Category Archives: morality

The Syria Strike

Posted on by
Reply

One point regarding President Donald Trump’s missile strike against Syria’s Shayrat airbase, from which the barbarian chieftain Bashar al-Assad launched his gas attacks against his own citizenry—including children and babies—is often missed, but Richard Fernandez did not.

[T]he Navy’s missiles very carefully avoided the tanks of sarin gas to avoid collateral damage. This could only be possible if the US knew the location of all the poison the previous administration had already destroyed.

While a single incident doesn’t create a trend (as a stat professor I once had put it, “If your hypothesis calls for a linear trend, collect two data points”), the absence of an administration willing to do more against barbarism than tut-tutting and finger-shaking seems to be getting filled in.

But wait—there’s more.  The Navy very carefully avoided targeting the air base barracks housing Russian soldiers, also.  Which means this administration also knew another thing that the prior administration must have known as well: there were Russian soldiers present on that base that housed the chemical weapons and which facilities armed and launched the aircraft that used those chemical weapons against those children and babies.

The Russians knew of and were complicit in the continued presence of Syria’s chemical weapons and al-Assad’s use of them.  As our UN Ambassador Nikki Haley mentioned.

The Gulag

Posted on by
Reply

…is back and in full force in Russian-occupied Crimea.  Russian dissidents—Tatars, this time—are being “diagnosed” as insane and locked away in “psychiatric” hospitals.

Since the annexation of the region three years ago many ethnic Tatar activists who oppose the occupation have been arrested and subjected to abuse and imprisonment in outdated mental institutions, said Robert van Voren, a Dutch human rights activist and political scientist.

“The number of cases has increased considerably over the past few years, in particular against Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian activists who oppose Russia’s annexation,” he added.

Just as in the Soviet Russian gulag, conditions are appalling and along with Russian treatment of the “inmates” are intended to retrain them to ways of which Russia approves.  Emil Kurbedinov, a Crimean civil rights lawyer focusing on Tatar civil rights and himself locked up for 10 days, had this:

Some are placed in isolation and are denied their basic needs, such as access to a toilet. Others are housed with multiple people suffering from severe mental health conditions.

The activists are interrogated about their alleged involvement in “extremism” and their views of the government. They are also deprived of the right to speak with their family, or meet their lawyer on a one-to-one basis without a guard being present.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Who’s Trying to Bully?

Posted on by
Reply

Tom Perez, the new Democratic National Committee Chairman, which makes him the functional head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, has gone hysterical over his party’s loss of the Presidential election five months ago (see, especially, the opening of the video at the link to get the full flavor of his irrationality).

Donald Trump, you don’t stand for our values. You didn’t win this election[.]

Aside from the utter denial of facts about who won the election, it is true that Donald Trump doesn’t stand for DNC values, which center on their fundamental belief that

the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

That, after all, is what Hillary Clinton was saying when she said millions of Americans were irredeemable and deplorable.  That is what Barack Obama said when he dismissed millions of Americans as nothing more than bitter Bible-clinging, gun-toting denizens of flyover country.

No, Donald Trump’s values are much closer to American values than they are to Progressive-Democrat values.

And this bit:

We have a bully in Washington in the White House[.]

Actually, no.  The bully wannabe has left the building.  Wannabe because a bully can’t succeed without the willing acquiescence of his intended victim—bullies being, fundamentally, cowards, after all.  And too many Americans refused to be cowed by Obama’s threats and slurs.

When Perez isn’t being hysterical, he’s merely projecting.

Continued Veterans Administration Failure

Posted on by
Reply

Dr Dale Klein is, formally, on the Veterans Administration payroll—to the tune of a $250,000/yr salary—but he’s not employed by them, and so his pain management skills are actively denied our veterans who would benefit from them.  Klein blew the whistle on his proximate employer’s—Southeast Missouri John J Pershing VA facility—secret waiting lists and wait time manipulation practices.  Now he’s shunned by his employers and banished to a room by himself where he’s denied access to his patients and patients are denied access to him.

VA management is continuing to refuse to clean up its act, preferring to serve their employed bureaucrats rather than, and at the direct expense of our veterans.  This has to stop, and the only way is to disband VA and commit its budget—all of it, including overhead—to vouchers for our veterans with which they can see doctors, clinics, and hospitals of their choice.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

“Our Federal Dollars”

Posted on by
Reply

It doesn’t get any clearer than this.  Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has illustrated the addictive nature of Federal funds transfers to the States and lower government jurisdictions with that phrase.

In defending his city’s lawsuit against the Federal government over DoJ’s decision to withhold Federal monies from cities that violate Federal law by protecting illegal aliens from enforcement of immigration law, Murray said this:

The federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities.

Our federal dollars.  The dollars aren’t theirs.  Those dollars are Texas citizens’ money.  Those dollars are New York citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Illinois citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Oregon citizens’ money.  Those dollars are the money of the citizens of every State and territory in the nation, including Washington.  Those dollars are money transferred from all those other citizens around the nation.

This is what such transfers lead to: the powerful addiction of a sense of entitlement to other people’s money and the loss of any sense of responsibility for a jurisdiction’s own money.