Category Archives: ethics

Arrogance and Cowardice

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Texas’ Progressive-Democrat State congressmen have joined Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen and Indiana’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen in their abject cowardice, masked by their o’erweening arrogance.

In order to block legislation of which they personally disapprove, they’ve run away from the State’s House of Representatives explicitly to deny a quorum and to block a bill that would expand access to the ballot box while also expanding the sanctity of each Texas citizen’s vote.

Texas Democrats walked out of the state House’s chamber just before midnight on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a final vote on a controversial bill that would tighten voting laws in the state.

This has been all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party over the last several years. If they can’t get their way, they block democracy—especially our republican form of democracy—altogether with their cowardly and toddler-esque temper tantrums.

Or they rule with their pen and phone. Or, when they’re in complete control, they simply ignore all others and act unilaterally. Or as President Joe Biden (D) has said, repeatedly, regarding the spendiferous and tax exploding bills Party currently is ramming through, he’d like to have Republican bipartisanship, but if they won’t come along, he and Party will act alone.

This instruction from the State’s House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D, 101st District (centered in Tarrant County) says it all.

Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly. Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.

Do not go to the gallery. Slink away through the back door and alley. Do not face Texas’ citizens.

Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t the first time that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have run away from their duties.

Yet Another Border Misapprehension

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…by a Progressive-Democrat.

This one is by Congressman Raul Ruiz (D, CA), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Asked whether Vice President Kamala Harris (D), appointed by President Joe Biden (D) to be responsible for and to lead solutions to our rapidly expanding illegal immigration crisis on our southern border, Ruiz gave a weasel-worded answer, but he said this much quite clearly:

I’m sure that someday she will [visit the border]. If you’re going to be strategic, right, she’s tasked with addressing the root causes of migration north. You don’t find the root causes at a CBP station at the border, you find the root causes by speaking to individuals who have fled. You speak to the leaders of local organizations, to the countries that they’re fleeing…industry leaders and UN human rights activists, and that’s exactly what she’s doing.

No, you don’t find root causes to anything without first understanding what it is that’s being caused.

And that requires speaking to individuals who have fled, yes, but at our border, when those individuals’ concerns, their outright fears, still are fresh in their minds, not after they’ve been settled in the interior and given words to say by the handlers on whom they’re dependent for their continued welfare.

That requires visits to our border, not to the personal safety of a CBP border station. Without visiting the border, a Progressive-Democrat will not observe the illegal aliens crossing our border individually and in groups, the children traveling alone or being dropped over a border fence to fend for themselves or being abandoned by their handlers once across the border.

The Progressive-Democrat Ruiz, Harris, Biden—any of them—can have no hope of understanding the “root causes” of our border crisis without first understanding those outcomes. Absent that understanding, they can have no idea for what they’re looking.

It’s instructive that one as awesomely brilliant as Ruiz chooses not to see that.

Wuhan Virus Vaccines and Intellectual Property

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President Joe Biden (D) is looking at “waiving” the patents held by American pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer and Moderna—that  developed the vaccines that have been so effective against the Peoples Republic of China-released Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside the uselessness of waiving these patent rights because the vaccines require to much, too varied, too complex equipment to be manufacturable just on the basis of the vaccines’ technologies being made freeware in the public arena.

Leave aside, too, that these companies—and others beyond American jurisdiction that have developed other Wuhan Virus vaccines—already are delivering doses virtually at cost to the poorer nations.

Biden’s proposal [is] to temporarily waive their patents, but that’s completely disingenuous. An intellectual property once lost is lost forever—there is nothing temporary about such a waiver except in the narrowest, most legalist, sense.

The larger problem is the: with that government-mandated loss will go any incentive a company might have to spend the billions of dollars it takes to develop future such things, especially vaccines, since a company can have no confidence Government might decide it “needs” to give the new patents away also.

There will be very little vaccine development in the United States after Biden goes through with this.

This will not be over quickly. We will not enjoy this.

Patient Privacy

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The Wall Street Journal article headline says it all.

Google Strikes Deal With Hospital Chain to Develop Healthcare Algorithms

Alphabet, through its Google subsidiary, is going to be given access to patient records—patient identification, medical history, drug prescription and use, Internet-connected medical device use and medical device-originated reporting—by a major healthcare provision chain, HCA Healthcare Inc.

Dr Jonathan Perlin, President of HCA’s Clinical Services Group and Chief Medical Officer assures us:

Data are spun off of every patient in real time[.]

In real time. As the patient is hooked into the Internet via an ostensibly privacy-protecting connection.

The claimed goal of this…partnership…is to

develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.

However,

Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA….

But not necessarily with the consent of the patient, it seems.

Perlin does promise that patient-identifying data will be stripped before HCA passes patient data to Alphabet.

Of course.

Never mind that patient monitoring is tough to do without those data. Never mind that developing algorithms for monitoring patients is tough to do without those data in the mix for, you know, testing.

Alphabet’s penchant for taking user personal data for its own purposes, including monetizing those data for the company’s benefit, is long-standing and well-known. Now the company, with the active collusion of a major hospital chain, is expanding that reach into patient medical data—Alphabet user or not.

Patient privacy be damned. It’s a brave new world.

“Out of Balance Scales”

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Juan Williams has joined the Left’s baying at Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer over the latter’s rudeness in staying on the job, rather than politely retiring and getting out of their way. He began his own howl with a question that opened his recent op-ed at The Hill.

How political is today’s Supreme Court?

He continued, citing the well-known statistics journal The Washington Post:

The current 6-3 conservative majority on the court makes it “more conservative than the elected branches [House, Senate and presidency—all controlled by Democrats] to a degree not seen in 70 years.”
The out-of-balance scales of Supreme Court justice can be traced to the heavy hand of Senate Republicans.

Only a Progressive-Democrat like Juan Williams could say with a straight face that a Supreme Court that adheres to the plain, obvious, and rational meaning of the text of our Constitution and statutes is “out of balance.”

And only a Progressive-Democrat could decry his political opponents for insisting on a Court whose Justices adhere to their oaths of office and defend our Constitution rather than blithely “reinterpreting” convenient clauses according to their personal views of the day—or making it up as they go along (expecting the law to catch up) as one of Williams’ favorites, Justice Thurgood Marshall, so famously (or infamously) bragged—or insisting that Justices extend that concept to adhering to the statutes as written and then enacted by our political branches of government rather than rewriting them to suit their personal views of societal wishes.

And then the baying:

The realistic fight is to keep the current imbalance on the court from getting worse.
That begins with nudging Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three remaining Democratic nominees on the court, to retire now.
Breyer is 82 years old. If he leaves the court now, he will be replaced by a Biden nominee….

How rude of Justice Breyer. How utterly political he is, to stay on a job for which he’s fully capable and well qualified still to do.