Tag Archives: ethics

Wrist Slaps and Unequal Justice

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Navy sailor Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao was caught passing classified information concerning an Okinawa radar system, along with plans for a large-scale maritime training exercise in the Pacific theatre, to a spy for the People’s Republic of China. [OPSEC note: the exercise plans would allow, among other things, the PRC to watch the radar system in action during the exercise.] Zhao has been sentenced to 27 months in prison. A whole 27 months. A wrist slap.

Meanwhile, the 6 January rioters—those who have actually had trials three years(!) after the event and whose trials have actually run to completion—have been sentenced to 3-6 years, and some have been sentenced to as many as 20 years.

Meanwhile meanwhile, insurrectionists rioters in Portland and Seattle have, in the main, gone wholly uncharged at all, with a few scapegoats getting a few months.

It’s long past time to clean out the DoJ, from top to bottom, including the FBI. In parallel with that, it’s long past time to clean up our sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines.

If a Navy traitor can get off with a wrist slap, so, too, should the rioters at Capital Hill. That precedent was set prior to Zhao’s case, with those “rioters” who seized Seattle territory, drove out the Seattle government, and held the territory for weeks getting off with wrist slaps or going scot-free, and with those “rioters” in Portland who attacked and tried, for weeks, to burn down a Federal building with Federal government security personnel inside also getting off with wrist slaps or going scot-free.

Alternatively, the Navy traitor should have gotten tens of years in jail, even a life sentence. The 6 January rioters—a truly mostly peaceful affair, just noisy and boisterous (the only true violence was a security officer shooting one of the rioters and a security officer getting bashed over the head by a rioter using a fire extinguisher)—should have gotten off with sentences for the trespass they were committing, and the occasional petty theft they were committing in their souvenir hunting. The insurrectionists in Seattle and Portland should have gotten intermediate sentences in the fives of years in jail range.

It’s long past time to clean out the DoJ, from top to bottom, including the FBI. In parallel with that, it’s long past time to clean up our sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines. Whether or not you, dear reader, agree with my sentencing suggestions for these particular cases, the rules need to be adjusted to produce truly similar sentences for substantially similar actions, and—especially—existing personnel completely replaced with those who actually will apply and enforce the rules.

AMLO’s Extortion Attempt

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Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador has made his demands clear concerning what he wants in return for helping the Biden administration do its job—which it doesn’t need help doing—regarding our border with Mexico. AMLO’s demands are naked extortion.

  • give $20 billion to Latin American and Caribbean countries
  • grant work visas to 10 million Hispanics who have worked in the US for at least 10 years
  • end sanctions against Venezuela and halt the blockade of Cuba

No. Just close the border altogether. Let no illegal aliens in; forcing their remaining in Mexico. Also bar Mexican visitors and Mexican products.

This won’t happen, though, with Timid Joe Biden. And it’s shameful that the United States should be victimized by the extortion of a Third World nation run by drug cartels.

Of Course He Did

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The Washington Policy Center says that Washington’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Jay Inslee has known all along that his carbon tax would significantly increase gas prices in the State.

In a Thursday morning blog post, WPC Environmental Director Todd Myers notes that reports from Inslee’s 2014 Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force, or CERT, showed a carbon tax could result in a significant hike in the price at the pump.
In fact, Inslee’s then-chief policy advisor Matt Steuerwalt, based on an analysis created for the task force, told the Senate Environment, Energy & Technology Committee that a carbon dioxide price of $52 per metric ton—almost identical to the state’s current carbon dioxide price—would increase prices by 44 cents per gallon.

Of course he’s known this all along. It’s why he pushed so hard for his carbon tax Climate Commitment Act. He’s trying to price hydrocarbon-based energy out of existence in his State.

Arrogance of the Left

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This time it’s the arrogance of Liz Cheney, the Leftist politician nominally of the Republican Party but resoundingly rejected by Republican voters. Here’s Cheney admonishing New Hampshire Republicans ahead of the upcoming Presidential primary there:

In a little over two weeks when you in New Hampshire go to the polls the world will be watching.
Speak for us all. Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation. But make sure they know that we do not bend, we do not break, and we do not yield in the defense of our freedom. Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican Party.

Because Republicans who disagree with her Specialness are, perforce, cowards.

Sure.

There’s a reason Republicans in her own State rejected her.

Western Battery-Car Adoption Anxiety

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The Wall Street Journal ran an article centered on how “western anxiety about Chinese EVs could prove self-defeating,” with a subheadline that summarized the thesis:

The US and Europe risk slowing electric-vehicle adoption by excluding Chinese suppliers from subsidies and raising tariffs

I have a hard time seeing the downside to slowing battery car adoption. Leave aside the tremendous drain that charging all those battery cars (assuming widespread adoption) would have on our already near or at capacity electric power grid and generating capacity for that grid.

Battery cars are tremendously polluting and damaging to our environment, from dirt in the ground to end-of-life battery disposal. Mining the metals—lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and on and on, metals that are used in far greater quantity in battery cars than in gasoline- diesel- or natural gas-powered vehicles—is extremely damaging, both from the toxicity of the metals themselves and from the toxicity of the tailings from the mining operations.

Processing those metals into battery-car-usable components is intensely energy demanding (have I mentioned the strains on anyone’s electricity grid?).

Disposing of those so-far unrecyclable dead batteries at their end of life is enormously polluting as they leach out of even the most well-kept landfills.

The risk is that the West cuts off its nose to spite its face. Slow down the shift to EVs too much to build local supply chains and give domestic manufacturers time to adapt, and Chinese technology might simply pull farther ahead….

Meh.

The technologies involved are useful, they should be pursued apace, and the supply chain problems need to be worked for a host of different reasons. However, it’s a Good Thing that battery cars are not being rapidly incorporated into our transportation systems.