Tag Archives: culture

Foolishness

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It seems a bunch of Army and Navy cadets flashed the “OK” sign—thumb and index finger touching in a circle with the remaining fingers extended—at last weekend’s Army-Navy football game. Now

West Point and Annapolis officials are trying to determine the motives

of those cadets.

Nonsense, and it’s…sad…to see otherwise intelligent Academy officials falling for the Left’s artificial hue and cry and wasting time looking into this. They’re just throwing their cadets under the bus by taking this idiocy seriously.

Only lately has the gesture been given

a different significance for some people around 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, when it began to be used to signify white power.

This is nothing but a cynical effort to change the meaning of an innocent, well-meaning, gesture for deliberately divisive meaning. The OK sign has no history of any other meaning, and it has no connection to any other meaning. The distortion is dishonestly created.

No. The gesture means “OK,” and nothing else. That it might also be used in a bar room prankish game is neither here nor there.

It’s important that all of us not surrender any part of the lexicon to the manipulations and bastardizations of the Left.

It’s important to not surrender this gesture to a motley collection of snowflakes, virtue-signalers, and segregationist identity politickers.

Flash the OK sign whenever and wherever you wish to indicate approval.

Culture and Compromise

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The subheadline of a Federalist article about the Boris Johnson/Tories election just concluded in Great Britain caught my eye. Read the whole article; it’s valuable in its entirety.

It is far easier for the right to compromise on economics than for the left to compromise on culture, religion, and nationalism. And that is the formula conservatives need to remember.

We’ve seen this in our nation, too: the Left’s and its Progressive-Democratic Party’s constant drumbeat of attacks against the right of particular, disapproved-of Americans to practice their religion and attacks on our nation, demanding, instead that we subordinate ourselves to internationalism, wherein we lose control of our own lives.  Understand: these sorts of things are unique to our nation. No other nation in the world has a written-down Constitution that says in so many words—opens with the words—that We the People are sovereign in our nation. Not Government, not any arm of Government, we citizens. Government works for us.

We’ve seen also the refusal of Progressive-Democrats to compromise, even to try, with Republicans. The Republican Party is just a Trumpian personality cult, they say.  Supporters of Trump are racists, now including Conservatives.  Blacks who support Trump are, to use more polite terms, Uncle Toms or oreos.  Women who support Trump are, at best, voting against their interest, and at worst, as was said about a Republican woman candidate for Vice President, she should be gang-raped by blacks and then shat in her mouth.  Americans, generally, are just bitter Bible- and gun-clingers, ignorant, racist, and misogynistic.  The Left and Party are in open warfare against our American culture.

In contrast, an ability to compromise on matters of economics, what those of the Right, the Republican Party and Conservatives in general are willing and able to do is a far more successful method, and it’s far more protective of American culture: economics is near, if not at, the center of culture.

It’s how businessmen of a particular religion live their business lives while still doing business with customers of differing religious tenets, or no such tenets at all.  It’s how businessmen protect their rights to speak openly and freely by not selling a product with a particular message to customers demanding that message, and this freedom is especially protected by American free markets: there will be another business just down the block willing to sell the same article with the customer-desired message.

Free market economics is how we interact with each other within the framework of culture.  And the freedom of our market is how we find compromise among each other.  And that preserves our American culture.

The fundamental difference in Western politics now is cultural, and is between Westphalian sovereignty and unifying nationalism on one hand, and complete individualist internationalism and rule by technocratic institutions on the other.

Indeed, in American politics in particular, as well as the British politics of which Sumantra Maitra was writing at the link. And one is preservative of our culture, our way of life, our central ethos, while the other is overtly, carefully considered destruction of all of that.

Voting Rights

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On the whole, convicted felons lose their right to cast votes in our elections for the rest of their lives. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) wants to restore this right to nonviolent felons.

It’s been a truism in our American jurisprudence and our American society that when a miscreant—a felon in the present case—has paid his debt to society (nominally including a measure of “make whole” his immediate victim), he should be allowed to start over, reenter society, and try to live honorably and on his own efforts rather than continuing to be dependent on society, a dependence begun with his dependence on our prison system for his existence as well as for his punishment.

Now, some crimes want a lifetime punishment, and a few demand the criminal’s life in compensation to society and to the victim.  Most crimes, though, have punishments that society has determined to be sufficient at a smaller price than the criminal’s life or life span.  These crimes are identifiable by their finite jail terms with parole following after release or by their having been suspended on the criminal’s good behavior during the period of suspension.

Many of those short-of-life crimes are violent crimes; Beshear wants to limit his action to non-violent crimes.

In principle, I agree with that.  When a man’s debt has been paid, his bill should be so marked, including with additional detriments, like a fundamental right of citizenship—voting—also lifted.  But we need to be careful with the definition of “non-violent.”  I suggest that a con job is non-violent, or a burglary of an unoccupied building.  I suggest, though, that dealing drugs is not at all non-violent, even if no guns are used: it destroys lives.  Drug dealing has no merely temporary effects.  I suggest, further, that identity theft, for all that no guns may have been involved, is far from non-violent.  Identity theft can destroy a life as thoroughly as drugs: it takes financial resources necessary for the victim’s present life and his future life.

Again, I agree, in principle, with the concept of restoring a citizen’s right to vote to a felon whose crime was non-violent and who has completed his sentence in every respect, including restitution.  But we need to know the details of Beshear’s specific proposal before we can agree that he’s on the right track.

Further Personnel Replacements

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I wrote yesterday about the need for replacement of senior FBI personnel in order to minimize the accumulation of incumbency power of bureaucrats in the FBI, a power increasingly abused in order to obstruct constitutional authority and authorities over them.

The same is needed in State, the Intelligence Community, and Defense.  Walter Russell Mead wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal of a foreign-policy showdown of historic proportions. His showdown is that between Progressive-Democrats (my term, not Mead’s) and Republicans over how to interpret administration handling of Ukraine within the framework of the former’s internationalist/Atlanticist perspective that also sees Russia as our main adversary and the latter’s view of not so much internationalist/Atlanticist, more domestic concerns, and maybe more attention to Latin American and across the Pacific.

That’s an important struggle, but it’s a political struggle perfectly well handled at the ballot box. There’s a much larger struggle in progress, though, and it’s insidious for its behind the scenes, not so controllable by We the People, nature. This struggle centers on who controls the formulation and execution of US foreign policy: the President, who is the Constitutional authority, or the bureaucrats of State, IC, and DoD who have their “interagency coordination group,” as described by Progressive-Democrat State Department witnesses during the House Intel “impeachment” hearings.

The latter is exemplified by Fiona Hill’s dismayed testimony that she was “quite cross” that she had been bypassed in the formulation of policy vis-à-vis Ukraine, especially since that “interagency coordination group” was unanimous—unanimous! —in its opposition to that policy. That that group has no existence in law or Executive Order is unimportant to these bureaucrats.

The existence of the struggle between a Constitutional authority and an informal claque is an indication of the need periodically to terminate most bureaucrats to break up their incumbency power. That break up should follow along the lines I proposed for the FBI:

State, IC, and DoD managers who are Presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed should be barred from any service, including pro bono or lobbying, within any of those Departments and Agencies under any immediately subsequent administration; they can go work in the private sector. Their eligibility for State, IC, and DoD employment could be restored with the election of the second President (not the next President reelected) after the one in whose administration they served.

This removal from employment should extend into and across the top tiers just below the confirmation positions, as well.

None of those folks will have necessarily done anything wrong or even untoward; it’s merely necessary to break up and terminate the accumulating power of incumbency and bureaucratic inertia.  Some might worry that too much corporate memory would be lost.  Such memory and history are valuable in any enterprise; however, there will remain sufficient value in the remaining senior employees. As well as from the non-State, IC, and DoD Federal organizations with their outside-looking-in perspective.

The FBI and Surveillance

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DoJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has produced a report that’s pretty damning of the FBI and its surveillance practices.  This has raised concerns about how far the FBI goes, and whether it exceeds the spirit, even the letter, of our laws governing FBI surveillance.

Monday’s report…also faulted the bureau for its “failure to adhere to its own standards of accuracy and completeness when filing applications” to conduct electronic surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign staffer, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Privacy advocates said the report’s findings validated their belief that surveillance practices under the FISA law…lacked adequate oversight and transparency.

Indeed. And this is the crux of the matter.  I suspect that the FISA law and other of our government surveillance-related laws are adequate to their task (eliding questions about FISA’s courts). It’s the humans in charge of the FBI, and their subordinates, who are wanting in this.

It’s virtually certain that additional law, or tweakings of existing laws, will accomplishment a good approximation of nothing in redressing this.

I suggest that what is needed are a couple of things.  One is an increase in the severity of sanction applied to those FBI managers (I won’t call them leaders; failure here disqualifies them from that favorable label) who fail in their oversight duties and separately in their transparency duties.  This will produce improvement, but that will erode, just as we’ve reached our present sorry pass via erosion over the past several years. J Edgar Hoover and James Comey are merely the culmination of such erosion.

The other thing promises to produce more long-lasting results. FBI managers who are Presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed should be barred from any service, including pro bono and lobbying, within DoJ under any immediately subsequent administration; they can go work in the private sector instead. Their eligibility for DoJ employment could be restored with the election of the second President (not the next President reelected) after the one in whose administration they served.

This removal from employment should extend into and across the top tiers just below the confirmation positions, as well.

None of those folks will have necessarily done anything wrong or even untoward; it’s merely necessary to break up and terminate the accumulating power of incumbency and bureaucratic inertia.  Some might worry that too much corporate memory would be lost.  Such memory and history are valuable in any enterprise; however, in the case of the FBI, there will be sufficient value in the senior agents and remaining other senior employees. As well as from the non-FBI DoJ with its outside-looking-in perspective.