Tag Archives: responsibilities

No They Don’t

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I’ll be brief.

The lede lays out the question.

Companies say President Trump’s climate overhaul makes it tough to frame their future emissions plans and prepare for what they see as inevitable environmental restrictions—particularly as their goals extend beyond the president’s term.

No, they don’t.

Quit planning their future emissions. Quit distorting business decisions away from simple economics and away from what’s optimal for the business’ owners—the shareholders.

Easy peasy, once business managers get up out of their deep defensive crouches and stop cowering in front of climate funding industry pushers.

The hard work, while remaining straightforward, is to engage those duck and cover energies and their existing lobbying budgets to getting the current Congress to codify in statute those Trump moves. Therein lies business planning stability and lower costs for business’ customers.

But What Has UCLA Done Concretely?

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UCLA’s Chancellor Julio Frenk protested that his school has done much to combat antisemitism in his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section. He even piously cloaked himself in his extended family’s history of flight from Nazi Germany and holocaust survival.

Among other actions, we have recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, established an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism with dedicated resources, reorganized our Office of Civil Rights, and appointed a Title VI/Title VII officer. We have strengthened our time, place, and manner policies to safeguard both free expression and campus operations. We are also supporting and partnering with community organizations engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

These, though, are merely steps that set up John Cleese-esque argument clinics.

What has the good Chancellor or his staff done to rid the school of its recalcitrant antisemitic bigots, whether employee or pupil? What has he done, personally, to address directly any of these bigots? What has any member of his staff done to address them directly?

Mistaken Analogy

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are correctly worried about ending the current campaign in Iran too soon, before

Iran’s navy and its missile stocks, launchers, and productive capacity are destroyed. It would also leave most of the IRGC and its Basij enforcers intact.

But they drew the wrong analogy in explaining their concern.

…George HW Bush and the first Gulf War in 1990. The coalition campaign was so successful in pushing Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait that Bush and his advisers stopped too soon and spared most of his military.

No. Bush the Younger had gained non-Iraq Arab nations’ cooperation in the campaign by promising not to go for regime change in Iraq and to limit the campaign to driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait decisively enough that Saddam would be unable to reinvade for the foreseeable future. Saddam’s forces were driven out, decimated badly, and their remnants driven back to Baghdad. That Bush stopped at that point and largely withdrew coalition forces was simply a fulfillment of that commitment.

After that, southern Iraq’s Shiites revolted against Saddam’s remaining Sunni forces, largely with Bush’s encouragement and were massacred, but this is a separate Bush error, having nothing to do with leaving too soon or keeping his commitment to end the fight with Kuwait’s liberation.

In reality, no analogy is needed regarding too-optimistic and -early off-ramps for the current Iran campaign. This is amply demonstrated by Iran’s behavior in response.

Iran has fired missiles or drones on Israel, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and even Oman, which was negotiating with the US on Iran’s behalf. It also launched strikes, if fewer of them, on Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and…Cyprus.
Some of its targets in these countries are US bases, but the attacks were often directed at civilian targets, including hotels in Dubai. [I add, attacks directed against Israeli apartment complexes.]

This is reason enough to finish the job in Iran before announcing victory.

Foolishness

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US intelligence estimates and experts outside government are busily downplaying Iran’s ability to launch ICBMs, much less to do so against American targets.

To build effective ICBMs, which soar out of the atmosphere and into space, Iran would have to overcome hurdles including developing a re-entry vehicle with heat shielding that can survive a fiery descent into the atmosphere, and a guidance system to keep the missile on target.

Iran has been launching satellites into orbit for years. Developing a reentry capability is a straightforward engineering task that lots of nations worked out decades ago, including such allies of Iran as Russia and the PRC. Indeed, Iran’s ballistic missile launches against Israel, as pointed out by ralflongwalker in another venue, already gives it most of the heat-shielding capability it needs for reentry after intercontinental flight. It’s an engineering refinement, now, not a de novo capability.

Iran’s ability to put its own satellites into orbit on its own rockets—much less its ability to target those Israeli sites—gives it already most, if not all, of the guidance system it needs, especially given the large footprint of its targets–our population centers.

 

Those downplayers plainly don’t understand the men of the Iranian government. In order to destroy us—the Great Satan—it would be necessary only to destroy our major cities with their populations and financial centers. Or even more easily, simply to detonate nuclear-driven EMP over us.

An Alternative Move

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Vice President JD Vance (R), in his new capacity as leader of President Donald Trump’s (R) newly formed anti-fraud facility, has paused transfer of some $260 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota until that State begins to do a better job of accounting for how it spends those American taxpayer dollars. Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Tim Walz, promptly claimed that Vance’s move was nothing more than a

campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.

There is a valid concern buried under Walz’ manufactured hysteria—the loss of financial support for the groups of Americans he named. As Vance noted,

Vance…recalled his own experience growing up depending on government programs and said the money should be there for people and children who need it. “It’s disgraceful that fraudsters out there are taking advantage of programs like Medicaid[.]”

There is an alternative solution to a blanket cutoff, however temporary. Who the individuals are in those groups about whom Walz so piously pretends to care is known to the Federal government. Those $260 million should be sent directly to those individuals, entirely bypassing the State and the third parties Walz’ administration uses to distribute and funnel the money.

The shift would go a long way toward reducing the corruption in the State’s Medicaid facility by bypassing it entirely. Remaining fraud would be limited to the Federal government’s distribution facility, and that, as a one-time affair, would be minimal. The Trump I administration’s distribution of a one-time followed by a smaller one-time distribution of Wuhan Virus shutdown funds to American taxpayers shows the way.