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Posts published in “Guest”

China Has Stopped Biding Its Time

In the 1980's Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said famously, “Hide our strength, bide our time.” Today, Xi Jinping is asserting China’s strength, not hiding it. And he believes that China’s time has come.

Mr. Xi’s strategy rests on five pillars. First, he has moved aggressively to take back authority over every industry in his country. Second, Mr. Xi has established technological superiority as a core national goal. 

Third, Mr. Xi has upgraded his defense forces and extended their reach. The Chinese army is far better equipped. The navy is the largest in the world. And China is establishing a global system of ports to give its forces access all over the world.

Fourth, Mr. Xi is using China’s economic clout to extend its diplomatic reach.

Finally, and most ominously, Mr. Xi has deployed the full force of Chinese nationalism to support the reassertion of his country’s power and to complete its reunification. A successful effort to end Taiwan’s independence by force, once considered improbable, can no longer be ruled out.

Read the full column in Wall Street Journal

Read and comment here on The Red Line

Does Tulsa 1921 Explain Chicago 2021?

President Biden traveled to Tulsa, Okla., Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of a race riot that destroyed a prosperous black community and is estimated to have left hundreds of people dead.

June 2, 2021

These historical milestones are certainly worthy of commemoration. Properly understood, they demonstrate how much racial progress has been made in this country in a relatively short time. Yet for progressives and their friends in the media, the events are also an opportunity to push for racial preferences and bigger government. The goal is to link today’s racial disparities to past wrongs and to play down or ignore the far more significant role that contemporary black behavior plays in social inequality.

Read in The Wall Street Journal

Policewoman Applauds Rep. Fiorello’s Call to Reduce Campus Drug and Alcohol Use to Reduce Rape

As a retired investigator of the Major Crime Division of the Stamford Police Department, I applaud state Rep. Kim Fiorello for identifying the catalyst for the majority of sexual assaults on campus — drug and alcohol abuse, especially by underage students.

Read in CT Hearst Media

Read and comment here on The Red Line

Public School Math Instruction is Racist. Really?

A proposed mathematics curriculum framework would guide K-12 instruction in California public schools, if approved by the Instructional Quality Commission.

The framework recommends that teachers use a troubling document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction," which claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy.

See also: Whereto Schooling Post-Pandemic

The framework explicitly rejects “ideas of natural gifts and talents.” It writes an obituary for gifted-and-talented programs.

Read in Wall Street Journal

UConn’s Top-Dollar Door Revolves and New Haven Cops Bank a Quarter-Million – Thus, CT’s “Steady Habits”

The University of Connecticut probably won't show any embarrassment over last week's abrupt resignation of its president, Thomas C. Katsouleas, who was not even two years into the job.

Having alienated the trustees, he won't be missed -- and indeed as a practical matter he won't be, for he really won't be leaving at all: his contract allows him to remain at UConn as a tenured professor with an office, secretarial help, and an annual salary of $330,000 -- an extravagant and premature pension.

Katsouleas' predecessor, Susan Herbst, is enjoying a similar arrangement as a tenured professor with a nominal courseload at UConn's Stamford branch with a salary of $319,000.

Meanwhile, three of New Haven's four highest-paid employees are police officers: a detective whose nominal salary was $84,000 earned $264,000, last year, and two officers whose nominal salaries were $76,000 earned $258,000 and $234,000.

Read in Journal Inquirer


Read and comment here on The Red Line

Green Energy: Not Soon, Not Easy, Not Clean

The International Energy Agency ( IEA) has assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don’t exist. Wind, solar and battery technologies are built from an array of “energy transition minerals,” or ETMs, such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals.

As the IEA observes, there are no plans to fund and build the necessary mines and refineries. The supply of ETMs is entirely aspirational.

The transition to green energy would entail a shift away from liquids and gases whose extraction and transport leave a very light footprint on the land and are transported easily, cheaply and efficiently toward big-footprint mines, the energy-intensive transport of massive amounts of rocks and other solid materials, and subsequent chemical processing and refining that pose contamination risks through acid mine drainage, wastewater discharge and the disposal of tailings.

Read in Wall Street Journal

U.S. Welfare State Is on Borrowed Time

Has anyone noticed that the president has proposed increasing federal spending by nearly $1 trillion a year, while promising that 98% of Americans will pay nothing for it? The very idea would have seemed mad to every previous generation of Americans. Today it is considered conventional.

From 1970 onward, the country has shifted to a budget-deficit policy—spending more than current revenue as a matter of routine.

Deficits had averaged 3% of spending in 1950-69. Then, deficits grew to 10% of spending in the 1970s and 18% in the 1980s. The U.S. borrowed for 22% of spending in 2019, a growth year that would have called for a budget surplus under the old regime.

Federal expenditures have shifted to benefits. In 1970, about 36% of federal spending, net of interest payments, was benefits to individuals—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (new programs at the time), unemployment compensation, means-tested welfare benefits. Benefits spending then grew mightily, roughly in tandem with deficit spending, and is now about 76% of spending, heading briskly toward 80%.


Read in Wall Street Journal

Are Greenwich Dems just looking for retribution?

What a rotten, unwarranted attack on Ryan Fazio and his campaign for state senate by Greenwich Democrats who filed a campaign finance complaint with the State Election Enforcement Commission (SEEC). Moving at lightening speed, the SEEC dismissed Democrats’ complaint in less than a month, without taking testimony. Complainant Bob Brady admits he didn’t even read the applicable regulations before filing the complaint. Yet he refused to apologize for his action or his ignorance.


Read in Greenwich Time e-edition

Read and comment here on The Red Line

CT budget chief gave raises to her staff — but not counterparts at other agencies

State budget chief Melissa McCaw quietly made special arrangements to take care of 13 nonunion management employees in her office by giving them raises between 5% and 10% last December, while their counterparts at other executive branch agencies didn’t receive pay hikes and haven’t for years.

Read in Hartford Courant

Read and comment here on The Red Line

The Bad Precedent Of Politicizing Schools

For some perspective, let’s revisit last year and the onset of the COVID pandemic. The Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) (led by Republicans) called for a flat budget for all town departments in the face of unprecedented fiscal uncertainty. BET’s throughout Fairfield County followed suit. Every town department responded with compliance, except one. The Board of Education.

April 30, 2021

What ensued was a viscous and often personal campaign against Republican BET members. It was accompanied by calls to action by the Greenwich PTA and Superintendent and threats of mass teacher firings. Despite the cacophony, BET Republicans did not waver in their decision. None of what was threatened ever materialized.

Local Democrats on the BET have used the North Mianus School ceiling collapse as a campaign tool to suggest Republicans are callous to school maintenance funding. They want you to think that every school in the district is on the verge of structural collapse.

Read in Greenwich Free Press

Read and comment here on The Red Line