Category Archives: politics

This Should Ease the Search

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A passel (that’s the technical term) of classified documents purportedly concerning the barbarian’s war in Ukraine and a number of other items have been stolen from DoD, one or two perhaps altered, and then posted at various sites around the Internet.

The search is on for the leaker(s) and/or the security…weakness…in SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD and/or in CJCS General Mark Milley’s organization within DoD.

One discovery should ease that search, and shorten it, also, is this.

One of the most significant leaks of highly classified US documents in recent history began among a small group of posters on a messaging channel [the Discord messaging platform] that trafficked in memes, jokes, and racist talk.
Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about US allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.

That small number of individuals should make it much easier to locate who got the materials, and from that, how they penetrated DoD security, or in the alternative, from whom they got the materials.

Once that’s done, the security gap must be plugged promptly and the leaker(s), if there was one, must be publicly identified and metaphorically drawn and quartered.

Typical Arrogance of the “Experts”

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US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryck, of the Northern District of Texas, has ruled that the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone must be withdrawn and the drug pulled from the market while an existing court case makes its way through, and he made his ruling nation-wide.

The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly. But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty—based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions[.]

No, no, no—leave our precious technocrats alone is the Leftist Lawyer cry. Only Government knows best. How dare anyone challenge Government’s experts. Areta Kupchyk, ex-FDA Associate Chief Counsel:

If the court does not defer to FDA, it would undermine FDA’s authority and set a precedent for second-guessing by judges wholly unqualified to evaluate scientific data[.]

This is the typical arrogance of Government “experts.” No one but these bureaucrats who hold one or another science degree are qualified to reign over the scientific world—and over us citizens.

No. It’s time Chevron Deference-style foolishness was done away with. It’s time our Article III courts acted like the coequal branch of our Federal government that they are instead of meekly bowing and subordinating themselves to junior agencies of a separate coequal branch.

That doing-away may finally be beginning.

A String’s Attached

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President Joe Biden (D) and his DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona are trying to rewrite the Title IX statute to bar States from categorically ban[ning] transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Never mind that the actual statute, enacted those decades ago, is explicitly designed to give women a fair and reasonably equal opportunity to play sports: if a State school or a local school district has a men’s program, that school or district must fund and provide for a substantially similar program for women.

Now the Biden/Cardona DoEd is proposing a rule that would ignore the sex-based Title IX statute and require biological men be allowed to compete in women’s sports in those schools that get Federal funding.

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are[.]

Never mind that a transgender woman is a man by his biology, by his genes, by his XY chromosome pair.

Never mind that a transgender man is a woman by her biology, by her genes, by her XX chromosome pair.

This is the Biden administration’s open war on women.

My advice to the States: don’t take the Federal funds. The strings attached are more like chains.

NPR’s New Label

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Twitter has applied a US state-affiliated media label to National Public Radio‘s Twitter account. Twitter’s label defines such media as

outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution[.]

What interests me, though, aside from the fact that there is a measure of affiliation just from the fact that the Federal government provides some funding to NPR, is the reaction to the label by NPR‘s CEO John Lansing in his statement—which he posted on Twitter:

NPR and our Member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide[.]

This is mostly irrelevant to whether NPR is state-affiliated. Voice of America, for instance, also is state-affiliated, and it provides fact-based journalism to the world—along with a strong measure of state-provided propaganda.

Mostly irrelevant: there’s this claim from NPR‘s Web site [emphasis in the original]:

Federal funding is essential to public radio’s service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.

And yet, just above that claim is this graph delineating NPR‘s funding sources as recently as its2020 fiscal year:

Plainly, NPR‘s support does come primarily from Lansing’s millions of listeners. Only 8%, plus a taste, of his funding comes from the Feds. That level may well be important, but it’s far from essential.

Lansing can’t even keep his stories consistent with each other. Which makes his objection even more irrelevant, both on substance and on the funding question.

Even so, that funding gives the Federal government that measure of influence over NPR‘s editorial decisions. And there’s the Federal government’s empirical use of its power to pressure Facebook’s Meta’s and pre-Trump Twitter’s editorial decisions. State-affiliated is warranted.

Sort of aside: it seems likely to this poor, dumb Texan that those State and local governments listed in the graph above, being much closer to Lansing’s millions of listeners than the Federal government, could well fill any shortfall were the Federal government to reduce or eliminate its funding share. That is, if the listeners resident in any of those more localized jurisdictions agreed that NPR was worth their tax money.

Update: As of 12 April, NPR has decided to no longer actively maintain its flagship @NPR Twitter account or any other official NPR accounts on Twitter over the site’s attaching the state-affiliated media label to its posts.

Buh by, luv ya, mean it. Watch out for that door closing behind you.

Grooming

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A woman, a mother of five children already, and a devout Christian, living in Oregon, tried to adopt two more children. Tried, and was denied by the State.

According to Oregon’s Department of Human Services, the state’s adoption application requires that potential parents “respect, accept, and support…the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of children.

The woman, already well into Oregon’s adoption process, then was required to attend explicit training to ensure she effected ODHS’ requirement. She advised them she could not attend; it violated her Christian beliefs, especially concerning the number of sexes extant in humans.

It gets worse. According to the lawsuit the woman filed last Monday,

Oregon’s Resource and Adoptive Family (RAFT) training [the woman was required to] attend[] urged potential parents to “use a child’s preferred pronouns, take a child to affirming events like Pride parades, or sign the child up for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone shots.”

Assuming the lawsuit’s claim is even remotely accurate, how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?

Nor is Oregon alone. There’s the Broward County (Florida) Public Schools board. Board member Brenda Fam at a recent board meeting put some questions to her fellow board members that her constituent parents had asked her regarding the board’s proposed sex education curriculum.

They want to know what the definition of a woman is for sexual education curriculum in Broward County. They want to know what individuals can get pregnant and what individuals can give birth.

The district’s Superintendent, Earlean Smiley:

They want to know what the definition of what a woman is in the sexual education curriculum for Broward County. That question is more than a question. It is a thought process, it’s an examination, a lot of laws based on a lot of things.
I guess I’m procrastinating and hesitating because there is no clear-cut answer I can give you at this point[.]

Fellow board member Sarah Leonardi:

This curriculum, the policy, the support guide, the goal of all of us being here is to support children and to educate children. And not to engage in a political line of questioning that distracts from that mission. I just think it’s very important that we stick to the purpose of, again, the curriculum, the policy, the support guide, which is to support children and not get distracted by other agendas.

No, the questions are quite simple and straightforward, and the biology underlying the questions is just as straightforward. It isn’t “a thought process,” it isn’t an “examination;” the biology of the matter perfectly straightforward. Nor is it “other agendas;” the other agendas, “the politics,” center on this board’s efforts to blur physiology, to disguise the ideological nature of the board’s—and the Superintendent’s—intended “teachings” and to hide all of that from the parents.

Here, too, I ask:  how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?