Privacy—and Trust

Posted on by
Reply

Parents of children in the People’s Republic of China have a new “aid.”

ByteDance is peddling a “study lamp” that lets teachers and parents constantly monitor children, ostensibly while the children are doing their schoolwork.

The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.

What else, though, is ByteDance monitoring, what other data is ByteDance collecting about the kids, the things they’re doing, with whom they’re doing it, parents’ handling of their kids? And passing it on to the PRC’s intelligence community under that 2017 law?

There’s also the question of trust. Not trust in Big Brother—or Uncle Xi—but trust between children and parents, and the ability of children to trust at all. What message are parents sending to their own children when the parents—and other authority figures, known to the children to be there at the parents’ request—insist on being, constantly and immediately, over the kids’ shoulders to be sure those kids are behaving properly? That the kids are fundamentally untrustworthy, maybe? That they’re unworthy in some way?

And there’s the creation of dependency on instant answers.

Some Chinese media outlets and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children as they study, warning that the lamp would make children accustomed to seeking easy answers from technology.

And what brave new world for us when ByteDance brings these…devices…to America?

Arrogance and Cowardice

Posted on by
Reply

Texas’ Progressive-Democrat State congressmen have joined Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen and Indiana’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen in their abject cowardice, masked by their o’erweening arrogance.

In order to block legislation of which they personally disapprove, they’ve run away from the State’s House of Representatives explicitly to deny a quorum and to block a bill that would expand access to the ballot box while also expanding the sanctity of each Texas citizen’s vote.

Texas Democrats walked out of the state House’s chamber just before midnight on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a final vote on a controversial bill that would tighten voting laws in the state.

This has been all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party over the last several years. If they can’t get their way, they block democracy—especially our republican form of democracy—altogether with their cowardly and toddler-esque temper tantrums.

Or they rule with their pen and phone. Or, when they’re in complete control, they simply ignore all others and act unilaterally. Or as President Joe Biden (D) has said, repeatedly, regarding the spendiferous and tax exploding bills Party currently is ramming through, he’d like to have Republican bipartisanship, but if they won’t come along, he and Party will act alone.

This instruction from the State’s House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D, 101st District (centered in Tarrant County) says it all.

Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly. Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.

Do not go to the gallery. Slink away through the back door and alley. Do not face Texas’ citizens.

Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t the first time that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have run away from their duties.

An Oxymoron Constitutional Amendment

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what the Illinois State legislature wants to inflict on the State’s citizens. That body has passed a State Constitution amendment proposal, at union behest, that would

guarantee a ““fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively,” including for better wages, hours, working conditions….

Never mind that that right already exists in our nation’s Constitution via the 1st Amendment’s Freedom of Assembly clause and the Supreme Court’s NAACP v Alabama ruling, which extended “speech” to include association and extended both to the State level.

That’s not the end of it, though. The legislature’s proposed amendment also says that

no law would be allowed to block labor agreements from “requiring membership in an organization as a condition of employment.”

That is a blatant violation of citizens’, and of a citizen’s, freedom of association—and of their speech rights by requiring them to associate with others in order to speak of certain things.

The thing will go to the citizens of Illinois in 2022, and it’s one more illustration of Illinois’ governmental dysfunction.

Yet Another Border Misapprehension

Posted on by
Reply

…by a Progressive-Democrat.

This one is by Congressman Raul Ruiz (D, CA), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Asked whether Vice President Kamala Harris (D), appointed by President Joe Biden (D) to be responsible for and to lead solutions to our rapidly expanding illegal immigration crisis on our southern border, Ruiz gave a weasel-worded answer, but he said this much quite clearly:

I’m sure that someday she will [visit the border]. If you’re going to be strategic, right, she’s tasked with addressing the root causes of migration north. You don’t find the root causes at a CBP station at the border, you find the root causes by speaking to individuals who have fled. You speak to the leaders of local organizations, to the countries that they’re fleeing…industry leaders and UN human rights activists, and that’s exactly what she’s doing.

No, you don’t find root causes to anything without first understanding what it is that’s being caused.

And that requires speaking to individuals who have fled, yes, but at our border, when those individuals’ concerns, their outright fears, still are fresh in their minds, not after they’ve been settled in the interior and given words to say by the handlers on whom they’re dependent for their continued welfare.

That requires visits to our border, not to the personal safety of a CBP border station. Without visiting the border, a Progressive-Democrat will not observe the illegal aliens crossing our border individually and in groups, the children traveling alone or being dropped over a border fence to fend for themselves or being abandoned by their handlers once across the border.

The Progressive-Democrat Ruiz, Harris, Biden—any of them—can have no hope of understanding the “root causes” of our border crisis without first understanding those outcomes. Absent that understanding, they can have no idea for what they’re looking.

It’s instructive that one as awesomely brilliant as Ruiz chooses not to see that.

Wuhan Virus Vaccines and Intellectual Property

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) is looking at “waiving” the patents held by American pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer and Moderna—that  developed the vaccines that have been so effective against the Peoples Republic of China-released Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside the uselessness of waiving these patent rights because the vaccines require to much, too varied, too complex equipment to be manufacturable just on the basis of the vaccines’ technologies being made freeware in the public arena.

Leave aside, too, that these companies—and others beyond American jurisdiction that have developed other Wuhan Virus vaccines—already are delivering doses virtually at cost to the poorer nations.

Biden’s proposal [is] to temporarily waive their patents, but that’s completely disingenuous. An intellectual property once lost is lost forever—there is nothing temporary about such a waiver except in the narrowest, most legalist, sense.

The larger problem is the: with that government-mandated loss will go any incentive a company might have to spend the billions of dollars it takes to develop future such things, especially vaccines, since a company can have no confidence Government might decide it “needs” to give the new patents away also.

There will be very little vaccine development in the United States after Biden goes through with this.

This will not be over quickly. We will not enjoy this.