Tag Archives: culture

Too Far

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) has reintroduced his Terror Intelligence Improvement Act, his bill to allow Government to block suspected terrorists from obtaining firearms. This bill, far from improving anything, is a long step back from our rights under our Constitution. As Dana Loesch summarized it in her newsletter (behind a paywall after this month; subscribe now for a discount on her subscription price),

The bill would also provide more authority for law enforcement agencies to go after suspected terrorists, while safeguarding law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment and due process rights.

But, as Loesch goes on to point out, that’s internally contradictory. It’s simply not possible to restrict American citizens’ rights while protecting those same American citizens’ rights. A suspect is just that—a suspect, and so still innocent, regardless of suspicion.

Then, however, Loesch makes her own mistake.

If lawmakers want to stop suspected terrorists placed on a watch list from buying firearms they need to indict them.
I have no problem with this.

I do have a problem with that. All a prosecutor has done with an indictment is convince a secret group of men and women that he has probable enough cause to hale the indictee—possibly an infamous ham sandwich—into criminal court for trial.

The indictee still is innocent; he hasn’t been proven otherwise in that criminal court.

It’s true enough that we do restrict innocent men—we lock them up; we make them wear ankle bracelets; we make them pay a significant something of value to be released, under restrictive conditions, from jail pending trial; and so on.

But those restrictions are done in open court where the prosecutor must convince the judge that his proposed restrictions are warranted, and he must do so in the face of the defendant’s right to answer the proposed restrictions.

Simple indictment isn’t enough. If the suspected terrorist must be denied his 2nd Amendment rights (in the present context), let the prosecutor show in open court that his suspicion is well enough founded that his suspect should be locked up.

As a practical matter, too, that’s the only way to deny such a suspect firearms—outside of jail, there simply are too many means of access to firearms, legal or not.

Beyond that, there’s another, better, way to protect us from terrorists, whether those persons are armed or not. That is for Government to get out of the way of the first responders to any situation—us citizens who happen to be already on scene when the action goes down—carrying our own firearms.

Where was IT?

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Oldsmar, FL’s, water treatment facility was hacked via a remote access software package, with potentially devastating results (and which access has much broader implications for our nation).

One of them [software functions] regulates the level of sodium hydroxide, or lye—a main ingredient of drain cleaners that also is used to control water acidity and remove metals from drinking water, Sheriff Gualtieri said. The hacker increased the amount of lye from about 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, he said.

That’s bad enough, but there’s this, that enabled the hack [emphasis added]:

The intruder got into the utility’s industrial control-system through TeamViewer, a tool that allows engineers to monitor and repair computers and network machines, Sheriff Gualtieri said in an interview. Though the utility had switched to a different tool six months ago, he said, the TeamViewer program remained in place but unused

Aside from the foolishness of allowing remote software access to any government facility, I have to ask: where was IT on this? Why was a disused and superseded remote access software package left in place for so long?

Indictments

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North Carolina Lt Governor Mark Robinson opposed a set of social studies standards proposed to be used in the State’s K-12 schools because he considered them to be fundamentally un-American. As an aside, Robinson is a citizen of the United States and of North Carolina who happens to be black.

In response to Robinson’s opposition, WRAL published the following cartoon:

Wholly independently of the rightness or wrongness Robinson’s argument, North Carolina’s Progressive-Democrats indict themselves in two ways with this political cartoon. One way is their dishonesty in attributing the KKK to the Republican Party. As any graduate of grade school American history and social studies lessons knows, the KKK was created by the post-Civil War Democratic Party (you know that party—the same gang that forced that civil war on us at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives just so Democrats could try to keep their slaves) explicitly to terrorize newly freed blacks and all those who supported them.

The second way those Progressive-Democrats indict themselves is with their…dismay…over a Republican daring to oppose social studies “standards” Progressive-Democrats pretend are in some way inclusive, when those standards are explicitly designed to be divisive and to denigrate all the good things about America—like winning that Civil War and ending slavery, and putting the KKK into the garbage sack, until, that is, Progressive-Democrats dragged the thuggery back out to use as a shibboleth against anyone farther right than their Leftism.

Canceling Native Americans

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That seems to be the goal of a Washington state legislator, for all that she claims otherwise—and despite the fact that she’s a Native American. Representative Debra Lekanoff (D), Tlingit and Aleut, has introduced a bill that would ban the State’s public schools from using Native American names, symbols, or images for mascots, logos, or team names.

Lekanoff claims that using these items in this way

fails to respect the cultural heritage of Native Americans and promote productive relationships between sovereign governments.

Few things could be farther from the truth.

Last things first: the use of Native American imagery has nothing at all to do with “relationships between sovereign governments.” On the contrary, their use is solely to promote school spirit and school unity.

The other thing is that school spirit and unity. The use of Native American symbology is all about “these guys are the guys we want to be like. These guys are worthy role models that we want to emulate.”

Few things can be more respectful than that. Sadly, barring the use of such symbology, barring this kind of reference from our sports endeavors is just a step from barring Native Americans from our national consciousness. It’s a small step at this point, but it’s a serious one down a destructive path.

People Like Me

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President Joe Biden’s Climate MFWIC, John Kerry, traveled to Iceland to accept an Arctic Circle award for his climate “leadership.” Of course, Kerry traveled by flying in his private jet (which has a much larger per-passenger carbon footprint than a commercial jet, but we won’t mention that).

An Icelandic journalist, Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson, asked him how that works. Kerry said,

If you offset your carbon—it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.
I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States.
I’ve been involved with this fight for years. I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris.

Of course. “I’m so special. I negotiated all this cool, yet vapid, stuff. I even got Xi to think about doing something decades into the future so we could get to the emptiness of Paris.

“Did I mention that I’m also rich enough to afford the carbon indulgences, unlike the little people—don’t they look like ants from my jet’s altitude?”

He’s so self-importantly oblivious, too, that he can’t conceive of spending his precious time in a commercial passenger jet. ‘Course, he’d be cooped up with so many of those ants.

I wonder if he invited James Taylor along on any of his private jet travels.