Yet Another Reason…

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…for State and local jurisdictions to stop taking government funds. This one is from HUD.

In proposed regulations that would touch any jurisdiction that accepts any sort of HUD funding, fair housing must mean a plan to “promote equity in their communities, decrease segregation, and increase access to opportunity and community assets for people of color and other underserved communities.”

Sounds reasonable.

However.

Those required to comply will include more than 1,200 cities and counties receiving HUD funding. All will be required to develop “equity plans.”
Such equity could mean anything from building low-income housing to redrawing school district lines for racial or socio-economic integration, all as assessed by the HUD bureaucracy.

Because folks moving from here to there still will be told, on arrival there, where they will be permitted to live and where their kids will be permitted to go to school and on and on—they’ll still be under government control. If they want, for good or bad reasons, to live with folks who look like them, or who share their values, or…, central government under these rules will not permit them that choice.

Racial discrimination in housing is pernicious, Husock concluded his piece (at the link). But he doesn’t go far enough in his conclusion. For Washington to invoke it to socially engineer neighborhoods across America is dangerous. No. For the Federal government itself to give special treatment to one group of Americans over other groups of Americans is especially pernicious racism.

This is another example of Federal government funds that are being transferred to State and local jurisdictions coming with strings attached, for good reasons or ill. Government strings only increase the central government’ ability to dictate terms to locals, to reduce our States to the same relationship to the central government as counties have relative to their States: merely convenient districts whose sole purpose is to enforce Federal law. That works for counties in States, but the structure of our system of federal government puts the States—individually as well as a group—on par with our central government on nationally domestic matters—and on higher authority on matters domestic to an individual State.

It is this federal republican structure, the role of our several States as [50] separate experiments in democracy, that string-loaded Federal funds transferred to States and locals so severely deprecates.

“Mistake”

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Recall the Smithsonian Museum student visitors who were ejected from the Museum by its guards for the heinous crime of wearing pro-life ball caps. The Museum’s management has responded to House Republicans requests for status and repercussions.

“This was an aberration and not reflective of Smithsonian values and practice of welcoming all visitors regardless of viewpoint,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said. “Visitors are not to be denied access based on messages on their clothing, and an error was made in this regard on January 20, 2023.”
When asked whether disciplinary action would be taken, Bunch responded, “The instruction to visitors to remove their pro-life hats was a mistake – a misinterpretation of what was permissible. It was not a willful violation.

The museum’s guards were acting out of mistake, so they’ll skate with no consequences.

Sure. The ejection might have been a mistake. I don’t think it was, but if it was, why aren’t the museum’s training and evaluation personnel—the ones who trained these guards and then marked them ready for duty—under sanction for their failed training and evaluation?

Regardless, stipulate the guards’ ejections of the students was a mistake. That wasn’t all that the Museum personnel did to these students. Per Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing the students,

The museum staff mocked the students, called them expletives, and made comments that the museum was a “neutral zone” where they could not express such statements[.]

That behavior was not a mistake; it was deliberately done. Why aren’t the guards being punished for that?

It looks like the Smithsonian, under current management, isn’t worth the moneys committed to supporting it.

Sometimes

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The FBI doesn’t engage only in pernicious activities—investigating mothers and traditional Catholics as terrorists, for instance, or lying to FISA courts.

Sometimes FBI personnel are just incompetent, and along a number of axes.

  • One agent left a highly lethal M4 carbine unsecured in his government car during a Starbucks run and had the weapon stolen…. “Although there was a lockbox in the trunk for storage of weapons and sensitive items,” the agent chose to store the rifle bag behind the car’s front passenger seat, one report shows.
    • [and] three dozen agents reported guns being lost, stolen or handled unsafely….
  • one agent who accidentally discharged his weapon and shot a hole through the floor of his hotel room….

If any Americans should have their guns taken away from them, maybe it should be FBI personnel. [/snark]

  • …inappropriate [sexual] affairs with felons in prison, confidential sources and subordinate employees.
  • agents and Bureau staff driving under the influence (DUI)….
  • One [agent] stole drug evidence to feed a heroin addiction….
  • [An FBI] employee pulled a gun on a private citizen during [the employee’s] road rage.
  • an [FBI] employee who shot and killed his neighbor’s dog….
  • [An FBI agent sent] “a threatening and vile email to his girlfriend’s ex-husband,” was faced with a temporary protective order. The agent then threatened to shoot the process server….

And so on. And on.

There’s this, too, which should saucer and blow the whole…affair:

The extensive reports were in fact so impactful that the FBI suspended distributing them for seven months in 2021-2022, due to complaints that the “employees harmed by misconduct” might feel shamed.

The FBI needs to be disbanded and certain of its investigative facilities transferred to a different, independent facility located in Middle America and created from scratch.

Should be Good for Us

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Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to start another arms race, which of necessity includes a technology race and a matching of economic strengths.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia would suspend its participation in the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, a vestige of the security architecture that has helped keep the peace for decades.

Despite the outcomes of Progressive-Democrat Party policies, we still have the strongest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even stronger, and we still have the largest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even larger. That feeds into our ability to innovate more rapidly than our competitors or our enemies, and so more rapidly in technology arenas, including weapons and cyber tech. And both our economic and technical capabilities potentiate our ability to produce existing weapons and the ammunition and logistics systems needed for them faster than our competitors or our enemies, and to more quickly develop new weapons and get them deployed in useful numbers.

We dissolved the USSR with that nation’s initiation of its late-stage arms race. Russia’s economic and technological establishment is even more fragile.

The People’s Republic of China? That nation is stronger than Russia, but not as strong—still—as the USSR was.

There’s this, too:

An entente between the two would replicate their Cold War anti-Western partnership with one significant difference, that Beijing rather than Moscow would be the dominant partner.

That prior entente was one in which the two nations routinely exchanged gunfire across their border, especially along the Amur River. One factor leading to those exchanges is the PRC’s—and Kuomintang China, and emperor-ist China and on back—longstanding holding that Siberia belongs to China and that Russia stole it centuries ago. This time around, the PRC is not only the dominant partner, it’s much more dominant than was the USSR in that prior arrangement. And the PRC still insists that Siberia is Chinese. Gunfire exchanges would be much more dangerous for Russia, although it would bleed the PLA, also.

That’s a risk worth taking seriously, but this is the much more likely outcome:

The prospect of the two great autocratic powers that dominate the Eurasian landmass moving closer together carries risks for Beijing. It would probably force European countries that now are hoping to maintain close commercial ties with China to move more decisively toward Washington, on which they depend for security. If that happened, geopolitical competition between the West (along with Asian democracies such as Japan and South Korea) and the Moscow-Beijing axis would solidify.

And that also would redound to the benefit of the US and to the West in general, for all the reasons listed earlier.

Bring it.

It Shouldn’t Matter

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the US expanding our military presence in the Republic of China from vanishingly small to miniscule, there’s this meek remark from a “US official” regarding the training of RoC forces that that slightly larger presence would be carrying out:

One of the difficult things to determine is what really is objectionable to China. We don’t think at the levels that we’re engaged in and are likely to remain engaged in the near future that we are anywhere close to a tipping point for China….

Leaving aside the question of to which China this person is referring (the timidity of the Biden and so many predecessor administrations makes that transparent, anyway), it doesn’t matter what is objectionable to the People’s Republic of China regarding our presence in the RoC. The PRC has no legitimate interest in the goings-on with respect to the RoC.

Full stop.