Mao Lives

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The People’s Republic of China, the home of rule by law (not rule of law), has retroactively legalized its “internment” camps, which the government is using to jail reeducate recalcitrant Muslims in its western province of Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities in the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang on Wednesday revised legislation to permit the use of “education and training centers” to combat religious extremism.

So far—so far, mind you—a million Muslims are…housed…in those camps.

The camps are strongly reminiscent of those of President Xi Jinping’s early predecessor, Mao Tse-tung.  Mao sent 16-18 million children and millions more adults to his “reeducation” camps.

Xi is off to a good start.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

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The tentacles reach far—even into the origin of Western concepts of individual liberty.  A British court has ordered

the wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker to explain how she and her husband could afford their multimillion-pound London mansion or face having it seized.

Government does not have to prove the illegal origin of the money.  No, the holder of the money must prove her innocence.  Here is the outcome of the British government’s legislation ostensibly aimed at allegedly dirty money held by people with political connections or suspected of serious crime.

Think about that: someone with the wrong political connections in the eyes of someone in government, or someone whom somebody in government decides is behaving suspiciously, now must prove his lack of guilt.

Money laundering might seem a perfectly fine excuse for invading individual liberty in this way: truly laundered money does indeed have origins that are inimical to safety.

But so are individual liberties critical to the safety of each of us.  What is the government’s limiting principle here?  Where does the tradeoff between security and liberty naturally end?

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept that must protect even the unsavory, or apparently unsavory, among us because that protection is critical to our own safety.

Exxon’s Carbon Tax

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Exxon Mobil Corp is throwing $1 million at the move to produce a national carbon tax.

Exxon’s move is an attempt to manage what it sees as the risk of a similar movement in the US, in ways that it hopes will simplify requirements on its industry….
Exxon sees a carbon tax as an alternative to patchwork regulations, putting one cost on all carbon emitters nationwide, eliminating regulatory uncertainty….

On the contrary, Exxon is looking for short-term competitive political advantage at the expense of long-term economic—real—advantage.  That’s unfortunate.

It’s also unfortunate because, leaving aside the question of whether a carbon tax even would work as claimed, the scheme is based on the false premise that increasing atmospheric CO2 somehow is bad.  Atmospheric CO2 is, in fact, critical—as in can’t live without it—plant food.  In addition to that small fact, ice core samples from both ends of the earth—Greenland and Antarctica—reaching back 400,000 years indicate that rising atmospheric CO2, far from being a harbinger of bad warming to come, lags planetary warming by several hundred years.  The rise confirms that a cold planet is warming out of its Ice Age, and life is recovering and exhaling increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

A Newly Conservative Court?

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Jess Bravin, writing in The Wall Street Journal, thought so.

When Justice Brett Kavanaugh takes the bench Tuesday, it will mark the culmination of the Republican Party’s 50-year drive to cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

At the least, he argued,

[A] five-justice majority more sensitive to regulatory and litigation costs on business should tip more outcomes toward industry and employers, imposing higher bars for workers, consumers and environmentalists, according to legal experts who have studied the court and Justice Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence. At the same time, the new majority is likely to show more sympathy for social conservatives resisting the encroachment of gay rights and access to contraceptives, as well as greater tolerance for state initiatives to curb the availability of abortion.

Not so much.

Bravin is either naive or excessively optimistic.  Kavanaugh’s confirmation has produced no five-justice majority.  The only Conservatives on the Court are Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.  Four others form a liberal bloc convinced that the Constitution needs updating in accordance with the climate of the era.

The ninth Justice, Chief Justice John Roberts, is too squishy, too enamored of “perceptions of Court legacy” to be reliably conservative. He’ll find middle ground for the sake of that perception instead of basing rulings on the text of the Constitution or the law in front of the Court.

The New Left

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There can be no reasoning, no rational debate anymore with the Progressive-Democratic Party and the Left in general.  This is made clear by the statements luminaries of that collection have made in recent days—confirming their behavior during the Kavanaugh confirmation process just concluded, during which they actively rejected a foundation of liberty: innocent until proven guilty.  Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) was the loudest on this, saying outright that then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh had to personally authorize an investigation into himself or he would show himself guilty.

It began earlier.  Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) called for Republicans to be physically confronted wherever they are.  Senator Corey Spartacus Booker (D, NJ) called on the Left to get up in the face of congresspeople.

Now the Progressive-Democrats and their Left are expanding on the thesis that there can be no rationality in discourse—if, indeed, there can be discourse at all—with those of us to the right of center.  Here’s Hillary Clinton, in an interview with CNN:

You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about….  That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.

That destruction is exactly what the Progressive-Democrats are attempting.  Yet, only when that Party is in control can there be any pretense of civility.  Only when the Party can require debate to be on their terms, within their parameters, can there be anything like peaceful disagreement.

The threats from the Left are palpable:

  • Senator Cory Gardner’s (R, CO) wife received a graphic text message with a video depicting a beheading
  • Progressive-Democrat intern Jackson Cosko has been arrested for posting the personal information, including home addresses, of Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC), Mike Lee (R, UT), and Orrin Hatch (R, UT) on Wikipedia
  • Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) was trapped in an elevator with two screaming women “activists”

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) worries about assassination attempts—a concern made concrete by last year’s mass assassination attempt of Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice.

Minnesota Special Education teacher, Samantha Ness, has actively called for the assassination of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

This is just a taste of what we can expect if the Progressive-Democrats are successful in this fall’s elections.  This is a taste of Progressive-Democrat “civility.”  It isn’t republican democracy that these folks want for our nation.  Not anymore.