Tag Archives: morality

The Biden Coverup

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What’s to be done about those who participated in the coverup? How do we hold them accountable—and by accountable, I mean how do we see them suitably and publicly punished?

The press’ complicity in the coverup is well known by all of us not already in thrall to their writings and television natterings. Most of us have learned to take their words skeptically, and we’ve moved on to other news and commentary sources, newer and perhaps no more trustworthy, but that’s yet to be demonstrated.

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians, though—they’re another matter. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the only Party member willing to expose the emperor was the back bencher Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who openly campaigned for President late in Party’s primary Potemkin contest on the premise that Biden wasn’t up to another four years either physically or mentally. Party castigated him as a traitor to his party, an opportunist, and a Republican cat’s paw. Then, in a remarkable—and instructive—demonstration of Party’s dedication to democratic elections and to democracy of any form, Party canceled altogether their sham primary and pronounced by fiat Kamala Harris its candidate.

Party politicians other than Phillips contributed to the coverup of Biden’s growing mental incompetence either directly through their pronouncements of his fitness or indirectly through their studied silence on Biden’s capacities.

In sum, Party politicians openly lied to us citizens, and as the WSJ also put it, they denied the American people a better presidential choice, or at least in the eyes of some 77 million of us, a better alternative candidate for the office. They denied even their own voters the opportunity to choose a better alternative.

Party and Party politicians lied to all of us about so foundational a matter as who will lead our nation in its time of peril, who will exercise American influence around the world on matters central to our economic and political national security.

If Party politicians are willing to lie to us—have lied to us—about such a basic matter, what else will they lie to us about if reelected to their existing offices, or worse, if reelected to majorities in the House and Senate and in the White House?

Another Reason…

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…we can’t trust those of the Left, and why even the Left can’t have nice things. This one is the smear campaign against the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Senator from Pennsylvania.

It began with a once-trustworthy senior aid to John Fetterman, Adam Jentleson, who sent a letter to Fetterman’s doctor after Fetterman’s recovery from his stroke was readily apparent. Jentleson wrote that

the senator was suffering from “conspiratorial thinking” and “megalomania” while experiencing “high highs and low lows.” In “long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues,” Mr Fetterman was “lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.” Mr Jentleson also said the senator was “preoccupied” with Twitter and driving “recklessly.”

Jentleson’s attack is only the most overt and blunt instance. There is a constant susurration behind closed doors and behind certain backs of concerns—carefully couched as being for Fetterman’s declining welfare, of course—for his mental state.

Fetterman’s mental disability? his deviation from the Left’s orthodoxy: he’s more moderate than the Left thought he would be and want him to be. He’s no radical, extreme Leftist firebrand thrower.

I was bothered, in the beginning, by Fetterman’s medical fitness for office following his stroke. But once he became able to communicate with the aid of a laptop translator so he could read what people were saying rather than having to process audio, the center of his stroke’s damage, it became clear that his mind was sound, and regardless of what anyone might think (anyone other than those of the Left) of his politics, he was, and is, quite rational. He no longer needs his laptop for this purpose, and his speaking difficulties, also typical of strokes, have long since nearly fully abated, too, outcomes increasingly typical of stroke rehab.

The smear and its rationale are reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s persecution, and consignment to its gulag, of those who disagreed with the Communist Party: such disagreement was ipso facto proof of their insanity and of the necessity of sequestering them away from “normal” society.

Vatican City Finances

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The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy article on the financial state of Vatican City, a condition that is rife with incompetent financial management taken advantage of by criminal financial management perpetrators and ongoing, determined obfuscation, refusal to cooperate with auditors, and cynical downplaying of the importance of the City’s finances by the incumbent financial managers and their supporters.

The article ended with this:

Some cardinals this week have been critical of the emphasis some have placed on the Vatican’s financial struggles.
“Jesus sent the Apostles and later the bishops into the world to preach the Gospel of salvation, redemption, hope to everybody. This remains the main issue for the Church,” [Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig] Muller said. “The other questions—the financial state of the Vatican—it’s not so important for the essence.”

The financial state of the Vatican lies at the core of the Pope’s and the Church’s ability to preach the Gospel of salvation, redemption, hope to everybody. It’s a global effort, and it cannot be done for free.

It seems like the Cardinals have themselves become a collection of moneychangers rather than ministers to the flock.

Why Must They Be Mutually Exclusive?

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section objected to an op-ed whose writer touted Federally mandated IVF insurance provided by private economy insurers as a means to elevate our nation’s too low birth rate.

The letter-writer proposed, instead, a tiered cash baby bonus: bigger for married women, smaller for unmarried women.

My question: why must it be one or the other? Why not both?

Follow-on question: why not consider the system of which these are just two components? If the Federal government, or at least the Republicans in the government, are going to work for increasing our birth rate and against the related universal and easily obtained abortion rate—and they should, on both—and on the underlying economic situation of the middle and lower class individuals and families, why not provide women—married or not—in parallel with a range of incentives to have more babies, with financial, educational, and medical support during their pregnancies and in the period surrounding birth, and in the first years (until kindergarten?) of the baby’s life, expanding that to include the baby/toddler/child in the support mechanisms?

If our government and us are going to be serious about birthrates and about right to life, government and we need to get serious about achieving those goals.

This is Naïve

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Perhaps it’s even disingenuous. Roland Fryer, of Harvard University, wants to bring algorithms into college/university admissions offices under the claim that it would help reduce endless, unproductive battles over race- and class-based affirmative action.

Of course, they would do no such thing. Algorithms are nothing more than software packages written by humans as tools to speed decision-making in narrowly defined areas in accordance with equally narrowly defined criteria. Inescapably, though, those decision-making software packages and their defined criteria have embedded within them the personal biases and world views of those human programmers, software testers, and their supervisors. The databases on which those algorithms are trained also are written by humans and so themselves contain human biases and world views. On a (slightly) higher level, there’s another layer of human bias and world view: it’s humans who select the databases to be used for algorithm training.

The presence of these biases and world views is inescapable and wholly independent of the intentions of the humans involved. Even those with the purest of intentions and the strongest efforts to control the impact of their biases and world views will have those leak into their algorithms and training databases. Even efforts to balance to net zero those biases and world views by using a political and social cross-section of humans in those production efforts are subject to the same shortcomings via the selection of those humans and the definitions of what constitutes a suitable cross-section.

That all of this still could lead to strong bias in the algorithms, despite the best of intentions, is amply demonstrated by Alphabet’s overtly racist Google Gemini AI package (which Alphabet claims has been corrected, but only after the fact, not before the AI was released and in use), Robby Starbuck’s suit against Meta over that company’s AI smearing him as involved with the J6 riot and an extremist organization, and Mark Walter’s suit against OpenAI over its ChatGPT smear accusing him of embezzlement.

Colleges and universities, despite Supreme Court rulings banning consideration of race in their admissions decisions, still do that under other names and rationalizations. Using these human-written and so too-likely biased algorithms in their admissions decisions would merely give those institutions another way to disguise their admissions misbehaviors.