Tag Archives: culture

ERIC Surveillance

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is an increasingly farther-Left standing organization that shares voter registration data among the member States, ostensibly so the States collectively have cleaner voter rolls that contain fewer ineligible registrants. Apparently, ERIC also shares those data with others than the member States, too, and does so in deliberate secrecy, without required permissions, and outside the center’s charter—for instance, with the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which got $70 million from the Leftist Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just in time for the 2020 elections. I’m actually more concerned about another aspect of ERIC’s activities [emphasis in the original].

The authors [of a Heritage Foundation report] note concerns about ERIC forcing member states to engage in active voter registration activities, despite states already making it easy for citizens to register to vote. …the membership agreement forces states to send out notices essentially yearly (every 425 days, to be precise) to at least 95 percent of the individuals in a state who are potentially eligible to vote but who have not registered “inform[ing] them how to register to vote.”

How does a State know who is eligible to register but has not? Certainly, the needed data are generally publicly available, but they need explicitly to be sought out, collected, and then fused into an eligible-but-not-registered list. Why are States being required by ERIC to conduct this surveillance, instead of leaving that up to the citizens of each State to do or to refuse to do? Why is it any American government’s business why this or that American citizen chooses to register, or not? Why is it any American government’s role to hector any American citizen to engage in this lawful behavior rather than that one? What other government surveillance is this supposed Organizational Compact trying to get governments to carry out at its behest? For what purposes? Maybe more States should be leaving ERIC and leave the government surveillance of private citizens to the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States whose governing personnel actually think this level of surveillance is a good idea.

We’ll Soon Learn Two Things

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We’re about to learn two things about the Canadian government. The Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents nearly a quarter million government employees, have gone on strike for…DEI claptrap like mandatory “unconscious bias” training; an intrinsically racist $1,500 bonus that’s only for Cree, Inuktitut, Dene, or any other Canada Indigenous language speakers; more racism in the form of special time off just for Indigenous employees; government-paid, which is to say Canadian taxpayer-paid, time off for union “training;” a union-administered “Social Justice Fund,” which PSAC carefully declines to say is its purpose—just give the union the money—and on and on.

One of the things we’re going to learn is how much courage Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his government have in standing up to this union’s strike, an action (not unique to PSAC) that is, essentially, extortion in that a striking union is saying it’s not going to allow the struck entity to operate until the entity pays the union’s demanded vig. In particular, will the Trudeau government show the same “courage” against this employee strike that it showed against a recent trucker protest, and will it use similarly heavy-handed tactics, which included freezing/seizing bank accounts, to break up the union strike?

The other thing we’ll learn is how much, or how little, these workers are missed as Canada’s government continues to function without them.

The PSAC 224-page program of demands can be read here.

Lose Your iPhone…

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…and lose your data, along with access to your financials. For instance,

thieves who stole [one man’s] iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change [his] Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

The thieves got his passcode by shoulder-surfing and watching him tap in his passcode before they stole his phone. And Apple can’t help him: without the recovery key, there’s nothing they can do. In addition to the money stolen, the man has lost the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters, which he was storing exclusively on his cell phone.

And this example:

After [a man’s] iPhone 13 Pro was stolen from a Boston bar in August, [he] said he spent hours on the phone with Apple customer support trying to regain access to over a decade of data.

Again, Apple was helpless to help without that now thief-altered recovery key.

The recovery key business is specific to Apple’s iPhones, and it’s irrelevant to my questions here. My questions apply to Android phones and other kinds of cell phones just as much.

My first question is this: when the cell phone owner was in any sort of public place—bar, office, park, etc, what was that cell phone doing anywhere but in the owner’s hot little hand or in an interior pocket? Leaving the cell phone out on a counter or a bar or a park bench, even if the owner is right there, is the same as taping a “Free for the Taking” sign on the phone.

My second question is this: convenience comes with a price, and these theft victims provide examples of the price to be paid for that convenience: the loss of those precious personal items, the loss of years of personally important data, or the loss of company or other business data and correspondence (whether text or email), the loss of the moneys in the various financial accounts to which the owner has given cell phone access, and on and on. Why are these data kept on cell phones at all? Why are they not, at the least, backed up on a separate device—a laptop, for instance, or the company’s desktop back at the office or in the home office?

There’s no excuse for the theft, but there’s no excuse, either, for the personal laziness that magnifies the outcome of the theft.

Progressive Idiocy

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The New York City Council is striking again. These wonders are pushing their cutely named Choose 2 Reuse bill, which

aims to improve sustainability in the restaurant business, but would add some friction to a customer experience that is typically defined by its convenience. Consumers would be asked to later return their reusable food containers, knives, forks, and chopsticks either through delivery or logistics partners who come to pick them up or in person via receptacles at participating restaurants. The bill doesn’t require reusable beverage containers.

It’s interesting that the City Council excludes beverage containers. There was a time when beverage containers—soda bottles, for instance—could be returned for a return of a deposit paid when the (sodas) were sold, a practice that enabled more than a few boys and girls to earn a bit of extra money by collecting up the bottles and doing the return. And there never was a problem cleaning the then-glass bottles for reuse, nor was there a liability problem arising from the reuse of inadequately cleaned bottles.

That sort of thing fell into disfavor when tin, and later aluminum, cans proved easier and cheaper to manufacture (and wend their way through the bottling process)—and far from being one-use disposable, they could be recycled through a different chain.

Now NYC is bent on reverting to that greater cost—never minding that one-use food containers for takeout are easily manufactured for breakdown and return to the soil when disposed of in landfills. Or in many jurisdictions, converted to mulch for DIY gardeners. Or recycled for yet other non-food related uses.

Now, in addition to the added costs inflicted on restaurants and consumers alike, the Wonders of the Council also want to expose the city’s restaurants to liability through suits centered on real or imagined food poisoning from allegedly inadequately cleaned-for-reuse containers and utensils. Even stipulating that utensils would no longer be included (presumably by restaurant choice; nothing in the proposed bill suggests this)—requiring consumers to use their own—the containers would need to be made sturdy enough to survive the restaurant’s dishwashers—or to survive the consumers’ dishwashers, should they be offered a discount for doing the cleaning for the restaurant. And which the restaurant would have no guarantee that the consumer had cleaned the containers well enough to meet the government standards imposed on the restaurant.

BlackRock Misses Again

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The Woke BlackRock, and especially its CEO Larry Fink, are not just wide of the mark, they’ve missed the target altogether. Not only does the company push its intrinsically racist and sexist “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology onto those companies in which it invests—often for the sole purpose of the push; investment quality being irrelevant—now it’s been caught out applying its racism and sexism in its internal hiring practices.

America First Legal Foundation sent a letter Tuesday to the New York District Office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to demand an investigation into the asset management giant for allegedly “engaging in unlawful employment practices in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
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“This program is just one piece of a long-term practice of BlackRock to use unlawful discriminatory employment practices to build its workforce,” the complaint stated. “Indeed, BlackRock has affirmatively and repeatedly represented to its shareholders, to its investors, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission, that its employment practices are infused with facially unlawful considerations of race, color, sex, and/or national origin.”

AFL added in a separate communication,

The odious and illegal practice of hiring based on immutable characteristics like race is a flagrant attack on civil rights that harms all Americans[.]

I’ll go further: it’s an insult to those minorities and women; BlackRock and Fink are saying that minorities and women are intrinsically inferior, inherently too stupid, to be able to compete without the special treatment and coddling that is preferential, DEI-based hiring.

There’s no doubt that there remains a disparity, especially in STEM environments, between white hiring into good-paying jobs and minority and women hiring into those jobs. But that disparity won’t be cured by preferentially hiring minorities and women; they still too often aren’t qualified for the positions, so they fail and set the program, and the hiring company, back.

The correction for the disparity lies in a factor that’s at the foundation of our nation: equal opportunity. That equality of opportunity doesn’t currently exist in our education system (among other milieus); see for a canonical example, the Baltimore, MD, school system’s failure and subsequent coverup by those responsible.

If BlackRock and similar entities put the money and energy they’re currently committing to push wokeness into improving our educational system (without the Woke…foolishness) and getting our children taught—from pre-K through high school—science, technology, engineering, and math, along with American history, Civics (and more of this than a single semester in junior high), Western Civilization, logic, and literature, with equal emphasis on inner city schools and wealthy district schools, those disparities would disappear in a generation.

 

The letter itself can be read at the first link above.