Tag Archives: ethics

“I’m Busy”

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President Joe Biden (D) has traveled to Maui to observe the damage done by the wild fires there and to claim that “help would be on the way.” Biden has just been to Florida to observe the damage done by Hurricane Idalia and to claim that “help would be on the way.”

But Biden still hasn’t been to East Palestine, seven months after a train derailment that polluted the town and its water supply with toxic chemicals that leaked from train’s tank cars. “I’ve been busy,” he claims.

Well, I haven’t had the occasion to go to East Palestine. There’s a lot going on here, and I just haven’t been able to break.

A lot of that lot going on here is the 40% of his time in office that he’s spent on vacation, mostly in his Delaware home.

And this bit:

Meanwhile, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R), Senators Sherrod Brown (D), and JD Vance (R) have called on Biden to issue a disaster declaration for East Palestine.

Biden hasn’t throughout these seven months since the disaster, even though the State and local jurisdictions have asked for the declaration. Biden’s vacation schedule has been interfering with that simple action, too.

It’s clear: Biden’s vacations are more important that going to East Palestine.

Frankly, the good residents of East Palestine are not missing anything in Biden’s absence. He’s speaking to them quite clearly from where he is.

Mistake

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wants Republicans currently investigating Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden (D), and the rest of his family to broaden their investigation to include ex-Secretary of State and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and ex-President Barack Obama (D).

…this is really about the weaponization of government, the collapse of the rule of law, and its replacement by the rule of power. And that really involves three principles. It involves Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

This would be a mistake, as it would unnecessarily dilute the investigative resources available to the House committees conducting the Biden investigations, possibly fatally to those investigations. The broadening, at best, would draw out the Biden family investigation unnecessarily through that dilution.

Gingrich is right about the weaponization and the supplanting of law by power. However, the optimal way to investigate that larger matter is to separately investigate Clinton and Obama, and then tie those three investigations together into the outcome that is that weaponization and power grab.

This will be a frustratingly slow process, but it’s the best way to get to the final truth and get the relevant folks tossed from political life for their misbehaviors and the remaining jailed for their crimes.

Drug Price…Foolishness

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President Joe Biden (D) and his associates over in Medicare have identified the drugs of which he’s willing to pretend to negotiate the price. The particular drugs aren’t important; what matters is the precedent being set regarding the Progressive-Democrat-run administration’s view of what constitutes negotiation in Party’s lexicon. Readers interested in which drugs are targeted for now can find the list at the end of the linked-to article.

What’s important here is this.

The naming of the 10 drugs subject to price negotiations kicks off a lengthy process. Drugmakers have until October 1 to say whether they will join in the negotiations.
If they don’t negotiate or accept the price resulting from it, companies face a tax of up to 95% on a medicine’s US sales, or they can pull all of their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

And this:

Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price will incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. This is extortion, not a negotiation.

That’s not negotiation, that’s “Take our price, or pay even more through our usurious, if not confiscatory, taxes.” The outcome will be a stifling of medical (not just for medicinal) innovation in the US. Instead, innovation, such as might remain, will be pushed overseas, in large part to nations that don’t themselves innovate very much, having come to rely on American developments which they then heavily subsidize for their own citizens.

Some of those drugs, too, will be pulled from Medicare/Medicaid coverage, along with all of the other drugs a company makes available through those programs, which will price them out of reach of those most in need—those with the ailments being treated by those medicines and who lack the money to pay the full price.

That is, until Party takes the next obvious step and taxes those medicines’ sales revenues earned outside of Medicare/Medicaid, to be followed by Party’s diktat that those medicines must be offered through Medicare/Medicaid.

Which will result in those medicines no longer being manufactured in the US at all and no longer being sold at all in the US, regardless of their manufacture.

“Let Ukraine Direct Its Own Counteroffensive”

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US Army General Jack Keane (ret), once Army Vice Chief of Staff and current Institute for the Study of War Chairman, thinks US military personnel criticizing the way Ukraine is conducting its offensive should (my paraphrase) sit down and shut up.

Keane’s characterization of those sideline inhabitants’ behavior, chirping from the sidelines, is being generous. Whatever their own combat experience, if any, it has no relevance to the realized combat environment the Ukrainians are facing with the Russian up-armored barbarians.

No one in the American military today has designed large-scale mechanized operations against a serious and capable enemy that is employing a comprehensive defense. The last time was the Metz campaign in France in 1944, led by General George S Patton.

But in all their woke awesomeness, the Pentagon’s armchair junior high quarterbacks Know So Much Better. If these wonders truly want to help Ukraine, they’ll push President Joe Biden (D) to stop slow-walking and outright denying the weapons Ukraine needs to effectively and efficiently prosecute its offensive, and they’ll get their own bureaucrats out of the way of actual delivery.

AI to Teach Cops to be Politically Correct?

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The Los Angeles Police Department—yes, that one, of “violent extremist views” infamy regarding its cops displaying the Thin Blue Line flag anywhere in public—now is going to use Artificial Intelligence to teach cops how to be politically correct and suitably social justice-y when they make traffic stops and potentially in other, even more tension-filled, encounters.

The headline says it all:

AI to binge LAPD bodycam footage to weed out rude tone, aggressive language

Because rudeness is so terrible, and never mind the occasional—the often—need for cops to be aggressive during an encounter with an individual of the public, even on a traffic stop.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on Tuesday announced the research initiative during the Board of Police Commissioners meeting. LAPD Cmdr Marla Ciuffetelli said at the meeting the study will be used to help train future officers on how to best interact with the public while also promoting accountability, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Researchers at the University of Southern California will review [body camera] footage from about 1,000 traffic stops over the next three years and establish parameters on interactions deemed appropriate by department policies and public feedback, and inappropriate interactions.
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The researchers will take into account the location of the traffic stop, the driver’s race, and the officer’s rank and age when analyzing their findings.

What could go wrong?

One major problem is that every stop is a unique encounter and those factors have greater or lesser influence depending on the individual cop and the individual person being stopped—and the degree of influence will vary from time to time for both the cop and the person being stopped.

What’s the difference between rude talk and banter? How do they differ from time to time? Even the most PC remark by the cop can be taken amiss by the stoppee, ranging from being viewed as condescending to not being PC enough to the stoppee simply feeling like taking offense because he woke up in an owly mood. Or because cop. Never mind that every traffic stop, and many other types of encounters, start out with the cop needing to be aggressive. “Kindly to stop doing that, Sir/Madam/Zir, and let’s chat for a bit” just isn’t going to cut it.

The “training” the LAPD line officers will be forced to undergo will, also, simply add to the tension any LA cop will feel when beginning an encounter—not over the encounter itself or the person’s reaction to the stop and to the cop, but over how LAPD…managers…will perceive the cop’s behavior when they review the encounter.

I have a problem with the proposed methodology, too.

LAPD has 150 cops and civilians for traffic enforcement. Those thousand traffic stops over three years works out to a bit over 2 stops per traffic enforcer per year. That’s not a big sample, even for something as supposedly magic as AI.

Maybe the city should leave off this kind of claptrap and use the money instead for hiring more cops, putting more cops on the street, and training cops how to be cops rather than everybody’s best friend out for a nice chat.