Tag Archives: culture

Our Future with the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Recall the Progressive-Democratic Party’s open assault on democracy when its State-level representatives shut down the Wisconsin and Indiana governments’ ability to do their citizens’ work by deserting their State legislative duties by running out of those two States in order to deny the respective Houses of Representatives the quorum necessary to function—all because those Progressive-Democrats couldn’t get their way honestly through our nation’s—and those States’—democratic processes. Those disruptions lasted for weeks.

Fast forward to a very few weeks ago when three Representatives, members of Tennessee’s Progressive-Democratic Party, led a riot on the floor of Tennessee’s House of Representatives. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden subsequently lionized those riot leaders with a visit to the Oval Office.

Now we have Progressive-Democrat-supported rioters inside the Montana House of Representatives, shouting down and shutting down that House.

Riot police have descended on Montana’s capitol after left-wing protesters disrupted proceedings in the state House of Representatives in support of transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat, who was censured by the body last week[.]

This is the domestic side of the job Biden said he wants to finish in his reelection announcement last Tuesday. This is the nature of the unity on which Biden campaigned for President the first time around.

Update: I’m reminded by a reader under separate cover–and shame on me for forgetting it–of the Texas Progressive-Democratic Party’s walkout at the end of the immediately prior Texas legislative session in an attempt to deny democracy and democratic procedures to the good citizens of Texas, all because Party members couldn’t get their way honestly.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) had to call a special session over the summer in order to complete the people’s business.

Aiding and Abetting Child Abuse

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Washington and California both have bills wending their way through their respective legislatures that would shut a child’s parents out of the decision-making, even the knowledge that the decision-making is in progress, associated with the application of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and breast and genital removal, and other “treatments”—cynically called gender affirming care—to their children.

Washington is on the verge of denying parents notice that their runaway children are living in licensed shelters if the children are seeking “protected health care services,” defined as gender affirming care and “reproductive health care” such as abortion and contraception.

And

The California Assembly approved legislation this month…that would let children 12 and up in the Medi-Cal program “consent to mental health treatment or counseling on an outpatient basis, or to residential shelter services,” if the “attending professional person” believes they are “mature enough to participate intelligently” in the services. Legal experts told the Associated Press that would cover gender identity counseling.

Were an individual adult to do this to a child, he’d be guilty of child sexual abuse and metaphorically drawn and quartered, and rightly so. But when an institution does it, it’s OK.

Go figure. And then go figure why any parents would want to risk their children by living in such a State.

ERIC Surveillance

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is an increasingly farther-Left standing organization that shares voter registration data among the member States, ostensibly so the States collectively have cleaner voter rolls that contain fewer ineligible registrants. Apparently, ERIC also shares those data with others than the member States, too, and does so in deliberate secrecy, without required permissions, and outside the center’s charter—for instance, with the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which got $70 million from the Leftist Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just in time for the 2020 elections. I’m actually more concerned about another aspect of ERIC’s activities [emphasis in the original].

The authors [of a Heritage Foundation report] note concerns about ERIC forcing member states to engage in active voter registration activities, despite states already making it easy for citizens to register to vote. …the membership agreement forces states to send out notices essentially yearly (every 425 days, to be precise) to at least 95 percent of the individuals in a state who are potentially eligible to vote but who have not registered “inform[ing] them how to register to vote.”

How does a State know who is eligible to register but has not? Certainly, the needed data are generally publicly available, but they need explicitly to be sought out, collected, and then fused into an eligible-but-not-registered list. Why are States being required by ERIC to conduct this surveillance, instead of leaving that up to the citizens of each State to do or to refuse to do? Why is it any American government’s business why this or that American citizen chooses to register, or not? Why is it any American government’s role to hector any American citizen to engage in this lawful behavior rather than that one? What other government surveillance is this supposed Organizational Compact trying to get governments to carry out at its behest? For what purposes? Maybe more States should be leaving ERIC and leave the government surveillance of private citizens to the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States whose governing personnel actually think this level of surveillance is a good idea.

We’ll Soon Learn Two Things

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We’re about to learn two things about the Canadian government. The Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents nearly a quarter million government employees, have gone on strike for…DEI claptrap like mandatory “unconscious bias” training; an intrinsically racist $1,500 bonus that’s only for Cree, Inuktitut, Dene, or any other Canada Indigenous language speakers; more racism in the form of special time off just for Indigenous employees; government-paid, which is to say Canadian taxpayer-paid, time off for union “training;” a union-administered “Social Justice Fund,” which PSAC carefully declines to say is its purpose—just give the union the money—and on and on.

One of the things we’re going to learn is how much courage Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his government have in standing up to this union’s strike, an action (not unique to PSAC) that is, essentially, extortion in that a striking union is saying it’s not going to allow the struck entity to operate until the entity pays the union’s demanded vig. In particular, will the Trudeau government show the same “courage” against this employee strike that it showed against a recent trucker protest, and will it use similarly heavy-handed tactics, which included freezing/seizing bank accounts, to break up the union strike?

The other thing we’ll learn is how much, or how little, these workers are missed as Canada’s government continues to function without them.

The PSAC 224-page program of demands can be read here.

Lose Your iPhone…

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…and lose your data, along with access to your financials. For instance,

thieves who stole [one man’s] iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change [his] Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

The thieves got his passcode by shoulder-surfing and watching him tap in his passcode before they stole his phone. And Apple can’t help him: without the recovery key, there’s nothing they can do. In addition to the money stolen, the man has lost the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters, which he was storing exclusively on his cell phone.

And this example:

After [a man’s] iPhone 13 Pro was stolen from a Boston bar in August, [he] said he spent hours on the phone with Apple customer support trying to regain access to over a decade of data.

Again, Apple was helpless to help without that now thief-altered recovery key.

The recovery key business is specific to Apple’s iPhones, and it’s irrelevant to my questions here. My questions apply to Android phones and other kinds of cell phones just as much.

My first question is this: when the cell phone owner was in any sort of public place—bar, office, park, etc, what was that cell phone doing anywhere but in the owner’s hot little hand or in an interior pocket? Leaving the cell phone out on a counter or a bar or a park bench, even if the owner is right there, is the same as taping a “Free for the Taking” sign on the phone.

My second question is this: convenience comes with a price, and these theft victims provide examples of the price to be paid for that convenience: the loss of those precious personal items, the loss of years of personally important data, or the loss of company or other business data and correspondence (whether text or email), the loss of the moneys in the various financial accounts to which the owner has given cell phone access, and on and on. Why are these data kept on cell phones at all? Why are they not, at the least, backed up on a separate device—a laptop, for instance, or the company’s desktop back at the office or in the home office?

There’s no excuse for the theft, but there’s no excuse, either, for the personal laziness that magnifies the outcome of the theft.