Tag Archives: morality

A Clear Difference

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Assume, for a moment, that the series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets near the border with Ukraine have been carried out by Ukrainian forces and are not just examples of shoddy Russian maintenance or done by disgruntled Russian protestors.

Compare, then, that damage with the damage done by Russian attacks inside Ukraine. “Ukraine’s attacks” have been carefully limited to facilities supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued prosecution of its unprovoked attack.

  • a fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod region directly opposite Kharkiv
  • an explosion sparked a blaze at an ammunition depot near the city of Belgorod
  • blasts have been reported inside the city
  • fires erupted at other oil depots, including one at a Russian military base
  • explosions have damaged rail lines in Kursk and Bryansk oblasts

Russian attacks, on the other hand, have been deliberately targeted at residential neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities, and have been aimed at deliberately razing whole cities to the ground (and of simply making the rubble bounce)—Kharkiv, Kherson, Izyum, Lyman, Bucha, Mariupol, to suggest a few—and nakedly, without regard for much of anything, attacking nuclear facilities at Zaporizhzhia or firing on “targets” very close to or having cruise missiles overfly the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant near Kostyantynivka in southern Ukraine and the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant near Netishyn in the northeast enroute to other targets, and blithely kicking up the potentially still lethal radioactive dirt around Chornobyl.

Parental Rights

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Some court cases are being engaged in response to the number of Leftist school boards pushing child sex transition “discussions” onto children behind the kids’ parents backs, and occasionally in defiance of parents’ written instructions.

A handful of court cases are being debated to decide whether school officials should be required to tell parents if their child identifies as LGBT.

These Leftists actually think going behind the parents’ backs is justifiable.

[Lambda Legal lawyer Kell] Olson would like to see parents support school districts’ “reasonable policies” rather than resort reflexively to the courts to uphold parental rights.

This gives away the game. No school policy that denies parents knowledge of the child’s performance at school or of the school’s treatment of their child is reasonable. No school policy that in any way seeks to circumscribe parents’ rights can be reasonable. That especially applies to whose responsibility it is to have discussions with children regarding gender and sex and sexual behavior.

Contrary to Olson’s attempts to justify this abusive behavior, not just of the parents’ rights, but of the parents’ kids, also, here’s Rick Claybrook, representing parents in a lawsuit against the Montgomery County school district:

Kids have their parents to protect them because they’re not able to do so until they reach maturity….

Especially, apparently, to protect them from out of control school boards and school administrators and school teachers.

Do Black Lives Matter?

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Or are companies just virtue-signaling?

These companies openly allied themselves with the Black Lives Matter organization (which should not be confused with the more honest black lives matter (lower case) movement):

Nike, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Ben & Jerry’s, Nordstrom, Target, and Ulta Beauty

Now, with crime against black Americans spiking—including homicides, and those including killings of children—as BLM and its anti-cop cronies push for, and succeed in getting, police departments defunded, reduced in funding, and police personnel reductions, those companies refuse to discuss their alignment, whether to defend and explain it or to acknowledge their error and correct their alignment. Or even to discuss the matter at all.

Of course, that’s consistent with many of these companies’—Nike, Apple—enthusiastic business dealings with and inside nations like the People’s Republic of China which is committing genocide against its Uighur population, and other of these companies—Ben & Jerry’s—openly siding with Middle East terrorists and reducing or boycotting altogether Israel, and of others—Facebook—just generally favoring censoring political speech.

Criminal behavior is of no interest to these companies—criminals’ dollars matter, too.

German Duplicity

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It continues. Recall then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s promise to boost German spending on NATO to 2% of GDP. She welched on that promise with her very next budget submittal to her Bundestag.

Now there’s current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He opened Germany’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked invasion of Ukraine by blocking transfer of German-originated arms from all of the Baltic States to Ukraine and by not allowing British aerial transfer of weapons to overfly German territory.

Scholz later pretended to alter his position, promising to step up German defense spending and sending—count ’em—5,000 helmets to the Ukrainian army while promising more robust arms transfers.

Now he’s welched on that promise. And in a most despicable way. He opened his latest betrayal by promising Germany would reimburse Ukraine for any arms purchases it might make from German manufacturers.

However, Bild reported that Scholz’s office had crossed all heavy weapons off the list submitted by Ukraine. The combined value of the items on the inventory eventually approved by Scholz’s office was €307 million, less than a third of the €1 billion of equipment that the chancellor had previously promised. After the chancellery was finished “consolidating” the list, the document had shrunk from 48 pages to 24, the paper said.

Worse [emphasis added],

Ukrainian officials had sent a list of 15 types of urgently needed equipment to the German Ministry of Defense, which included tanks and artillery. Scholz’s government only agreed to three of these, including a radar system. Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany, told the German public broadcaster ZDF that “the weapons we need aren’t on the list.”

Because…?

[M]embers of the [German] government argued that it would not be easy for Ukrainian forces to learn to use this western equipment.

Dumb Slavs just aren’t capable of understanding serious weaponry. Never mind that even the Americans think the Ukrainians are fully capable of learning—quickly—how to use American arms, and that training is going on pursuant to the US’ latest transfer of American howitzers.

This is not NATO ally anyone can rely on.

Discrimination

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Recall the California law that requires (required) the boards of directors of California-headquartered public companies to have at least one member of an “underrepresented” race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, and two to three for larger boards. Recall further that California Superior Court Judge

Terry Green judge struck the law for violating California’s constitution.

Now The Wall Street Journal includes a bit of the judge’s reasoning from his opinion.

the judge says no one “appears to have made any effort to identify, define, or survey the qualified talent pool for director positions.”

Oops.

In an associated footnote, the judge went on, with clarity that even a California Progressive-Democrat should be able to discern.

Some of the experts have identified common feeder positions (such as “C-Suite” executive roles) and academic qualifications (such as an MBA), but there appears to be no one single” gatekeeping “qualification that could be used to define the pool in the way that a license might for lawyers and medical professionals, or a credential might for teachers.

Then he drove the point home in his conclusion.

Corporations Code § 301.4 [the board of directors membership law] violates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution on its face. The statute treats similarly situated individuals—qualified potential corporate board members—differently based on their membership (or lack thereof) in certain listed racial, sexual orientation, and gender identity groups. It requires that a certain specific number of board seats be reserved for members of the groups on the list—and necessarily excludes members of other groups from those seats.

It’s hard to get any clearer than that, but if the California Progressive-Democratic Party legislators are true to their history, they’ll work hard to find a way to be confused.