Patriotism is Intimidation

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The subheadline tells the tale that’s been unfolding for far too long in the United Kingdom, the cradle, but no longer a home, of individual liberty and consensual government,.

For some it [the national flag of the United Kingdom] is a symbol restoring patriotic traditions. Others see it as vehicle for intimidation.

The British flag, and its sibling, the red cross on a white field that is the Cross of St George flag, are symbols of British culture and history, and especially of British national identity.

Yet there is a growing movement (only lately starting to be answered) that openly disparages those national symbols, risibly calling them bigoted, exclusionary, and divisive.

They’re sort of right on one, but the other two—the bigotry and divisiveness—are centered on and emanate from only those folks, mostly “immigrants” and their apologists, who do not want to assimilate into British culture, to become British citizens, or merely to accept British culture in their status as non-citizen legal residents.

The flags are exclusionary, though, in the sense that they’re symbols of nationhood for patriotic British citizens and subjects, folks who are proud of their national history and culture, warts and all, while working to improve a grand but humanly imperfect nation.

Different flags in the UK have different connotations. The Union Jack, or, more formally, the Union Flag, is meant to represent England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It can be controversial among Scottish, Welsh, or Irish nationalists, but is often seen as a mild expression of patriotism in much of England. But the English flag—the Cross of St George—is sometimes associated with soccer hooligans and far-right protests, and has xenophobic connotations for some.

This is just foolish. There’s nothing controversial about the Union Flag—it symbolizes the union of the nation. Those who don’t want to be part of the union need to recognize that their view has lost repeated independence referenda and get over themselves. The only ones seeing the flag as in any way xenophobic are those immigrants who refuse to assimilate and the timid virtue-signalers who side with them to curry favor.

That some hooligans have chosen to wrap themselves in the English flag is in no way a reflection of what that flag represents—it only reflects the misbehaviors of the hooligans. Those who associate it with hooliganism need to leave off their Newspeak Dictionary-twisted definitions and return to British English dictionaries.

[A] local lawmaker called to remove the flags, whether British or English, saying they were being used by some “to rally those who suppress the rights of others and perpetrate acts of hate.” The local city council estimated it would cost £250,000 to take them down and has removed only a few.

This is disingenuous at best. Here, too, the lawmaker’s beef is with those who misuse—abuse—the flags, not with the flags themselves. It’s only the ones who rally those to hate who should be getting the lawmaker’s opprobrium. The position he’s taken, though, is akin to him actively supporting the unpatriotic over British patriots.

Don’t get too smug over the falling—and fallen—Brits, though. We have too many neighborhoods and news writers waxing hysterical about how divisive our own national flag is.

The same contempt for bigots and cowards in the UK applies to these so-called Americans, too. We have a chance, still, to decisively defeat those naysaying unpatriotic ones, and hopefully one good thing about our own Left’s murder of Charlie Kirk will wake us up and get us going.

There’s Always an Excuse

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Recall that Bureau of Labor Statistics honcho Erika McEntarfer was fired over labor reports that reflected wildly inaccurate data and that necessitated radically large corrections in subsequent months. Those data may have been fudged, as President Donald Trump (R) suggests, or they may have resulted from badly inaccurate and incomplete data collection by the BLS’ periodic polling processes.

Now she’s speaking out.

While speaking to students at her alma mater, Bard College, McEntarfer said she took the helm of BLS last year with high hopes of improving the stats on employment and inflation that the agency produces. Instead, she wound up spending much of 2025 guarding it against interference from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team.

And making self-serving excuses. She took office in January 2024. DOGE didn’t start in until early 2025.

Two questions, then: the first is what progress had she made on her improvements in the intervening year? What bureaucratic impediments had been interfering with those efforts, and what had she been doing about those impeding bureaucrats?

McEntarfer, who spent most of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau, said she had been aiming to tackle those problems as BLS commissioner before she was fired.
“I was prepared to help BLS modernize data collection,” she said.

She spent that whole year “preparing to” help? When was she going actually to get started? When was she going to start leading the effort rather than “helping” it?

The second question is in what way had DOGE been interfering with her efforts, and what resources had she diverted from stats improvement to dealing with—mostly interfering with—DOGE’s efforts?

Stupid, or Dishonest?

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Senator John Fetterman (D, PA) had an exchange with CNN‘s Manu Raju last Wednesday in the aftermath of a Leftist’s murder of Charlie Kirk. It began with Fetterman decrying the Left’s and his own party’s divisive rhetoric:

…just one day prior, people were protesting Trump by calling him the “Hitler of our time.” He condemned comparing anyone, including Trump, to Adolf Hitler and insisted his party must “turn the temperature down.”

Then, this:

“I think you just don’t ever, ever compare anyone to Hitler and those kinds of extreme things,” Fetterman said. “Now, look what happened to Charlie Kirk. I mean, you know, the man was shot. Now, we have to turn the temperature down. We can’t compare people to these kinds of figures in history. And this is not an autocrat. This is a product of a democratic election.”
“So you don’t think that Trump is at all shattering any of the norms of democracy in any way?” Raju asked.

Here is a CNN opinionator suggesting that “shattering…norms of democracy” is justification for murdering Conservatives who are associated with President Donald Trump (R).

I have to ask, given the irrelevancy between doing things not normally done but entirely legal, and murder: is Raju really that stupid, or is he really that nakedly dishonest?

A Constitutional Amendment Proposal

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As  Nicholas Ballasy, of Just the News, wrote Saturday, the Federal government is once again nearing the end of a fiscal year with no serious plan for funding the next year. His lede:

Congress is on its way to missing a “basic” budget deadline for the 29th year in a row, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

And just to emphasize the point:

Meanwhile, the deficit so far into the current fiscal year is larger than the same period last year.

Hence my Constitutional Amendment in its outline if not in its final wording:

If, at the end of any fiscal year, the following year is not fully funded—that is all 12 of the necessary appropriations bills are not enacted into law—then the only Continuing Resolution that is allowed is this one, which is automatically implemented beginning on the first day of that following fiscal year:
All spending by the Federal government is reduced by 10% of the prior year’s level, with the exception of spending on our national debt and our national defense. These two will have their spending held unchanged from the just concluded fiscal year. The spending reduction includes all Federal government spending, including so-called entitlement spending and all “off the books” spending.

This Continuing Resolution will continue in effect until the Federal government is fully funded for a fiscal year by enacting each of the dozen appropriations bills for that year. The Continuing Resolution, including the year-on-year spending reductions, will continue in effect for all subsequent consecutive fiscal years across which the funding failure continues. This means that if Year0 concludes at a spending level with Year1 not fully funded, then Year1’s spending level will be reduced to 90% of Year0. If the funding failure continues into Year2, then Year2’s spending level will have an additional 10% reduction, for a total reduction to 81% of Year0’s, and so on into Year3, Year4, etc.

Amending our Constitution is, by design, a difficult process, and that’s correct: our Constitution is our blueprint for governing ourselves rather than for us being governed; it cannot function as a limit on government if it’s reduced to a reflection of what we think ought be done in the moment and from moment to moment. Nor is a Convention necessary; We the People can convene ourselves to create and then push through an Amendment. It is time, though, to get started; it does take time to propose, write, and then ratify the thing.

Dealing with the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China has decided that the American company Nvidia has violated PRC anti-trust laws and is holding the company hostage in trade negotiations with the US.

China’s antitrust regulator said Monday that a preliminary investigation found Nvidia violated the country’s antimonopoly law in connection with an acquisition of an Israeli company that was completed in 2020. The regulator said the investigation was continuing, and it didn’t elaborate on the alleged violations or say whether it would punish Nvidia.

The PRC is centering its case on Nvidia’s commitment to not cut the PRC off from its chips as a condition of PRC approval of the acquisition. That might make a basis for a legitimate anti-trust beef; however:

Since 2022, the US. government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top-flight artificial-intelligence chips to China.

Here is the PRC threatening an American company for its compliance with American law.

There are now two strong reasons for American companies to walk away from the PRC and discontinue all business with PRC-domiciled companies or within the PRC under any guise. One is the overt interference with the domestic affairs of our nation. If the PRC doesn’t like our government’s block of Nvidia, et al., selling their best chips into the PRC, its beef is with our government, not with the American businesses it tries to take hostage in its “negotiations” with our government.

The other reason is the PRC’s presumption that it should have veto authority over whether an American company acquires, or otherwise takes a stake in, any non-PRC-domiciled company. If American companies stop doing business in/with the PRC, then the PRC has no approval/disapproval authority over acquisitions—it becomes irrelevant. And that’s as it should be with an enemy nation.