Category Archives: culture

Foolish Move

Posted on by
1

Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R, SC) has introduced legislation that would make illegal formation of House caucuses organized around race, ethnicity, or national origin.

If adopted, the measure would effectively force the dissolution of Democrat-aligned groups, including the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
The proposal could also affect GOP-affiliated organizations, including the Black Republican Congressional Staff Association, the GOP Latino Staff Association, and the Republican Asian American Staff Association.

It’s a nice idea, blocking race-based organizations and the like in the House. Mace’s argument is straightforward and entirely legitimate.

Race-based caucuses are not diversity. They are federally sanctioned segregation. You do not get to lecture America about inclusion while running an organization which checks your skin color at the door. The hypocrisy ends now.
It is time to end taxpayer-funded discrimination in this institution[.]

There is, though, no way to enforce the intent of the thing, even were the legislation to pass. The caucuses won’t disappear. The groups will just continue to meet informally in glorified coffee klatches and therewith continue to coordinate legislative proposal and votes. Nothing material will change.

Are They Not Working Americans?

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Posted on by
Reply

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.

What DSA Wants for the United States

Posted on by
1

The Democratic Socialists of America has published its Program. The categorizations are mine.

  • Government-owned means of production—land, labor, capital and general infrastructure and capital goods
    • publicly-owned social housing
    • strictly regulated investment properties
    • universal rent control
    • publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure
    • phase out the use of fossil fuels
    • earth’s resources for all
    • public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries
  • National security
    • disempower police unions [there’s a pro-worker move]
    • abolish the police and prison system
    • defund the Department of War
    • end economic warfare against [enemy] countries…such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran
    • end ICE detention and deportations
    • legalize migration
    • grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status
  • Government—national—structure
    • replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy
    • expand the House of Representatives
    • abolish the Senate
  • Economy
    • reparations
    • aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations
    • Protect, expand, and enforce the rights of all workers to form, join, and strike with their unions, regardless of industry [except for those Evil Police, which are being eliminated, anyway]

This also is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is absorbing into its own core with its enthusiastic embrace of the DSA, the objections of the small right wing Establishment of Party notwithstanding.

How Far Have the Brits Fallen?

Posted on by
Reply

We’re all well aware of the shambles Labour—and the Tories before them—have made of the UK economy, of what they still so cutely think of as their borders, and of their foreign policy.

Look elsewhere, too, for instance at the nation’s flagship airport, Heathrow, in western London. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of…well, lookie here…. It’s owned by a consortium consisting of

Ardian, a French private investment company
Qatar Investment Authority
Public Investment Fund, a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund
Australian Retirement Trust
GIC, a Singaporezn sovereign wealth fund
China Investment Corporation, a People’s Republic of China sovereign wealth fund

In their aggregate, they own 100% of Heathrow, all under the transparent fig leaf of FGP Topco Limited, which is headquartered in Middlesex. And circularly, its acquisition by Ardian and Qatar Holding LLC (Qatar Investment Authority) was approved by the European Commission in 2024.

Do the Brits own anything of their own anymore? This would be bad enough, but five of those owners are foreign governments, which own, collectively, 67.4% of that erstwhile pride of the United Kingdom.