Noah Rothman: Republican Incoherence on Ukraine is a National Embarrassment

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It has been nothing less than a national embarrassment to watch Republicans fish for a rationale that justifies what they’re talking themselves into. What they’re articulating is a monarchical conception of America’s national mission, in which its geostrategic priorities are either set or altered in accordance with the prestige of one man. Even if you believe Zelensky has been insufficiently grateful to the West and America in particular — a subjective and evidentiarily deficient claim — that does not justify the wholesale reappraisal of America’s posture toward its allies and enemies or its grand strategic objectives. But a comprehensive renovation of American foreign policy is what Trump and company want to engineer, and Republicans are looking for a permission structure that allows him to get there without encountering much cognitive dissonance along the way.

I'm trying to understand Trump's position...but for now I have to regretfully agree with the above. 

Rupert Darwall: Driving a Stake Through Stakeholder Capitalism (and ESG)

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I haven't given ESG the attention is seems to deserve. But it strikes me as being similar to DEI--a set of ideas/principles that are already fairly consistent with the ideas/principles of the left...but which are so protean that they can be used more-or-less however the left wants to use them. So they basically become catspaws. That's my view of DEI, anyway. Perhaps it's not so true of ESG. But, again, that's an aspect of the whole train wreck that I haven't really attended to. Largely because I know nothing about business and woefully little about economics.

But the totalitarian tendencies of the left incline it to basically take over every institution and endeavor, and to turn them to its nefarious ends. The right is filled with crackpottery of various kinds, but it just doesn't seem to have this same totalitarian...whatever it is. Center of gravity or something. Hence Jean Kirkpatrick's view of the authoritarian/totalitarian distinction. As the great Jeremiah McCarthy puts it: the right just wants you to behave; the left wants your soul.

Trump Is On Fire

Dude is hilarious, you've gotta give him that.

Carolina 91 - VA Tech 59

5-game winning streak!

Noah Rothman: Democrat Incoherence on "Transgender" Sports

It's the secular-political analog of a religion.

The Dems' new motto might as well be credo quia absurdum est.

Should Trump Pardon Derek Chauvin?

Yes.

Stephen Wertheim: Is Europe Misunderstanding Trump's Position on Ukraine?

This was a real surprise.

A Grauniad piece that was not only pretty good (IMO), but which offered a reasonable and justificatory hypothesis about   Trump's position on Ukraine.

   For the record, I don't like/understand/agree with Trump's approach to Ukraine overall.

I'm pretty bone-headed about this stuff: Putin bad. NATO good. Invasion bad. Zelenskyy > Putin. Put on your game face and convince Ivan that we are implacable in our defense of Ukraine, ergo we are (as a friend likes to say) willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. Ergo they can't win. Ergo might as well go back home, eat potato.

   According to the Trumplings, Trump is never wrong, he's just playing 12 dimensional chess and normies can't understand his God-level strategy.

   Problem: that often actually seems to be kinda true...

   I finally came to acknowledge that Trump is good at this sort of thing, and I am not. He's negotiated like $100bn worth of deals or whatever. I have negotiated for...a very old Ford Ranger once that fell apart on the way home. One of Trump's cognitive super powers is merely that he is immune to the blue-tinged groupthink that colors all our public discussions.

Again: I don't agree with what I hear coming from him...but, forced to bet, I suppose I'd have to bet that he's up to something I don't get.

   Which may not add up to a smart strategy, of course.

   But it's probably not stupid and evil, as the blues would have us think.

   I've already acknowledged that the mineral deal seems smart and promising.

   

   Anyway.

William Deresiewicz: Academe's Divorce From Reality

I've linked to this before, but it's great, so here it is again.

Wesley J. Smith: Science Blogger Says It Should Be A Crime To Dissent From Scientific Consensus

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Ethan Siegel is apparently an idiot.

Kevin Roberts: Why Trump Tilts Toward Peace in Ukraine

Maybe the best defense of Trump's approach I've seen...though hardly decisive.

I would like to see us try another "reset" with Russia. Though maybe that has to wait until Putin kicks the bucket.

China seems to be the real threat.

Ideally, we'd be able to coax Russia at least a little Westward and have some kind of rough alliance with them against China.

Trump often knows a lot more and sees things a lot more clearly than people like me give him credit for. But I'm not really getting his NATO/Ukraine/Russia strategy.

WSJ: Putin Wins the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office Spectacle

Can you win a spectacle?

Well, anyway...

Maine's Transanity

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Trump/Vance-Zelenskyy

Ugh.

Not good.

WI Governor Evers Wants 'Mother' Replaced With 'Inseminated Person' in (a) State Law

For stupid reasons.

Snopes, needless to say, does what it usually does--spins the facts as hard as possible leftward.

They try to turn this into some pro-same-sex-marriage thing. But that makes no sense. In the relevant law, if this were their goal, they'd need to change 'husband' to 'spouse' in one place.

But, of course, that's not what this is really about.

It's about advancing gender pseudoscience.

Understand that, in all likelihood, the left is never going to give this up. They'll just keep making up pseudo-scholarly neologisms, attempting to redefine ordinary words, and pushing this bullshit in whatever way they can find.

'Inseminated person' is just idiotic. It's also dehumanizing. It's reminiscent of their suggestion that 'front hole' should replace 'vagina.' 

Progressivism has become more and more difficult to distinguish from mental illness.

Carolina 92 - Miami 73

Five in a row.

The New York Times Discovers Free Speech

This is hilarious.

I was actually cracking up halfway through it.

   Now, don't be like me. Don't be distracted by the ad hominem. NYT sucks. Its editorial page is a rolling, flaming train wreck. And the train is made of horseshit.

   The editors of the NYT should be stricken mute for mentioning the name of Orwell.

   NYT might as well be Pravda.

   Here's a clue, leftards: purging gender pseudoscience from government sites is not a violation of free speech. In fact, it's undoing the batshit crazy nonsense the left has imposed on the government and the culture for a decade. It's as if your side had all suddenly become Scientologists, and infused tends of thousands of websites with drivel about Xenu and Dianetics and becoming "clear." Trump is undoing your abject madness.

   For a decade you totalitarian moonbats have suppressed speech and inquiry in the USA.

   And now Trump is undoing your moonbattery.

   Taking your Newspeak out of government websites is not only not a violation of the First Amendment, it's a rational imperative. Newspeak and the control of language is on the totalitarian left's main weapons.

   Undo it.

   Crush it.

   Commit it all to the dustbin of history.

   And as for the "Gulf of America" nonsense...well, here's my longstanding view of that: the left actual controls thought and speech by infusing its bizarrely effective pseudo-scholarly clown-talk into everything. The right gives us tongue-in-cheek dumbassery like "freedom fries."

   And "the Gulf of America."

   

   Now.

   Though NYT deserves our contempt, even a stopped clock, etc. A lot of what they write is lies or otherwise misleading. (See e.g. the Nazi ads BS on Twitter). Removing 'T' and 'Q' from the notoriously ever-expanding abbreviation is perfectly reasonable--there's no such thing as being transgender, and 'queer' is arguably a philosophical/political category. Pulling books from library shelves? Pray, what kind of books? You know what kind...

   Deporting legal immigrants for engaging in protected speech is nonsense, and the courts will slap it down hard--as they should.

   But, despicable though the big leftist lie machine is, free speech is too important to be made partisan. Sure, they're a gaggle of big, fat, lying hypocrites...but that doesn't mean they're never right about anything.

   Do not make the mistake of thinking that they care a single bit about freedom of speech.

   But we care.

   And we've got to hold Trump and company just as accountable as we have to hold the barking moonbats of the left.

Susan B. Glasser: "Why Aren't We in the Streets?"

It's hard not to be enthusiastic about what Trump is doing when it brings out this kind of feckless puling in his detestable, effete opponents.

Trump may not be right about everything--in fact, he certainly isn't. But he's right about a lot. And he's at least largely right about government waste. He's right that the uniparty--though particularly the Democrats--have turned the government--our government--into a vast patronage system, dispensing our money to unworthy people promoting unworthy causes...and running us into a financial ditch in the process.

I have grave concerns about the Trump/Elon/DoGE approach. Many of which come down to: I don't understand it.

But it's hard to hear my own inner worrywart over the screeching and whimpering of the detestable lot on the other side.

If Susan Glasser and the New Yorker are against it, that's just about enough for me to be for it.

No, I do not think this is a justifiable attitude.

I'm just being honest.

The Canadian Residential School / Mass Graves Hoax: And Now, A Meta-Hoax

The mass graves hoax never existed!

Jesus Christ, these people.

Data Republican ("Small 'r' ") on USAID / NGO / Uniparty corruption

I sort of suspect that the person in the video isn't Data Republican herself/himself...but that's just a hunch.

Jeffrey A. Tucker: America's Future Depends on DOGE

I'm inclined to agree.

But I'm far from certain.

This seems pretty right to me:

As we’re seeing now, substantial opposition awaits anyone who challenges the bureaucracy. Unions are powerful. Intimidation from those with institutional knowledge can be overwhelming. Fear of the media has also been a deterrent to action. Every president has been at least somewhat fearful of the intelligence agencies. Industry leaders who have captured the agencies, including many campaign donors, have been too powerful to unseat or control.
Countless cabinet secretaries come and go with the intention of changing the system. They get big offices, a nice portrait and social status, but the bureaucrats know that the political appointees are temporary and easily can be ignored. Frustrated by institutional inertia, the appointees often leave outwitted, outgunned and demoralized.
Meanwhile, the American people feel increasingly oppressed, taxed, regulated, spied on, browbeaten, hectored and harassed. Voting never made a difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies rule all. We’ve come to know this in our gut, which is why voters’ trust in the system has eroded as agencies’ power has built up.
The Biden years underscored this point. We didn’t even need a conscious or active president, only a figurehead. Behind the scenes, institutions ran everything.
How can the U.S. deal with this problem? President Trump alone figured it out in his last term: He simply took charge of agencies in a limited way with selective firings, which he believed he had the legal authority to do. This unleashed howls of horror and whispers of plots from his critics, including in the media. Entrenched administrators hatched clever schemes to thwart his plans and show him who was boss—not the democratically elected president but the bureaucracy.
The message from today’s civic elites is that the president’s job is to pretend to be in charge while doing nothing meaningful. Shut up. Don’t disturb the administrative state. Let it keep doing its thing without oversight or disruption, and you’ll get your library and bestselling memoir.
Mr. Trump refuses this deal. In his second term, he’s determined to slay the bureaucratic beast he knows all too well from his first term and the Biden years. DOGE’s efforts are epic, breaking more than a century of acquiescence to the deep state. The Trump team is courageously confronting the problem head-on, come what may. Mr. Trump’s allies know that they must act quickly and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, lest we default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded “men of the system”—to adapt a phrase from Adam Smith—run things behind closed doors.

Trump Ending Benefits to Illegal Aliens is a Game-Changer

This should not be controversial.