Tag Archives: regulation

Tax Data Theft

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A tax data thief stole Donald Trump’s tax data and transmitted them to various press outlets, many of which, in turn, promptly published the data. The thief was caught and has been sentenced to five years in jail. Congress is working on a bill that would make the penalty for such action much more serious.

That’s nice, but that legislation only addresses one side of the crime, and it only addresses one area in which such a crime might occur.

A more complete solution would include all instances of stolen information and the recipients of those stolen goods. If a journalist receives stolen material from any source on any subject and moves to profit from that—moves to publish the material—instead of returning the material to its owner or turning it over to relevant law authorities, that journalist must be held criminally liable for his crime. He is, after all, receiving stolen goods.

In most other cases, recipients of stolen goods who then move to profit from the receipt are criminally liable. There’s no reason to excuse the press from that liability. If no one is above the law, that must include journalists and the organizations for which they work or to which they contribute.

Free Speech German Style

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A Gab user stands criminally accused of…free speech…in Germany. Gab, so far, is standing tall and refusing Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office demand that the social media outlet dox the user so s/he can be hauled before a German court to answer for his “crime.” The user, it seems, called the Leader of Alliance 90/The Greens, Ricarda Lang, fat.

This is from German Criminal Code, Section 186:

disseminat[ing] a fact about another person which is suited to degrading that person or negatively affecting public opinion about that person, unless this fact can be proved to be true [is a crime]….

Here is Lang, in all her bountifully curvaceous glory:

That’s fatter than fat, it seems to me, and her image provides ample proof of the Gab user’s characterization. But telling the truth, even when the truth is proved, seems to be illegal in Germany.

While we’re on the subject of free speech, here’s Section 188:

If…insult (section 185) is committed publicly, in a meeting or by disseminating content (section 11 (3)) against a person involved in the political life of the nation on account of the position that person holds in public life and if the offence is suited to making that person’s public activities substantially more difficult

Never mind that that’s the whole point of public insults against a political personage—especially if the insult turns out to be accurate and not merely contemptuous (which would be legal in any nation whose politicos are not terrified of their own constituents).

But wait—Section 192 the German attitude toward proof that Section 185 otherwise says would exonerate the person.

Proof of the truth of the asserted or disseminated fact does not preclude punishment in accordance with section 185 if the insult results from the form of the assertion or dissemination or the circumstances under which it was made.

Here’s my “form of the assertion or dissemination:” my echo of the Gab user’s characterization of Lang’s physique, repeated from above:

How far Germany has fallen.

Speaking of Proud Records…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.

Mark Zuckerberg Against our 1st and 2nd Amendments

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Mark Zuckerberg, who owns controlling shares of Meta, has instructed his Facebook and Instagram packages to censor posts of athletes participating in sporting events that involve firearms.

McKenna Geer competes for Team USA at the Paralympic Games in air rifle competitions. She posted an image of the air rifle she uses on her Instagram feed. Conner Prince competes in shotgun events for Team USA. He posts about his competitions and the equipment he uses in them. The US Military Academy has its West Point Rifle Team that competes in various events. The team similarly posts about their competitions and equipment.

Zuckerberg has censored them all, even completely “unpublishing” the West Point Rifle Team’s Facebook page. He did this because each of them violated, he claims, in some nebulous way his “Community Standards.”

Never mind that these athletes and organizations, in addition to competing, share with fellow competitors a variety of tips about how to do better and emphasize to their larger public—until Zuckerberg cut each of them off from their larger public—the necessity for firearm safety and the techniques for achieving firearm safety.

This isn’t Zuckerberg expressing his opinions regarding speech and firearms. This is the Progressive social media pusher moving to dictate to us average Americans what he will permit us to say and do under our unalienable, and constitutionally acknowledged, rights. His unamerican behavior is a prime example of why social media’s Section 230 protection needs major modification so entities that are in the public square—which Zuckerberg said early on was his goal—and engage in such censorship can be haled into court.

Trump’s Education Plan

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Former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has released a 12-point plan (actually, 8 points, the last of which has 4 sub-points) for revamping and improving our nation’s public education system. He deserves large credit for laying out a specific plan. No one in the Progressive-Democratic Party has been willing to do anything of this specificity, especially including Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, other than tightly hewing to the teachers union line and denigrating voucher and charter schools.

For all that, much of Trump’s plan will be difficult to achieve. The dozen points, together with my august comments (in italics), are listed below.

  • Cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. These, especially CRT, will be hard to enforce, beyond getting rid of public verbiage on Web sites. Florida provides a good example of how to do this. That’s at the State level, though. South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which this can be implemented at the Federal level. That ruling held that while Federal funds could be preferentially withheld, they could not be withheld to a coercive extent.
  • Direct the Departments of Justice and Education to open Civil Rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination, including discrimination against Asian Americans. There need to be sanctions identified, also, though.
  • Because the Marxism being taught in schools is aggressively hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. Better would be to enforce teaching Judeo-Christian material alongside.
  • Find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and get Congress to reaffirm the president’s ability to remove recalcitrant employees from the job. The former will be hard to define. The latter needs to be done wholly separately, and Executive Branch-wide, not just in DoEd.
  • Veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. And teach civics far more than in just a single 8th grade semester.
  • Keep men out of women’s sports. In parallel, make a Title IX case, or amend Title IX, to require separate athletic programs for transgender athletes in the same manner that Title IX mandates for men and women sports programs.
  • Create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them. The new credentialing body also needs to emphasize subject matter expertise, not merely “teach how to teach.”
  • Implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment for all states and school districts that make the following historic reforms in education: These are local control matters; see my remark above for how South Dakota v Dole will impact the extent to which “funding preferences” can be implemented. Reward funding, though, will be easier to implement than coercive defunding.
    • Abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12 and adopt Merit Pay.
    • Drastically cut number of school administrators, including the “DEI” bureaucracy.
    • Adopt a Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice.
    • Implement the direct election of school principals by the parents, as the ultimate form of local control.

On the whole, this is a plan worth pursuing with all speed.