Sunday, December 25, 2022

George Orwell:Boy Did I Call It., Or What?

 ROGER KIMBALL: Stanford’s Naughty and Nice List.

The scarifying bulletin offers advice on the language that you should—and, more to the point, language that you shouldn’t—use in several different situations. With respect to language that touches on prowess and disability, for example, it suggests that instead of saying “addict” one say “person with a substance use disorder” (not that the person mainlining heroin had any choice in the matter, you see). Instead of saying “basket case,” consider saying “nervous.” Instead of saying “committed suicide,” say “died by suicide”—as if it just happened; no agency or responsibility involved. And on and on through the usual lexicon of supposedly hypersensitive but really obtuse insanity. 

The website proceeds through all the usual politically correct categories, with entries on “ageist” language, 57 varieties of “gender identification” and, of course, endless handwringing entries dealing with race. Don’t say “bury the hatchet,” for heaven’s sake, say “call for peace, call a truce. ” Don’t say “low man on the totem pole,” say “lacking seniority, don’t have the power or prestige.” By the same token (is that permissible?), don’t say “balls to the wall” (I could have told you that), say “accelerate efforts,” don’t say “chairman” or “chairwoman,” say “chairperson, chair.” 

Naturally, you shouldn’t even think about using personal pronouns or the word “man” as a collective noun or as a verb. Don’t say “black hat,” “black mark,” “black sheep,” “blackballed,” “blackbox,” “blacklist.” Don’t even say “brown bag” because—well, you know. Grandfather, father, mother, daughter, son: they’re out, and so are most uses of the word “master”: “master list,” “master a subject,” “master plan.” You can’t say “rule of thumb” because, the document explains, “this phrase is attributed to an old British law that allowed men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.” It actually has its source in Muslim practice, but they’re a protected group, so we’re not supposed to mention them. 

Note that the version of this pathetic document I link to exists on a server at the Wall Street Journal. Stanford, facing blowback (that word must certainly offend someone!) hid it from public scrutiny. As the Journal’s column put it, “without a password, you wouldn’t know that ‘stupid’ made the list.”

The Newspeak Dictionary doesn’t shrink itself, you know.


Tuesday, December 6, 2022

Citizens United - Super PACs - DARK Money (A Primer)

 

Citizens United Explained

The 2010 Supreme Court decision further tilted political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations.

 
PUBLISHED: December 12, 2019

January 21, 2020 will mark a decade since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a controversial decision that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.

While wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups have long had an outsized influence in elections, that sway has dramatically expanded since the Citizens United decision, with negative repercussions for American democracy and the fight against political corruption.

What was Citizens United about?

A conservative nonprofit group called Citizens United challenged campaign finance rules after the FEC stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton too close to the presidential primaries.

A 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court sided with Citizens United, ruling that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections.

What was the rationale for the ruling?

In the court’s opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that limiting “independent political spending” from corporations and other groups violates the First Amendment right to free speech. The justices who voted with the majority assumed that independent spending cannot be corrupt and that the spending would be transparent, but both assumptions have proven to be incorrect.

With its decision, the Supreme Court overturned election spending restrictions that date back more than 100 years. Previously, the court had upheld certain spending restrictions, arguing that the government had a role in preventing corruption. But in Citizens United, a bare majority of the justices held that “independent political spending” did not present a substantive threat of corruption, provided it was not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign. 

As a result, corporations can now spend unlimited funds on campaign advertising if they are not formally “coordinating” with a candidate or political party. 

How has Citizens United changed elections in the United States?

The ruling has ushered in massive increases in political spending from outside groups, dramatically expanding the already outsized political influence of wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups.

In the immediate aftermath of the Citizens United decision, analysts focused much of their attention on how the Supreme Court designated corporate spending on elections as free speech. But perhaps the most significant outcomes of Citizens United have been the creation of super PACs, which empower the wealthiest donors, and the expansion of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors.

A Brennan Center report by Daniel I. Weiner pointed out that a very small group of Americans now wield “more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics.“

“This is perhaps the most troubling result of Citizens United: in a time of historic wealth inequality,” wrote Weiner, “the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”

An election system that is skewed heavily toward wealthy donors also sustains racial bias and reinforces the racial wealth gap. Citizens United also unleashed political spending from special interest groups.

What are PACs and super PACs?

Political action committees, or “PACs,” are organizations that raise and spend money for campaigns that support or oppose political candidates, legislation, or ballot initiatives. Traditional PACs are permitted to donate directly to a candidate’s official campaign, but they are also subject to contribution limits, both in terms of what they can receive from individuals and what they can give to candidates. For example, PACs are only permitted to contribute up to $5,000 per year to a candidate per election. 

In the 2010 case Speechnow.org v. FEC, however, a federal appeals court ruled — applying logic from Citizens United — that outside groups could accept unlimited contributions from both individual donors and corporations as long as they don’t give directly to candidates. Labeled “super PACs,” these outside groups were still permitted to spend money on independently produced ads and on other communications that promote or attack specific candidates.

In other words, super PACs are not bound by spending limits on what they can collect or spend. Additionally, super PACs are required to disclose their donors, but those donors can include dark money groups, which make the original source of the donations unclear. And while super PACs are technically prohibited from coordinating directly with candidates, weak coordination rules have often proven ineffective.

Super PAC money started influencing elections almost immediately after Citizens United. From 2010 to 2018, super PACs spent approximately $2.9 billion on federal elections. Notably, the bulk of that money comes from just a few wealthy individual donors. In the 2018 election cycle, for example, the top 100 donors to super PACs contributed nearly 78 percent of all super PAC spending.

What is dark money?

Dark money is election-related spending where the source is secret. Citizens United contributed to a major jump in this type of spending, which often comes from nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors.

In its decision, the Supreme Court reasoned that unlimited spending by wealthy donors and corporations would not distort the political process, because the public would be able to see who was paying for ads and “give proper weight to different speakers and messages.” But in reality, the voters often cannot know who is actually behind campaign spending.

That’s because leading up to Citizens United, transparency in U.S. elections had started to erode, thanks to a disclosure loophole opened by the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, along with inaction by the IRS and controversial rulemaking by the FEC.

Citizens United allowed big political spenders to exploit the growing lack of transparency in political spending. This has contributed to a surge in secret spending from outside groups in federal elections. Dark money expenditures increased from less than $5 million in 2006 to more than $300 million in the 2012 election cycle and more than $174 million in the 2014 midterms. In the top 10 most competitive 2014 Senate races, more than 71 percent of the outside spending on the winning candidates was dark money. These numbers actually underestimate the impact of dark money on recent elections, because they do not include super PAC spending that may have originated with dark money sources, or spending that happens outside the “electioneering communications window” 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election.

Finally, because they can hide the identities of their donors, dark money groups also provide a way for foreign countries to hide their activity from U.S. voters and law enforcement agencies. This increases the vulnerability of U.S. elections to international interference.

How can reformers address the consequences of Citizens United?

In the short term, a Supreme Court reversal or constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United is extremely unlikely, and regardless, it would leave many of the problems of big money in politics unsolved. But even without a full reversal of Citizens United in the near future, there are policy solutions to help combat the dominance of big money in politics and the lack of transparency in the U.S. campaign finance system.

First, publicly funded elections would help counter the influence of the extremely wealthy by empowering small donors. Specifically, a system that matches small-dollar donations with public funds would expand the role of small donors and help candidates rely less on big checks and special interests. In recent years, public financing has gained support across the United States. As of 2018, 24 municipalities and 14 states have enacted some form of public financing, and at least 124 winning congressional candidates voiced support for public financing during the 2018 midterm election cycle.

Lawmakers on the national, state, and local level can also push to increase transparency in election spending. For example, the DISCLOSE Act, which has been introduced several times in Congress, would strengthen disclosure and disclaimer requirements, enabling voters to know who is trying to influence their votes. Congress could also pass stricter rules to prevent super PACs and other outside groups from coordinating directly with campaigns and political parties. 

Fixing the U.S. elections system will also require fixing the FEC.

Long dysfunctional thanks to partisan gridlock, the FEC is out of touch with today’s election landscape and has failed to update campaign finance safeguards to reflect current challenges. For example, FEC rules do not even include the term “super PAC,” and it has declined to find violations or even open an investigation in high-profile allegations of coordination. The agency’s failure to enforce federal disclosure laws helped allow dark money to pour into U.S. federal elections since 2010.

In an April 2019 report, the Brennan Center outlined a number of structural reforms that Congress can pursue to help tackle dysfunction in the FEC. 

Finally, addressing the impacts of Citizens United requires building a movement in favor of campaign finance reform. There’s public support for such reforms. In recent polls, 94 percent of Americans blamed wealthy political donors for political dysfunction, and 77 percent of registered voters said that “reducing the influence of special interests and corruption in Washington” was either the “single most” or a “very important” factor in deciding their vote for Congress.

Citizens United was a blow to democracy — but it doesn’t have to be the final word. Politicians can listen to what the vast majority of the public wants, even if big donors don’t like it.

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Apple vs Elon Musk (Free Speech) It's All about China!

 BECAUSE 

COOK REGARDS THE CHINESE AS FRIENDS 


AND ELON MUSK AS AN ENEMY:

Related: Tim Cook Says He’s Ready To Pull Twitter From App Store Once President Xi Gives The Order. It’s satire. Or is it?


ROGER SIMON: Trapped by Apple—a Tale of the ‘Great Reset.’

Apparently, they are more upset with Elon Musk for trying to bring a modicum of transparency to Twitter, pulling their ads from his newly purchased platform and, according to Musk, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store.

Yet worse, in China, Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.

Meanwhile, Apple stock has lost some ground because these protests may be interfering with their iPhone production. Poor things. Further, according to Bloomberg, violent protests have erupted at Apple’s main iPhone plant in China. (Wasn’t Apple supposed to be leaving China for production? I guess not.)

Sadly, what’s going on isn’t surprising. Apple is acting in tandem with our administration, which also, not surprisingly, has stayed mostly mum about what’s going on in China and Iran. Freedom is of no interest to them.

Behind the Iran silence is, obviously, the three-letter word oil, for which President Joe Biden has only himself to blame for having seriously restricted our domestic supply for the most dubious of reasons.

As for China, Biden, we recall, is the man who insisted the Chinese—meaning the regime—were our friends, before he recanted that for electoral purposes. The true story of the Biden family and the Chinese communists, some of which must reside on Hunter’s laptop, is yet to be fully exposed.

What all this adds up to is Apple and the rest of Big Tech cooperating with the administration in the big lie that domestic terrorists (Trump, et al.) are the threat to democracy when they themselves are.

True democracy, whether manifest as a democratic republic or otherwise, has become an inconvenience for them in the march to globalism and the “Great Reset.”

When its guru Klaus Schwab said, “You will have nothing and you will be happy,” it’s not hard to imagine that he would exclude the iPhone or its equivalent implanted under our skin—“the better to track you with, my dear,” they might say in a modern version of a Disney classic.

Whatever their disagreements with Musk, “Elon Musk meets Tim Cook, says Apple never considered removing Twitter app,” according to CNBC.


UPDATE: Apple’s cowardice on China reveals app store Twitter ban as pure hypocrisy. “Apple is willing to defend its market value by co-operating with, quite literally, the world’s most brutal regime in its efforts to crush a grassroots movement of protestors pushed to the breaking point. But allowing people to tweet things offensive to liberal pieties is worthy of its action?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Cook denies Twitter threat.

 

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

When Ideology Trumps Empathy - Dems are All Hypocrites - Heather McDonald

 When Ideology Trumps Empathy - Dems are All Hypocrites



When Ideology Trumps Empathy - City Journal Essay

It turns out that black lives really don’t matter.  In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, conservatives had relentlessly raised the alarm about the post–George Floyd crime surge: homicides had risen 29 percent in 2020 (the largest increase on record), and they have continued rising since then. Democrats and their media allies responded either that crime was a racist fiction or that, because post-Floyd crime levels nationally were still lower than they were in the early 1990s, there was nothing to see here, folks, move on!

These opposing positions were tantamount to saying that black lives matter or that they don’t. Black Americans have borne the brunt of the increased violence since the George Floyd race riots. Their share of homicide victims went from 53 percent in 2019 (blacks are 13 percent of the national population) to 56 percent in 2020. At least an additional 2,164 black lives were lost in 2020 over the 2019 count, compared with an increase of 950 white and Hispanic homicide victims combined in 2020. Such disparities only worsened in 2021 and 2022. In 2020, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at 20 times the rate of whites in the same age range. In 2021, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of whites of the same age.

It’s the only racial disparity that progressives don’t care about.

TSBT - The Torah (One YEAR in the Torah

 The TORAH


Ten Second Bible Talk (#TSBT) 

 

This week on TMBT: the end of Deuteronomy!

 

Y'all. We made it through the Torah!! ðŸŽ‰ That's 187 chapters across five books in the Bible!

(Who else discovered they'd been sleeping on Leviticus? ðŸ™‹‍♀️)

 

To celebrate, we're taking a page from Spotify's book with Torah Wrapped. Check out some stats from our journey through the OT. I've also got a timely spiritual practice for y'all this week. ðŸ¦ƒ


TORAH Wrapped

Way back in January 2022, TMBT started its journey through the Torah (and the TMBT Newsletter was born to help answer the question, 'What the heck is going on here?'). Between the podcast and the newsletter, we covered a lot of ground. 

 

3 Truths from the Torah:

Jensen's TMBT episode today provides a helpful time to reflect on what the Torah teaches us today. Here are three truths she identifies:

  1. God is telling a bigger story.
  2. Humans are not the hero.
  3. God is always faithful!

Listen to the full episode: Lessons From a Year in the Torah

 

Some "Wait, What? ðŸ˜³" Moments:

The Bible (especially the OT) def has tricky parts. Because we're separated from events in the Torah by language, culture, and time, it's tough to know what we don't know. This, in turn, makes it hard to know what to think about those seemingly problematic parts of the Bible. 

 

To name a few:

  • Do angels have sex with humans to create a scary giant race?
  • Was God cool with Jacob having 2 wives? Does that mean he thinks polygamy is okay??
  • Why does the Day of Atonement include sending a goat to the desert god Azazel?

Remember these two guiding principles as you seek to understand these strange parts:

  1. The inclusion of information in a story doesn’t mean it’s good. It means it happened.
  2. God is consistent. If something seems off, it might be your understanding of what's going on.

 

Songs Studied:

Music allows us to remember and internalize truths differently than we do when we read or hear about them. 

This means listening to songs about God and faith can help us learn in different ways.

 

Here are some songs we studied in the TMBT Newsletter:

 

Your Time in the Torah:

If you kept up from the beginning of the Torah series, you listened to Ten Minute Bible Talks for 31 hours, 57 minutes, and 20 seconds!

 

Real talk: God is currently working through the time you spent learning about his word, changing your life. Keep it up! ðŸ™Œ


Practice a Spiritual Practice

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. In my family growing up, it was a time to eat lots of food and share something you're thankful for around the dinner table. 

 

Though Thanksgiving is a national holiday, it provides an intentional opportunity for followers of Jesus to live out Paul's exhortation:

 

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

 

Notice the three things we should be doing *all the time*. So when you're doing any of these, Jesus's will is that you do all of them:

  1. Rejoice
  2. Pray
  3. Give Thanks

Why does God want these things for you? Imagine what your life would be like if you were constantly rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks.

 

Your brain would be so full that there'd be no room for worry, fear, selfishness, or any other icky thoughts. You'd be completely aware of God's presence because you'd never stop talking to him and delighting in him. You'd see your whole life through the lens of his goodness and provision. 

 

Tbh, it sounds too good to be true. (Or at least, easier said than done.)

 

I think the struggle to do any one of these (rejoicing, praying, giving thanks) comes with the fact that we often try to tackle them one at a time. In reality, they each inform and inflate each other.  

 

So this week, celebrate Thanksgiving by giving all of this passage of Thessalonians a shot.

 

This week's challenge: Give Thanks.

Don't just "give thanks" in some abstract way. Instead, intentionally tell God about how thankful you are, listing the many ways he's blessed your life. Then spend time emotionally processing each one, creating space to notice how the things that trigger thankfulness make you feel.

 

Here's how:

  1. Over the holiday weekend, set aside time for you and God.
  2. Write out a list of things you're thankful for, big and small. 
  3. Pray slowly through each item on the list, telling God about why you're thankful for it. 
    Answer questions like, "What does this add to or make possible in my life?", "How is God involved in this?", "Why did God give me this good gift?"
  4. Once you've worked through the list, notice how you feel about God in light of his good gifts. Tell him about it. 

God is moving in your life. The more you give thanks, the more you'll notice to be thankful for. And the more you bring these to God in prayer, the more you'll experience his presence. You'll be rejoicing in no time!

Monday, November 21, 2022

Understanding the Left (MARXism)

 Flashback:

“To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.”

Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.

In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”) . . .

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

Their first response is always to call their critics bigots


Sunday, November 20, 2022

Trump was always the result of the conservative populist coalition, not the cause.

 SALENA ZITO: 

Trump was always the result of the conservative populist coalition, not the cause.

Ever since former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, there has been a flag hanging from a home not far from where I live that reads “Trump 2024” — one of the thousands I have seen across the country in the past two years. But yesterday, when I drove past this home, that sign was gone.

The Trump flag is a phenomenon I have written about for years. I have noted that this wasn’t really about Trump himself — it was mostly about the conservative populist movement, using the name of its only standard-bearer to let people know they were not going anywhere. At that point, no one else had stepped up to fill the void. And so the flag bore the Trump name.

Flashback: “To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.”

Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.

In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”) . . .

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

Their first response is always to call their critics bigots