Tag Archives: responsibilities

A Stiff Sentence

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Recall that Jean-Claude Arnault was convicted in a Swedish court for rape in a case that also so implicated the Nobel Prize facility that it chose not to award a Literature prize that year.  For the crime, Arnault was sentenced to jail for an interminable two years.

Now a Swedish court has convicted Arnault of a second rape.  It sentenced him, for that crime, to an additional…six months.

Sweden surely takes a dim view of rape.

Sure.

Oh, and one of the items being considered in the US Congress this week is the Violence Against Women Act, which provides funding for battered-women’s shelters and other programs to prevent domestic violence and bolster its prosecution.  Here is a chance for us to draw some contrast with that European nation—or will the Progressive-Democrats succeed in making us a bit more like them as that Party insists on lighting up the Act like a Christmas tree with add-on froo-froo having little to do with the subject matter of the bill and thereby make it impossible to pass?

Desperation

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With his legacy mostly erased, and more of it on the way after the current temporary interruption—an outcome ex-President Barack Obama (D) will thank us for in the fullness of time and his clearer understanding—Obama is desperate to preserve such of it as he can with his revisionist history.

Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday took credit for the boom in US oil and gas production, saying, “That was me, people.”

Of course, it was.  His sequestration of Federal lands and offshore fields from oil and gas exploration with his slow-walking of the necessary permits were instrumental in triggering the boom.

You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole—suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas….

Never mind that those year-on-year increases—small as they were—were driven by exploration and exploitation of those fields on private and other non-Federal lands.  The increases didn’t get serious until Obama and his administration were out of the way, but we’ll not mention that.

Another bit of history that the revisionist Obama carefully elided was provided by ex-Shell Oil Company President John Hofmeister:

…he tried to remake the power generation industry without involving Congress, and the Paris accords—again without involving Congress.

That remake was his threat—which he tried most enthusiastically to carry out—to eliminate our carbon-based (mostly coal, but oil and gas, also) electricity production industry, along with the wholesale destruction to our overall economy that acting on his Paris Accord would have wreaked.

The extent of Obama’s desperation is sad.

A Thought on Elitists and Common Sense

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Not mine; Thomas Sowell’s, from his The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy:

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?

 

h/t Seawriter at Ricochet

Foreign Aid to Whom?

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The United Nations’ Central Emergency Response Fund has, with Venezuelan President Nicolas Madura’s permission (recipient nations’ permissions are required for CERF funds release), sent $9.2 million in emergency humanitarian aid to…someone…in Venezuela.  The money is intended to mitigate Venezuela’s medicine and food shortage crisis which stems from the Venezuelan government’s failure to perform.

In addition, the UN’s International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is expanding its aid for Venezuela.  UNICEF already has delivered…to someone…nearly 130 tons of medicine, health, and nutrition supplies for 350,000 women and children just since August.

The UN has not said to whom it sent these goodies, only for whom they’re intended.

May’s Brexit Surrender

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The terms include these, via Deutsche Welle:

  • The rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU will be protected
  • EU citizens living in the UK can be joined by close family members…who live in a different country at any point in the future.
  • Workers and self-employed people will be broadly guaranteed the same rights they currently enjoy

All of which negate one of the motives for leaving the European Union. EU citizens resident in the UK will be magnets for drawing in others for the UK’s generous welfare system—and EU citizens still will be able to seek work in the UK preferentially, availing themselves both of the UK’s higher wage rates and that welfare system.

  • There will be a 21-month transition period ending December 31, 2020
  • EU rules would continue to apply in the UK subject to the terms set out in the Brexit agreement
  • After the transition period, a joint committee co-chaired by the EU and the UK would police the final withdrawal agreement, taking decisions by mutual consent and whose verdicts would be binding

Meaning that the UK would remain unable to enter into separate, independent trade agreements during this “transition” period EU laws would remain in effect inside allegedly sovereign Great Britain, and the EU will retain veto power, via that mutual consent requirement, on post-transition moves—including those independent trade agreements and moves to supplant EU laws with domestic, UK, laws.

  • If appropriate customs arrangements are not agreed to, a backstop arrangement would kick in. A joint “single customs territory” between the EU and UK would apply from the end of the transition period…
  • Under the backstop arrangement, the UK must observe “level playing field” commitments on competition, state aid, taxes and employment and environment standards

Are not agreed to means the agreement will be in accordance with EU diktat or there will be the backstop arrangement. This is what the EU wants, so there will be no agreed customs arrangement.  The EU wants the backstop because those terms require the UK to keep its Northern Ireland inside the EU’s competition, state aid, taxes and employment, and environment laws in perpetuity. This is the beginning of prising Northern Ireland out of the UK—the beginning of dismantling the UK.  This is part of the EU’s demonstration to restive members of the EU and a warning of their fate if they become impertinent, too.

The bottom line for the UK here is that, under this “agreement,” these terms of surrender, the nation will become a speechless, toothless satrap of the EU, and its dismantling will be begun.

May, with her abject surrender to Brussels, has betrayed her nation’s referendum.  And she has betrayed other members of the EU similarly dismayed with Brussels’ interference in their domestic affairs.

It’s no wonder that members of her Cabinet are resigning in droves, her coalition government is falling apart, and her own party is in (sub rosa, for now) revolt.