Tag Archives: ethics

“Tax Us”

Posted on by
Reply

Some members of the rich class have formed a group and extended a demand that governments should tax all members of their clique.

Over 80 men and women worth seven figures from the US, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and the Netherlands calling themselves the “Millionaires for Humanity” have signed an open letter asking their governments to “raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently.

The Americans in that crowd first must prove they mean it by committing—with publicly available means for verifying that they’re honoring that commitment over the succeeding years—to making donations to the US Treasury of the amounts they’d pay under this “tax us” plan.

They don’t get to force their taxes on the rest of us, especially when they don’t believe in them themselves.

Dishonesty of the Press

Posted on by
Reply

The White House Press Corps has its collective panties bunched up again; this time the cause of their angst is White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany refusal to kowtow to them and her open disdain for their contemptible behavior.

Poor ABC News correspondent Jon Karl, who’s the current head of the WHPC wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, complaining that she doesn’t run the daily press briefings in accordance with his preferences in the right way.

The job is to inform the public: to be an intermediary between the president and a press corps the public relies on for information….

Of course, the press isn’t the least bit arrogant or self-important. They’re the gateway to what we know; we rely on them. No, we don’t. Usually, we bypass the press and go straight to the sources—real sources, not those the press masquerades as “officials” or “anonymous sources.”

Denying reality….

Of course, there can’t possibly be differing interpretations of events. McEnany must be denying reality.

Karl specifically pointed to derisive statements McEnany made about Seattle’s so-called autonomous zone, arguing she wrongly implied that President Trump liberated the city from its occupation.

Except that McEnany did no such thing, neither did Trump. She merely reported what he said—that he’d act if they didn’t, followed by their acting, followed by Trump’s bragging about having successfully prodded them. Look who’s really denying reality.

And

he [Karl] accused her of implying in a July 6 briefing that reporters didn’t care about shootings in New York….

An accurate implication, since the press corps, in that briefing, displayed exactly zero interest in the New York shootings. Here’s how McEnany closed that briefing:

I was asked probably 12 questions about the Confederate flag. This president is focused on action, and I’m a little dismayed that I didn’t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend. I didn’t receive one question about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week.

The lack of questions regarding that surge—still surging—of murders and what might the President think or do or plan to do about them—in favor or the press’ manufactured spat over the NASCAR and Confederate Flag beef—is a pretty strong indication of the press’ lack of interest in those murders.

How dare this person object to press misbehaviors? Doesn’t she know the press is above reproach?

Vote Fraud

Posted on by
Reply

It happened in West Virginia, and it didn’t involve vote harvesters or vote canvassers or vote counters.

A West Virginia postal carrier pleaded guilty Thursday to altering mail-in requests for absentee voter ballots.
Thomas Cooper entered the plea in federal court in Elkins to attempted election fraud and injury to the mail, US Attorney Bill Powell said in a statement.
Cooper was charged in May after eight mail-in requests for absentee voter ballots had their party affiliations altered.

This was a failure of West Virginia’s decision to mail ballot applications to all registered voters, whether they asked for one or not.

But Progressive-Democrats say there is no mail vote fraud. And they are honorable men. So are they all, all of the Left, honorable men.

A Thought on Kipp

Posted on by
Reply

Since I’m thinking about things today.

KIPP Public Schools is a nation-wide charter school organization that has had outsized success in teaching its students, as has virtually all charter and voucher schools and school organizations in the US.  It had a motto, Work Hard. Be Nice., which it scrapped in an attempt to pander to the woke gangs.

In defense of that move, Kipp Co-Founder Dave Levin wrote a Letter to The Wall Street Journal. Toward the end of that letter, Levin made the remarkable claim that

Hard work is essential. Character matters.

Which is true for most of us, but it seems petty rationalization from Levin. If he really believed in the importance of hard work and character, he and his organization would not have struck their Work Hard. Be Nice. motto altogether.

Work Hard. Be Nice. Create our Future.—adapted from Kipp’s claimed Vision statement—would have been a fine update.

But no.

Some Thoughts on TikTok

Posted on by
Reply

TikTok is a video messaging app that was developed in the People’s Republic of China and is owned by ByteDance, another PRC company. The Wall Street Journal published a Q&A on the app last Tuesday.

I have some thoughts, too.

For background, here are some of the data that TikTok collects just because you’re using it.

…location data and your internet address, according to its privacy policy, and it tracks the type of device you are using to access its platform. It stores your browsing and search history as well as the content of messages you exchange with others on the app.

How to locate your device in the Net, where you’ve been virtually, and what you say in your correspondence. That’s just for starters.

If you opt in, TikTok says it can collect your phone and social-network contacts, your GPS position, and your personal information such as age and phone number along with any user-generated content you post, such as photos and videos. It can store payment information, too. TikTok also gets a sense of what makes you tick. It can track the videos you like, share, watch….

Your physical location, and all that personally identifying information. It exposes your contacts, too, without their having any opportunity to reject “opting in.”

Now, some of the rest of the story:

Why is the US concerned?
Beijing performing mass data collection on American citizens….
…a vast database of information that could be used for espionage…if TikTok’s user data could be obtained by the Chinese government, that would enhance any such efforts. “You can use [artificial intelligence tools] to sort through it and find an awful lot of data….”

And this:

A TikTok spokesman said that the Chinese government has never asked the company for user data and that it would refuse such a request. “TikTok has an American CEO and is owned by a private company that is backed by some of the best-known US investors[.]”

This is a disingenuous claim. What the PRC has or has not done in the past in this regard is wholly irrelevant to what it can do. The more important thing, too, is what it can do. Under a PRC 2017 national intelligence law, all PRC companies and people are required to comply with any and all intel community requests for intel-related information. What is intel-related is determined by the intel community. Under the just-passed Hong Kong national security law, the PRC government has arrogated to itself the authority to go after any entity or person it deems a national security threat—wherever that entity or person is located, under whatever sovereign nation jurisdiction that entity or person resides, in the world.

TikTok, owned by ByteDance, is as subject to those laws as is ByteDance.

Does TikTok share any information with ByteDance, its China-based parent?
TikTok stores its data on American users on servers in the US and Singapore, but its website says that information can be shared with ByteDance or other affiliates.

Not only can be shared, but will be. Nor will it matter what firewalls ByteDance might claim to have erected between it and its subordinate—limiting the number of employees who have access to user data and the scenarios where data access is enabled, for instance—the parent organization can tear them down at will. And can be expected to, as necessary, to satisfy information demands from the PRC’s intel community.

As for those “other affiliates”—some of them may well be within the PRC.

What happens to your data if you quit TikTok?
Users can ask TikTok to delete their data, and the company has said in its policy that it will respond in a manner consistent with applicable law upon verifying your identity.

Users are supposed to believe TikTok’s wide-eyed innocent claim to have complied, even though they have no means of independently verifying TikTok’s assertion. But the kicker is that manner consistent with applicable law caveat. Two of those applicable laws are the PRC’s security laws mentioned above.

This is not a bit of software that should appear anywhere on anyone’s device.