Tag Archives: politics

Think about Leaving

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Portland business owners are more than fed up with the level of crime destroying their businesses. Their idea of who has the solution is misguided, though.

Frustrated business owners are calling on city and county leaders to do more to combat rising property crime in Portland….

This situation is not solely on the heads of Portland’s city councilmen or the county commissioners. The business’ fellow residents of Portland keep electing those councilmen and commissioners, politicians who’ve demonstrated their lack of commitment to order and rule of law.

Why would any business owner want as his customers folks who so consciously approve of and vote for such politicians? Those are the voters, after all, who then vandalize, rob, and otherwise trash their businesses. There are plenty of jurisdictions that do regard rule of law to be a Good Thing, and those jurisdictions have sound economies with plenty of room for businesses currently domiciled in lawless Portland.

Projecting

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That’s what Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is doing vis-à-vis the United States.

Washington went the furthest. … Some “unnamed officials” from the Pentagon actually threatened to inflict a “decapitation blow” on the Kremlin, but, in fact, it is a threat to physically eliminate the head of the Russian state[.]

This is the Russian thinking out loud about what he and/or his BFF and boss Russia’s President Vladimir Putin have in mind regarding our own government.

Another bit of Lavrovian projecting:

It is no longer a secret to anyone that the strategic goal of the United States and its NATO allies is “victory over Russia on the battlefield” as a mechanism for significantly weakening or even destroying our country.
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…Washington is also solving an important geopolitical task—to break the traditional ties between Russia and Europe and to further subjugate the European satellites.

This, again, is the Russian thinking out loud about what the men of the barbarian government has in mind for themselves regarding Europe and Putin’s lost (and to be recovered and then expanded) empire. He’s also assuming that because the barbarian would do such a thing, other nations, per force, must be intent on those things.

I Don’t Watch the NBA

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I stopped watching the NBA years ago when one team’s General Manager tweeted in support of Hong Kong’s then-freedom protestors. That GM was promptly canceled, not just by the Left, but by the NBA (he was forced to resign), as players, owners, sports commentators came out of the woodwork all yelling that there was money to be made in the People’s Republic of China; how dare this GM endanger their pocketbooks like that. The point of the freedom protestors’ protests has since been amply demonstrated by the men of the People’s Republic of China government.

The NBA’s utter disregard for morality, for anything resembling common human decency, continues. Enes Kanter Freedom, late of the NBA, has the tale.

The NBA [is the] “No Boundaries Association.” The NBA gives free propaganda to a genocidal regime[.]

This is the sort of thing that has drawn Freedom’s disgust, and mine:

NBA league owners all allegedly have over $10 billion invested in China and a video from the Washington Wizards showing Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang shooting free throws.

Freedom went on.

When the Muslims are being literally slaughtered in concentration camps in China, you [Adam Silver] are silent, and not only are you silent, but you’re literally working with this genocidal regime. You’re literally working with the most brutal regime in the world hand-in-hand and trying to make money and business over there.
Please look me in the eye and say you don’t know nothing about the 3 million people in concentration camps in China [who] are getting tortured and raped every day. Shame on you.

Freedom is being generous. Of course Silver knows that. Every man and woman in the NBA knows that. They don’t care. There’s money to be made.

This is another reason to ignore the National Basketball/No Boundaries Association and everything its members do or say.

The Supreme Court and Title 42

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Much is being made of the Supreme Court’s decision requiring Title 42 restrictions on illegal aliens to remain in effect until the Court hears the underlying case (sometime in February). That underlying case, as put by the Court in granting certiorari, is this:

Applicants suggested this Court treat the application as a petition for a writ of certiorari; doing so, the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the State applicants may intervene to challenge the District Court’s summary judgment order.

That’s an outcome, however temporary, that is very welcome.

There’s an additional aspect to this ruling that’s also interesting to me, though. A dissent to the grant of certiorari was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and it was joined by the activist Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Gorsuch wrote,

The States contend that they face an immigration crisis at the border and policymakers have failed to agree on adequate measures to address it. … And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.

This is the activist Justice Jackson agreeing that it’s not a role of an American court to make policy, only to apply law. Whether she honors that position in future cases remains to be seen, but it is, perhaps, a start.

The other two activist Justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, ducked the question altogether, choosing only to vote without comment against certiorari.

More Destruction

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I alluded earlier to the destruction the current crop of DoD managers are wreaking on our military establishment.

Here’s a specific example, all too canonical.

The upstate New York military academy [West Point] is removing 13 items that reference the Confederacy, including a portrait and bust of General Robert E Lee, its superintendent before the Civil War, the Washington Examiner reports.

This revision of our nation’s military history is being done on the express approval of SecDef Lloyd Austin. Because erasing history, including critical military history, is the best way to teach military principles, successes, and failures to our future military officers.

We can’t get rid of the SecDef and his syndicate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense soon enough.