Category Archives: morality

A Pseudo-Seminarian Candidate for Texas Senator

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That would be the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico. (That he was a shoo-in for the Party’s nomination is only because his opponent in Party’s primary election was the Extremist and part-time racist Jasmine Crockett.)

Here’s an example of Talarico’s own Leftist extremism:

God is nonbinary[.]

On which he expanded:

“Most Texans understand that God is beyond gender. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Galatians,” Talarico said. If Republicans have an issue with that, he added, “they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.”

This Texan non-seminarian went to the tape, or rather to the King James Version of Paul’s letter as recounted in Galatians, to see what the Apostle actually wrote. Paul opened his letter with this:

Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)
And all the brethren which are with me, unto the churches of Galatia:
Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ,

God the Father—not once, but twice in those three paragraphs. Not God the Binary—or Nonbinary—or God the Transgender, or God the Gender Fluid, or…. God the Father, which is the male sex and one of the two human genders and sexes.

Paul had several additional references to God in his Letter, and every time he referenced God with a qualifier, it was universally God the Father.

It’s a mystery to me whence Talarico got his “nonbinary” characteristic. Except from the swamp of his mind.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

‘Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past?

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That’s the claim of an Israeli opinion reader, Amit Segal, of Israel’s Channel 12 News (Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge, at least, offer an English translation on initial linking). He doesn’t seem to understand proportionality in war, though.

For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion.

This isn’t proportionality, though; it’s just a history of tit-for-tat, and that does—and has done—nothing but run up friendly casualties. This has been amply demonstrated by Iran’s years of butchery and destruction of Israeli lives and property in the aftermath of Israel’s repeated tit-for-tat responses to each of those Iranian or Iranian-sponsored terrorist acts.

Proportionality is what the IDF has only lately figured out (and too many Leftist and Progressive-Democrat Americans still fail to understand): when you respond, overwhelm your foe.

The IDF also recognized, lately, an extension of that: the enemy exists in one of two states: pursuer or pursued…if terrorists are running for their lives, they can’t make plans to take ours.

Indeed, true proportionality is to respond so destructively and decisively that the enemy cannot attack again for some long years, and to respond so overwhelmingly that the decision is reached in short order. That’s what minimizes friendly casualties in the mid- and longer-term, and it reduces over the same time frame unnecessary casualties among the enemy’s civilian population. These two outcomes are what makes true proportionality not just sound doctrine, but the more moral one as well.

But What Has UCLA Done Concretely?

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UCLA’s Chancellor Julio Frenk protested that his school has done much to combat antisemitism in his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section. He even piously cloaked himself in his extended family’s history of flight from Nazi Germany and holocaust survival.

Among other actions, we have recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, established an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism with dedicated resources, reorganized our Office of Civil Rights, and appointed a Title VI/Title VII officer. We have strengthened our time, place, and manner policies to safeguard both free expression and campus operations. We are also supporting and partnering with community organizations engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

These, though, are merely steps that set up John Cleese-esque argument clinics.

What has the good Chancellor or his staff done to rid the school of its recalcitrant antisemitic bigots, whether employee or pupil? What has he done, personally, to address directly any of these bigots? What has any member of his staff done to address them directly?

Transgenders are Better than other Americans?

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Kansas passed a law with effect last Thursday that requires driver licenses to reflect the biological gender of the license holder and not the holder’s currently self-claimed gender. The law invalidates, with immediate force, existing driver licenses that reflect a gender different from the holder’s birth gender. That lack of notice strikes me as unfair, but that’s a separate issue. The law also

invalidates birth certificates of residents [sic] who changed their gender and says citizens can sue transgender Kansans who use public bathrooms that don’t correspond with their assigned birth sex.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit claim that

the law violate[s] transgender Kansans rights to privacy, equality, and free expression guaranteed by the state constitution.

Leave aside the plain fact that the plaintiffs’ suit utterly denies biological fact. What’s interesting here is the self-important arrogance of the plaintiffs, along with the cynically offered irrelevance of one of their beefs.

Last thing first: the law does not deny the plaintiffs’ their right to free expression. No one is telling them they cannot self-claim a different gender than that of their biology. No one is telling them they cannot live their lives as though they were that…alternate…gender, with the few exceptions that all citizens have when exercise of their rights interferes with the ability of their fellow citizens to exercise their own rights.

Which brings me to the first things. Plaintiffs, with their suit, insist that others’ rights to privacy and equality must take a back seat to plaintiffs’. To hell with women’s rights to their own privacy, the equality of their own rights. They must accept that their rights are less important than, are inferior to, the claimed rights of men who claim to be women.

This is a suit that should be tossed on its face, with prejudice, and in short order.

I Know Something You Don’t…

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….so trust me. Of course. That’s the self-important claim of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the ongoing US/Israeli campaign against Iran and its nuclear programs, missile and drone launching and production facilities, and the nation’s chief terrorists at the top of the Iranian government. His opening claim:

As a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, with access to ample classified information about threats from Iran and others, I can state plainly that there was no imminent threat from Iran to America sufficient to warrant committing our sons and daughters to another war in the Middle East….

Maybe, maybe not. It’s awfully convenient to cite “information” that’s hidden from us average Americans, almost as convenient as citing those childhood imaginary friends masqueraded as “officials familiar with the matter” of which news writers are so enamored. There’s no more reason to believe Kaine’s claims than those other claims.

He went on.

To be sure, Iran is a bad actor, oppressing its own citizens and fomenting violence outside its borders, including attacks against US troops in the region.

Of course, in his mind, attacking our forces and the civilians and militaries of our friends and allies presents no cause for kinetic response. Do diplomacy again. Continue those decades of failed diplomatic efforts. This time is different. He means it.

And this, from his claimed history that the rest of us, not nearly as learned as his august self, do not know:

The US and Iran were friends and allies until the US led a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

Yeah. We were such tight friends and close allies that we felt constrained to assist in tossing that government. The illogic here is awesome.

Then Kaine cited a list of Iranian-inspired if not -led attacks on our facilities and murders of our people throughout the Middle East. Our support for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, though, is sufficient justification for us to ignore the mullahs’ terrorist attacks on us and on our friends and allies. Diplomacy is so effective with terrorists, you see.

Then he quoted—carefully cherry-picking—from the JCPOA, which his Party claimed to end Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

That’s in the first paragraph of the Preface to the document. Throughout the body of the document, where the actual force of the agreement lies, are repeated agreements that sanctions would be lifted at 8, 15, or 25 years, depending on the sanctions involved (those at 25 years are trivial). Following the end of those sanctions, Iran would have been free to resume nuclear weapons development without consequence. Kaine so carefully withheld these tidbits from his op-ed.

And his “constitutional” pseudo-argument: he opened with this,

without the congressional debate and vote that the Constitution requires

and bookended that with this at the close of his piece:

How long will the Article I branch of America’s government remain silent against this wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order?

This is the carefully generalized, carefully unspecific claim of “it’s unconstitutional!” while just as carefully declining to cite the clause(s) of our Constitution that mandates all of this. What Article I—Section 8 for those of you following along more closely than Kaine is doing—says is that the power to declare war is reserved to the Congress. That’s all that our Constitution says about our involvement in the beginning of wars, and it’s a far cry from the Article II executive authority to fight for our safety.

Even the War Powers Act, grants the President—whoever he is—60 days of fighting before he must seek Congressional approval to continue. Congresses led by both parties have explored altering the Act, and each of them have explicitly declined to do so. At that, the Act is iffy itself; generations of Presidents since the Act’s passage in 1973 have called the Act an unconstitutional infringement of our Constitution’s separation of powers structure of government.

This kind of deliberately misleading foolishness by Kaine is why his Party can never be trusted with the reins (Party: reigns) of government.