Tag Archives: culture

Juice and Squeeze

Posted on by
Reply

In Wednesday’s WSJ Letters Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, sought to defend her own behavior in the disruption that prevented an invited guest from speaking at all.

She insisted on asking a key question:

We have to…ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Steinbach blew up her own case with that question, which she also put to the invited guest speaker as she participated in her school’s censorship and cancelation of his speaking.

Free speech juice always and everywhere is worth the squeeze. We have sufficient laws, already, to deal with actual incitement to riot, actual creation of panic in stressful situations, slander, and so on.

The correct and only legitimate answer to speech to which someone or some group objects is speech by that someone or group, or a perhaps more articulate supporter, to contradict or refute the prior.

That Steinbach is oblivious to this demonstrates her unfitness for her role on Stanford’s management team, even her unfitness to retain such licenses to practice law as she might have.

Biden Courts

Posted on by
Reply

Last Wednesday, Magistrate Judge and Biden nominee to a Federal judgeship in the US District Court of Colorado Kato Crews was asked about a legal procedure and then a Supreme Court ruling that any first year law student would have known the answers to. Senator John Kennedy (R, LA) asked Crews

how he would “analyze a Brady motion,” with Crews answering that he had not “had the occasion to address a Brady motion” during his four and a half years on the bench.

Kennedy followed that with a question of whether Crews remembered the Supreme Court case Brady v Maryland and what the case held. Crews:

I believe that the Brady case involved something regarding the Second Amendment. I have not had an occasion to address that.

Here’s a snippet of that exchange.

A Brady motion is a move to require the prosecution in a criminal case to turn over to the defense any information favorable to the defense that the prosecution’s own investigation turns up. The motion is one of the outcomes of Brady v Maryland, which was decided 60 years ago. Those first-year students wouldn’t have had an occasion to address either of those, either, but they would have known the answers, anyway.

This failure comes on the heels of Spokane County Superior Court Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, nominated to a Federal judgeship in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, who could not answer Kennedy’s even more basic questions of Articles V and II of our Constitution do. Neither article, Bjelkengren said, come to mind.

Breathtaking as these two Federal judge nominees’ ignorance about laws, legal procedures, even our Constitution is, what’s far worse is the quality of “judges” President Joe Biden (D) is choosing to nominate to our Federal judicial bench. It’s like the 40-year lawmaker cum President is himself entirely ignorant of American law and of our Constitution. Or like he doesn’t care.

Thousand Year Tradition

Posted on by
Reply

Pope Francis is contemplating ending the celibacy requirement the Catholic Church imposes on its priests and nuns. The hue and cry over ending this “thousand year” tradition is deafening.

I have a brief thought on this. Those decriers are missing, with equally missed irony, the meaning of that thousand year tradition in a two thousand year old church.

For good or ill, celibacy has never been a universal requirement in the universal church. Get the smelling salts; some pseudo-traditionalists seem to need them.

Some Needed Firings

Posted on by
Reply

They haven’t happened, yet, but they need to.

The US Air Force this month launched an effort to hire a handful of senior-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) managers and is hoping to place these officials in posts across the country, from Washington, DC, to Alaska.

And

The Air Force is looking for a “supervisory diversity equity inclusion and accessibility officer for Air Force headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, which will pay anywhere from $155,700 to $183,500 per year.” The person who fills this position will serve as a “first-level supervisor” who will direct employees assigned to the Air Force’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

And

The goal of the managerial slot is to ensure that “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility education and training….

This is nothing but the combat dumbing down of our Air Force: USAF management is putting the divisiveness and bigotry of DEI ahead of training for actual combat against our nation’s enemies.

The staff officers who thought this was a good idea and wasted government time and money developing it and selling to up the chain need to be reassigned to operational billets, not staff billets, in the Combatant Commands, in theater and not safely home in the US. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendell needs to be fired, and Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown needs to be dismissed, for allowing this destructive move to occur.

The firings must extend to the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and JCS Chairman General Mark Milley, also; these wonders are responsible for fostering this destructive culture throughout our defense establishment.

What Are They Teaching?

Posted on by
Reply

Matthew Wielicki, University of Alabama Assistant Professor of Geological Science, is on the right track, but he’s in a vanishing minority.

We’re literally moving away from the foundations of academia. If professors have any hesitancy in their speech, if students are hesitant to ask questions, if there is a decrease in dialogue because of a fear of retribution—that’s the fundamental principles that universities were founded on.

Unfortunately, he says, professors have precisely that hesitancy to speak freely. And this regarding a December 2022 poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression that found that

[m]ore than half of the nearly 1,500 college faculty members…were afraid of losing their jobs or reputations because of their words being used against them, even if unfairly. About a third said they don’t feel they can freely express their opinions.
“I definitely experienced that,” Wielicki said.

Even more unfortunately, destructively to our nation’s ability to grow following generations of inquisitive children and adults, these self-censoring “professors,” instead of teaching their subject matter, are teaching two critical and pernicious things. They’re teaching, by example—modeling, in the precious lexicon—cowardice. And they’re teaching that morals don’t matter; it’s better to put career, to put personal gain, ahead of morality.