“The lady should always walk on the inside.”

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Like nearly all blanket, all-encompassing rules, this one is just dumba*. A letter writer recounted an anecdote from early in his relationship with his wife.

My wife and I were walking down 5th Ave. in Manhattan with her on the outside closer to the street while I was on the inside…. We passed a man who promptly chastised me: “The lady should always walk on the inside.”

The letter writer meekly complied, and he was wrong to do so; although, his error was not in his timidity in the face of the officious, self-important accoster.

When my wife and I go for our walks, significant parts of the walks are along a greenbelt frequented by bobcats and, occasionally, coyotes. The bobcats mostly leave humans alone, though they want watching with the same caution with which they watch us. Coyotes, though, are much more aggressive and often attack the humans they encounter.

When we’re along those greenbelts, we cross, and my wife walks on the outside, the street side, while I switch to the inside, the side toward the danger. That danger is small, but it’s larger than the danger from the street.

The letter writer should have similarly assessed the relative dangers and adjusted their walking sides accordingly. In an earlier time, the lady generally walked on the gentleman’s left so he could keep his sword hand free in order to draw promptly against a brigand. That sort of danger obtains today, also, even if it isn’t a sword that the gentleman, or the lady, is carrying.

A Thought on Income Taxes and Equal Treatment under Law

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It occurs to me that many of our States’ income tax codes violate our Constitution. Here’s the relevant clause, from the 14th Amendment’s Article I:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any income tax law that taxes citizens differentially plainly does not afford all citizens equal protection of the (tax) law. Such laws confiscate the incomes of some people far more than it does others, and such laws that exempt some people from paying the tax favors those folks over others who must pay.

States’ income tax laws that do not tax every one equally must be found unconstitutional. That such a ruling would disrupt State budgets is no reason to continue this violation.

That principle applies, or should apply even if not strictly constitutionally, to our Federal income tax code, also. In particular, the 16th Amendment authorizes a Federal income tax, but it in no way authorizes the Federal government to tax Americans differentially from each other.

How Unfit is Unfit?

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UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer (Labour) is busily screwing the pooch. His latest failures are two, and both are related to his choice of Ambassador to the US.

For months, Starmer had insisted that his government followed “due process” in appointing Mandelson as US envoy, telling lawmakers repeatedly that Mandelson had been vetted and cleared by UK security services for the post.
On Thursday, it emerged that Mandelson had, in fact, failed his security clearance but was approved for the job anyway.

Then,

Starmer said Thursday he wasn’t aware Mandelson had failed his vetting process….

That Starmer blamed others for his ignorance and fired a scapegoat is neither here nor there against the enormity of his failures here.

The real upshot is that either Starmer has been lying through his…teeth…or he’s utterly incompetent. Either one alone demonstrates his unfitness for public office, much less for heading up the British government.

Parliament’s MPs shouldn’t be wasting time nattering on about how Starmer should resign. The MPs should simply dump him with a no-confidence vote. Absent that, they’re as timid, waffle-y, and incompetent or dishonest as Starmer.

Broken Windows Enforcement?

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The Trump Doctrine in progress. That’s Matthew Continetti’s thesis in his Free Expression piece, The Trump Doctrine in Action. His subheadline summarizes:

Major military operations in Venezuela and Iran make America, and the world, safer.

This is the mechanism for that increased safety:

Mr Trump cares less about a regime’s structure and ideology—whether it’s authoritarian or democratic, Chavista or Islamist—than its conduct. He cycles between negotiations and war, between economic punishment and military force, until he elicits the desired behavior.

Maybe, though, Continetti’s understanding doesn’t go far enough. Maybe what President Trump (R) is doing is this. Instead of taking on our peer and near-peer enemies directly—they are, after all, the most serious and direct threats to our nation’s sovereignty and freedom–he’s going after their satraps and clients, which weakens those enemies and limits their long-term and larger scale activities.

Is this broken windows enforcement on a nation-level scale? Broken picture windows enforcement, maybe? Or maybe hogwash. We’ll have to see over time whether Russia and/or the People’s Republic of China change their behaviors with the success of one window enforcement—Venezuela—the so far apparent success of another—Iran—and whether the next—Cuba—is attempted and, if so, successful.

Be Nice if they Can Get It

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The headline and subheadline demonstrate a dangerous misunderstanding.

Iran’s War-Shattered Economy Means It Has an Urgent Reason to Negotiate
Damage done by US and Israeli attacks will take years to repair, putting pressure on Tehran to seek financial relief in talks.

No, it doesn’t. The claim here egregiously wrongly assumes that those in control of Iran, those reigning over the Iranian people, think like we do. Assuredly, they do not. Their view of this war is that they’re not dead yet, so they haven’t lost. They consider themselves winning, and they will consider themselves to have won (and here, they’d be correct by Western standards, too) if the fighting stops with them still in charge (their primary war aim) and in a position to continue pursuing nuclear weapons (their close second war aim).

Full stop.

Yes, it will take years to rebuild the economic and infrastructure damage done them, but the only economic and infrastructure functions that interest them are those necessary to their nuclear weapons development and building program. The rest, that which would ease the lot of the Iranian people, are of no interest to these rulers. That narrow view greatly shortens the timeline for repairing and rebuilding.

There is one parallel with Western values that does obtain here, more or less. The news writer had this in the piece at the first link:

The US blockade of Iranian ports will further strain the country’s budget.

So, too, was our own Revolutionary War a strain on the allied 13 colonies’ budgets. They ran out of money and just freely and willy-nilly printed up paper dollars, with consequent runaway inflation and refusal of so many suppliers, colonial and foreign, to accept that paper. This is the meaning of “not worth a Continental.” The colonies stayed in the fight, though, for eight (more or less, depending on when you mark the beginning and the end of the war itself) long years, ultimately outlasting more than defeating the British. There is one critical difference, though. The colonies and the colonials suffered that as a free people who were in charge of their destinies. Iran’s despotic rulers are the ones in charge of Iran’s their destinies, and they don’t care about their subjects.

Sure, getting financial relief would be welcome to Iran’s despots, but that’s nothing more than a happy side effect for them.

I’ve quoted Rafsanjani before; here he is again:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.