Tag Archives: freedom

The PRC and Bitcoin

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The behavior of the People’s Republic of China regarding bitcoin has purpose far beyond controlling bitcoin.  As background, The Wall Street Journal had this assessment of the PRC’s financial industry:

China has digitized its financial sector faster than any other nation.

The reason for their rapid pace is this according to Li Lihui, a spokesman for the National Internet Finance Association of China, and it has nothing at all to do with a sovereign nation’s legitimate desire to control its own currency and money supply:

A goal of China’s monetary regulation is to ensure that “the source and destination of every piece of money can be tracked[.]”

That end-to-end tracking, to the extent it can be done, guarantees that the PRC will know who is spending and for what.

And that means that the PRC, a nation that rules by “law” (rather than operates under rule of law) and that brooks no dissent from the pronouncements of the Communist Party of China, can control whether any given individual or organization will be permitted to spend for any particular purpose—or even whether that person or individual will be allowed access to his money at all.

Discrimination

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Now FEMA is doing it, and it’s religious discrimination.  Churches, bastions of succor in times of disaster—like Hurricanes Harvey and Irma—suffer their own damages in those disasters, as they did in Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  However, unlike other charitable organizations in similar straits, churches are being denied FEMA assistance to recover.

Law on this is not clear because separation of church and state, New York University Law Professor Burt Neuborne is claiming.

The difficulty is that the Constitution has two provisions in it. It has a freedom of religion, but it also has kind of a freedom from religion which prevents government money from being used for religious purposes, worship purposes.

No, it doesn’t.  This is, at best, mistaken.  The two relevant 1st Amendment clauses are the Free Exercise Clause—Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof [of religion]—and the Establishment Clause—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.  There’s nothing in there about freedom from religion; that’s just the distortionate drivel used by crowds like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the like.

The Federal government cannot favor one religion over another or favor religion over atheism; there’s nothing in there that prohibits the Feds from providing disaster recovery help to religious organizations along with the same sort of help for secular non-profit organizations.  In fact, refusing to do so violates the Establishment Clause by actively disfavoring religion rather than acting neutrally toward it—as the Clause requires.

Neuborne wasn’t finished.

The question is: can they get the money and rebuild their worship facilities? Because then the money would be going towards worship, not to help people from not getting skinned knees on the playground, or being able to get food at the food bank.

This is just disingenuous.  No, the money would not be going toward worship, it would be going toward restoring a building.  A building that comes in critically handy for sheltering those displaced by disasters, natural or otherwise.  Regardless of the religions (or lack) of the sheltered or the shelter.

The attacks on religion from continues.

The Left’s Favored Antifa

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The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page editors closed their Monday opinion piece with this remark:

The mainstream left ought to denounce it [Antifa’s censorious criminality] as much as the right should reject white supremacists.

The right does denounce white supremacists—and all bigots, not only white supremacists. We get called out by the dishonest Left and its NLMSM for not denouncing only the white supremacists.

Did I say “dishonest Left and its NLMSM?” That the Left chooses to embrace its hate groups and bigots rather than denounce them demonstrates the accuracy of the characterization.

That the Progressive-Democratic Party leadership, including in particular Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senator Diane Feinstein (D, CA) (and the rest of the California contingent, come to that) is studiously silent on these attacks—including Sunday’s Antifa attack, which Berkeley’s police chief permitted—shows clearly where the Party stands on free speech and on freedom generally.

Update: Wednesday–three days after Antifa’s assault–House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi got around to issuing a statement that’s being masqueraded as a condemnation of Antifa:

The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.

Notice that: it’s not a condemnation of Antifa, it’s a condemnation of those “calling themselves Antifa.”  Yet the KKK, neo-Nazis, Nazi-wannabes, the NLMSM’s made-up “alt-right” are all Conservatives in her eyes, those of her cronies, and the NLMSM.

Still, her…statement…is more than others of the Progressive-Democratic Party are willing to do.  I’ve seen no statement, however weasel-worded, from House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D, MD), from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), from Senators Diane Feinstein (D, CA), Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), or Dick Durbin (D, IL), or anyone else from the Left.

Monuments

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The European Commission had a thought on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, that while not explicitly about monuments is related:

The European Union was built on the common values of human dignity, fundamental rights, rule of law and democracy, and on the rejection of extreme nationalism.

We must never take these rights and freedoms for granted. We pledge to fight for them every day.

Extremism, nationalism, xenophobia and hatred can still be heard in public speech in Europe. Keeping these memories alive is not only a tribute to the victims but also a way to ensure that these ideologies can be forcefully rejected and such atrocities never happen again.

We stand firm in our defense of democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights, in Europe and worldwide. There is no place in the European Union for extremism, intolerance and oppression.

These remarks dovetail tightly with a suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence:

I hold the view that it’s important that we remember our past and build on the progress that we have made.

I’m someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments.  What we ought to do is we ought to remember our history, but we also ought to celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history.

And

When I walked back in 2010 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge…we remembered Bloody Sunday and the extraordinary progress of the civil rights movement, and I can’t help but think that, rather than pulling down monuments, as some are wont to do…we ought to have been building more monuments[.]

Hmm….

Threats of Violence

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The Left never threatens violence against those with whom they disagree.  Mm, mm.

A Democratic state senator in Missouri is facing resignation calls for posting on Facebook Thursday that she hopes President Trump is assassinated.

“I hope Trump is assassinated!” state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D) wrote.

No violence.  Just murder.

Then, showing the courage of her conviction, she deleted her Facebook post and pretended to apologize for it.

Sure.

Update: She apologized again.

President Trump I apologize to you and your family.  I also apologize to all the people in Missouri. And I also apologize to my colleagues in the Missouri legislature for the mistake that I made.

An actual apology, too, and not the noise that’s used for an apology in the 21st century.  Cool.