Category Archives: morality

Where to Cut

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As the recent government shutdown demonstrated, there’s a lot of fat that can be cut in the personnel department.  This is no fault of the personnel, but the fact is, we don’t need that many in Federal employ.

Here are a couple more items on that score.

The Department of Agriculture is fairly typical of most agencies in its sometimes incongruous responsibilities and huge some say too huge workforce.  It employs roughly 99,000 people to service the roughly 1.4 million Americans employed in farming.

That’s 14 farmers for every DA employee.

And this on the states being absolved, more and more, of their responsibilities by the Federal government:

“Ronald Reagan had a yellow book test,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.  “If something could be found in the Yellow Book, it should be done by the private sector.  Unfortunately, the administration now is taking the opposite view, claiming many services are inherently governmental, and therefore not subject to competition.”

Which feeds back into the bloat in Departments like the DA and those listed on the other side of the first link above.

Government and Personal Information Security

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Government snooping on the ObamaCare website certainly raises alarms.  But [TrustedSec President, David] Kennedy says even more concerning is that—according to his research—HealthCare.gov is riddled with holes in security.

“We can look at the code that’s behind it,” Kennedy told Fox News, “look at how things work.  And we can tell that there wasn’t even minimum standards bolted onto this application, even before its release.”

The Feds, of course, insist otherwise.  Health and Human Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner testified before last week’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing:

They can trust that the information they’re providing is protected to the highest privacy standards.

Kennedy again:

If I was allowed to attack the website by myself and I had approval to go and do it, it would be very simple for me to break into it, steal all that information that’s in the database including all of your personal information that you used to register for the site, Social Security numbers—everything like that.

Which one has the greater vested interest in the claims?

Racist Assaults

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A group of 10 black youths—one of them a 12-year-old girl—surrounded a white couple’s car in Brooklyn, viciously beating the husband and yanking the wife to the pavement by her hair as they peppered the two with racial slurs, authorities said.

Get those crackers!” some of them screamed, according to court papers.  “Get that white whore!”

And so on.

I wonder: if President Barack Obama had a son and daughter-in-law, would they look like this couple?

The Mendacity of Zero-Tolerance Policies

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Here’s another example.  A 17-year-old high school student (and volleyball player) in the North Andover Public Schools system, Erin Cox, was texted by a friend at a (underage) drinking party who needed a ride home.  Notwithstanding the judgment that brought the friend to such a gathering, this young lady retained the good sense to ask for help, recognizing that she was too drunk to drive herself.  Cox answered the call.

Shortly after she arrived to pick up her friend and bring her home, though, the police also arrived and made a number of arrests—not including Cox.  The police involved absolved her of any wrong-doing, recognizing she was there to help a friend and not a party participant.

That wasn’t good enough for Superintendent Dr Kevin Hutchinson, though.  He has a “No tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol.”  He suspended Cox for five games for her involvement in the party.  “No tolerance” apparently includes no tolerance for helping drunken friend who retained the judgment to call for help rather than trying to drive herself—since giving that help necessarily involved the alcohol that help-requesting friend had ingested.

Cox spoke a few days later to The Boston Herald.

I wasn’t drinking.  And I felt like going to get her was the right thing to do.  Saving her from getting in the car when she was intoxicated and hurt herself or getting in the car with someone else who was drinking. I’d give her a ride home.
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I just feel very defeated.  When you’re in high school you’re supposed to stay perfect and be perfect, but everyone makes mistakes.

No.  This young woman made no mistake.  Her school’s “leadership” did.

A Censoring Press

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How does this work, exactly?  The Los Angeles Times has decided that it will no longer publish letters to its editorial staff from “climate change deniers.”

The Times‘ letters editor, Paul Thornton, wrote, with no trace of irony,

Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published.  Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.

No statement of an opinion, here.  Mm, mm.  Thornton is a newspaper man.  Each of his statements a Truth.

Here’s what Thornton is demonstrating with his censorship.  When someone is unable to make a coherent argument for his case, when he’s unable to concede the possibility of the error of his case, when he lacks the integrity to concede the possibility of that error, he does his best to prevent the opposing case from being spoken—either through ad hominem attacks against the opposing case’s presenters or, as Thornton does here with his control over speech, through outright censorship of the speech with which he’s unable to dispute coherently.

I can’t hear you, indeed.