Author Archives: eehines

Over-the-Beach Resupply

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We have a floating pier off the coast of the Gaza Strip which was intended to greatly increase the amount and pace of humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians during the ongoing Hamas war against Israel. It took weeks to get the components sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and then along the length of the Mediterranean Sea to that Gazan coast. Those weeks included delays enroute (and at the start) caused by equipment failure, both in some of the components and in the ships transporting the components.

Once assembled and in more-or-less operation, the volume of traffic was much lower than expected, and under heavy Med seas (heavy for the Med, the seas weren’t the raging high waves of the Atlantic), the pier broke apart with a section being pushed across the remaining gap between the end of the pier and the actual shore (a gap that exists by design) up onto the shore. A ship sent to catch the pier section before it grounded also wound up grounded in the shallow waters near the shore. It took some weeks to repair the damage and reopen the pier.

Now, in anticipation of further heavy seas, this pier has been preemptively dismantled.

This is the level of capability we have in our military to conduct post-forced landing resupply while our troops remain engaged, either still on/near the beach or farther inland? I hope not. I hope this floating pier is not typical of our ability conduct over-the-beach resupply, especially while under fire, but I’m not sanguine about it.

Journalist Complaining about Violation of Journalistic Ethics

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This is rich. Here’s David Brooks, complaining about a journalist penetrating a private gathering hosted by a historical society and attended by some Supreme Court Justices:

It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up.

I’ve addressed this concept of ethics in journalism—rather the lack of ethics in journalism—before. I’m addressing it again here, now that the highly esteemed (at least in some circles) Brooks has brought the matter up.

Today’s journalists news writers and opinion personalities think it’s jake to base their pieces entirely on “anonymous sources,” leaving readers and listeners no means of assessing for themselves the accuracy of the claims made or the credibility of the unidentified claimers.

Today’s news writers and opinion personalities think it entirely appropriate to treat their anonymous sources as though they actually exist, and subsequently that they are truthful solely because the writer and personality say so. Never mind that such a source, if it exists, is likely violating his terms of employment if not his oath of office by leaking, and so is empirically dishonest at the outset. Alternatively, an anonymous source, if it exists, is hiding behind anonymity out of cowardice, and cowards will always and only say what he believes will be personally beneficial with his leaks.

Some writers and personalities think it sufficient to address those points by claiming the source is a whistleblower. They consciously choose to not provide any evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues of objection before he chose to become a leaker. Again, we’re supposed to believe the writer/personality solely on the basis of his smiling face and congenial rhetoric.

Finally, and of overarching importance, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources.

Today’s writers and personalities have long since walked away from that standard. On top of that, today’s writers and personalities, and their Editors-in-Chief, refuse today to identify the standard of journalistic integrity they use in its stead.

“Journalistic ethics.” A canonical oxymoron.

One More Reason…

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The Environmental Protection Agency is turning more and more into a Progressive-Democratic Party agenda protection agency and less and less devoted to protecting our environment. Recall that the EPA has been busily using some of its Inflation Reduction Act funding allocation to fund an outfit backing anti-Israel protests. It turns out that the EPA is using another tranche of its IRA allocation to fund groups that oppose immigration enforcement. The EPA received $3 billion for Environmental and Climate Justice block grants.

Here’s what the EPA is doing with those dollars:

EPA tapped Fordham University as a grantmaker to distribute $50 million, in collaboration with the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) and the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ).

Aside from those agencies having nothing to do with climate, as the WSJ‘s editors note (I note, also, that climate is only peripherally related to the EPA’s environment DOC), the NYIC (at the least) sees its immigration role as one of defunding and getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This is just one more reason to abolish the EPA altogether and return its personnel, from Secretary on down to the janitors, to the private sector.

We do need an agency of some sort to protect the environment, but not this one, which is so badly damaged that it cannot be rehabilitated. The replacement needn’t be a huge and sprawling agency devoted to pseudo-science (atmospheric CO2 is more pollutant than plant food?), and so what’s used for the EPA’s budget needn’t be so monstrously huge, either. The difference could even be used to pay down some small part of the debt the Progressive-Democratic Party has been inflicting on our federal government.

Maybe…

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California has been getting plenty of rain for a couple of years—the State even has declared its drought over—and so reservoirs are nearly full and aquifers are refilling.

However.

…many farmers in Central Valley, America’s fruit and vegetable basket, will get just 40% of the federal water they are supposed to this year.
Why? Endangered fish.

The problem, to the extent it’s a legitimate problem (spoiler: it isn’t), is that those reservoirs and aquifers are in northern California, and the Central Valley…isn’t. That water must pass through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to get to the Central Valley. Fish swim in the Delta, though, including some that are on the Endangered Species Act’s lists.

California’s environmentalists have functional control over the Delta, and they insist that fish are more important than food.

And downstream fallout—here’s just one example:

The nonprofit Latino Equity, Advocacy & Policy is converting a former cantaloupe and asparagus plant into a center to teach new work skills.

Maybe California’s farmers should look hard at eschewing planting for one year; leave their fields, en masse, to lie fallow. Alternatively, look into leasing their farm fields for that year (or longer if the deal works well enough) to ranchers to graze their herds. Either of these would be good for the fields, too.

Let California’s environmentalistas and regulators live without California’s farm crops for an extended period of time.

The rest of us need to move to reclaim the US Bureau of Reclamation and get it back under control or entirely rescinded and its employees, top to bottom, returned to the private sector.

RFK Jr’s National Defense Plan

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Third party Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, now is promising to cut our national defense spending by 50% if he’s elected.

I will push for [a] 50% reduction in military expenditures in my first four years in office, with more cuts to come thereafter. A way to keep the dollar strong is to keep the country strong. We can do that by redirecting our bloated military budget toward infrastructure, education, and health, and building our economy and building small business.

Kennedy insists, instead, that the United States should

project strength through moral leadership and strong economics.

What would this Kennedy have us do, though, when our arming-up enemies—Russia, People’s Republic of China, Iran, among others—come with actual guns and bullets and destruction and killing. Does he expect our remaining armed forces to defend our nation by throwing copies of Aristotle’s Nicomachean or Eudemian Ethics at them? Or perhaps Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations? Maybe Summa Theologiae, the compendium of St Thomas Acquinas’ writings? All nine volumes—there’s some heavy artillery. Or something both older and more current, the Christian Bible, which contains—rapid fire, now—Judaism’s Torah.

How strong does Kennedy think our economy would be when moralizing in the face of bullets fails to persuade?

Does he really think our infrastructure, education, and health really will matter when they’re controlled by our conquerors? That our economy and small businesses will be for our benefit when they’re controlled by our conquerors? That our dollar will matter when the currency in effect is that of our conquerors?

Kennedy badly misunderstands the parable of the mouse and the owl: the mouse thinks the owl’s ways are wrong, while the owl thinks the mouse is lunch.