Category Archives: politics

Suicide Pact

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Now The Wall Street Journal has joined the bandwagon.

Gun rights need to be protected, but the Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.

Indeed, they do, and it is not. But violating the Second Amendment as a matter of routine, or gutting it as the Progressive-Democrats want to do (background checks? Where would the Progressive-Democrats stop? They refuse to say, they refuse to articulate their limiting principle) certainly would be national suicide.

…those in the gun lobby who claim that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates individual rights.

This is a cynically offered straw man. No one in the gun lobby argues that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates the individual rights of that person with that history. Their argument is that the definition of such a history is too vague for practical applicability. More broadly, their argument is that the laws don’t adequately protect the individual rights of those surrounding or otherwise associated with the individual in question.

Overreactive “Professional” Investors

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Some folks think Fed President Jerome Powell is “in over his head” in terms of communicating Federal Reserve Bank policies to the general public (read: to “professionals”).

Here’s Krishna Memani, OppenheimerFunds Inc’s Vice Chairman of Investments:

As a central banker, you don’t want to give people the opportunity to interpret things how they want to[.]

This is backwards. The Central Banker—Powell—says what he says, and he does so clearly in today’s improved environment over the last century’s deliberate obfuscation in that era’s misguided attempt to avoid confusion.  It’s on “people”—professional investors—to take Powell at his words and not interpret things “how they want to,” or desperately over-parse them, or look for meanings hidden in backward-playing recordings of his statements

Investors must act only on what he actually says.

Better is the Enemy of Good Enough

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In the aftermath of Boeing’s failure with its 737MAX, the FAA—and foreign jurisdictions—are on the verge of entering that larger failure regime.

As Boeing Co and safety regulators push to complete long-awaited fixes for 737 MAX jets, testing has expanded to cover increasingly unlikely emergencies including potential computer failures pinpointed by overseas authorities, according to US government officials briefed on the details.
The broader risk analyses and simulator scenarios, some details of which haven’t been reported before, show the lengths to which leaders of the Federal Aviation Administration, in coordination with their foreign counterparts, are going to verify the safety of the MAX fleet before allowing the planes to fly again.

And one thing that is not being addressed in the lengths to which these leaders are going is the adequacy of training that pilots are required to undergo to receive certification.  Instead, excuses are offered.

Ali Bahrami, the FAA’s top safety official, told a Senate subcommittee during a hearing that the June tests “identified a very remote failure case,” adding that FAA pilots decided “the level of proficiency that is required to recover from this event was exceptional” and could overwhelm average airline crews.

Which raises two questions. One is how “very remote,” and when does that criterion cross the Better-Good Enough line?

The other (stipulating that line is not crossed here) is why “average airline crews” would be so inadequately trained?  Where, too, are pilots trained to disconnect from the computers, and disconnect the computers from the aircraft, and go manual? And: what is the adequacy of the manual backups?

In the end, though, demanding Better before going to production too often prevents going to production.  Demanding perfection first—rather than questing after it (or merely after Better) constantly and iteratively while iteratively producing the outcome of those quality iterations—prevents serious efforts to produce.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

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Here are some of the more despicable examples as Progressive-Democrats—including those running for President—look to politicize an El Paso tragedy for their personal political gain.

Washington state Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Jay Inslee:

The first order of business to reduce white nationalism is to eliminate white nationalism in our White House. The sentiments of fear and division, and outright racism, that this president has emboldened out to be sickening to anyone.

What’s sickening is Inslee’s active condonement, along with his confrere in Oregon’s governor’s mansion, of Antifa’s active violence against conservatives, indeed against anyone to the right of their Leftist extremism.  What’s sickening is Inslee’s manufacture of racist beefs where he knows none exist.

Small-town mayor and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg:

The President of the United States is condoning white nationalism[.]

Made without a shred of evidence, even as Buttigieg gives eye-wash words to events in his own town—while enhancing “outrage” over a police shooting, playing up the fact of a white cop shooting a black man while ignoring the salient facts of a cop shooting a man and the facts surrounding the man’s behavior at the time.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D, MN):

I do think Trump’s rhetoric has fueled more hate in this country.

She ignores the fact that Trump’s rhetoric has only fueled the hatred of the Left and its Party as he has been unhesitant to call out, bluntly, the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ refusal (not failure) to perform, their knee-jerk obstructionism of anything not proposed by them.  Klobuchar also carefully ignores the racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric of her fellow politicians in the House—fellows like Ilhan Omar (D, MN), from her own State, yet; Ayanna Pressley (D, MA); Rashida Tlaib (D, MI); Alexendria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY)—who routinely spew their race- and Jew-hatred, even calling Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) racist for disagreeing with them.

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke:

He [President Donald Trump] is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country. We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years.

If Trump stokes racism, he’s an utter failure at it.

All of these august personages, along with many more of their Party, have dishonestly manufactured a race crime out of Trump’s calling out their icon, Elijah Cummings’ (D, MD) failure to deal, to even try to deal, with the terrible, inhumane conditions in Inner City Baltimore. They’ve gone so far as to claim it’s racist to criticize Cummings, to claim that saying no humans would want to live in a rat-infested environment is racist.  This kind of made-up charge, centered as it is on their manufactured racism is itself stinkingly racist.

All of these august personages, again along with many more of their Party, outright refused to decry Omar’s anti-Semitic remarks, passing instead a carefully saccharine resolution decrying rude talk and being mean.

This is the pernicious, dishonest—dare I say, evil—racism toward which we can look were this Party to retain majority in the House, gain it in the Senate, and place one of these racist candidates in the White House.

Which points up this piece, from a different perspective.

“I am afraid of the police, not the protesters”

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That’s it, in a nutshell.  That’s the worry of a resident of Mong Kok, a major shopping and residential neighborhood on the mainland side of Hong Kong, as she prepared to join a protest last weekend.

That worry comes against the backdrop of Hong Kong police using tear gas and truncheons in attempts to break up peaceful protests throughout Hong Kong as those protests have grown over the last several weeks, with those police using isolated incidents of protestor violence as their excuse.  Keep in mind, too, that these protests originated as a response to the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a law demanded by People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party of China, a law that would have allowed any accused Hong Kong citizen or visitor to be seized and shipped into the PRC proper for trial.

That worry comes against the backdrop of Hong Kong police standing by, keeping watch, while criminals beat protestors in a subway station in an earlier protest in this sequence of protests.

That worry comes against the backdrop of violent suppression attempts by the PRC Hong Kong police against protests in Mong Kok in 2014 and 2016.

That worry comes against Xi’s sub rosa threats of military intervention in Hong Kong:

Chinese officials have said its military, which has a garrison in Hong Kong, could restore order if called upon by Hong Kong’s leadership.
The military recently released a propaganda video depicting Chinese soldiers practicing to do just that.

It’s a valid worry as Hong Kong’s legitimate leadership is in the streets protesting the actions of the PRC’s government-in-residence in Hong Kong.

It’s a valid worry as the Xi presses his government’s disregard of the transfer agreement the UK and the PRC signed 22 years ago and increases his government’s direct control over and destruction of the semi-autonomy of Hong Kong and his direct attacks on the freedoms of the Hong Kong people.