Category Archives: culture

This Move Suits Me

Posted on by
Reply

Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler and his City Council are upset with Texas and our heartbeat law.

Portland City Council is to consider an emergency resolution this week to ban future travel, goods and services from the state of Texas in protest of the state’s new abortion law.
In statement released Friday, Mayor Ted Wheeler said City Council will hold a vote on the resolution on Wednesday, Sept 8, with the intent to ban Portland’s “future procurement of goods and services from, and City employee business travel to, the state of Texas.”

That works for me. Wheeler, acting as both Mayor and Police Commissioner, has actively condoned the rioting, looting, and arson that’s been going on in his city for more than a year, and he’s actively prevented his police force from protecting Federal property. He’s even, just recently, allowed a riotous clash between antifa and a far right group to continue to the point of gunfire by requiring his police to not interfere.

Portland’s City Council is working assiduously to defund the police altogether.

With the exception of those police themselves and the city’s other emergency responders, the city’s employees have shown themselves unfit for decent company. They’ll not be missed here.

How Far

Posted on by
Reply

…has Australia fallen. The once proudly free nation is stooping to this.

The government of South Australia has implemented a new policy requiring Australians to use an app with facial recognition software and geolocation to prove that they are abiding by a 14-day quarantine for travel within the country.

It’s just one state in the nation, but Australia’s central government, with its silence on this move, seems not far behind. Neither will this Big Government Overwatch be limited to quarantine from the Wuhan Virus.

This is a government surveillance regime that would make the Communist Party of China blush.

“A Retreat on Racial Preferences”

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the headline on a Tuesday editorial in The Wall Street Journal. The Editors opened with

The Biden Administration has been losing in court on its racially biased policies, and last week something remarkable happened. It gave up. Without explanation, the Justice Department declined to appeal a federal court injunction against a discriminatory loan-forgiveness program for farmers.

The decision not to defend appears to be widespread.

More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging the USDA’s racial preferences, and three so far have resulted in preliminary injunctions by district courts in Florida, Wisconsin and Texas. Justice failed to appeal the Florida injunction before its 60-day deadline last week and hasn’t contested the others.

But maybe not. This collection of decisions only concerns the Ag Department, not other parts of the Biden-Harris (it’s Biden’s demand, after all, that the administration be termed Biden-Harris) Executive Branch.

Without explanation—without public explanation, perhaps. Another explanation might be that, sotto voce, President Joe Biden (D) and his co-President (co-Vice President?), Kamala Harris (D), fear that their Executive Branch’s racism is getting to be too obvious to too many average Americans.

It’s no retreat, actually, nor even a retrograde, but only a misdirection. This administration continues to push racist policies in Defense, with its critical race “theory” spew; in Justice, with its push for “diversity” for diversity’s sake; in Education, with its push to have critical race “theory” and its parallel and misnomered “anti-racism” taught in K-12.

Thought Police

Posted on by
Reply

They’re metastasizing into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a guide to “inclusive language” in order to promote “health equity” and “inclusive communication.”

For instance, their “Corrections & Detentions” section “suggests”

replacing terms such as “Inmate,” “Prisoner,” “Convict/ex-convict,” and “Criminal” with terms such as “People/persons,” “Persons in pre-trial or with charge,” “Persons on parole or probation,” or “People in immigration detention facilities.”

The problem with euphemisms, though, is that they mean precisely the same as the word they’re intended to replace. Persons on parole or probation still are criminals. That’s the status of folks on parole or probation—they’re still criminals, felons, until they complete their sentences. People in immigration detention facilities remain illegal aliens—that’s why they’re being detained.

The substitutes may soften the language in a misguided attempt to disguise or obfuscate the facts, but that’s only a temporary condition, and the frankness of the underlying meaning ultimately (and quickly) comes through. That’s why there’s a constant search for euphemisms.

The problem with government agents—the men and women who populate government agencies—being the ones pushing for euphemisms is that their push becomes mandates, and government mandates are nothing more than restrictions on free speech, limits on one of our most basic individual liberties. When government agents presume to dictate how we must term concepts, they’re dictating how we must think about them.

Even the worthies in government know that. Which is maybe why they’re making their push.

Maybe It’s Time

Posted on by
Reply

Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston had this on the importance of “diversity and inclusion” relative to combat capability:

Diversity is a number—do you have people that don’t look or think like you in the room? Inclusion is listening and valuing those people[.]

Our army’s Training and Doctrine Command, via its official twitter account had this:

Inclusion & Diversity is what makes our [U.S. Army] better.

No. What makes our army—our military establishment in general—is whether we have soldiers and formations of soldiers who are capable, in defense of our nation and when called of our friends and allies, of successfully engaging, pursuing, and killing our enemies’ soldiers, our enemies’ formations, our enemies’ capability of mounting further attacks.

That’s also who we should see “in the room.” And no one else. Diversity will fall out of that, if we do a proper job of training for combat, rather than for political correctness. Every combat or combat support training graduate will be included—and that’s the inclusiveness that we need.

Our current military management’s (we seem to have a serious lack of leadership) emphasis on “diversity and inclusion” for their own sake, as epitomized by Grinston, is divisive, it’s stinking racism and sexism.

Grinston had the…political correctness…to make his claim against the backdrop of the travesty exploding in Afghanistan. About that contrast, Marine veteran Jessie Jane Duff is on the right track [emphasis hers].

This is what matters: 11 Marines and one Navy Corpsman killed. Americans.
I’m positive they didn’t look or think like you, Sergeant Major. Every flag drapped coffin looks the same.
We have an #AfghanistanCrisis and this is your tweet. Shameful.

Maybe it’s time to clear out the foolish and the idiotic who choose not to understand what it takes to have an effective military. Maybe it’s time to discharge or retire our military managers, from the Secretary of Defense and JCS Chief on down through most of the flag and GS equivalents in the Pentagon.