Category Archives: ethics

Soft on Crime

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Especially in Los Angeles County, where County District Attorney George Gascón rules.

Gascón has proposed legislation that would bar felonies committed while a juvenile from being counted as “strikes” under California’s Three Strikes law when the person commits a felony as an adult. Superficially, it seems like a good idea. After all, Gascón argues, the child’s brain isn’t fully developed.

A sister of a gang-related murder victim exposed the flaw in that argument, though. Aja Courtney:

Anybody who has children understands that children know at very early ages what’s right from wrong[.]

Indeed. Virtually from the time the child can walk—and whose new-found mobility lets the child especially explore the matter—he learns the difference between right and wrong. The child starts developing, early on, an understanding of the distinction between the more complex concepts of fair and unfair; these are fully developed in children before they reach puberty.

Then Gascón blew up his own argument while being too absorbed with his own virtue to recognize it:

A juvenile system is based on rehabilitation, not on punishment…criminalization of young people leads to higher levels of recidivism, which means that it creates more insecurity in our community.

And when the juvenile commits a felony as an adult, that rehabilitation effort plainly has failed. Furthermore, young people aren’t criminalized by having the strikes continue to count. They criminalize themselves by continuing to commit crimes.

In the end, too, releasing a man back to the community—or to another community—before he’s been rehabilitated is what creates more insecurity in our community.

Biden to State: Drop Dead

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That’s President Joe Biden’s position vis-à-vis Michigan as that State experiences an increase in Wuhan Virus infections, particularly via the UK Variant. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been trying to get President Joe Biden (D) to increase the number of vaccine doses allocated to her State. Biden says, “No.”

Here’s Biden’s CDC Director Rochelle Walensky:

The answer is not necessarily to give vaccine. The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down.

Never mind that lockdowns, empirically, don’t work. Never mind Michigan’s Supreme Court has already ruled that Whitmer has no authority to close the State down—the legislature must agree.

Just…drop dead. Not fiscally as then-President Gerald Ford said to New York City unless it corrected its spendthrift ways. Drop dead literally unless Michigan shuts down altogether—resulting in far more deaths and disabilities and damage to children and economic damage to the State than the UK Variant, or the Wuhan Virus generally, is capable of inflicting, with or without the vaccines.

Spreading Disinformation

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Jay Bhattacharya, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, (mostly) correctly called out and decried YouTube for censoring and spiking a public-policy roundtable hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and in which Bhattacharya had participated.

Among other things discussed by the participants was the wisdom of requiring children to wear masks in the face of the Wuhan Virus situation. The panel said the requirement was foolish and counterproductive, and this was too much for the Know Betters. YouTube

removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Bhattacharya, though, in his op-ed cited study after study supporting the panel’s position: requiring children to wear masks is deeply suboptimal, and is so across a wide range of dimensions.

Never mind.

Never mind that the panelists, in addition to Bhattacharya, who is a physician, economist, and Stanford Medical School professor, consisted of Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford; Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Scott Atlas, radiologist, health care policy advisor, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. They’re only experts; they know nothing.

Their position is contrary to The Narrative. How dare anyone contradict Settled Narrative.

I said above “‘mostly’ correctly called out…YouTube” because YouTube is wholly owned by Google, and Google is wholly owned by Alphabet. The latter two are run by Sundar Pichai.

It is, in fact, Alphabet and Sundar Pichai who are peddling disinformation under the guise of preventing “misinformation,” using YouTube as the vehicle for their machination.

Once again, Pichai is pushing the Left’s Newspeak dictionary and doing so at the direct and deliberate expense of objective discourse.

This also is a prima facie case for treating Alphabet, et al., as public accommodations—or as common carriers—and limiting their ability to discriminate or to censor.

A Thought on the J&J Vaccine

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A couple of nuggets in a Tuesday Wall Street Journal editorial prompt this in my pea brain. The editorial itself concerns [t]he issue [of] how best to address public anxiety over rare blood clots seemingly associated with the J&J anti-Wuhan Virus vaccine.

The nuggets are these:

six US cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) [in] 6.8 million who have received J&J’s vaccine

and

This particular brain blood clot is extremely rare in the general population—five individuals per million per year….

The J&J association—if it is more than coincidence—works out to less than one incident of this particular brain blood clot per million getting the J&J vaccine, if my third-grade arithmetic is any good.

The question that occurs to me (and that I’ve seen no evidence is being considered) is whether the J&J vaccine has the happy side effect of providing a measure of protection against this already extremely rare type of clot.

A bonus question from my pea brain. The clots seemingly associated with the J&J vaccine have all occurred in women in the age range of 18 to 48. Assuming the clot-vaccine association is more than coincidence, is there something in the metabolism of women, or in some other factor particular to women, that leaves them susceptible to the clot, even if less so than the general population for having had the vaccine? Alternatively, is there something in the metabolism of men, or in some other factor particular to men, that makes them proof against the clot for having had the vaccine?

Timidity

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It’s especially dangerous in the face of People’s Republic of China aggression. Yet it’s the position of Canada’s Justin Trudeau government. Don’t angrify the bully.

The Halifax Security Forum is a congress of international security experts:

…sponsored by NATO [and by the Canadian government, the latter especially with money], draws scores of powerful military and civilian leaders. Previous speakers have included then-US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel; Admiral Phil Davidson, the commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command; Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan; and officials from a host of other countries, including Israel, Estonia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Poland and Japan.

And

The forum’s website states it is “devoted to strengthening strategic cooperation among democratic nations.”

But it seems that Trudeau and his coterie aren’t that devoted.

The Forum had planned on awarding its John McCain Prize to the Republic of China’s President, Tsai Ing-wen for standing strong against China’s relentless pressure. Its two prior recipients were the people of Lesbos, Greece, for their efforts to save refugees; the second, in 2019, went to the citizen protesters in Hong Kong.

But the President of the RoC apparently is a bridge too far, requiring more courage to support than Trudeau seems able to muster.

When Canadian officials learned of the forum’s plans, they made it clear that if organizers gave the honor to Tsai, the Canadian government would pull support—and funding—from HFX.

This is not a proper government for the nation whose people helped face down tyranny in world wars of the past and who helped send a later tyranny, the USSR, into the garbage can of history.

Sadly, the Forum now seems to be dithering in the face of Trudeau’s pro-PRC threats.