Tag Archives: politics

Not the Government’s Job

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DHS wants the Supreme Court to let its agents cut the razor wire barrier Texas has erected along sections of Texas’ border with Mexico, a barrier raised in order to slow the flow of illegal aliens into Texas, and a barrier necessitated by the Biden’s decision to not defend our southern border and to not enforce existing immigration laws. A core part of DHS’ rationalization for eliminating that barrier is this:

Homeland Security says the wire can leave migrants stranded in the river, risking injury.

The razor wire does no such thing. What leaves the illegal aliens stranded in the river is their decision to try to come into our nation illegally, to break our laws as their first act on entry.

It’s not our government’s job—at any level—to protect illegal aliens from the consequences of their own decisions. It is our government’s job—at any level—to protect our nation from illegal aliens’ entry.

Full stop.

President Plagiarist

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Harvard’s, not the one currently sitting, on occasion, in the White House. Claudine Gay has been caught out again.

Seven of Gay’s 17 published works have already been impacted by the scandal, but the new charges, which have not been previously reported, extend into an eighth: In a 2001 article, Gay lifts nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
That article, The Effect of Minority Districts and Minority Representation on Political Participation in California, includes some of the most extreme and clear-cut cases of plagiarism yet. At one point, Gay borrows four sentences from Canon’s 1999 book, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts, without quotation marks and with only minor semantic tweaks. She does not cite Canon anywhere in or near the passage, though he does appear in the bibliography.

Gay’s…performance…goes downhill from there.

Is it the case that here, too, every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”?

In the end, on Tuesday she resigned as Harvard President. The Harvard management team cravenly allowed her to resign, rather than firing her for cause—of which there were two: her dishonesty and her bigotry. Harvard management, even more cravenly, are keeping her on the professorial payroll. Never mind that she should be fired altogether for cause—of which there are two: her dishonesty and her bigotry.

It’s unfortunate that Harvard continues to employ this person, and her continued employment demonstrates that the school doesn’t care about her dishonesty or her bigotry. From that, Harvard should be disqualified from any further government funding, from any level of government.

Western Battery-Car Adoption Anxiety

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The Wall Street Journal ran an article centered on how “western anxiety about Chinese EVs could prove self-defeating,” with a subheadline that summarized the thesis:

The US and Europe risk slowing electric-vehicle adoption by excluding Chinese suppliers from subsidies and raising tariffs

I have a hard time seeing the downside to slowing battery car adoption. Leave aside the tremendous drain that charging all those battery cars (assuming widespread adoption) would have on our already near or at capacity electric power grid and generating capacity for that grid.

Battery cars are tremendously polluting and damaging to our environment, from dirt in the ground to end-of-life battery disposal. Mining the metals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and on and on, metals that are used in far greater quantity in battery cars than in gasoline- diesel- or natural gas-powered vehicles—is extremely damaging, both from the toxicity of the metals themselves and from the toxicity of the tailings from the mining operations.

Processing those metals into battery-car-usable components is intensely energy demanding (have I mentioned the strains on anyone’s electricity grid?).

Disposing of those so-far unrecyclable dead batteries at their end of life is enormously polluting as they leach out of even the most well-kept landfills.

The risk is that the West cuts off its nose to spite its face. Slow down the shift to EVs too much to build local supply chains and give domestic manufacturers time to adapt, and Chinese technology might simply pull farther ahead….

Meh.

The technologies involved are useful, they should be pursued apace, and the supply chain problems need to be worked for a host of different reasons. However, it’s a Good Thing that battery cars are not being rapidly incorporated into our transportation systems.

“Very Contentious Issue”

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Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has vetoed the SAFE Act, which would have barred biological males from women’s sports and protected Ohio’s children from mutilation in the form of sex hormone…treatments…and related sex change surgeries until those children reached 18 years old. DeWine had had this bill on his desk since 15 December, yet he waited until the last moment to veto it.

DeWine called the debate over transgender youth a “very contentious issue….”

Riley Gaines was direct on the matter during those two weeks:

He hasn’t signed it yet. He has 2 more days to sign before it becomes law without his signature. Why the hesitation, [Governor DeWine]?

No—there was, and is, nothing contentious at all in moving to protect children. There’s nothing contentious at all in moving to protect women’s sports and the women who compete in them. Contention exists only in the minds of extremists on the Left and of cowards in public office.

Riley Gaines is right: of what was Mike DeWine so terrified?

Or was he just putting his political position at the top of the Ohio heap ahead of the safety and welfare of Ohio’s children and women athletes?

It’s embarrassing that DeWine is a member of the Republican Party.

A UN Official…

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…gets one right.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, through organs of his administration, is moving to expand Title IX’s definition of sex and sexual discrimination to include “gender identity” and to bar schools, colleges, and universities from banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Even an agency of the UN sees this as…foolish.

Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls:

I share the concern expressed by women and girl athletes and women sports associations, as well as women and girls on sports scholarships, that the proposed Title IX rule changes would have detrimental effects on the participation of biological women and girls in sports, including by denying them the opportunity to compete fairly, resulting in the loss of athletic and scholarship opportunities[.]
More importantly, it would lead to the loss of privacy, an increased risk of physical injury, heightened exposure to sexual harassment and voyeurism, as well as a more frequent and accumulated psychological distress due to the loss of privacy and fair and equal sporting and academic opportunities[.]

Right on all counts. A better solution, and it is a problem that wants a solution, even as the Biden administration refuses even to consider the alternative, would be to modify Title IX to create a transgender section and separate transgender athletic programs.