Monthly Archives: October 2025

A Solid Proposal

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John Early, of the Cato Institute and ex-Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (two times), has a thought on how to further remove unconstitutional race considerations from Federal government tolerance and behavior. Expanding on Chief Justice John Roberts’s observation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[,]” he offers this:

One simple way that the Trump administration can promote these objectives is by revising the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical Policy Directive 15, which specifies the kind of data on race and ethnicity government agencies must collect. The current directive is unconstitutional, discriminatory, and scientifically unsound.
If OMB revised the directive to prohibit the collection of racial data, it would make it more difficult for regulators and attorneys to devise schemes for government to discriminate by race.

He’s mostly right on this. There is no need for the Federal government to collect race or ethnicity data under a couple of axes. One is that it’s barred by the 14th Amendment, which requires all of us to be treated equally under law. That makes race irrelevant. The other axis is that we’re all American citizens—see that 14th Amendment, again. We’re all the same in every way that matters to law.

There is, thus, no need for the Federal government to collect any data on persons present in our nation beyond the number of American citizens and the number of non-citizens actually present. I’d break that last into two categories, but not doing so wouldn’t be a deal breaker: the number of resident aliens and the number of illegal aliens. That last subcategory would, of necessity, be a guess, but DHS and Interior have the resources with which to make reasonably educated guesses.

“Mostly right:” there’s little need to collect ethnicity data either: the ethnicity of us American citizens is American. Full stop. There might be interest in collecting ethnicity data regarding non-citizens present in our nation, but that centers mostly on the illegal aliens so we know the first option regarding where to deport them. Ethnicity data regarding these, though, can be identified as the illegal aliens are caught; there’s no real need to collect the data as a matter of course.

Jews for Nazism?

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One Jew, anyway. The Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senator from Maine, Graham Platner, sports—has done for 18 or so years—a Nazi symbol tattooed onto his chest: a copy of the skull and crossbones as used by the SS Totenkopf (more formally, the SS-Totenkopfverbände and not to be confused with the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf), which operated the Nazis’ concentration and Jew extermination camps.

That’s all jake with Vermont’s “Independent” Senator Bernie Sanders (he enthusiastically caucuses with the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators).

…what he did was, he has expressed his darkness on the internet, probably not a brilliant thing to do, all right, and he said things that are stupid, things that were hurtful. He has apologized for it.

Sanders proceeded to profess his continued support for this fellow Party candidate.

Platner wore that despicable symbol of Jew hatred for the 18 years, but he apologized for it. That makes it all better. Never mind that he still wears it, albeit “disguised” with another tattoo overlaid on it.

Never mind, either, that tattoos can be removed with laser treatment.

A Jewish Senator supporting Nazism because Party. A Jewish Senator excusing Nazism in any guise.

Imagine that.

Education Parity

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There are two paths for achieving some sort of “parity” in education. One path is through pushing for equality of opportunity. This path is exemplified by New York City’s gifted and talented programs that identify gifted children before they reach school age and try to funnel them into educational programs that are tailored to enhance their giftedness and encourage them to learn more and faster—to excel. This is a reflection of Theodore Roosevelt’s each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. Roosevelt was speaking economically, but the guarantee applies just as surely to education systems. That equality of opportunity makes each person—each student—equally capable of reaching his full potential, however large or small that might be from student to student.

The other path for education parity—it really is binary—is to push for—parity—in educational outcomes. This is the path Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani espouses. Mamdani promises to eliminate the city’s gifted and talented program under the fiction that children will benefit more from experiencing the breadth of ability in their peers than they will be harmed from being held back to the pace of their peers. Mamdani’s claim extends to insisting that the gifted children will, in the end, be unharmed from being restrained.

Oh, sure, Mamdani gussies up his move:

Mr Mamdani argues that New York City’s gifted programs have produced racially inequitable outcomes, and therefore all students should remain in the same classrooms, regardless of ability.

This is a Mamdani paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson: [removing gifted and talented programs] is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you [parents]. This is deeply insulting to those parents and to their children. This is Mamdani saying in so many words that black children and brown children are intrinsically inferior to white children and Asian children, they cannot hope to compete in school, and so they must get the protections of holding back the white and Asian children.

It’s inconceivable to Mamdani and his fellow Progressive-Democrats that blacks and browns could easily compete did they have the same access to opportunity as their white and Asian fellow children.

New Sanctions and some Thoughts

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President Donald Trump (R) has implemented new sanctions on Russia in response to the barbarian’s continued intransigence in its invasion of Ukraine—blacklisting Russia’s two biggest oil producers and a plethora of their subsidiaries. As The Wall Street Journal notes, how much the sanctions will impact Russia depends on three major factors:

  • how well they are enforced
  • the reaction of major markets in India and China
  • whether Moscow can circumvent the measures

Regarding the first, that depends on Europe, India, and the People’s Republic of China. In the short term, Europe will give a strong indication of how serious those nations are in supporting Ukraine and how serious they are in beefing up their defense establishments and industries so as to be able to face down the confrontation with Russia that will follow as the night does the day if Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine. Carrots can be offered those nations, and a primary one would be tariff relief in exchange for strictly enforcing the sanctions. There even are ready to hand alternative sources for oil and natural gas to supply their current and buildup energy needs.

Tariff relief and improved mutual investment agreements, along with those readily available alternative oil and gas sources, would go a long way to weaning India off Russian oil.

Another carrot is essentially self-referential. By taking themselves completely off Russian energy, they would be proofing themselves against Russian economic blackmail.

The Indian markets can be drawn off Russian energy with tariff relief and mutual investment agreements centered on other matters important to India, Europe, and the US.

The PRC, though, is going to buy Russian oil and gas regardless. The two nations already have an economic arrangement in place that allows the PRC to develop Siberian hydrocarbon resources in return for first pick on the output of that development. When those distributing pipelines are built from Siberia into the PRC, the latter will get the former’s oil and gas functionally at no cost.

There’s more to this, though than just the blacklists. What’s also needed is better enforcement and strengthening of the existing bars against technology transfers and against equipment and maintenance supply transfers that are needed to develop wells and to maintain delivery pipelines to refineries, to (re)build and maintain refineries, and to build and maintain refined output pipelines delivering to end users.

The third factor centers on the black market, the Russian shadow fleet of oil tankers serving that black market, and the buyers’ shadow fleet of tankers as ships meeting the Russian ships for at-sea transfers. This is, perhaps, the most straightforward factor to handle, if the most difficult for the politically timid national managers. The shadow fleet ships could be—have been in the main—easily identified and seized, their cargo transferred to the seizing nation for its use (not resale) and the ships sent to the breakers for recouping the scrap metal and such other items as might be useful. Those shadow fleet ships whose captains resist seizure should simply have their ships sunk on the spot, without wasting much time arguing the matter: “Prepare to be boarded.” “No.” Sink the ship.

All of that is straightforward, only that first factor of widespread enforcement will take some political maneuverings among the relevant nations.

“Stable Climate”

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Alex Flint and Kalee Kreider, posing as pro-climate adapters rather than as climate mitigators, want us to move toward adapting to our changing climate rather than attempting to mitigate our climate’s changes. That would seem to be a step in the right direction.

However.

Around the world, people are giving priority to higher living standards, economic security, and access to affordable energy above a stable climate.

This is a false dichotomy, leading to their false premise. In truth, we do have a stable climate—stable over human-level time frames—and we have it in conjunction with the potential for higher living standards, economic security, and access to affordable energy. These are not mutually exclusive.

For one thing, the plain fact is that our climate is stable over generations of humans, and that flows from the equally plain geologic fact that our climate is warming predictably, if noisily over thousands- to multi-million year cycles.

Since the end of the last glaciation, some 11,000 years ago, our climate has varied over narrow temperature ranges from the warming period that roughly coincides with the rise of human civilization and persisted into the period of the Roman empire to the Little Ice Age that ran from the early 14th century into the early 19th century. That variability, too, leaves us today still a couple degrees cooler than the geologic warming rate of our planet.

The other thing is that geologic warming rate. Our climate has been warming since the earth formed and stabilized as a solid body because our sun has been warming since it coalesced gravitationally and lit off its core fusion furnace. That warming is governed cyclically by our planet’s not quite circular orbit around the sun, which moves us closer and farther from the sun—not by much but by measurable temperature effects—on a cycle that harmonizes with our planet’s rotational axis precession, a cycle that points our norther hemisphere toward our sun in some seasons and away from our sun in the six months later seasons, a precession that points our northern hemisphere toward the sun in summer, roughly 6,500 years later has our northern hemisphere pointing away from the sun in summer, then after another 6,500 years points it back toward the sun in summer again for a complete cycle of about 13,000 years. That precessional cycle harmonizes with our orbit’s behavior over some hundreds of thousands of years.

Around that lockstep cycling, our climate varies noisily from the presence of an atmosphere that maintains a more stable temperature across days and months—and centuries—while being intermittently impacted by volcanism and meteor strikes. The outcome of those orbital and rotational mechanics and the interactions of volcanism and meteor strikes has produced the geological record of epochs much warmer and colder than today with life being lush in the warm periods, along with epochs of atmospheric CO2 being much higher and much lower than today, with life being lush in both higher and lower CO2 epochs—life has been lush when it was warmer independently of CO2 concentrations with no correlation between the CO2 epochs and the warmer and cooler epochs.

Mitigation always has been a scam to draw Federal funding for pet research projects.

Even though this op-ed’s excuse for shifting to adaptation comes from that false premise, it’s still a welcome step toward economic prosperity and sanity.