Tag Archives: responsibilities

Donald Trump Bullies?

Posted on by
Reply

Really? A letter writer in Wednesday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. He credulously makes, though, a couple of critical mistakes that no rational, grown adult would make.

Today, Donald Trump’s “bullying” embodies the more contemporary meaning: the cowardly actions of one who seeks to harm or intimidate those he views as weak.

This is risible on its face. Bullies have only the power their putative victims choose to grant them, not a minim more. The cowardice is in those who make the decision to allow themselves to be bullied. Yes, that’s often a hard decision to make, but “hard” means “possible.” There’s no excuse for choosing wrongly here.

The letter writer’s other mistake centers on this—which he, in all seriousness, offers as an example of Trumpian bullying:

[T]he president has issued an executive order stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling, who provided pro bono legal assistance to former special counsel Jack Smith. More recently, Ed Martin, interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to Georgetown Law School, demanding that it cease diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and warning that his office wouldn’t hire the school’s graduates unless it did so.
These actions violate the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of expression.

This is laughable beyond anything related to “bullying” or being “bullied.” There is no intrinsic free speech right, or any other right, to a security clearances—which grants the holder access (given a parallel and simultaneous need to know) to data involving national security. Neither Covington & Burling as an institution, nor any of its lawyers, have any such right. It’s not bullying to rescind the clearances of those entities and persons who no longer work for the government.

Neither is there any intrinsic free speech right—or any other 1st Amendment right or any other right sourced to any other clause or clauses of our Constitution—to a government job. The government, like any potential employer, has its own intrinsic right to determine for itself the qualifications required for a job and then to determine for itself who the best candidate(s) might be to be hired into that job.

Nor is there any such right held by Georgetown Law School to place its graduates into any particular job, including a government one.

Back to the bullying foolishness: if Georgetown managers feel bullied by this, that’s their conscious choice. It would be particularly easy, though, for these worthies to stand up to the alleged Trumpian bullying. The Federal government’s authority to enforce any demand, whether to desist from DEI efforts or anything else, extends only so far as Georgetown Law School takes in Federal dollars. The institution is under no obligation to take those dollars. The school’s managers could eliminate the pressures they’ve chosen to perceive simply by ceasing those acceptances rather than ceasing their DEI efforts.

Professorial Disingenuosity

Posted on by
2

Columbia University professors who support pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian protests, mostly humanities and liberal arts professors, claim that those “protests” are actually innocent students exercising their free speech rights. Other professors at the school, mostly medical and STEM types, claim they’ve been too busy “doing their jobs” teaching and researching to worry about such mundane things as campus disruptions.

Those former either know better, and they’re being disingenuous in their wide-eyed innocence claims, or they’re breathtakingly ignorant of what free speech actually means. It’s not free speech when the “protestors” block others’ right to their own free speech by shutting off their ability to speak at all, or by shutting down the campus altogether, or by preventing others from exercising their free speech right to not listen to the “protestors.” The “protestors” are engaging in the abhorrence of censorship.

Neither are the “protestors” exercising free speech when they seize and occupy campus buildings and prevent the ordinary course of business in those buildings. Those “protestors” are executing illegal takings of others’ property and denying them and the users’ their accesses.

Neither are those “protestors” exercising free speech when they damage or destroy equipment in those illegally seized building or paint graffiti on and in the buildings. Those “protestors” are engaging in criminal destruction and in vandalism.

The medical and STEM professors also know better. As Pericles said a while ago, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” And Plato: “Those who think they’re too smart to engage in politics are destined to be ruled by those who are dumber.” These professors are just being cowards, hiding away from their responsibilities.

They’re all worthless; they all need replacement.

Don’t Care? Or Don’t Care?

Posted on by
Reply

Gerald Baker, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, worried that no one cares about news writers and news opinionators “harrumphing” about the doings of the Trump administration. His subheadline:

Journalists harrumph at Trump’s actions, but no one cares anymore. I say that with no satisfaction.

He then listed some horribles committed by those news writers and opinionators:

Moral affront that a president who has already answered more questions from reporters than his predecessor did in four years should choose which subgroup of White House journalists gets even closer to him. Panicked warnings about access to national-security information when the new team at the Pentagon moves some of the most entitled titles out of their privileged real estate in the building. Bilious incomprehension when a newspaper owner who has kept them in jobs for the last decade has the temerity to say he has a right to determine what editorial stance the paper should take.

Baker then lamented:

The ability of the traditional media to influence events is attenuated to the point of near extinction….
No one cares anymore.

That’s only the latest beginning, though. This crop of writers and opinionators have too often lied to us, whether by commission or omission:

• lying about Trump’s collusion with Russia over the 2016 election, when it was the Clinton campaign doing the colluding
• spiking the Hunter Biden laptop story
• lying about which “good people on both sides of the question” in a Trump Charlottesville speech, claiming he was talking about rioters when he was talking about the debates over which statues to take down, if any statures were to be
• lying about Trump’s claim that the Wuhan Virus was a hoax when he had plainly said that Democrat hyping of the virus was the hoax
• LATimes announcing that it would no longer print letters to the editor disputing, much less refuting, the idea that the climate crisis was overblown
• NYTimes announcing early in the 2016 campaign season that there could be no objectivity in news reporting; journalists had to pick sides in their reporting
• a major broadcast news speaker announcing that there were not two sides to every story, only one, the news speaker’s
• a major cable news opinionator smearing Tea Partiers as tea baggers
• spiked stories regarding ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) mental decline

That list goes on and on.

This remark of Baker’s, though, is central to his own egregious bias and why we don’t trust his “media:”

Holding powerful people accountable by reporting things they don’t want reported was always the most important role news played.

The most important role of honest journalists—a vanishingly small group—is most assuredly not holding powerful people accountable by reporting things they don’t want reported, and it never has been. Their role, their job, is—always and everywhere—to report the news objectively and completely, to provide their opinionating on separate pages from their reporting and to keep their opinionating solely informed by balanced facts and logic. Holding powerful people accountable will fall out of that naturally, and it is we consumers of news and opinion—actual, honestly presented news and opinion—who will do the accountability holding, not arrogant, self-important news writers and opinionators.

It’s not that no one cares about the harrumphing, however justified or not that harrumphing might be. It’s that no one cares about anything news writers and opinionators spill pixels and ink over—they’ve shown themselves as a group to be wholly and intrinsically dishonest.

No one believes what news writers or opinionators say or write or post. Baker closed his piece with this:

Can we get back to a healthy, trusted objectivity in journalism, so that it again becomes a vehicle for accountability?

He then proceeded to claim that AI could help today’s writers and opinionators achieve this. He’s wrong on both accounts. The current crop of news writers and opinionators have shown themselves too dishonest to ever be trustworthy again. A healthy, trusted objectivity in journalism cannot be achieved so long as these remain on our pages and televisions. They must be replaced en masse by an entirely new population of journalists, schooled in objectivity, factual and complete reporting, logical and factually informed opinion writing, and the ethical necessity of both.

This new crop, on taking their office, must do one thing immediately. Since journalists have long since walked away from their editorial requirement of at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims, the new crop must state in clear, concrete, and measurable terms what new standard of journalistic integrity they will follow and that us news and opinion consumers can follow and assess their performance.

That the current crop is incapable of satisfying Baker’s question or of satisfying the standards requirement is further illustrated by Baker’s repetition of his basic thesis in that last clause of his question. I repeat, then: it is not the job of journalism to hold anyone accountable; that’s the job of us consumers of news and opinion. It is the job of journalists to report and separately to offer opinion. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Chlorinated Water and Cancer Risk

Posted on by
Reply

The New York Post‘s headline screams

Chemical found in US drinking water is linked to 15% higher risk of colorectal cancer, 33% for bladder cancer

The chemical in question is a collection of trihalomethanes (THM)—chloroform, bromodichloromethane, dibromochloromethane, and bromoform—that can form when chlorine reacts with water. Chlorine is routinely added to our nation’s potable water by water producers in order to eliminate bacteria and viruses from our drinking water. Chlorine is very effective at that.

The second paragraph in the Post‘s article lays out the…fear:

A new analysis out of Sweden reports that disinfecting water with chlorine creates chemical byproducts that can increase the risk of bladder cancer by 33% and colorectal cancer by 15%.

What’s the baseline rate of those cancers in the US, though? How big an increase are those 15% and 33% bumps? Those bits of context, critical to understanding the true nature of these risks, are elided by the news outlet.

Here are some data with which to fill in those gaps. According to the American Cancer Society,

[T]he lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1 in 24 for men and 1 in 26 for women.

According to the National Cancer Institute,

Approximately 2.2% of men and women will be diagnosed with bladder cancer at some point during their lifetime

Applying the increased risk values to these really quite low baseline probabilities, we get

• likelihood of men getting colorectal cancer rises from 4.2% to 4.8%
• likelihood of women getting colorectal cancer rises from 3.8% to 4.4%
• likelihood of men or women getting bladder cancer rises from 2.2% to 4.2%

Keep in mind the lifetime nature of those risks, which is nicely matched by the lifetime practice we have of drinking chlorinated tap water. Thus, it’s certainly true that these increases are worth watching, especially the bladder cancer risk increase, but these already very low baseline risks remain quite low even with chlorinated water.

Further balancing those risk increases are the enormously reduced risk of infection by serious and debilitating water-borne disease.

How to Handle Federal Lands

Posted on by
Reply

Terry Anderson, of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has some thoughts on how best to handle Federal lands, a unaggregated expanse of some 640 million acres, 28% of US land. In their essence, his ideas are to handle those lands in a business-like manner.

…three options: raise the price of goods and services (timber, minerals, visits to national parks), reduce labor costs and liquidate money losers.

He’s right, but those are the second steps that need to be taken, not the first step.

Twenty-eight percent is far too much of American land to be retained by the Federal government. The necessary first step is the transfer of those lands to their respective States.

Anderson’s ideas, fleshed out some in the fulness of his op-ed, does recommend [t]urn[ing] ownership of some federal lands over to the states, but that’s wholly inadequate. The vast majority of those lands should be turned over.

The amount that might be retained by the Federal government, to suggest a percentage for opening discussion, would be less than 5%, and the retention purposes might be limited to protecting some historical and scenic areas for public park use, to finishing cleaning up Superfund sites of their contamination—following which those sites should be returned to the States—to maintaining (and I say expanding) our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to siting military installations, and to setting up, or finishing, nuclear waste storage sites.

The Federal government has no legitimate interest in withholding from State and private use so huge an expanse of our land. Selling it to the States and to private citizens would raise funds for paying down our national debt, too. The modern equivalent of a dollar an acre comes to mind for a suitable sale price—that original one dollar price wasn’t so much for raising money—though it did for that then small Federal budget—than to transfer the land to owners who, by paying for it, would have some incentive to make economic-based use of it.

The retained land then should be managed IAW business principles.