Category Archives: ethics

Rogue DoJ

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Progressive-Democrat Attorney General Merrick Garland is trying to muzzle his Department personnel—by telling them not to talk to Congress without his prior permission.

[N]o department employee may communicate with Senators, Representatives, congressional committees, or congressional staff without advance coordination, consultation, and approval by OLA [Office of Legislative Affairs][.]

The trigger for Garland’s missive?

The memo comes as whistleblowers have flocked to Republican elected officials with whistleblower allegations of political bias….
Whistleblower reports allege that FBI senior officials forced their subordinates to sign false affidavits. Others have pointed to domestic terrorism probes of parents who objected to left-wing school board policies.

Not similar injunction, though, about telling them not to leak to the press.

Contempt for our Constitution

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President Joe Biden (D) has canceled thousands of dollars of student loan debt with a few swipes of his Executive Order pen. Lay aside the amorality of that, and lay aside, too, the enormous cost of his move.

It’s blatantly illegal.

January 2021…the Department of Education issued a legal memo saying the education secretary “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) Biden didn’t have the power to cancel student debt.

That has to be an act of Congress…the president can’t do it. That’s not even a discussion.

Only the Congress can specify the spending—or lack of spending—that the Federal government engages in. No President can do that unilaterally.

It’s also a cancelation of existing contracts, both without consultation with and acceptance by the contracts’ counterparties, it’s done without compensation to those counterparties. These are Federal loans to the students, though, doesn’t that make the Federal government the counterparty? No. It’s We the People, the taxpayers, who floated these loans and who will lose from their unilateral modification. The Federal government only acted in our name.

It’s what we have an elected legislature for, and a legislature that is the sole source of legislation, and the House of Representatives in particular that is the origin of spending bills.

I’m reminded of the remark made by a future philosopher: I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.

This is Biden’s Woodrow Wilson-esque contempt for and disregard of our Constitution. That document and statutes that implement it are to be themselves laid aside whenever they’re inconvenient.

He Didn’t Have to Kowtow

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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and controlling shareholder of Facebook Meta, said on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that he was bullied (he said pressured) by the FBI to censor Facebook commentary regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop and the information on it. He also claimed to feel

some regret that the company limited the story’s distribution after it was ultimately verified.

Sure. On the other hand, his behavior empirically demonstrates that he agreed with the idea of Facebook (and his Big Tech competitors/confreres) “filtering” information and deciding for himself what information he deemed fit for consumption by us unwashed average Americans.

After all, he wasn’t actually forced to accede to the FBI’s…pressure. He chose to do that. And he still does it. No, the more likely explanation is that it was straight up collusion, and now Zuckerberg is scrambling to cover his behind in the face of likely Section 230 backlash.

That’s Huge

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s just passed Climate Correction Act/Inflation Reduction Act—Party can’t decide which it is—as doing wonders for Earth’s climate.

The Biden administration claims the law will enable the US to reduce carbon emissions in 2030 by around 40% below 2005 levels.

Environmentalist and Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg offered some actual data on the matter.

If you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is assuming the law’s emission reductions end when its funding does after 2030. But even if you charitably assume they’ll somehow be sustained through 2100 without any interruption, the impact on global temperature will still be almost unnoticeable, at 0.028 degree Fahrenheit.

That’s noise, not signal. Day-to-day—year-to-year—temperature varies, up and down, by that much.

But the Biden administration is perfectly willing to trash our economy and damage the lives of hundreds of millions of us Americans through that economic damage so it can virtue-signal and, especially, protect its political standing with the extreme Left.

That’s huge.

Banning on a Maybe

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Dr Drew Montez Clark, a black Republican Conservative running to flip Florida’s Congressional District 20 from Progressive-Democrat to Republican, saw his Twitter account banned the night before the originally scheduled Republican Primary election for the district was scheduled to occur.

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, let it happen, probably not directly, but through the corporate culture he inherited from Jack Dorsey, and which he has actively cultivated since becoming CEO.

Clark’s account was restored “hours later,” but the move had already been made, and the night had already passed into that election day.

Agrawal’s excuse—Twitter’s statement—for the cancelation is instructive.

Twitter uses proactive, automated systems to detect content that might violate our rules, part of our work to improve the health of conversations on the service. In the case referenced, our automated system detected a false positive. The account has since been reinstated.

Might violate. Sometime in the future. Our rules. But we’re not saying which one or ones.

Mind you, Clark’s Twitter commentary hadn’t actually violated any of Twitter’s rules; Agrawal’s excuse statement makes that clear. But it might, later, violate some as yet carefully unnamed rule(s), so Agrawal let it be taken down preemptively by one of his bots. Or by one of his humans, and he’s hiding behind that bot. Thinking we’re too stupid to understand that his bots are programmed by his human employees.

Fortunately, in this specific case, Agrawal’s Twitter…misbehavior…had no effect, as Clark was running unopposed, and his primary wound up being canceled.

But wait until the November election, when Clark is actively facing the Progressive-Democratic Party incumbent. Agrawal already is on record as saying his Twitter will interfere with Twitter accounts of those of whom he disapproves.