What Are These People Thinking?

 

                                    What Are These People Thinking?

Ms. Harris met with Guatemala’s former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, despite Ms. Aldana’s two outstanding Guatemalan arrest warrants on charges of corruption.

Former Guatemalan high-court judge Gloria Porras was at the same meeting, though there are scores of legal complaints against her at home for allegedly refusing to obey the constitution. These include complaints from a qualified majority of the association of representatives who drafted the constitution in the mid-1980s.

In 2014 and 2015, insiders at Guatemala’s National Registry of Persons and at the attorney general’s office presented evidence to Ms. Aldana suggesting that permanent residency cards were fraudulently issued for people from places like Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Iran, Libya and Syria. Such cards can be used to secure Guatemalan citizenship, which can then be used to apply for U.S. visas. Rather than investigate the person who signed those documents, Ms. Aldana promoted her to deputy attorney general.

Now Vice President Kamala Harris visits Guatemala as part of her laughable effort to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America’s Northern Triangle. Root causes are apparently not known by these people. And one of Ms. Harris’s "goals" is to drum up investment for the region.

Imagine. 

Presumably, investors will join right in with the corruption. And they will not be alarmed the fact that all the native citizens are trying to leave.

Groups

 

                        Groups

The biological continuity of the generations lends plausibility to the notion of group compensation—but only if guilt can be inherited. Otherwise there are simply windfall gains and windfall losses among contemporaries, according to the accident of their antecedents. Moreover, few people would accept this as a general principle to be applied consistently, however much they may advocate it out of compassion (or guilt) over the fate of particular unfortunates. No one would advocate that today’s Jews are morally entitled to put today’s Germans in concentration camps, in compensation for the Nazi Holocaust. Most people would not only be horrified at any such suggestion but would also regard it as a second act of gross immorality, in no way compensating for the first, but simply adding to the sum total of human sins.--Sowell

If you get a creepy feeling about "collective guilt" and "inherited guilt"--as if it is a watered-down obverse version of the old "national soul"--you are right. These collectivists never seem to have confidence in the unifying, imaginary factors they concoct, they always resort to an enemy to congeal those factors. "Collective" and "inherited" qualities are no different than the sins of the Kulaks, or the Jews, or the genetic inferiority of whoever you want to invade and/or eliminate. Individual responsibility and value are nowhere to be seen.

USS Liberty

 

              The Amazing Story of the USS Liberty

FacebookTwitter Emai

Damaged USS Liberty. Photo: US Navy.

(This is from St. Clair, mostly a summary of "Assault on the Liberty," a first-hand account by James Ennes Jr. whose book of the event is hair-raising story of betrayal by America's presumed friends and its own leadership. On this day in history, June 8, 1967.)

'In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.
Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.
Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.
A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.
The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier, it was under attack
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.
After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gunfire. Nobody was going to get out alive that way.
After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”
The Israeli boat turned and left.
A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.
Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.'

The Children of Israel are never alone. But sometimes it's hard to see why.

Western Civilization is a Construct

 

                         Western Civilization is a Construct

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a classics prof. at Princeton, is probably one of the people driving the self-demolition of their classics department. At the annual meeting for classics (in San Diego) a few years ago he admitted that he would like to see classics “die as swiftly as possible” if it becomes (again) a field that promotes “western civilization.” Ending the language requirement is part of their plan to erase the “white supremacy” (Peralta’s phrase) in classics. But the ultimate goal is to destroy the discipline entirely, since it is irredeemable. Peralta has written,

“Why not invest (say) in an Afro-pessimistic critique that, in recognizing the inescapability of white supremacy in the discipline’s phylogeny and ontogeny, kept all options for reparative intellectual justice — including the demolition of the discipline itself — on the table?”

The University of Vermont just decided to eliminate its classics department. The demolition continues.

Operation Overlord

 

                              Operation Overlord

On this day in 1944, Operation Overlord, code named D-Day, occurred--the Allied invasion of northern France. The memorials of this world-changing event are getting smaller.

The business of fighting a war is probably not best done as an individual effort. Nor as a startup. Indeed, the very notion of democracy is probably antithetical to war. War demands structure, forced sacrifice of individuals, obedience, and the centralization of decision-making. After the decision-making has been handed off in a democratic manner it's time for the state to get on with it. But the process of democracy has nothing magic about it; it is a defensive system aiming at minimizing the damage to the citizen. In war, that's gone.


D-Day was the beginning of the end. The democracies organized, rose up, and destroyed two totalitarian princes of darkness  However, the success of power in war, the success of the militarized state, gives the state undue credit. In every war, one militarized system loses.

SatStats

 

 

From Thomas Sowell’s 1989 article in Commentary “Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster“:

The contemporary socioeconomic position of groups in a given society often bears no relationship to the historic wrongs they have suffered. Both in Canada and the United States, the Japanese have significantly higher incomes than the whites, who have a documented history of severe anti-Japanese discrimination in both countries. The same story could be told of the Chinese in Malaysia, Indonesia, and many other countries around the world, of the Jews in countries with virulent anti-Semitism, and a wide variety of groups in a wide variety of other countries. Among poorer groups as well, the level of poverty often has little correlation with the degree of oppression. No one would claim that the historic wrongs suffered by Puerto Ricans in the United States exceed those suffered by blacks, but the average Puerto Rican income is lower than the average income of blacks.

Zero Risk

 

                                       

                                Zero Risk

From Purdue University president Mitch Daniels' remarks to that school’s graduating class of 2021.

"This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hoped to accomplish.

Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero, in this case zero risk of anyone contracting the virus, block out other competing concerns, like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication. I feel confident your Purdue preparation won’t let you fall prey to it.

But there’s a companion quality you’ll need to be the leaders you can be. That’s the willingness to take risks. Not reckless ones, but the risks that still remain after all the evidence has been considered."

The leadership is seeking zero risk for itself.