Category Archives: ethics

Arrogance of the Left

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This time it’s the arrogance of Liz Cheney, the Leftist politician nominally of the Republican Party but resoundingly rejected by Republican voters. Here’s Cheney admonishing New Hampshire Republicans ahead of the upcoming Presidential primary there:

In a little over two weeks when you in New Hampshire go to the polls the world will be watching.
Speak for us all. Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation. But make sure they know that we do not bend, we do not break, and we do not yield in the defense of our freedom. Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican Party.

Because Republicans who disagree with her Specialness are, perforce, cowards.

Sure.

There’s a reason Republicans in her own State rejected her.

Western Battery-Car Adoption Anxiety

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The Wall Street Journal ran an article centered on how “western anxiety about Chinese EVs could prove self-defeating,” with a subheadline that summarized the thesis:

The US and Europe risk slowing electric-vehicle adoption by excluding Chinese suppliers from subsidies and raising tariffs

I have a hard time seeing the downside to slowing battery car adoption. Leave aside the tremendous drain that charging all those battery cars (assuming widespread adoption) would have on our already near or at capacity electric power grid and generating capacity for that grid.

Battery cars are tremendously polluting and damaging to our environment, from dirt in the ground to end-of-life battery disposal. Mining the metals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and on and on, metals that are used in far greater quantity in battery cars than in gasoline- diesel- or natural gas-powered vehicles—is extremely damaging, both from the toxicity of the metals themselves and from the toxicity of the tailings from the mining operations.

Processing those metals into battery-car-usable components is intensely energy demanding (have I mentioned the strains on anyone’s electricity grid?).

Disposing of those so-far unrecyclable dead batteries at their end of life is enormously polluting as they leach out of even the most well-kept landfills.

The risk is that the West cuts off its nose to spite its face. Slow down the shift to EVs too much to build local supply chains and give domestic manufacturers time to adapt, and Chinese technology might simply pull farther ahead….

Meh.

The technologies involved are useful, they should be pursued apace, and the supply chain problems need to be worked for a host of different reasons. However, it’s a Good Thing that battery cars are not being rapidly incorporated into our transportation systems.

A Karen Sues a Company

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So, what else is new? Not this one; it just happened to catch my eye. A Florida Karen, Cynthia Kelly, is suing Hershey’s over its Reese’s labeling, which Kelly claims is misleading advertising. The image below is the cause of her ire and the center of her (proposed class-action) suit:

She would not have purchased the candy had she known there was not actually ap face carved into the item. Given the image, she plainly expected, also, that there would already be a bite taken out of the item. Why would she buy a candy that had already been partly eaten?

This is the depth of the…foolishness…to which so many Precious Ones and outright lawfare gold diggers have stooped.

New York City’s Failure

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There are many; this is just one. It seems that a significant number of city officials are thoroughly disgruntled with Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams’ handling of the city’s “migrant crisis.”

Some officials, like New York City comptroller Brad Lander, have directly opposed Adams, restricting “the mayor’s emergency power to contract for migrant services without review.”
Some migrants choose to “sleep on the sidewalk outside an office to hold their place in line” for shelter, with others getting into outright “[s]hoving matches.”
The confusion and overcrowding of shelters in New York City and across the state comes as migrants’ families and advocates protest Adams’ policy for a 60-day limit for stay in shelters….

That failure, though, stems from Adams’ and his coterie’s utter misunderstanding of the situation. New York City does not have a migrant crisis; the city has no serious influx of migrants at all. The city does have a problem with illegal aliens; although in relative terms, the city is skating by with ease—or it would be were there any competence in Gracie Mansion—compared to vast flow of illegal aliens inundating border towns and cities.

There’s Educational Opportunity…

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…and there’s educational obstruction. This is the contest between charter schools (and, larger, school choice) and union public schools.

Charter enrollment is up 9% since 2019, while the number of students in district schools is down 3.5%, according to a new study from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Families have discovered choice,” the report says, “and they like it.”

And

The trend holds for states of all sizes and political persuasions. From 2019-2023, charter enrollment grew in 40 of the 42 states analyzed, while traditional schools lost students in 40 states.

Naturally, the unions that run the public schools don’t like it: reduced public school enrollment reduces the power of teachers unions, and that reduces the power of the unions’ managers, and those folks can’t stand that.

Which is why teachers union management teams are so strident in their opposition to State funding for charter schools, and for voucher schools, or even—as in New York City—to allowing unused public school buildings for charter schools. Better to leave those facilities empty than to use them for the betterment of children.