Category Archives: ethics

Harvard’s Contradiction

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Powerline has a piece that has Harvard seemingly talking about setting up a conservative center on its campus as a balance to its strongly Leftist bent. (Such a center would, supposedly, cost up to $1 billion. I note that that’s less than 2% of its endowment, eliding that much of that endowment is targeted IAW the requirements of the donors who made and make that portion of the donations.)

Say, though, that the scuttlebutt is accurate, and Harvard is serious about setting up such a center. Harvard has also said, per The Telegraph, that

it refused to change its hiring, admissions, and other internal procedures following demands by the Trump administration….

Those hiring, admissions, and other procedures, though, are based entirely on its determined DEI practices, which are nakedly racist and sexist, and drive Harvard to hire only left-leaning or outright leftist personnel of merit ranging from none to quite a bit.

Given that, on what basis would Harvard hire actual conservative personnel for its claimed conservative center?

No, It Won’t

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This time, it’s an op-ed writer in The Wall Street Journal who is making misleading claims. In his piece regarding the likelihood of wealth flight from a Zohran Mamdani-run New York City, their subheadline reads

The state will lose wealthy taxpayers, and the federal government will have to cough up more aid.

The opinion-writer ties the weal of our nation to the weal of New York, and the article fails utterly on the false premise of a necessary Federal bailout.

No, the Federal government will not have to cough up more aid. New York’s political machinations, including its drumbeat attacks on successful Americans and on businesses domiciled there, would be coming to a head under a socialist Mamdani city administration, and that outcome is solely that New York State’s responsibility.

The good citizens of States running from Maine through New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, on to California, Alaska, and Hawaii have absolutely no obligation to bail out a fiscally and regulatorily irresponsible New York City or State. The Federal government has no business forcing the rest of the nation’s citizens to do so.

The other side of the matter: only if New York—city and State—are left to stew in their own fetid spending, taxing, and regulation messes will either have any chance of mending its ways. In that way, the weal of the nation is impacted by the weal of New York State: a healthy State, not dependent of Federal funding, would be an unalloyed good for our nation.

Where Have We Heard This Before?

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The Wall Street Journal editors opined regarding the Progressive-Democratic Party’s “abundance” campaign in contrast with Party’s New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign of paucity:

…higher taxes on the rich, greater income redistribution, and expanding government control over private business—or, as he put it in 2021, “seizing the means of production.”

Then they wrote this:

Despite the tension between the two camps, both believe government should re-engineer the economy and society to their desired liberal ends.

They seem surprised by this. But. But, but, but. Progressive-Democratic Party leaders have sung this song before, and we’ve heard Party’s singing.

Then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama, on the eve of his election bragged that he was just days away from fundamentally transforming America. In his first address to Congress, the then-Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden announced his intention to fundamentally transform our national economy.

Mamdani should come as no surprise at all, and New Yorkers would be well to heed this and elect accordingly.

Environmentalists and Technology

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TL;DR, environmentalists don’t like technological improvements that don’t meet their climate funding industry’s approval. Typical of this is their objection to AI-centered data centers and those facilities’ demand for electricity. Especially typical is their hue and cry over the newly hated-by-the Left Elon Musk’s entry into the business with his Grok AI data center.

The facility [built in Memphis, TN] is partially powered by dozens of small natural-gas turbines—most of which are temporary. A relentless environmentalist campaign erupted, accusing the facility of polluting the skies over predominantly black neighborhoods. The city responded by conducting air quality tests, which showed no dangerous levels of pollutants.

The climatistas reject those test results because they refute—not merely contradict—the climatistas’ claims.

Denial isn’t a river in Egypt, but it does rhyme with climatistas’ dismissal of inconvenient truths.

He’s Right

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President Donald Trump (R) is looking to seal off leaks, especially those that center on potentially treasonous leaks to the press.

A leaked report claimed that the U.S. strike only set back Iran’s program by a few months. U.S. officials have said the nuclear sites were destroyed and it would take years for Iran to rebuild them.
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Trump suggested compelling the journalists who publicly reported on the leaked intelligence to reveal their source for national security reasons.

Certainly such leakers should be identified, haled into criminal court, and if convicted, locked up for a very long time. This kind of leaker isn’t just violating his oath of office, or the terms of his employment, he’s committing the felonious act of sending classified material—national security-related material—to the press, which our enemies avidly read. Furthermore, the only way this sort of leaker can have passed the classified material along to the press is by having stolen the material first, and the theft itself should be separately punished with a jail term.

There’s more to this than just that, though.

In all other walks of life, receiving stolen goods is itself a crime, magnified by efforts to profit from the receipt. Unlike the legal and medical professions, there is no intrinsic right to confidentiality between news writers—journalists—and their sources. The Frankenstein-esque creation of a “need to protect sources” is right next door to violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement for equal treatment under law.

Journalism would suffer mighty and irreversible damage were journalists required to reveal the source(s) who transmitted to them stolen materials or communicated to them information the sources were revealing in violation of the obligations of their position? This is cynically offered nonsense. In times past, journalists were required by their editors to have at least two on-the-record sources corroborating the anonymously sourced information those journalists published. That requirement has since been abandoned by the journalist guild.

What concrete, publicly accessible, and publicly measurable standard of journalistic integrity do today’s news writers and their editors use?  They refuse to say, which is them saying loudly and clearly that they have no standard.

It’s long past time to bring journalism, which refuses to regulate itself, back within the bounds of a law that the rest of us must obey.