Author Archives: eehines

A Tax Picture

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This is for the benefit of those who demand the Evil Rich “pay their fair share.” The rest of us—us ordinary Americans—already know the facts of the matter.

As noted at the bottom of the graph, the data are from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which is comprised of nonpartisan tax specialists. WSJ staff did the analysis.

Those Evil Rich, boy, they’re only paying 39% of the total income taxes remitted, nearly two-and-a-half times their proportion of income earned across the nation, while the working poor are paying a whopping 6%, or just under a third of their proportion of income earned.

No wonder no Progressive-Democratic Party politician, or anyone on the Left, is willing to say what “fair share” is.

Biden Censorship

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Now President Joe Biden (D) is moving to add his censorship requirements to artificial intelligence programming, to go along with his censorship actions vis-à-vis social media.

The Biden administration is pursuing regulations for artificial intelligence systems that would require government audits to ensure they produce trustworthy outputs, which could include assessments of whether AI is promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Here is the leader of the Progressive-Democratic Party once again asserting that Government definitions of misinformation and disinformation, and by extension true information, are the only valid definitions, and Government will inflict those definitions on us ordinary Americans.

And one more Government dictated definition, from Alan Davidson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information:

The Biden administration supports the advancement of trustworthy AI. We are devoting a lot of energy to that goal across government.

Trustworthy—it’s what Government says it is.

The Progressive-Democratic Party as an institution, and its constituent politicians individually and collectively, are increasingly pushing their Newspeak Dictionary on us, seeking to replace our American dictionaries. This is right out of the playbook of the Left’s icon, Saul Alinsky:

He who controls the language controls the masses.

Higher Ed Administrators and Values

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Phil Murphy, has decided to intervene, nakedly, on the side of unions in a labor dispute between Rutgers faculty and Rutgers administrators.

Rutgers faculty walked off the job Monday after three employee unions launched a strike. The move has left classrooms empty….

Under New Jersey law, university administrators can go into State court and get an injunction forcing an end to the strike and a resumption/continuation of negotiations. Murphy has stepped in, though, and told the administrators “don’t you dare.” Murphy’s diktat isn’t, strictly speaking, enforceable, but Murphy does control 20% of Rutgers’ state funding, and he appoints the majority of its board.

As the WSJ editorial put it,

…administrators are now under political pressure to cave.

Not entirely, though. They could force Murphy’s hand by going to court anyway. These administrators just have to decide which they value more: their personal jobs or the Rutgers students and their ability to get the education they’re paying princely sums for.

Those administrators’ actions will make their values obvious, regardless of how they might characterize their choice.

“Help Ukraine Defeat Russia, Then Make Friends”

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That’s the headline on (ex-acting CIA Deputy Director of Operations) Jack Devin’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Help Ukraine Defeat Russia, Then Make Friends

That might be useful on the international stage from a purely political perspective, but consider the cost.

What we’re seeing in the atrocities the Russian “soldiers” and “officers” are committing in Ukraine—bombing civilian bomb shelters carefully marked as civilian—and child—shelters, bombing or missile-attacking hospitals, raping women and children(!), torturing civilian men—these soldiers may be in the lower tiers of Russian society, but their officers are from the middle and upper tiers, and they’re all representative of Russian culture.

How is it possible to make friends with such a country is this?

20th Century Bigotry Updated

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the fraud that’s rampant—and hard to root out—in Federal programs intended to give a special leg up on project awards to “Disadvantaged Business Enterprises.” They closed their piece with this bit of truism on the…foolishness…of singling out government-favored groups of Americans for special treatment.

Trying to do social engineering via civil engineering makes federal projects opaque, inefficient and—far too often—dishonest.

To which I add, it’s also just another way for the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party to repeat—updated for the 21st century—the segregationist bigotry of the middle of the last century.