Monthly Archives: December 2017

That’s the Point

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Six months after it went into force, China’s tough new cybersecurity law is still troubling US technology executives who fear that it will put the intellectual property of their companies and the data they collect in jeopardy.

And

…while the law went into effect June 1, the Chinese government is still drafting specific implementation rules.

And

Company and trade-group representatives are also concerned that the network-equipment security reviews could expose proprietary source code, jeopardizing their trade secrets[.]

The People’s Republic of China wants other nations’ intellectual and technology property, and it’s willing to steal it in any way it can.  Especially targeted are businesses the PRC considers “critical information infrastructure:” computer-network operations in telecommunications, energy, transportation, information services, and finance.

Notice that.  These technologies also are critical to the other nations’ security. But that’s why the PRC demands the accesses and is so…hazy…about its rules facilitating getting those accesses.

One more reason to restrict the amount and nature of any business dealings with the mainland.

The US Embassy to Israel

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Deutsche Welle is fretting about the potential for the US, finally, to move our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.

The status of Jerusalem has been a key stumbling block in previous peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

Sure, it’s been a stumbling block, but it’s not been the only one, nor even a key one, despite DW‘s angst.

And Naabil Shaath, a man of many portfolios within the Palestinian Authority and an advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas, is making veiled threats about the move:

We warned the American side that if the American government does in fact carry out that statement to recognize a unified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and transfers the American embassy to Jerusalem, this is a step that will end any chance of a peace process[.]

Mahmoud Habash, another Abbas advisor, is even more blunt:

[T]he world will pay the price….

And

Hamas, the militant band of Palestinians that controls Gaza, has warned of a renewed intifada….

In fact, the Palestinians have no interest in peace with Israel in any guise other than after Israel’s destruction.  They’ve opposed or walked away from every discussion of peace in the past.  They’ve engaged in terrorist attacks against Israeli women and children whenever they’ve thought they could get away with them.

Moving our embassy won’t affect Palestinian behavior in the least, only Abbas’ and his cronies’, including Hamas’, rhetoric.  US law requires our embassy to be in Jerusalem.

It’s long past time to obey that law.

Colin Kaepernick and the ACLU’s Lack of Understanding

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The ACLU awarded Colin Kaepernick its Eason Monroe Courageous Advocate Award over the weekend, ostensibly for his “courage” in beginning a movement of kneeling during our national anthem.

It’s clear that the ACLU—all of the Left, really—and the kneeling athletes have, at best, misunderstood the meaning of their actions.  The hoo-raw over these protests, the empty seats in football stadiums, and the declining TV viewership shows plainly that the message being received is one of disrespect for the core symbols of our nation and insult toward those who have and are defending our nation, those symbols, and what our nation and symbols represent—individual liberty, including the right to protest even in the most disagreeable manner.

That misunderstanding carries one or both of two implications, since the protesting athletes surely know that their original message long ago was missed, and they’ve not changed in the slightest how they’re delivering their message.  One is that their original message never was a protest against this or that form of social injustice as they claim; it is what has been received all along: a protest and insult against our nation, its symbols, and those who defend and have defended them over the centuries.

The other implication is that these protestors now have walked away from their original message; the continued demonstrations of disrespect and insult are descents into the petty ego contest of trying to out-stubborn those who consider their form of protest disrespectful and insulting.  The “protestors” are trying to jam their form down the throats of those who read their form differently, solely to show who’s bigger and without any concern for the message itself.

Some have suggested that kneeling (rather than, say sitting on the bench as Kaepernick originally did, or raising clenched fists as a couple of Olympic contestants did years ago and some NFL players do today) is a reverential form of protest.

The correct, the respectful, treatment of our national anthem is to stand and face the flag, or if the flag isn’t visible face the direction of the music, with our hand right hand over heart; or if wearing a hat, while holding that hat over our heart; or if in uniform, standing at attention and saluting.  There’s nothing remotely reverential in disrespectful behavior.

How Close Are the House and Senate Tax Reform Bills?

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See the table below, from The Wall Street Journal.  While the Left and its NLMSM emphasize the differences, and the Progressive-Democratic Party denizens rail at the claimed iniquities in their manufactured dudgeon, the tax reform bills on offer from the House and the Senate are remarkably similar.  The agree right down the line on the goals of tax reform, and they agree right down that same line on the means of achieving those goals.  The differences between the two bills are matters of degree, details bordering on trivial.

Tax rates and brackets differ only slightly, even the Senate’s seven brackets only amount to a finer parsing of income.  In both bills, the death tax disappears for at least eight years—four House election cycles, a Senate election cycle, and two Presidential election cycles.  It’ll be tough, even for the Progressive-Democratic Party, to let the death tax reappear after that amount of time, and the same difficulty will exist for letting the individual tax cuts disappear.

The biggest difference is with the Medical Expense deduction, but that effect on our general taxes or on Federal revenues flowing from the tax code reform is minor; settling it entirely in favor of one house or the other, without compromise, should be easily doable.

The House-Senate Conference should be able to settle these minor differences quickly.  Whether the Conference Bill passes both houses then will depend in large part on the egos of a very few snowflake Republican Senators.  Keep their votes in mind come primary season.

This Makes No Sense

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The German government wants to pay a bonus to refugees who’ve been rejected from consideration for remaining in Germany.

The German government wants to encourage rejected asylum seekers to voluntarily return to their home countries with a cash incentive, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told newspaper Bild am Sonntag on Sunday.

It’s also a cynical move.  Maiziere offered this as part of the bonus:

When you voluntarily decide to return by the end of February, in addition to startup help you can provisionally receive housing cost help for the first 12 months in your homeland

If these folks have been rejected even for refugee status, what have they done that would earn them any of the German citizens’ money?  These folks are refugees, or claim to be; what is there in the home country from which they say they’re fleeing that would allow them to live there in safety?