Category Archives: culture

Just Whose Side Are They On?

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The New York City Council is at it this time.

A new bill would require the New York Police Department to disclose and describe all “surveillance technology,” which it defines as “equipment, software, or system capable of, or used or designed for, collecting, retaining, processing, or sharing audio, video, location, thermal, biometric, or similar information.” The cops would have to post this information online annually and respond to public comments.

Naturally, the ACLU thinks this is a good idea, too.

Yeah.  It is a good idea to tell criminals and terrorists just how they’re being identified and might be preempted.  Sure.

The Nub of the Thing

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In a Deutsche Welle piece on the likelihood of Emmanuel Macron being able to reform French labor and pension law, is this statement by Julie Hamann, a political scientist with the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

The French have high expectations of the state, for it to fulfill its protective function with regard to social welfare.  As soon as reforms are announced that may lead to cuts in social services or labor market insecurity, this very quickly gives rise to very great and very emotional fears.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.  The French people—French society—expects government to play the major role in doing for them; individual personal responsibility for a Frenchman’s own future is secondary and operable only within a Government provided framework.

Macron and his La République en Marche! party may well fail as resoundingly as did Alain Juppe, who had the major French labor union on his side 22 years ago but couldn’t do the deed, and as resoundingly as did Dominique de Villepin, whose plan already had passed through Parliament 11 years ago when he folded and canceled reforms similar to Macron’s.

Macron is a younger man, and his party is populated by newcomers still fired by their idealism and disdain, if not disgust, for the establishment.  But he will need to go directly against the forces of the people—the popular establishment of a sort—if he’s to succeed.

Macron will change the foundation of French social thinking with his proposals.  He and a sufficiency of his party must have the courage to lead in order to enact his proposals—and to face the consequences if his policies, rammed through and held to, do not lift the French economy into prosperity-generating dynamism.

Leaks, Again

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on leaks about ongoing investigations:

Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories any stories attributed to anonymous “officials,” particularly when they do not identify the country—let alone the branch or agency of government—with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated.

Indeed.  And here’s Peter Carr, a Robert Mueller spokesman, assuring us that Mueller’s special counsel operation

has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct.

Then, I have to ask, why is Mueller still allowing these leaks to occur?  Why hasn’t he hailed his leakers into court, civil or criminal?

This Must Be Rejected

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Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló is coming to the mainland to stump for statehood for the territory on the basis of the just completed referendum on matter.  The referendum had only a 23% turnout after heavy boycotting by several other interests; the last referendum had a 78% turnout.  That tiny turnout, though, voted strongly for statehood rather than the status quo or independence, the alternatives on the ballot.

Rosselló’s effort should be strongly rejected.

There can be no question of Puerto Rican statehood until the territory has demonstrated stability in a responsible spending and taxing régime that also excludes outlandish debt.  This demonstration would require at the least first finishing the territory’s current bankruptcy proceedings and its recovery of its economy to a stable low debt and low taxation condition—a stability that can only be demonstrated across a generation or two.

We have enough States already with out of control spending, taxing, and debt—beginning with California, Illinois, and New York, but not ending there—and that are risks to the national weal without adding another profligate and irresponsible state government to the mess.

Despite boycotts by opposition parties that depressed voter turnout, Puerto Rican voters delivered “a clear rejection of the current colonial status and a path forward through statehood,” Governor Ricardo Rosselló said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Never mind the questionable validity of the referendum from the boycott.  Take the referendum’s outcome as a rejection of “colonial,” of territorial, status, at least; it certainly has seemed that or nearly so across the several referenda.  Another way to end that status is to become an independent, sovereign nation.

Of what are the Puerto Rican elites so afraid about independence?  Oh, wait—those elites wouldn’t have such ready access to OPM to support their virtue signaling and the spending on pseudo-welfare that supports it.

Another “Leak,” Another Rumor

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President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey is now a subject of the federal probe being headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, which has expanded to include whether the president obstructed justice, a person familiar with the matter said.

The rest of the article continued in that vein: no real-world sources cited, only this deliberately unidentified one.  The Wall Street Journal‘s article at the link also cited a Washington Post article on the same subject; that bit also only cited “sources”—five of them in WaPo‘s case—whose identities were carefully withheld.

“…a person familiar….”  “…five officials….”  The WaPo piece even said their “five officials” demanded anonymity because they were speaking without authorization.

This raises two questions and a concern. The questions are these. First, with no substantiation, how are we to know these sources even exist?  How can we do our own checking?

Second, these sources—if they exist—begin as liars: they’re speaking without authorization, and so they have broken the terms of their employment and possibly their oaths of office.  How can we believe the claims of liars? Why would WaPo or WSJ take such claims seriously?

And this, at the end of the WSJ piece, with no trace of irony on the part of the authors:

At a June 13 hearing at a House of Representatives panel, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein declined to say who asked him to write a memo justifying Mr Comey’s firing.  …  Mr Rosenstein said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the matter.

“The reason for that is that if it is within the scope of Director Mueller’s investigation, and I’ve been a prosecutor for 27 years, we don’t want people talking publicly about the subjects of ongoing investigations,” Mr Rosenstein said.

So much for that.

The concern is this: why WaPo and especially WSJ have walked away from basic, foundational journalist standards—that allow for anonymous sources but require them to be substantiated by two or more on-the-record sources—and descended themselves to rumor-mongering.