Category Archives: culture

Right Idea, Wrong Target

Posted on by
Reply

Charlottesville, VA, Mayor Mike Signer (D):

I’m not going to make any bones about it.  I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president.

True enough; that is where last weekend’s sorry events began.  The identity politics of the last eight years by the White House of ex-President Barack Obama (D) and by his mentee, Democratic Party White House hopeful Hillary Clinton, and those associated with the two created the conditions that caused the rioting in Charlottesville last Friday and Saturday.

After all, those who disagreed with Obama were unpatriotic, were terrorists, were hostage takers, were racists.  Those who weren’t in that White House’s chosen groups were contemptuously dismissed as Bible-clinging, gun-toting residents of flyover country.  Those who disagreed with the policies of the Democrats’ favored groups were slandered as irredeemably deplorable racists (repeatedly racist), homophobes, Islamophobes, any _phobe Democrats could think of.

The police were stupid when they weren’t being racist—never mind any of the facts of the situations.  The Left gleefully calling Tea Partiers “teabaggers.”  Democratic Congressmen, on the Capital Building steps in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage, falsely claiming racist slurs coming from the protestors that greeted them on those steps.

Signer needs to check his sight picture.

Bullies

Posted on by
Reply

Recall how Google, last week, outed a Conservative employee and his critique of Google personnel practices, then bullied him with public opprobrium, then fired him.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was going to have an all-hands town hall this week to address the matter, but then, after employees expressed concerns

about their safety and worried they may be “outed” publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall[,]

he cancelled the whole affair.  The company put the original teapot tempest into the public’s eye, but when allegedly faced with the same outcome for themselves, they skittered back into their baseboard holes in the walls.

Aside from the breathtaking hypocrisy of this sorry charade, this illustrates an old maxim: bullies are cowards, and Google management and Google’s Precious Ones employees are just the same.

Way to Go, Google

Posted on by
2

Recall the now ex-employee who wrote a lengthy and thought-out memo for internal distribution via one of what Google is pleased to call its open communication channels. A summary of the ex-employee’s case is in the Sunday Wall Street Journal; my comments on the situation, based on that summary, are below.

…critics saying the company squelched free speech by firing a male employee who wrote a divisive memo denouncing its diversity push, while others said his views showed that the company’s diversity policies were needed.

Both the critics and “others” are right: the incident clearly demonstrates need for open debate and discussion, not the need to suppress discussion and debate by firing the one who raised the question.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said…to suggest “colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”

Commenters here, in the WSJ comment thread, and elsewhere can offer data on either side of that claim. Pichai’s decision to provide none is beyond arrogant; it’s dishonest.  As is Danielle Brown’s decision to speak solely ex Cathedra ab umbilico in her responding memo, similarly without the first minim of actual data.  We’re just supposed to accept the bald statements of these august personages.

Indeed, here’s a Google spokesman responding to a WSJ request for comment/elaboration:

He violated our Code of Conduct, period.

Not gonna discuss it. Sit down, and shut up.

As an aside, there is this much in the WSJ piece [emphasis added]:

…[the ex-employee] wrote that biological differences explain some of the gap between male and female tech workers….

Indeed. The more mendacious NLMSM is carefully omitting that qualifier.

The memo can be seen on Gizmodo here, along with Google’s vapid response.

What a way to go, indeed.

Gun Control

Posted on by
1

A bill is making progress in Congress that would allow concealed carry license holders, whose license was issued in one State (their State of residence) to concealed carry their weapons in all States: the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.  The bill also would require such a carrier to abide by the laws of the State they’re visiting, including all of that State’s gun-free zone designations.  In this way, the reciprocity law is similar to drivers license reciprocity, under which it’s legal to drive in any State so long as the driver both is licensed in his home State and obeys the driving laws of the State he’s visiting.

Naturally, the bill has lots of resistance in the coastal States and cities—jurisdictions run by Progressive-Democrats.  The California Police Chiefs Association President Edward Medrano, for instance, has these objections:

The bill would erode local control of issuing concealed carry permits, as the arbitrariness of the issuing authority rules would reduce the requirements for concealed carry to the lowest common denominator.  Further, the lack of a national database for concealed carry permits makes it functionally impossible for a law enforcement officer in the field to determine the legal compliance of an individual carrying a concealed firearm.

Both of these objections are disingenuous.  The requirement for concealed carry is quite simple, and it’s laid out clearly in the 2nd Amendment [emphasis added]:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The “lowest common denominator” objection also illustrates the utter illogic of Medrano’s objection.  It is the multiply varied local jurisdiction rules that are arbitrary.  The lowest common denominator standard, accepting that characterization arguendo, would be easily understood and widely so, since it would not at all be arbitrarily varying.  Too, a required reciprocity like that in the Act, would put the onus for keeping up with local jurisdiction variability and arbitrariness where it belongs: on the individual and not on the government’s men.

Beyond that, no national database of concealed carry permits is needed.  Most States issue concealed carry licenses and require the license holder to have that license in his possession at all times—just like his drivers license.  A few States don’t require licenses to carry concealed, but those States are easily identified—by the drivers license the holder still must have with him at all times.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (OK, an interior mayor, but a Progressive-Democratic Party one nonetheless) argue that the reciprocity act would

essentially force the localities to give full faith and credit to permits that are issued on less rigorous grounds [and] remove local governments’ ability to maintain sensible gun standards.

Because full faith and credit is a terrible thing.  We’ve also seen what Progressive-Democrat “sensible gun standards” amount to: a citizen having to show to a government official’s satisfaction that a need to carry exists.  The Supreme Court has already ruled on the illegality of that arrogant nonsense.

Progressive-Democrats like New York’s District Attorney Cy Vance is even arguing that reciprocity would give Daesh terrorists (and other terrorists, presumably) a leg up.  This is just a cynically offered red herring of a scare tactic.  Guys like Vance carefully ignore the fact that the leg up is that of an armed citizen or group of us confronted with an already armed terrorist.

The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act needs to go through without any delay.

Human Gene-Splicing

Posted on by
Reply

Some scientists have successfully spliced some genes into a human embryo to correct a mutation that causes heart disease, proving the possibilities open to us and our health (and potentially eliminating health coverage provision as a Progressive-Democrat tool of welfare entrapment [/snark]).

Experts noted that the newly successful process could cure more than 10,000 genetic diseases, including some types of cancer and early-onset Alzheimer’s, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis.

“We have to be very delicate with how we use this because it’s very, very powerful,” Alice Benjamin, a clinical nurse specialist said on Fox & Friends.

There is a legitimately strong concern with the ethics of this, concerning both the matter of messing with human genetics and upsetting the “natural order to things.”  Benjamin went on to express the latter concern, but as a matter of caution not of objection.

It’s certainly true that caution is needed and a clearly laid out set of guidelines for getting down into human genetics to correct this or that item needs to be developed, along with a clearly laid out set of sanctions for violating those guidelines.

However, we’ve been messing with nature and upsetting the natural order of things ever since we went pastoral and agrarian and started selectively breeding our food animals and plants, deliberating selecting animal offspring and plant seeds for the favorable characteristics of their parents in order to enhance those characteristics in succeeding generations.

In addition to that caution regarding manipulating human genes, though, we also need to consider the ethics of withholding the ability to correct serious genetic defects and meekly allowing the baby to grow, sort of, with a serious disease, or like Charlie Gard, simply leaving the baby to die.

Genetic manipulation moves much more rapidly than selective breeding, and that’s the basis for caution.  Genetic manipulation as messing with nature or upsetting the natural order is what we’ve been doing for the last 8,000-10,000 years, though.