Happy New Year

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Originally published in 2012, I repeat it here.

This blogger hopes for increasing prosperity for all in the new year just begun.  Following are some additional thoughts, from those better than me.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
–William Makepeace Thackeray

New Year’s Resolution: to tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
–James Agate

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution.  Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise, and thou art happy.
–Akhenaton

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
–Cavett Robert

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
–Thomas Hood

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
–Ellen Goodman

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
–Mark Twain

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve.  Middle age is when you’re forced to.
–Bill Vaughn

This bit of ’70s-style wisdom:

A year from now, you’re gonna weigh more or less than what you do right now.
–Phil McGraw

And finally,

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.
–Goran Persson

The Supreme Court and Title 42

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Much is being made of the Supreme Court’s decision requiring Title 42 restrictions on illegal aliens to remain in effect until the Court hears the underlying case (sometime in February). That underlying case, as put by the Court in granting certiorari, is this:

Applicants suggested this Court treat the application as a petition for a writ of certiorari; doing so, the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the State applicants may intervene to challenge the District Court’s summary judgment order.

That’s an outcome, however temporary, that is very welcome.

There’s an additional aspect to this ruling that’s also interesting to me, though. A dissent to the grant of certiorari was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and it was joined by the activist Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Gorsuch wrote,

The States contend that they face an immigration crisis at the border and policymakers have failed to agree on adequate measures to address it. … And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.

This is the activist Justice Jackson agreeing that it’s not a role of an American court to make policy, only to apply law. Whether she honors that position in future cases remains to be seen, but it is, perhaps, a start.

The other two activist Justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, ducked the question altogether, choosing only to vote without comment against certiorari.

More Destruction

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I alluded earlier to the destruction the current crop of DoD managers are wreaking on our military establishment.

Here’s a specific example, all too canonical.

The upstate New York military academy [West Point] is removing 13 items that reference the Confederacy, including a portrait and bust of General Robert E Lee, its superintendent before the Civil War, the Washington Examiner reports.

This revision of our nation’s military history is being done on the express approval of SecDef Lloyd Austin. Because erasing history, including critical military history, is the best way to teach military principles, successes, and failures to our future military officers.

We can’t get rid of the SecDef and his syndicate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense soon enough.

Some European Questions

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the supposed unity of Europe against Russian President Putin and Europe’s dependency on the US in countering Putin, there were these questions the men and women of Europe’s governments have—especially in the face of Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden’s waffling on military and economic aid to Ukraine and his slow-walking that military aid.

  1. How much firepower should Ukraine receive in its quest to retake occupied territory from Russia’s invasion forces?
  2. How much Western weaponry would risk an uncontrolled escalation of the war?
  3. And what sort of compromises should Ukraine contemplate if it can’t drive Russian troops off its land entirely?

As might be expected, I have answers.

  1. All that the Ukrainian military needs, of the type they say they need (most assuredly not the type the Know Betters of the Pentagon say they need), and as fast as they can absorb it.
  2. Quit worrying about it. The barbarian’s conventional forces are in no position to escalate—or widen—anything, and even the barbarian chieftain understands that going nuclear, even if only tactical, will bring about the destruction of Russia and more importantly to the chieftain, his personal destruction.
  3. See 1 above. Zelenskyy has been quite clear about this, the pretended confusion of the Western press notwithstanding. The barbarian’s departure from Ukraine is a prerequisite to peace negotiation.

Concerning that last, I’ve written before that border negotiations must begin with, and the only border-related compromise permissible is, how far back from the Ukraine border Russian roads and railroads must be torn up and the terrain (re)sown with Russian olive trees.

Some Biden Admin Officials are Correct

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I’ve written about the dangers of TikTok to American children’s safety and to US security before. For two years, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US has been dickering with TikTok about ways to wall the app off from the government of the People’s Republic of China as a criterion for TikTok’s continued operation in the US.

Of course, a wall-off has no hope of success: its owner, ByteDance, would remain a PRC company and so wholly responsible to the PRC government’s intelligence community to commit espionage on demand. With TikTok still owned by ByteDance, any firewall must necessarily fail in the face of any PRC intel demand.

As a result of that, some members of CFIUS, in particular, DoD and DoJ folks, are becoming more interested in requiring TikTok be spun off by ByteDance into a separate entity. It’s an interesting idea; although I wonder about remaining sub rosa connections in the form of ByteDance-affiliated persons remaining in TikTok’s management structure, along with the risk of allegedly ex-ByteDance persons still in TikTok’s management.

Treasury has its own concerns regarding a forced sale.

[T]he Treasury Department, which chairs the panel [CFIUS], is worried that such an order might be overturned in court, and is looking for other possible solutions, according to a person familiar with that department’s thinking.

Treasury’s concern is easily enough preempted, along with my concern about ByteDance-related persons in TikTok employ: ban TikTok altogether from the US.