Tag Archives: government

Correct Beef, Inadequate Correction

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) and Congresswoman Ashley Hinson (R, IA), in their 27 December Fox News op-ed, correctly identified a critical problem with our military as deconstructed by the Progressive-Democratic Biden administration: Commander-in-Chief Biden’s and DoD’s preference for wokeness in over combat effectiveness of our military service men and women. As they put it,

[T]he US Air Force Academy had cadets participate in a seminar that instructs them against using the word “terrorist” and to avoid gender specific phrases. When we’re training cadets how not to offend terrorists rather than how to destroy them, we need to seriously review our priorities.

However, the corrective action they suggested is wholly inadequate.

When Republicans take control of Congress next year, we must return the military’s focus to its core mission. We should start by firing every last Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer on the Department of Defense’s payroll. All unnecessary and onerous administrative training, especially so-called “extremism” trainings, should be eliminated.

Leaving aside the erroneous claim of “control of Congress”—Republicans will have a majority only in the House of Representatives—the Cotton-Hinson proposal can be no more than Step 3. Eliminating those personnel will by itself change nothing; the individuals would be promptly replaced by others of similar ilk by the managers at the top.

The first step in return[ing] the military’s focus to its core mission is the Critical Item. The personnel in the Office of the Secretary of Defense must be fired—every single one of them, from SecDef Lloyd Austin on down. At the same time, all of the incumbent personnel in the Offices of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard also must be fired.

The second step is another Critical Item, and it must deal with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every officer and senior NCO in the JCS beginning with CJCS Mark Milley and his staff and including each of the Service Chiefs and their staffs must be relieved and either retired or reassigned to the Combatant Commands to serve in situ in actual line jobs—whether combat, supply, or maintenance.

Without a complete replacement of the current crop of managers—they cannot be called leaders—removing the subordinate personnel will have no effect.

To those who warn that such a sweeping, essentially simultaneous turnover of the top management of our military establishment will leave our military rudderless and without direction, consider: the Combatant Commands remain intact (so far—the damage being done hasn’t materially harmed those Commands, yet). And: with the current crop of managers at the top, our military establishment already is without direction and has been—dangerously so—for the last two years.

They Don’t Clash

Posted on by
Reply

New Jersey has a new gun control law, one which Governor Phil Murphy (D) signed just last week.

Under the new law, concealed carry is not allowed in “high-density” locations, places with vulnerable populations or where there is First Amendment or government activity.

New Jerseyans can’t exercise their Second Amendment rights where they’re exercising their First Amendment rights? How does that work, exactly? The two sets of rights are synergistic, not conflicting.

And of what is Murphy’s government so terrified that his administration’s “activities” need to be protected from the people for whom he works?

There’s this fillip, too:

The new law also restricts who is ineligible to obtain a carry permit, including those with an outstanding arrest [warrant]….

But not convicted of the charge. So much for innocent until proven guilty in New Jersey.

And

…four endorsements of character from non-related references must be provided with applications.

Those four endorsers, too, each will be…interviewed…by Murphy’s government men. Murphy’s government not only is tracking New Jersey citizens who have firearms, now he intends to track those who support those who have firearms, also.

Never mind that the Supreme Court’s rulings in NY State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, District of Columbia v Heller, and McDonald v City of Chicago individually and together acknowledged that the right of us Americans to keep and bear Arms is an individual right rather than a collective one, and that they acknowledged that we don’t have to satisfy Government of any sort of “need” or “suitability of purpose” in our keeping and bearing. Never mind, either, that the rulings also required carry permit issuance to be based on strictly objective criteria, not on a government functionary’s wholly subjective assessment of “character” references.

The opening line of our Constitution—the opening phrase—is We the People of the United States.  It’s our Constitution, not Government’s. We are sovereign in our nation, not Government. It’s our obligation to enforce our rights; Government can act (and should), legitimately, only to assist us, not to usurp our duties. We defend our nation; Government acts in our name for us, not in its own name for itself.

Our Second Amendment rights are critical to all of that. Without our individual, personal keep[ing] and bear[ing] Arms, we cannot do any of that. That’s why our right shall not be infringed. Especially where First Amendment or government activities are occurring.

This is one example of why we can’t trust gun control pushers. They have no understanding whatsoever of our Bill of Rights and, by extension, of our Constitution.

Not Just DoJ

Posted on by
Reply

It has come to light that DoJ prosecutors convened a grand jury and got subpoenas with which to investigate then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R) and a number of Republican Committee staffers during Nunes’ Committee investigations into what are now known to be Progressive-Democratic Party collusion with DoJ to create a false narrative of Republican collusion with Russia.

“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it,” Nunes said. “It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”
The subpoenas demanded a broad swath of records from Google, including “all customer and subscriber account information” for [then-Committee Senior Counsel Kash] Patel and the other staffer, “addresses (including mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and e-mail addresses,” user names, “screen names,” “local and long distance telephone connection records,” and even the “means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records.”

That’s bad enough, but I’m especially concerned about another, closely related matter. Retired FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence, Kevin Brock:

A federal grand jury subpoena for records can only be issued after some type of criminal investigation has been opened.  So whoever sought the subpoena will have to be prepared to articulate why they thought these staffers broke the law. And it better be a substantial violation, something more than just a media leak investigation for example, otherwise it will risk being perceived as a gross misuse of the grand jury process to intimidate or chill a congressional committee demanding pointed answers from DOJ.

The larger question in my view—especially if the subpoenas were issued on an allegation of a chump change crime—is who were the judges, if any, who played along and approved the grand jury subpoenas, what were their rationales for their approvals? Also, who were the prosecutors convening the grand jury? It’s possible they came from the DC US Attorney’s Office, but who in particular?

Government-Tech Censorship?

Posted on by
Reply

In his op-ed concerning social media censorship, Philip Hamburger, Columbia Law School Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, had this:

Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship.

He’s on the right track, but he doesn’t take it far enough, even as he writes this:

The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users.

That’s the nub of the matter. It’s not gov-tech censorship; it’s Government-directed tech censorship. Nothing less.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Posted on by
1

Lots of folks tout cryptocurrency as the be-all and end-all of currency and liberation of our money from Evil Government.

However.

Here’s a bit about blockchain.

A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. … The innovation with a blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party.

Guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data—the fidelity part of that is that each transaction of good in a sequence of transactions is explicitly tracked and its provenance known: who or what did the transaction and who or what received the transaction. At every step of the way from first origin of the first transaction to the last recipient of the last transaction.

Here’s a bit about cryptocurrency, using the hoary Bitcoin as a canonical example.

The key thing to understand here is that Bitcoin merely uses blockchain as a means to transparently record a ledger of payments, but blockchain can, in theory, be used to immutably record any number of data points.

Cryptocurrencies use blockchain—and that ledger, here, of payments (from whom or what to what or whom)—to track the financial transactions.

That immutable record of transactions is just what governments love to have in order to track their subjects’ doings.

Cryptocurrencies are encrypted, though—that’s the “crypto” part. Except that any encryption mechanism can be cracked, and governments have the resources to do exactly that should the men in government decide they have a “need” to.

On the other hand, cash transactions still are untrackable.