Dec 21, 2020 | Business
Facebook’s chief counsel Jennifer Newstead responds to Antitrust Suit in “Lawsuits Filed by the FTC and the State Attorneys General Are Revisionist History“:
The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general today attack two acquisitions that we made: Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. These transactions were intended to provide better products for the people who use them, and they unquestionably did. Both of these acquisitions were reviewed by relevant antitrust regulators at the time. The FTC conducted an in-depth “Second Request” of the Instagram transaction in 2012 before voting unanimously to clear it. The European Commission reviewed the WhatsApp transaction in 2014 and found no risk of harm to competition in any potential market. Regulators correctly allowed these deals to move forward because they did not threaten competition.
Now, many years later, with seemingly no regard for settled law or the consequences to innovation and investment, the agency is saying it got it wrong and wants a do-over. In addition to being revisionist history, this is simply not how the antitrust laws are supposed to work.
I would not be so sure.
Writes philosopher Ayn Rand in her article “Choose Your Issues,” The Objectivist Newsletter, Jan. 1962, 1, on the nature and purpose of the antitrust laws:
The Antitrust laws—an unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable mess of contradictions—have for decades kept American businessmen under a silent, growing reign of terror. Yet these laws were created and, to this day, are upheld by the “conservatives,” as a grim monument to their lack of political philosophy, of economic knowledge and of any concern with principles. Under the Antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly or for a successful “intent to monopolize”; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “unfair competition” or “restraint of trade”; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “collusion” or “conspiracy.” There is only one difference in the legal treatment accorded to a criminal or to a businessman: the criminal’s rights are protected much more securely and objectively than the businessman’s.
Recommended Reading:
Dec 20, 2020 | Sci-Tech
NASA has spent over 23 billion dollars on the Orion spacecraft – that has yet to be able to take a person into space. Writes Eric Berger in “The Orion spacecraft is now 15 years old and has flown into space just once“:
The Orion spacecraft dates back to 2005, when NASA issued a “request for proposals” to industry with the goal of “developing a new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2014 that is capable of carrying astronauts beyond low Earth orbit.” NASA sought Orion as a building block to land humans on the Moon as part of what became known as the Constellation program. This program was later canceled, but Orion survived. Since that time, according to The Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier, NASA has spent $23.7 billion developing the Orion spacecraft. This does not include primary costs for the vehicle’s Service Module, which provides power and propulsion, as it is being provided by the European Space Agency.
For this money, NASA has gotten a bare-bones version of Orion that flew [without a crew] during the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014. The agency has also gotten the construction of an Orion capsule—which also does not have a full life support system—that will be used during the uncrewed Artemis I mission due to be flown in 12 to 24 months. So over its lifetime, and for $23.7 billion, the Orion program has produced:
- Development of Orion spacecraft
- Exploration Flight Test-1 basic vehicle
- The Orion capsule to be used for another test flight
- Work on capsules for subsequent missions
How does that compare to Elon Musk’s privately run space initiative, SpaceX?
SpaceX is generally considered one of the most efficient space companies. Founded in 2002, the company has received funding from NASA, the Department of Defense, and private investors. Over its history, we can reliably estimate that SpaceX has expended a total of $16 billion to $20 billion on all of its spaceflight endeavors. Consider what that money has bought:
- Development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy rockets
- Development of Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, and Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft
- Development of Merlin, Kestrel, and Raptor rocket engines
- Build-out of launch sites at Vandenberg (twice), Kwajalein Atoll, Cape Canaveral, and Kennedy Space Center
- 105 successful launches to orbit
- 20 missions to supply International Space Station, two crewed flights
- Development of vertical take off, vertical landing, rapid reuse for first stages
- Starship and Super Heavy rocket development program
- Starlink Internet program (with 955 satellites on orbit, SpaceX is largest satellite operator in the world)
The author calls this an “extreme” comparison. Far from it, when comparing the economics of capitalism and socialism it is the norm.
Dec 19, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Writes David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine, “We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time“:
You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it .
The author then goes on to regurgitate “the FDA has to approve it” excuse for not banning the sale of the vaccine until the end of 2020:
To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that Moderna should have been allowed to roll out its vaccine in February or even in May, when interim results from its Phase I trial demonstrated its basic safety.
Well, why the hell not?
Shouldn’t that judgment on the efficacy of the vaccine be up to each individual? If you have a high probability of dying from COVID-19 if you get it, the vaccine in February 2020 might be worth the risk.
And why not release it in May 2020 when it was proven “safe” by FDA standards (but not yet proven as “efficacious”).
Observe that for 41% of voters; the pandemic was the “most important issue facing the country”:
What was the FDA waiting for? For Trump to lose the 2020 Presidential election? I seriously hope not. More likely, it is something worse: bureaucratic inertia with a central planning anti-free-market mindset.
Continues the author on the “reasoning” of the experts:
An unsafe vaccine, like the one for polio that killed ten and paralyzed 200 in 1955, could cause medical disaster and public-health backlash — though, as Balloux points out, since none of the new coronavirus vaccines use real viral material, that kind of accident, which affected one in a thousand recipients, would be impossible. (These days, one adverse impact in a million is the rule-of-thumb threshold of acceptability.) An ineffective vaccine could also give false security to those receiving it, thereby helping spread the disease by providing population-scale license to irresponsible behavior (indoor parties, say, or masklessness). But on other matters of population-level guidance, our messaging about risk has been erratic all year, too. In February and March, we were warned against the use of masks, in part on the grounds that a false sense of security would lead to irresponsible behavior — on balance, perhaps the most consequential public-health mistake in the whole horrid pandemic. In April, with schools already shut, we closed playgrounds. In May, beaches — unable or unwilling to live with even the very-close-to-zero risk of socializing outside (often shaming those who gathered there anyway). But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall. The whole time, we also knew that the Moderna vaccine was essentially safe. We were just waiting to know for sure that it worked, too.
None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs.
The problem is that “scientists” cannot determine the “trade-offs” for any given individual. Those decisions should be up to the individual, with “experts” providing the facts, allowing each person to decide based on their particular situation and personal priorities, with the government’s job to get-out-of-the-way.
Given that the FDA blocked the sale and distribution of a vaccine that could have prevented the death of over a quarter a million Americans, we think the name suggested by Harry Binswanger to be a far more accurate description: Federal Death Agency.
Recommended Reading:
Dec 19, 2020 | Culture
Writes Professor Thompson in The Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans: A Critique of the Dissident Right:
The publication of my new book, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American revolution and the Declaration that Defined It, comes at a crucial moment in American history. Academic study of the American revolution is dying on our college campuses, and the principles and institutions of the American Founding are now under assault from the nattering nabobs of both the progressive Left and the reactionary Right. These two ideological antipodes share little in common other than a mutually-assured desire to purge 21st-century American life of the founders’ philosophy of classical liberalism.
On this point, the radical Left and Right have merged.
The philosophy of Americanism is, as I have argued in my book and elsewhere, synonymous with the founders’ ideas, actions, and institutions. Its core tenets can be summed up as: the moral laws and rights of nature, ethical individualism, self-interest rightly understood, self-rule, constitutionalism, rule of law, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism.
[…]
There was a time, of course, when most Americans (especially conservatives and libertarians) agreed with this assessment. Sadly, that is no longer true.
The anti-Americanism of the radical Left is well known and long established. Its most recent and most virulent incarnation comes in the form of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which claims that the founders’ principles and institutions were disingenuous in 1776 and immoral today.
Much more interesting than the ho-hum anti-Americanism of the progressive Left, though, is the rise in recent years of a rump faction of former Paleo or Tradcons, who have come out of their ideological closet and transitioned from pro- to anti-Americanism. The recent rise of the radical Right in America is distinguished from all previous forms of conservatism and libertarianism by its explicit rejection of the founders’ liberalism.
A new generation of neo-reactionary ideologues looks at contemporary America and sees nothing but moral, cultural, and political decay, which they blame on the soullessness of the founders’ Americanism. Remarkably, just like the radical Left, the radical Right condemns the philosophy of 18th-century liberalism as untrue and therefore immoral. It is the source, they claim, of all our present discontents.
Read the rest.
Dec 18, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Note: In NY if a person contracted COVID-19 in LTC facility and dies in the hospital, NY counts it as a hospital death and does not attribute it the LTC.
“...the Long-Term Care COVID Tracker is the most comprehensive dataset about COVID-19 in US long-term care facilities. It compiles crucial data about the effects of the pandemic on a population with extraordinary vulnerabilities to the virus due to age, underlying health conditions, or proximity to large outbreaks.
The dataset compiles all currently available information of COVID-19 cases and related deaths in long-term care facilities—nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, and other care homes—and tracks both residents and staff.
One solution is to “bubble” the home and have staff live full-time on-site during the pandemic:
Currently, most senior homes rely on checkpoints to screen staff as they arrive to work, mainly by asking them questions and taking their temperatures. But these checkpoints can easily fail, because people without symptoms can carry and transmit the coronavirus. Moreover, many staff members work at multiple homes or have family members who work at other facilities. Many senior homes also have been preparing for the pandemic by hiring extra staffers. So it is hardly surprising that the contagion has spread like a chain reaction in senior care homes.
[…]
A better approach is to pay front line aides and nurses to live on-site through the period when the disease is surging — meaning right now. This is hardship work, requiring staff to work 60 to 80 hours a week without seeing family members. But it could be the best way to protect our elderly. Lowering the number of infections at our senior homes would also allow us to conserve protective equipment, reduce the need for hospital beds and prevent the spread of the disease into communities where staff members live.
[…]
At homes overwhelmed by Covid-19, having caregivers live on-site would prevent them from bringing the virus home to their families or spreading it through communities, particularly when they commute.
Looking ahead, Covid may recede for much of the country this summer, but I fear that senior homes will remain vulnerable to a new wave of infection. We can prepare for that by having our staff live in our homes.
The result?
The result has been promising; we have yet to have a confirmed case of Covid-19 among our residents or staff.
Unfortunately, it is more expensive:
But I cannot afford it for much longer, and many other senior care centers could not afford to even start such a program.
Hat Tip: Phil Magness
Dec 17, 2020 | Politics
Writes Richard Salsman on why “Biden’s Disdain for Shareholders is Fascistic“:
…“shareholder capitalism” is redundant, and “stakeholder capitalism” is oxymoronic. The former is genuine capitalism: private ownership (and control) of the means of production (and its output, too). The latter is fascism: private ownership but public control, imposed by non-owners. Socialism, of course, is public (state) ownership and public control of the means of production. Capitalism entails and promotes mutually beneficial contractual responsibility; fascism destroys that, by brutally severing ownership and control.
Which of these political-economic systems does Biden and his allies (Harris, Sanders, Warren, AOC) denounce, and which do they extoll? Is it not obvious? We know. They won’t dare use the word fascism, of course – just its definition. They prefer to reclassify fascism as a form of capitalism (“stakeholder” capitalism) so as to get away with imposing what is radical but not new. Many anti-capitalist academics and journalists, likewise sympathetic to fascism, euphemistically call it ‘corporatism’ or ‘cronyism,’ and pretend it’s a brand of capitalism. Not so. ‘Big money’ controls politics only to the extent politics controls money-making, and for decades left-Democrats have pushed for an ever-greater government subsidization and regulation of business. They encourage and reward corporate cronies – and punish small businesses. This is why most billionaires and major corporate officials support the Democrat Party.
Photo by Gage Skidmore
Dec 16, 2020 | Politics
Elan Journo talks with Flemming Rose, author of The Tyranny of Silence.
In 2005, [Rose] was an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when it commissioned and later published cartoons on the subject of Islam to assess the seeming climate of self-censorship. That decision led to boycotts, deadly protests, and a global crisis. Al Qaeda put Mr. Rose on a hit list, and today when he leaves home, he must be accompanied by bodyguards. We talked about the “cartoons crisis,” which has become shrouded in misconceptions, the worldwide protests and boycotts that ensued, and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo (it had republished the Danish cartoons in support of freedom of speech). Following that attack, millions flocked to the streets of Paris to show their solidarity with the murdered journalists, declaring on banners, “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”). What became of that visceral outpouring of support in the years since?
Dec 15, 2020 | Politics
The WSJ presents an opinion piece of Mr. Barr’s accomplishments on his resignation today, ostensibly over his statement that there was not enough evidence of voter fraud to overturn the presidential election.
Some highlights:
…Mr. Barr…wanted to clean up a Justice Department that he rightly knew had been tainted by a corrupt FBI under James Comey and political appointees in both parties who lacked the courage or tenacity to take responsibility for hard prosecutorial judgments.
[He navigated] the end of the Robert Mueller probe while protecting the office of the Presidency from unconstitutional conclusions about obstruction of justice. Future Presidents of both parties will thank him.
He was willing to endure media and Democratic smears by taking fresh looks at old investigations…. His release of documents has helped to show the FBI probe began in partisan scheming and unlawful practices…
Mr. Barr also had the guts to ask another U.S. Attorney, Jeffrey Jensen, to re-examine Mr. Mueller’s prosecution of Michael Flynn. That probe turned up more malpractice and a decision to dismiss charges that never should have been brought…
…Perhaps Mr. Barr’s greatest contribution was speaking truth to Mr. Trump, who wanted his tormentors prosecuted whether or not the evidence warranted. This resistance chafed on Mr. Trump as Mr. Barr’s tenure went on, and especially when Mr. Durham declined to bring indictments or leak evidence before the presidential election. This was the right decision and shows Mr. Barr’s adherence to principle. [“Thank You Bill Bar”, WSJ, 14 Dec 2020]
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Barr (his antitrust case against Google is described by the WSJ as “weak”) whether revealing the abuses of Democrat “deep state” operatives or willing to disagree with Trump when he believed the facts warranted it, Barr demonstrated an allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, and the rule of law, which is all that one can demand of a public official.
Dec 14, 2020 | Education
From “Luminar going public makes 25-year-old Austin Russell one of world’s first, and youngest, self-driving billionaires” at CNBC:
Luminar, which creates lidar technology critical to many automakers’ autonomous driving efforts, is going public on Thursday through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and the deal will make Luminar co-founder and CEO Austin Russell a billionaire — at the age of 25.
Russell, who founded the company as a 17-year-old high school student, said the feeling of becoming a billionaire (on paper, at least) is “absolutely incredible” and “totally surreal.”
[…]
Russell was a bit of a science prodigy.
“I guess, I did memorize the periodic table — I think I was around 2 or so,” Russell told CNBC Make It in a 2018 interview. “I was just obsessed with learning certain things … just independently learning and understanding a lot of new types of scientific fields, among other things.”
That evolved into work on lasers and ultimately, lidar, which uses lasers to detect and measure distance and ultimately create a 3D map of the real world environment that can be used in self-driving.
He ended up at Stanford University studying physics, but dropped out and received a Thiel Fellowship, created by tech icon and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to provide tech talent with alternatives to traditional education programs.
Dec 13, 2020 | Politics
“Constitutional capitalist” Professor Richard Salsman elaborates on the assault against America’s institutions and values on The P.A.S. Report Political Podcast:
“This assault is not by the hands of a foreign adversary, but by her own intellectuals and the ruling class, including professors, editorialists, policy wonks, pundits, politicians, and entertainers…The battle isn’t simply over capitalism vs. socialism. The battle is over peace, prosperity, and human happiness vs. war, poverty, and human misery.”
Dec 9, 2020 | Sci-Tech
Nov 26, 2020 | Politics
According to a CNN commentator and a former White House aide (presumably under Obama):
Orlando Hall was executed last night. Hall was a Black man convicted by an all-white jury. He is the eighth person executed this year by the Trump administration. There were no federal executions under Pres. Obama, and Biden plans to end them as well.
Boykin’s tweet is race-baiting compounded with a lie of omitting essential facts.
The race-baiting is his statement “a Black man convicted [to death] by an all-white jury.”
A black man sentenced to be killed? Someone call BLM Inc. and organize some “protests.”
The lie is in what facts Mr. Boykin omits from his post. Mr. Boykin makes no mention of what this “Black man” was sentenced to death by an “all-white jury” for.
According to a DOJ press release, Execution Scheduled for Federal Death Row Inmate Convicted of Murdering a Child:
Attorney General William P. Barr today directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the execution of Orlando Cordia Hall, who was sentenced to death after kidnapping, raping, and murdering a 16-year-old girl in 1994.
In other words that “all-white jury” convicted a monster who repeatedly raped, tortured, doused with gas, and buried alive a young black child.
Why did this “Black man” do this?
In September 1994, Hall and several accomplices ran a marijuana trafficking operation out of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. After a failed drug transaction involving $4,700, Hall and his accomplices went to the Arlington, Texas, home of a man they believed had reneged on the deal.
Mr. Hall took a child out to a car and raped her because he believed her brother reneged on a pot deal.
The man’s 16-year-old sister, Lisa Rene, answered the door. Although she was simply an innocent bystander, Hall and his accomplices kidnapped her at gunpoint, and Hall raped her in the car.
But that is not the worst of it:
Hall’s accomplices subsequently drove her to a motel in Arkansas, where they raped her several more times. Hall and his accomplices then took her to a park where they had dug a grave. There, they beat her over the head with a shovel, soaked her with gasoline, and buried her alive.
In October 1995, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas found Hall guilty of, among other offenses, kidnapping resulting in death, and unanimously recommended a death sentence, which the court imposed. Hall’s convictions and sentences were affirmed on appeal more than 20 years ago, and his initial round of collateral challenges failed nearly 15 years ago. In 2006, Hall received a preliminary injunction from a federal district court in Washington, D.C., based on his challenge to the then-existing federal lethal-injection protocol. That injunction was vacated by the district court on Sept. 20, 2020, making Hall the only child murderer on federal death row who is eligible for execution and not subject to a stay or injunction. Hall’s execution is scheduled for Nov. 19, 2020, at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute, Indiana.
According to the NY Times:
Mr. Hall, 49, was the first of three federal prisoners scheduled for execution during the presidential transition. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has said he will work to end the use of capital punishment by the federal government, reversing President Trump’s support for it.
Nov 25, 2020 | Politics
Jeff Greenwald on “Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress ‘Hyper-Partisan Sites’ in Favor of ‘Mainstream News’ (The NYT) is a Fraud“:
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
[…]
Over the last four years, they devoted themselves to the ultimate deranged, mangled conspiracy theory: that the Kremlin had infiltrated the U.S. and was clandestinely controlling the levers of American power through some combination of sexual and financial blackmail. The endless pursuit of that twisted conspiracy led them to produce one article after the next that spread utter falsehoods, embraced reckless journalism and fostered humiliating debacles. The only thing more absurd than these hyper-partisan, reckless outlets posturing as the alternatives to hyper-partisanship is them insisting that they’re the only safeguards against misinformation.
Read the full article.
Nov 24, 2020 | Culture
From an excellent review of How to Be an Antiracist by Coleman Hughes:
“Capitalism is essentially racist,” Kendi proclaims, and “racism is essentially capitalist.” To test this claim, a careful thinker might compare racism in capitalist countries with racism in socialist/Communist ones; or he might compare racism in the private sector with racism in the public sector. Kendi does neither. Instead, he presents the link between capitalism and racism as self-evidently true: “Since the dawn of racial capitalism, when were markets level playing fields? . . . . When could Black people compete equally with White people?” Kendi asks, implying that the answer is “never.”
I can think of several historical examples in which capitalism inspired anti-racism. The most famous is the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, when a profit-hungry railroad company––upset that legally mandated segregation meant adding costly train cars––teamed up with a civil rights group to challenge racial segregation. Nor was that case unique. Privately owned bus and trolley companies in the Jim Crow South “frequently resisted segregation” because “separate cars and sections” were “too expensive,” according to one scholarly paper on the subject.
A lesser known example is the South African housing market under Apartheid. Though landlords in whites-only areas were legally barred from renting to nonwhites, vacancies made discrimination against non-white tenants costly. As a result, white landlords often ignored the law. In his book South Africa’s War on Capitalism, economist Walter Williams notes that at least one “whites-only” district was in fact comprised of a majority of nonwhites.
History offers little evidence that capitalism is either inherently racist or antiracist. As a result, Kendi must resort to cherry-picking data to demonstrate a link. Citing a Pew article, he asserts that the “Black unemployment rate has been at least twice as high as the White unemployment rate for the last fifty years” because of the “conjoined twins” of racism and capitalism. But why limit the analysis to the past 50 years? A paper cited in the same Pew article reveals that the black-white unemployment gap was “small or nonexistent before 1940,” when America was arguably more capitalist—and certainly more racist. [“How to Be an Anti-Intellectual,” City Journal]
The entire review is a recommended read.
Laissez-faire Capitalism, defined as the social system based on the principle of individual rights, is in fact the social system that defangs racism by legally banning the initiation of physical force from all relationships.
See Andrew Bernstein’s America: A Racist Nation? and Leftist Supremacy, Not White Supremacy, is the Gravest Threat to Black Lives.
Nov 23, 2020 | Education
Guidepost Montessori presents Maria Montessori’s revolutionary approach to educating children.
Nov 22, 2020 | Philosophy
Here are a few alternatives to Goole Search, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp Messenger with less filtering restrictions and/or more privacy.
Duck Duck Go: Pro-Privacy Alternative to Google Search
Duck Duck Go makes use of google search results but without tracking you and it seems to not have the filtering problems associated with the mysterious google “algorithm.”
MeWe: The No Ad, No SpyWare Alternative to Facebook
MeWe does not data mine or sell your private data. No ads either. Your feed has nothing but content from those you follow.
Parler: “Free-Speech” Alternative to Twitter
Parler is a popular “free-speech” alternative to Twitter.
Signal: Alternative to WhatsApp & Facebook Messenger
Signal is the messaging app for people worried about their privacy. It’s end-to-end encrypted, free, and available on all major mobile platforms. Used by Ed Snowden and the U.S. military.
Have a recommendation? Let us know.
Nov 15, 2020 | Politics
Kimberley A. Strassel’s “Harvesting the 2020 Election“, in the WSJ, elaborates on how changes in election rules in key states made it easier to engage in election fraud to empower Democrats:
Mrs. Pelosi unveiled a 600-plus page bill devoted to “election reform.” Some of the legislation was aimed at weaponizing campaign-finance law, giving Democrats more power to control political speech and to intimidate opponents. But the bill was equally focused on empowering the federal government to dictate how states conduct elections—with new rules designed to water down ballot integrity and to corral huge new tranches of Democratic voters.
[…]
[Pelosi’s] bill would require states to offer early voting. They also would have to allow Election Day and online voter registration, diluting the accuracy of voting rolls. H.R. 1 would make states register voters automatically from government databases, including federal welfare recipients. Colleges and universities were designated a s voter-registration hubs, and 16-year-olds would be registered to vote two years in advance. The bill would require “no fault” absentee ballots, allowing anyone to vote by mail, for any reason. It envisioned prepaid postage for federal absentee ballots. It would cripple most state voter-ID laws. It left in place the “ballot harvesting” rules that let paid activists canvass neighborhoods to hoover up absentee votes.
[…]
Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.
Here is the cashing in:
Meaning, “the fix” (as it were) was in well before anyone started counting votes. Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close– potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.
[…]
Yet the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud. How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid–or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules.
Similar points were made by Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch:
Nothing in our founding document contemplates the kind of judicial intervention that took place here, nor is there precedent for it in 230 years of this Court’s decisions.
Last-minute changes to longstanding election rules risk other problems too, inviting confusion and chaos and eroding public confidence in electoral outcomes. No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges. But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted.
The mass fraud did not happen on election day; it happened much before.
The “fraud” or “fix” was in the rules of the game before the election even began.
In an election based on objectively valid rules, the onus of the proof for election fraud requires one to produce positive evidence of fraud.
But for an election based on invalid rules – which reward fraud and help hide it – does the same principle apply? Is objectivity in evaluating the results of an election with non-objective rules even possible? It is uncertain that the kind of investigations going on now can uncover that kind of fraud.
“Our ends are noble, therefore by any means necessary.”
Nov 9, 2020 | Culture
“George Washington, “father of his country,” led the Continental Army to victory in the American Revolutionary War, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and served honorably as the nation’s first president, setting the gold standard for leaders worldwide.”
