Tag Archives: responsibilities

How Do We Know?

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SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD section, the Department of Defense Education Activity, appears to be disbanding DoDEA’s own section focused on pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap onto our military members’ children in DoD schools. That subordinate organization, the DEI unit, was founded on explicitly racist tenets. These are from the originally selected head of that organization:

So exhausted at the White folks in these PD sessions. This lady actually had the caudacity to say Black people can be racist, too. I had to stop the session and give the Karen the business. We are not the majority. We don’t have power.

And

I am exhausted by 99% of the white men in education and 95% of the white women. Where can I get a break from white nonsense for a while?

And

If another Karen tells me about her feelings… I might lose it….

And so on. The woman, Kelisa Wing, has since been removed from that position, but there’s no reason to believe that bigotry wasn’t still imbued within that DoDEA DEI unit.

But how do know that…stuff…won’t still be inflicted on the children attending DoD schools following the DEI unit’s formal disappearance? All we’re seeing here is the disbandment of the official front organization for the ideological “teaching.”

DoDEA’s director, Tom Brady, said he will be dispersing the DEI specialists into existing units as part of a “reconfiguration of talent.”

The same person who set up the organization remains in place. The same persons he charged with executing on that organization’s ideology remain; they’re just getting new titles. There’s also this from a “Pentagon statement:”

The Department of Defense Education Activity’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for our employees and in support of high achievement for our 67,000 military-connected students remains unchanged.

And

Within the next month, we will integrate our DEI specialists into four key divisions at headquarters: Research, Accountability, and Evaluation; Strategic and Organizational Excellent; Professional Learning; and Human Resources.

This is that “reconfiguration of talent.”

In short, we don’t know. But we have no reason to believe it won’t still be.

‘Unacceptable incompetence’

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That’s the description of CDC performance under the then and continuing management of Rochelle Walensky, the Sobbing Doomsayer.

The CDC found itself hoist with its own petard by making 25 basic statistical and numerical errors related to COVID-19, particularly with regard to children, while purporting to expose COVID vaccine misinformation, according to an analysis led by University of California San Francisco epidemiologists.

And they’re still at it.

…nearly as many [errors] were made in the first two months of 2023 as in all of 2021….

The JtN article went on at considerable length concerning the vast numbers of errors—often dangerous errors, especially for our children—the experts of the CDC committed.

TL;DR summary: the CDC is nothing but a bunch of government bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees or this or that science degree. Nothing in the CDC, and no words from CDC bureaucrats, can be taken seriously as long as Walensky and her coterie remain in place.

Biden Courts

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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.

Mistake

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants to extend the Federal government’s intrusion into our banking system.

Our intervention was necessary to protect the broader US banking system. And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffer deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion[.]

No, it wasn’t. No, it would not be.

Businesses thrive or fail on their managers’—individual Americans acting in concert with other individual Americans—performance or failure to perform. We individual Americans thrive, or not, on our own decisions, made out of our own obligations and determination to get ahead.

It isn’t government’s job to inure us individual Americans or our businesses from the vagaries of the marketplace or—especially—from our own poor decision-making. It’s government’s job to create and enforce a framework within which our free market can operate freely, and within which personal responsibility, whether as individuals or as business managers, can operate freely.

If our decisions are without consequence, we are neither operating freely nor in accordance the requirements of our personal responsibility.

“The Fed Got Us Into the SVB Mess”

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That’s the headline on The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section. There’s also this from a letter by Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute:

The real lesson from SVB’s failure is that things break when the Fed is forced to raise interest rates at an unusually rapid rate to regain inflation control.

And this, from another Letter-writer in that section:

…the Fed sowed the seeds of the current crisis as SVB stretched for yield in a zero-interest-rate environment and then failed to manage its duration risk. The Fed’s efforts to micromanage the economy creates unforeseen problems that continue to erupt.

No, and no.

There is much to criticize regarding the Fed’s interest rate moves, but they’re irrelevant to SVB’s and Signature Bank’s failures.

The Fed’s interest rate increases may have been done at an unusually rapid rate, but they still occurred over a period of months—12 of them in fact: the first increase in the current series was way back in March 2022. The Fed’s moves were part of the environment in which these two failed banks operated, nothing more. It was the management teams of two failed banks who failed to deal with the environment in which they operated.

The idea that the Fed’s moves—micromanaging our economy or other moves—created unforeseen problems is risible on its face. Any pupil in a high school economics class knows that bond (and other debt instrument) prices move in the opposite direction from interest rates: as rates rise, existing bond prices fall. SVB’s and Signature’s managers surely are high school graduates; they knew full well that their reserve holdings, held almost entirely in long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed debt instruments, were falling in value for the entire year that the Fed had been raising interest rates. The failure of these two banks to pay attention to their reserves is entirely and solely the fault of those two banks’ management teams.