Category Archives: culture

Fault and Blame

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This example is all too typical. An elderly couple was scammed out of their life savings–$5 million—by a “pig butcherer” who conned the husband into wiring the couple’s savings, in a number of tranches, to the scammer under the guise, among others, of investing the money in a sure-fire investment.

What happened:

A year or so earlier, Craig had responded to an online ad about investments and later received a text message from someone calling themself Tiffany, according to his hazy account. The person struck up a flirtatious exchange and was soon telling him about a lucrative opportunity. All he needed to do was wire money from his bank account.

And

The adviser [at an earlier bank where the husband had begun his “investing” with Tiffany] had repeatedly tried to convince Craig that “Tiffany” was scamming him, to no avail.

The husband after that had pulled his—their—money from that bank and placed it with another bank, from which the husband continued “investing” with Tiffany.

And

Shortly after discovering the scam, Anamarie learned something else about Craig that helped explain what had happened. His doctor told her that Craig had vascular dementia, likely due to a brain injury from a fall he took in 2015 while walking his brother-in-law’s dog.

The first the wife knew anything was amiss was when her credit cards were declined at a Walmart.

In the end, the couple is blaming bank for their having been scammed, claiming that the bank hadn’t acted nanny-ish enough [my term] to protect the couple from themselves.

I have questions, and I’m not entirely sympathetic with the couple or with their blame-shifting.

Why didn’t the wife know more about the couple’s financial situation? True enough, they’re of an age where money matters usually was the husband’s job, but that doesn’t excuse her ignorance; it only illustrates how widespread such ignorance is.

What was the husband doing getting flirty with an online person about whom he knew nothing about, including whether the person even was female? See below for this before readers get up in morality arms.

Why didn’t the wife know anything about her husband’s medical condition? Certainly, this is related to a couple’s internal dynamics, but there’s little reason for one member of the couple to be so ignorant of the other member’s medical state. This is another aspect of couples of an age, but again, this doesn’t excuse the ignorance; it only illustrates the widespread nature of it.

Snowflake Insult

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A pressman, CBS News Capitol Hill Correspondent Scott MacFarlane, is crying that he has PTSD as a result of the crowd’s real-time reaction to the attempted murder of then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America. And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck [Todd on The Chuck Todd Cast podcast]. This was—I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.
They were coming for us. If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us!

This is disgusting and despicable even for a member of the journalism guild. No one was coming for MacFarlane or any other member of the press present during that rally and shooting. Any diagnosis of PTSD for a journalist in that environment is almost tautologically erroneous.

Worse, MacFarlane’s crying and PTSD diagnosis are insults to our soldiers who have been injured, traumatized, and suffer from actual PTSD. They’re insults to all of our firemen, policemen, and EMTs who have been injured or traumatized in the course of their life-threatening duties or, in the particular case of EMTs, the horrific abuses they’ve seen and treated in the course of their duties.

MacFarlane is a Snowflake Poster Boy for why journalist guildsmen and -women are viewed with such utter distrust and contempt by us average Americans.

Sometimes…

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A letter-writer, a founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, wrote in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday’s Letters section decrying the proposed funding reductions for the CDC and NIH.

Americans’ distrust of science isn’t merely leading to lower vaccination rates for such preventable diseases as measles; it’s also fueling shortsighted proposals to scale back public-health programs that save lives and taxpayer dollars[.]

It’s not so much that as it is that government bureaucrats who happen to have medical (or other science) degrees can’t be trusted. These worthies—Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are only the most famous examples—have shown themselves more interested in political ideology than actual science.

The letter-writer added this:

Proposed appropriations aside, $11 billion in cuts in early 2025 to already cash-strapped state and local health departments are leading to layoffs and cancelled data-infrastructure upgrades that hamper their ability to keep their communities safe.

This has nothing to do with funding cuts in “proposed appropriations.” If States are losing personnel and equipment upgrades, that’s entirely due to the spending decisions of those States—their governing politicians clearly consider other matters more important than the medical weal of the citizens they pretend to represent.

The letter-writer closed with a quote from former CDC Director Thomas Frieden, as though the remark is somehow dispositive:

You don’t improve things by destroying them, you improve them by improving them.

That’s often, even usually, true. However, sometimes the only way to improve the product a failed institution is supposed to produce is to remove the failed institution and replace it completely.

Harvard’s Contradiction

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Powerline has a piece that has Harvard seemingly talking about setting up a conservative center on its campus as a balance to its strongly Leftist bent. (Such a center would, supposedly, cost up to $1 billion. I note that that’s less than 2% of its endowment, eliding that much of that endowment is targeted IAW the requirements of the donors who made and make that portion of the donations.)

Say, though, that the scuttlebutt is accurate, and Harvard is serious about setting up such a center. Harvard has also said, per The Telegraph, that

it refused to change its hiring, admissions, and other internal procedures following demands by the Trump administration….

Those hiring, admissions, and other procedures, though, are based entirely on its determined DEI practices, which are nakedly racist and sexist, and drive Harvard to hire only left-leaning or outright leftist personnel of merit ranging from none to quite a bit.

Given that, on what basis would Harvard hire actual conservative personnel for its claimed conservative center?

Another Thought on Birthright Citizenship

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I start from two premises. One is the clear distinction in meaning between subject to the jurisdiction and subject to the power of. I continue with the premise that illegal aliens, who have entered our country illegally and remain here illegally, are subject only to the power of our government.

Our government sits at the head of our social compact. More to the point, our government has exactly zero jurisdiction beyond the limits of our social compact; this is well understood both in our domestic law and in international law. Illegal aliens have illegally entered our nation, and they continue to stay without turning themselves to positively seek to get themselves right with our laws, especially with that subset that is our immigration laws. By their own conscious behavior, they are holding themselves outside of our social compact where our government has no jurisdiction, only raw power.

Within or without our social compact is a distinction that applies also to pregnant women who enter our nation, even legally, solely to have their babies on American soil, and who then depart for their home country. These women, never having given up their home country’s jurisdiction, have never submitted themselves to our jurisdiction. Indeed, by their intention of returning to their home country as soon as they’re able after birth, these women have never intended to submit themselves to our government’s jurisdiction. These women have held themselves outside our social compact for the duration of their stay here.

From that, babies born to illegal aliens and to birth-tourist mothers are not—cannot—be citizens of our United States: they’ve been born outside our government’s jurisdiction.

Looking at this from another direction, here is the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The form of the clause’s logical construction is this: If A AND B, THEN C. Thus: If born or naturalized AND subject to our jurisdiction, THEN citizen.

Both A and B must be true for C to be true; that’s the meaning of the AND connector. Since the babies born to illegal aliens or to birth-tourist mothers do not meet the second condition, they cannot reach the THEN outcome.

There is a counterargument, and that one centers on the early 17th century British origins of the concept of citizenship by dint of place of birth, with further references to American court decisions on the matter prior to the 1868 ratification of our 14th Amendment. This argument also makes reference to long-standing policy as well as to that legal matter. The counterargument, though, fails for a number of reasons.

Last reason first: ‘long-standing policy” is irrelevant. Policy isn’t binding on anything outside the administrations that choose to maintain it; policy is not statute, it is too easily changed solely extra-legislatively, and it can be eliminated altogether by any subsequent administration.

British law and British legal history have value only for the logic and ideas contained in their derivation; they have nothing to contribute in terms of legally binding matters. They have no jurisdiction inside the United States; indeed, they have no jurisdiction outside the bounds of Great Britain. They’re wholly irrelevant.

Similarly, those American court rulings that predate ratification of the 14th Amendment are wholly irrelevant. With that ratification, those rulings’ vague descriptions of what an American citizen was were rendered entirely without effect by the clear definition of “citizen” that the 14th Amendment created and codified.

Even the counterargument’s references to court rulings subsequent to Amendment’s ratification are irrelevant: they merely expand on those prior irrelevancies; not affecting the Amendment’s dispositive definition, they do not render those decisions current and within the Amendment’s bounds.