Monthly Archives: March 2026

Keeping a Close Watch

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Matthew Hennessey had a heads-up in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Free Expression section. His warning is summarized in his subheadline and again early on in the piece.

China is getting a good look at the precision and professionalism of the American war machine.

And

With the possible exception of Donald Trump and the Iranians themselves, no one is following the progress of the latest Middle East war more closely than China’s Xi Jinping. Not so much for the outcome, but for the scouting opportunity. Mr Xi is interested in US tactics and weaponry because he’s preparing for a war of his own.

Of course Xi is. Whatever else he (and his rump general staff, come to that) might be, they’re not stupid men.

Which brings me to my concern. Hennessey liked his football analogy throughout his piece, so I’ll expand it. The…game…between the US and Iran is like unto a start-of-the-season game between a highly ranked college team and a third or fourth tier college team, a game whose value for the ranked team is little more than another scrimmage, this time with plays and outcomes on the line.

Or, a more apt analogy: the campaign the US is executing against Iran (Hennessey ignored Israel’s role in the campaign because Xi isn’t concerned with the Israeli machine’s precision and professionalism) is little more than a live fire exercise.

Live fire exercises are tightly constrained in their activities; even when state-of-the-art systems are used, those are used under artificial constraints and only employed a very few times, as proofs of technique. I strongly hope we’re not putting our best systems, tactics, and doctrine to use against this third or fourth tier opponent, or at least limiting their use. There’s no need, in order to crush the mullahs easily, to broadly expose those for Xi’s edification.

“Better is the enemy of good enough” applies here, too.

On the other hand, there’s this bit of Hennessey misapprehension:

One thing to remember: it’s been 47 years since the PLA was involved in anything close to a real firefight—a monthlong spitting contest that it fought to a draw with Vietnam in 1979. The US military has been trading blows with real bad guys in hard places more or less constantly since 2001.

That’s true enough, and our military’s hard experience is invaluable. But would it be enough? It’s been 75 years since our military was involved in a fight with a peer or near peer enemy. And that was against the PLA in the Korean War, and absent the use of nuclear weapons, we escaped with a draw.

‘Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past?

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That’s the claim of an Israeli opinion reader, Amit Segal, of Israel’s Channel 12 News (Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge, at least, offer an English translation on initial linking). He doesn’t seem to understand proportionality in war, though.

For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion.

This isn’t proportionality, though; it’s just a history of tit-for-tat, and that does—and has done—nothing but run up friendly casualties. This has been amply demonstrated by Iran’s years of butchery and destruction of Israeli lives and property in the aftermath of Israel’s repeated tit-for-tat responses to each of those Iranian or Iranian-sponsored terrorist acts.

Proportionality is what the IDF has only lately figured out (and too many Leftist and Progressive-Democrat Americans still fail to understand): when you respond, overwhelm your foe.

The IDF also recognized, lately, an extension of that: the enemy exists in one of two states: pursuer or pursued…if terrorists are running for their lives, they can’t make plans to take ours.

Indeed, true proportionality is to respond so destructively and decisively that the enemy cannot attack again for some long years, and to respond so overwhelmingly that the decision is reached in short order. That’s what minimizes friendly casualties in the mid- and longer-term, and it reduces over the same time frame unnecessary casualties among the enemy’s civilian population. These two outcomes are what makes true proportionality not just sound doctrine, but the more moral one as well.

No They Don’t

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I’ll be brief.

The lede lays out the question.

Companies say President Trump’s climate overhaul makes it tough to frame their future emissions plans and prepare for what they see as inevitable environmental restrictions—particularly as their goals extend beyond the president’s term.

No, they don’t.

Quit planning their future emissions. Quit distorting business decisions away from simple economics and away from what’s optimal for the business’ owners—the shareholders.

Easy peasy, once business managers get up out of their deep defensive crouches and stop cowering in front of climate funding industry pushers.

The hard work, while remaining straightforward, is to engage those duck and cover energies and their existing lobbying budgets to getting the current Congress to codify in statute those Trump moves. Therein lies business planning stability and lower costs for business’ customers.

But What Has UCLA Done Concretely?

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UCLA’s Chancellor Julio Frenk protested that his school has done much to combat antisemitism in his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section. He even piously cloaked himself in his extended family’s history of flight from Nazi Germany and holocaust survival.

Among other actions, we have recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, established an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism with dedicated resources, reorganized our Office of Civil Rights, and appointed a Title VI/Title VII officer. We have strengthened our time, place, and manner policies to safeguard both free expression and campus operations. We are also supporting and partnering with community organizations engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

These, though, are merely steps that set up John Cleese-esque argument clinics.

What has the good Chancellor or his staff done to rid the school of its recalcitrant antisemitic bigots, whether employee or pupil? What has he done, personally, to address directly any of these bigots? What has any member of his staff done to address them directly?

Selected Results from Texas’ Primary Elections

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Via NPR, with 93% or more of the votes counted:

Texas Governor primary: 12,800 more Progressive-Democrats voted than Republicans

Senate: 110,518 more Progressive-Democrats

Via NBC News, with more than 91% of the votes counted:

Attorney General: 19,588 more Republicans than Progressive-Democrats

I have little information concerning how these results compare with the history of Texas primaries. These differences strike me as small—0.6% of the total vote in the Governor races, 2.5% in the Senate race, and 0.5% in the AG race.

For comparison, though, putting the current results into a measure of context, here are the 2022 primary results, via The Texas Tribune. Neither Texas Senate seat was up for election:

Governor: 841,244 more Republicans voted than did Progressive-Democrat voters, a difference of some 29% of the total vote.

Attorney General: 907,758 more Republicans voted, a difference of some 31%.

While more Republicans voted in the 2026 primaries, the large swing in those differences—30 percentage points—is from a doubling of Progressive-Democrat voter turnout in 2026 over 2022.

Republicans need to take this to heart and work hard, not only on getting the voters out to the polls, but especially on giving them a reason to come out. Republicans need to get out of their comfy offices and talk directly to their constituents, in person, as well as in local radio and television interviews and op-eds in their local news papers, addressing in specific, concrete terms, measurable by their constituents, what the candidates will do (not just what they have done) to make those voters’ lives better at the gas pump, with their utility bills, at the grocery stores—focusing here on what they actually eat, not some mythical basket of food—and on mortgage, rent, and house insurance costs.

If they don’t do that, Texas will turn blue. And that will be a disaster for our State and for our republic.