Category Archives: ethics

Colin Kaepernick and the ACLU’s Lack of Understanding

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The ACLU awarded Colin Kaepernick its Eason Monroe Courageous Advocate Award over the weekend, ostensibly for his “courage” in beginning a movement of kneeling during our national anthem.

It’s clear that the ACLU—all of the Left, really—and the kneeling athletes have, at best, misunderstood the meaning of their actions.  The hoo-raw over these protests, the empty seats in football stadiums, and the declining TV viewership shows plainly that the message being received is one of disrespect for the core symbols of our nation and insult toward those who have and are defending our nation, those symbols, and what our nation and symbols represent—individual liberty, including the right to protest even in the most disagreeable manner.

That misunderstanding carries one or both of two implications, since the protesting athletes surely know that their original message long ago was missed, and they’ve not changed in the slightest how they’re delivering their message.  One is that their original message never was a protest against this or that form of social injustice as they claim; it is what has been received all along: a protest and insult against our nation, its symbols, and those who defend and have defended them over the centuries.

The other implication is that these protestors now have walked away from their original message; the continued demonstrations of disrespect and insult are descents into the petty ego contest of trying to out-stubborn those who consider their form of protest disrespectful and insulting.  The “protestors” are trying to jam their form down the throats of those who read their form differently, solely to show who’s bigger and without any concern for the message itself.

Some have suggested that kneeling (rather than, say sitting on the bench as Kaepernick originally did, or raising clenched fists as a couple of Olympic contestants did years ago and some NFL players do today) is a reverential form of protest.

The correct, the respectful, treatment of our national anthem is to stand and face the flag, or if the flag isn’t visible face the direction of the music, with our hand right hand over heart; or if wearing a hat, while holding that hat over our heart; or if in uniform, standing at attention and saluting.  There’s nothing remotely reverential in disrespectful behavior.

Law Be Damned

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The city of Seattle passed a law earlier this year that levied an income tax on the city’s wealthiest—all in the name of equality of outcome and so…fairness.

It turns out that tax was contrary to the State’s law, which said that only the State can levy an income tax and, explicitly, cities cannot.  The question also was raised regarding whether the Seattle law was even contrary to the State’s constitution—illegitimate—as well as illegal, but the judge avoided the constitutional question.

King County Superior Court Judge John Ruhl ruled in a Wednesday that Seattle did not have the authority to impose the tax because state law prohibits tax on net income.

Seattle’s City Attorney Pete Holmes and Mayor Tim Burgess demurred.

We are also living in a time of extreme income inequality that corrodes our social compact and causes many to wonder whether wealthy individuals are paying their fair share[.]

Because their goal is worthy, so the law should be disregarded.  And

Councilmember Kshama Sawant told Fox News in July that the need for the tax is “crystal clear.”

Again, goals, but let’s skip the inconvenience of law or of adjusting particular ones.

It just doesn’t matter what the law requires.  Never mind, either, that the State’s voters have repeatedly defeated such a tax on State referendums.  The Left demand to do what they want, when they want it, because that’s all that’s…just.

As an aside, it should be noted that Holmes and Burgess, in demanding the rich pay their fair share, carefully decline to say explicitly what level of wealth constitutes “the wealthy,” although the level is implied by the erstwhile tax’s threshold, and they carefully decline to say what that “fair share” would be: what per centage of the city’s taxes should be paid by “the wealthy,” especially in comparison with what the “fair share” of the city’s taxes paid by the various levels of the non-wealthy would be.

More Mueller Leaks

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The New York Times has published another.

Lawyers for Michael T Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case….

Who might those “four people” be?  They can only be from Flynn’s team, from President Donald Trump’s team, or from Robert Mueller’s team.

Flynn’s team has no particular reason to leak, nothing to gain; although Flynn plainly has reason to cut the ties—he’s looking to trade favorables to Mueller in return for favorables back.

Trump’s team has reason to leak—to corroborate his drumbeat of complaints about Mueller’s “witch hunt.”  Except that Trump’s team hasn’t so far leaked anything specific to Mueller’s investigation—only those generalized complaints about his witch hunt.

An objective Special Counsel wouldn’t leak, with or with motive to do so.  However, with Mueller’s track record of leaks, it seems clear from whom this leak came.

Climate and Atmospheric CO2

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In a piece on Watts Up With That, Eric Worrall explored the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature.  (Yes, yes, I know the science is settled, but the fact is the only thing settled is the pseudo-science nesting in the fetid imaginations of climate “science” funding industry personages.  The rest of us keep asking rude questions.)

Using data consisting of meteorological records back to the 1850s and other data collected from sources like “isotope ratios in gas samples extracted from ice cores and seabed cores,” temperature records of Earth dating back hundreds of thousands of years (ice core data from Greenland and Antarctica reach back 400,000 years, for example), Worall was able to generate an interesting pair of graphs.  The upper graph of the two-parter below is one such easily constructed graph.  The red dotted line at the end of the measure period is the current “warming” put in context.

Figure 1. After Professor Bob Carter (lecture at the 10th International Conference on Climate Change at the Heartland Institute on June 12, 2015). Air Temperatures above the Greenland ice cap for the past 10,000 years reconstructed from ice cores using data from Alley, 2000 (The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19, 213-226) (top panel), with a time scale showing years before modern time. Lower panel shows the carbon-dioxide concentrations of the atmosphere over the same period from EPICA Dome C ice core.

The caption of the graph gives the data source for the lower graph: they’re from ice core data collected by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica from the Antarctic Plateau.

A number of things jump out at me about this graphed relationship between temperature and the atmosphere’s CO2 content.

One is the clear cyclical nature of global temperature.  There clearly is more going on with planetary temperature than any putative CO2 pumping.

Another is the absolute lack of relationship between temperature and CO2 in our atmosphere.  Atmospheric CO2 was at its nearby (as such things go on a geologic time scale) low when temperature cycles were achieving apparent highs over the 11,000 years presented.  While atmospheric CO2 has been rising since that low, it has been doing so more or less slowly and steadily, especially compared with the wild (relatively) swings of the temperature cycles.

Another goes back to the upper, temperature graph.  The average planetary temperature over the geologic time frame sure looks like it’s been decreasing, slightly, across the period.  While the atmospheric CO2 content has been rising.

And one more thing: that current rise in temperature represented by that dotted red line.  It’s indistinguishable from any of the other sharp rises into a warm cycle.

Settled, indeed.

Baristas, Bikinis, and Harvey Weinstein

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Everett, WA, has passed two ordinances that presume to define “lewd” behavior and forces employees to stop wearing bikinis on the job or otherwise showing “too much” skin.  Everett, it seems, has too many coffee shops that employee bikini-clad baristas to suit the prim town fathers.

After all, they claim,

The skin-flaunting coffee servers could turn men into the next Harvey Weinstein.

This is just projection.  These Liberals, with their two ordinances, confess their weakness of character, their own lack of morality, their own inability to resist temptation, and they insultingly assume that all of us are as weak, amoral, and temptation-accepting as they are.