Category Archives: ethics

Deceptiveness

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Ex-FLOTUS Jill Biden, in a CBS News interview, said that during Joe Biden’s 2024 debate with then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump she became afraid that her husband was in the middle of a stroke, evidenced by his disjointed, often incoherent performance. Now the press, led by CNN‘s Abby Phillip, is very upset and calling out Progressive-Democratic Party politicians over their deceptiveness regarding Biden’s mental decline.

It’s true enough that Party politicians lied to the rest of us about Biden’s mental capacities. The deceptiveness wasn’t only theirs though.

That rest of us could plainly see Biden’s progressive decline while it was happening. If the press couldn’t see that with their own eyes, they were only deceiving themselves. That alone removes any credibility they might have had regarding their reporting—they couldn’t then discriminate between reality and what they wanted reality to be, and there’s no reason to believe their acuity has improved since.

More likely, though, they were either deliberately oblivious to Biden’s ongoing mental degradation, choosing the lazy path of accepting at face value Party politician assurances of his hale and hearty alertness, or they were actively complicit in the deception. That laziness and/or dishonesty destroys press credibility, and the only way for the press to regain credibility is to achieve a wholesale turnover of news writers, editors, and publishers. The current crop can never again be believable.

Continuing Coverup

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The House Judiciary Committee requested the sound files and transcripts that had been collected by a special prosecutor during his investigation of ex-Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified material. The Heritage Foundation had requested the same material via a FOIA request. The recordings and transcripts were scheduled to be released to the requestors in the middle of next month.

Then Joe Biden decided the material would be embarrassing to him, so now he’s suing to stop the delivery. He wants the DC district court to

declare the committee’s request pretextual and invalid, and permanently bar the release of the records.

The same would apply, presumably, to The Heritage Foundation‘s FOIA delivery.

Biden isn’t alone in this coverup. Progressive-Democratic Party will claim pretextual-ness regarding any Congressional summons of, or FOIA requests for, documentation and any other information that might embarrass any Party politicians or leadership personnel.

Self-Serving and Dishonest

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The Chicago Teachers Union wanted to raise dues on its Chicago membership to the tune of an additional $800 per year. They claimed they wanted the additional money for

win[ning] a majority of the first 21 person fully elected school board

and

resources to fund a statewide millionaires tax campaign

Union management doesn’t care that their own union bylaws say

…our dues are not used for political purposes—so our PAC relies on extra contributions from our members to support progressive candidates….

The CTU’s dues and its PAC are entirely separate from each other. So why raise dues in order to fund political purposes? Because CTU’s management is that dishonest and that contemptuous of union members’ intelligence.

It turns out that CTU members are not as dumb as their Betters think they are. The dues increase was voted down by roughly 3:2.

Members will need to be actively vigilant, though, these Betters have shown their colors, and they’ll be back with more attempts, or they’ll simply weasel-word their way around the members’ No and go ahead, anyway. This is, after all, Chicago.

The Strength and the Weakness

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In a Wall Street Journal article regarding Binance’s complicity, allegedly unwitting, in financing Iran’s behaviors despite sanctions to the contrary, there’s this tidbit that is the subject of my post.

The funds are part of billions in crypto transactions that have flowed through Binance to networks financing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the two years preceding the current US-Iran war, according to Binance compliance reports, blockchain data, foreign law-enforcement officials who track terrorism financing, and other crypto researchers and nonpublic documents.

It’s those blockchain data and their role in backtracking to the source of the funding that concerns me.

Blockchain is a highly useful, incorruptible means (so far; hackers and ever-improving computers include blockchain in the cyber arms race between the good guys and the nefarious) of proving the provenance of what’s being tracked, which is mostly financial transactions (again, so far). But that surveillance capability, in the hands of a government (and at bottom, there’s no practical way to keep it out of the hands of government) can be very dangerous to individual privacy, even to individual liberty.

We the People, and free citizens elsewhere in the free world, need especially to be vigilant and to respond quickly when government misuses that capability.

The “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

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I have some thoughts on this and how it might work. Of course, I’m speculating; no criteria for eligibility or payout have been set, the five-person “adjudication” panel has not been stood up, and it’s possible the funding will not survive Congressional purse-control oversight. Within that, here I go again.

Payouts, I expect, will be limited to actual loss, with no add-ons related to punitive matters. In many respects, this will be straightforward, but there are a number of areas where losses are not clearly specifiable and/or the alleged losses are highly subjective. These latter include losses from loss of jobs, loss of business revenue, closure of the business. Courts have gotten fairly adept, if widely variable across jurisdictions, in assessing this sort of loss.

Even hazier are things like loss through death of a spouse, loss of the spouse’s income (which is separate from his/her death, even if the income loss resulted from the death), loss of conjugal relations or alienation of affection resulting from divorce or the affair that led to the divorce—and yes, some divorces have occurred as a result of many of the J6 prosecutions and, in the present context, persecutions. Courts make guesses at these losses, but only guesses; they’re not very good at it.

The next, and the overwhelmingly most important, problem, though is this. Given provable or even merely articulable loss that meets fund eligibility criteria to this point, it’s going to be deucedly hard to prove the political targeting, lawfare nature of the cases for which an applicant is seeking recompense. At best, satisfying a court, most likely satisfying the succession of courts, appellate courts, the Supreme Court, with the potential for remands to lower courts for further consideration or for reconsideration, will take years and years to reach a final decision. And that decision may well be that the matter at hand was not, in fact, political targeting, and so no payout is due.

And one more question. Given a final decision, whence the monies for the legal costs of getting to one? Will the Fund pay the government’s legal costs apart from any payout ordered? If not, where will the government’s funding come from?