Tag Archives: morality

Foolish Social Conservatives

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Some are as foolish as the Republicans’ House Chaos Caucus in their all-or-nothing positions. A case in point is Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and its supporting cohorts. These entities are, quite properly, anti-abortion, but their tactics are, at best, suboptimal.

The activists’ warning was simple: extending subsidies without such limits [no funding for abortions] was a line Republicans must not cross to keep social conservative support in next year’s midterm elections.

Withholding support for Republican candidates in 2026 over their not being anti-abortion enough to suit them will guarantee a Progressive-Democratic Party majority in the House—and those politicians absolutely will not stay with the status quo; they will enthusiastically and loudly expand access to abortion and make all of us taxpayers—including members of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, et al.—pay for those abortions.

Better would be, for the near term, to push a concrete (not merely conceptual) plan for using the putative subsidy funding instead as vouchers for us citizens to use to fund our HSAs and FSAs, with limits on annual contributions to those eliminated. An additional improvement to HSAs in particular would be eliminating the requirement to have a particular kind of health coverage policy (so-called high-deductible policies) in order to have an HSA. Any citizen should be able to set up and fund an HSA regardless of the kind of policy or no policy at all that he has. Allowing unused FSA funds to be rolled over into subsequent years would be a useful step toward rolling FSA accounts into HSAs, eliminating the quasi-duplication.

True, But

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday installment of its Letters section suggested a solution to our nation’s baby-birth dearth.

The problem isn’t finances—it’s perceived inconvenience.
Children are a responsibility: a limitation on us in an age of careerism and radical individualism. But they also contain a hidden wealth that exceeds anything else—and hope for the future. We need to stop framing decisions about childrearing as simply another cost-benefit analysis and present young people with a more beautiful vision of what family life can be and do for the world.

The problem, though, also includes this simple, critical fact: today’s young people have already experienced what family life is, not hypothetical “can be’s.”

It’s necessary to address that realized experience in these proposed presentations. Absent that, such presentations will be perceived as just another installment in the empty words of lectures by older generations.

Who Tested this Stuff?

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram (which he controls through his Meta) claims to be protecting child users from predators.

However.

When Instagram began fencing off teen accounts last year for safety reasons, content from people under 18 all but vanished for adults.
Teen accounts were automatically private, and posts and reels from those accounts no longer circulated in the Explore tab and main feeds, except in the case of adults who were already following teens. Predators suddenly had a lot harder time finding targets.

Actually, not so much.

But two moms affiliated with the family-advocacy organization ParentsTogether Action discovered a workaround, which they shared with me: When a teen account comments on a public post or video reel, and an adult account that hasn’t already been flagged for suspicious behavior sees it, the adult can chat up the teen in the comments and even send that teen a follow request. If the teen accepts, the two can engage in private direct messaging.

Those direct messages can—as these tests also proved—include nude picture exchanges, and then the sextortion operations can begin.

Zuckerberg’s claims, through his Instagram team, regarding these exchanges:

When the test accounts shared nude images with one another, they initially appeared blurred in the teen account, but the teen account user could opt to view the photos. Instagram says its nudity protection feature—on by default for teen accounts and including warnings about the dangers of sharing such images—has encouraged teens to think twice. In June, more than 40% of blurred images received in direct messages remained blurred, the company says.

And 60% did not remain blurred, apparently. If Zuckerberg’s Instagram programmers are that capable of identifying the teen accounts, why are nude images allowed to be transmitted to them at all?

These “workarounds” are so obvious that I have to question how seriously Zuckerberg is taking these threats to our children.

Who tested this stuff? Apparently, no one qualified or serious.

A Thought on Crimes by Children

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Serious crimes are adult crimes, regardless of the age of the perpetrator. The perpetrator needs to be seriously punished for the crime, too. But sentencing a 14- or 15-yr-old to life in prison for a murder? What about the 6-yr-old who brought a gun to school and shot his teacher? I doubt if he understood the magnitude of his act, even though he likely knows the words to say and could say them.

I tend to agree with the Supreme Court Justice who worried about life sentences for children.

Serious crimes are adult crimes. Full stop. But who’s responsible for them, really? The child who did the deed needs punishment, as I said, but he’s also able to be reeducated, or at least worth the attempt.

However. It’s the parent or parents, whether biological or adoptive, who raised the child, who led the child astray or who let him wander astray through negligently absent parental attention.

I suggest this alternative: try the child as an adult for his adult crime, but put him into a juvenile detention and education environment. Adjudicate a suitable jail term for the crime; apply the sentencing guidelines for the crime committed, but apply the upper end of the guidelines to the parents—both of them if they’re present in the family.

Mom and pop should be in jail for the crime their child, for whom they are irrevocably responsible, committed.

Retarded or Crooked?

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President Donald Trump (R) has called Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Tim Walz retarded. Having watched this Party politician stumble and mumble his way through a failed campaign for Vice President, and especially during the only Vice President debate in which he was willing to participate, I’m forced to conclude that the characterization (which is rude, but Karens notwithstanding, it’s no slur) isn’t entirely inaccurate.

But wait….

Minnesota’s Department of Human Service Employees has more.

[T]he Minnesota DHS, wrote on X that Walz is “100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota.”
“We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response. Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports. In addition to retaliating against whistleblower[s], Tim Walz disempowered the Office of the Legislative Auditor, allowing agencies to disregard their audit findings and guidance.”

This comes in relation to the massive Wuhan Virus fraud in which Minnesota was an enthusiastic participant and which Walz had been permitting that participation despite those warnings.

[T]he Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, which prosecutors say involved more than $250 million in stolen funds from a federally-funded child nutrition program and has already resulted in over 50 convictions. Many of the individuals charged come from Minnesota’s Somali community.

It’s hard to see how such large fraud could continue for so long unless the governor, at best, cavalierly turned a blind eye to it.

Thus: retarded or crooked? Maybe both.