Category Archives: ethics

Open Border Made Official

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has issued an Executive Order that would allow—apparently not require—him to close our southern border when the number of illegal aliens crossing our border exceeds 2,500 per day, averaged over a week’s time. The closure, if it’s done at all, would end when the number of illegals crossing drops below 1,500 per day, averaged over a week’s time. Biden doesn’t seem to have offered any serious means of enforcing those limits, however, including any mechanism for removing the “excess” illegal aliens from our nation.

It’s important to note, too, that those numbers seem not to include gotaways or those not encountered at all but known only by the traces they leave in the crossing.

With this EO, Biden is attempting to codify the entry into our nation of 500,000+ illegal aliens to just under a million illegal aliens per year.

This is Biden’s active erasure of our southern border, and it wholly ignores our even more porous, and increasingly used by illegal aliens, northern border.

It’s also a demonstration of the lie that is Biden’s claim that no one is above the law. Clearly, Biden considers those 500,000 to a million illegal aliens to be above the law.

We average Americans need to keep this in mind in November.

There’s a Hint There

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The farm bill just passed out of the House Agriculture Committee contains a provision barring the Secretary of Agriculture from increasing, on his own alleged authority, SNAP spending above the amounts provided for in the legislation:

[c]orrects egregious Executive branch overreach and disallows future unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or decimating SNAP benefits.

Austin Scott (R, GA):

The Farm Bill includes protective language that prevents extreme changes to SNAP benefits without Congressional input and continues the cost-neutral status that the TFP [Thrifty Food Plan] has maintained for over 40 years.

The Progressive-Democrat Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed, though, that

the proposal would amount to a roughly $27 billion cut to SNAP[.]

This is the AgSec’s confession that he fully intended to spend—on his own and without any Congressional spending authority to do so—at least those $27 billion above his authorized level. He’s not alone in this. Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo (D, CO):

…it is necessary that we go back to the negotiating table and remove this provision[.]

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D, MI):

It…does not have the votes to pass on the House floor. And certainly not in the Senate[.]

This is the budgeting and spending paradigm of the Progressive-Democratic Party: Congressional appropriations and allocations are mere suggestions, and they are to be disregarded whenever inconvenient to Party. After all, it’s only your and my money they’re spending.

There’s an election coming up. Maybe us average Americans should vote our tax dollars.

More Party Gaslighting

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This time, it’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians doing the gaslighting.

Progressive-Democrat Congressman Dean Phillips (MN) wants New York’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Kathy Hochul, to pardon former President Donald Trump (R) “for the good of the country.”

But is this a Ford pardons Nixon for the good of the country pardon request? Ford pardoned Nixon to reduce (it wound up damping down almost completely) the political divisions growing out of Nixon’s misbehaviors.

No, that’s not the sort of pardon request that Phillips is after. Here’s Phillips in his own words:

You think pardoning is stupid?
Making him a martyr over a payment to a porn star is stupid. (Election charges are entirely different.)
It’s energizing his base, generating record sums of campaign cash, and will likely result in an electoral boost.

Phillips isn’t interested in tamping down our nation’s current divisions. He’s interested only in nakedly favoring his Progressive-Democratic Party, and he has no concerns at all for partisan division mitigation. His “for the good of the country” is just so much gaslighting.

More Press Gaslighting

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The notoriously strongly Leftist, and commensurately biased, news outlet The Associated Press now is promising to instigate what it’s pleased to call a nonpartisan news initiative and to have it up and running before the coming national elections. The opening paragraph in the news outlet’s announcement:

The Associated Press today announced five new content sharing agreements with US nonprofit news outlets: CalMatters, Honolulu Civil Beat, Montana Free Press, Nebraska Journalism Trust, and South Dakota News Watch.

Never mind that these five outlets are themselves solidly on the left side—some farther left, some less so—of our nation’s political spectrum. Here are a couple items of interest concerning the balance we can expect from the AP‘s construct. These two new partners are openly proud of their bias.

The CEO and Publisher of Honolulu Civil Beat is Pierre Omidyar who made billions as one of the creators of eBay. Omidyar donated considerable funds to create The Intercept, and in 2016 personally donated “$100,000 to NeverTrump PAC, a political action committee dedicated to making sure New York businessman Donald Trump never becomes president of the United States,” according to Honolulu Civil Beat.

And

CalMatters is a nonprofit news organization that was cofounded by Austin resident Simone Coxe who personally donated $100,000 to a pro-Joe Biden super PAC back in 2020, according to a report from The Washington Free Beacon. Coxe and her husband Tench collectively donated $2 million to Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 presidential campaign, the Texas Tribune reported.

We’re supposed to take this new construct as balanced.

Whether the AP is making this claim of “nonpartisan-ness” deliberately or from its having gone so far Left it no longer can recognize the center of American politics, much less what’s center-right in our political spectrum, this is the news outlet gaslighting us all.

“Should AI Have Access to Your Medical Records? What if It Can Save Many Lives?”

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The Wall Street Journal asked that question last week. And their subheadline:

We asked readers: Is it worth giving up some potential privacy if the public benefit could be great?

A good many of the published answers centered on Yes, with oversight by, among others, medical professionals.

This reader (unpublished in the WSJ) says, resoundingly, No. Not now, and not for the foreseeable future, say I. Personal data aggregators, whether government or private enterprise, have shown no ability to protect our personal data, whether from hackers or from organizational carelessness, incompetence, or ignorance. With our medical data especially, very good protection, even six sigma-level protection, isn’t good enough. This is one of the few areas where perfection must be the standard. Since that’s an unachievable standard, AIs must not be permitted any access to our personal data, including our personal medical data.

There are additional reasons for saying no. One is the inherent bias programmers build into AIs. Alphabet’s overtly bigoted Gemini is an extreme example, but the programmers build their biases into AIs through the data sets they use and have their AIs use in training.

There’s also the just as overt bigotry too many medical training institutions apply through their emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion claptrap at the expense of training actual medicine. Those institutions are producing the doctors that would the second generation of “medical” professionals doing the oversight.

In the current state of affairs, and for that foreseeable future, it’s not feasible to let AIs into any aspect of our personal lives. The blithely assumed public benefit is vastly overwhelmed by the threat to our individual privacy—the “public,” after all, is all of us individuals aggregated.