Category Archives: rights

Free Speech

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…the way the Left sees it. And too many Republican Presidential candidates are misunderstanding the situation.

Recall last week: Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump was forced to cancel a rally in Chicago because “protestors” were out in force intending to prevent the rally from occurring.  They then bragged loudly about their success.

Over the weekend, at rallies in Missouri, Ohio, and again in Illinois, “protestors” again attempted to prevent Trump rallies from proceeding, charging him on the stage at rallies they couldn’t block.

These are not protestors exercising their own free speech rights; these persons are actively, cynically, dishonestly trying to prevent others from exercising their free speech rights.  These Leftists see freedom to speak as freedom only to speak what the Left approves.  These Leftists see listeners’ free speech not as their own choice, but only the choice to hear what the Left will permit them to hear.

We expect this sort of understanding out of the Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidates:

The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous.  …  That’s not leadership.  That’s political arson.

The Left’s encouragement of violence and aggression is, indeed, wrong, and it’s dangerous.  When will Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders condemn the Left’s assault on free speech, when will Clinton and Sanders condemn the violence their “protestors” threaten Republican rallies with?

It’s especially disappointing, though, to hear Republican Party candidates choose to attack a fellow Republican for being attacked by this assault on speech, carefully not saying a word about the real assault, the one on Americans’ First Amendment right.  John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz should know better.

Update: corrected a dumb___ typo.

Tax Dollars

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Yours, and mine, at work. The paper from which the following excerpt was taken (h/t The Wall Street Journal) was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature. The feminist glaciology framework draws attention to those who dominate and frame the production of glaciological knowledge, the gendered discourses of science and knowledge, and the ways in which colonial, military, and geopolitical domination co-constitute glaciological knowledge. Even in a globalized age where the place of women and indigenous people has improved markedly in some parts of the world, masculinist discourses continue to dominate, in subtle and determinative ways. Feminist glaciology advocates for a shift of preoccupations in research, policy, and public perceptions from the physical and seemingly natural, to a broader consideration of “cryoscapes,” the human, and the insights and potentials of alternative ice narratives and folk glaciologies.

The critique and framework outlined here illuminate experiences and narratives that emerged historically but remain potent today. Public discourse on the cryosphere continues to privilege, quite explicitly, manly endeavours and adventures in the field, and those who conduct their science in the manner of masculinist glaciologists and other field scientists of decades and centuries past….

The call for a feminist glaciology is not limited to ice and glaciers, but is a larger intervention into global environmental change (and especially climate change) research and policy.

Those were your tax dollars, and mine. Yeesh.

The Need for a Republican President

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The need is starkly illustrated by a couple of developments involving cases, the Supreme Court, and Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

One development is this:

Dow Chemical Co had agreed to pay $835 million to settle a class-action case rather than risk an appeal without the conservative justice.

The other is this:

The state Rifle and Pistol Association decided against filing a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case fearing the conservative Scalia’s death will make winning the case virtually impossible.

[Rifle and Pistol Association President and National Rifle Association board member, Tom] King said his lawyers advised that going forward could damage the case because the High Court at the very least would likely deliver a split 4-4 decision that would leave the law in place.

This puts a very high premium on electing a Republican president, so we have a good chance of nominating and confirming a conservative judge to the Supreme Court.

Upsetting Someone

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I seem to be, anyway. Some of you may have noticed that I take a dim view of the People’s Republic of China’s aggression and acquisitiveness in the East and South China Seas.

So, apparently, do the folks of the PRC government take a dim view of my dim view. For the last several days, this blog has been getting hit by spam comments from a series of IP addresses owned by Chinanet, which is headquartered in Jiangsu Province in the PRC.

Hmm….

The Fox Investigating the Hen House Leak, Revisited

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I mentioned Fox Business News‘ reporting on the FAA’s carefully biased “outreach” plan for increasing “diversity” in its air traffic controller employee base nearly a year ago, and I concluded that brief mention with the seemingly cynical remark, “Stand by for another whitewash.”

Now, it seems the whitewash is well in hand. DoT conducted its investigation, and there’s no word on its outcome. The FAA conducted its investigation; it

concluded an internal investigation which cleared the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong. In a statement sent to members of Congress last month the FAA claimed its Office of Security and Hazardous Materials Safety (ASH) had conducted an investigation into the allegations of cheating and favoritism. The FAA claims it was a thorough investigation which reviewed relevant audio recordings and documents. The statement says, “ASH found no specific information or evidence supporting claims that Human Resources employees improperly provided an advantage to ATCS applicants affiliated with the NBCFAE….”

The NBCFAE, recall, is the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees, one of whose members, Moranda Reilly (among others),

received emails in December 2013 and a recorded message from NBCFAE officer and air traffic controller Shelton Snow.   Reilly says the emails included buzzwords that, “…would help identify us. Key words the system would pick up. It was a kind of a way for our resumes to be picked and chosen. We were told not to share this information with anybody outside NBCFAE.”

Now, in an attempted final response to a FOIA request for those and related emails pursuant to a related law suit, the FAA has filed a motion with the Federal court presiding claiming it is

unable to recover missing and “corrupted” emails….

The FAA reached its conclusion of no wrong-doing, no carefully constructed bias in its air traffic controller applicant selection, by the FAA knowing these critical data weren’t being used in its investigation.

The “missing and unrecoverable” status of that evidence seems awfully convenient.