It Doesn’t Matter

Vice President Mike Pence doesn’t think it’s a done deal that the Progressive-Democrats have the votes in the House to impeach President Donald Trump.

He’s operating from a misunderstanding of the Progressive-Democrats’ purpose. Their move has nothing to do with impeachment—they know they have no case based on what they’ve leaked from their secret hearings and what’s been exposed in both their committees’ public hearings—and everything to do with smearing Trump and poisoning the upcoming election.

As Al Green (D, TX) has made clear.

There is no limit on the number of the times the Senate can vote to convict or not [convict] a president. No limit to the number of times a House can vote to impeach, or not….

And

I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.

The Progressive-Democrats will just keep the “impeachment” effort alive and ongoing through the campaign season.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

That’s what French unions are demanding with their strikes against French President Emmanuel Macron’s and French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe’s plans to streamline, standardize, and otherwise reduce the cost to French taxpayers of France’s byzantine pension system.

Never mind that the pension system consists of 42 different pension plans or that French civil servants insist that they are, somehow, special and so should have special perquisites unavailable to petty private sector workers.

Trains, subways, and buses were still severely curtailed on Friday, and hundreds of domestic and regional flights were canceled. There were no demonstrations on Friday, but unions have warned the strike could last days and become one of the biggest in France in over two decades.

And

Civil servants, in particular, fear they may lose advantages they have over private-sector employees.

To hell with their fellow citizens attempting to get to and from their own work, to and from their own necessary errands, to and from their own entertainments.  The unions want theirs, and no one else matters.

All the government wants to do is to

extend the number of years needed to collect a full pension and create a universal plan that would do away with the so-called special regimes enjoyed by French civil servants, including rail workers.

Currently, full retirement occurs after 43 years of work or age 62; the latter being the youngest full-retirement age in the OECD.

“Screw you,” say the unions, exemplified by Catherine Perret, Confederal Secretary of the CGT trade union:

We won’t let go[.]

This is the naked, if strictly legal, extortion of union strikes made national.  The US has Taft-Hartley, in which the government can order the end to a strike for a significant period during which serious negotiations could occur.  France, not so much; its unions are amok.

YGTBSM

Congressman Al Green (D, TX) is upset that, of all of the law professor witnesses testifying at Wednesday’s Jerry Nadler-run (D, NY) Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing, not one of them was “a person of color.” In his upset, he actually said this on the House floor before the Committee began its round of the Progressive-Democrats’ inquisition:

It hurts my heart, Mr Speaker, to see the Judiciary Committee hearing experts on the topic of impeachment—one of the seminal issues of this Congress—hearing experts…and not one person of color among the experts.
What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we have experts but not one person of color? Are we saying that there are no people of color who are experts on this topic of impeachment?

Because, for this man, the most important characteristic, the defining characteristic of anyone is the color of his skin.  What subliminal message are we sending to the world when we insist we cannot have a collection of experts unless some of them are “persons of color?”

Apparently Green does not believe in Martin Luther King’s dream: that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The racism is strong and stench-ridden in this Congressman.

Surveillance

It turns out the People’s Republic of China government is a collection of pikers compared to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pair of bills Monday, one of which will require all consumer electronic devices sold in the country to be pre-installed with Russian software, while the other will register individual journalists as foreign agents.

Government spyware pre-installed on Russian citizens’ devices, so Russia’s modern-day KGB successor can track where Russian citizens are, with whom they’re communicating, what they’re doing, down to the last detail.

Government spyware that will not only identify who is a journalist (Russia’s definition of “journalist”), but register them as foreign agents—right alongside diplomats, diplomat staff, foreign-declared agents of a diplomat staff, but without any of the protections of those diplomats and staffs.

PRC President Xi Jinping seems yet to have lots to learn from the Russians.

Expanding Surveillance State

Want a new phone in the People’s Republic of China? You have to give up an image of your face to the government.

The requirement, which came into effect Sunday, is aimed at minimizing telephone fraud and preventing the reselling and illegal transfer of mobile phone cards, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a notice in September.

Right. That’s believable.  Never mind that

…facial recognition becomes more and more prevalent in [the PRC], with authorities applying artificial intelligence to sift through reams of data collected in a bid to boost the economy and centralize oversight of the population.

These are the guys our Big Tech is so anxious to do business with—especially in facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology development.