Tag Archives: responsibilities

They’re Not Journalists

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Just the News had a Saturday article that debunked the claims—claims actively supported by the press—by a plethora of insurers that climate change is responsible for their changing policies, increases in premiums and deductibles, and growing numbers of exclusion clauses in the policies they do sell.

I’m interested in one apologia for the press offered by Ryan Maue, a research meteorologist [emphasis added].

Journalists aren’t equipped to go into the studies. They’re not economists. They’re not climate scientists. They’re journalists. They’re supposed to ask questions and dig deeper by going to ask all the sources, or go find experts either to talk on the record or off the record. And for whatever reason, this field just does not do that.

No, they’re not journalists. Among other criteria for journalism and those who claim to practice the form was a long ago editorial criterion requiring a journalist to produce two (or more) on-the-record sources to corroborate any number of anonymous claims the journalist might include in his piece. The journalism practice, the practice’s editors, and the practice’s writers have long since walked away from that criterion.

The question then becomes: what concrete, publicly measurable standard of journalistic integrity is used today in the practice of journalism? The answer is none. At least that’s the implication from the myriad times I’ve asked that question of a number of those claiming to be journalists, and the zero times I’ve gotten a response.

The current crop are not journalists; they are proselytizers when they’re not being propagandists.

Joe Biden’s Dishonesty and Joe Biden’s Decline

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Just the News calls all of these “whoppers;” I have a slightly different view.

  • Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden claims that inflation was at 9% when he took office when it actually was 1.4% then and didn’t reach 9% until the second year of his term.
  • Biden claims to have reduced the Federal government’s deficit by some $1.7 trillion, when what reduction that did occur was the result of Wuhan Virus Situation stimulus spending expiring.
  • There was no reduction from anything Biden did.
  • Biden claimed gasoline was at $5, on average, when he took office and was then-currently $3.39. Actual average pricing was $2.334 when he took office, and at the time he made his…claim…gasoline cost $3.76.

These are straight up lies, easily checked, and he—at least his advisors—knew better and know better.

Then there are these claims:

  • Biden says his uncle was eaten by cannibals. There is no evidence to support that claim beyond the unadorned fact that the airplane carrying his uncle crashed in the Pacific Ocean near New Guinea.
  • Biden says he was at Ground Zero the day after the 9/11 terrorist attack. In his 2007 book—published just 6 years after the attack—he wrote that he was in DC on that day after.
  • Biden claims his son Beau, who died in Walter Reed from brain cancer, died in Iraq.
  • Biden attacked Special Counsel Hur for asking him about Beau’s death. The interview transcript makes it clear that Hur did not; Biden himself brought up the matter of his son’s death.

These aren’t lies; these are nothing more than the confused ramblings of an old man in mental decline.

Deadlines

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Columbia’s management team gave terrorist supporters a deadline to clear their campus “encampment,” and when the campers ignored the deadline, managers issued them a new deadline. When the terrorist supporters seized and occupied a school building, managers gave them a deadline by which to clear out. And then another.

Terrorist supporters seized a Rhode Island School of Design building, and that school’s managers have issued a deadline. As seems typical of school management teams, the design school’s administrators have yet to announce consequences for demonstrators if they do not comply with the 8 am deadline.

And at MIT:

Anti-Israel agitators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took back their campus encampment after it was initially cleared by police.
…
Protesters at MIT were given a Monday afternoon deadline to voluntarily leave or face suspension. Many cleared out of the area, according to the school spokesperson. Dozens of protesters remained at the encampment through the night.
No arrests had been made as of Monday night, according to the MIT spokesperson.

This sort of thing is all too common, and it’s not unique to today’s school disruptions. As far back as Vietnam War college and university protests, disrupters would occupy school buildings, and school managers would issue deadlines to clear out after deadlines to clear out.

In all those cases, it became necessary, ultimately, for campus and local police, augmented in some cases by State police, to go in and forcibly root out the occupiers.

Enough. It’s time—long past time—for school managers to learn what should by now be the obvious lesson. Deadlines are useless except to the occupiers; all the deadlines do is demonstrate the timidity of school managers.

The correct answer to all of these test questions is to send the campus and local police right in immediately after the campers have encamped and the occupiers have occupied, and root them out. And apply suitable corrective action: expelling the students participating, firing professors (tenured or not) participating, and charging those who’ve committed crimes—vandalism, for instance, is rampant among occupiers—with the relevant charges, and then taking them to trial—no settlements, no plea bargains.

Coddling Scofflaws

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Alysia Finley has another of her cogent opinion pieces, this one centered on the failure of Progressives in the several government levels and at our colleges and universities to punish miscreants and how widespread those Leftist protections of misbehaviors are. One set of consequences of the coddling jumped out at me.

If they forget to pay other bills, the government has their backs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has effectively capped all credit-card late fees at $8. The CFPB also plans to cap bank overdraft fees at a nominal amount, meaning spendthrifts needn’t worry about getting penalized for overdrawing their checking accounts. And if they don’t want to pay rent, cities including New York and Los Angeles have imposed regulations that make it prohibitively difficult to evict tenants.

Finley was writing specifically about…misbehaving…students at Columbia, but the failures generalize, as do the consequences of excusing the failures.

“Forgetting” to pay bills will have consequences with the local merchants, including the major chains, all of whose establishments are locally run.

Being “late” paying off credit card debt will lead to difficulty getting a credit card renewed and in getting another credit card: getting access to credit will be harder and more expensive. The availability for scofflaws of cards other than prepaid, and at higher rates, will become emphasized. Credit difficulty goes beyond the card, too; it’ll expand to access to mortgages and access to rent (landlords run their own credit checks), among other credit needs.

Overdrawing checking accounts as a matter of routine will lead to closed checking accounts, difficulty opening any other checking accounts, and more trouble with local merchants who will start refusing to accept checks from folks who routinely bounce them. And this: banks and merchants heretofore would treat a bounced check as a mistake rather than the kiting felony that it is, charge the fee, and everyone moved on. No more. Those who frequently bounce checks will find themselves more likely to be charged with the felony.

Making tenant eviction over nonpayment of rent will make it more difficult for renters to rent in the first place, greatly increase the initial deposits required, and reduce the amount of houses and apartments available to rent at all.

All of that, too, will increase the cost of credit and of housing for the rest of us.

The Planned Racism of the Illinois State Legislature

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An Illinois legislatively created commission established…to come up with ways to make appropriations to state universities more “equitable” has issued a report delineating how to achieve that.

…lawmakers would determine how much funding a school deserves. They would do this using a variable called the “adequacy target,” which takes into account the school’s mission and enrollment as well as the programs it offers. … Larger amounts would be set aside for groups the commission considers underenrolled—say, with a $6,000 bonus for each enrolled black student, $4,000 for each enrolled low-income student, and $2,000 for each enrolled rural student.

And

The commission pretends that universities charge different prices for different races. Specifically, the plan wants lawmakers to assume that universities will charge minority students a lower tuition rate than whites and Asians, regardless of income.

And so on.

No. This intrinsically racist plan will only codify the inability of minority students to compete in higher ed and subsequently in the work force and in the managerial teams that manage enterprise work forces.

To increase minorities’ educational opportunities and improve their education in Illinois’ colleges and universities, these legislators must lose their DEI sewage. Beyond that, they must take the currently politically unpopular steps of divesting themselves of their teachers unions yokes, and then move decisively to expand parents’ school choices by making K-12—kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school—charter and voucher schools, whether privately or publicly run, ubiquitous throughout the State.

And this: to the extent that Illinois insists on using its tax code for social engineering purposes, it should reallocate its existing tax collections toward having school-directed taxes follow the student rather than remaining trapped—along with minority students—in failing public schools. Beyond that, additional existing tax collections should be placed into a fund for providing education scholarships to all students whose parents wish to transfer their children out of failing schools and into different, better performing schools.

Waiting until post-high school to begin even to pretend to address educational failure is far too late to have any serious effect.

For Illinois, I’m not holding my breath.