Category Archives: ethics

Begging Iran

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The subheadline tells the tale:

Biden administration mounts last-ditch appeal to Tehran, while also pushing to keep cease-fire talks alive

And this from Secretary of State Antony Blinken:

We are engaged in intense diplomacy pretty much around the clock with a very simple message: all parties must refrain from escalation. It’s also critical that we break this cycle by reaching a cease-fire in Gaza.

And this from a carefully unidentified US official:

We’re preparing to defend Israel in an April-like manner[.]

This timidity by our government is only leading to continued deaths of Israeli citizens at the hands of Iran and its terrorist surrogates, and the continued deaths of those Palestinians about whom the Biden-Harris administration pretends so shrilly to be worried, as Iran’s terrorist surrogate Hamas continues to hold Palestinians as shields.

Equating Israel’s struggle to defend itself in a war for its survival against its terrorist attackers with those terrorist attackers is disgustingly, deeply immoral. Defending Israel in an April-like manner, wherein American forces, along with Jordanian and British forces, shot down an important number of the 300+ missiles, rockets, and cruise missiles Iran fired at Israel that April, was sufficiently inadequate that Israel finds itself in a similar strait today.

Purely defensive efforts are wholly inadequate.  Without further second-guessing the Biden-Harris effort last April, what will be necessary today are Rules Two and Three. The US must destroy Hezbollah and Houthi launching facilities, whether or not they’re preparing to launch, along with those terrorists’ missile and rocket storage sites and their ammunition and fuel dumps. The US must go further: our forces must sink the Iranian navy afloat and destroy Iran’s air defense sites and its launch facilities and associated missile and rocket storage sites.

That will leave Israel free to deal with the close-in threats: those rockets, missiles, and cruise missiles that do get through to range of Israel’s defenses, and to deal with Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist forces.

In the meantime, though, Hezbollah is firing rockets into northern Israel, killing tens of Israeli men, women, and children, all with no response from the US.

Israel is a critical ally of ours. Either we are a critical ally of Israel, or we are not. The Biden-Harris administration’s activities are not encouraging.

Pseudo-Support, Two Ways

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Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor Josh Shapiro claims to be pro-school choice, yet when the State’s Republican legislature passed a $100 million voucher program, he vetoed it: his fellow Progressive-Democrats in the legislature objected, and their opposition would have “complicated” passing the State’s upcoming budget bill. Shapiro used his Party opposition as cover for his closet opposition to support for non-public school programs. Never mind that the same Republican legislature could have passed the State’s budget bill over continuing Party opposition.

Then there’s this claim by an organizer of a letter to Progressive-Democrat Vice President and likely Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris opposing any thought of her nominating Shapiro to be her running mate:

He is far too supportive of school privatization to be the vice president. We don’t need to be soft on this issue because public education is the cornerstone of our democracy.

Education certainly is a cornerstone of our (republican) democracy. There’s nothing magic about public education, though, especially in today’s world where public education districts, run for the most part by teachers unions, are so badly failing our students.

Pseudo-support for voucher schools and pseudo-support for education in general, each with the same Progressive-Democrat at the center—these are the positions of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

A Supreme Court Justice Doesn’t Understand our Constitution

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The Supreme Court has a very good code of ethics—pronounced so by no less a light than Justice Elena Kagan—but it lacks teeth sufficient enough to suit that same light. So Kagan wants—and she’s serious—a panel of lower court judges to pass judgment on claimed ethics violations done by a Justice.

There’s a problem with that. Here’s what Art III, Section 1, of our Constitution says about our courts and our judges and Justices:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

The editors of the WSJ understand this full well:

The Supreme Court was established by the Constitution, but the lower courts were created by Congress. A lower-court tribunal would therefore subject the High Court to supervision by a creature of Congress, which is constitutionally dubious.

It’s not just dubious; such a travesty would be a blatant violation of the separation of powers that our Constitution has created for our Federal government.

How is it that the Light of the Supreme Court does not understand this?

How Concerned?

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Just the News recently ran a poll of its readers—entirely unscientific, since the respondents are far from a random sample even of readers of JtN, and JtN makes no bones about this with any of its polls—that asked How concerned were you by FBI Director Wray’s testimony on attempt to assassinate Trump? regarding FBI Director Christopher Wray’s initial House testimony that he couldn’t be sure that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, in the recent assassination attempt, was hit by a bullet—it might have been, speculated Wray, a piece of shrapnel.

You can guess how the poll went (I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two won’t count), but that’s not what’s important here.

What’s important is the speed with which “the FBI” reacted to pushback on that “uncertainty” and moved to correct/adjust Wray’s testimony to indicate that Wray was, after all, confident that Trump was hit by a bullet. The initial testimony and the clarification, especially as it was a response to the hooraw over that initial testimony, when taken together are concerning: the whipsaw change suggestd that the FBI and its Director were not thinking overmuch about what actually had happened.

What has become of the FBI’s claim to operate on facts, wherever those facts might lead? What has become of Wray’s respect for facts?

It’s Still the Case

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Sundar Pichai’s Google is busily censoring/shadow banning Google searches for information about the recent assassination attempt against former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Billionaire Elon Musk suggested that Google’s omission of search functions for the assassination attempt against former President Trump may be improper.
Musk took to social media to highlight that Google Search’s autocomplete feature omitted results relating to the July 13 shooting. Google has denied taking any action to limit the results.

A carefully anonymous Google spokesman clarified that there has been no manual action taken on these predictions. This is cynically disingenuous. Pichai’s Google programmers are responsible for that absence; they’re the ones who wrote the algorithms that omit exactly those search suggestions.

That same Unknown Spokesman further insisted that

Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring[.]

Indeed, as this screenshot, published on Fox Business on 28 July, demonstrates:

Yet, suddenly, similar searches regarding the Trump assassination attempt are seeing similar autocomplete suggestions censored out. That’s continuing even after Pichai’s censorship has been exposed. That Google still is censoring the search effort is demonstrated by this screen shot that I took shortly after noon CDT on 29 Jul.

Still no autocomplete output there. If a searcher doesn’t come up with the precisely correct—Pichai’s and his Google programmers’ definition of correct—the searcher will find nothing.