Any Excuse

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…to extend an “emergency” in order to continue Government’s expanded powers and reduced individual liberties, an expansion that depends on that continued emergency. Here’s the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics in a letter to President Joe Biden (D) and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D):

…unprecedented levels of RSV happening with growing flu rates, ongoing high numbers of children in mental health crisis and serious workforce shortages are combining to stretch pediatric care capacity at the hospital and community level to the breaking point[.]
…
Your ongoing response to COVID-19 has successfully supported strategies to mitigate the impact of health care capacity issues for adult patients. Please take this action to allow these same strategies to be employed in service of our nation’s children.

Understand that this is the same American Academy of Pediatrics that promotes “gender-affirming care”—gender-affirming: destigmatizing gender variance—in children who, even at their tender age, think they’re confused about their sex—including in some cases puberty blockers. The Children’s Hospital Association also actively supports gender-affirming care. These are entities wholly unqualified to have medical or psychological opinions regarding the health and well-being of our children.

Notice, also, that this same hysterical “overloaded hospital” bleat was made during the Wuhan Virus situation—and no, hospitals were not, in the main, overloaded then. On the contrary, those Wuhan Virus situation strategies did nothing useful regarding the virus, but they did hammer our economy and do long-term damage to our children while expanding government powers over us average Americans.

Withal, keep in mind the origin of any shortages of medicines or medical facilities for handling the present outbreaks of respiratory virus and influenza in our children.

This situation is a direct result of school lockdowns and other moves to isolate our children from each other and from adults outside the immediate family, lockdowns and other moves that were pushed zealously by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, teachers union managers, these medical “experts,” and the Left generally.

This forced isolation blocked continued development of our children’s immune systems, which left our children vulnerable to viruses against which they would have developed natural resistance absent that shameful, deliberate isolation. It’s no wonder viral outbreaks in our children are spiking.

We might have expected these Medical Wonders to understand and predict the impact of isolation on children’s immune systems and prepare for just these outbreaks.

No, this demand to extend a “medical” emergency is just another naked power grab by Party and Party supporters.

Financial Reporting

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A little bit in the weeds, here, but necessary for future understandings by some investors. The proximate matter is FTX’ collapse and bankruptcy (with possibly criminal activities associated).

In a footnote to the financial statements, the company said its “primary shareholder is also the primary shareholder of several related entities which do business with the company.” It didn’t say who the related parties were for any specific transaction it disclosed.
The standard accounting rules for disclosing related-party transactions are vague and have long been considered a weakness in the system. There is no clear-cut rule requiring companies to disclose the players in a related-party transaction. The rules do say, “If necessary to the understanding of the relationship, the name of the related party shall be disclosed.”

Some questions arise. Whose definitions of “necessary” and “understanding?” The way the rule is written, those definitions are left to the company—FTX, here—to determine, and what an investor or customer or client needs or wishes for his own understanding is unimportant.

FTX’s new CEO John Ray exposed part of the much larger problem in his FTX bankruptcy-court filing, in which he acknowledged that FTX’s financial information wasn’t trustworthy and that it was controlled by

 a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals.

That potentially compromised part is key. Compromised by whom? In what way? That would seem clearly related to who those “related parties” are.

There’s more, related to arm’s length transactions, which are statutorily required in many business arrangements. Here’s a working definition of arm’s length transactions that’s good enough for our purposes:

A transaction in which the buyer and the seller have no significant, prior relationship. In an arm’s length transaction, neither party has an incentive to act against his/her own interest. That is, the seller seeks to make the price as high as he/she can, and likewise the buyer seeks to make it as low as he/she can. The negotiations for an arm’s length transaction result in the arm’s length price, which is almost always close to the market value of the asset being sold.

That drive for each party to work toward his own interest, and especially the resulting essentially market price for the things being transacted, also is key. How can an investor or a customer or a client know that a particular transaction within an FTX is legitimate or problematic under arms’ length requirements if the investor or customer or client can’t know who the related party is that’s do[ing] business with the company? And why is the investor or customer or client being actively denied this information? What’s being hidden?

This is, as RG Associates founder and member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Emerging Issues Task Force, Jack Ciesielski, said,

a hole that needs to be fixed. The auditors would have to know who the related party is. Why not just put that in there? How hard can it be? By keeping it purposely opaque it’s defeating the purposes of the footnote.

And so do investors, customers, and clients need to know—hence the footnote, even if carefully vague in the present case. And hence the need to plug that loophole: require the related parties to be explicitly identified. There’s no free speech question here, no political speech would be chilled by this. Documenting business arrangements in a purely investment environment has nothing to do with our 1st Amendment.

Merrick Garland’s Confession

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a Special Counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump’s (R) alleged involvement in both the Mar-a-Lago documents case and whether Mr. Trump or others “unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power” after the 2020 election. Here is Garland’s confession that his appointment is purely politically motivated.

Based on recent developments, including the former President’s announcement that he is a candidate for President in the next election, and the sitting President’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a Special Counsel[.]

Garland could have appointed his special counsel months ago, as he was repeatedly encouraged to do over last summer. Instead—his own words, mind you—he chose to wait until the Presidential contest was joined to do so, and he did it on the heels of the contest’s beginning: just three days after Trump’s announcement.

This is Garland’s statement that his appointment is intended to influence the coming Presidential race in favor of his boss, President Joe Biden (D).

An Illustration of Why…

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…we have a 2nd Amendment and of why Government has no business, or legitimate authority, to dictate to us our needs for firearms or our purposes in keep[ing] and bear[ing] Arms of any type.

A report issued last year by the watchdog group Open The Books, The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies, found that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats now have been granted the authority to carry guns and make arrests—more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the US Marine Corps.

And [emphasis added]

One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation adjusted). Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.

The Federal government has no business arming itself so heavily against the very citizens for whom that government works.

Full stop.

Some Corporate Values

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Recall Major League Baseball’s, Coca Cola’s, and Delta Airlines’ reactions to Georgia’s voter integrity protection law, SB202, passed last year. That law, after all, created such nasty things as

  • signature matching
  • voter ID
  • restrictions on drop boxes
  • ban on the mass mailing of absentee ballot request forms to those who did not ask for them,
  • mandatory citizenship checks

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said baseball’s decision to pull the All Star Game out of Atlanta that year, causing the loss of upwards of $70 million of revenue to Atlanta’s small and medium businesses, was the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said Georgia’s law is unacceptable and a step backwards.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that Georgia’s law is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.

Here’s what that law, wholly unacceptable to these corporations’ values, did.

  • total turnout of early voters—both in-person and absentee—was 2,504,956, an all-time record
  • 2,288,889 total early in-person voters this year, compared to 1,890,364 early in-person voters in the 2018 midterm elections, a 17% increase
  • average wait time in [voting] lines was about two minutes in the afternoon, when a day’s voting really starts getting going
  • tracking at three minutes
  • longest on the leader board 14 minutes
  • check-in time, when you got to the front line, 47 seconds

Now we know clearly what those corporate values are: low voter turnout, great difficulty getting to a voting booth for those who are allowed to vote, voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens.

In fine, those corporations have shown their values to be suppression of citizens’ ability to vote and diminution of the value of citizens’ votes through promotion of non-citizens’ votes.

Why would any American citizen want to do business with this kind of corporation, a corporation that so blatantly disparages what it means to be an American citizen?