Tag Archives: responsibilities

“Pay Their Way Out of Jail”

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Illinois has a law, signed into that status by Progressive-Democrat Governor JB Pritzker, that will allow folks accused of any of a broad array of felonies, including kidnapping, armed robbery, second degree murder, drug induced homicide, aggravated DUI, threatening a public official, and aggravated fleeing and eluding to walk free pending trial under the law’s cashless bail component. This component takes effect next January.

The problem with this cashless bail foolishness of Illinois—with any jurisdiction’s cashless bail policy—is made crystalline by Pritzker’s reaction to one State’s Attorney’s lawsuit against Pritzker and his Attorney General, Kwame Raoul.

Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe has filed a lawsuit in his county’s circuit court against the governor and state attorney general, arguing that the SAFE-T law violates the state constitution.
Pritzker’s office criticized the lawsuit, calling it a “weak attempt to protect the status quo that lets murderers and abusers pay their way out of jail.”

Pay their way out of jail. Pritzker wants to let murderers and abusers out of jail for free, instead. (And he completely ignored the premise that his policy violates the State’s constitution. Apparently, Pritzker cares not a fig for his State’s supreme law.)

Saul Alinsky Lives

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And the Progressive-Democrat administration can’t handle it. Regarding some governors transporting illegal aliens to Progressive-Democrat-run cities and homes (the way President Joe Biden (D) has been doing all over our nation, I add), Power Line noted this:

Governors Abbott and DeSantis have put several of Alinsky’s rules in play Among them:

  • Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
  • Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
  • A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
  • Keep the pressure on.
  • The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
  • Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

A Politico “person familiar” with White House thinking had this:

Oh no. This is a dangerous situation. How can we fix it?

Biden had this, through his Press Secretary:

It’s really just disrespectful to humanity. It doesn’t afford them any dignity what they’re doing, when you’re abandoning families and children in a place where they were told they were going to get housing and a place where they were told they were going to get jobs. … It’s just cruel.

Disrespectful and cruel to transport illegal aliens from the Biden-created shambles and squalor of our southern border and transport them to welcoming sanctuary cities like New York City and Chicago—never minding the despicable racism and xenophobia of those cities’ mayors who say these brown-skinned foreigners aren’t welcome in those cities after all.

Disrespectful and cruel to take the illegal aliens from the squalor the Biden administration has made of our southern border and transport them to the lap of luxury that is Martha’s Vineyard.

Sure.

And we’ve seen the hysteria that includes threats of criminal charges since this sort of thing is legal only when Progressive-Democrats do it.

Location Apps on Smartphones

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A techy article about the wonders of location apps in our smartphones—if “properly shared”—in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. The author’s piece centered on the alleged benefits of automatically sharing your personal location data with a selected audience (usually family members) and the app providers’ directions for how to achieve “proper sharing,” supposedly limiting the location sharing to that selected audience.

The author missed the larger problem, though: the intrinsic lack of security on those apps, especially given the historical disdain for personal information security on the part of some of those providers.

I won’t share my location, ever. It wasn’t necessary before such apps became available, and it isn’t necessary today. My smartphone has a—wait for it—telephone app that I can use to check in with and/or check on the ones about whom I care.

The location data in these apps simply aren’t as secure as the touters make them out to be. Data that are held anywhere but on my personal devices are vulnerable to exposure, whether by “mistake”—last week’s IRS release of tax records (which is all too routine for this government agency) comes to mind—or programming mistakes, or cloud or providers’ servers being hacked, or the receivers’ devices being hacked, or location history being vulnerable to government information demands, or….

Location data that aren’t in the cloud or on those other servers and that aren’t being transmitted to a supposedly limited audience aren’t available to exposure.

Along those lines, a commenter in the comment thread for that article had this:

I checked FindMy to see if my wife was lost coming to an appointment at the bank (she was). The banker gasped, “Does she know you’re tracking her?” Her reaction? “It’s a sign of a secure marriage.”
She once missed where I-26 turns and followed the connector straight ahead into downtown Columbia, SC. I was able to guide her through town back to I-26 by a convenient route. I had been tracking her anticipating that very thing.
Very useful app, but one has to be careful with it.

Leaving aside the Banker’s intrusion into a family matter having nothing to do with the family business being conducted, I had this reaction:

Before location apps were available, my wife had a similar missed-turn-now-lost experience trying to get to a location in a large city in Texas hours away from the large city in Texas in which we live, and where I still was.
Her solution? She exercised the telephone app that happened be on her smartphone and called me. I brought up the map function on my laptop, and from her description of the landmarks she was seeing, I quickly located her and then talked her back onto her route. She finished her trip with no further trouble.

Telephone apps. What will Big Tech think of next?

He Didn’t Have to Kowtow

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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and controlling shareholder of Facebook Meta, said on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that he was bullied (he said pressured) by the FBI to censor Facebook commentary regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop and the information on it. He also claimed to feel

some regret that the company limited the story’s distribution after it was ultimately verified.

Sure. On the other hand, his behavior empirically demonstrates that he agreed with the idea of Facebook (and his Big Tech competitors/confreres) “filtering” information and deciding for himself what information he deemed fit for consumption by us unwashed average Americans.

After all, he wasn’t actually forced to accede to the FBI’s…pressure. He chose to do that. And he still does it. No, the more likely explanation is that it was straight up collusion, and now Zuckerberg is scrambling to cover his behind in the face of likely Section 230 backlash.

It’s Not Even That

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The Wall Street Journal thinks President Joe Biden’s (D) write-off of $10,000 worth of student loan debt is a “forgiveness coup.”

It has that effect, but I don’t think Biden is operating that deviously. This is nothing more than Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate nakedly buying votes for this fall and 2024. It’s the bread part of bread and circuses, with the circuses being staged by his Party supporters in Congress alternately touting his having bypassed Congress to do this and bleating that he didn’t go far enough in the doing.

But at what cost is Biden buying those votes? Purely fiscally, he’s forcing us taxpayers to pony up $300 billion to make good on Biden’s largesse, according to Penn Wharton, and as much as twice that according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Politically, the move seriously angrifies a major fraction of us American citizens and voters. Perhaps chief among these are the majority of us who have no student debt to pay off: we never went to college/university; we went to work, instead, vis., in the trades, without which no house, no office building, no road, no mine or well, no part of our nation’s infrastructure gets built. Or we went to other than Ivy League schools to get quality educations in marketable areas of study, didn’t borrow to do so, and got jobs. Or we went to Ivy League or those Other Than schools, borrowed, and paid off our loans—because we got degrees in marketable areas and so got jobs.

We are the folks Biden and his syndicate are explicitly tapping to cover his forgiveness. We’re the folks who have demonstrated a grand capacity to pay off debt, so Biden is calling on us to use that skill some more.

Morally, it’s costing those bailed-out students the practice of actually keeping their own commitments, and it’s trapping them into the welfare cage of being too used to government welfare to get out of it. Because that’s the easy way out for them, and that’s what this sort of “forgiveness” teaches them.

There’s also the potential financial cost to these bailed out persons: now they have money to buy their first house, start a family, buy a car, …? Who’ll lend them the money? Are they now too great a credit risk, expecting as they might, simply to be able to walk away from that loan, too, when repaying it becomes inconvenient to them? Who’ll be willing to hire them, with potential employers looking askance at their willingness to walk away from inconvenient commitments.

The answers to those last questions will unroll only over the next few years—possibly to no serious effect, possibly to the great detriment of these persons, and thence to our economy.

One other thing is certain: colleges and universities will raise their tuition and other charges to absorb this Progressive-Democrat donation. That will leave none of us in the real economy better off.