Category Archives: ethics

Republican Virtue-Signaling

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Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives voted Wednesday to impeach Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner over his position that some crimes, like prostitution, theft, and drug-related offenses would no longer be prosecuted and were therefore de facto legal. Krasner also stands accused of lying to judges and to crime victims. The vote was 107-85. With violent crime spiking as it is in Philadelphia during Krasner’s soft-on-crime term, it certainly seems he should be unceremoniously removed from office.

However.

Pennsylvania’s State Senate doesn’t even know when it’ll get around to trying him. It is certain, though, that there aren’t the votes to convict Krasner, and the Republicans in the House have known this all along.

This move goes along with the push by Republicans in the Federal House of Representatives to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and President Joe Biden—if, in fact, they win a majority of House seats. It’s certainly the case that Mayorkas badly needs removal, and it’s also likely that Biden is, for a number of reasons, unfit. House Republicans, though, know full well that there aren’t the votes in the Senate to convict either.

This is just Republicans yapping, it’s a waste of time, and the foolishness of it is one part of the reason the 2022 Red Wave turned out to be a little pink stain.

Hush Money Grants and Consequences

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It turns out that quite a number persons with medical or other science-related degrees took Federal grant money as a quid pro quo for either remaining silent about the origins of the Wuhan Virus or actively denying its Wuhan lab origin.

Congressman James Comer (R, KY), the likely chairman of the House Oversight Committee if the GOP wins control of the House, told Just the News on Monday night that his investigators have evidence showing that even though Dr Anthony Fauci was warned the virus likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, he constructed, with the aid of federally funded private scientists, a counternarrative that COVID-19 evolved naturally from animals.
“Everyone in the medical community backed up Dr Fauci, and what we now know is they were receiving a lot of grant dollars[.]”

And

“What we learned is how much slush money the NIH had to award in the form of grants to these advisers.”

If the allegations prove true, then these persons who happen to have medical degrees of one sort or another plainly put their desire for money ahead their obligation to tell the truth—a Critical Item in their Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm.

If the allegations prove true, then others of these persons, who style themselves other scientists than medical doctors, plainly put their desire for money ahead of their obligation to tell the truth—a Critical Item in doing credible research.

Consequences. These persons need to be publicly identified and then cut off from any further Federal (and State, although the States will have to act for themselves) grants of any sort. These persons will have shown that they cannot be trusted with our tax money.

Too Bad, So Sad

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It seems that Philadelphia is going to be the latest recipient of illegal aliens bused from Texas.

Cue the whining, this time from Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s spokesman.

This information was relayed to us from a community partner organization as Texas officials have not coordinated with the city. We do not have an exact location of where the bus will disembark, nor do we have any specific information about those on board, nor do we know if other buses are planned.

Neither do any of the cities getting the illegal aliens Biden flies in in the dark of night get any warning of arrival or of when they’re departing.

Neither do any of the cities in the border States get any warning of the illegal aliens streaming across our open southern border—other than the fact of that steady flow; 2.3 million illegal aliens in Fiscal 2022 alone.

Neither do any of us get any indication of when the Biden administration will start taking this border and illegal alien disaster seriously.

Virtue Signaling

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Recall the climatistas who have been running around (sort of) gluing themselves to museum art, throwing messy food at the art, and one group, pleased to call themselves scientists, even glued themselves to the floor of a luxury sports car dealership showroom floor. All that in the name of saving the planet from overheating. (In that last case, dealership management just left them there, refusing to feed them or give them bowls into which to empty their bladders and bowels. Management just closed up and turned out the lights. Good for dealership management).

Now other climatistas are calling out these self-gluers. Danielle Butcher, American Conservation Coalition Executive Vice President:

Activists are trying to deface property and artwork specifically because it is shocking. The tactics, they’re focused on sparking conversation, whatever that means, but they’re not actually helping the environment tangibly.

Whatever that means, indeed.

Addressing only the self-gluers, I note Mason Cooley’s remark: Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

Butcher went on:

You cannot annoy people into agreeing with you.
And certainly throwing mashed potatoes or glue or soup or dumping milk on a grocery store floor, those are not ways that you convince people you are in the right position[.]

On the other hand, “you” cannot always convince folks to agree with you when you cynically omit key facts, here related to Earth’s evolving climate. Facts like we’ve been hotter with lush life, and we’ve had higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations with lush life, and those periods do not correlate with each other.

Oh, and we’re still cooler than the geologic planetary warming trend line 11,000 years after the end of the last Ice Age.

Maybe Cooley’s remark applies here, too.

Ubiquitous Battery-Powered Vehicles

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These need things; here’s a partial list of Critical Items and some problems associated with their acquisition.

With respect to batteries, the raw materials—lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, among others—are expensive to mine and destructive of the environment to mine. Both the metals themselves and the mining tailings are highly toxic and expensive to handle and to dispose of.

Refining those materials comes with its own problems:

[The People’s Republic of China] processes some 70% of the world’s lithium and cobalt, and 99% of the manganese, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. [The PRC] also dominates the market for the parts that go into batteries, such as cathodes and anodes, as well as the production of batteries themselves.

And this:

[The] majority of motors used in today’s EVs rely on permanent magnets, which produce a constant magnetic field that helps spin a motor’s rotor and, in turn, power the wheels.
But these magnets require costly rare-earth metals such as neodymium and dysprosium. As with battery ingredients, the dominant supplier is [the PRC], and producing the metals can cause pollution

That makes us dependent on an enemy nation for our economic welfare.

On the other hand, there are such things as AC induction motors. These are a 19th century invention and are ubiquitous in today’s household appliances. However.

[They are] less efficient. That can reduce a vehicle’s driving range unless battery storage is boosted.

That increased battery dependence would make us even more dependent on that enemy nation for the materials. Aside from that, induction motors also take a double potful of copper, and copper mining is destructive of the environment.

And this: the electricity distribution infrastructure needed to for recharging the batteries doesn’t yet exist, and the current grid already is nearly fully occupied just handling today’s household and business loads.

And this: the production of electricity depends on inconstant solar and wind facilities, on fossil fuel (reliable and cheap, but currently under attack by the Left), and on nuclear power (currently hugely expensive to produce, with the building of additional nuclear power facilities even more expensive due to enormously expensive over-regulation).

The root problem (to use a phrase), then, is to get government out of the way of fossil fuel use and out of the way of adding nuclear power reactors to the electricity distribution grid. And expanding the grid to handle the increased load.