Monthly Archives: December 2024

Misunderstanding “Equity”

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A letter writer in Friday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section badly misunderstands this artificial, modern “liberal” construct of humans and the human condition. She writes

Mr Stone seems to have confused “equal” with “equity” [in his WSJ Cross Country op-ed] We aren’t all created equal, and this is why there is DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion.
Equity isn’t about being “created equal.” It is about creating equality. This means that no matter if you are tall or short, blind or sighted, wheelchair bound or not, rich, poor, male, female or any other gender, etc., these characteristics won’t be permitted to hamper your equality of treatment, opportunity or access.

Therein lies her misunderstanding. Equity doesn’t create equality at all; instead, it destroys it. The characteristics she ascribes to the equality being created by equity are the characteristics of equality that all human beings are born with: we start out owed equal treatment under law because we are all equal in the eyes of God. This is why we have those laws demanding equal access—to protect our intrinsic right to equal opportunity.

Equity, on the other hand, singles out specific groups of Americans for special treatment, and does so at the direct expense of other groups of Americans, both specific and generalized. Equity does this in the name of the equal outcomes that the ideology holds as its underlying tenet. That is the very definition of unequal treatment and the destruction of the equal nature of us under law and under God.

One More Reason…

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…to stop doing business in New York. This time, it’s the State’s move to tax energy producers who sell their fossil fuel products in the State on the risible basis of those producers’ (global) CO2 production over the years 2000 through 2018. Never mind that, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

It’s impossible to determine a company’s contribution to climate change since the effects of CO2 emissions on temperature and natural disasters are mediated by myriad variables.

New York’s bureaucrats will make their assessments anyway, and those assessments will be, of necessity, wholly arbitrary. Then there’s this, too, which New York’s government personages consider irrelevant:

Most fossil-fuel emissions stem from their combustion rather than production….

The fossil fuel energy producers shouldn’t waste time litigating this in court, even though they’d likely win given the plethora of court decisions that hold moves like New York’s illegal.

These folks should simply stop selling their products in New York, and that should include no longer selling their products to utilities that provide electricity- and natural gas-related energy in New York. They’ll save more money that way, money that could be used for innovation and better fossil-fuel-related products for their other customers.

Nor will New Yorkers be harmed by the withdrawal. They have plenty of energy flowing from all those “green” and “renewable” energy sources. And those nuclear reactors on the horizon. The State government’s personages assure us so.

Since Mexico Won’t

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Supporters of Republican President-elect Donald Trump are making noises about military strikes against the drug cartels in Mexico. Newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is downplaying the matter while she makes noises about her government taking the cartels seriously.

Sheinbaum has rushed to show her administration isn’t soft on drugs and migrants. Her government has gone after fentanyl smugglers in Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, seizing 1.3 tons of the drug in a record bust. She has sent her security minister to Sinaloa to oversee the efforts to take back control of a state where organized crime dominates the political establishment and two factions are in a turf war.
Mexico is in talks to set up a unit of elite security officers who would be vetted and trained by US law-enforcement officials for operations against criminals in Mexico, according to Mexican officials.

The fentanyl bust seems like a large number, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total fentanyl output of Mexico’s drug cartels, an output that includes both their own production and their transshipment of fentanyl through Mexico to the US. The talks regarding the elite unit appear to be just chit-chat for show, given how progress in setting up the unit is close to nil.

There’s no reason to believe that Sheinbaum is any more serious about the fentanyl flows than was her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who functionally aided the cartels with his hugs instead of jails policy.

The facts remain that the cartels are poisoning us, and so far the Mexican government is allowing that. The Mexican government has even allowed various of the cartels to take over and operate many of Mexico’s cities, and the cartels own and operate the state of Sinaloa. That’s the central government functionally abetting the cartels.

As noted above, Sheinbaum is making noises about returning Sinaloa to government control, but nothing is happening so far. Meanwhile, the fentanyl continues to flow. If all Sheinbaum has is noise, or if she really does try and does not succeed, it may be necessary for the US to take down the cartels ourselves. American lives depend on it.

A Proposal

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The Republican Party has one of the smallest majorities in the House of Representatives in decades. They also have one of the most obstructionist, ego-driven factions in Party history, the Chaos Caucus whose members are pleased to call themselves the Freedom Caucus.

While Republicans will have full control of Congress and the White House, the wafer-thin cushion in the House means any small handful of Republican defectors could trip up the GOP agenda by holding out for their leaders or their own terms.

That small handful of defectors is the Chaos Caucus, and they spent all of the just ending Congressional session blowing up the Republican agenda, denying the party the passage of bills (even if doomed in the Progressive-Democrat-controlled Senate) that would have furthered Republican and Conservative goals.

That claque now is threatening the current House Speaker’s, Mike Johnson (R, LA), with removal from the Speakership at the outset of the next session. Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY) is on record as refusing to support Johnson under any circumstances, and Congresswoman Victoria Spartz (R, IN) is throwing her own terrible-twos tantrum. The claque is on track to continue, throughout that session, obstructing Republican and Conservative moves in favor of their own desires, an obstruction borne of their my way or nothing attitude.

Hence my proposal.

Regardless of what anyone might think of Johnson’s performance as Speaker, he should continue to run for the Speakership, he should refuse to step aside, and the majority of the Republican caucus should continue to vote him up, regardless of how long that leaves the House without a Speakership, regardless of how long the Chaos Caucus refuses to support him for the role. That should occur even when Chaos Caucus obstruction prevents the Congress as a whole from overseeing the Senate’s attempts to certify the Electoral College election of—still President-elect—Donald Trump, the Republican President-in-waiting, and thereby prevents that certification from occurring.

In addition to that, once Johnson is elected Speaker—if the House gets a Speaker at all this session in the face of Chaos Caucus obstruction—the Republican caucus (which in its aggregation unfortunately includes the Chaos Caucus) should attempt to enact spending cuts, tax rate reductions, and national defense recovery and buildup in the usual manner, and then put the bills to floor votes regardless of Chaos Caucus agreement or continued obstruction.

Put the Chaos Caucus’ deliberate intransigence on display for all to see, especially those Congressmen’s constituents. It’s time to make blatantly obvious just how destructive this ego-driven collection of politicians are of the Conservative agenda that Americans in all of our nation’s House districts elected all of our Representatives to enact.

The Chaos Caucus began as an evolution of the Tea Party movement and caucus, but the present claque as a whole no longer is a collection of Tea Partiers. Congressmen like Jim Jordan (OH), current House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Chairman of the Chaos Caucus, is one of the few who still is a Tea Partier and who is willing to compromise to move things along in the direction of Republican and Conservative—and Chaos—goals.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and coming back later to improve on the good enough takes us toward the perfect. The Chaos Caucus knows that as well as the rest of us; the claque’s refusal to compromise, their way or nothing blockages, only gets the Republican Party nothing at all, and puts the Progressive-Democratic Party in control.

It’s almost like the Chaos Caucus are Machiavellian-esque moles of the other party.

There would be a happy side effect of this: the government wouldn’t be increasing its spending while the Chaos Caucus is holding its collective breath until it turns blue.

No More Thinking Outside the Box

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It’s bad enough that targeted advertising, including—but not at all limited to—algorithm-driven targeting, limits our choices when we go looking for products or services. That targeted advertising limits us to our “preferences” that advertisers create from our early choices and hinders our ability to see things beyond those early decisions, hinders our natural tendency to evolve our actual preferences as time, circumstance, and age progress. Those actually are weak hinderances, though.

Far more serious is this bit about the coming AI “advances,” as expressed in a Wall Street Journal article:

Agents will understand context, learn your preferences, and interact with you and other software to get stuff done: booking travel, ordering food, shopping for those new sneakers, etc.

No, I don’t need AI, nor any other software package, especially one of high sophistication and capability, acting for me on the preferences it thinks I have. I don’t need AI straitjacketing me in my thinking, keeping me within the bounds it thinks it’s identified based on those preferences.

Years ago, a bookseller centralized its inventory management system and limited all of its branches to carrying the inventory that the central office decided those branch customers customarily bought. Which limited what the branches had available to buy regardless of what the customers wanted. As a result, the customers didn’t buy, so the books weren’t available, so customers couldn’t buy—even as their tastes and interests changed, even as an individual store’s customer base itself changed. Sales fell, franchises folded, and bookseller itself folded.

I don’t need AI similarly limiting me to what I customarily (it thinks) think or want; I don’t even want its “suggestions” regarding what that software says might interest me. I prefer being able to think outside the box occasionally. Nor am I interested in wasting time and resources acting randomly just to break the AI’s hold.

“Agents” can help me solve difficult problems, but I’ll be the one identifying the problems to be solved, and I’ll be the one choosing among the solutions, most especially including the solutions I work out independently of that…help.

Spare me the convenience. It’s too limiting, and that’s no benefit. It’s not even convenient.