Both Can Be Correct

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In the aftermath of the discovery that Progressive-Democrat-run New Jersey really does have 6,600 illegal aliens on its registered voter rolls (the State’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Mikie Sherrill says she’s taking steps to purge those illegal registrants, but I’ve seen no evidence, yet, the purge actually has occurred) and that 400 of them did, indeed, vote, Sherrill is blaming the software vendor the State hired to collate and vet all those registering to vote in New Jersey.

These individuals answered “no” when asked on a keypad whether they were a US citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway[.]

IDEMIA, the software vendor, says it’s not responsible.

IDEMIA works with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, and has for more than 40 years, to support the process through which eligible individuals may indicate their interest in registering to vote when applying for or renewing a driver’s license or state-issued identification card. IDEMIA’s role is to transmit information through the motor vehicle system.
The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote. Information submitted by IDEMIA must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections.

Missed in the finger-pointing and defensive crouching and responsibility ducking is a simple truism. Both of those statements can be correct at the same time. The software vendor’s output may well have, this time at least, failed to meet contractually obligated accuracy standards. Meanwhile, New Jersey’s DoS/DoE personnel may well have failed their own obligation to inspect the received data with due diligence.

Blame shifting is more important than problem solving, though.

Are They Not Working Americans?

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The news writers in The Wall Street Journal note, correctly, that

IRAs and workplace retirement accounts were created to help working Americans save for old age by providing tax incentives for doing so.

Then they spent more than 2,700 words decrying some who have had more success at that than others, as though those with that success do not deserve that success while claiming that such success is a mark of dysfunction of those IRAs and workplace retirement accounts and the associated incentives.

But how did these successful ones achieve the growth of their retirement-oriented accounts? One example:

Gregory Baszucki’s [IRA] holds at least $68 million—and possibly a whole lot more.
Baszucki, 61 years old, is one of hundreds of people who bought stakes in promising startups when the shares were worth peanuts, stashing them in retirement accounts and watching their values balloon to eight figures or more. What they are getting, essentially, is the mother of all tax breaks.

That’s wrong how, exactly? Baszucki did what he was encouraged to do by financial planning experts and by Government through its design of the retirement savings programs. He stashed away some stock shares in his IRA so their value could grow tax deferred, or tax free if he put them in a Roth IRA, th latter which is designed explicitly to allow retirement savers to set aside already taxed monies to grow and be free of taxes on withdrawal. What these news writers carefully ignore is the broadly chancy—extremely so—nature of startups: most of them fail. Baszucki could easily have lost all of his stakes in their entirety. That he has been better than most of us in choosing startups for his investment money, or luckier, is an outcome to be celebrated by the rest of us and an outcome which we all can achieve with our own skill and/or luck.

And this from the article:

Those entrepreneurs and their financial backers are increasingly using that strategy to pile up giant retirement-account balances, all subsidized by US taxpayers….

This is plain wrong, to the point of deliberately offered disinformation. Of course none of that is subsidized by taxpayers. The government simply isn’t getting the tax revenue from those giant retirement-account balances; no one else is paying in that revenue in the place of those account holders.

Steven Rosenthal, a retired tax lawyer lately of the Tax Policy Center:

We aren’t talking about saving enough for your needs in retirement. This isn’t keeping you off the dole in old age. This is yacht financing or dynasty building.

And

Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) and Congressman Richard Neal (D, MA) plan to introduce a bill this week that would require annual withdrawals from accounts over $10 million for individuals of any age. The planned legislation stemmed in part from long-running concerns that some investors might circumvent annual contribution limits on retirement accounts by undervaluing shares in companies that aren’t public, “thus substantially increasing their tax benefits,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2014.
“This is an egregious loophole we’ve got to close,” Wyden said. “Congress created tax-advantaged retirement accounts to help more Americans save for a dignified retirement, not to help the ultrawealthy dodge taxes on insider deals and build titanic fortunes.”

The Progressive-Democrats’ position less obtusely stated: “Give us the damn money, already. It’s not yours, it’s Government’s.”

This is the arrogance of those presuming to determine what the needs of others are; this is the resentment of those who don’t have presuming to determine the legitimacy of the wants of those who do have. And dynasty building? There’s something wrong with parents looking to leave their children better off than they are? To these resentful ones, yes: success must be capped, and the children must be knee-capped of their inheritances.

Are the Baszuckis of our nation not working Americans? Of course they are. This is nothing more than a naked drive to punish those who have been more successful than others by taking away their success and redistributing it to those favored by Know Betters. It’s what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants; it’s what the Democratic Socialist of America party, a core constituent of the Progressive-Democratic Party has as its explicit goal; and it’s what the fundamentally mendacious press is pushing.

A fundamental question that Know Betters and Redistributionists must answer is this: what’s their limiting principle defining how much success is too much? What’s the basis for their claimed principle—should they have the integrity to name one?

No point in waiting for an answer. It’s a an amorphous, generalized claim born nakedly of covetousness, it’s wrong, and it’s anti-American.

Quitters?

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American AI developers are all up in arms over the successes of People’s Republic of China AI models, especially those that are being released as open source. The American executives’ beef centers on how good those models are and how cheaply produced they are.

OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

And

The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with US models on some benchmarks.
…
“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,'” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.

The general thrust of these bleats and cries to Mommy Government is that these personages think that the PRC’s scientists and programmers are smarter than American scientists and programmers, and they want to cower inside a truly dystopian regulatory moat that would stifle American innovation in AI altogether.

That’s as unacceptable as it is despicable. AI development—American AI development, especially—enormously benefits from open competition. Competition is what drives at an accelerating rate the quality of any product class, and especially AI. Especially AI, too, is a competition we must win—where winning isn’t across the finish line first, since with all product development, there is no finish line. Winning here means maintaining a significant (not just by a nose) lead.

Thus, American AI development must proceed apace, without regulatory restriction. We have enough laws on the books to handle its misuse, just as we have for any tool. American execs need to stop bleating and get competitive, on quality, on price, on rate of improvement.

The sole exception to largely unfettered competition should be AI models from companies domiciled in, or associated with companies domiciled in, the People’s Republic of China.

That exception, though, has nothing to do with those models’ costs or capabilities or open source availability or nearly anything else. This exception is driven solely by the national and corporate security threat those companies and their models represent. Those companies, via the PRC’s 2017 intelligence law, are entirely beholden to the PRC intelligence community for conducting espionage on any subject, in any venue, and against any potential source that the intelligence arm of the PRC government wishes. These companies should be barred from the US, and other nations wishing to remain free from PRC…influence…should do the same.

And this central truth: American scientists and programmers are every bit as good as, if not better than, PRC scientists and programmers. As are the scientists and programmers of other nations wishing to remain free.

An Alternative Extinguishment

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Federal District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has ordered Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to halt their merger process for two weeks—ostensibly, the judge claimed—to give States challenging the deal more time to see their case through in court. The silliness of that order is in the claim that two whole weeks is enough time for such a complex case to wend its way. Any Federal judge worthy of his black robe is well aware of the implications of such a short time frame. This is nothing more than judicial interference in a business decision.

The States’ argument also is risible. The merger would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood and reduce choices for consumers. This can be rendered irrelevant in a straightforward manner. Paramount and WB should move their operations out of Hollywood, out of California altogether. Then there would be no concern about Hollywood at all. There also would be no reduction in consumer choice from the move.

Likely locations for the two companies include Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, and Alabama, each of which has an environment favorable to making movies and television shows. Any of those environments also would lower the costs of production, which could only enhance consumer choice by making movies and TV shows easier and faster to bring off.

“Harassment of the Press”

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In their house editorial, the worthies of The Wall Street Journal let loose this remark regarding the leak of President Donald Trump’s (R) decision, on the advice of his Secret Service, to change his Air Force One ride out of Turkey to Great Britain:

Notably, the Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Times writers who reported the story to disclose their sources. That’s harassment against the press that won’t make the US safer.

This is the self-serving preciousness of our routinely mendacious press. The information the NYT‘s news writers received for their story was illegally transferred by a leaker who leaked classified information to those writers.

It isn’t harassment of the press to demand that pressmen reveal the sources of their illegally transferred and illegally received by them goods. Anyone but a pressman convicted of receiving stolen goods would be jailed for the felony. The august press guildsmen cannot even be charged under current practice.

Aside from that, there is nothing in our Constitution, especially in our First Amendment, that contains any reference, any hint, of journalist-source confidentiality. The journalist is not a doctor or a priest, neither is the source a patient or supplicant.

At bottom, whether a journalist should or should not be put on trial for receiving stolen goods, there is no threat to press freedom from requiring a journalist to provide the name of his source when that source has potentially committed a crime by an illegal transfer.