Happy New Year

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Originally published in 2012, I repeat it here.

This blogger hopes for increasing prosperity for all in the new year just begun.  Following are some additional thoughts, from those better than I.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
–William Makepeace Thackeray

New Year’s Resolution: to tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
–James Agate

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution.  Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise, and thou art happy.
–Akhenaton

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
–Cavett Robert

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
–Thomas Hood

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
–Ellen Goodman

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
–Mark Twain

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve.  Middle age is when you’re forced to.
–Bill Vaughn

This bit of ’70s-style wisdom:

A year from now, you’re gonna weigh more or less than what you do right now.
–Phil McGraw

And finally,

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.
–Goran Persson

Investing in the PRC

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For good or ill, the People’s Republic of China has decided change the regulatory rules regarding Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s banking activities. The company has lost

almost all its stock-market gains this year, just days after [PRC] regulators signaled a major change in their posture toward the e-commerce behemoth and its finance affiliate, Ant Group Co.

Notice that: the regulatory change does not cover the PRC’s banking or finance industries—it’s explicitly targeted at Alibaba’s subordinate, Ant. The PRC’s

central bank released a harshly worded statement Sunday criticizing Ant’s business practices and instructing the financial-technology giant to shift its focus back to its mainstay—and less lucrative—digital-payments business.

Notice that, too: the ruling is not the outcome of any sort of investigation, followed by trial in court to assess whether anything wrong actually was being done, followed by a court ruling based on the presented evidence. No, the order is government diktat.

Investors, unwarned by the existence of an investigation or subsequent existence of a court trial, have lost heavily. The only warning investors had was a Christmas Eve announcement of an investigation—and then came the diktat.

Alibaba’s swift comedown has led investors to reassess the regulatory risks faced by [PRC] internet companies…
The hard part is figuring out “how much of the recent regulatory moves against Ant and Alibaba is politically based, how far it will go, and when it will be over,” said Alex Au, managing director at Alphalex Capital Management, a Hong Kong-based hedge fund.

Yewbetcha.

This is what rule by law does, as compared to rule of law. This is why it’s foolish, potentially to the point of violating fiduciary responsibility, to invest in PRC businesses.

Remember this for the coming year.

In Which the Supreme Court Gets One Right, Sort Of

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The Supreme Court has ruled, for now, that the Trump administration’s policy of not allowing census-counted illegal aliens to be included in States’ post-census Federal Congressional reapportionment decisions can stand.

Following its ruling earlier this month that allowed the Trump administration to remove illegal aliens from the 2020 Census count, the Supreme Court on December 28 threw out two lower court decisions that went the other way, that barred the government from eliminating that population from the process of allocating congressional seats and Electoral College votes that officially determine the presidency.

The two tossed cases were Trump v Useche and Trump v City of San Jose. Notice that these address two separate, albeit related, matters. One is counting illegal aliens during the census itself; the other is whether State populations of illegal aliens can be used in setting the seats each State is allocated in the Federal House of Representatives and from that each State’s Electoral College representation.

California Attorney General and Joe Biden’s wish for HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D) insists,

[a] complete, accurate census is about ensuring all our voices are heard and that our states get their share of resources to protect the health and well-being of all of our communities. We remain committed to the core principle that everyone counts.

This, too, addresses two separate matters. Becerra is right, of course, about one of those matters, just not in the way he thinks. All of our voices—the voices of all of us who are citizens of the United States and of the particular State in which we reside—should be heard. Our voices should not be drowned out, or even diluted, by the voices of illegal aliens. Illegal aliens are not citizens; they’re not entitled to Federal government representation, and they shouldn’t be allowed to water down the representation of us citizens.

The other matter is this. Illegal aliens not being excludable from the census itself has perhaps legitimate implications for Federal transfers to the States for Medicare and other welfare fundings. It may be that taxpayers shouldn’t be held liable for the upkeep of those who announce from the jump their disrespect for our laws by breaking into our nation. On the other hand, we have our Judeo-Christian obligation to help those less well off—including those illegal aliens who have come from far direr straits: the difference between stealing a loaf of bread because the thief can, and stealing the loaf to feed his family.

Of course, the liberal, Living Constitution Says What We Say It Says wing dissented. Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Useche, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, and carried forward into this dismissal centered here:

The plain meaning of the governing statutes, decades of historical practice, and uniform interpretations from all three branches of Government demonstrate that aliens without lawful status cannot be excluded from the decennial census solely on account of that status.

That dissent does not address the use of populations of illegal aliens in apportioning State representation, only whether the illegal aliens can be counted in the first place. The dissenters will get their chance to argue again, though: the Supremes rejected the lower courts’ rulings on technical grounds, not on the merits of the issue.

Be heads up.

The Supremes’ order can be read here.

“Interfering” with Internal Affairs

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The People’s Republic of China is objecting to the Taiwan Assurance Act of 2020 and the Tibetan Policy and Support Act of 2020, which President Donald Trump has signed into law.

The PRC Foreign Ministry’s Deputy Director, Information Department, Zhao Lijian said that the PRC was

“resolutely opposed” to both acts

and

The determination of the Chinese government to safeguard its national sovereignty, security, and development interests is unwavering[]

and that the acts were (OANN‘s paraphrase)

an interference in China’s internal affairs.

Of course, it can be no interference in the PRC’s internal affairs to support an occupied nation, even if it is PRC-occupied. Nor can it be any sort of interference in the PRC’s domesticity to support a sovereign nation that the PRC constantly threatens with conquering and occupation.

Never mind the PRC’s arrogant hypocrisy in its attempt to pressure us regarding our own laws.

Another Reason

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…to toss the elites and reassert the sovereignty of We the People.

In a Christmas Eve interview with the New York Times, [Dr Anthony, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Fauci acknowledged he had offered a lower estimate of the level of herd immunity necessary to stop the COVID-19 pandemic because he thought Americans would be discouraged by hearing his true thoughts on the issue.

And

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75%,” he told reporter Donald McNeil. “Then, when newer surveys said 60% or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

And this:

At the outset of the pandemic, Fauci…advised against wearing face masks, telling the public that doing so was unnecessary unless an individual was showing symptoms of COVID-19.
…
When pressed in June on why he had initially argued against masks, Fauci said that the public health community was “concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”

Lying to us “for our own good.”

It’s time to remove these…persons…from office and from other positions of influence.