Insidious

A letter-writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote,

In the dissenters’ telling [in Mahmoud v Taylor], children can be expected to manage the complex issues of sex and gender as objective information, quite apart from the faith and morals their parents seek to instill.

What’s especially insidious here, though, is government, public school administrators, and public school teachers pushing onto their students, our children, clear disinformation and outright lies on more than just issues of sex and gender, such claims as gender being a matter of choice and not genetically, and so immutably, determined at conception, and that some races are intrinsically and irreversibly oppressed while other races are intrinsically and irreversibly oppressors.

That’s the sort of thing those…dissenters…want to see continue, whether deliberately or from the blindness of their modern liberal/monarchist ideology that insists that government, public school administrators, and public school teachers each know better than parents.

School choice, above all, would allow parents to rescue their children from such sewers. To that end, as another letter-writer in the same section wrote,

Let public-education funding follow families’ decisions.

Free Speech Climate Funding Industry Style

The UN is at it again; this time it’s the UN arm of the Climate Funding Industry that’s attacking individual freedoms.

A United Nations climate expert is calling for people who question the goal of avoiding a climate catastrophe by rapidly eliminating fossil fuels to face criminal penalties.

Elisa Morgera, UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change is insisting that nations have an obligation to

defossilize information systems to protect human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence and from information distortions.

In order to protect human rights, our most basic, intrinsic, and inalienable right—free speech—must be circumscribed to suit Climate Funding Industry personages’ definition of proper and properly free speech.

This is just one more reason climate activists cannot be taken seriously and must be cut off from government funds, tax credits, subsidies, and so on.

Independence Day

I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and many dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over a host of things, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs and other meats in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

He’s Right

President Donald Trump (R) is looking to seal off leaks, especially those that center on potentially treasonous leaks to the press.

A leaked report claimed that the U.S. strike only set back Iran’s program by a few months. U.S. officials have said the nuclear sites were destroyed and it would take years for Iran to rebuild them.

Trump suggested compelling the journalists who publicly reported on the leaked intelligence to reveal their source for national security reasons.

Certainly such leakers should be identified, haled into criminal court, and if convicted, locked up for a very long time. This kind of leaker isn’t just violating his oath of office, or the terms of his employment, he’s committing the felonious act of sending classified material—national security-related material—to the press, which our enemies avidly read. Furthermore, the only way this sort of leaker can have passed the classified material along to the press is by having stolen the material first, and the theft itself should be separately punished with a jail term.

There’s more to this than just that, though.

In all other walks of life, receiving stolen goods is itself a crime, magnified by efforts to profit from the receipt. Unlike the legal and medical professions, there is no intrinsic right to confidentiality between news writers—journalists—and their sources. The Frankenstein-esque creation of a “need to protect sources” is right next door to violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement for equal treatment under law.

Journalism would suffer mighty and irreversible damage were journalists required to reveal the source(s) who transmitted to them stolen materials or communicated to them information the sources were revealing in violation of the obligations of their position? This is cynically offered nonsense. In times past, journalists were required by their editors to have at least two on-the-record sources corroborating the anonymously sourced information those journalists published. That requirement has since been abandoned by the journalist guild.

What concrete, publicly accessible, and publicly measurable standard of journalistic integrity do today’s news writers and their editors use?  They refuse to say, which is them saying loudly and clearly that they have no standard.

It’s long past time to bring journalism, which refuses to regulate itself, back within the bounds of a law that the rest of us must obey.

Mamdani Is Not a Communist

He says so, and that settles it, doesn’t it? Yet the Progressive-Democratic Party’s candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said, much more forcefully, otherwise, and not so long ago, given his youth (he’s only 33).

  • …we need a socialist New York to give these workers their power back….
  • [I]f we want to change the nature of politics in New York State wholesale, it will require bringing in a lot more DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] members
  • [T]here are other issues which we firmly believe…[including] the end goal of seizing the means of production
  • if we want everyone to be full participants in the economy, we need worker ownership of the means of production

And so on.

Mamdani’s denial of his communist status is typical Leftist and Progressive-Democratic Party reliance on their Newspeak dictionary and their parallel rejection of our American English dictionaries.

Ignorance is strength.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Indeed. Our ignorance. Know Betters’ strength. Our minds torn asunder. Know Betters’ choosing.