Category Archives: culture

The PRC and Bitcoin

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The behavior of the People’s Republic of China regarding bitcoin has purpose far beyond controlling bitcoin.  As background, The Wall Street Journal had this assessment of the PRC’s financial industry:

China has digitized its financial sector faster than any other nation.

The reason for their rapid pace is this according to Li Lihui, a spokesman for the National Internet Finance Association of China, and it has nothing at all to do with a sovereign nation’s legitimate desire to control its own currency and money supply:

A goal of China’s monetary regulation is to ensure that “the source and destination of every piece of money can be tracked[.]”

That end-to-end tracking, to the extent it can be done, guarantees that the PRC will know who is spending and for what.

And that means that the PRC, a nation that rules by “law” (rather than operates under rule of law) and that brooks no dissent from the pronouncements of the Communist Party of China, can control whether any given individual or organization will be permitted to spend for any particular purpose—or even whether that person or individual will be allowed access to his money at all.

Our Pledge of Allegiance and God

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A Detroit teacher is forced onto leave now because she forced a student to stand for the class’ routine recital of our Pledge of Allegiance.  Used to be, such disrespect was handled in exactly this way, and quite properly so.

The boy actually had a good reason, though, even if he misunderstood what the pledge of allegiance is about:

God said don’t worship anything other than me, don’t worship any idols, and pledging to a flag would kind of be like worshiping it[.]

It’s certainly true that our pledge opens with a pledge of allegiance to our flag, then moving on to our Republic.  However, it’s no violation of God’s injunction to have no other gods before him, nor is it a violation of His injunction to worship no graven images.

The pledge demands no worship, only loyalty, allegiance, to our nation.  The flag is no graven image; it’s a symbol of our nation—for which it stands—not of any god.

This is a missed teaching opportunity.  It was missed by the teacher, who was inarticulate in this particular moment, and it was missed by a stupefying margin by the school’s administration, which plainly doesn’t even understand the question.

This also is an illustration of the shabby condition of our public schools today.

What Else?

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Adjunct Professor Michael Issacson at the John Jay College, a part of the City University of New York system and a used-to-be prestigious school has expressed his disdain for and hopes for violence against police officers, tweeting

He then showed he meant it, telling the New York Daily News regarding his tweet,

Oh, that s—?  Everybody dies.

The college management’s response?  President Karol Mason in her press release:

I want to state clearly that I was shocked by these statements. They are abhorrent.  This adjunct expressed personal views that are not consistent with our college’s well-known and firm values and principles and my own personal standards and principles. I am appalled that anyone associated with John Jay, with our proud history of supporting law enforcement authorities, would suggest that violence against police is ever acceptable.

Fine sounding words, but what has she actually done to show they’re not just idle chit-chat?  She closed her presser with this:

The safety of our students, faculty and staff is our top priority. Today, members of the John Jay faculty received threats, and our students expressed concerns for their safety in the classroom. Out of concern for the safety of our students, faculty and staff, we are immediately placing the adjunct on administrative leave as we continue to review this matter.

Notice that.  Isaacson is put on “administrative leave” for the school’s sake, not because Isaacson did anything wrong in the eyes of school management.  Apparently, he didn’t.  Idle chit-chat, indeed.

Beside that, Isaacson is an adjunct professor, and he can be fired at will at any time.  Even a tenured professor could be fired over this; it clearly would be a violation of his terms of office.

Administrative leave.

Aside: it’s interesting that Isaacson’s implied threat was made late last month, but the NLMSM is only just starting to report on it.  In limited fashion.

Manufactured Racism

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A Democratic congresswoman said drawing attention to a colleague’s first job in the fast food industry is racist.

Seriously.

Congressman Joe Wilson (R, SC) was talking up the value of a fast food job as a means of gaining valuable experience and life/work lessons while on the job, and he mentioned that Senator Tim Scott (R, SC) had started out in such a starter job in a Chick-fil-A franchise, and now he was a sitting Senator.

[Franchises] provide entry level jobs for people to have first-time employment, improve themselves, and succeed.  In South Carolina we particularly recognize this. US Senator Tim Scott had his first job at a Chick-fil-A franchise.

It’s true enough that Wilson was factually wrong about Scott’s relationship with the franchise—he was mentored by a franchisee rather than having his first job at one.  However, it’s crystalline that Wilson was not being racist in referencing Scott’s employment history.

That didn’t stop Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D, OH) from deciding to get her knickers in a twist over the reference.

I have to say this. I am trying to figure out for the life of me what Tim Scott has to do with what we are talking about today. So he worked at Chick-fil-A? So what? I mean did [Wilson] bring it up because he’s black?

No, Wilson brought it up to show the value of starter jobs of the sort a franchise can offer.

Fudge knows this.  She manufactured her beef for her own political ends.  Making up a racist beef, though, where it’s clear that no racism exists is itself racist.  She could have served her personal politics in other ways.  Unless this is her personal politics.

Discrimination

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Now FEMA is doing it, and it’s religious discrimination.  Churches, bastions of succor in times of disaster—like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma—suffer their own damages in those disasters, as they did in Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  However, unlike other charitable organizations in similar straits, churches are being denied FEMA assistance to recover.

Law on this is not clear because separation of church and state, New York University Law Professor Burt Neuborne is claiming.

The difficulty is that the Constitution has two provisions in it. It has a freedom of religion, but it also has kind of a freedom from religion which prevents government money from being used for religious purposes, worship purposes.

No, it doesn’t.  This is, at best, mistaken.  The two relevant 1st Amendment clauses are the Free Exercise Clause—Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof [of religion]—and the Establishment Clause—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.  There’s nothing in there about freedom from religion; that’s just the distortionate drivel used by crowds like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the like.

The Federal government cannot favor one religion over another or favor religion over atheism; there’s nothing in there that prohibits the Feds from providing disaster recovery help to religious organizations along with the same sort of help for secular non-profit organizations.  In fact, refusing to do so violates the Establishment Clause by actively disfavoring religion rather than acting neutrally toward it—as the Clause requires.

Neuborne wasn’t finished.

The question is: can they get the money and rebuild their worship facilities? Because then the money would be going towards worship, not to help people from not getting skinned knees on the playground, or being able to get food at the food bank.

This is just disingenuous.  No, the money would not be going toward worship, it would be going toward restoring a building.  A building that comes in critically handy for sheltering those displaced by disasters, natural or otherwise.  Regardless of the religions (or lack) of the sheltered or the shelter.

The attacks on religion from continues.