The Party of…Something

Posted on 9 October 2018 by eehines

The editors of the Wall Street Journal warned us last Sunday to be heads up: the Progressive-Democrats are not going to let this Kavanaugh thing go, even now that the confirmation is done. Shamefully, neither are they going to let Dr Christine Blasey Ford go.

The Minority Leader made clear that Democrats are going to use accuser Christine Blasey Ford as a campaign prop from here to November and beyond.

Schumer, Feinstein, Hirono, Gillibrand, Durbin, Spartacus—all of these, and each of them, have abused Dr Ford nearly as badly as did her unknown assailant all those decades ago. So has nearly every member of the Progressive-Democrat Party up for reelection this cycle.

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Promise

Posted on 22 September 2018 by eehines

The People’s Republic of China has been rolling out its system for spying on surveilling its citizens for a while now. This is the system that develops social scores for every PRC citizen, and the system has bennies for achieving high scores:

…waived deposits on hotels and rental cars, VIP treatment at airports, discounted loans, priority job applications, and fast-tracking to the most prestigious universities.

Things that can detract from those high scores include

[j]aywalking, late payments on bills or taxes, buying too much alcohol, or speaking out against the government….
Other mooted punishable offences include spending too long playing video games, wasting money on frivolous purchases, and posting on social media….

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Flipping Witnesses

Posted on 28 August 2018 by eehines

President Donald Trump decries it. So have I in writing about the Manafort case and the credibility of Mueller’s prosecutors’ witnesses.

What’s interesting to me and saddening, and what’s dangerous to our system of justice—which includes justice for the accused as well as the victim—is prosecutors’ response to Trump’s decrial.

Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that Mr Trump’s comments amount to “an absolutely outrageous statement and to any prosecutor would just be shocking to hear.”

“It’s hard to overstate how fundamental” to prosecutions cooperating witnesses are, Mr Zeidenberg said.

And Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor:

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Accountability

Posted on 26 August 2018 by eehines

Fr James Connell, of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, had a thought on the recently exposed massive child abuse perpetrated by priests and bishops of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.

Civil governments must take the lead, as was done in Pennsylvania, and do what the church won’t do. Many more grand juries need to be impaneled and empowered to find and declare the truth. Without truth, there can be no justice, and without justice, there will be no healing.

Take the lead? Maybe yes, maybe no. Certainly, civil authority must deal with the secular crime aspect of this.

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A Question of Credibility

Posted on 24 August 2018 by eehines

Google is being sued for invasion of privacy and for what approximates false advertising.

“Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users’ geolocations,” says Patacsil’s suit, which was filed Friday in California federal court. “This representation was false.”
“Despite users’ attempts to protect their location privacy, Google collects and stores users’ location data, thereby invading users’ reasonable expectations of privacy, counter to Google’s own representations about how users can configure Google’s products to prevent such egregious privacy violations,” the complaint says.

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The Will of the People

Posted on 16 August 2018 by eehines

The West Virginia House of Delegates has returned articles of impeachment against every one of the sitting Justices of the State’s Supreme Court. One Justice, Robin Davis, has resigned her post, doing so before any of the impeachment cases proceed to the West Virginia Senate for trial. In her resignation press conference, Davis complained

The majority members have ignored the will of the people who elected the justices of this court. They have erased the lines of separation between the branches of government.

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Heads in the Sand

Posted on 14 August 2018 by eehines

There is a Defcon computer security conference in progress at which a Voting Village hackers collection is busily hacking various voting machine manufacturers’ machines. As McMillan and Volz put it in their Wall Street Journal piece about the Village,

These hacks can root out weaknesses in voting machines so that vendors will be pressured to patch flaws and states will upgrade to more secure systems, organizers say.

Sadly, many of those manufacturers are upset over it, even to the point of warning about voting software license abuse. Even State government representatives don’t like the idea of testing this software’s and these machines’ security. Here’s Leslie Reynolds, National Association of Secretaries of State Executive Director:

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Facebook Strikes Again, Again

Posted on 14 August 2018 by eehines

I’ve written before about the duplicity of Facebook and its MFWIC Mark Zuckerberg.

Here’s another example, even more blatant than that last.

Permanent link to this post (56 words, 1 image, estimated 13 secs reading time)

An Oxymoron

Posted on 8 August 2018 by eehines

Apple has chosen to conceal accesses to Infowars by removing links to it from Apple’s podcast facility because Apple thinks Infowars is too far right for Apple’s taste and because the site pushes bad speech.

This is rank censorship.

Eliminating easy access to Infowars podcasts marks a rare, prominent foray for Apple into an issue confronting many major internet companies: how to remove hateful or conspiratorial messages from their platforms without infringing on free speech.

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Based on What Law?

Posted on 2 August 2018 by eehines

Federal District Judge Robert Lasnik of the Western District of Washington has blocked, temporarily, the online distribution of blueprints for printing 3-D guns. Lasnik’s temporary restraining order is subsequent to a settlement reached between Defense Distributed and State (which previously had blocked the posting of the plans) that functionally set aside State’s security objections to the posting. The State of Washington, et al., then sued to reinstate the prior block.

In decrying the settlement that’s the subject of his TRO, Lasik wrote

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