Transgenders are Better than other Americans?

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Kansas passed a law with effect last Thursday that requires driver licenses to reflect the biological gender of the license holder and not the holder’s currently self-claimed gender. The law invalidates, with immediate force, existing driver licenses that reflect a gender different from the holder’s birth gender. That lack of notice strikes me as unfair, but that’s a separate issue. The law also

invalidates birth certificates of residents [sic] who changed their gender and says citizens can sue transgender Kansans who use public bathrooms that don’t correspond with their assigned birth sex.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit claim that

the law violate[s] transgender Kansans rights to privacy, equality, and free expression guaranteed by the state constitution.

Leave aside the plain fact that the plaintiffs’ suit utterly denies biological fact. What’s interesting here is the self-important arrogance of the plaintiffs, along with the cynically offered irrelevance of one of their beefs.

Last thing first: the law does not deny the plaintiffs’ their right to free expression. No one is telling them they cannot self-claim a different gender than that of their biology. No one is telling them they cannot live their lives as though they were that…alternate…gender, with the few exceptions that all citizens have when exercise of their rights interferes with the ability of their fellow citizens to exercise their own rights.

Which brings me to the first things. Plaintiffs, with their suit, insist that others’ rights to privacy and equality must take a back seat to plaintiffs’. To hell with women’s rights to their own privacy, the equality of their own rights. They must accept that their rights are less important than, are inferior to, the claimed rights of men who claim to be women.

This is a suit that should be tossed on its face, with prejudice, and in short order.

That’s One Spin

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The news writers over at The Wall Street Journal now are insisting that President Donald Trump (R) has reversed himself on the matter of regime change and Western intervention.

In front of a packed chamber of Arab leaders last May, President Trump declared that the era of American-led regime change was over.
“In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said in Riyadh, deriding the “Western interventionalists giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”
Nine months later, he launched the largest US military operation the region had seen in two decades and urged Iranians to “take over” their government, backed by US force.
It marked a jarring reversal….

Trump went on to say, in a variety of venues, that the Iranian people needed to be the ones to act, not outside forces. He added further, that the opportunity arises out of the US/Israeli attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities; its missile and drone production and launch facilities; and the nation’s chief terrorists, Khamenei and much of his syndicate. The opportunity for the Iranian people to take the fate of their government in their own hands arises as a side effect of these attacks, not as a regime change goal.

This further illustrates the…misapprehension:

[A] new conviction among the president and his top advisers after January’s operation in Venezuela that regime change didn’t have to mean another Iraq….

There’s been no regime change in Venezuela. The head man and his wife have been removed from the Venezuelan government, but the government he headed remains intact.

The news writers have their spin, and there are facts on the ground.

Foolishness

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US intelligence estimates and experts outside government are busily downplaying Iran’s ability to launch ICBMs, much less to do so against American targets.

To build effective ICBMs, which soar out of the atmosphere and into space, Iran would have to overcome hurdles including developing a re-entry vehicle with heat shielding that can survive a fiery descent into the atmosphere, and a guidance system to keep the missile on target.

Iran has been launching satellites into orbit for years. Developing a reentry capability is a straightforward engineering task that lots of nations worked out decades ago, including such allies of Iran as Russia and the PRC. Indeed, Iran’s ballistic missile launches against Israel, as pointed out by ralflongwalker in another venue, already gives it most of the heat-shielding capability it needs for reentry after intercontinental flight. It’s an engineering refinement, now, not a de novo capability.

Iran’s ability to put its own satellites into orbit on its own rockets—much less its ability to target those Israeli sites—gives it already most, if not all, of the guidance system it needs, especially given the large footprint of its targets–our population centers.

 

Those downplayers plainly don’t understand the men of the Iranian government. In order to destroy us—the Great Satan—it would be necessary only to destroy our major cities with their populations and financial centers. Or even more easily, simply to detonate nuclear-driven EMP over us.

I Know Something You Don’t…

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….so trust me. Of course. That’s the self-important claim of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the ongoing US/Israeli campaign against Iran and its nuclear programs, missile and drone launching and production facilities, and the nation’s chief terrorists at the top of the Iranian government. His opening claim:

As a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, with access to ample classified information about threats from Iran and others, I can state plainly that there was no imminent threat from Iran to America sufficient to warrant committing our sons and daughters to another war in the Middle East….

Maybe, maybe not. It’s awfully convenient to cite “information” that’s hidden from us average Americans, almost as convenient as citing those childhood imaginary friends masqueraded as “officials familiar with the matter” of which news writers are so enamored. There’s no more reason to believe Kaine’s claims than those other claims.

He went on.

To be sure, Iran is a bad actor, oppressing its own citizens and fomenting violence outside its borders, including attacks against US troops in the region.

Of course, in his mind, attacking our forces and the civilians and militaries of our friends and allies presents no cause for kinetic response. Do diplomacy again. Continue those decades of failed diplomatic efforts. This time is different. He means it.

And this, from his claimed history that the rest of us, not nearly as learned as his august self, do not know:

The US and Iran were friends and allies until the US led a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

Yeah. We were such tight friends and close allies that we felt constrained to assist in tossing that government. The illogic here is awesome.

Then Kaine cited a list of Iranian-inspired if not -led attacks on our facilities and murders of our people throughout the Middle East. Our support for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, though, is sufficient justification for us to ignore the mullahs’ terrorist attacks on us and on our friends and allies. Diplomacy is so effective with terrorists, you see.

Then he quoted—carefully cherry-picking—from the JCPOA, which his Party claimed to end Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

That’s in the first paragraph of the Preface to the document. Throughout the body of the document, where the actual force of the agreement lies, are repeated agreements that sanctions would be lifted at 8, 15, or 25 years, depending on the sanctions involved (those at 25 years are trivial). Following the end of those sanctions, Iran would have been free to resume nuclear weapons development without consequence. Kaine so carefully withheld these tidbits from his op-ed.

And his “constitutional” pseudo-argument: he opened with this,

without the congressional debate and vote that the Constitution requires

and bookended that with this at the close of his piece:

How long will the Article I branch of America’s government remain silent against this wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order?

This is the carefully generalized, carefully unspecific claim of “it’s unconstitutional!” while just as carefully declining to cite the clause(s) of our Constitution that mandates all of this. What Article I—Section 8 for those of you following along more closely than Kaine is doing—says is that the power to declare war is reserved to the Congress. That’s all that our Constitution says about our involvement in the beginning of wars, and it’s a far cry from the Article II executive authority to fight for our safety.

Even the War Powers Act, grants the President—whoever he is—60 days of fighting before he must seek Congressional approval to continue. Congresses led by both parties have explored altering the Act, and each of them have explicitly declined to do so. At that, the Act is iffy itself; generations of Presidents since the Act’s passage in 1973 have called the Act an unconstitutional infringement of our Constitution’s separation of powers structure of government.

This kind of deliberately misleading foolishness by Kaine is why his Party can never be trusted with the reins (Party: reigns) of government.

What He Said

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Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, had a few words to say in response to Vermont’s nominally Independent Senator, Bernie Sanders, the latter whom wants a moratorium on building data centers to support AI development or any other uses. Reeves’ words, though, have much broader implication, and I’ve repeated them below in their entirety.

I understand individuals who would rather not have any industrial project in their backyard. We all choose where to live, whether it’s urban, suburban, agrarian, or industrial. I do not understand the impulse to prevent our country from advancing technologically—except as civilizational suicide.
This instinct seems to infect the far left across lots of domains: immigration, crime fighting, and the national debt to name a few. You can tell they’re just sort of yearning to submit our society to outside forces: mobs, international councils, or communist China. Maybe they’re exhausted and just want a few years of taxpayer-funded rest before they shuffle off.
I don’t want to go gently. I love this country, and want her to rise. That’s why Mississippi has become the home of the world’s most impressive supercomputers. We are committed to America and American power. We know that being the hub of the world’s most awesome technology will inevitably bring prosperity and authority to our state. There is nobody better than Mississippians to wield it.
I am tempted to sit back and let other states fritter away the generational chance to build. To laugh at their short-sightedness. But the best path for all of us would be to see America dominate, because our foes are not like us. They don’t believe in order, except brutal order under their heels. They don’t believe in prosperity, except for that gained through fraud and plunder. They don’t think or act in a way I can respect as an American.
So, let’s see Americans (and Mississippians) dominate this space—no matter how many leftists want us to roll over and die instead.

That last is especially important; I’ll say it again:

So, let’s see Americans (and Mississippians) dominate this space—no matter how many leftists want us to roll over and die instead.