Tag Archives: government

Australian Regulators’ Mistake

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Australian regulators are pressuring X to take down—to delete—a video posted to X showing the real-time terrorist attack in a western Sydney suburb on a Bishop of the Christ the Good Shepherd Church. X has blocked access to the video from locations within Australia per the regulators’ request, but is balking from going further. The regulators, though, are demanding the video be deleted altogether. Musk has responded that that would set the dangerous precedent of allowing one nation’s regulators to control the content of the Internet everywhere in the world, not just within the regulators’ own nation.

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Government Convenience

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The Federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission is vacuuming every scrap of data—including personally identifiable—on every single stock trade done by every single American, and it’s collecting these data from every single broker, exchange, clearing agency, and alternative trading system in the US.

It’s also doing this without any Congressional authorization to do so. The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed suit to attempt to block the SEC from continuing and to get the SEC’s Consolidated Audit Trail, the mechanism by which the SEC collects and stores these ill-gotten data, completely eliminated. Peggy Little, the NCLA’s Senior Litigation Counsel:

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An Argument for Patronage

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James Freeman described Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s move to strengthen bureaucracy’s and bureaucrats’ control over our Federal government. Citing a CNN report, Freeman wrote:

Betsy Klein and Tami Luhby report for CNN:

The Biden administration has finalized a new rule bolstering protections for career federal workers, marking a move to preemptively halt or significantly slow any efforts by former President Donald Trump, should he win in November, to reduce or alter the federal workforce.

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Government Influence over the Means of Production

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The Biden administration wants to control—put a leash on—the development of artificial intelligence software, in contrast with the Clinton administration’s hands-off approach to the development of the Internet. That’s the thrust of a Wall Street Journal Monday article.

The matter is far deeper and far broader than that. Biden’s move regarding AI is of a piece with his moves regarding ICE vs battery cars, solar and wind energy vs oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy, and on and on.

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A Thought on Mexico

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In the ongoing internal-to-the-US debate over whether Texas can take steps to protect itself from the flood of illegal aliens—SB4—in the absence of the Federal government’s overt action to not protect any of the States, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, through his Foreign Minister’s spokesman, that

[Mexico] “won’t accept, under any circumstances,” deportations by Texas.
Mexico “categorically rejects any measure that allows state or local authorities to carry out immigration control tasks, detain and return nationals or foreigners to Mexican territory[.]”

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Justice Breyer is Wrong Again

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Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is out with a new book [emphasis in the title], Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism. In an interview with The New York Times, he had this to say about originalism, textualism, and relatively newly appointed Justices.

Recently, major cases have come before the court while several new justices have spent only two or three years at the court. Major changes take time, and there are many years left for the newly appointed justices to decide whether they want to build the law using only textualism and originalism.

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Soviet Canada

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Now the Justin Trudeau government that’s reigning over Canada wants to lock Canadian citizens away for the crime of speculating—thinking—in ways Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finds personally objectionable.

On February 26 Mr Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which targets so-called hate speech on the internet. One of its provisions would enable anyone, with the consent of the federal attorney general, to “lay an information before a provincial court judge if the person fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit” an offense. The judge could then issue a “peace bond” imposing conditions, including house arrest and electronic monitoring, on the defendant merely because it’s feared he could commit a hate crime.

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Government Making Crime Pay

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Now the Progressive-Democratic Party reigning in the New York State government wants to reward felons for their crimes. After those felons have paid their debt to New York society through their jail time (and apparently before they’ve served out the rest of their penalty in the form of parole), the State wants to give them $2,600 for their trouble.

The legislation, introduced by State Senator Kevin Parker [D] and Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs [D], would allow inmates to collect around $400 each month over six months once they leave prison.
As the bill currently stands, there are no limitations on how or where the money can be spent, according to Fox 5 New York.

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A No-Filibuster Senate

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The Wall Street Journal editors worry about Arizona’s Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision not to run for reelection, coupled with West Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement, and how those decisions will affect the Senate filibuster. The editors correctly predict the end of the filibuster if the Progressive-Democrats maintain their Senate majority after the coming elections, and they suggest the ravages of the resulting one-party rule:

  • doubling the national minimum wage
  • mandating a British NIH-style national health care program—Medicare for All—and damn the cost or reduction in quality of health care
  • enacting national “right” to abortion
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What Damages?

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Stipulate, arguendo, that Republican Primary Presidential candidate Donald Trump was, indeed, guilty of civil fraud as New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled regarding the way Trump valued his properties in order to obtain loans. As a result of that civil conviction, Engoron has ordered, among other things, that Trump must pay more than $350 million in “ill-gotten profits” which are some sort of “damages.”

I have to ask: what damage? What ill-gotten profit? All the bank loans were repaid in full along with all of the associated interest accumulated over the lives of the loans. Think about that for a moment. The question of damage goes, or should go, far beyond the proximate question of whether the banks got all that was due them under the terms of those loans.

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