Category Archives: rights

A Right Answer

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And a righteous one.

The public schools’ association for religion teachers, Religionslærerforeningen, has today urged that the controversial Mohammed Cartoons, which were first printed in Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, should become part of the public school curriculum as quickly as possible.

The RLF is a Danish teachers’ organization. The Danish government is starting to get on board, too.

And now, several political parties—including Socialdemokraterne, Dansk Folkeparti (DF) and Konservative—have voiced their support for that idea, although the degree of support varies.

“It would be natural for the cartoons to become part of the material that the teachers can choose to use,” [according to Konservative’s spokeswoman Mai Mercado].

DF is a bit more forward in its view of the matter. According to their immigration spokesman, Martin Henriksen,

One of our time’s great challenges is the threat from Islamism and the pressure on freedom rights that have built up over many years.

If they really want to do something right, in terms of making sure that the students—including those with a Muslim background—know which freedom rights we have in Denmark, they should go all the way.

 

h/t The Washington Post.

A Conservative’s View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts

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It’s out.

This is the first of a pair of publications on American policy; the other is concerned with National Policy, which consists of foreign and defense policy.

Domestic Policy both is necessary in its own right and must come before National Policy since a sound policy domestically is absolutely required both for the health of the nation within our borders and to facilitate—indeed, to enable—any form of outward-facing policy at the national level.

Domestic Policy is a combination of social and economic policies. Social Policy consists of these things: the concept of the American nation; American citizenship; the role of faith in our society; the role of immigration and its importance to our society; the importance of consensus; and the role of education.

Economic Policy consists of these things: the nature of a free market and its condition as the most moral system and the one most conducive to generating prosperity for all (even though there always will be some more or less prosperous than others), the role of the Federal government in protecting and enhancing our economy, and the role of Federal regulation in facilitating our economy.

Of course, these two major divisions of Domestic Policy are not truly separate from each other any more than biology, chemistry, and physics are separate from each other within science. Just as we divide scientific disciplines from each other to facilitate inquiry and discussion, I’m separating domestic policy into these divisions to facilitate a similar inquiry and discussion—while remaining fully aware and making occasional use of their very large areas of overlap.

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Rule By Law—Spying Edition

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The People’s Republic of China is on the verge of enacting a law that would make legal corporate spying by the PRC government. Of course, the Chinese are couching this as a wholly innocent effort at countering terrorism.

The draft law requires both foreign and domestic telecommunications and Internet service providers to create backdoors in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access, hand over copies of their encryption codes and assist government agencies with decryption when asked, among other provisions. Also, companies would be required to store Chinese users’ data on servers in the Chinese mainland; otherwise, they wouldn’t be allowed to operate in the country.

This sort of thing really should make it impossible for any honest company to do business in the PRC or with a PRC business. They should accept the Chinese offer of not “be[ing] allowed to operate in the country.” The financial gains to be had on the mainland—particularly with the money repatriation restrictions the PRC already has in place—can’t be worth this surrender of control over a legitimate business to the PRC government.

“Missing” IRS Emails

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Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails in backup tapes related to the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative organizations.

But they don’t know how many of them are new, and told a congressional oversight committee that IRS employees had not asked computer technicians for the tapes, as directed by a subpoena from House oversight and other investigating committees.

That admission was in direct contradiction to earlier testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

Of particular interest, other than Koskinen’s apparent lie, is that

The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status.

IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus said, according to Fox News‘ paraphrase at the above link, that

investigators recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency’s email system, though he said he believed some tapes had been erased.

It’s early in this batch’s status, though; Camus also said

We recovered quite a number of emails, but until we compare those to what’s already been produced we don’t know if they’re new emails[.]

But it’s not a scandal in any event. This is simply the sort of behavior guys like David Axelrod and Barack Obama think is entirely appropriate.

On Terrorist Wannabes

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Would-be ISIS terrorists are taking more roundabout routes to Syria in an effort to make European authorities’ attempts to catch them more difficult.

And

At least 3,400 European fighters are believed to have joined the ISIS army….

European authorities are concerned about that, looking for ways to stop the wannabes’ outbound travel. The authorities have this backward. They should let these folks go; Europe is better off without them. The authorities should, instead, focus their efforts on not letting the survivors back in.