Author Archives: eehines

Even Axios is becoming Aware

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The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

And

The ads say that they are sponsored, but it’s not immediately clear that the text that accompanies real news links is written by the campaigns and not by the media publication itself.

That obfuscation is deliberate, done as it is by the self-identified smartest folks in the nation and by folks for whom words are their stock in trade.

And Progressive-Democrats call out “disinformation” moves by those to the right of them. That’s freedom of speech the Progressive-Democratic Party way. Speech is—literally—what Party says it is, free or not.

A Couple of Suitable Civil Sanctions

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General Motors is being sued by Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton for allegedly

unlawfully collecting driving data from users and selling it to other companies.

GMC allegedly

used technology that was installed in the majority of 2015 or newer General Motors vehicles that would “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data about each time a driver used their vehicle[.]”

That’s a long time to be collecting and peddling personal information without the permission of the vehicle’s owner.

After all,

Unbeknownst to customers, however, by enrolling in GM’s products, they were “agreeing” to General Motors’ collection and sale of their data. Despite lengthy and convoluted disclosures, General Motors never informed its customers of its actual conduct—the systematic collection and sale of their highly detailed driving data.

I see two suitable civil sanctions here, assuming conviction. One is to force GMC to disclose the amount of money it received over those two years from its sale of those data. It must then be required to pay that money to each person who bought a GMC vehicle from those two model years, whether the vehicle was bought new or used. Yes, yes, identifying all the used vehicle buyers will be difficult. Cry me a river. GMC should have thought about that beforehand.

The other isn’t really a sanction, per se. GMC should be required to disclose each of the buyers of those data, and then each of those buyers should be required to certify that it has purged all of the data of this type that GMC sold to it.

It would be suitable, also, to go after criminal sanctions against the GMC executives who authorized the illegal collection of the data, who authorized the sale of those illegally collected data, and who carried out the collections, and who carried out the sales.

It’s time to get draconian in sanctioning these data thefts. Bad enough we have to deal with hackers; we shouldn’t have to be subject to such thefts from allegedly mainstream companies.

A Silly Tradeoff

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In an editorial regarding former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump as “Central Banker”—The Wall Street Journal editors’ tongue-in-cheek term—those same editors noted this about the Federal Reserve’s economic models:

[T]he Fed staff’s models that are still rooted in the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.

The editors are right about that being a mistake; although they don’t expand on that claim with their reasoning about why that’s a mistake.

My claim about why that’s a mistake is this. First, the Fed’s situation is rooted in its statutorily mandated requirement to maintain price stability and to maintain full employment. The view from Congressional and White House politicians, the Fed, and so many economists is that these are separate, if not mutually opposing (and so not so separate) requirements.

My view, then, is that the two requirements are closely related, but in sequence, not in opposition. Keeping prices reasonably stable—the Fed’s nominal inflation target of 2% per year works well enough—greatly facilitates a healthy, growing economy. That healthy, growing economy itself pushes toward full employment. The Fed’s strongest move toward its full employment mandate, then, is to satisfy its mandate of maintaining price stability and to take no overt action regarding employment.

What’s He So Terrified Of?

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Secretary of State Anthony Blinken postponed a scheduled trip to the Middle East amid heightened tensions in the area and a possible attack on Israel by Iran. The trip ostensibly was to continue to pressure Israel to agree a ceasefire with the terrorists who began their war to exterminate Israel.

Possible attack by Iran on Israel? What better time for a senior US government official to visit Israel could there be? SecState’s presence in Israel would greatly raise the stakes for Iran as it contemplates, or executes, its own effort to destroy Israel.

Blinken could have used the time in Israel to coordinate with them on defenses against an Iranian attack and against a coordinated set of attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran, as well as moves post attack to finish Hamas and to kinetically punish Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran.

Instead, Blinken—consistent with the Biden-Harris administration generally—chickened out.

Open Borders

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Even when they tout their secure the border policies, Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are deliberately leaving our borders wide open and unsecured.

The Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) program was announced in in May 2023 and the administration has only removed around 2,600 illegal immigrants under the program arriving as family units while border patrol apprehended almost 850,000.

That’s three-tenths of one percent of those “families” caught illegally entering our nation who actually got deported.

This is Border Czar, Progressive-Democrat Vice President, and Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ Newspeak Dictionary definition of “secure border.”

This is a small taste of what we will get in the United States, in spades, if the Harris-Walz ticket is elected this fall.