Author Archives: eehines

Progressive-Democratic Party and Religious Freedom

Posted on by
Reply

Consider the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a 42-bed nursing facility in New York that gives free palliative care to poor people with cancer. The State of New York is trying to force this Catholic institution to deliberately violate their religious beliefs. The New York State Department of Health requires the Sisters to begin

  • assigning patients to rooms by self-identified sex
  • [stop] segregating restrooms by biological sex
  • use…patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present
  • allow patients to cross-dress

The Department is threatening the Sisters with fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they do not repudiate their religious beliefs and commit these egregious to them acts.

The Sisters have applied for a religious exemption, and the State has ignored their application.

The Sisters are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg. This is Party’s attitude toward the 1st Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Party already badly wants to disarm us and deny us our right to speak as we see fit. Now we’re to have no conscience, as well.

Misreading

Posted on by
Reply

In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.

Regulating Reputational Risk

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrat ex-Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used their banking regulators to “encourage” banks to do no businesses that might inflict “reputational risk” on the bank’s soundness and to end existing business relationships with such enities. Those reputation-damaging businesses—according to those administration men—centered on such Nasties as payday lenders, gun retailers, and crypto.

By focusing on reputation risk, supervisors attempt to understand and anticipate public opinion regarding issues and events and then to attempt to directly connect this public opinion regarding issues and events to an institution’s condition in ways that have proven nearly impossible to assess or quantify with accuracy[.]

Those are the words of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Comptroller of the Currency bosses as they work on a rule that would bar regulators from “reputational risk” evaluations. If regulators can’t quantify what it is they want to regulate, they have no business trying to regulate it—that’s on top of regulators need to be limiting on their regulatory activities in the first place.

Reputational risk assessments in particular are entirely subjective, and that just excuses and enables administrations of whatever stripe to regulate out of business any enterprise of which the regulators or their political bosses disapprove.

The market is fully capable of assessing reputational risk, and it should be left free to do so without government “assistance.”

That’s One Spin

Posted on by
Reply

The DC Circuit Court has denied Anthropic’s appeal of a DoD decision to cut the company out of Defense contracts as a security risk to Defense supply chains. Meanwhile a Northern District of California Federal court judge has upheld Anthropic’s appeal on free speech grounds. This, of course, creates a split of sorts that, ultimately, the Supreme Court will need to resolve, unless the 9th Circuit overrules the District judge wih a ruling that substantially aligns with the DC Circuit.

What’s interesting, though, is Computer & Communications Industry Association CEO Matt Schruers’ characterization of the split.

The DC Circuit’s denial will prolong ambiguities regarding whether political considerations can drive federal procurement[.]

This is Schruers’ conclusory characterization centered on his preferred outcome. It couldn’t possibly be the California district judge’s ruling that is prolonging ambiguities.

The Strait and Victory

Posted on by
Reply

There is a two week cease fire more or less in progress in the US-Iran portion of the US/Israeli war against Iran, one that is subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has not done so.

On Wednesday [after the cease fire nominally went into effect], Iran told mediators that it would limit the number of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz to around a dozen a day and charge tolls. The Iranian navy also told ships anchored nearby that they still needed Iran’s permission to cross the strait. “If any vessel tries to transit without permission, [it] will be destroyed,” according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The White House is insisting that what the Iranian personnel say in public is radically different from what they’re saying in private. Either way, though, those are just words. Actions matter, and so far those actions include a lack of tanker and cargo ship movement through the strait beyond a few that have paid as much as $2 million in protection money to the Iranians. That’s not a COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING.

Meanwhile, Iran is attempting after the fact to alter the terms of the cease fire to include Lebanon and Israel’s campaign against the Iranian terrorist surrogate Hezbollah. That that’s a separate matter is unimportant to Iran as its personnel, once again, welch on an agreement, tap things along, and stall, stall, stall.

That Iran’s military capacity has been devastated is true enough.

…strikes destroyed roughly 80% of Iran’s air defenses, more than 1,500 targets, as well as more than 450 ballistic missile storage facilities and 800 one-way attack drone storage facilities. The operation has also decimated Iran’s defense industrial base, Caine said, including shattering more than 80% of its missile factories.

But those numbers are just the modern body count, and they’re just as meaningless without context. How do those losses compare with what Iran started with? How many of those missiles, rockets, drones, and launch systems does it have left? How many of those small boats? How much of its industrial base is left?

The current situation seems similar to that of the Rome-Carthage wars, particularly the second one. From Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of Carthage:

Despite their appalling losses, the string of humiliating defeats, the defections of some Italian allies, and the continuing malevolent presence of Hannibal’s army in Italy, the Romans simply refused to come to terms with the Carthaginians…. They were then able to beat the enemy on every other front and force the undefeated Hannibal to evacuate Italy…. The Carthaginians expected a war to end in a negotiated peace. The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation, something which no contemporary state had the resources to achieve.

We’re not dead yet, say the Iranian negotiators, so we haven’t lost.

It’s time for them to die.