Tag Archives: morality

Know Betters Who Know Better

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had a few things to say, in the context of an AP interview about the Supremes’ VRA ruling last month, about voter ID and the sanctity of the individual vote.

Texas’ decision to implement its voter ID law hours after the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last month was powerful evidence of an ongoing need to keep states with a history of voting discrimination from making changes in the way they hold elections without getting advance approval from Washington.

Because acting on being newly freed from the shackles of government is somehow nefarious.

The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn’t make any sense to me[.]

Because we’re irretrievably beyond redemption, men cannot change away from the mistakes of a distant past, and it takes an enlightened Progressive to instruct and guide us.

It’s inconceivable to Know Betters that such seigniory might not actually be necessary.

Bunny Huggers

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…or seal huggers.

Mark Hodgdon was scuba diving around 1:30 pm when he found a stranded baby seal covered in bite marks.

“As I got a little [bit] closer, he just swam closer to me and jumped right up on my shoulder,” said Hodgdon.

…implying that the baby seal’s distress might have been more exhaustion than serious injury.

However.

After Hodgdon and his fiancé (who was with him during this) got the seal to shore and called the New England Aquarium for assistance, when the Aquarium’s volunteer arrived, he refused to lift a finger to help the seal.

In fairness to the Aquarium, this is driven by our bunny hugger laws that make it a crime even to touch baby seals.

Touching the seal was a violation of the Federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the couple could face a $5,000 fine.  Aquarium officials say even though their intentions were good, if you see a seal you should not approach it.

No, instead,

Anyone who thinks a seal is in distress is asked to call the US Coast Guard or emergency officials and stay nearby so it can be found.

This, on the heels of the Kennedy brothers’ rescue of a leatherback turtle that was tangled in a buoy line.  Rescuing that member of an endangered species was a violation of the Endangered Species Act.

Remember: when the shark comes, and seconds count, the do-nothing authorities will be only hours away.  And expect you to pay the vig if you lift a finger to intervene in the interim.  It’s the law.

Federal Climate Plan and Crony Capitalism

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George Russell, writing for Fox News, had this on the efficacy of President Barack Obama’s national plan to fight “climate change:”

a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases .

The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they  have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.

And

[T]he study declared that “their combined impact is less than 1% of total US emissions” over the next 25 years, and they are a lousy bargain to boot:  “Very little if any GHG reductions are achieved at substantial cost with these provisions.”

[T]he study concluded “current tax expenditures and subsidies are a poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”   They “achieve small reductions in GHG emissions and are costly per unit of emissions reduction.”

The full cost was something the study was unable to make entirely clear.  It estimated that the federal government had spent some $48 billion in just the past two years on “tax expenditures”—meaning subsidies, credits, and other incentives—related to the energy sector, and also noted that few were specifically enacted to reduce greenhouse gases.

Obama’s plan also ignores the erroneous nature of its assumptions about what is a significant GHG.  It includes all of their assumed GHGs, for instance including atmospheric CO2….

Worse, for the short term,

[T]he probe underlined how little is yet known about the relationship between government tax-and-spend activity and actual climate change results, especially as government spending gets embedded in a growing thicket of regulations and initiatives created to solve different parts of the greenhouse gas puzzle, but all touted to achieve the same ends.

And

[T]he plan also calls for $7.9 billion in additional funding for advanced clean energy technology, a hike of about 30%.  This includes investment in a range of energy technologies, from advanced biofuels to nuclear mini-reactors.

Never mind that this is a waste of money.  If the technology can’t compete in the free market without subsidies, it’s not commercially viable.  And so does not warrant subsidization—assuming government subsidies are ever appropriate.

The ludicrosity goes on, but you get the idea.

It’s hard to believe that Obama and his colleagues in the Executive Branch and allies in the Legislative Branch didn’t know this stuff a priori; earlier studies, for instance, have debunked the very concept of serious human impact on evolving climate.  But he, and they, do know full well the pecuniary benefit of this plan for the plan’s recipients.

The study itself can be found here.

Detroit and the Nation

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In Detroit’s bankruptcy filing, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) included a letter outlining his reasons for his approval of the filing.  Here are some of them [emphasis added].

  • The City’s unemployment rate has nearly tripled since 2000 and is more than double the national average.
  • Its citizens wait an average of 58 minutes for the police to respond to their calls, compared to a national average of 11 minutes.
  • The City’s police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances are so old that breakdowns make it impossible to keep up the fleet or properly carry out their roles.
  • The City has more than $18 billion in accrued obligations.
  • Detroit tax rates are at their current legal limits, and that even if the City was legally able to raise taxes, its residents cannot afford to pay additional taxes. Detroit simply cannot raise enough revenue to meet its current obligations….
  • The City’s population has declined 63% from its peak, including a 28% decline since 2000.
  • A decreasing tax base has made meeting obligations to creditors impossible.

Horribly high expenditures against a tax system that’s already very expensive for the citizens has driven Detroit into the ground and forced restructuring through bankruptcy.

What are the implications for the nation as a whole?

On the one hand, bankruptcy—legal bankruptcy—is not an option for the US.  Nations have no bankruptcy system available to them; all a bankrupt nation can do is to repudiate its debts or debase its currency, repaying with devalued (dollars)—to repudiate its debts through subterfuge.

Here lies the United States: we have horribly high expenditures (see Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid transfer payments, Social Security, Federal public service union pensions, Stimulus spending, etc) against a tax system that is hammering the paying population into the ground while, by design, excluding half the tax base from tax obligations.   This combines to create on the national level massive annual deficits, exploding national debt, and increasing costs to borrow (presently low, Bernanke’s artificially suppressed interest rates will not be able to stop the market’s assessments of our national creditworthiness).

Detroit is the future of the United States under our current policies.  In that light, notice the loss of population as Detroiters fled the disaster—28% of its people just since 2000.  As our national disaster unfolds—unless we move to terminate our Federal government’s destructive policies and put aside our own disdain for work and responsibility—where will Americans go?

Some Thoughts on President Obama’s Remarks on the Zimmerman/Martin Case

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I’ll leave aside President Barack Obama’s segue into his hobby horses of gun violence, the role of government in self defense (which is, of necessity, first and foremost a personal matter), and how government should manage how we think about things.  I’ll just comment on his remarks about race and the Zimmerman acquittal.

The following excerpts what I believe to be the relevant parts of his speech [emphasis added] (the full transcript of which can be found here, via The Washington Post).

Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.  And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that—that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me, at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.  And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.
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And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration.
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We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys?
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…figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society[.]

Is this following, door locking, elevator nervousness, etc occurring at the same rate today that it was 35 years ago, with no improvement?  Locks, mechanically, are a whole lot quieter today than they were 35 years ago, and many (most?) cars today lock their doors as soon as they’re put into gear or start moving the first time; I have to wonder whether lock-clicking even is audible on today’s streets.  Regardless, is this behavior really occurring today unabated?  I’ve not seen any of this in the (very thoroughly integrated) stores, or elevators, or streets—or restaurants or any other public spaces—I frequent; although I certainly did see much of this 35 years ago.  But then, I’m just a pasty white guy….

Obama speaks of the inescapability of a history of 35 years and more ago.  He talks of the inescapability of a history of nearly two generations—and more—ago, as though today’s children still are trapped in the past of their grandfathers.  Yet, what’s also, if not more so, inescapable is that men also can bring to bear the fact of great improvement in relations over these 35 years.  It’s also inescapable that blacks can—and do—recognize that not every ruling—legal, economic, or otherwise—that goes against a black man or in favor of a white or Hispanic man must, perforce, have been a racial ruling and not an honest one.  For Obama to suggest otherwise is to demean the intelligence and maturity of the “black community.”  Indeed, adding to frustration levels on this matter is his, and his liberal confreres’, insistence on wallowing in that history (which roughly coincides with the last time Obama actually was in the world before entering the cloisters of legal academe and politics) as though it were the present, rather than moving forward.

No, the history of blacks and of black treatment is not the present.  Certainly there remains racism—but today is radically different from the general history of 35 years ago that Obama insinuates remains the present.  Yes, he did pay lip service to change with his stock phrases concerning progress made; he offered them as an afterthought at the end of his remarks.

Regardless of any of the foregoing, though, is the appropriate response to following, to door-locking, to nervous purse-clutching to attack the one behaving inappropriately, to “ground and pound” that one?  Is Obama suggesting that 35 years ago—or today—he could have been the one assaulting a man whose behavior offended him?

Then Obama asked that we think about how to bolster and reinforce African-American boys.  How about, instead, thinking about how to bolster and reinforce American boys?  And American girls?  (This, though, is not done by government involvement with our children, rather by government working to protect the economic and moral environment so as to let local communities bolster and reinforce families.)

Along these lines, on the subject of his last question quoted above: one way—the best way—to help “African-American men” feel they’re a full part of “this society” would be to stop holding them separate from society and to stop singling them out for special treatment (vis., “African-American men” instead of American men (who happen to be black), or making exceptions for them because of a history that is increasingly less related to the present, or affirmative action programs).  Let them actually be a full part of society.

Finally, what does our President see when he looks out over the audience at any of his speeches?  A sea of Americans, who happen to have a variety of ethnic heritages?  Or a collection of distinct ethnic identities who happen to have American citizenship?