Category Archives: ethics

“Threats of Violence”

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Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, under [last week’s Senate hearing’s] questioning from [Senator Josh, (R, MO)] Hawley, said the memo is only about violence and threats of violence, and it’s the role of the FBI address those threats.

And

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a separate hearing that the Justice Department does not see parents as a threat and that the attorney general’s memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

The FBI’s claimed responsibility in this context is to

help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists….

To help. Help whom? State and local police forces, acting within a State’s police powers, their authority to enforce law, are fully capable of handling “threats and intimidation;” they might need help only against domestic terrorism.

To help. Emphasis on “help.” The FBI’s claimed responsibility also is to help State and local law enforcement agencies deal with violence, not to do for the State and locals, or dictate to them, or to usurp their responsibilities.

But, if we can take Clarke’s and Monaco’s claims at face value, the only ones talking about domestic terrorism or domestic terrorists are the worthies of the National School Boards Association. Specifically, neither DoJ nor the FBI are talking about domestic terrorism, either in the Garland Memo or in those Senate hearing testimonies. Thus, there is no reason, by Garland’s own memo or those testimonies, for the FBI’s presence in these matters: with no domestic terrorism involved, there’s nothing for which the FBI need assist State and local law enforcement.

AG Merrick Garland’s memo is reprehensible, and dangerous to liberty, not because it focuses on threats of violence (which is bad enough FBI interference)—stipulate, arguendo, that that insistence is accurate—but because it exists.

Garland’s memo is reprehensible and dangerous to liberty because it is a naked attempt to usurp those States’ police powers and law enforcement capacities and arrogate them to the Federal government’s national police.

Bank Experts Need Risk Management Advice from Government Bureaucrats

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Federal Reserve System Governor Lael Brainard actually said that with a straight face [Wall Street Journal‘s paraphrase]:

…financial regulators should direct the nation’s biggest banks to take new steps to manage climate-related risks as part of a broader effort to monitor potential hazards posed to the financial system.

She said this (quoted by WSJ) at last week’s conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Ultimately, I anticipate it will be helpful to provide supervisory guidance for large banking institutions in their efforts to appropriately measure, monitor, and manage material climate-related risks.

Yeah. Because finance businessmen, bankers, whose businesses live or die on their abilities, are incapable of understanding the financial risks to their businesses without the…guidance…of government bureaucrat/regulators.

PRC Pyramids

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The Egyptians invested in pyramids, but those were concrete, physical edifices that satisfied then-national needs.

The People’s Republic of China and its builders invested in a different sort of pyramid, and those ephemeralities are fading into the mists at great cost to the suckers investors.

First, it was the PRC’s Evergrande, with its serial defaulting on its debt obligations. Now it’s the PRC’s Fantasia, reneging on $US206 million worth of its own bonds. It seems likely that others of the PRC’s builders will follow, unless the PRC government men decide to interfere and require different outcomes, regardless of economic and fiscal reality.

I mentioned pyramids. These builders finance their future operations in very large part by selling apartments before they’re even built. That puts their borrowings at risk, unless they can come up with more money—which they do in large party by selling yet more unbuilt apartments.

Bernie Madoff, if not exactly a piker in comparison, certainly didn’t accomplish this much.

Domestic Terrorists

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They aren’t the parents who object, however vociferously, to the misbehaviors of school boards, even though the National School Boards Association and Biden-Harris’ Attorney General Merrick Garland overtly claim so.

On the contrary.

If Garland—and through him, President Joe Biden (D) and Kamala Harris (D) of the Biden-Harris administration—think mothers and fathers vociferously protesting the misbehaviors of school boards are domestic terrorists, then he needs, also, to investigate those school boards’ acts of terrorism.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they wear masks all through the hours of school, which various pediatricians and child development experts have shown stunts those children’s development by strongly inhibiting their socialization and delays their ability to learn the nominal subjects of their lessons.

The school boards’ terrorism of forcing those children to hate themselves and each other over the color of their skin.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they be injected with experimental and unapproved for routine use vaccines.

But, no, nor Garland nor Biden nor Harris have any interest in protecting the rights—or the obligations—of parents or of protecting those children.

Those Progressive-Democrats are interested only in extending their political power and stifling those with the impudence to demur from their abuses.

More Biden, et al., Disingenuousity

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On the matter of raising our nation’s debt ceiling, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) and the Republican caucus in the Senate have been crystalline for months: Progressive-Democrats in both the House and the Senate have the votes to raise the debt ceiling by themselves, and they have the responsibility to do that, given their decision to pass spending bills with no Republican input, without even talking to Republicans in any serious fashion to seek their input on spending.

Now comes President Joe Biden (D).

He called on Republicans to “get out of the way” and let Democrats quickly raise the debt limit. Asked whether he could guarantee that the US would be able to raise the debt ceiling before the deadline, he put the onus on Republicans: “No, I can’t. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.”

Of course, it’s impossible for the Republicans, being the minority party in both houses of Congress, to be in the way in any shape or form. They can’t stop the Progressive-Democrats from raising the debt ceiling; they don’t have the votes.

All that’s required is for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and his Progressive-Democrat caucus, along with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) with her Progressive-Democrat majority, to move the raise along through reconciliation—either as a stand-alone bill or by each house passing the extant reconciliation bill, then adding the debt ceiling raise during Conference Committee discussions. Bills coming out of Conference are passable via simple majority votes—no Senate filibusters on Conference-agreed bills.

The latter move, in particular, would let Schumer put Senators Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) on the spot, forcing them to choose between reneging on their pious promises to not vote for a $3.5 trillion bill they say is too much to spend all at once and whose breadth of content they say is too broad in order to vote for a debt ceiling raise, or sticking to their promises and thereby vote down the debt ceiling raise.

Nor would that jeopardize a subsequent clean debt ceiling raise bill, should Manchin and Sinema prove themselves good for their promises: the Senate’s Parliamentarian has already said that the Senate’s two reconciliation bills per session limit would not be applicable. A third bill, dedicated to passing a debt ceiling raise, could be done functionally as reconciliation by “modifying” the second reconciliation bill.

Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi know all of this full well. They’re just trying to duck their personal and Party responsibilities.