Category Archives: culture

A Scenario

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Let’s assume the Chaos Caucus is successful in preventing the election of a Speaker of the House. We already have Congressman Thomas “Permanent No” Massie (R, KY) and Congresswoman Victoria “Toddler Tantrum” Spartz (R, IN) on record saying they’ll not vote for current Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) for Speaker when the new House convenes on 3 January 2025.

That’s enough, given the Republican’s tiny majority in the House, to prevent a Speaker from being chosen. If the Chaos Caucus persists, the Electoral College vote can’t occur on 6 January. If the Chaos Caucus ego-driven obstruction persists through 20 January 2025, who would become the Acting President?

Currently the line of succession is this:

President of the United States—don’t have one
Vice President of the United States —don’t have one
Speaker of the House—don’t have one
President Pro Tempore of the Senate—serves in place of the President of the Senate, that non-existent Vice President of the United States.

The President Pro Tempore is elected by the Senate at large—one of which we will have on 20 January. With the Republican majority of 53 Senators (52 until Senator-elect and current Governor Jim Justice (R, WV) is sworn in, which he has said he’d delay until his successor Governor is sworn in), it’s less likely that a President Pro Tempore would not be elected promptly.

I speculate that the Senate Majority Leader-to-be, John Thune (R, SD), would be elected President Pro Tempore.

Which would make John Thune the acting President.

Is this what the Chaos Caucus is aiming for? Seems unlikely since Thune isn’t, and never has been, far enough right to suit the Chaos Caucus.

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.

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.

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.

That’s Nice

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The organization Do No Harm had been writing about how the Association of American Medical Colleges has been pushing DEI in medicine; its report delineating all of that can be read here. Now the AAMC has taken information regarding how it uses that DEI claptrap from its Web site.

Shortly after Do No Harm released its report, [AAMC] removed information about DEI-related grants from its website. They also restricted access to information about a database that tracked the race and sex of medical personnel[.]

That raises the obvious question: what is the AAMC hiding? Laura Morgan, who wrote the Do No Harm report, also wondered.

Considering their laser focus on all things DEI, it’s curious that the AAMC would take down a web page that described the federal and private grants it receives, especially when it contains information on programs that are DEI-focused

Whether AAMC has removed its DEI claptrap from its actions, overt and sub rosa, remains to be seen. After all, the same management personnel who ran the organization while that claptrap was put in place are still there.

I’m not holding my breath on this.