Tag Archives: politics

Stopping Fentanyl

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Sultan Meghji, Frontier Foundry CEO and former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation CIO, wants the government to use artificial intelligence packages to stop fentanyl at the border.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) can leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the trucks, boats, and planes trying to sneak fentanyl into the country.
We must use this technology at the border and ports of entry (where nearly 85% of America’s fentanyl comes into the country,) when we have access to every vehicle coming in.

That’s a good step, to the extent such packages actually can be useful in combatting fentanyl entry in to our nation. It is, though, at best a third step.

Better would be to use artificial intelligence packages—again, to the extent they prove useful—to intercept and stop fentanyl precursor and constituent chemicals from entering Mexico, thereby starving the drug cartels of these ingredients. Additionally, use these packages, if they actually work, to prevent those precursors and constituents from leaving the People’s Republic of China, these chemicals’ primary source, from leaving the PRC at all.

Those moves would interfere with Mexico’s participation in the drug trade, and they would greatly inhibit the PRC’s ability to continue its Opium War Redux against the US.

Joe Biden’s Tariffs

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has raised the tariff on steel imports from The People’s Republic of China, a tariff former President Donald Trump initiated (although Trump badly diluted the effect and importance of the tariff by applying it against our allies, also). The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are in a bodice-ripping panic attack over Biden’s move.

Didn’t President Biden promise a better trade policy than his predecessor? Well, he now appears to be in a race with Donald Trump to be Protectionist in Chief. Witness his pitch for new tariffs at a campaign stop on Wednesday in Pittsburgh.

The editors’ angst also is broadly irrational (which is the nature of angst, but it’s irrational in another way, too).

Steel making is energy-intensive, and Mr Biden’s green energy agenda threatens to make US companies less competitive.

That’s also true, but it’s wholly irrelevant to the question of tariffs, which is the subject of the editors’ hysteria. The editors also seem unable to discriminate between two primary types of tariffs.

There are tariffs for protectionism, and these are dismal failures.

There are tariffs for foreign policy, and these can be dismal failures or outstanding successes, depending on the underlying policy and the moral and political courage of politicians to set serious tariffs and then strictly enforce them.

Tariffs against People’s Republic of China steel imports could, and should, fall into the latter category; the broad underlying foreign policy is one of making it supremely expensive to do any sort of business with the enemy nation.

For my money, Biden’s PRC steel tariff is just virtue-signaling as he continues to kowtow to the PRC otherwise all across the board. He needs to deepen his steel tariff and extend it across a broad and deep range of PRC exports. In parallel, he needs—and Congress needs to support him—to make it supremely expensive for American businesses to export technology-related goods and services, and to transfer intellectual property and knowledge, to the PRC.

An example of Biden’s kowtowing is his expected move to cancel

The Ambler Access Road project…that would connect a mining district in west-central Alaska to the Dalton Highway that runs through the middle of the state. The operations in the mining district could provide a steady domestic supply of copper, zinc, lead, gold, silver, and cobalt, which are strategic elements needed for manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines, and electric vehicle batteries.

Such a move would continue our dependence on the PRC for our own “green” energy and transportation economy.

Foreign policy tariffs will, indeed, carry domestic costs, including protectionist tariffs’ higher prices for domestically produced goods and services.

But in what fantasy world does anyone think any war—and we are in one with the PRC, no matter the lack, so far, of a kinetic aspect—is entirely bloodless for either side? And, as with any war, what are the costs—fiscal or independence of action—of our losing the present war?

Financial Institutions Retreating from ESG Claptrap

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Or are they? Are they, maybe, simply moving to disguise their ESG claptrap in other ways or only altering their rhetoric without materially altering their censorious behavior?

States have responded [to the explosion of ESG irrelevances] with a barrage of legislation that restricts the use of ESG factors or targets entities that boycott certain industries.
Financial institutions are reacting to these state-level actions with what appears to be a retreat from their commitment to ESG, but there are questions if they are changing or just regrouping the efforts under new names.

One way to control for financial institutions’ weasel-wording around those State-level bars (whether those institutions are looking sub rosa to avoid the bars or not) would be to require financial institutions that decline a loan application, or cancel an account, or otherwise restrict one relative to similar accounts of other customers is the following.

Require financial institutions to explain their adverse actions to their customers in concrete, measurable terms supported by including in their letters of explanation the hard, factual data they used to form their adverse actions, along with the concretely termed concerns the financial institution claims to have toward its adversely affected customer/prospective customer. Simply asserting that the enterprise/individual doesn’t align with the financial institution’s values doesn’t cut it. Which value? How? Show them the hard data supporting the assertion. Explain how any data provided by the enterprise/individual falls short.

There are no serious compliance difficulty/cost concerns here. The financial institution taking the adverse action already has collected and organized the data and concerns underlying its action; the institution has merely to copy/paste those materials into the letter advising its customer/prospective customer of the adverse action.

Concerns Regarding “Unreasonable” Searches

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There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.

The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.

Worse, goes the argument, the bill

would prohibit the US government from buying digital information that would remain available to the likes of China and Russia.

That last is a non sequitur, though. The fact that the data are readily available to our enemies doesn’t legitimize its collection by our government, which has Constitutional bars against most kinds of searches. It’s further the case that if we can’t be secure against the unwarranted [sic] intrusions of our own government, how can we expect our own government to keep us secure from the intrusions of foreign governments, especially enemy foreign governments?

There also is a misunderstanding buried in the claim regarding that digital exhaust [that] most Americans leave behind online. A significant fraction of that “digital exhaust” is not voluntary; it’s left behind as a condition of doing business with those enterprises that require collection of the data. Some of those data are legitimately needed by businesses: credit card account numbers if payment is being offered via credit card, shipping addresses so the seller can deliver the product, personal names so the seller can be sure of the credit card numbers and shipping addresses, and the like. Other data are demanded by the business as a condition of doing business with the customer for reasons unique to the specific enterprise.

Better would be to bar the sale, rather than bar the purchase, of such data.

That sale, too, should be barred universally, not just with respect to our government, within the following boundaries. All data that an enterprise demands be collected in order to do business needs to be barred from sale or any other transfer, to any other entity, whether government or not. There should be no default position or opt in or out; the sale or transfer of these data should be prohibited. Government legitimately can still access those data on presentation in court of a probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the [data] to be searched, and the [data] to be seized. Voluntarily left data should require affirmative opt-in before those data can be sold or transferred. Failure to choose should be taken as not opting in—the enterprise cannot sell of transfer the data.

Contempt for Average Americans

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Television personality Katie Couric has made it plain. Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive Movement, wrote a century ago in his The Promise of American Life, that

the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

Couric had this to say on Bell Maher’s podcast:

The socioeconomic disparities are a lot and class resentment is a lot and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment—which are Trump voters—so, I think that is a huge problem that we have to address[.]

We average Americans are just too stupid to be taken seriously by the Know Betters, especially press personalities who style themselves the filter, the gateway, of what they deem fit for us to know.