Tag Archives: politics

Common Ground and Mutual Understanding

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Michael Schill, Northwestern University President, in a message to “members of the Northwestern community” regarding the terrorist Hamas attack on Israeli women, children, and babies:

This is a moment for us to pull together, to support each other, and seek common ground. That does not mean we need to agree with each other about divisive issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But we must have empathy for each other and strive to build understanding.

Common ground is precisely that shared territory of overlap that disparate positions and whole belief systems have. How can there be any shared territory, any overlap, between those who butcher innocents as their goal and method in pushing their position and those who support…civilization?

How can there be any empathy for those who inflict such evil with deliberation and careful planning?

It’s easy enough to understand such evil and those who seek to inflict it—the evil is plain before us. But such understanding neither requires, nor supports, empathy, nor is there common ground with such. If evil cannot be eradicated, those who do evil certainly can be destroyed, and they must.

Schill’s moral equivocation (his words are so far afield that I almost did not use “moral”) is illustrative of the utter failure of the management teams of our higher “education” edifices.

UN Passes Up an Excellent Chance to Be Quiet

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Then-French President Jackques Chirac, on the eave of the US dealing with a terrorist entity running Iraq, decried eastern European nations loudly supporting the upcoming US effort, saying,

It is not really responsible behavior. It is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.

Now comes this Wall Street Journal article talking about the Israeli response to the terrorist Hamas attack within Israel and yapping about a growing humanitarian crisis.

The United Nations, in the person of Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General, speaks only of a generalized Gaza humanitarian crisis.

Lazzarini isn’t alone in this cynical spin. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants to

discuss ways to stop the military operations that claimed the lives of innocent people….”

No. Military operations are not claim[ing] the lives of innocent people, Hamas’ terrorist operations are doing that.

The humanitarian crisis is in Israel, inflicted on Israelis by the terrorist Hamas with their assault into Israel where the terrorists butchered civilians, raped women, murdered babies—cutting off the heads of (too) many—and kidnapping 150, or so, more for the terrorists’ use in later atrocities.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is inflicted on Gazans by the terrorist Hamas with their use of Gazan civilians as human shields, and their use Gazans’ homes, schools, religious centers, hospitals, and on and on, as weapons caches, ammunition dumps, command and control centers. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is exacerbated by the terrorist Hamas’ refusal to allow Gaza’s civilians to evacuate northern Gaza as Israel has given them time to do. Beyond that, Lazzarini’s UNRWA is itself well known for allowing the terrorists to secrete their weapons in UNRWA facilities.

United Nations personnel, especially Lazzarini, and bin Salmon all are not engaging in really responsible behavior. [Theirs] is not well brought-up behavior. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet.

They Don’t Know What They’re Doing?

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Or is that they’re just riding the Climate Funding Industry Hobby Horse?

East Coast wind projects are in jeopardy after a decision by New York regulators Thursday to deny requests from renewable energy developers to charge customers billions of dollars more.
Offshore wind developers say they have been struggling against record inflation, supply chain issues, and interest rate hikes. Facing these pressures, Orsted, BP, and Equinor and other renewable developers requested that contracts for four offshore projects and 86 land-based projects be renegotiated, according to Reuters.
The offshore developers asked the New York Public Service Commission to alter its long term contracts and raise purchase prices to a level that would have let them collect an additional $38 billion from ratepayers.

They missed—badly—their initial financing and execution estimates, and they failed badly in their early adjustments following actual execution. The supply chain problems about which they complain have been extant since the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation. The inflation that has them in such an uproar has been a problem for the last three years. The rising interest rates have been an inevitable outcome of the inflation.

Do these guys—at the top of the top companies in their industry—really not know what they are doing?

Or are they just trying to rake in the money from their shadow industry of global warming hysteria funding, and some jurisdictions are starting to get tired of being taken for granted as cash cows?

Kasparov Screwed the Pooch

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Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative Chairman and Russian Action Committee Co-Founder has suggested, in his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden move to decisively defeat[] Russia and Iran and their terrorist proxies, and then step out of the Presidential campaign. So far, so good.

Then, however, he suggested this—and he was dead serious:

[R]ather than proceed with an unpredictable rematch with Mr. Trump, the president could endorse a younger leader up to the challenge: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Lloyd Austin, the Woke SecDef who’s severely damaging our military with his push for Woke Reeducation Programs in lieu of pushing for more weapons, ammunition, and combat training?

Wow.

Kasparov usually is better informed than this.

False Choices

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editors are correct that, as their subheadline says,

Helping Kyiv won’t rob weapons to fight Hamas or Hezbollah.

This is in response to some otherwise reasonably intelligent politicians insist on that false choice—that it’s either Ukraine or Israel. Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO), for instance:

Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately[.]

This is a foolishly false dichotomy, for all that, in Hawley’s case, it centers on his disdain for Ukraine and his lack of understanding of the threat the Russian barbarian hordes present.

The false choice representation is broader than that, though.

It’s also a false choice between either Israel or Ukraine, and our southern border, and it’s a false choice between any of those and supporting the Republic of China in deterring the People’s Republic of China or in fighting the PRC if they go ahead and invade.

What’s necessary—and more generally beneficial—is a reallocation of existing expenditures. That requires the Progressive-Democratic Party Representatives and Senators to either get out of the way or work with Republicans in a serious manner to do the reallocations.

It also requires timid Republican Senators to get out of the way or work seriously within their party and for the Republican House caucus to deal, with finality, with the Chaos Gang led by Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Texas’ Chip Roy and get serious about leading the House.