Victory AT ONT!

Howdy folks! Welcome to Thursday night. I saw this cartoon yesterday, and boy does it ring true.

Post Racial Society

Devon Makes Some Good points

Our home, our nation, our great civilizational dream, is something you must, at the very least, embrace, believe in, and join. We chose to base it on thoughts, ideals, and beliefs, instead of genetics, but that was our call. If you can't even go along with that loose restriction, what the hell are you doing here? You don't get to show up and hang out without believing and participating, just because you brought samosas. We are the United States of America. We may have chosen to be liberal about what unites us, but if you are not united to us, if you don't think and act as one of us, then you don't make the cut. If perhaps you think that the requirement of shared identity is still too stringent, and you would like to live in a nation made from small racial enclaves sharing an economic zone, you could make your own country and try that as a separate experiment. Buy some land in southwest Asia. Build your multicultural paradise. You could call it "Ethniklashistan".

Read the whole thing. The post he's responding to is at the bottom, if you want to read that first.

Living Abroad

"American" Ingredients They Can't Find Overseas

I imagine a lot of these can be ordered online. Anything any of y'all noticed was missing when traveling abroad? It's not food related, but personally, I still can't get over seeing the toilets in Amsterdam for the first time.

Birthright Citizenship

The 14th Amendment does not confer automatic citizenship.

This is a good article, that clearly lays out the case. Frankly, it's what I've always said, and on the merit of the facts and a clear reading of the text it's a no-brainer, but I have no confidence SCOTUS will rule that way.

Our argument is straightforward. The text of the 14th Amendment contains two requirements for acquiring automatic citizenship by birth: one must be born in the United States and be subject to its jurisdiction. The proper understanding of the Citizenship Clause therefore turns on what the drafters of the amendment, and those who ratified it, meant by “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Was it merely a partial, temporary jurisdiction, such as applies to anyone (except for diplomats) who are subject to our laws while they are within our borders? Or does it instead apply only to those who are subject to a more complete jurisdiction, one which manifests itself as owing allegiance to the United States and not to any foreign power?

Think of it this way. Someone from Great Britain visiting the United States is subject to our laws while here, which is to say subject to our partial or territorial jurisdiction. He must drive on the right-hand side of the road rather than the left, for example. But he does not thereby owe allegiance to the United States; he is not subject to being drafted into our army; and he cannot be prosecuted for treason (as opposed to ordinary violations of law) if he takes up arms against the United States, for he has breached no oath of allegiance.

So which understanding of “subject to the jurisdiction” did the drafters of the 14th Amendment have in mind? 

Happily, we don’t need to speculate, as they were asked that very question. They unambiguously stated that it meant “complete” jurisdiction, such as existed under the law at the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which excluded from citizenship those born on U.S. soil who were “subject to a foreign power.”

Mein Führer!

Hitler, Musk, and the Art of the Smear

Musk dismissed the accusations on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

But that the attacks are tired is not what matters. The purpose of the slurs is to get enough traction for some mud to stick. “Did you see Musk gave a Nazi salute?” was how a colleague started a morning zoom with us on a different matter.

Those who disagree with Trump’s policies have every right to take him and his administration to task. However, the Nazi analogies feed a dangerous and false narrative. Moreover, their cavalier and inauthentic use denigrates the memory of those who died in the Holocaust from history’s real Nazis.

Stop it already. If not, the Democratic party might find itself alienating more voters who are looking for substantive policy differences and not the basest types of ad hominem attacks.

Frankly, I'll never Seig Heil. First because I'm not a Nazi, and second because I already have a much better slogan.

Deus vult

Executive Orders

These Executive Orders Should Not Be Necessary

You can scour the Founding documents all day and find very little support for government-by-executive-order. It was not supposed to be this way. It should not have to be this way. The President under the Constitution has a very limited role.

That said, most of the many executive orders issued by President Trump are purely restorative, a reaffirmation of core constitutional structures that had been previously ignored or overthrown. Therefore, these are not acts of executive imposition so much as deployments of power in order to give power back to the people.

In other words, most of the actions are not about the “imperial presidency.” They are about returning power to where it belongs and never should have left, namely to the U.S. Constitution and to the voters in a republican system of government.

This is why all the chatter about Trump’s use of power (“He’s behaving like a dictator!”) misses the mark. Completely.

We must find a way to force power from the executive back to Congress where it belongs, or the next Democrat president will just do the same thing Trump's doing, but going the other way.

A Smart Military Blog

Navy Says It Won’t Repeat Cruiser Upgrade Blunder With Destroyer Modernization 2.0 Effort

As the U.S. Navy proceeds with modernizing its Flight IIA Arleigh Burke class destroyers with advanced electronic warfare, radar and combat systems upgrades, the head of the so-called DDG Modernization 2.0 program said the service has learned lessons from its deeply troubled Ticonderoga class cruiser modernization efforts, and several guardrails are in place to avoid similar pitfalls.

TWZ has reported extensively on the congressionally mandated cruiser modernization effort, and how nearly $4 billion was spent modernizing seven of the ships, which have for years served in the air defense commander role for carrier strike groups (CSG), among other missions. But of those seven large surface combatants, none ended up gaining the extra five years of service life originally envisioned. 

Instead, nearly half that money was wasted modernizing four cruisers that never returned to sea and were retired by the Navy, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessment, which warned that efforts like DDG Modernization 2.0 carried the same risks if the Navy didn’t learn from its mistakes.

Spend $2 bil on upgrading ships and then retire them. Sounds like the government all right.

Racism At Sea

Cruise passengers horrified as workers parade around while dressed as ‘KKK members’

Cruise staff seemingly dressed up as white supremacist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members during a Christmas-themed event, horrifying passengers as they marched by the swimming pool. P&O Cruises Australia issued an apology after footage surfaced online of a group of eight staff walking through the pool deck of the ship wearing their white cleaning uniforms and pointy hats

“Is this appropriate for 2024?” a passenger captioned the clip after uploading it to Facebook.

The cruise company says the housekeeping crew had no idea what they looked like when they chose to dress up as “upside down snow cones” for the event during a Pacific Explorer voyage from Melbourne to Hobart in December.

When I went on a cruise, my favorite events were the all you can eat lobster night, the adults only bar and hot tub on the fantail and the nightly cross burning.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by the Muppets:

posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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