Category Archives: Commerce
Civil Disobedience Not What It Used To Be
Civil Disobedience isn’t about fighting for your rights by enduring police dogs and fire hoses anymore.
Last year Antifa thug Gage Halupowski got six years for bashing Adam Kelly in the head during a protest riot. And this year it was Shelley Luther who went to the slammer for opening her hair salon.
Civil Disobedience
The Dallas Morning News reports a judge fined the hair stylist $7,000 and locked her up for a week for re-opening her salon on April 24 in violation of a stay-at-home order.
But the Texas Supreme Court ordered her release the next day.
Meanwhile 77-year-old Carl Manske wasn’t so lucky. His license was revoked for re-opening his Michigan barbershop. So Operation Haircut protesters plan to cut hair in his support on the Statehouse lawn May 20. Governor Gretchen Whitmer says the protest will spread the virus.
Chinese Virus Emergency
The World Health Organization wants to ban Chinese virus exports. So this week it officially designated the coronavirus outbreak a public-health emergency.
But also this week, Boris Johnson gave the official o.k. for the U.K. to import Huawei G5 networking technology.
And that doesn’t sit well with Boris’s best buddy Donald Trump. Last May Trump issued his own national emergency, essentially banning Huawei in America.
Another Chinese Virus?
Secretary of State Pompeo believes China spies through Huawei networks. He’s in London to welcome Brexit but “warned that the Chinese Communist party did not have “a technical back door to Huawei. They have the front door.”
Crony In Chief
Ted Cruz has an ad showing Donald Trump bulldozing a widow’s home in order to make room for limousine parking at Trump Plaza. Trump didn’t do that. But he tried. He got the state of New Jersey to use its eminent domain power to go after the house. Trump lost in court but he thinks teaming up with government to seize private property for his own benefit is “wonderful”.
Crony Capitalism.
Kevin Williamson in National Review calls Trump “a lifelong crony capitalist who brags about buying political favors”. He goes on to say Trump supporters believe, “that they can dispatch a crony capitalist to undo crony capitalism in the same way that New Age healers believe that a little bit of diluted poison chases away similar toxins.”
Internet Control
Al Gore invented the internet and Barack Obama is giving it away.
Who Controls the Internet
Brendan Greeley in Bloomberg Businessweek explains how it works. The system that assigns names to web servers, the Internet domain name system (DNS), is run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann). Icann is under the control of the U.S. Commerce Department. The government announced in a news dump last Friday it’s giving up that control.
Countries like China and Russia want that power to go the U.N. Then they would have influence over which websites get domain names. Without a domain name you’re nobody. As Greeley puts it:
It’s a bad sign that the U.S. has chosen to give up this power. It means that the administration doesn’t feel that it can get away with holding onto it, diplomatically, which means that on this issue, we no longer enjoy the support of countries such as Germany. Perhaps it was that time we tapped Angela Merkel’s cell phone.
The Facebook IPO is a train wreck so far. There were problems at NASDAQ with the launch but Gordon Crovitz in the WSJ says people just don’t click Facebook ads enough. Then there’s this:
Why did Facebook go public?
They couldn’t figure out the privacy settings either.
