Tag Archives: rights

Bureaucrats Exercising Personal Power Because They Can

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The Biden-Harris administration is urging Americans in Ukraine to get out of that nation as fast as they can go. Biden-Harris even trotted out his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, to issue a panicky plea for our citizens to get out—because Biden-Harris intends to strand those who don’t make it out just as thoroughly as he did in Afghanistan.

Enter Biden-Harris’ State Department bureaucrats.

The US State Department is requiring American citizens fleeing Ukraine into Poland to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, according to a press release issued Saturday.
US citizens are allowed to enter Poland through its land border with Ukraine, but the State Department says those evacuating “must present a valid US passport and proof of COVID-19 vaccination.”

On top of this [aside: this seems a tacit Biden-Harris administration admission that vaccines against the Wuhan Virus don’t proof folks against subsequent infection as Biden-Harris had originally touted.]

Travelers are also encouraged to present a negative test result from a PCR or antigen COVID-19 test, which will facilitate entry into Poland[.]

This is just Biden-Harris’ bureaucrats exercising power for the sake of the exercise.

Even stipulating, arguendo, that the threat of the unvaccinated spreading the Wuhan Virus is real or has serious consequences, there are just too many ways for State to handle American “travelers'” who lack vaccination/negative test proof after their entry into Poland from Ukraine for this demand to be anything other than the ego trip of power.

State’s statement containing these barriers requirements can be read here.

Proving Their Point

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Freedom Convoy convoy/protests, in salute to and support of, the Canadian Freedom Convoy are planned for Brussels and France. The convoys have the same purpose, too: to protest the Wuhan Virus vaccine mandates and health papers “passports” required by the Belgian and French governments and to demand their end.

But.

A wide perimeter around the city of 1.1 million would be set up to keep an excess of trucks out of the center of Brussels.
Brussels Mayor Philippe Close said in a Twitter message that officials decided to ban the “Freedom Convoy” protest because organizers failed to seek permission to hold the event.

Imagine that. Needing Government permission to protest Government’s diktats.

And this:

Citing “risks of trouble to public order,” the Paris police department banned protests aimed at “blocking the capital” from Friday through Monday. Police will put measures in place to protect roads and detain violators.
Blocking traffic can lead to two years in prison, 4,500 euros (more than $5,000) in fines and a suspended driver’s license, the police department said in a statement.

Don’t you dare question your Government Betters.

Which proves the point of the truckers’ protests most admirably.

And, the proof has gone live.

Parts of the French “Freedom Convoy” made it to the Arc de Triomphe monument, where French police tear gassed them to drive them away and deny their protest.

The irony abounds.

Voter Discrimination

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Alabama, pursuant to the latest decennial census, has drawn its electoral map, and the outcome supposedly yields a House delegation of six white Republicans and one Black Democrat for the Federal Congress.

Opponents of the map say it disadvantages black voters. So far, the map stands, as the Supreme Court ruled that the map mustn’t be changed this close to an upcoming Federal election, but it’s a temporary ruling: the Court said it will hear the full case in its next term, starting in October. Thus the map will be the one in effect for next November’s midterms.

The “disadvantages black voters” bit rings hollow to me. There’s no doubt that the map is gerrymandered to favor one group of Americans over another, but that’s what gerrymandering does, and both parties have been doing it, for good or ill, ever since there were two dominant parties in our Republic.

What makes the beef ring hollow though, it the bit about disadvantaging one group of Americans over another. That suggests, strongly, that it would be OK to advantage that group of Americans over the other, currently advantaged. Or even merely to seek some version of “equity” or “equality.”

Either way—explicitly targeting one group of Americans separately from another, regardless of purpose—is nothing but rank identity politics. While there remains bigotry afoot in our republic, this is no longer the 1950s. We have come far closer today to realizing our ideal—as carved into the Supreme Court building—of all Americans being equal under law, just as we are—as acknowledged in the opening sentences of our Declaration of Independence—equal under God.

There is no need, any longer, to explicitly carve out districts to favor any race or ethnicity over any other: we’re all the same voters; we’re all American voters.

The answer, of course, for all that it’ll be easier written than done, is to do away with gerrymandering altogether. Divide each State up into squares of substantially equal populations of citizens, beginning at the State’s geographic center, and deviating from straight-line district boundaries only at the State’s boundary with an adjoining State.

Madness

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That’s what the Ottawa Police Chief, Peter Sloly, claims the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa is.

[a] nationwide insurrection driven by madness

Because the truckers disagree with the Canadian government’s diktats regarding individual health and individual decisions regarding health.

Now where have I heard before such characterizations of disagreement with Government being the definition of madness?

Oh, yeah—Nikita Khrushchev’s and his successor Tzar General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev’s, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (For completeness’ sake, they were only extending and expanding Josef Stalin’s use of psychiatry as a political tool of control, but that’s a separate story.) Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s USSR government would routinely decide dissenters were insane—suffering from delusions of reformism—and confine them to asylums until they were…cured. Or died from one cause or another. Major General Pyotr Grigorenko was only one of the more prominent ones “driven by madness.”

Now here is Sloly: a wrong-minded protest—his position—must perforce be an “insurrection,” and insurrections must be—again, his position—acts of insanity.

“in the event of an investigation into a user”

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The IRS is bent on using facial recognition to allow (or block) an American taxpayer to have access to his own tax records that the IRS maintains on each of us. The program is called ID.me, and it

will require a face scan, with which it will then “verify” a person’s identity, store in a database, and use for future logins.

As the WSJ asks, What could go wrong? It then answers the question:

Tucked into the agency’s ID.me project document is a line explaining that the agency will also use the mobile phones that submit selfies as a “piece of identity evidence” and that “geolocation can be gleaned from [mobile network operators] in the event of an investigation into a user.”

This is People’s Republic of China-grade surveillance, this time by a weaponized IRS of each of us American citizens. This is the IRS whose weaponization was begun under the Progressive-Democrat, Barack Obama. This is the IRS whose weaponization is being expanded to republic-threatening levels by the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden.

Update: The IRS now claims it’s not going to do the facial recognition bit. But it hasn’t made any similar claims regarding “geolocation” or any other piece of “identity evidence” that it might hold, or get hold of, and would willingly pass along to support any “investigation” into a user.

Sort of like tax data and forms that it already has a history of passing along to the press.