Category Archives: rights

The Encryption Divide

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Silicon Valley and Washington have spent the past year arguing over whether technology companies should enable users to encrypt their digital lives in such a way that not even the Federal Bureau of Investigation could unscramble the information.

And

In private conversations, administration officials have said they don’t want Congress to pass a new law or to dictate to how tech companies should write code, said people briefed on the conversations.

That much is appropriate.

There’s no divide here, except in the minds of an overreaching government. The Constitution is quite clear. Get a warrant. That’s often inconvenient to Government. That’s part of the point.

Another VA Failure

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An ex-Army scout and Iraq War veteran tried at two separate Veterans Administration clinics to get treatment for his PTSD. Does he actually have PTSD? I’m spring-loaded to believe so, but I don’t know. And neither does this veteran, unless he’s been previously diagnosed. The problem is that he can’t get that treatment, or even a diagnosis and so effective treatment for what medical problem he might really have.

“The VA isn’t taking new patients.” He got that at both of the Georgia clinics he tried. If you follow the link to the video he recorded, the relevant action starts at around 6:45.

The VA isn’t taking new patients. How does that work? It doesn’t work.

VA spokesman James Hutton gave out the usual VA nonsense:

VA staff should have established a full understanding of Mr Dorsey’s medical situation and determined if an appointment was available for him at another location or if he was eligible for the Choice Program and could be seen outside of VA. The message Mr Dorsey was given, as seen on the video, is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Of course the message Dorsey was given is entirely acceptable and fully tolerated by the VA. It’s still going on. Years after the VA’s mistreatment of our veterans was first exposed. Dorsey has indicated that VA Chief of Staff Rob Nabors has “reached out to him and is trying to help resolve his issue.” Great. We’ll see if Nabors, or anyone at the VA delivers. But that’s small potatoes. This sort of thing is far too widespread to be effectively handled by onesies and twosies.

It’s time to disband the VA altogether and use the VA budget as vouchers to our veterans so they can go to the doctors, clinics, and hospitals of their choice—doctors, clinics, and hospitals that actually do, you know, medical work for, umm, patients.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Free Speech

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Not directly, because this Oregon law predates Kennedy’s Obergefell ruling, but this is the inevitable outcome of his ruling on free speech.

Aaron and Melissa Klein, bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, lost in an Oregon court and have been ordered to pay $135,000 in “emotional damages” to the couple for whom they refused the baking. Administrative Law Judge Alan McCullough, who found for the victimhood couple, ordered the fine, but nothing further.

However, Brad Avakian, Oregon’s Labor Commissioner and Политический Руководитель, and for whom this Administrative Judge works, overruled the omission. On hearing that the Kleins had assured Oregonians in an interview with the Family Research Council that they intended to pursue the matter, he ordered them to speak no further. He gagged them.

So much for freedom of speech in Oregon. So much for freedom of religion in Oregon. Look for this sort of thing to accelerate in the wake of Kennedy’s ruling.

A Thought on Iron Curtains

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Shortly after World War II, Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain descended across Europe. The curtain was made concrete with the erection by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The purpose of that wall was more than simply to divide the USSR and its occupied territories from the rest of Europe; it was to keep the people inside that wall—inside the USSR or those occupied territories—from leaving for a better place, for a place where freedom and individual choice could be had.

Shortly after our Revolutionary War, our Founders wrote, and We the People ratified, our Constitution and its attendant Bill of Rights, which include the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So was born a Federation and ultimately 50 laboratories of democracy, particularly as described by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in New State Ice Co v Liebmann when he wrote in his dissent how a:

state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

Now keep in mind the concern of John Jay who, while the Constitution was being drafted in those fateful summer days, considered that, in contrast to the failing Articles of Confederation, the States should be reduced to the same relationship to the proposed central government as counties then had relative to their States (although, in the event, he strongly advocated ratification of the Constitution itself):

merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government.

Next, consider these activities of our Federal government:

  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning abortion and when it might be appropriate or inappropriate, nationalizing the thing in Roe.
  • it terminated the discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the nature of marriage, nationalizing the thing in Obergefell.
  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the provision of health care and of health insurance, nationalizing the thing with the Affordable Care Act.
  • it terminated the democratic discussion in progress among and within the several states concerning the market behavior of private enterprise, nationalizing the thing with Dodd-Frank.
  • it removed from all possibility of local discussion the relationship between private enterprise and private citizens with the creation of the wholly unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The list goes on.

The USSR’s physical iron curtain was designed to keep people from leaving in an era when they had a place to go to. There is another kind of iron curtain, though.

Our government is no longer requiring—as the Constitution above it does in Article IV, Section 1—that every state honor the decisions of every other state. Rather, it’s demanding that every state behave the same as every other state.

With the reduction of our 50 laboratories of democracy to mere districts to facilitate the purposes of the Federal government, this government is erecting a legalist iron curtain by deprecating the 10th Amendment, and so denying Americans a place to go to, denying us any place more compatible with our individual views, needs, moral imperatives.

Microaggression

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It’s all the latest rage in the PC fascism that’s running amok in our United States these days.

There are these, for instance, from a list of allegedly microaggressive statements put out by Janet Napolitano, late of DHS and now President of the University of California system:

  • I believe the most qualified person should get the job.
  • Of course he’ll get tenure, even though he hasn’t published much—he’s Black!
  • Men and women have equal opportunities for achievement.
  • Gender plays no part in who we hire.
  • America is the land of opportunity.
  • Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.
  • Affirmative action is racist.

The whole list goes on in this vein, but these are the ones most directly and deliberately aimed at the fabric of Americanism.

Of course it could be argued that the second on the list is, indeed, racist, but it’s a direct fallout of the last item on the list. Affirmative action isn’t only racist, though, it’s sexist, too, and by design: deliberately, race and gender are additional selection criteria, and for the explicitly racist and sexist purpose of achieving “diversity”–because, so the Liberals believe, blacks, minorities generally, and women simply are incapable of competing on their own–while simultaneously downplaying qualification, much less merit, in the selection.

Another problem with foolishness like this is that while many remarks are certainly rude, and polite people shouldn’t use them, courtesy is a thing that can come only from within the person; it cannot be imposed from without, and certainly not by diktat. That only leads to rule-following, or rule-breaking; the courtesy of the thing will have been wholly removed.

Lists like these are themselves plainly microaggressions.

Keep in mind, too, that the Napolitano of this list is also the Napolitano of the DHS lists that called American military veterans “right-wing extremists” and that cynically, if not cowardly, substituted “man-caused disaster” for “act of terrorism,” and on and on.

Now that’s microaggression of a hugely macro nature.