Politics & Law

Amy Peikoff on the first amendment and a good argument for why private companies could be called “state actors.”

Some findings of a Rasmussen/Heartland survey:

– Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. However, 55% of Democratic voters would support such a proposal, compared to just 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters.

– Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.

– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.

– Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”

– While about two-thirds (66%) of likely voters would be against governments using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others, 47% of Democrats favor a government tracking program for those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Amy Peikoff of Don’t Let It Go has an excellent list of “When did the Covidian fascists cross the line for you?”

When did the Covidian fascists cross the line for you?

1. Two weeks to flatten the curve
2. Lockdowns beyond two weeks
3. Dividing workforce into "essential and non-essential"
4. Flip-flop on masks
5. Mandating masks
6. Withholding approval for testing…

— Amy "Djokovic Would Have Won" Peikoff 🇺🇸🌈 (@AmyPeikoff) January 29, 2022

Here are a few of them…

4. Flip-flop on masks
9. Government protocols that deny early treatment
15. Mandating vaccinations for travel, restaurants, shopping, and other good things in life
16. Governments releasing official statements shaming the unvaccinated, sowing division
17. Mainstream media, refusing to help expose cover-ups about origins of the virus, vaccine injuries, data crimes, or other challenges to “the science”
22. In some places already, mandating the vaccines for kids, and even legalizing their administration without parental consent
23. Social media as an accomplice in pushing the narrative, banning, throttling, and labeling anything which questions “the science”
24. QR Codes for “vaccine status,” as an entree to social credit scores.

Read the entire list.

Writes Adam Mossoff, in Big Tech has an IP piracy problem:

Years ago, Big Tech companies like Google decided that they profit more by stealing smaller companies’ intellectual property than buying or licensing it. Google, Apple, Samsung and others — with cash reserves in the tens, even hundreds, of billions of dollars — do not sweat legal fees, court costs or even damages they might have to pay for this theft. Google has a reported $142 billion in cash in the bank. This is far beyond what most companies make in total annual profits.

Big Tech thus takes what it wants. It then uses scorched-earth litigation tactics to beat up on complaining IP owners. It drags out litigation over many years and imposes massive litigation costs on IP owners seeking justice. Many IP owners don’t even file a lawsuit. They know it is ruinous and self-defeating to try to protect what is rightfully theirs.

Simply put, Big Tech benefits from stealing IP. The legal costs and potential damages, if ever issued after years of litigation, are paltry by comparison.

A few companies have fought back, and the results confirm this predatory infringement practice. The story of Google’s abuse of Sonos is one of the more telling ones.

Read the rest.

Image: Pixabay

In “Not Everyone Wants To Be Vaccinated. I’m OK With That“, Dr. Paul Hseih (who voluntarily chose to be vaccinated) writes:

For the record, I do not support making the vaccine legally mandatory. You have a right to decide what goes into your body. That’s one of the core principles of medical ethics – and of individual rights. As a corollary, others have the right to decide whether or how to interact with you in person, based on your decisions. A private business may choose to only allow vaccinated people to attend their indoor events, or a private employer may set vaccination as a condition for any in-person work with others. They also have that right.

And of course, everyone has a free speech right to encourage (or discourage) others to becoming vaccinated. Those who wish others to be vaccinated can make their best possible case in favor of the vaccine; those who oppose it can do likewise.

Paul Hseih also makes an interesting point, that just as the principle of individual rights means that private businesses (individuals) can require vaccination as a condition of employment (and association), they can also do the reverse:

For example, one private school in Florida is reportedly requiring that teachers not be vaccinated as a condition of employment, citing safety concerns. This is their right, and this is the flip side of a school’s right to require vaccination as a condition of employment. Similarly, media personality Joe Rogan has publicly encouraged young people not to get vaccinated. I don’t agree with these positions, but I respect their rights to express their views – and the rights of others to offer their best counterarguments (which many are doing.)

Ultimately, if the purpose of a vaccination campaign is to help the country return to “normal,” then a crucial part of that normal is a respect for individual rights and personal medical autonomy.

What about the case for vax mandates in legitimate government organizations, such as the police, military, and courts? That is a thorny issue, I lean on the side that the state can require such vaccines as a condition of employment, especially, in the case of the military (which is voluntary) to protect them from enemy viral attacks. (There could also be exemptions for those with natural immunity.)

Bari Weiss dismisses the lies by the Democrats and their press in The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse:

Writes Weiss:

• There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting.
• In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins.
• Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.
• Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.
• [T]here’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse.

Read the rest.

The centrally planned government response to the COVID19 virus is the cause of the pandemic. What should have been an isolated episode has become a global crisis.

From the introduction of the virus to the world from Communist China (possibly from a Wuhan lab) under the approving eye of WHO (which disregarded the warning signals provided by Taiwan) to the U.S. CDC banning PCR tests that worked, in favor of its own test that did not work, etc.

If the COVID19 response was ‘managed’ by a free market it would have been long over by now as it is in the interests of producers and consumers to not die from COVID19.

There are many ways to attack COVID19 (in addition to masks, lockdowns, and vaccines) such as creating a drug that treats COVID19 and prevents death.

Under central planning, there is only one option: the government one with non-approved solutions banned.

Observe that U.S. regulators chose to:

(1) lockdown the healthy;

(2) banned the sale of cheap rapid antigen tests for over a year resulting in the failure to identify the infected;

(3) banned the sale of the COVID19 vaccine created in February 2020 (until after the 2020 US elections), etc.

Under a free-market competition, we would have a plethora of rapid tests & treatment options — such as a drug that treats COIVD19 rendering it harmless, and who knows what else.

What is required is innovation under the freedom of laissez-faire capitalism and not regulation under the authoritarianism of the fascist medical state.

Instead, of medical freedom, we have the expansion of a totalitarian, fascist regulatory government — that expands into all aspects of our lives. – Mark Da Cunha

Writing in Commentary magazine in “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage,” Bari Weiss provides an excellent summation of the “core beliefs of the Woke Revolution,” and asks, “Why are so many, especially so many young people, drawn to this ideology?”

If you have ever tried to build something, even something small, you know how hard it is. It takes time. It takes tremendous effort. But tearing things down? That’s quick work.

The Woke Revolution has been exceptionally effective. It has successfully captured the most important sense-making institutions of American life: our newspapers. Our magazines. Our Hollywood studios. Our publishing houses. Many of our tech companies. And, increasingly, corporate America.

Just as in China under Chairman Mao, the seeds of our own cultural revolution can be traced to the academy, the first of our institutions to be overtaken by it. And our schools—public, private, parochial—are increasingly the recruiting grounds for this ideological army.

And then asks “How did we get here?”

There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer….[b]ut there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility—that is how we got here.

Her solution?

All that had to change for the entire story to turn out differently was for the person in charge, the person tasked with being a steward for the newspaper or the magazine or the college or the school district or the private high school or the kindergarten, to say: No.

If cowardice is the thing that has allowed for all of this, the force that stops this cultural revolution can also be summed up by one word: courage.

[…]

George Orwell said that “the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” In an age of lies, telling the truth is high risk. It comes with a cost. But it is our moral obligation.

Read the rest.

According to a report by the National Foundation for American Policy:

American “Immigrants have been awarded 38%, or 40 of 104, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics since 2000….In 2021, three of the four U.S. recipients of Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry and physics were immigrants to the United States. Between 1901 and 2021, immigrants have been awarded 35%, or 109 of 311, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics.”

Among the other findings in the NFAP research:

•  “The proper immigration laws matter, particularly in determining whether the United States gains from increased globalization and rising educational achievement in the world. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated the discriminatory national origin quotas and opened the door to Asian immigrants, while the Immigration Act of 1990 increased employment-based green card numbers. Those two pieces of legislation have been essential factors in drawing international students to the country and enhancing the ability of America to assimilate talented individuals into our culture and economy.
• “The rise in immigrant Nobel Prize winners reflects an overall increase in the reputation and capability of American institutions and researchers post-1960, and a greater openness to immigration has helped make the United States the leading global destination for research in many different science and technology fields, including computer and information sciences, cancer research and others.
• “One can see the increasing influence and importance of immigrants on science in America reflected in Nobel Prize winners. Between 1901 and 1959, immigrants won 21 Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics but won 88 prizes in these fields—more than four times as many—between 1960 and 2021.
• “The pre-1960 immigrant (and U.S.) Nobel Prize total would have been lower if not for the many Jewish scientists who overcame significant restrictions against immigration in the 1930s and fled to the United States to escape European fascism.
• “Since 2000, immigrants have been awarded 44% of the U.S. Nobel Prizes in physics, 37% in chemistry and 33% in medicine.”

For more coverage on immigration click here.

Writes Tom Bowden at New Ideal on “Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution“:

Scholars have called it “the greatest judicial opinion of the last hundred years” and “a major turning point in American constitutional jurisprudence.” Today, his dissent not only exerts strong influence over constitutional interpretation and the terms of public debate, but it also serves as a litmus test for discerning a judge’s fundamental view of the United States Constitution. This means that any Supreme Court nominee who dares to question Holmes’s wisdom invites a fierce confirmation battle and risks Senate rejection. As one observer recently remarked, “The ghost of Lochner continues to haunt American constitutional law.”

What heinous offense did the Lochner majority commit to provoke Holmes’s caustic dissent? It was not the fact that they had struck down a New York law setting maximum working hours for bakers. Holmes personally disapproved of such paternalistic laws and never questioned the Supreme Court’s power to strike down legislation that violated some particular clause in the Constitution. No, in Holmes’s eyes the majority’s unforgivable sin did not lie in the particular result they reached, but in the method by which they reached it. The majority interpreted the Constitution as if it embodies a principled commitment to protecting individual liberty. But no such foundational principle exists, Holmes asserted, and the sooner judges realize they are expounding an empty Constitution — empty of any underlying view on the relationship of the individual to the state — the sooner they will step aside and allow legislators to decide the fate of individuals such as Joseph Lochner.

Writing in Newsweek, Alan Dershowitz asks: Can the Federal government compel vaccinations?

There is a Supreme Court decision on compelled vaccinations, but it is a 1905 state case that carried a small fine for noncompliance.

Can Biden mandate vaccinations without explicit authorization from congress?

[T]he constitutional authority of the presidency has been expanding since the New Deal and its limits are constantly being tested by presidents of both parties. Presidents generally cite broad and vague congressional authority for their actions. […] It would surely have been better if Congress had explicitly authorized the mandates—better for democratic values and easier as a matter of constitutional law.

Sadly, Dershowitz resorts to the rubber-band concept, “the public interest”,

One point is clear: both sides are exaggerating their constitutional claims. Some proponents of the Biden mandate assure us that its constitutionality “is completely clear,” while some opponents are certain that it is “utterly lawless.” The reality is that the question could go either way. In such a close case, President Biden is justified in doing what he believes to be in the public interest and leaving it to courts to decide.

(In other words, the executive makes the law, and the courts possibly rewrite the law, totally circumventing the authority of the legislative branch.)

Commenting on the concept, Ayn Rand wrote in “The Fascist New Frontier”:

There is no such thing as “the public interest” except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of “the public interest”—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.

The principles of a free, non-coercive social system are the only form of “the public interest.” [The Ayn Rand Column, 111]

and similarly in her essay, “The Monument Builders,”

Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public interest” with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that “The public, c’est moi”—and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun. [The Virtue of Selfishness, 88]