Tag Archives: ethics

Christianity is a Threat

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The Chinese Communist Party, through its provincial organ in Henan Province, says so.

The Hebi Municipal Radio Administrative Bureau [hosted] a presentation titled “Christianity’s Enormous Harm on China’s Security,” to party members in the city of Hebi….

Instructive title, that.  The seminarists insisted that the “correct view” is that Christianity (and, I suppose, religion generally), are bent on undermining the Communists’ rule.  Never mind that “render unto Caesar” bit.

Of course, Christianity’s central tenets of conscience, free will, individual responsibility do work out to threats to tyrannical societies like the PRC’s because these fundamental positions are threats to the power of the tyrants that reign over those societies.  Hence the need for the CCP to work so zealously to suppress Christianity and along the way to lock Muslims up in concentration camps and jail Falun Gong followers.

Keep in mind, too, that this is the People’s Republic of China that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden says is no threat to us.

Military Academy Athlete Grads Go Pro Immediately?

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President Donald Trump supports this, and he’s actually serious.

I am going to look at doing a waiver for service-academy athletes who can get into the major leagues, like the NFL, hockey, baseball, and they’ll serve their time when they leave professional sports. I imagine that would make recruiting a little bit easier[.]

This is foolish.  These guys got an excellent education at good engineering schools as well as a strong military and leadership training.  In return for paying zilch for that education, they accepted a multi-year commitment to serve on active duty in our armed forces and to begin that service upon graduation.

Delay that service in favor of a professional athletic career?  Let’s leave aside the morality of such a thing and what it says to the less athletically stellar cadets who don’t have professional sports careers in the offing.  Look, instead, at the practical outcome.

A professional baseball career can last for years—a decade or more (ignoring outliers like Cal Ripken), even longer if AAA ball counts for this delay, serving as it does as continued prep for the majors and as rehab opportunities in later stages of a career (more on this in a bit).

A professional football or hockey career lasts quite a bit shorter—because of career-ending injury or accumulation of injuries.  What’s the value of a soldier, airman, marine, or sailor who’s so banged up that he can no longer ply his athlete’s trade by the time he reports for active duty?  Here we include that baseball player sent down for rehab.  What’s the risk he poses to the soldier, airman, marine, or sailor serving beside him in a fight?  What’s the additional medical cost this guy poses to the service required to wait on his appearance for duty?

How much time does such a man have left for his military career if he’s able to complete his professional sport career reasonably injury-free?

On the flip side are these two examples.  David Robinson, Navy Academy grad and basketball star, served his commitment promptly on graduation and then went on to a highly successful NBA career.  He needed no delay.

Napoleon McCallum, Navy Academy grad and football star, served his commitment promptly on graduation and then went on to a highly successful NFL career—until he had a career-ending injury during a Monday Night Football game.  McCallum’s injury, admittedly, was exceptionally gruesome, even for a terminating one, but blown knees that end careers are common in football:

[He suffered a] ruptured artery in his left knee, and tore three ligaments, tore the calf and hamstring from the bone, and suffered nerve damage in the knee. …McCallum’s surgeon told him that there was no chance of him ever being medically cleared to play again.

How fit for military duty would McCallum have been had he had that injury before serving his commitment?

This is a bad idea that needs no further serious consideration.

Wrong Vote Outcome

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They didn’t vote the way they were supposed to, so there’ll be a whole new election.  No, not for Georgia governor, but for Mayor of Istanbul.  Based solely on Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plaint that there were “numerical mistakes,” “irregularities,” and outright “corruption” in that mayoral election—Erdoğan’s party didn’t win there; the Republican People’s Party’s Ekrem Imamoglu did—the Supreme Electoral Council has completely annulled the election and required a new one to be held.

Echoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) claim that if her Progressive-Democratic Party didn’t win big in 2020, President Donald Trump would refuse to accept the outcome, Erdoğan did just that in Istanbul:

a margin of only 15,000 votes in a city as large as Istanbul was too close to be fair.

And

He [Erdoğan] said a difference of “13,000 to 14,000 votes” was not enough in a city of 15 million inhabitants.

So his election board tossed the results.  This, after AKP spokesman Omer Celik, speaking for Erdoğan, promised

At the end of the day, we will accept the final result regardless of whether it is to our advantage or disadvantage[.]

Former German Greens leader Cem Özdemir, who has Turkish roots suggested that this shows Erdogan to be a

bitter old man, who has long passed the zenith of his power. …  In the world of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, everyone who thinks differently to him is a terrorist, and every election he loses is a sham election[.]

Apparently not so far past.  And there’s that echo, again.

Disarmament

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The Progressive-Democratic Party wants to disarm us. That’s made clear by Party Presidential candidate and Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker’s (NJ) gun control plan.  Senator Spartacus wants, among other requirements [emphasis added]:

  • prospective gun owners must prove to the FBI that they’ve completed a gun-safety course to obtain a federal gun license
  • that federal license would be required to purchase a firearm
  • a federal background check on virtually all sales
  • the federal license would be good for only five years
  • current firearm owners would have to get this federal license, also
  • limit handgun purchases limited to one per person per month

This can only be taken as an assault on the federal republican nature of our nation and a backdoor assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Background checks already are required by the feds in order to purchase a firearm.  States already require licenses—which themselves carry safety courses as part of the licensing procedure—in order to carry firearms on public property (a couple of States have Constitutional Carry capabilities, instead).

No, this expansion of background checks and federalizing the licensing requirement can only be for building a Federal database of who has weapons.

Background checks to screen prospective owners and buyers for felony records can be useful—at the State level—but when the checks are used to build a database of weapons owners, which is the only purpose for requiring existing firearms owners with their proven track records, to get federally licensed, those checks become a lethal danger to individual liberty. Such databases are too easily used by governments at all levels of jurisdictions (the Federal level is only the most powerful) to seize legally owned weapons under any guise that seems convenient—whether an “emergency” or a claimed domestic violence threat.

Even the domestic violence bit might seem legitimate, but for the process for the accused to get his weapons back and government’s demonstrated intransigence in returning other seized property after the seizure has been deemed erroneous.  One has only to look at the lengthy nature of the proceedings for getting weapons back.  One has only to look at the outright refusal of jurisdictions to return confiscated vehicles, even cash, seized under drug or money laundering claims proven erroneous.

Censorship Continued

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The Poynter Institute, an organization that masquerades itself as a…watchdog…built a list of what it claimed to be unreliable news outlets and then urged censorship through boycotting these offending outlets. “Unreliable,” mind you, was determined by Poynter personnel.  Then they got caught, and they’re claiming to have withdrawn their list.

Here are two critical clues to the nature of their list. One is [emphasis added]:

…initially released a list of more than 500 “unreliable” news outlets purportedly “built from pre-existing databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers around the country.”

Even those purported researchers were carefully unnamed.

And this one:

The index was created with the help of an employee for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That’s by itself is a fatal condemnation.

From those two clues, it’s clear that the Poynter Institute got exactly what it was looking for.  It just got caught, like the Ezra Klein’s JournoList of a few short years ago.

Do we have, though, any reason to believe the list actually has been scrapped? Or is it merely being better hidden? Like that JournoList. This is, after all, a long-established member of the NLMSM.  The Managing Editor of Poynter, Barbara Allen, had this about that in her statement:

[W]e are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria. The list was intended to be a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that purported to offer news; it was not intended to be definitive or all encompassing

In other words, they’ll be back with a more effectively disguised version of their attempt at censorship, a censorship goal made plain by her next sentence. A starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites, indeed. A “starting place” written by journalists and JournoList members who will define for us “veracity,” because we’re too stupid to recognize it on our own.

And not intended to be definitive….  Yewbetcha.