Tag Archives: responsibilities

Who’s in Charge?

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British Prime Minister Liz Truss and her then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng proposed a serious personal and corporate tax reduction for British subjects. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey demurred—loudly—and sent the British securities and debt markets into a tailspin.

As a result of the turmoil, Truss folded, fired Kwarteng, and removed the corporate tax reduction.

That wasn’t enough for Bailey and now the TINAs—Tories in Name Alone—and now Truss has virtually quit the game altogether: she’s now withdrawn all of the tax reductions, even those income tax reductions that would have benefitted the ordinary British subject.

Never mind, either, that the tax reductions would have spurred British economic growth and gone a long way toward getting its high inflation back under control and back down.

Elected Truss doesn’t seem to be in charge. Bureaucrat Bailey does. On the other hand, between the two of them, only Bailey seems to have the courage to stay the course he’s set.

One of those TINAs, a carefully unnamed Conservative lawmaker who won his district in 2019 with a 65% majority had this:

One says that he lies awake at night worrying about being kicked out when the country next goes to the polls.
“I’ve got private school fees to pay and my mortgage is going through the roof[.]”

More worried about his elite status and personal welfare than he is about the job his constituents hired him to do.

And isn’t all of that a sad state of affairs for the British people.

A Method of Identifying Acceptable Views

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday Notable & Quotable contains an excerpt from a Times Literary Supplement piece in which the piece’s writer recounted a classroom incident in which he had touted a free market society and the instructor had written on his paper, “Are you Margaret Thatcher?” and left the paper ungraded. The classroom boy was mortified.

[T]he comparison shocked me into a more thoughtful politics and provided an early lesson: if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view.

And

That doesn’t mean that every person with [fill in that disagreeable person’s identity] views endorses those links, but some soul-searching is surely called for.

Of course. It isn’t the merits of the message that’s important; rather, it’s the merits of the person carrying that message.

This is what has passed for teaching our children for too many years.

A Simple Enough Solution

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And straightforward, too.

Nike thinks it has supply chain and marketing problems with its shoe manufacturing.

Nike Inc’s quarterly results highlight how some US brands have too much inventory at home and in markets like China, where the companies have placed big financial bets.
The sneaker giant on Thursday said revenue from China in the August quarter fell 16% to $1.65 billion, citing Covid-19 lockdowns in different cities hurting store traffic.

The People’s Republic of China represented some 13% of sales and 29% of earnings for Nike in its quarter ending last August.

Nike offered a number of excuses for its problems, including the PRC’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns, a heat wave in the PRC that the PRC claimed affected energy production, and inflation.

These are, though, just excuses. Nike’s problem—and it’s a political and a moral one, also—is that it does business inside the PRC.

These problems wouldn’t exist if the company moved is manufacturing facilities out of the PRC. Neither Vietnam nor Japan nor Australia have lockdown or heat wave/energy problems affecting manufactury (Australia has made significant progress since its wind storm shut down its wind-power energy production in a western state a couple years ago).

Neither would Nike have a PRC-related inflation related problem with its PRC inventory or sales if it didn’t do business in the PRC.

Nike wouldn’t have any sort of supply chain problem, or delivery problem, were it to make its products in the US.

Nike would solve its political and moral problems (did company managers have the grace to recognize that these problems are real) if it had no business dealings of any sort with the PRC so long as that nation continues its genocidal behavior vis-à-vis the Uighurs.

CDC Fail

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Again.

The CDC’s latest “guidance” directly contradicts and rescinds its immediately latest “guidance,” issued just weeks ago.

CDC’s latest guess is this:

[c]larified that healthcare facilities, including nursing homes, have discretion on whether to screen-test asymptomatic personnel. It also now says asymptomatic patients “in general” do not require “empiric use of Transmission-Based Precautions”

Because the vaccines aren’t all that. British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, Visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Brazil’s Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health:

By reanalyzing the randomized controlled trials used for emergency authorization and other medical reviews, Malhotra concluded it takes thousands of vaccinations in the non-elderly population “to prevent a single death” from COVID and that severe adverse events are more likely than prevented hospitalizations.

CDC is only just getting around to doing the relevant research that would have identified this apparent ineffectiveness or objectively refuted it. Instead, we just get another rotation of the CDC Guidance Weather Vane.

It’s time for a general elimination, and replacement, of CDC managers from mid-level on up to the Sobbing Doomsayer herself, Director Rochelle Walensky. The agency as currently manned is useless.

Journalists Deceiving

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Project Veritas lost a case brought by Democracy Partnerships in the DC District Court, with the jury awarding $120,000 to the consultancy. The firm had been targeted by PV, and recordings made by an undercover PV operative strongly indicated that DP was engaged in efforts to incite violence at rallies for then-President Donald Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 Presidential campaign.

The DC jury, made up of residents of Washington, DC, decided that

the actions of the former operative…breached a fiduciary duty to the consulting firms and amounted to fraudulent misrepresentation….

Project Veritas has said it will appeal; founder James O’Keefe saying in part

The jury effectively ruled investigative journalists owe a fiduciary duty to the subjects they are investigating and that investigative journalists may not deceive the subjects they are investigating.

I generally agree with what Project Veritas does, discovers, and publicizes.

However.

Not here. No one should be able to deceive anyone; although in most cases, that’s a moral limit, not a legally actionable one.

There’s a fine line here regarding investigative journalism. Going undercover isn’t deception unless the operative openly lies about who he is or what he’s doing. Letting the target draw a wrong conclusion, though, is on the target: do a better job of vetting. The “fiduciary duty” is the target’s as part of its own decision to spend money.

Beyond that, though, deception is what journalists do far too routinely, especially to their readers and viewers. PV needs to do better in its defenses.