Category Archives: ethics

Idiocy

Posted on by
Reply

David Cameron, once (and future?) British Prime Minister, thinks that if Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the upcoming G-20 meeting, everyone else should boycott the meeting.

Cameron griped, among other things that when Putin and then-President Barack Obama (D) attended the G-20 meetings in ’14 and ’15,

the conversations with Mr Putin were worse than pointless.

Then Cameron gave the game away, amusingly, without recognizing it.

What does or doesn’t happen at the G-20 won’t change the world.

Indeed. The G-20 is a coffee klatch wherein previously and behind the scenes decisions are announced. Otherwise, the gathering is just a see-and-be-scene show for the political glitterati of the developed world.

Conversations with Putin are, indeed, worse than pointless, but avoiding the G-20 because Putin shows up is the wrong answer.

Instead, boycott Putin, don’t waste time on conversations with him. Don’t interact with him at all. For those two seated next to him at dinners, they should turn their backs on him and converse with the dinner companions on the other side.

Boycotting the G-20 if he shows up would be just a toddler-ish face-spiting nose-cutting temper tantrum. Or a cowering away from the Big Bad Man.

A Campaign Issue

Posted on by
Reply

Republican candidates for Senator Dr Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker (Pennsylvania and Georgia, respectively) have been ordered by President Joe Biden (D) to resign from their positions on President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition “by the end of the day” or “face termination.

Both have refused.

Both, also, should wear their terminations as the badges of honor they will be, and they should use their terminations as campaign issues. Oz has the right of it:

Clearly, Joe Biden can’t be around anyone who doesn’t completely fall in line with his fear-mongering authoritarian one-size-fits-all COVID handling. I am proud of my service and will not resign.

It’s illustrative of Biden’s timidity and slowness to react to much of anything that he’s only now getting around to “ordering” the resignations. Did he truly think campaigning while serving was a problem, he would have made a request for their resignation the day after they announced their candidacies.

Biden did not.

Oblivious

Posted on by
Reply

Nero fiddled, but in the modern world, President Joe Biden (D)…bicycles. And he’s not even doing it in the capital like Nero did; he’s ducking out to Delaware to take his rides. Meanwhile, Kyiv burns, Kharkhiv burns, Kherson burns, Mariupol is being razed to the ground, Lviv is getting missiles and bombs dropped on it, barbarians are bombing women, children, hospitals, schools, refugee convoys on routes the barbarians pretended to agree to leave alone. Much of Ukraine burns.

And then other nations that Russia President Vladimir Putin wants to conquer in order to reconstitute the Russian empire will burn. And the conflagration is likely to grow from there.

Bicycling is good exercise, and the physical effort is good for clearing the mind and momentarily relieving the stress of office, even for one who so dedicatedly ducks out on those stresses at every opportunity.

However, Biden doesn’t need to run off to Delaware’s coast every time he takes the notion to go for a bike ride. There’s a nice, five-mile circuit closer to home that he could use to his heart’s content, if he weren’t so insistent on getting out of town.

He could ride his bicycle from the White House up Pennsylvania Avenue to Constitution Avenue, then take 23rd Street NW to loop the Lincoln Memorial, then return along Independence Avenue to Maryland Avenue, and finish back at the White House.

Easy peasy.

But easier for this president [sic] to hie off to Delaware to duck away from the stresses of office. And to avoid facing the world.

Oh, yeah—there is this on his calendar for tomorrow:

Biden is slated to travel to Brussels, Belgium, this week for the March 24 NATO summit on Russia’s war in Ukraine[.]

No plans, though, to travel to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like some eastern European heads of state did a few short days ago.

That would be a bicycle ride too much.

Political Disapproval of Private Enterprise Production

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are touting the withdrawal of Sarah Bloom Raskin from the nomination to the Federal Reserve Board’s Vice Chairman position, laying that defeat off to this:

But Ms Raskin’s most significant opponent was her oft-expressed view that the Fed and other regulators should deny credit to companies that produce or heavily consume fossil fuels.

It’s good that this one failed, but it’s just an early skirmish.

The problem is broader than this. It’s dangerous to our republican democracy that anyone would be nominated to the Fed or to any Executive Branch position who would willingly abuse that position’s authority to discriminate against any government-disapproved American enterprise.

Silence is Violence

Posted on by
Reply

The Ukrainian industrialist and philanthropist, Victor Pinchuk, has a simple plea for the West:

We thank you for the food, the money, the sympathy and the painted blue-and-yellow flags. But if you want to save us, Ukraine needs planes, antiaircraft and antitank missiles, armed drones, and other weapons of war. So I beg our friends in the West: please give Ukraine the planes and other weapons it needs—now. Stop buying coal and oil from Russia. Don’t think about it; don’t evaluate options; don’t consider. Just do it. Time is life.

What he said.

What is that Leftist slogan? Silence is violence. More to the point for Biden-Harris and the persons leading NATO and the EU, so is dithering.