Category Archives: ethics

More Ivory Tower Foolishness

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It seems too many academicians (are they any such anymore, or are there only folks who’ve gotten credentialed and now sit in those chairs?) have no contact with the empiricism of the real world outside their ivied and cloistered halls.

The University of Michigan provides the example.

The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.

These Know Betters even shy away from the “fail” that is only alternative to “pass;” preferring to cower behind the euphemism of “no credit.” With their timidity, these august personages do even more harm to their charges.

This rationalization seems instructive:

The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes.

A coverup of Michigan’s reluctance to put an end to its own grade inflating practices? Maybe, maybe not. In either event, though, if the little dears are not expected to meet standards, they’ll never learn to meet standards. If they’re not required to acclimate, they’ll never acclimate. Silliness like this at Michigan only delays the inevitable, and that delay only makes the pupil’s coming crisis all the harsher when it does arrive.

Another step, done before the hold them to standards part, would further mitigate the “mental health crisis” the school’s enrollees are claimed to experience. This one is to do away with the remediation bit. If the enrollees are that ill-prepared for college-level classes, disenroll them and send them home to get themselves ready. It harms those students who are ready when resources that should be going toward their instruction are withheld from them in favor of those who can’t cut it.

In the meantime, regarding those other newly enrolled, let the student wannabes struggle. Be firm on grading, setting maximum percentages per class of As, of Bs, and of Cs. Most of the students will work through their struggles and be the stronger, emotionally and academically, for it. Those few who truly cannot make the adjustment, having had that first semester to try, would be better off sent home to try again the next year.

Accesses to Classified

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SecDef Pete Hegseth has revoked the security clearance of Frank Kendall, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) Secretary of the Air Force. Kendall had been quoted in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as saying that the Air Force One jet gifted to President Trump by the Qatari government lacks the defensive capabilities of the traditional jets that fly the president.

Kendall is all wide-eyed innocence.

“I’m mystified,” Kendall said in a text message when asked for comment. “I’ve been extremely careful to not say anything that could be classified, and as far as I know I have not said anything classified.” He added, “So far no one has told me what I’m supposed to have revealed.”

Revealing the defensive capabilities of the aircraft flying as Air Force One is perfectly jake?

This is Kendall pretending to not understand the requirements of OPSEC. Or he’s cynically standing on the legalist distinction between classified material vs OPSEC material. That’s assuming, generously, that he didn’t reveal actual classified information—and I would be amazed if information regarding the military capabilities of our President’s transport aircraft were unclassified.

It’s good that Kendall has lost his accesses. More retired or resigned officials should lose their accesses.

The problem could be mitigated greatly if all employees, government or private, automatically lost their clearances as well as any other accesses when they leave the job in which they had those credentials. This needn’t be stigmatic; it should be routine: those people no longer have any need for a security clearance, and so it’s automatically revoked.

Obsessive-Compulsive

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are beating each other up over who should hold sway over Party—socialists or Establishment Democrats. Their serious policy differences and the power struggle that otherwise would fracture Party, though, are not stopping them from linking arms in order to go against President Donald Trump (R). Consider the just concluded Party primary election in Michigan to determine who should represent Party in the US Senate. Democratic Socialist of America member Abdul el-Sayed edged Establishment Democrat Haley Stevens. El-Dayed’s campaign was marked by vitriol toward Stevens. However,

Ms Stevens, who spent the campaign avoiding the subject of Mr El-Sayed’s not-quite-spoken animus, last week ventured a diagonal allusion to it. “You want to blame all your problems on Jewish Americans,” she said in an online post. But she also vowed to support him in the general election—a paradox that nicely captures her party’s pusillanimity on the Jewish question.

Hours after her defeat, Stevens posted on X:

I love Michigan and am so proud to have put up my hand to serve. I spoke with Abdul a few moments ago to offer him my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November. Thank you, Michigan.

She loves Michigan, or she hates President Donald Trump (R) and/or Jews that much? Trump, not Rogers, since both el-Sayed and Stevens, were running against Trump, not Rogers. Jews, since el-Sayed never hid his antisemitic bigotry under a bushel, while Stevens tacitly agreed with his bigotry through her silence on that.

And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) endorsement of el-Sayed within hours of his primary victory. The Jewish Party mucky-muck looked past el-Sayed’s hatred of him and his religious confreres to make his endorsement explicitly about his own hatred of Trump.

Democrats are united by a common purpose: putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate. We look forward to working with Abdul….

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are so deeply immersed in their anti-Trump obsession that they’re compulsively supporting the candidate whom they so deeply despised before the Primary and who has such strong contempt for them and such raw hatred of so many Americans.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party our nation is facing in the fall mid-terms. Weak-kneed on honesty, lacking entirely the courage to denounce bigotry, embracing the destructive policies of the Democratic Socialists of America, accepting violence-embracing, if not outright inciting, rhetoric (you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message).

Corruption, Thy Name Is…

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The lede lays it out in no uncertain terms.

Arizona’s largest county suffered a significant breach of its election data in the days before the 2020 presidential election when a self-described hacker foiled security and obtained 633,000 voter registration files but the Biden Justice Department and local prosecutors declined to bring charges even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.

And this:

FBI Director Kash Patel sent a letter to that task force this week stating the bureau spent “significant resources” but could not get the US Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Arizona Attorney’s Office or the Pinal County, Arizona Attorney’s Office to bring charges despite an admission from the alleged hacker.

The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that our election system is entirely secure and there’s no need for a SAVE Act to secure it. Never mind that the hacker suspect described just how “secure” the Maricopa County setup was (and is?):

The suspect, who described himself as a “hacker or tinkerer,” told the agents that he first discovered the vulnerabilities in Maricopa’s website about two months earlier, in September 2020. “He noticed his voter ID appeared in the URL” after entering his own voter information and “tested the vulnerability by entering several seven-digit numbers into the URL path resulting in access to different voter registration information,” the agents wrote.

That lack of security is so bad it has to be deliberate. The software designer, tester, and their supervisors, along with the Election Monitor chief all need to be on trial for that criminal negligence.

Hold Who Accountable, Again?

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Over the last month, or so, there has been a spate of cyber attacks against our nation’s infrastructure, culminating in a series of attacks a variety of water distribution networks causing shutdowns of several cities’ water supply, primarily in Minnesota, but spread also across seven States.

It’s not like these attacks came out of the blue, though. Ever since Colonial Pipeline, the executive management teams of utilities—of all private enterprises, come to that—have been on clear notice that well that cyber attacks were a thing; they would occur; and by the success of that attack, they were encouraged by Colonial’s—at then-President Joe Biden’s (D) pressure in his own abject meekness in front of Russia—weak-kneed payment of the demanded ransomware, matched by Biden’s surrender to Russia regarding Nord Stream 2.

And yet, these latest attacks occurred and successfully shut down those physical networks.

The failure of these management teams is reprehensible, given their apparent cavalier attitude—criminally negligent attitude, in my opinion—toward cyber security and securing their networks against cyber intrusion, cyber vandalism, cyber-instigated shutdown. This lack of effort by those managers should result in stern sanction, including jail, against them.

Their decision to not bother with any serious security measures is a failure of their fiduciary duty toward their shareholders. More than that, their failure, especially in the water distribution cases, puts their customers who depend on them for water at serious risk. Above even that, their negligence represents a threat to our nation’s security. The one is criminal, if proven, and the others are unpatriotic and especially unacceptable.

And yet, to date, no one is being looked at for sanction or even civil liability.