Tag Archives: responsibilities

Walls and Negotiation

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Last Friday, President Donald Trump hosted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), and a few others for another round of attempted negotiation over the border wall we so badly need.

The outcome?  Pelosi and Schumer continued their refusal to negotiate at all.  They demanded the government’s partial shutdown be ended before they’ll say a word about funding for a wall.  Never mind that, as they’ve made clear since last month, that word, their only word, is “No,” anyway.

Trump may be responsible for the partial shutdown’s initiation (that’s arguable, though, given Pelosi’s and Schumer’s opening position, even before Trump said he’d officially take the fall), but it’s plain that Pelosi and Schumer are responsible for keeping the partial shutdown going—they’re the ones refusing even to discuss funding for a wall, much less negotiate the matter.  This is the same pair that voted for a wall under both Clinton and Obama, and this is the same pair that supported $25 billion for a wall in return for protections not for just 800 thousand DACA persons, but for those 800 thousand DACAs plus a million more who are similarly situated, just a bit over a year ago.  Until Schumer welched on the deal.

Just after that meeting, we had this spectacle: on Fox News‘ Outnumbered Overtime program Progressive-Democratic strategist and ex-Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Antjuan Seawright disparaged Trump’s “shutdown” over his keeping a campaign promise (scroll ahead to about 2:48).

How is it possible to negotiate with those who refuse to negotiate?  How is it possible to negotiate with those who consider promises to be empty words?  Even were the former overcome, no agreement with Progressive-Democrats could be trusted—their agreement is only too likely to be just another ploy.

Brexit and a Pan-European Military Establishment

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Recall the year-old EU effort with PESCO (the EU’s carefully euphemistically named Permanent Structured Cooperation), the bloc’s effort to form an EU army that would represent and act in the (sovereign) name of the European Union in defending Europe from outside incursions.  Oh, and be less dependent on us and our nuclear umbrella, our treasure, and our blood for their defense.

We’re seeing yet another example of the too-broad effort to unite all of Europe under one political flag, as this PESCO effort continues to lag.  More importantly, we’re seeing the cost to the EU of Brexit.  As Handelsblatt Today observed, the current situation is one of military failure:

The German Council on Foreign Relations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, DGAP) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) recently reported that the EU at best has only a third of the resources needed for its ambitions to intervene in armed conflicts in Europe or neighboring regions, provide humanitarian aid in catastrophes, help in rebuilding programs, and to free hostages and evacuate civilians.
The EU does not have enough ships, planes, aircraft carriers, or even reconnaissance equipment to accomplish these goals, especially after the UK leaves the EU.

Notice that last.  Aside from the minor detail that the Brits will take with them half the EU’s carrier complement (France has the other one), they’re taking with them manpower, equipment, a serious (by European standards) defense budget, and a strong innovative capacity.

Prime Minister Theresa May is badly missing another strong bet in her series of missed bets as she “negotiates” Great Britain’s departure from the EU.

Racism and Naming Schools

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Jason Willick had an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that recounted a failed effort to rename a Palo Alto, CA, middle school in honor of an American WWII war hero. That hero was PFC and Silver Star recipient Fred Minoru Yamamoto of the US Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team; he was killed in action in 1944 in the Vosges, in eastern France, by German artillery.

Chinese-Americans [sic] raised a huge hue and cry over the proposal—because Isoroku Yamamoto was an admiral of some…fame…in the Japanese navy from 1939-1943.  Fred and Isoroku shared a last name, and even though there was no relationship, familial or otherwise, whatsoever between the two, that similarity of sound in last names was enough, in those Chinese-American minds, to brand Fred with the same evil as Isoroku. No school would be named after Fred as a result of this uproar.

This is an example of identity politics in its full, racist bloom.  It goes further.

“Are we racist?” one Taiwanese-American mother asks incredulously. “Look at the history in Asia,” she adds, while preferring not to be quoted by name. “Taiwan was colonized by Japan for 50 years.”

Yeah. You are racist. The Republic of China [sic—it’s interesting you insist on using your misnomer] was not colonized by anyone related to Fred Yamamoto. Your insistence that all Yamamotos look alike—your refusal to see any difference among them—and your manufacture of hurt feelings over a partial name mark you racist, indeed. No wonder you hide in anonymity.

Do you agree, Madam, with Progressive-Democrat FD Roosevelt’s locking up of Americans with Japanese heritage in “internment” camps solely on the basis of that heritage?  Two of which incarcerated our Yamamoto before his enlistment?  Think about this entry from Fred’s diary, written while he was in the Heart Mountain “internment” camp. He made this entry on the occasion of his decision to enlist in the United States Army:

Because faith to me is a positive thing, I’m putting all my blue chips on the U.S.A. … In short, I’ve volunteered.

 

Separately, the identity politics obsession of Willick is equally evident: Taiwanese-American? Not American with Taiwanese [RoC] heritage? Really?

Facebook’s Secret Rule Book

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Facebook has written a massive, byzantine, and secret document of rules packed with spreadsheets and power point slides to help it censor the news posted tackle misinformation posted to its facility.

Even the New York Times gets it, at least to an extent.

The closely held rules are extensive, and they make the company a far more powerful arbiter of global speech than has been publicly recognized or acknowledged by the company itself[.]

It’s also internally inconsistent.

The [NYT] discovered a range of gaps, biases and outright errors—including instances where Facebook allowed extremism to spread in some counties while censoring mainstream speech in others.

Are these deliberate?  It’s hard to believe the smartest kids, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, their management team, wouldn’t be doing this deliberately.  But it’s also hard to discern the logic of their inconsistencies in their rulebook, too.

Inconsistencies like

outsource[ing …] content moderation to other companies that tend to hire unskilled workers…. The 7,500-plus moderators “have mere seconds to recall countless rules and apply them to the hundreds of posts that dash across their screens each day. When is a reference to ‘jihad,’ for example, forbidden? When is a ‘crying laughter’ emoji a warning sign?”

Sara Su, a senior engineer on Facebook’s News Feed:

It’s not our place to correct people’s speech, but we do want to enforce our community standards on our platform. When you’re in our community, we want to make sure that we’re balancing freedom of expression and safety.

Facebook’s definition of “balance.”  Facebook’s definition of “freedom of expression.”  Facebook’s definition of “safety.”  And so Facebook, appropriately, does not try to correct speech.  Instead, it openly bans speech of which it—Zuckerberg and Sandberg—personally disapprove.  And so it bars some individuals altogether, it blocks some Presidential tweets, it blocks administration immigration advertisements.

An this, from Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global policy management honcho:

We have billions of posts every day, we’re identifying more and more potential violations using our technical systems.  At that scale, even if you’re 99% accurate, you’re going to have a lot of mistakes.

This is utterly disingenuous; it shows that Facebook isn’t even trying.  Not in a world where car makers and other manufacturers have, for years, demanded and achieved six-sigma accuracy.  Can’t reach six-sigma accuracy in speech censorship?  Not yet, perhaps.  But a serious effort would achieve better than 99%.  Or–work with me on this; it’s a concept still under development–maybe Facebook should stop censoring altogether.

Or: Facebook already is achieving that greater accuracy—it does, after all, succeed in censoring speech from the right side of center.  It hides its evident bias, though, behind an internally inconsistent, multi-thousand-page rule book.  Maybe that’s the logic to the inconsistencies.

And maybe that’s why they wanted to keep their rulebook secret.

Child Molestation and Bankruptcy Escapes

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Ironically, it’s the Catholic Church that has invented this ruse.

The Archdiocese of Portland was the first to do it. Three months later the Roman Catholic Diocese in Tucson, AZ, followed suit and three months after that the diocese in Spokane, WA, did it, too.
They all filed for bankruptcy and since then more than 15 other Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from lawsuits by sexual-assault victims, resulting in about 4,000 claims seeking compensation for past wrongdoing. This year, three more Catholic dioceses announced intentions to file.

Escaping debt—escaping court ordered financial penalties for the Church’s abuse of children and women—through bankruptcy.

But, of course. The outcome of this ruse is

[T]he legal strategy uses the law that protects companies from creditors to help preserve its mission and shield assets from claims made by victims of sexual abuse. Filing for chapter 11 freezes lawsuits and provides breathing room to work out a plan to compensate abuse victims.

Never mind that there already are plans for compensating the children and women: the courts’ judgments and assigned penalties from those cynically frozen suits.  There’s nothing to work out.  Aside from that, I’m not sure that a mission that includes condoning officials’ abuse of the most helpless of their flock is a mission worth preserving.  Condoning? See the Pope’s response to attempts to punish priests who are found abusive. See his attempts to absolve higher officials—bishops and cardinals—of their responsibility for the abuses.

And the strategy is spreading.  USA Gymnastics and the Boy Scouts of America are both in or looking to bankruptcy as a way to escape judgment.  Condoning?  See USAG’s—and USOC’s, come to that—covering up of a doctor/trainer’s decades long abuse.

This stinks.

I’m not much enamored of Federal laws, but we need one here: bankruptcy must be legally barred as a means of avoiding financial responsibility for this sort of abuse.  We even have a precedent: college students can’t duck their student debt through bankruptcy, albeit that bar is newly in flux.

Churches (not just Catholic), and any other organizations whose leadership teams or individuals are found culpable of child abuse or sexual abuse of women, cannot be allowed to run away from their fiscal responsibility (criminal courts work the crimes here, already; although I’d certainly like to see the employing institution punished, also).  No debt “reorganization” through bankruptcy should be allowed.  Pay the judgment in full or cease to exist.  With one exception: the guilty ones must be permanently barred from taking any role other than parishioner or line employee in any religious institution, regardless of religion, or in any company in the originating industry.  If the bankruptcy court is empowered to require that, then any fiscal penalties could legitimately undergo some adjustment once publicly available proof has been provided that all the named individuals—and all of the individuals responsible must be named—have been so barred.

Sadly, this bar will have to be done civilly, since the Church, of which the Catholic Church and USAG have shown themselves the canonical examples for all institutions—have chosen not to.