Category Archives: ethics

Our Minds Are Made Up

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The House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs held a hearing in Plano, Texas, Tuesday on energy from the perspective of a number of oil and gas industry leaders.

The 15 Progressive-Democrat members of the subcommittee were invited to the hearing—as all members of a (sub)committee must be when that body meets in its official capacity—and all 15 chose not to attend. That refusal is within House rules, but it’s no less unethical or downright chickens** for that.

Congressional hearings often are puppet theater presentations, with the Congressmen often occupying their time allocations for questioning witnesses with speeches rather than with efficiently asked questions that leave the bulk of the time for witness answers. Too, witnesses often are chosen for their ability to support a political narrative.

All of that, though, is easily enough refuted by Congressmen proceeding from their own lines of questioning. Actual questions, mind you, not self-aggrandizing speech-ifying.

Instead regarding the Plano field hearing, the Progressive-Democratic Party subcommittee members said, “Don’t confuse us with facts,” with their decision to absent themselves.

 

The hearing itself can be viewed via C-SPAN here.

Cowardice

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Columbia University’s managers have abjectly surrendered to terrorist supporters masquerading as pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are doing their best to prevent Jewish students from attending classes and to prevent Columbia from operating at all.

Columbia University was holding classes virtually Monday as protests over the Israel-Hamas war continue to engulf the campus.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik said she wanted to “deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

Even the Wall Street Journal‘s characterization of these “protests” as being over the Israel-Hamas war is cynical and misleading. These “protestors” aren’t protesting the war, they’re objecting to Israel’s defending itself against Hamas’ war of extermination. Nor will these terrorist supporters stop. As Shafik bows down here, the “rancor” will only escalate, and the disruptors will then push for ending all support for Israel and for the “from the river to the sea” destruction of Israel.

Here’s more from Shafik:

I understand that many are experiencing deep moral distress and want Columbia to help alleviate this by taking action. But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.

And yet, that’s exactly what Shafik is doing when she allows these “protestors” to disrupt to the extent that in-person classes, which are what those students and their parents have paid for and which are far more effective teaching devices than individuals participating remotely via video, are no longer being held. In-person classes that are blocked, not by these terrorist supporters, but by the cowardice of Shafik and her management team. Beyond that, Shafik is refusing to do anything to alleviate the deep moral distress that the school’s Jewish students and their supporters are experiencing, and she is empirically refusing to take any action to supply her defect.

Rather than bowing and scraping at the feet of the disrupters, Shafik should authorize and require campus police to arrest them, push for New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to have the arrestees jailed, expel with prejudice those disruptors who are enrolled in any capacity at Columbia, and fire for cause any COlumbia employee participating in the disruption. The only way to deescalate these disruptions is to eliminate the disruptors.

Addendum: Shafik’s perfidy goes even further than merely aiding and abetting the terrorists-supporting disrupters on campus.

A [Jewish] Columbia University professor who has been a vocal critic of the administration’s response to the ongoing anti-Israel student protests was barred from campus after he tried to lead a pro-Jewish rally at the Ivy League college.
Israel-born Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School and an outspoken supporter of the Jewish state, said that when he swiped his key card at the school’s Morningside Heights campus, it read “deactivated.”

Now Shafik is actively opposing those who disagree with her terrorist-supporting disrupters.

In Thy light shall we see light. Dishonoring the school’s motto, Shafik has turned out the lights.

“We are obligated”

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Apple has once again kowtowed to the demands of an enemy nation government: the People’s Republic of China instructed Apple to remove some of the world’s most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country. The offending apps include Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads and Signal and Telegram.

Apple promptly and meekly complied.

An anonymous Apple spokesman rationalized the obedience:

We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree[.]

Certainly. But Apple is not obligated to operate in those countries where they disagree; especially is Apple not obligated to operate in an enemy that is engaged in genocide internally or that externally is actively occupying seas and islands that are either international or belong to other nations, openly threatening to invade and conquer a sovereign nation, and prosecuting an economic war against us. Indeed, moral imperative at the least would seem to urge ceasing business operations with and within such a nation.

But Apple thinks it has more important things to do.

Financial Institutions Retreating from ESG Claptrap

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Or are they? Are they, maybe, simply moving to disguise their ESG claptrap in other ways or only altering their rhetoric without materially altering their censorious behavior?

States have responded [to the explosion of ESG irrelevances] with a barrage of legislation that restricts the use of ESG factors or targets entities that boycott certain industries.
Financial institutions are reacting to these state-level actions with what appears to be a retreat from their commitment to ESG, but there are questions if they are changing or just regrouping the efforts under new names.

One way to control for financial institutions’ weasel-wording around those State-level bars (whether those institutions are looking sub rosa to avoid the bars or not) would be to require financial institutions that decline a loan application, or cancel an account, or otherwise restrict one relative to similar accounts of other customers is the following.

Require financial institutions to explain their adverse actions to their customers in concrete, measurable terms supported by including in their letters of explanation the hard, factual data they used to form their adverse actions, along with the concretely termed concerns the financial institution claims to have toward its adversely affected customer/prospective customer. Simply asserting that the enterprise/individual doesn’t align with the financial institution’s values doesn’t cut it. Which value? How? Show them the hard data supporting the assertion. Explain how any data provided by the enterprise/individual falls short.

There are no serious compliance difficulty/cost concerns here. The financial institution taking the adverse action already has collected and organized the data and concerns underlying its action; the institution has merely to copy/paste those materials into the letter advising its customer/prospective customer of the adverse action.

Concerns Regarding “Unreasonable” Searches

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There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.

The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.

Worse, goes the argument, the bill

would prohibit the US government from buying digital information that would remain available to the likes of China and Russia.

That last is a non sequitur, though. The fact that the data are readily available to our enemies doesn’t legitimize its collection by our government, which has Constitutional bars against most kinds of searches. It’s further the case that if we can’t be secure against the unwarranted [sic] intrusions of our own government, how can we expect our own government to keep us secure from the intrusions of foreign governments, especially enemy foreign governments?

There also is a misunderstanding buried in the claim regarding that digital exhaust [that] most Americans leave behind online. A significant fraction of that “digital exhaust” is not voluntary; it’s left behind as a condition of doing business with those enterprises that require collection of the data. Some of those data are legitimately needed by businesses: credit card account numbers if payment is being offered via credit card, shipping addresses so the seller can deliver the product, personal names so the seller can be sure of the credit card numbers and shipping addresses, and the like. Other data are demanded by the business as a condition of doing business with the customer for reasons unique to the specific enterprise.

Better would be to bar the sale, rather than bar the purchase, of such data.

That sale, too, should be barred universally, not just with respect to our government, within the following boundaries. All data that an enterprise demands be collected in order to do business needs to be barred from sale or any other transfer, to any other entity, whether government or not. There should be no default position or opt in or out; the sale or transfer of these data should be prohibited. Government legitimately can still access those data on presentation in court of a probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the [data] to be searched, and the [data] to be seized. Voluntarily left data should require affirmative opt-in before those data can be sold or transferred. Failure to choose should be taken as not opting in—the enterprise cannot sell of transfer the data.