Why Cryptocurrencies Are No Panacea

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In his piece concerning cryptocurrency scams and the difficulty victims have getting their money back even after the government has recovered the money from the scammers, the news writer had this statement.

[FBI] Agents have learned to painstakingly trace digital currencies, hop by hop, across blockchains—the decentralized ledgers stored on computers around the world that provide a public record of transactions between digital wallets.

This is why I won’t do anything with blockchain if I can avoid it. The very purpose of blockchain, proving permanently (at least until blockchain itself gets compromised) the provenance of transactions, makes it too easy for government to track what us ordinary Americans are doing.

Government doesn’t need to surveil me just because it wants to.

That Time Has Long Since Come

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The Trump administration wants a new rule that would achieve two ends governing how the 2030 census counts persons present in the US and how those counts are used.

The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, proposed not to count most immigrants toward the population used to apportion seats for the House, unless they have become citizens or hold permanent resident status. The proposed new calculation would exclude immigrants in the country illegally, which various analyses estimate total about 15 million.

And

In addition, the proposed rule would prohibit the Census Bureau from including race or ethnicity questions on the census form sent to all households, saying such data is “immaterial” to the constitutional mandate to conduct an actual population count. That would eliminate the most complete counts of the country’s Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American populations, ending a key source of information used in civil and voting rights enforcement.

The time for this rule has long since come, and it needs to be enacted promptly, with no further delay.

Illegal aliens have no business voting in American elections—they are not Americans, and as they’ve demonstrated by their illegal entry and subsequent insistent dodging of immigration authorities, they have no intention of becoming citizens or even legal residency. This is especially the case since for years, they’ve been able to voluntarily leave for their home contracts, collect a significant cash stipend on arrival, and then return to the US and enter legally.

It’s also plainly obvious that race or ethnicity have no place in our voting rules. This is borne out by our 14th Amendment and Supreme Court rulings explicitly eliminating race and ethnicity from voting special treatments. In the end, too, the only ethnicity that matters in eligibility for voting is American ethnicity. Beyond that, all American voters are the same under our Constitution and our statutes. Segregating us into groups for voting district construction would be irrelevant were the segregation not openly racist.

There’s Another Way, Also

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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has submitted to Congress a number of California “climate” waivers for repeal under the Clean Air Act. This is a necessary step, and the Republicans in the House and Senate need to find the personal courage to take them up without delay and rescind them, an action that’s straightforwardly doable with simple majority votes in both houses and the President’s signature.

There’s another way, a parallel path, though, and it’s the responsibility of We the People and our businesses and enterprises.

One EPA waiver lets California mandate “zero emission” commercial vessels, including ferries and whale-watching boats. Another allows California to require that container ships and oil tankers docked at California ports plug into the state’s electrical grid or install technology to capture their emissions.

And

Another EPA permit lets California mandate that new lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chain saws, and other “small off-road engines” sold in the state must be electric.

And

[An EPA] waiver approved by the Obama team…allowed California to impose EV quotas through 2025.

It’s straightforward, also, for our private enterprises to adjust their supply chains and sales paradigms to avoid doing business in California altogether. These businesses need to do so promptly and broadly.

“Parliamentary Heresy”

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In his Tuesday FoxNews article on two Progressive-Democrats voting in favor of a Republican procedure to advance a bill against the express wishes of Party leadership, Chad Pergram had this comment:

The duo [Congressmen Jared Golden (D, M) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, WA)] committed something close to a parliamentary heresy, handing the GOP the necessary votes on a procedural matter to unlock the floor for the majority.
Republicans lacked the votes to do it on their own—had Golden and Gluesenkamp not intervened.

Couple things on this. One is that our Congress is not a Parliament where party discipline is a requirement and MPs voting against their leadership is both rare and serious enough to lead directly to the fall of the government. No member of the American Congress is bound to vote the way any party leadership demands. Indeed, Congressmen voting against their party’s leadership has occurred ever since there were political parties in the US—what Washington referred to as factions. Such contrary votes only recently include two Progressive-Democrat Senators voting against a Party budget bill and moving against an effort to get rid of the filibuster.

That these two Progressive-Democrats also didn’t advise Party leadership in advance of their intention was certainly rude, but that’s hardly heresy, Parliamentary or otherwise. I suggest on this, that they gave no heads up because their Party boss, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), because he is so deeply in the pocket of Party’s Left and its DSA members that he couldn’t be expected to listen to their reasons.

The other thing is that second paragraph in the cite. Republicans lacked the vote because some Republican Congressmen were voting against Republican party leadership by voting against that same procedural matter. This, though, seems no parliamentary heresy in Pergram’s eyes, he made no mention of the dastardly nature of those contrary votes.

Go figure.

Revisionist History and Political CYA

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress from Michigan’s 7th Congressional District William Lawrence has been busily deleting politically inconvenient social media posts he’s made in the past. The smaller problem is that his deletions are nothing other than a coward’s attempt to revise his history. It’s the smaller problem because such revisionism is widely spread and all too common, even though that in no way legitimizes the misbehavior.

The larger problem here concerns those deletions and his rationalization of them. The deletions include posts pushing for such things as

police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats, and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
…
“f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

That’s about as un-American as it gets. His rationalization, though….

Lawrence said that he currently does not support defunding the police or open borders despite what his earlier posts suggested.
“Like many millennials, I’ve done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet[.]”

That’s an illustration of Lawrence’s dishonesty. He spoke from his heart in those since-deleted posts. His deletions and his rationalizations are nothing more than him covering his political behind. What concrete actions has he taken, after all, to illustrate, if not demonstrate, his alleged evolution of his thinking?