Tag Archives: morality

But What Has UCLA Done Concretely?

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UCLA’s Chancellor Julio Frenk protested that his school has done much to combat antisemitism in his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section. He even piously cloaked himself in his extended family’s history of flight from Nazi Germany and holocaust survival.

Among other actions, we have recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, established an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism with dedicated resources, reorganized our Office of Civil Rights, and appointed a Title VI/Title VII officer. We have strengthened our time, place, and manner policies to safeguard both free expression and campus operations. We are also supporting and partnering with community organizations engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

These, though, are merely steps that set up John Cleese-esque argument clinics.

What has the good Chancellor or his staff done to rid the school of its recalcitrant antisemitic bigots, whether employee or pupil? What has he done, personally, to address directly any of these bigots? What has any member of his staff done to address them directly?

Transgenders are Better than other Americans?

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Kansas passed a law with effect last Thursday that requires driver licenses to reflect the biological gender of the license holder and not the holder’s currently self-claimed gender. The law invalidates, with immediate force, existing driver licenses that reflect a gender different from the holder’s birth gender. That lack of notice strikes me as unfair, but that’s a separate issue. The law also

invalidates birth certificates of residents [sic] who changed their gender and says citizens can sue transgender Kansans who use public bathrooms that don’t correspond with their assigned birth sex.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit claim that

the law violate[s] transgender Kansans rights to privacy, equality, and free expression guaranteed by the state constitution.

Leave aside the plain fact that the plaintiffs’ suit utterly denies biological fact. What’s interesting here is the self-important arrogance of the plaintiffs, along with the cynically offered irrelevance of one of their beefs.

Last thing first: the law does not deny the plaintiffs’ their right to free expression. No one is telling them they cannot self-claim a different gender than that of their biology. No one is telling them they cannot live their lives as though they were that…alternate…gender, with the few exceptions that all citizens have when exercise of their rights interferes with the ability of their fellow citizens to exercise their own rights.

Which brings me to the first things. Plaintiffs, with their suit, insist that others’ rights to privacy and equality must take a back seat to plaintiffs’. To hell with women’s rights to their own privacy, the equality of their own rights. They must accept that their rights are less important than, are inferior to, the claimed rights of men who claim to be women.

This is a suit that should be tossed on its face, with prejudice, and in short order.

I Know Something You Don’t…

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….so trust me. Of course. That’s the self-important claim of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the ongoing US/Israeli campaign against Iran and its nuclear programs, missile and drone launching and production facilities, and the nation’s chief terrorists at the top of the Iranian government. His opening claim:

As a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, with access to ample classified information about threats from Iran and others, I can state plainly that there was no imminent threat from Iran to America sufficient to warrant committing our sons and daughters to another war in the Middle East….

Maybe, maybe not. It’s awfully convenient to cite “information” that’s hidden from us average Americans, almost as convenient as citing those childhood imaginary friends masqueraded as “officials familiar with the matter” of which news writers are so enamored. There’s no more reason to believe Kaine’s claims than those other claims.

He went on.

To be sure, Iran is a bad actor, oppressing its own citizens and fomenting violence outside its borders, including attacks against US troops in the region.

Of course, in his mind, attacking our forces and the civilians and militaries of our friends and allies presents no cause for kinetic response. Do diplomacy again. Continue those decades of failed diplomatic efforts. This time is different. He means it.

And this, from his claimed history that the rest of us, not nearly as learned as his august self, do not know:

The US and Iran were friends and allies until the US led a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

Yeah. We were such tight friends and close allies that we felt constrained to assist in tossing that government. The illogic here is awesome.

Then Kaine cited a list of Iranian-inspired if not -led attacks on our facilities and murders of our people throughout the Middle East. Our support for Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, though, is sufficient justification for us to ignore the mullahs’ terrorist attacks on us and on our friends and allies. Diplomacy is so effective with terrorists, you see.

Then he quoted—carefully cherry-picking—from the JCPOA, which his Party claimed to end Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

That’s in the first paragraph of the Preface to the document. Throughout the body of the document, where the actual force of the agreement lies, are repeated agreements that sanctions would be lifted at 8, 15, or 25 years, depending on the sanctions involved (those at 25 years are trivial). Following the end of those sanctions, Iran would have been free to resume nuclear weapons development without consequence. Kaine so carefully withheld these tidbits from his op-ed.

And his “constitutional” pseudo-argument: he opened with this,

without the congressional debate and vote that the Constitution requires

and bookended that with this at the close of his piece:

How long will the Article I branch of America’s government remain silent against this wholesale repudiation of our basic constitutional order?

This is the carefully generalized, carefully unspecific claim of “it’s unconstitutional!” while just as carefully declining to cite the clause(s) of our Constitution that mandates all of this. What Article I—Section 8 for those of you following along more closely than Kaine is doing—says is that the power to declare war is reserved to the Congress. That’s all that our Constitution says about our involvement in the beginning of wars, and it’s a far cry from the Article II executive authority to fight for our safety.

Even the War Powers Act, grants the President—whoever he is—60 days of fighting before he must seek Congressional approval to continue. Congresses led by both parties have explored altering the Act, and each of them have explicitly declined to do so. At that, the Act is iffy itself; generations of Presidents since the Act’s passage in 1973 have called the Act an unconstitutional infringement of our Constitution’s separation of powers structure of government.

This kind of deliberately misleading foolishness by Kaine is why his Party can never be trusted with the reins (Party: reigns) of government.

It Isn’t Enough

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DoJ has filed suit against UCLA over the school’s overt antisemitic bigotry in the immediate and ensuing aftermath of Hamas’ atrocities inflicted on Israel 7 October 2023 and subsequently.

The school “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination against Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA…by failing to prevent and correct antisemitic workplace discrimination,” the complaint says. For all the incidents of anti-Jewish harassment, “not a single student, staff member, or faculty member was…formally disciplined for antisemitic behavior—including those who were arrested for illegal conduct.”

UCLA has lied about cleaning up its act:

UCLA said in a statement that the school had “taken concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies and combat antisemitism.”

The lie is demonstrated:

UCLA didn’t discipline or expel students for behavior that crossed into threats and harassment.

DoJ’s suit “asks,” according to the WSJ,

the school to stop tolerating a hostile work environment based on race, religion, and national origin.

If that’s an accurate summation and the extent of the call, it’s badly deficient. The personnel who perpetrated this bigotries would seem to remain in place. Any words they might fall past their lips or out of their keyboards claiming to stop such misbehaviors cannot be trusted given their empirically demonstrated bigotry. As part of any outcome of the suit—and there should be no settlement—these personnel must be fired for cause and any educator licenses they might possess be revoked with prejudice. Any students involved who are still present must be expelled with prejudice, and any since graduated must have their degrees rescinded, also with prejudice.

Trump is Right, and He’s Wrong

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President Donald Trump (R) delivered his State of the Union Speech Tuesday evening. In it, among a variety of topics (as is the nature of SOTU speeches), he touted the large improvement in our economy, from inflation down sharply, the stock market up strongly, manufacturing coming home, energy costs coming down, and so on. On all of this, Trump was absolutely correct: our economy is much better, much stronger, much more stable than it was under his predecessor Joe Biden (D). He also touted a number of projects and statutory proposals that would cement existing improvements and lead to further improvements.

Those, though, are national, population-as-a-whole, items. Our national population is made up of individuals, small clusters of individuals, and regional collections of individuals.

What Trump didn’t do was acknowledge the further work necessary to make those individual, cluster, and collections of Americans’ lives better in particular. He should have, he still needs to do, and what Republicans in Congress and running for Congress in Progressive-Democrat incumbent districts and States need to do, is talk to those folks specifically and directly about their economic situations and how Republican policies and proposals will help them in particular, how they’re already helping them (without talking down to them).

Failing that, both houses of Congress are in peril of falling to the Progressive-Democrats and the economic and security destruction they will inflict with their big, intrusive government; increasing taxation; and exploding spending policies.

One other thing: Trump got the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Congressmen to demonstrate, with their own behavior, how useless, if not dangerous, they are to our Republic. Trump challenged all of the Congressmen in the room (and it was most of them, as the threats of fully a third of Party’s House Representatives to boycott Trump’s SOTU speech proved empty words; they showed up instead) who agreed with the simple statement that the primary goal of the government is to protect American citizens and not illegal aliens to stand. To a man and woman, all of the Republicans stood. Nearly all of the Progressive-Democrats (there were a couple of exceptions) remained seated. They showed, thereby, that they don’t agree that protecting us American citizens is paramount.

Come to that, this was a Party that refused even to stand for the proposition that child transition hormonal or surgical treatments is wrong. This was a Party that refused even to stand for a little girl who survived a traffic collision caused by an illegal alien with an illegally granted Commercial Driver License driving a truck. This was a Party that refused even to stand for the mother of a young Ukrainian immigrant brutally murdered in a subway car.

This should be remembered in this primary season and in the fall elections.