-place, face-to-face interactions and collaborations. It’s entirely appropriate to require government employees work full time in the offices and cubicles alongside their colleagues. Those who resist are those resisting the teaming and collaboration that is so necessary to work and so much more effectively done when done in person, and those persons are reducing the efficiency and limiting the potential of their teams. They should be let go.

On that matter of efficiency, this is best achieved with a smaller workforce operating under narrower scoped of responsibilities, tasks, and goals.

Califf is a senior bureaucrat in a government “medical” bureaucracy looking to preserve bureaucrats’ job. Nothing more.

“UCLA pleads for legal immunity….”

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This is a measure of how deeply embedded antisemitism bigotry is in the managers running UCLA. They ordered, according to the charges in the case in which they demand immunity, exclusion zones that barred Jewish students from certain areas of the UCLA campus—areas which granted antisemitic protestors and terrorist supporters proclaiming Israeli genocide—veto authority over who could enter areas of campus those protestors occupied.

The defendants in the case already have had an injunction issued against them barring such actions and barring the defendants’ proclaiming programs that certain groups could have but that barred other groups from having similar or participating in the former. The presiding judge in that injunction opened his order with this [emphasis in the original]:

In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.

This is the bigotry from which these personages demand their immunity. They rationalize their demand to be excused from their bigotry with this:

“There was no blueprint for how to respond to a protest encampment,” and UCLA used de-escalation in the context of “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” situations, which justifies qualified immunity….

Right. We’re supposed to believe that the folks at the pinnacle of this major university’s management team had themselves to be told what to do before they acted. At the very least, that’s their confession that they’re unfit for the positions and should be fired for cause.

And they need to be sanctioned monetarily for their actions in furtherance of their bigotry along with any education-related licenses they may hold rescinded with prejudice.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Defund PBS and NPR

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Howard Husock, of American Enterprise Institute, thinks that is a bad idea. Unfortunately, his argument for continuing to send taxpayer money to these entities is pie in the sky irrationality. He does acknowledge the deep progressive tilt of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, and his own abuse by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Congressionally-created entity that partially funds PBS and operates NPR, when he was a member of CPB‘s board of directors over a pro-ideology diversity op-ed he’d written: CPB stripped [him] of [his] committee assignments and accused [him] of violating [his] fiduciary duties. Because thought diversity is intolerable.

Nonetheless, he wants our taxpayer money to continue flowing to this left-wing “public” company and its subordinate formations.

Were PBS and NPR (and, I say, CPB) successfully shorn of taxpayer funding, Husock worries that

liberal foundations—many of which already support NPR and individual PBS programs—will step in to keep NPR and PBS alive. The Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Kellogg, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson, and Open Society foundations have been NPR financial supporters and could easily fill a funding gap or even donate directly to the CPB, a chartered nonprofit.

He didn’t recognize the so what in his own words. Those entities already financially support those left-wing outlets; it won’t matter that those entities, and others, would step in to fill the gap from the loss of taxpayer funding. It won’t matter because what those three outlets publish won’t change.

Husock had this rationalization, too:

There would be no more congressional hearings about NPR‘s ideological bias, as were held in May. But the imprimatur and implied government seal of approval—the “national public” branding—would remain.

The former is another so what. Congress doesn’t do anything about that naked bias other than waste time on public virtue-signaling—by both parties—hearings. The latter is a matter of messaging, something the Republicans are heroically bad at. The outlet, in fact, wouldn’t be public anymore because it wouldn’t be receiving public funds anymore.

Husock closed his fantasy with posits of what Congress should do instead of cutting off the taxpayer dollar spigot: emphasize the purpose of promoting local “journalism,” ban advertising for “causes,” make CPB board budgeting debates and decisions public.

See above regarding Congressional inaction. Ask also—which Husock did not ask—about definitions of such things as “cause” and “journalism.” Then ask—which Husock also did not ask—about enforcement mechanisms.

Skip over the messy pie in the sky time-wasters. Defund NPR, PBS, and CPB.