Sitzkrieg

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As President Donald Trump (R) seeks a deal with the terrorists reigning over Iran, two primary problems continue: the need to foreclose altogether the terrorists’ ability to acquire, even to do research and production of preliminary materials for, nuclear weapons, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz without constraint—viz., tolls,  “protection” fees, etc, any semblance of Iranian control over this international water—and those terrorists’ insistence that Iran should be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and should have control of the Strait.

In pursuit of that deal, Trump and Iran’s thugs agreed and have largely maintained a ceasefire for these last five weeks, to allow space for negotiations to proceed. During this time, all the terrorists have done is repeat their demands in varying terms: they will continue their drive to acquire nuclear weapons and they will continue to control the Strait and charge their tolls and protection vig. Oh, and they will have all sanctions lifted and frozen accounts unfrozen.

Those reigning over Iran are continuing to demonstrate their bad faith and their decision to not negotiate in any serious manner. The terrorists are, in Trump’s own phrase, just tapping us along.

It’s time to put an end to this sitzkrieg. It’s time to begin reducing to rubble the terrorists’ ability to move oil and natural gas from their wells to their refineries and ports by breaking the pipelines at the wells, destroying those refineries, and closing those ports while destroying the pipelines, roads, and railroads entering them. It’s time to eliminate the factories that produce war materiel and civilian/military dual use materiel and to destroy those factories’ input sources and routes. The terrorists’ missile and drone stockpiles, launching facilities, and production ability must be eliminated. The terrorists’ mosquito fleet of small boats must be sunk, and the naval and naval-usable ports must be destroyed. The assault must continue apace and without letup until the terrorists are physically incapable of continuing or have agreed terms.

If the terrorists decide to engage in serious negotiations, they must send decision-makers, not intermediaries, to the table. Safe passage can be granted to these persons while the attacks on the terrorists’ war-making and shipping-threatening capabilities continue apace.

The “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

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I have some thoughts on this and how it might work. Of course, I’m speculating; no criteria for eligibility or payout have been set, the five-person “adjudication” panel has not been stood up, and it’s possible the funding will not survive Congressional purse-control oversight. Within that, here I go again.

Payouts, I expect, will be limited to actual loss, with no add-ons related to punitive matters. In many respects, this will be straightforward, but there are a number of areas where losses are not clearly specifiable and/or the alleged losses are highly subjective. These latter include losses from loss of jobs, loss of business revenue, closure of the business. Courts have gotten fairly adept, if widely variable across jurisdictions, in assessing this sort of loss.

Even hazier are things like loss through death of a spouse, loss of the spouse’s income (which is separate from his/her death, even if the income loss resulted from the death), loss of conjugal relations or alienation of affection resulting from divorce or the affair that led to the divorce—and yes, some divorces have occurred as a result of many of the J6 prosecutions and, in the present context, persecutions. Courts make guesses at these losses, but only guesses; they’re not very good at it.

The next, and the overwhelmingly most important, problem, though is this. Given provable or even merely articulable loss that meets fund eligibility criteria to this point, it’s going to be deucedly hard to prove the political targeting, lawfare nature of the cases for which an applicant is seeking recompense. At best, satisfying a court, most likely satisfying the succession of courts, appellate courts, the Supreme Court, with the potential for remands to lower courts for further consideration or for reconsideration, will take years and years to reach a final decision. And that decision may well be that the matter at hand was not, in fact, political targeting, and so no payout is due.

And one more question. Given a final decision, whence the monies for the legal costs of getting to one? Will the Fund pay the government’s legal costs apart from any payout ordered? If not, where will the government’s funding come from?

Memorial Day Celebrations

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I first posted this in 2012.  It bears repeating.

Enjoy this holiday.  Take the time to kick back, relax from the hard work you’ve been doing, and just goof off for a bit.

While you’re doing that, though, do something else, also.  Invite that veteran in your neighborhood, who came back from his service wounded or maimed, and his or her family, to your celebration.  Invite the family in your neighborhood whose veteran was killed in his or her service to your celebration.  They need the break and the relaxation and the support, also.  And they’ve earned your respect and remembrance.

To which I add this, excerpted from Alex Horton’s remarks on the significance of the day to him and his:

I hope civilians find more solace in Memorial Day than I do.  Many seem to forget why it exists in the first place, and spend the time looking for good sales or drinking beers on the back porch.  It’s a long weekend, not a period of personal reflection.  At the same time, many incorrectly thank Vets or active duty folks for their service.  While appreciated, it’s misdirected.  That’s what Veterans Day is for.  Instead, they should take some time and remember the spirit of the country and the dedication of those men and women who chose to pick up arms.  They never came home to be thanked, and only their memory remains.

h/t Spirit of America

What Error did she Acknowledge?

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In James Freeman’s Best of the Web Wednesday piece, he wrote of Seattle’s newly elected socialist mayor Katie Wilson’s supposed acknowledgment of her problem vis-à-vis her disdain for big business in a competitive market. In her series of victory laps shortly after her election, she crowed while at a barista union rally,

I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either.

With the ensuing backlash, which includes an exodus of big businesses like Starbucks from Seattle, she then said,

Those comments were not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good….

Freeman then quoted, without questioning, Danny Westneat, writing for the Seattle Times:

Admitting errors in public is hard…. Conventional political wisdom says it means you’re weak. In this case, I’d argue it’s a positive sign for the future of both the mayor and Seattle.
It means the mayor is at least more grounded in the real world than some of her blinkered progressive fans….
Maybe this is a chance to reset relations with businesses—at least ones other than Starbucks, where it may be too late.

But what “error” is Westneat claiming Wilson has admitted? In fact, it’s quite clear from Wilson’s own words, and Westneat has chosen to ignore it. Wilson admitted the error of her words, not the error of their intent, which is and always has been, her disdain for and assaults on free markets and the larger businesses that operate in them.

Competition

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In her Free Expression piece concerning the Harvard faculty’s vote to limit the number A grades (but not A- and lower grades) awarded to the school’s pupils, Mary Julia Koch had this:

It’s a fair point that a scarcity of A’s could crank up the competitiveness among an already ambitious group of college kids.

It’s a fair point? What, exactly, is wrong with competition among the pupils for the better grades, and so for the benefits ensuing, beginning with a less stressful and sooner successful job hunt? What’s wrong with increasing the level of that competition?

Harvard’s pupils, even after this grade inflation move (as small as it is), have no idea of the level of competition in our relatively free market economy. Those pupils have no idea of the benefits of competition, from improving their own skills to producing better products and services at the companies that employ them to the follow-on of more and better jobs and better pay.

One professor who doesn’t like the quota said that

she didn’t become a college professor to “rank my students against one another for the convenience of potential employers.”

But that’s precisely the purpose and the benefit of such rankings, and her attitude insults those students who take her classes. College graduates are not simple members of a commodity pool from which a company can select at random. Companies want to hire only the best because that’s what produces the best goods and services, which in turn maximizes the companies’ ability to thrive and grow and do R&D, which in the end maximizes job growth and so employment opportunities. One of the most important tools a company has in discriminating among a pool of brand new college graduates is an honestly done GPA.

The answers to my prior questions is that there’s nothing wrong with competition or with increasing competition. That’s what makes all of our lives better, including those of Harvard’s pupils, who now will be required to level up their game.