Category Archives: ethics

Confidential

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A fifteen-year-old boy who sued YouTube, Alphabet‘s Google-owned company over YouTube‘s alleged causing [of] mental health harms to children via its also alleged by-design addictive nature, has settled his lawsuit rather than insisting on going to trial. The terms of the settlement are…confidential.

Of course, the boy’s lawyers are taking a victory lap.

YouTube‘s decision to resolve this case before having to face a jury speaks for itself.

On the other hand, José Castañeda, a Policy Communications Manager (III) at Google, speaking on behalf of YouTube and the settlement

said in a statement to FOX Business that the lawsuit had been amicably resolved.

Naturally, the lawyers for both sides would paint the outcome as favorable for their own client. The losers in such an outcome, though, are the public, other children in the boy’s claimed strait, and the boy himself.

By concealing the outcome, it’s impossible for the public—those other children, especially—to know whether YouTube is being suitably punished or the boy’s beef is bogus. That’s all carefully hidden. The concealment reduces a suit and the associated publicity to nothing more than virtue-signaling.

I’m spring-loaded against keeping settlements of civil lawsuits, which themselves are public affairs, hidden away from the public. If the plaintiff(s) aren’t confident of the legitimacy of their plaint, they ought not bring the case in the first place. If they are confident, they should push the pace and go to trial.

That’s the Point

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Recall that one of New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goal was a plethora of city government-run grocery stores to sell groceries at “affordable prices”—which, for Mamdani, meant “cheaper than what existing grocery stores were selling.” He could mean only that, else he’d be conceding that those prices already were affordable.

The outcome of such a move is laid out in the subheadline:

His socialist supermarkets could put New York’s little grocers out of business.

That’s the point.

Like any good socialist, Mamdani wants government to control the producers. Especially if it’s the particular socialist’s government. Getting rid of the little businesses demonstrates to the larger stores and the chains—whose individual stores generally are franchises run by moms and pops or collections of them run by small- or mid-sized businesses—that they’d better kowtow to the socialist government or leave. In either case, that would increase government’s control over the remains.

Contradiction in Terms

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The lede lays it out.

State financial aid continues to expand within higher education, allowing money to go to eligible illegal immigrant students.

That’s an obvious oxymoron, or it should be. Leave aside the plain fact that folks in the US illegally are not “migrants”—those are folks who entered (and remain) our nation legally. These folks are illegal aliens.

The contradiction is magnified by this bit:

Currently, around 21 states and the District of Columbia offer in-state tuition eligibility to certain illegal immigrant students, and 18 states and DC provide access to state financial aid programs, according to Higher Ed immigration.
For example, at a University of California school, the base in-state tuition is roughly $15,000 annually. For nonresidents, the base tuition is over $31,000, which means eligible illegal immigrants are essentially receiving $16,000 a year in aid.

That understates the case: these illegal aliens (not migrants or immigrants) are receiving $31,000 per year in aid, since they are, or should be, by dint of their illegal status not at all eligible for any of this taxpayer largesse.

Illegal aliens should be eligible for none of our welfare or other financial assistance beyond the payments they’re offered for leaving voluntarily, payments consisting both of a lump sum cash payment and he preservation of a one-time ability to come back, this time doing so legally and above board.

Entertainers Entertaining

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Hollywood’s “entertainers” and NLMSM “journalists” put on a 3-hour show to compete with and draw viewers from the cage fight circus that President Donald Trump (R) put on to kick off our nation’s three-week celebration of our 250th birthday.

The event, called “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment,” was hosted by far-left activist and actress Jane Fonda…and the Committee for the First Amendment in New York City.

Bette Midler, reediting an Arlo Guthrie classic:

All you fascists bound to lose
Lose, you fascists bound to lose
We’ll battle ICE together, until they cut and run,
just like in Minneapolis, and when the midterms come
you’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose.

Joy Reid:

The threat is not coming, friends. It is here. Brendan Carr, the man who wrote the blueprint to dismantle the FCC and Project 2025, is now running it. He is weaponizing the agency to bully and control the press and suppress the wider televised media.

Robert De Niro:

I hate to say it, but loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser. I can’t love a country that’s led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant.

The competing show was neither competitive nor entertaining. Pro tip from the peanut gallery of viewers: if you want to compete with an entertainment event, bitter hysteria is not the way.

They Knew…

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…or they did not. Regarding the massive welfare fraud going on in Minnesota, a (Republican-led) House Oversight and Accountability Committee report says that Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic Party governor, Tim Walz, and the State’s Progressive-Democratic Party Attorney General, Keith Ellison, knew all about it from early on and made the conscious decision to do nothing about it, instead choosing to punish those officials rude enough to object to the fraud.

There are two possibilities here. One is for Walz and Ellison to deny all knowledge, either directly or via weasel-word deflections. In this case, the two would be lying through their teeth.

The other possibility is that they wouldn’t be lying in denials, and they really didn’t know about all that fraud occurring under that not so watchful eyes. In this case, they would be confessing their incompetence and unfitness for senior (or any other) government position.

With either possibility and with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s continued support for them or for either of them, Party will be demonstrating its general unfitness for any leading role in our government.