Monthly Archives: November 2025

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance”

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Jenna Norton, Program Director of the NIH’s Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, has strongly encouraged, in deed and writings,

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance” to stop President Trump and valorizes those “willing to ‘break the law’ when the law is evil.”
“To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world” and “small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers[.]”

Such acts, in fact, vary from civil disobedience to outright insubordination.

Civil disobedience, though, demands consequences be applied to the civil disobeyer, else the disobedience is just insubordination, or worse—vandalism or sabotage—with no message of value involved. Insubordination requires its own punishment separately from any attached to claimed civil disobedience.

And so: Norton was put on “non-disciplinary” administrative leave as of 2 pm Thursday [13 November].

She claims

I was not given a reason…but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing[.]

Yet the reason, even if not explicitly stated (and that has not been established), seems obvious; certainly it should be, even to the most ardent, blindered Leftist.

Some—the Left—will decry the evident unfairness of such retaliatory behavior by her employer. They will be, of course, badly mistaken, even as they revel in their Precious dudgeon. Individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance are not limited to one direction. Employers are allowed—and correctly so—to take explicitly individualized, person-to-person acts of resistance against those employees politically and socially resisting them. To that end, employers acting to resist insubordination couched in political and social resistance terms are necessarily acting, in part, politically and socially in their resistance to their employees’ misbehavior.

Indeed, the individualized part is mandated by law, and the person-to-person part is simply optimal business practice. The acts by the employer in such cases also are nothing more than enforcement of the inherent nature of the employer-employee relationship and an emphasis of who works for whom.

An Iron Curtain Descends on Seattle

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Seattle’s newly elected mayor, Socialist Katie Wilson, has announced that she

will not allow private grocery stores to close….

She also wants city government-run grocery stores to operate. Shades of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain that was erected—physically on the boundary between then-East and West Berlin and functionally in its travel document issuance and withholding—to keep people from leaving that communist paradise. Not being allowed to close a store is the same as saying to the store’s operator that “you’re not allowed to leave.”

Those government stores also are reminiscent of the USSR’s government establishments and its nominally independent icon of Soviet socialism, GUM, best known for its ubiquitous presence around the nation and its equally ubiquitous empty shelves, except for those with access exclusively for the Soviet elite.

It’s likely that Federal courts (and it will likely end up in front of the Supreme Court) will not allow any bar to a private entity deciding to close an outlet or to cease operation altogether. However, the uncertainty that will occur and build over the years until that final judgment will wreak havoc on Seattle’s economy and its unemployment rate.

Seattle voters have done this to themselves. They’re the ones who elected the woman. They’re welcome to their enforced stay in the meantime.

Maybe Take the Hint

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Regarding the Georgia case against President Donald Trump (R) from when he’d lost his reelection campaign in 2020 and a slate of alternate Electors was created and offered to the US Senate: Fani Willis brought a criminal case against Trump and others over that alternate slate, never minding that doing so is entirely illegal, if only rarely done. As a result of Willis’ own nefarious behaviors, she was thrown off the case by Georgia courts. Now we have the State’s Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council (the body charged with finding a successor to Willis) Executive Director Peter Skandalakis assigning himself to the case.

His selfie appointment is because of ACE’s

The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case. Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment[.].

Maybe Skandalakis should take the hint. It’s a bogus beef, and he would do well to drop it with prejudice.

Suing Government Officials

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As part of the Reopen Government Act passed by the Senate, then by the House, and signed into law by the President, Senate Republicans had slipped in a provision allowing Senators to sue…the government…over having had their cell phone records secretly collected by Federal government Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was pretending to investigate the January 6 Capitol Hill riot participants.

Notably, the bill explicitly strips federal officials of qualified immunity—a legal doctrine that has long shielded government agents from personal liability even in cases of egregious constitutional violations.

Aside from the fact that a successful suit by a Senator would result in us taxpayers paying the judgement rather than the government officials who did the deed, it would exclude House members, and worse, us average Americans from that capacity.

There’s an alternative to that that would be more far-reaching than just rescinding the Senate’s amendment.

Contrast this with the fate of the Bivens Act of 2024, a modest bill that would have amended America’s premier civil-rights statute. Under Section 1983 of the US Code, Americans can sue state and local officials for constitutional violations, but federal officials are virtually untouchable. The Bivens Act would change that, while still keeping qualified immunity as a defense. The bill sought to codify a cause of action that the Supreme Court has steadily eroded over the past two decades. It died in committee without a vote.

The House needs to revisit the Bivens Act and include it in their rescission bill.

And go a step further.

Qualified immunity for government officials is a highly useful judicial doctrine (not statute) which protects those persons from a plethora of frivolous suits. But the bar is too high, allowing some constitutionally miscreanting officials to skate on otherwise egregious behavior. An additional move that would mitigate this would be to change the onus from requiring the plaintiff to prove why qualified immunity should not apply in his case to requiring the defendant to prove why it should. And an additional step, which would mitigate all those suits that would turn on that proof: the loser of the case over whether qualified immunity should apply, must pay the winner all legal costs involved.

A Couple of A Propos Characterizations

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As usual, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (R) shows his mastery of them. Here are two.

On the Progressive-Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY):

Senator Schumer gambled, and he lost. He’s kind of walking around now looking like a guy who just lost his luggage.
I think his testicles are on back order from China[.]

On the Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY):

The congresswoman is a creation of the media.
I’ve never heard anybody describe her as a policy maven. My experience with her is if you scratch the surface, you just get more surface.

Some might characterize these as cheap shots. That doesn’t make them inapt, though.