Category Archives: culture

The Opposite of Courage

Posted on by
Reply

In a Just the News article centered on George Washington University Law Professor, and holder of the university’s Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, Jonathan Turley’s view that four Border Patrol agents have defamation and denial of due process cases (the four agents face administrative punishments even though the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found they’d done nothing wrong), JtN quoted National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd as saying,

…the president of the United States said that these individuals would pay, and the moment he said that, those investigators had no choice but to find some sort of fault—whether it was criminal or administrative.

On that I must disagree. There’s no doubt the “investigators” might have felt pressure to find a fault, but they also without doubt were not forced to do so. The most pressure that could have been applied would have been to cancel their jobs.

It would have taken a measure of courage to resist the pressure. Choosing their jobs, assuming such a threat was made or implied, over doing the right thing, however, took no courage.

In choosing between doing a right thing and doing a wrong thing, the opposite of courage is cowardice.

A Thought on Money-Follow-the-Child Programs

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters had one.

Quoting Toni Jennings, retired teacher and former Florida Lieutenant Governor, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute CEO, wrote

The more competition we had in education, the better off we became. So, I for one believe that competition is good. But you will hear those who say, “Oh no, you’re making the public schools compete with others.” Well, those children are going to have to go out and compete with others in the workaday world.

Absolutely, and those public schools are not only failing those children, they’re defrauding those children’s parents, whose tax money is paying for those schools.

Here’s another thought, this one from me, flowing from this bit in Trabert’s letter:

The 2021 ACT results show that 31% of white students are college-ready in English, reading, math, and science, while only 14% of Hispanic students and 6% of black students met that standard. Achievement gaps are getting worse….

Even if that achievement gap didn’t exist, and those minority children also were at that 31% rate, the rate is unacceptably bad and illustrates the magnitude of the failure of our public schools.

We need vastly more competition in our K-12 system, not less, in order to both eliminate that achievement gap and to bring the college-ready rate up to acceptable levels. That means the Federal government must butt out of the business [sic] or be butted out by the States rejecting Federal funds; it means that State and local education funding must follow the child not the institution; and it means that State and local jurisdictions must stop, or be stopped from, using their regulatory powers to obstruct the opening of charter and voucher schools or of the nascent homeschooling pod alternative.

What Apology?

Posted on by
Reply

First Lady and Edith Bolling President of the United States, Jill Biden, likened Hispanics to (breakfast) tacos. When I was growing up, that was an extremely serious and ugly ethnic slur, and I don’t think it’s gotten any gentler since.

In response to the hue and cry about the slur—and not before, mind you—Biden is being reported by the New York Post as apologizing for her insult.

But Biden isn’t apologizing, actually. Instead, her Press Secretary, Michael LaRosa, tweeted some words in her name:

The First Lady apologizes that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community[.]

The First Bigot doesn’t even have the courage, much less the morality, to “apologize” herself, choosing instead to cower behind another.

Regarding “apology” in those euphemism quotes: it’s not even an apology. The surrogate mumbled apologies for the outcome of Biden’s bigotry—words conveyed anything but—but there’s not a syllable of apology for Biden’s bigotry. Not even from the man she was ducking down behind.

This is disgusting.

No Quick Fixes

Posted on by
Reply

Some of you may have noticed that the “media industry”—newspapers and broadcast/cable news outlets—is losing credibility.

Only 16% of Americans said they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 2022, a 5% drop [or maybe, a 5 per centage point drop] compared to the 2021 findings, according to Gallup. It was the lowest number to give those answers since Gallup started asking about newspapers in 1973.
Television news has Americans even more concerned in 2022, as a dismal 11% told Gallup they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in the industry. This is down 5% […] from the 16% who were confident in TV news last year, a record-low total.

Joe Concha on the matter:

They can improve the situation by not injecting so much opinion into what should be straight reporting. And also by not automatically and blatantly taking a side on big issues such as the recent abortion ruling, or serving at the pleasure of one major political party like we saw by calling Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Instead, you might see some trust resorted, but it’s a hard bell to unring

Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor, a global news company that is expected to launch later this year:

We’re hoping that a commitment to transparency and openness to a range of views can help close that gap over time[.]

Hope isn’t much of a solution, here, not when it’s too late even for Concha’s solution: the same crop of dishonest journalists and media outlet editors and publishers would still be in place.

No, the required solution must include—must begin with—a significant fraction, a strong majority, of journalists must be terminated, and all of the media outlet managers and their deputies, and and all of the editors and their deputies, must be terminated, their ties to media “news” outlets completely severed. These are the ones proximately responsible for the distortions and outright lies they write, the editorial decisions they make to publish those stories and to minimize others or to spike them altogether. These are the ones that engage in rewriting their past stories rather than leaving them intact and publishing corrections to them. The incumbents can never be trusted, no matter the bodice-ripping mea culpas that might spill from their lips or pens.

It will take a considerable amount of time to accomplish—the firings needn’t take any time at all, but finding replacements—both capable of reporting and honest enough to do it objectively will take time.

Red Flag Laws

Posted on by
Reply

Apart from their unconstitutionality—they ignore due process, equal protection, and privileges or immunities that are central tenets of our Constitution and of what it means to be an American—these laws don’t work on a petty practical level, either.

Illustrative of that are the mass shooting in Buffalo and especially the one on Independence Day in Highland Park.

In the latter case, police even entered the shooter’s home in 2019 and seized knives, only to return them later that same day.

According to Lake County officials, police had visited Crimo’s home twice in 2019 after he threatened to kill himself and his family. Police said they recovered knives from the home but no guns.
But, authorities pointed out, he responded no when asked if he felt like harming himself or others, and his father said the knives were his and were being stored in his son’s closet for safekeeping. Based on that information, the Highland Park police returned the knives to the father the same day.

Following that, at the end of 2019,

Crimo applied for a FOID [Firearms Owner Identification] card, according to the state police. Because he was under 21, the application had to be sponsored by a parent or guardian, according to state law.
“The application was sponsored by the subject’s father,” the agency said.
In January 2020, “There was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger to deny the FOID application” and Crimo was given a card, according to the state police.

Then,

Crimo passed four separate background checks to buy guns on June 9, 2020, July 18, 2020, July 31, 2020 and Sept. 20, 2021, the state police said.

Pushing for Red Flag laws is frivolous, nothing other than cynical virtue-signaling, and it’s a waste of taxpayer money for the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and too many Republican Party politicians to push them in government legislatures.