Category Archives: culture

Another Question

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…for President Joe Biden. The President has been decidedly slow to comment on the People’s Republic of China government’s treatment of the country’s Uighur population.

Biden, who vowed to be tough on China while on the campaign trail, has been careful not to classify the human rights abuses against the Uighurs since entering office. The Trump administration declared the actions by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as genocide one day before vacating the White House.
The president didn’t mention China’s human rights abuses during a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Tuesday. He said that the US and Canada are coordinating “approaches to better compete with China and to counter threats to our interests and values.”

So, Joe—can I call ya Joe?—is the PRC government committing genocide against the Uighurs? Is the PRC government at all mistreating the Uighurs?

We’ll wait for your answer, Joe.

But the Uighurs can’t.

Anti-Nobel Prize

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Frank Wilczek, himself a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, wants one, not for himself in particular, but for seemingly brilliant work that doesn’t work out.

For instance:

In the heady days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, many physicists—including me—thought they were on the cusp of achieving a unified theory of the fundamental forces. A striking prediction to emerge from this circle of ideas is that protons are unstable and will eventually decay, just as many radioactive nuclei do. It was widely hoped that experimenters would find ways to verify the prediction.
Sure enough, they did. Unfortunately, subsequent work revealed that the claimed observations of proton decay could not be correct, though the nature of the experiments’ flaws was never clarified completely. This story is not unique: In recent years a number of exotic physical phenomena—including magnetic monopoles, cosmological dark matter, axions and supersymmetric particles—have reportedly been detected, only for later, more sensitive experiments to come up empty.

Wilczek’s concept would work like this:

An anti-Nobel would be awarded for incorrect work that, had it been correct, would have merited a Nobel Prize. It would be awarded secretly, so no one need be embarrassed. The anti-Nobel prize would only come into play if the recipient did subsequent Prize-worthy work, in which case, the two would cancel each other out.

Cancel each other like matter-antimatter collisions.

We have, however, a similar prize already extant. It doesn’t directly address work that would be Nobel-worthy but for its failure, but it gets at the concept.

That prize is the Ig Noble Prize, awarded for work that gets its accolade from the monumental foolishness of the work.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals. This one, in Australia, illustrates another failure of those secondary schools that are trapped in the gaols of the Woke Left.

Australian National University have a new Gender-Inclusive Handbook out—fortunately not authoritative, only “advisory,”—giving “guidance” on the correct terms professors should use.

A couple examples:

  • not “mother,” but “gestational parent”
  • not “father,” but “non-birthing parent”
  • not “breastfeeding,” but “breast/chest feeding”
  • not “mother’s milk,” but “human/parent’s milk”

After all, according to a Lauren Dinour bit of…research…

heterosexual and woman-focused lactation language…can misgender, isolate, and harm transmasculine parents and non-heteronormative families.

Right.

I have a question. What if the father identifies as the mother?

OK, two questions. Why is the handbook only in English? There are five Asian and Middle eastern languages spoken in Australia, and over 250 indigenous Australian languages spoken there. I thought they were serious about inclusivity.

“My Word as a Biden”

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That was then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s go-to phrase whenever he wanted to emphasize his seriousness in making a claim.

Here’s one of those serious statements:

If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise I will fire you on the spot. On the spot, no ifs, ands, or buts[.]

When White House Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo was abusive to a Politico reporter, he was suspended for a week without pay and barred from interacting with Politico reporters.

That’s an example of the worthlessness of the now-President’s word as a Biden.

Unless he’s going to stand on the technicality that he didn’t personally hear Ducklo’s abuse, or that Ducklo wasn’t directly working with him at the time of Ducklo’s abuse.

In which case that quibble would be a separate demonstration of the worthlessness of the now-President’s word as a Biden.

In the end, Ducklo was allowed to resign and slink away. Biden, choosing not to fire him, has pretty conclusively shown the worthlessness of his word as a Biden.

Too Far

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) has reintroduced his Terror Intelligence Improvement Act, his bill to allow Government to block suspected terrorists from obtaining firearms. This bill, far from improving anything, is a long step back from our rights under our Constitution. As Dana Loesch summarized it in her newsletter (behind a paywall after this month; subscribe now for a discount on her subscription price),

The bill would also provide more authority for law enforcement agencies to go after suspected terrorists, while safeguarding law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment and due process rights.

But, as Loesch goes on to point out, that’s internally contradictory. It’s simply not possible to restrict American citizens’ rights while protecting those same American citizens’ rights. A suspect is just that—a suspect, and so still innocent, regardless of suspicion.

Then, however, Loesch makes her own mistake.

If lawmakers want to stop suspected terrorists placed on a watch list from buying firearms they need to indict them.
I have no problem with this.

I do have a problem with that. All a prosecutor has done with an indictment is convince a secret group of men and women that he has probable enough cause to hale the indictee—possibly an infamous ham sandwich—into criminal court for trial.

The indictee still is innocent; he hasn’t been proven otherwise in that criminal court.

It’s true enough that we do restrict innocent men—we lock them up; we make them wear ankle bracelets; we make them pay a significant something of value to be released, under restrictive conditions, from jail pending trial; and so on.

But those restrictions are done in open court where the prosecutor must convince the judge that his proposed restrictions are warranted, and he must do so in the face of the defendant’s right to answer the proposed restrictions.

Simple indictment isn’t enough. If the suspected terrorist must be denied his 2nd Amendment rights (in the present context), let the prosecutor show in open court that his suspicion is well enough founded that his suspect should be locked up.

As a practical matter, too, that’s the only way to deny such a suspect firearms—outside of jail, there simply are too many means of access to firearms, legal or not.

Beyond that, there’s another, better, way to protect us from terrorists, whether those persons are armed or not. That is for Government to get out of the way of the first responders to any situation—us citizens who happen to be already on scene when the action goes down—carrying our own firearms.