Category Archives: rights

A Two-Faced Move

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PRC President Xi Jinping is moving to revive Confucius and his philosophical tradition. Xi wants to “inoculate Chinese people against the spread of Western political ideals of individual freedom and democracy.” He’s “seeking a fresh source of legitimacy by reinventing the party as inheritor and savior of a 5,000-year-old civilization.”

Renew reverence for authority—with the Communist Party of China the authority.

And, tellingly, one of Xi Jinping’s favorite Confucius sayings is this:

No calamity greater than to be discontented with one’s lot; no fault greater than the wish to be getting.

Be content. Party will give you what you need. You don’t need any more than that.

Values and Mottoes

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The Freedom from Religion Foundation is at it again.

It seems the Childress, TX, Chief of Police has committed the evil crime of putting the nation’s motto, In God We Trust, on the town’s police cars.

This is some sort of affront to constitutionally mandated freedom of religion, according to the FRFF—whose name gives away the game: freedom from religion, not freedom of religion. I suppose the US as a whole is an affront to freedom, what with that motto, and all.

Gary Parsons, Lee County, VA, sheriff, who did the same thing with his department’s cars, is on the right track.

It’s not only a symbol of moral values but also a symbol of patriotism[.]

Especially that first part: the motto and its presence on cop cars is an espousal of morality, not of religion.

Therein lies FRFF’s dishonesty and hypocrisy. Rather than that particular set of moral values, FRFF is seeking to impose its own moral values on all of us. It’s also seeking to impose its own religion—the religion of atheism—on all of us.

Undoing a Unilateral “Presidency”

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Lahnee Chen closed his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar title with this:

By revoking Mr Obama’s executive actions, and beginning the arduous task of identifying and addressing his many other unilateral moves, the next president wouldn’t have to jettison the entire Obama legacy.

But our next President should.

On the next president’s first day in office, the president could simply issue an executive order revoking all of his predecessor’s executive actions, except those necessary for national security or the basic functioning of government. This includes Mr Obama’s executive orders, but also a flood of presidential memorandums and directives, as well as informal guidance and orders from federal agencies, that he has used to reshape federal policy.

Not “except for.” Every single one. Don’t waste time sorting through the mess to find the occasional nugget that might be useful. Rescind every single one. The next President should issue his own few Executive Orders regarding those narrow areas of national security and the basic functioning of government. That last, especially, doesn’t need many, since government can, and should be, shrunk drastically by the next President and the next two (at least) Congresses.

In the name of actual transparency, this item, too. Those Presidential Memoranda don’t need to be, and so they’re not, published in the Federal Register, and so the public has very limited access to them. The next President, on day two, should publish those memoranda. Every single one of them.

Keep in mind this, too. It’s not only Obama’s legacy. It’s our nation’s legacy, it’s the legacy of us citizens, it’s your and my legacy. It needs to jettisoned in its entirety, every single syllable. For our national honor.

Government Transparency

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President Obama favors government by executive order. How about this one: a Presidential directive requiring every appointee and bureaucrat to attest to the existence of any private email, texting or instant-messaging systems being used for government work. All off-the-reservation documentation must cease. Private email is for personal needs.

The chances of this happening are nil. Opacity has served the Obama Administration’s political purposes if not the country. A sunnier day will have to wait until 2017.

Here’s an action that doesn’t necessarily have to wait on an Executive Order (which, being only temporary, would be a suboptimal answer, anyway): call every Department and Agency head before the House Government Reform Committee and separately and sequentially before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to certify under oath to each that the Department or Agency he heads has no private email correspondence going out over government servers, no government emails going out over private servers, and that all government business is conducted over and only over government servers—three separate, if overlapping, sworn certifications, each made separately to the two committees. For any such head who does not make that sworn certification, cut his organization’s budget by 10%. Do it again at the start of the next budget cycle.

Don’t ask these heads, pretty please, to come on over; subpoena their patooties to testify on the first day of the week following the subpoena.

That’ll likely have to wait until 2017, too, though, to get any teeth.

Whose Phones Are They?

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Apple Inc’s move to make it easier to block ads on iPhones and iPads is troubling publishers and heightening tensions with its Silicon Valley neighbors.
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Putting such “ad blockers” within reach of hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users threatens to disrupt the $70 billion annual mobile-marketing business, where many publishers and tech firms hope to generate far more revenue from a growing mobile audience. If fewer users see ads, publishers—and other players such as ad networks—will reap less revenue.

Yeah, and? I sympathize with publishers and tech firms and…ad networks…over their loss of revenue from their ads not being viewed—about as much as I sympathize with other advertisers over the loss of revenue from their bulk snail mail brochures going unread directly from my mailbox to my trash can.

My house is my own, and advertisers have no authority, no right, to enter it to pitch their wares, or for any other reason at all, without my prior permission to come in. If I wanted to be a curmudgeon about it, I could—quite legally and morally—take steps to prevent them from entering my property at all to gain access to my doorbell. That I don’t is only because such a measure would interfere with the access to my door that my friends and those friends who are still strangers should have.

So it is with my cell phone. It’s my cell phone, not those advertisers’, and if I don’t want them to clutter up my phone with their digital brochures, then they have no choice but to comply with my wish that they not come knocking at all.

Here’s Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next:

The ad-blocking problem is real and growing, and ad-blocking on iOS is only going to accelerate it.

Problem for whom? Not for the property owners. We’re not your piggy bank.

I don’t often agree with Apple, but on this question I say a hearty well done.