This is the lede image in a Wall Street Journal Letters letter:
Not a minim about educating students. That’s teachers unions for you.
Happy staff, indeed.
Image Says It All
Reply
Monthly Archives: July 2025
Fault and Blame
This example is all too typical. An elderly couple was scammed out of their life savings–$5 million—by a “pig butcherer” who conned the husband into wiring the couple’s savings, in a number of tranches, to the scammer under the guise, among others, of investing the money in a sure-fire investment.
What happened:
A year or so earlier, Craig had responded to an online ad about investments and later received a text message from someone calling themself Tiffany, according to his hazy account. The person struck up a flirtatious exchange and was soon telling him about a lucrative opportunity. All he needed to do was wire money from his bank account.
And
The adviser [at an earlier bank where the husband had begun his “investing” with Tiffany] had repeatedly tried to convince Craig that “Tiffany” was scamming him, to no avail.
The husband after that had pulled his—their—money from that bank and placed it with another bank, from which the husband continued “investing” with Tiffany.
And
Shortly after discovering the scam, Anamarie learned something else about Craig that helped explain what had happened. His doctor told her that Craig had vascular dementia, likely due to a brain injury from a fall he took in 2015 while walking his brother-in-law’s dog.
The first the wife knew anything was amiss was when her credit cards were declined at a Walmart.
In the end, the couple is blaming bank for their having been scammed, claiming that the bank hadn’t acted nanny-ish enough [my term] to protect the couple from themselves.
I have questions, and I’m not entirely sympathetic with the couple or with their blame-shifting.
Why didn’t the wife know more about the couple’s financial situation? True enough, they’re of an age where money matters usually was the husband’s job, but that doesn’t excuse her ignorance; it only illustrates how widespread such ignorance is.
What was the husband doing getting flirty with an online person about whom he knew nothing about, including whether the person even was female? See below for this before readers get up in morality arms.
Why didn’t the wife know anything about her husband’s medical condition? Certainly, this is related to a couple’s internal dynamics, but there’s little reason for one member of the couple to be so ignorant of the other member’s medical state. This is another aspect of couples of an age, but again, this doesn’t excuse the ignorance; it only illustrates the widespread nature of it.
A Thought on Autopens
There’s a kerfuffle in progress over ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) extensive use of the autopen to sign a plethora of Presidential edicts, nominations, and especially pardons. That kerfuffle has spilled over into questions of who actually was in charge of the White House given Biden’s mental capacities, but I’m concerned here only with the autopen.
The purpose of the autopen is to sign documents that are time sensitive and need to be signed right now, but the President is out of the office and cannot get back within the time available. That’s a perfectly fine purpose.
However, as we’re seeing now, it’s far too easy for person or persons unknown to abuse the autopen, especially in the absence of any sort of logs memorializing each use, who actually manipulated it, and who authorized its use. So: get rid of the autopen altogether.
Replace the autopen with a Remote Pen that has the pen connected to the President’s hand over the Internet (via a secure connection that authenticates both the President and the White House end). The President can use a suitably designed connected pen (a proper item in the Internet of Things) to sign a blank piece of paper (to be subsequently destroyed), with that personal signature aped over the Internet connection by the Remote Pen passing over the document to be signed. That has the President personally signing the document(s) he needs to sign, rather than a functionary independently manipulating an autopen and document.
Aside: given the number of witnesses “testifying before the House regarding who was running the White House autopen and the White House in general, I do wonder: what crime(s) do these personages think they might be charged with?
Credulous Editors
The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are in a tizzy over the Senate Judiciary Committee having voted out to the Senate floor the nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having done so after the Progressive-Democratic Party’s committee members staged another of their toddler temper tantrums and stormed out of the committee meeting because they couldn’t get their way. Especially, though. the editors are upset because the Republican majority on the committee chose to ignore a so-called whistleblower’s beef about Bove.
At a March 14 meeting, discussing the possibility that a judge could block those removals [illegal alien deportations], “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.” That’s according to a “whistleblower” letter by a former government lawyer.
And
The Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority dismissed this evidence as “completely devoid of context.” That sounds like an argument by plausible deniability. The whistleblower made specific claims, and isn’t his account context?
That also sounds like an argument for facts and specifics rather than anonymous claims. It’s telling that the editors chose one interpretation while completely ignoring another, much less identifying that other and explaining their logic in choosing the one interpretation over the other. And, no, the person’s account isn’t context; it is itself shorn of context: for instance, to whom was his letter written, what are the relationships between the letter writer and the letter’s recipient with Bove?
And this: the editors never even identify the whistleblower, whose name as the protected person that all whistleblowers are, should be a matter of public record. There’s also a reason that the editors put their characterization of whistleblower inside those euphemism quotes. Maybe that’s because the person isn’t actually a whistleblower, but a leaker with an axe to grind. What proof—what evidence, even—do the editors have that the person exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues before he chose to leak? Too, if the whistleblower isn’t actually one, but a leaker, why do the editors not worry about that leak context?
The Biggest Losers
Progressive-Democratic Party New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a real threat to businesses domiciled in the city.
One of Mamdani’s most controversial proposals is a plan to launch government-run grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods.
Especially this, from 2021 when he was a city councilman:
…there are also other issues that we firmly believe in…the end goal of seizing the means of production….
Businesses would leave “in droves” if Mamdani gets elected, according to some. That’s the problem, though. Only those with mobile businesses—enterprises that can produce or sell their products anywhere, although factories of any size would be deucedly expensive to move. Businesses that can’t just pick up and go, though—the mom and pops, chain franchises that require hands-on direct customer-facing operations can’t. These include restaurants, fast food stores, gasoline stations, grocery stores, bodegas, food trucks, skating rinks, the list is endless: these businesses are trapped. And within a short time—one mayoral cycle, likely—they’ll be the ones left to pick up the city-imposed costs of operating in NYC.
And those small operations will be forced to compete against city government-run grocery stores, restaurants, gasoline stations, and on and on, businesses that have no worries about costs—especially with the city picking up, or waiving, the costs of rent and property taxes—because they’ll have the bottomless pocketbooks of the city’s coffers.
Yes, yes, Mamdani is only talking about government-run grocery stores. Who truly believes he’ll stop there? He’s already offering additions [from the first link]:
…eliminating subway fares, free municipal housing and childcare….