Category Archives: ethics

A Couple of Suitable Civil Sanctions

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General Motors is being sued by Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton for allegedly

unlawfully collecting driving data from users and selling it to other companies.

GMC allegedly

used technology that was installed in the majority of 2015 or newer General Motors vehicles that would “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data about each time a driver used their vehicle[.]”

That’s a long time to be collecting and peddling personal information without the permission of the vehicle’s owner.

After all,

Unbeknownst to customers, however, by enrolling in GM’s products, they were “agreeing” to General Motors’ collection and sale of their data. Despite lengthy and convoluted disclosures, General Motors never informed its customers of its actual conduct—the systematic collection and sale of their highly detailed driving data.

I see two suitable civil sanctions here, assuming conviction. One is to force GMC to disclose the amount of money it received over those two years from its sale of those data. It must then be required to pay that money to each person who bought a GMC vehicle from those two model years, whether the vehicle was bought new or used. Yes, yes, identifying all the used vehicle buyers will be difficult. Cry me a river. GMC should have thought about that beforehand.

The other isn’t really a sanction, per se. GMC should be required to disclose each of the buyers of those data, and then each of those buyers should be required to certify that it has purged all of the data of this type that GMC sold to it.

It would be suitable, also, to go after criminal sanctions against the GMC executives who authorized the illegal collection of the data, who authorized the sale of those illegally collected data, and who carried out the collections, and who carried out the sales.

It’s time to get draconian in sanctioning these data thefts. Bad enough we have to deal with hackers; we shouldn’t have to be subject to such thefts from allegedly mainstream companies.

Open Borders

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Even when they tout their secure the border policies, Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are deliberately leaving our borders wide open and unsecured.

The Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) program was announced in in May 2023 and the administration has only removed around 2,600 illegal immigrants under the program arriving as family units while border patrol apprehended almost 850,000.

That’s three-tenths of one percent of those “families” caught illegally entering our nation who actually got deported.

This is Border Czar, Progressive-Democrat Vice President, and Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ Newspeak Dictionary definition of “secure border.”

This is a small taste of what we will get in the United States, in spades, if the Harris-Walz ticket is elected this fall.

Press Arrogance Confessed

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The AP has confessed press arrogance, even though it likely didn’t intend its statement to be that. In David Bauder’s article concerning journalist efforts to downplay Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ ducking interviews at every opportunity, Brauder wrote

[F]or journalists, the larger lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers is probably diminishing forever.

Bauder then cited Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden:

For the teams behind candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible[.]”

Of course. They’re wresting that control away from an intrinsically mendacious guild.

Gatekeepers. Because men of the journalist guild Know Better what us average Americans should know about the political doings in our nation. These Wonders presume to censor gatekeep that information, to decide for us what we should hear and how we should understand what we hear, and they’re distressed that there are so many other means through which politicians talk to us.

Progressive-Democrat Lawfare Harassment of Political Opponents

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They’re spreading their warfare-via-law against political opponents far beyond former President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. Now they’re attacking ex-Congresswomen who were treacherous enough to leave Party and to speak for herself and for average Americans even though she remains left of center.

Against the backdrop of the Biden-Wray FBI releasing into our nation a Pakistani, under “parole,” who was known to be plan[ning] an assassination of Donald Trump and other politicians, the Progressive-Democrat administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is having their Transportation Security Administration place former Democrat Congresswoman and Army Reserve Lt Col Tulsi Gabbard onto the TSA’s Quiet Skies watchlist. That program is for TSA officers in airports to look hard at travelers [who] present an elevated risk to aviation security. The program also has

armed undercover marshals in airports and on planes keep tabs on passenger behaviors and movements they deemed noteworthy—including abrupt change of direction in the airport, fidgeting, having a “cold penetrating stare”, changing clothes, shaving, using phones, even using the bathroom—and send detailed observations to the TSA.

TSA is executing with enthusiasm, as Gabbard has confirmed:

She described how when she boarded a flight, TSA agents conducted a thorough screening, patting down every inch, searching all corners of her luggage, and individually inspected her electronic devices.
“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers. They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.”

Because Gabbard is that suspicious, while the assassin wannabe targeting a senior Republican politician, is none of that.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party that wants to be the only party in power, controlling our House of Representatives, our Senate, and our White House, and from where they intend to castrate the final check on their government power, our Supreme Court.

Speaking of Proud Records…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.

At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:

There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?

In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.

Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.

Now she’s pushing funding police departments.

On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.

Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:

White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.

Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.