Monthly Archives: November 2021

A Risky Argument

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Stephen Miller, late of the Trump administration and current member of the board of directors of America First Legal, in supporting Texas’ law prohibiting doctors from performing abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected, is making this argument, among others:

In every other area of public life, people are able to, through the legislatures, pass laws against sex trafficking, sexual abuse, elder abuse, against every other social ill imaginable. And yet for about half a century now, there’s been no ability by citizens in any state to work through legislatures to ensure some measure of protection for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

This is, at best, a weak argument, and if the lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court rely on this, they risk setting back the anti-abortion cause by decades. Under the 14th amendment, citizen status only exists for those born…in the United States; the ones we’re trying to protect aren’t born, yet, so they are not citizens.

The unborn’s right of of relevance here is the much broader one: his right to life, which he has through the simple fact of his existence and as acknowledged under that other founding document of ours, our Declaration of Independence. His status, or lack, as a citizen of the United States isn’t relevant to his right to live.

Miller should know better.

Backwards

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Maine is voting today on an amendment to its State Constitution that would declare the right to food to be a fundamental right. The specific phrasing is this:

Constitution, Art. I, §25 is enacted to read:
Section 25.  Right to food.  All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.

The problem here, though, is not with the proposed amendment, which may or may not be a good idea. The problem is with the response to the proposal by folks who apparently slept through their grade school American history lessons and their junior high Civics classes. Typical is this response, from Katie Hansberry, Maine State Director of The Humane Society of the United States:

We do not think it is the intent of this proposal to allow food producers and and/or hunters, trappers, and fisherman be exempt from animal welfare and cruelty laws, but as currently written that would likely be the case as the current list of limitations fails to include any reference to such laws.

Constitutions are not subordinate to laws; laws are subordinate to Constitutions. Maine’s laws must fit within Maine’s Constitution, and when its Constitution changes, those laws must be changed accordingly; the laws are not immutable. Nor is there any requirement to enumerate subordinate matters into a governing document.

More than that, it’s foolish to expect the Constitution to be malleable by whatever later lawmakers decide with their new laws.

Still worse, if a Constitution is changeable by any collection of politicians, it will be vulnerable to willy-nilly changes according to the whims of the day, and from that it will soon cease to be a governing document. It will merely be a reflection of what men in government from time to time see as their own benefit, and it will no longer stand as a long-lasting and stable document that represents the will of the citizenry and that restrains those elastic politicians and their inconstant desires.

Reckless—But in Whose Eyes?

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The Tennessee legislature, in a Special Session that lasted into the small hours of last Saturday morning, passed a Wuhan Virus Freedom bill (my term) that achieves a number of things:

The final bill said government entities cannot force private businesses to institute a mask mandate or COVID-19 vaccination mandate, and private businesses cannot take action against an employee for not receiving the vaccine and cannot compel an employee or visitor to show proof of vaccination.

There are a couple of fillips: music venues will be able to require proof of vaccination in lieu of a negative virus test, and K-12 school principals will be able to require masks, but only on a school-by-school basis, and the principal must get the State’s permission, provide the masks, mandate a maximum of 14 days, and act only on a 14-day moving average of 1% cases for the school.

And yet….

Senator Jeff Yarbro (D, Nashville), a member of the conference committee that produced the final bill:

This is a reckless way to legislate[.]

Because individual freedom is reckless to Progressive-Democrats, and voting for individual freedom at 0100, as this bill was due to the long days and late hours of Progressive-Democrat obstruction, is equally reckless.

The bill itself can be read here.

Update: Governor Bill Lee (R) signed the bill 12 Nov 21.

The Cost of Aiding and Abetting

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$590 million dollars. That’s the cost of aiding and abetting ransomware criminals in the first half of this year. That’s what so-called victims of ransomware attacks paid to their putative attackers to reward them for their crimes. Moreover,

The average cost of reported ransomware payments per month in the US in 2021 was $102.3 million. If the current trend continues, the number of SARs filed in 2021 “are projected to have a higher ransomware-related transaction value than SARs filed in the previous 10 years combined,” the Treasury projects.

(The average cost and the total cost differ by about 4%, but the point remains valid.)

Andrew Lipow, Lipow Oil Associates LLC CEO, is busy ducking responsibility—and he’s sadly typical:

The anonymity of a digital currency has allowed ransomware attacks to flourish. If you can’t follow the money today, regulators need to either ban the digital currencies or implement regulations that enable the identification of people and accounts involved in these transactions—just like they would do for a real bank.

Sure. Because criminals engaged in ransomware attacks can be counted on to obey currency laws. What a copout.

Aside from that, whether digital currencies need to be regulated is wholly irrelevant. What’s required is for businessmen to stop paying the ransom, stop rewarding criminals for their crimes, stop actively aiding and abetting criminals. They’re only making their companies willing repeat targets.

Beyond that, this is more than just money out of these companies’ coffers. It’s money out of other companies’ coffers, too, those that are downstream in the supply chain from the company that decides it’s fine to reward the criminals. They have to pay the higher prices the “victim” companies charge to cover their payoffs ransom payments.

It’s also money out of the coffers of other, otherwise unrelated, companies as they must bear the added security costs accruing from having also been made targets by those putative victims so amply rewarding the crimes and the criminals engaged in them.

It’s money out of us consumers’ pockets, too, in the form of increased prices we have to pay as those company executives just treat the “ransom” payments as a cost center, a cost of doing business.

Biden-Harris Deliberate Lawlessness

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This time, it’s through zir’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. Under the latest bit of lawlessness, Mayorkas has ordered his department’s enforcement arms to ignore existing law and not go after illegal aliens in these locations:

  • Schools, including pre-schools, primary and secondary schools, vocational or trade schools, and colleges and universities
  • Medical or mental healthcare facilities, like hospitals, doctors’ offices, health clinics, vaccination or testing sites, urgent care centers, sites that serve pregnant individuals, or community health centers
  • Houses of worship or religious studies and places where children gather, like playgrounds, recreation centers, childcare centers, before- or after-school care centers, foster care facilities, group homes for children, or school bus stops
  • Social services establishments, like crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, victims’ services centers, child advocacy centers, supervised visitation centers, family justice centers, community-based organizations, facilities that serve the disabled, homeless shelters, drug or alcohol counseling and treatment facilities, or food banks or other establishments that distribute food or other essentials of life to people in need
  • Places where disaster or emergency response and relief are provided, including along evacuation routes, where shelter or emergency supplies, food, or water are being distributed, or registration for disaster-related assistance or family reunification is underway
  • Places where funerals or other religious or civil ceremonies or observances occur, as well as ongoing parades, demonstrations, or rallies

These areas are the new Progressive-Democrat sanctuaries, within which enforcing immigration law is…illegal.

This is on top of Mayorkas’ prior lawlessness:

The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them[.]

After all, just because someone is breaking the law, that’s no reason to go and arrest them. C’mon, man.