Tag Archives: responsibilities

Oh, W-a-ah

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These precious ones bring it on themselves.

Big banks and brokerage firms are handing over bigger checks to settle regulatory investigations, including those that don’t result in losses for investors. US market regulators are increasingly demanding tens of millions of dollars to settle technical violations that just a few years ago cost companies much less to resolve.

Because:

The SEC settles most of its enforcement cases, and Wall Street firms prefer to pay fines and avoid litigation that would put more heat on executives. But SEC officials under Chair Gary Gensler are seeking higher fines to settle, even if prior offenders paid less.

We’re supposed to feel sympathy for these…personages. Wall Street Is Furious Over Rising Fines From SEC goes the headline. There’s much about which to criticize Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, but Wall Street executive shyness, fear of heat, outright cowardice isn’t on that list.

That those worthies would rather settle and skitter into the baseboard holes to avoid a bit of heat does severe disservice to the companies they’re pretending to manage and those companies’ shareholders. Litigation costs too much, and it’s cheaper to settle? Settling repeatedly runs up that cost and alters the balance.

If Wall Street managers were worthy of their paychecks, they’d hie the SEC into court over the SEC’s charges, which range from social and climate justice claptrap to the trivia noted in the linked article to the occasional legitimate SEC beef. It would take only a few wins in court to get the SEC to back off and stick to its knitting.

Knee-jerk settling SEC suits is a violation of those persons’ fiscal duties.

The Cowardice of Dishonesty

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An all too typical example is provided by climatista Patrick Brown, Johns Hopkins University lecturer and “doctor” of “earth and climate sciences.” He has confessed, now that his damage has been done, that he

“left out the full truth” about climate change, blaming it primarily on human causes, to get his study published in a prestigious science journal.

His rationalization for his lie by omission:

And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society[.]

Here is Brown confessing that he put his career aspirations ahead of his morality and his integrity. He committed his lie of omission because he was too much of a coward to stick to the whole truth; he wanted to get published prestigiously, instead of published in a lesser, but honest, journal.

Brown’s rationalization:

He blamed his angle on the pressure scientists face to get their studies published in prestigious articles and the need to create catchy abstracts that can be turned into headlines.

No, this is his cowardice. “Scientists” and real scientists only feel the pressure they choose to feel, and they make that choice because they subordinate morality and integrity to their ambition.

Sadly, those “editors of these journals” are able to get away with their own dishonesty because climatistas as a class are too cowardly, too dishonest, to go elsewhere for their publications, and too many other climatistas, even knowing these journals’ censorship, still take the journals’ articles seriously.

Then Don’t Do That

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he wants to avoid brinksmanship and the risk of a government shutdown in the upcoming talks as Congress get back to work after its August month back home.

We cannot afford the brinkmanship or hostage-taking we saw from House Republicans earlier this year when they pushed our country to the brink of default to appease the most extreme members of their party.

If Schumer were serious, though, he’d cut out his obstructionism and work with Republicans to pass spending bills that represent true spending cuts; and he’d work with Republicans to make permanent the tax cuts enacted in 2017 and to further reduce tax rates; and he’d work with Republicans to pass legislation that would seal our southern border; and he’d work with Republicans on the sole rational spending increase, that for rebuilding our Navy and the rest of our military establishment.

Instead, he’s bent on his brinkmanship and on his decision to try to hold our economy hostage for his personal and his Party’s political gain. He’s pushing for another Schumer shutdown.

It’s Never the Criminal

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It’s always the victim, or the victim’s property, or—in some infamous instances—the producers of the victim’s property that are to blame for the crimes. It’s a modern day version of “if she hadn’t dressed that way, she wouldn’t have been raped. She invited it.”

The latest example is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson’s decision to sue a couple of automobile manufacturers for Chicago’s spiking auto thefts. His rationalization is that those manufacturers didn’t install “standard” anti-theft technology on cars manufactured in the model years 2011 to 2022.

He’s carefully ignoring the fact that auto thefts in Chicago spiked during the latter years of his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot’s (D) term and continues in his own—with their decidedly soft on crime and no bail policies. All those model years prior, still lacking anti-theft tech acceptable to the mayor, weren’t getting stolen.

Nah, it’s the car manufacturers. It’s the gun manufacturers. It’s the woman’s attire. It’s any excuse Progressive-Democrats can dream up in order to avoid facing the fact that crimes are committed by criminals, and criminals need to be punished for their crimes. But, bleat these Leftists, that would work a hardship on the poor, misunderstood, downtrodden criminals.

AI to Teach Cops to be Politically Correct?

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The Los Angeles Police Department—yes, that one, of “violent extremist views” infamy regarding its cops displaying the Thin Blue Line flag anywhere in public—now is going to use Artificial Intelligence to teach cops how to be politically correct and suitably social justice-y when they make traffic stops and potentially in other, even more tension-filled, encounters.

The headline says it all:

AI to binge LAPD bodycam footage to weed out rude tone, aggressive language

Because rudeness is so terrible, and never mind the occasional—the often—need for cops to be aggressive during an encounter with an individual of the public, even on a traffic stop.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on Tuesday announced the research initiative during the Board of Police Commissioners meeting. LAPD Cmdr Marla Ciuffetelli said at the meeting the study will be used to help train future officers on how to best interact with the public while also promoting accountability, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Researchers at the University of Southern California will review [body camera] footage from about 1,000 traffic stops over the next three years and establish parameters on interactions deemed appropriate by department policies and public feedback, and inappropriate interactions.
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The researchers will take into account the location of the traffic stop, the driver’s race, and the officer’s rank and age when analyzing their findings.

What could go wrong?

One major problem is that every stop is a unique encounter and those factors have greater or lesser influence depending on the individual cop and the individual person being stopped—and the degree of influence will vary from time to time for both the cop and the person being stopped.

What’s the difference between rude talk and banter? How do they differ from time to time? Even the most PC remark by the cop can be taken amiss by the stoppee, ranging from being viewed as condescending to not being PC enough to the stoppee simply feeling like taking offense because he woke up in an owly mood. Or because cop. Never mind that every traffic stop, and many other types of encounters, start out with the cop needing to be aggressive. “Kindly to stop doing that, Sir/Madam/Zir, and let’s chat for a bit” just isn’t going to cut it.

The “training” the LAPD line officers will be forced to undergo will, also, simply add to the tension any LA cop will feel when beginning an encounter—not over the encounter itself or the person’s reaction to the stop and to the cop, but over how LAPD…managers…will perceive the cop’s behavior when they review the encounter.

I have a problem with the proposed methodology, too.

LAPD has 150 cops and civilians for traffic enforcement. Those thousand traffic stops over three years works out to a bit over 2 stops per traffic enforcer per year. That’s not a big sample, even for something as supposedly magic as AI.

Maybe the city should leave off this kind of claptrap and use the money instead for hiring more cops, putting more cops on the street, and training cops how to be cops rather than everybody’s best friend out for a nice chat.