Tag Archives: politics

This is a Mistake

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The Trump administration, in the person of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, has decided to ban American gain-of-function research on the rationale that the risks to public safety or national security are too great for the gains.

This is a mistake, especially on national security grounds and public safety.

Our enemies are enthusiastically conducting gain-of-function research, as demonstrated by the PRC’s work on the Wuhan Virus. We need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand our enemies’ products and how to counter them in the event they loose their bioweapons deliberately.

We also need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand the mechanisms by which viruses, and bacteria, that are currently unique to animals or plants might cross species lines and infect humans, and were they to cross over, what effects they would have on us. That’s how we’ll be able to deal rapidly with a pandemic from such a virus or bacterium. We did nothing about the influenza pandemic of a century ago and got away with it. We don’t know if we were lucky, and we don’t know whether we might have mitigated its effects had we known more. It’ll be the same with any future global—or national—epidemic if we’re deliberately responding in the blind.

I’ve Said These Before

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However, they bear repeating.

The WSJ editors rightly warn against killing the Senate filibuster. Progressive-Democratic Party Senators already have committed to eliminating it as soon as they seize the majority. Ill-informed Republican Senators, along with unthinking Republican Senators and President Donald Trump (R), are pushing to eliminate the filibuster first on the idiocy that the Progressive-Democrats are going to do it, anyway, so why not, and on the excuse that it’s necessary in order to pass the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

The SAVE Act is, indeed, a critical piece of legislation, and one that the House already has passed, twice. However, it’s not worth the elimination of the filibuster, which would lead to far more and far wider damage to our Republic.

The loss of the filibuster would reduce the Senate to a simple majority rule popular contest, which along with the House’s simple majority rule would reduce our nation to a popular democracy and the elimination of our republican democracy.

With the filibuster intact, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD) should hold the vote, regardless of his view of the potential vote count. Average Americans need to know, ahead of this fall’s elections, which Senators of either party favor secure elections in which only American citizens vote, and which ones favor, openly or tacitly, elections in which non-citizens, including illegal aliens, are allowed to vote.

DSA and Government Structure

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The Wall Street Journal editors are rightly worried about the ascendancy of the Democratic Socialists of America. The center of their concern rests on DSA intent to restructure our government:

…replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

Sure. Parliament, with its largely figurehead House of Lords, and Parliamentary Superiority vis-a-vis the British courts has worked so well for the UK.

Similarly, the Duma and the National People’s Congress have done so much for the people of Russia and the PRC.

The DSA isn’t about “radical change” for the sake of us average Americans; it’s about a naked grab for party political power–which is to say a naked grab for personal power for those persons atop the DSA. That the bulk of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are silent or openly supportive of DSA goals shows how thoroughly Party has chosen to absorb the DSA into its core (or, the other side of that coin: how thoroughly the DSA has coopted Party). The only Party members who are beginning to object to the DSA are on Party’s far right–that fringe group who are Establishment Democrats.

The contest for power within Party is one that legacy Party politicians—those Establishment Democrats—think they can win. They’re likely wrong on that. Keep in mind, in this intraparty power struggle the DSA leadership has made no bones about their candidates running on the Progressive-Democratic Party ticket. It’s a ballot line, and nothing more. DSA plans to supplant the Progressive-Democratic Party, whether by absorption or by replacement.

“Socialism’s Slippery Definitions”

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The subheadline makes it plain:

The hard left is whatever it needs to be at the moment.

That’s certainly the case for the Left and for far too many others. The even plainer fact, though, is that there’s nothing slippery about American English dictionary and textbooks written in American English definitions of socialism. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production—government ownership of an economy’s businesses—from which flows government determination of what to produce, allocation of that output, and determination of the wages involved. All because, hold socialists, government knows better than any of us how to determine what to produce, how to allocate that output, and how to determine the wages involved.

All of the rest, those slippery definitions, are simply taken from the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary. Those slippery definitions, too, are little more than a variety of labels used to obscure. Democratic socialism, social democracy, even communism (itself misused in such discussions) are used only to create artificial definitions, as Matthew Hennessey noted in his article at the link, to suit the moment.

It’s unfortunate that our education systems, up through graduate school, fail to make clear which of those competing definitions is the accurate one.

It’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our economy and so to our national security, that one of our political parties actively and enthusiastically trades on those false definitions of the Newspeak Dictionary in its own push to inflict socialism, that government control of the engines of our economy, on our nation.

Stop Wasting Time

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Alternatively, stop timidly ducking the issue.

The issue at hand is the SAVE Act, which would plus up our election security with strong steps aimed at ensuring only American citizens vote in American national elections. The time waste/timidity is Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD) and his…hesitancy…to put the Act, already passed by the House (twice!), on the floor of the Senate for a vote.

Thune may well be right that the Act doesn’t have the votes for passage. At this point, that’s not important. What matters is putting all of the Senators on the record as voting for or against the Act (or, their own timidity, voting Present or not voting at all). Us average Americans have a right to know who of them wants a secure election system, who actively opposes security in our elections, and who just doesn’t care enough or is too timid to take a position.