Category Archives: rights

Leadership Regarding Tax Avoidance

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Large multinationals operating in the European Union will have to publish details of profits and tax bills generated in countries considered to be “tax havens,” the bloc’s executive arm said on Tuesday as it toughened up proposals for fighting tax avoidance following the “Panama Papers” leak.

And

“By adopting this proposal, Europe is demonstrating its leadership in the fight against tax avoidance,” said Valdis Dombrovskis [European Commissioner for the Euro and Social Dialogue](!).

Never let a crisis go to waste, eh, guys?  Never pass up an excuse to increase Government intrusion and control.

Here’s a thought.  Work with me on this, it’s an unfamiliar concept for you Big Government aficionados.  How about showing leadership on tax avoidance by reducing the incentive to avoid paying taxes?  Lower your tax rates.

You haven’t demonstrated a need for all that money, anyway, and certainly you haven’t demonstrated a greater need for that money than the folks who’ve actually earned it: private citizens and their private enterprises.  All of you should be “tax havens.”

This Bears Close Watching

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Especially in light of this administration’s—and its hoped-for Progressive successor’s—penchant for surrendering apologetically our sovereignty to extra-national entities like the United Nations.

The United Nations has launched a far-reaching initiative that could give UN-sponsored authorities sway over the biological resources of the high seas—all the waters that lie outside national territories and economic zones.

The potential shift in power involves multi-trillion-dollar issues, such as whether large areas—conceivably, as much as 30%—of the world’s international waters should be designated as no-go areas to protect biological diversity….

Because national sovereignty is so 19th century.  And the UN does such a wonderful job managing its existing tasks.

She’s the Wrong Group

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Only members of some, special, groups are allowed to speak at schools, it seems.

She is a liberal icon and was America’s first female secretary of state, but not everyone at a California college [Scripps College] is thrilled that “white feminist and repeated genocide enabler” Madeleine Albright has been lined up to give next month’s commencement address.

And

Scripps students did not object when Angela Davis, a radical-turned-academic who was on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list for murder and kidnapping—spoke on campus earlier this year.

But that’s OK, though.  Davis is a member in good standing of an approved group—black “feminism”—and her political ideology—outright communism—is far more appropriate.

Free Speech

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…the way the Left sees it. And too many Republican Presidential candidates are misunderstanding the situation.

Recall last week: Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump was forced to cancel a rally in Chicago because “protestors” were out in force intending to prevent the rally from occurring.  They then bragged loudly about their success.

Over the weekend, at rallies in Missouri, Ohio, and again in Illinois, “protestors” again attempted to prevent Trump rallies from proceeding, charging him on the stage at rallies they couldn’t block.

These are not protestors exercising their own free speech rights; these persons are actively, cynically, dishonestly trying to prevent others from exercising their free speech rights.  These Leftists see freedom to speak as freedom only to speak what the Left approves.  These Leftists see listeners’ free speech not as their own choice, but only the choice to hear what the Left will permit them to hear.

We expect this sort of understanding out of the Progressive-Democrat Party Presidential candidates:

The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous.  …  That’s not leadership.  That’s political arson.

The Left’s encouragement of violence and aggression is, indeed, wrong, and it’s dangerous.  When will Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders condemn the Left’s assault on free speech, when will Clinton and Sanders condemn the violence their “protestors” threaten Republican rallies with?

It’s especially disappointing, though, to hear Republican Party candidates choose to attack a fellow Republican for being attacked by this assault on speech, carefully not saying a word about the real assault, the one on Americans’ First Amendment right.  John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz should know better.

Update: corrected a dumb___ typo.

Tax Dollars

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Yours, and mine, at work. The paper from which the following excerpt was taken (h/t The Wall Street Journal) was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature. The feminist glaciology framework draws attention to those who dominate and frame the production of glaciological knowledge, the gendered discourses of science and knowledge, and the ways in which colonial, military, and geopolitical domination co-constitute glaciological knowledge. Even in a globalized age where the place of women and indigenous people has improved markedly in some parts of the world, masculinist discourses continue to dominate, in subtle and determinative ways. Feminist glaciology advocates for a shift of preoccupations in research, policy, and public perceptions from the physical and seemingly natural, to a broader consideration of “cryoscapes,” the human, and the insights and potentials of alternative ice narratives and folk glaciologies.

The critique and framework outlined here illuminate experiences and narratives that emerged historically but remain potent today. Public discourse on the cryosphere continues to privilege, quite explicitly, manly endeavours and adventures in the field, and those who conduct their science in the manner of masculinist glaciologists and other field scientists of decades and centuries past….

The call for a feminist glaciology is not limited to ice and glaciers, but is a larger intervention into global environmental change (and especially climate change) research and policy.

Those were your tax dollars, and mine. Yeesh.