Monthly Archives: June 2022

A 2nd Amendment Ruling

Posted on by
Reply

The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 ruling, has struck down a New York law that required citizens to show a proper cause and good moral character in order get a license to carry a firearm outside the home. That “proper cause” and the goodness of a citizen’s “moral character” were as defined by the State’s government personnel, and if they didn’t feel like it, or if the “need” didn’t suit them, or if these Moral Superiors didn’t like the man, they blithely could deny the applied-for license.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the Court, said that was unconstitutional.

“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,'” Thomas wrote.
Thomas added that there is “no other constitutional right” that requires an individual to demonstrate some sort of special need to government officers in order to obtain a concealed carry permit.
“That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense,” Thomas added.

And

New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment in that it prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

Here’s New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D) preemptive reaction to the then-pending ruling:

Hochul vowed in May to call for an emergency legislative session this summer to craft new gun legislation as a means to work around the expected high court decision that curtailed the state’s concealed carry permit law.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) announced that his office is

analyzing this ruling and crafting gun safety legislation that will take the strongest steps possible to mitigate the damage done today.

These are canonical examples of why the 2nd Amendment is so necessary.

Notice, too, that this ruling looks like the beginning of the end for the concept of a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

The Fed and Equity

Posted on by
Reply

And, no, I’m not writing about house ownership type equity. This concerns the Fed’s potentially increasing role in “social equity.”

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board expressed concern about Progressive-Democrats trying to legislate into the Federal Reserve’s mandates the matter of “racial equity.” They’re correct as far as they went, but they based their concern on the Fed’s existing workload and on the question of how to assess “racial equity” in the Fed’s pronouncements and enforce the concept in its controls.

The Editors, though, missed the most important distinction and problem.

Whether or not “racial equity” is a matter to be taken seriously, it’s a political matter only, and so belongs only to the political branches of our Federal government—Congress and the White House.

The matter has no place in any Central Bank, including ours. The Federal Reserve’s function, in particular, is to protect our currency by protecting our economy—by working, under its existing statutory instructions, to maintain stable pricing, maximum employment, and moderate long-term interest rates (which means working to maintain stable pricing, since employment and interest rates fall out of that).

The Fed has no business or place in the political environment.

Airbus Thinks It’s Special

Posted on by
Reply

Or at least, more important than the existence of a nation.

Airbus is pushing against sanctions on Russian titanium sales, amid a flurry of restrictions on the export of other Russian goods ranging from vodka to steel.

After all,

About 65% of Airbus’s titanium supply comes from Russia, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.

Of course, Russia should be let off the hook regarding its naked and barbaric invasion of Ukraine, and Ukraine should be made to pay with its existence for Airbus’ consciously developed business decisions. Airbus Chief Executive Guillaume Faury:

We think sanctioning titanium from Russia would be sanctioning ourselves[.]

And

Russian titanium sales are “one of the few areas of business where it is in the interest of no party to disrupt the current situation,” he told reporters at an aviation gathering in Doha, Qatar.

Because Ukraine and Ukrainians are just bits of trivia and flotsam, not worth the notice. This is in stark contrast with Boeing:

…before the war purchased about one third of its titanium from Russia, said at the onset of the invasion of Ukraine that it would suspend its titanium joint venture in Russia and halt purchases of the metal from there.

It’s true enough that Russia is the second largest producer of titanium in the world (behind the People’s Republic of China). On the other hand, Ukraine is—or was before the barbarian’s invasion—the fifth largest producer of titanium.

However, Russia doesn’t even make the list of the top fourteen nations with titanium reserves.

American Computer Chip Dependency

Posted on by
Reply

Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, and Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO and ex-Executive Chairman of Google and its successor, Alphabet Inc, in a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, expressed considerable concern over the US’ growing dependency on other nations for computer chips that are critical to our economy (and to our national security, I add). They proposed three steps to alleviate this dependency.

  • double down on [US’] strength in the manufacturing of less-advanced semiconductors
  • use [US’] political leverage with the governments of Taiwan and South Korea to persuade TSMC and Samsung to form partnerships with US chip designers and manufacture advanced semiconductors in America
  • tighten the links between R&D and manufacturing

That first step, though, is tantamount to surrendering superiority in most-advanced chips to other nations, including our enemies. Emphasizing that can only come at the expense of not emphasizing as much other, more critical, steps (see below). We certainly should push our market dominance in those lesser chips, but only as a source of revenue for other chip production aspects.

The second step is as suboptimal: forming partnerships with others for chip design and manufacture works to stifle our own innovation and skills in innovation in design and manufacture technique and equipage. That makes it too easy to take the lazy way and simply copy others’ work. That costs us the skill and flexible (and intuitive) thought that underlies innovation.

The third step is the only one with real value—and that only to the extent that Government isn’t dictating those links or their nature, and only to the extent that private enterprise owns all of the output from any enterprise/government partnership (subject to some key criteria that would prevent those enterprises from simply freeloading off government/taxpayers).

Allison and Schmidt, while right to be concerned, have missed the Critical Item that’s at the foundation of breaking that dependency.

Also necessary for our gaining control of our own fate is shifting raw material production—lithium, rare earths, nickel, cobalt, and copper, for instance—to within our own borders. Not all of it, to be sure, but enough to ensure at least a core of these critical items along the entire chain from dirt in the ground to components arriving in domestic factories for assembly into finished products are produced domestically.

Even if all we accomplish is doing our own mining, that will go a long way toward short-circuiting our dependency on other nations—whether enemies like the People’s Republic of China or friends like the Republic of China—by giving us strong influence over their processing these materials into computer chips.

The Progressive-Democrats’ Jan 6 Committee

Posted on by
Reply

How’s it doing, so far? Aside from its poor viewership, I mean, as real concerns of us average Americans—things like high and increasing gasoline and diesel prices, high and increasing food prices, high inflation generally, loss of control over our southern border, illegal alien penetration into our nation’s interior (with unknown numbers of terrorists among them), the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine, and on and on—predominate our worries.

Let’s review the bidding.

Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA) altered text messages between Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) and Mark Meadows, then-White House Chief of Staff, and presented his fakery as evidence for the committee.

And

…Capitol Police caught Massachusetts Democrat Congressman Jake Auchincloss’s (D, MA) chief of staff on security footage defacing posters outside the Capitol complex office of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) this spring

And

…Capitol Police directly disputed allegations House January 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D, MS) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R, WY) made in May that GOP Congressman (GA) Barry Loudermilk led January 6 demonstrators on a reconnaissance mission the day before the Capitol riots

The Capital Police said, on the record, that security footage showed no such thing occurred.

And

…the committee accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik of attending a January 5, 2021, meeting in Washington, DC, to plot to block the certification of 2020 election results. In fact, Kerik was in New York that day, according to phone and toll booth records

It’s Party’s version of the Keystone Kops.

Aside from the Keystone Kops level of performance, all the committee has succeeded in doing is pulling together, sort of, into one place all the old news that the press already has published over the last couple of years, and from the same one-sided aspect as those…publishments.

And none of that reaches to the intrinsically unethical, if not illegitimate under House rules, nature of the J6 Committee. No cross-examination of witnesses is allowed; the committee consists of seven members of the Progressive-Democratic Party and only two members of the Republican Party; and the committee, contrary to 200 years of tradition in addition to those rules, consists of solely of members selected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), including those two Republicans. The members selected by the Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA), which did not include those two Republicans, were deliberately barred by Pelosi from participating.