Category Archives: ethics

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.

Congressional Term Limits?

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Sure, but only sort of.

Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger has been absent from duty in Congress since last July. The discovery of that shirking (or coverup of disability) is leading to renewed calls for term limits for Congressmen. For instance,

Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee on Sunday…claimed Granger’s absence made a “compelling case” for term limits….

Yes and no. I remain adamantly opposed to Government dictating to us, in anything resembling absolute terms, who we might or might not choose to represent us in that government. I am just as adamantly opposed to one generation of Americans attempting to dictate to future generations of Americans who they might or might not choose to represent them in government.

Rather than hard and absolute limits, Article V of our erstwhile Articles of Convention has the optimal application of term limits.

…no person shall be capable of being a delegate [to Congress] for more than three years in any term of six years….

That Congress was a unicameral body, but that relative limit is easily adaptable to our bicameral Congress. It would be easy enough, too (as easily as enacting any Constitutional Amendment…), to add the requirement that no Congressman, during a period of non-Congressional service, can serve on any government staff, whether for pay or pro bono, nor can such a one work for or with any government lobbyist during that period.

Separate from that, and additional to it, former Department of Education Press Secretary Angela Morabito:

WOW: Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), who hasn’t voted on a bill in six months, has been living in a nursing home in secret. Records show she has a staff of 25. If any of them knew—and it would be hard not to know—they are complicit[.]

Granger’s, or her staffers’, concealment of her incapacity and absence from Congress should suffer serious consequences from their deception. Those consequences should begin with Granger forfeiting her Congressional pension, if she was/is of sound mind during this period, and should include every single one of her staffers forfeiting any pension they might have accrued along with the barring of all them, including unpaid staffers in DC or in her district, from Federal and Texas government service for life.

That group openly and dishonorably and in a most unamerican fashion deprived Granger’s constituents of their Congressional representation for a quarter of the just concluding Congressional session.

Food Stamps and Consumer Choice

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A Wall Street Journal article on soda companies and their lobbying efforts to keep their drinks eligible for the Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and related programs closed with this bit:

The Republican Party has long been divided over policing what people on food stamps eat. Some GOP lawmakers favor consumer choice.

For instance, Congressman Frank Lucas (R, OK), of the House Agriculture Committee:

I believe in educating consumers on what is in their best interest. I’ve always had a hard time telling people what they cannot have.

I agree with Lucas regarding Government dictating to consumers what they can—or must—buy and what they cannot or must not buy. However, Lucas and his ilk need to better understand who the consumer is in the present case.

The consumer in the milieu of welfare programs like SNAP is not the welfare recipient. That person merely is picking out welfare package handouts. The consumer, the one who’s actually doing the buying, or not, of those package contents, is us taxpayers. We’re the ones paying for—buying—the food stamp products, in the particular case, with our tax remittals. That food stamp recipients can pick and choose among the variety of food packages we purchase for them in no way alters this fundamental fact.

It’s absolutely the case that we should be the ones deciding what we buy with our tax money, what we buy for inclusion in those package varieties, not the recipients of our welfare packages.

Schools in Contempt of Court

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Despite a variety of court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, far too many still schools are using race and gender in their admission standards and for other performance criteria metrics.

The Equal Protection Project, founded and led by Cornell professor William Jacobson, has released a deep-dive report on the prevalence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at Ivy League universities.
In his comprehensive report, Poison Ivies: DEI and the Downfall of the Ivy League, Jacobson examines programs the eight Ivy League institutions use and require for students.

Jacobson:

The review of Ivy League practices by our CriticalRace.org project reflects substantial efforts by Ivy League schools to purport to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, while maintaining work-arounds and DEI practices that continue the obsession with racial identities

One set of TL;DR findings, focused on our oh-so-cool Ivy League schools, as summarized by Fox News:

  • Four require DEI training in student orientation programs (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale)
  • Six require faculty or staff DEI training in some capacity (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI offices at the institutional and/or department level
  • Five have a strategic plan devoted to DEI or anti-racism (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI or CRT (critical race theory) topics in classes and curricula
  • All eight have bias reporting systems

For those schools—not just the Ivy Leaguers; the report highlights 26 schools—so evidently contemptuous of court rulings, the Federal government should cut off all Federal funds to those schools and reduce funds transfers to the States in the amount of their own continued funding for those schools until the schools cure their functional contempt of court status by complying with the rulings rather than weasel-wording their way around them.