Argument from ignorance
implies an irrational gamble
https://lifematters164.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-subtle-error-in-roe-v-wade.html
Archived version
https://archive.vn/MMHlI
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Paul Conant's current blogs
Jesus Christ's Miracle Cure Book
The Invisible Man XaX
New Zion Call
Theological notes and old posts
What is Jesus really saying in the Sermon on the Mount?
Detailed commentary
Deep State Fragments
Old articles on the Intel Establishment et al
Footnotes to Plato
Sundry philosophy articles
Ghost slips Ryle's grasp
An oft-updated version of this philosophy review
Life support
At present, only working notes on topic of abotion
MadMath Archive
A few old odds and ends of minor -- if that -- interest.
I've got to come up with a better blog name!
Route 66
Belles lettres. Prose poems. Poems. What Not.
SupportAssange
Need to update this blog. Important.
Universal Copy Desk
A cranky editor's meanderings.
(BTW, many newsrooms used to have a U-shaped desk with copy readers around the rim and a slot person in the slot. U also meant "universal" when all, or nearly all, editorial copy had to pass through the hands of the denizens of the main copy desk for final massage and clearance.)
Θ theta Θ
A dual-use blog.
Many rather arcane philosophical notes serve as footnotes to the essay on Ryle, but can also be read as independent items.
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Tore and Millie censored for blowing whistle
MillenialMillie.Com
is blocked by a program that redirects to junk sites, at least when I try. If I hit the link, I am sent to a null page with this blog's head. If I paste it in, I am sent to junk pages. So it appears that Google is the guilty party. Though... when I used Bing, and typed in MillenialMillie.com the Bing icon flipped to what supposedly was a Minecraft icon and I was redirected to a junk Chrome page. I finally got access by searching Bing for her site and plugging in that way. This represents quote a bit of monkey business from people who are not great respecters of free speech.
ShadowGate: chockablock with eye-popping disclosures
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Q8PlNvPy1KYl/
Millie & Tore: very interesting discussion (skip music and pick up around 4 min.) https://www.bitchute.com/video/emPo4jR4fGWn/
Dad prays for his daughter
https://www.bitchute.com/video/hzITp2JJH1Sw/
Tore is a well-informed IT intelligence ace, and she is the real reason for the blockade on this documentary by YouTube and Facebook. This censorship isn't about hate speech or about falsely crying "fire" in a crowded theater. It's about protecting a group of professional spooks, Deep Staters and oligarchs.
Tore, who says she has inside dope, asserts that Steve Bannon was framed and that he will get off. But that is beside the point. The real point, she says, was a pretext for wiretaps that would pick up all Bannon's talks with Trump. And, although Bannon started his Fund the Wall site after leaving the White House, any private messages and phone calls from that period are still held in data bases and available to prosecutors. I am not upholding Tore's theory, but I must give her respect.
These women have really illuminated a dark area of "national security." Good job!
Some have questioned whether the women gave a shiv in the back to Trump with the Manafort connection. But they explain in their discussion video that their purpose was to expose the intelligence contractor crony system. In the main, they are very supportive of Trump. In my thinking, that's good journalism.
A judge released Millie from jail on condition that she not claim that her prosecution was political. Of course the conclusion of the lengthy "investigation" of a minor domestic dispute came just before she was to introduce her ShadowGate video and was also timed to kick her in the pants at the start of the Democratic Convention. The prosecutor is an Ohio Democratic politician, who made sure she was arrested on a Friday night so that she would have to spend the weekend in a raunchy jail cell with several other women.
But it is now standard operating procedure for judges to side with prosecutors in ordering defendants not to use the political vendetta defense even though that's exactly what's going on.
This is how the rich always treat regular Americans who "get too uppity" – especially if they don't have a powerful media group behind them.
Tore, left, and Millie
It is quite amusing how politicians bandy about the putdown "conspiracy theorist" when the fundamental dynamic of political parties is conspiracy.
They have a public position which they use for political benefit. But they meet in private to discuss strategy and means of hurting their adversaries. This secrecy is essential to how they function. Very often the things they talk about on the QT are rather shady, insofar as John and Jane Q. Public are concerned. These political types are professional swindlers. To them, it's a game. But, nevertheless, they behave just like conspirators – routinely. So it is highly unbecoming of them (but why should they care?) to use the putdown "conspiracy theorist" – a putdown also beloved of spooks, mobsters and ideological journalists everywhere.
That doesn't mean that some people's theories aren't goofy. But, what's going on is that a small group, that includes professional politicians, wants to control the conversation by branding whatever they are against as "misinformation" and "conspiracy theory." But, these folks hardly rank as the arbiters of truth they make themselves out to be.
Saturday, August 15, 2020
Furor erupts over Harris citizenship
Snopes rushes in where angels fear to tread
as law professors clash over her status
Backing Biden's veep choice
https://www.newsweek.com/born-us-kamala-harris-eligible-become-vice-president-opinion-1525031
https://archive.vn/o0rL6
I realize that many think Biden was having a senior moment when he chose the problematical Kamala Harris. But, I wonder how far down his list Biden had to travel before he found someone willing to say 'yes.' People who still have real political careers ahead of them would have fled in horror as soon as they learned they were on Biden's veep list.
Opinion in Newsweek
by John C. Eastman
as law professors clash over her status
Backing Biden's veep choice
https://www.newsweek.com/born-us-kamala-harris-eligible-become-vice-president-opinion-1525031
https://archive.vn/o0rL6
I realize that many think Biden was having a senior moment when he chose the problematical Kamala Harris. But, I wonder how far down his list Biden had to travel before he found someone willing to say 'yes.' People who still have real political careers ahead of them would have fled in horror as soon as they learned they were on Biden's veep list.
Opinion in Newsweek
by John C. Eastman
The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position. The 12th Amendment provides that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." And Article II of the Constitution specifies that "[n]o person except a natural born citizen...shall be eligible to the office of President." Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris' birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a "natural born citizen"—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.
"Nonsense," runs the counter-commentary. Indeed, PolitiFact rated the claim of ineligibility as "Pants on Fire" false, Snopes rated it simply "False," and from the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Daily News likewise rated it "False." All three (and numerous others) simply assert that Harris is eligible because she was born in Oakland—and is therefore a natural-born citizen from location of birth. The 14th Amendment says so, they all claim, and the Supreme Court so held in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.
But those claims are erroneous, at least as the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was originally understood—an error to which even my good friend, renowned UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh, has fallen prey.
The language of Article II is that one must be a natural-born citizen. The original Constitution did not define citizenship, but the 14th Amendment does—and it provides that "all persons born...in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." Those who claim that birth alone is sufficient overlook the second phrase. The person must also be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, and that meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully). Such was the view of those who authored the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause; of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1872 Slaughter-House Cases and the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins; of Thomas Cooley, the leading constitutional treatise writer of the day; and of the State Department, which, in the 1880s, issued directives to U.S. embassies to that effect.
The Supreme Court's subsequent decision in Wong Kim Ark is not to the contrary. At issue there was a child born to Chinese immigrants who had become lawful, permanent residents in the United States—"domiciled" was the legally significant word used by the Court. But that was the extent of the Court's holding (as opposed to broader language that was dicta, and therefore not binding). Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances of the parents, is automatically a U.S. citizen.
Granted, our government's view of the Constitution's citizenship mandate has morphed over the decades to what is now an absolute "birth on the soil no matter the circumstances" view—but that morphing does not appear to have begun until the late 1960s, after Kamala Harris' birth in 1964. The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico. Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.
So before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris' eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth. Were Harris' parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.
Interestingly, this recitation of the original meaning of the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause might also call into question Harris' eligibility for her current position as a United States senator. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution specifies that to be eligible for the office of senator, one must have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States." If Harris was not a citizen at birth, we would need to know when (if ever) she became a citizen. Her father's biographical page at Stanford University identifies his citizenship status as follows: "Jamaica (by birth); U.S. (by naturalization)." But there is some dispute over whether he was in fact ever naturalized, and it is also unclear whether Harris' mother ever became a naturalized citizen. If neither was ever naturalized, or at least not naturalized before Harris' 16th birthday (which would have allowed her to obtain citizenship derived from their naturalization under the immigration law, at the time), then she would have had to become naturalized herself in order to be a citizen. That does not appear to have ever happened, yet without it, she could not have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States" before her election to the U.S. Senate.
I have no doubt that this significant challenge to Harris' constitutional eligibility to the second-highest office in the land will be dismissed out of hand as so much antiquated constitutional tripe. But the concerns about divided allegiance that led our nation's Founders to include the "natural-born citizen" requirement for the office of president and commander-in-chief remain important; indeed, with persistent threats from Russia, China and others to our sovereignty and electoral process, those concerns are perhaps even more important today. It would be an inauspicious start for any campaign for the highest offices in the land to ignore the Constitution's eligibility requirements; how else could we possibly expect the candidates, if elected, to honor their oaths to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and...to the best of [their] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"
Dr. John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori professor of law & community service and former dean at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law. He is also the 2020-21 visitor scholar in conservative thought and policy at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Eastman is also a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and founding Director of the Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Eastman ran in the 2010 Republican primary as a candidate for attorney general; he lost to Steve Cooley, who lost to Kamala Harris in the general election. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
But those claims are erroneous, at least as the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was originally understood—an error to which even my good friend, renowned UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh, has fallen prey.
The language of Article II is that one must be a natural-born citizen. The original Constitution did not define citizenship, but the 14th Amendment does—and it provides that "all persons born...in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." Those who claim that birth alone is sufficient overlook the second phrase. The person must also be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, and that meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully). Such was the view of those who authored the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause; of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1872 Slaughter-House Cases and the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins; of Thomas Cooley, the leading constitutional treatise writer of the day; and of the State Department, which, in the 1880s, issued directives to U.S. embassies to that effect.
The Supreme Court's subsequent decision in Wong Kim Ark is not to the contrary. At issue there was a child born to Chinese immigrants who had become lawful, permanent residents in the United States—"domiciled" was the legally significant word used by the Court. But that was the extent of the Court's holding (as opposed to broader language that was dicta, and therefore not binding). Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances of the parents, is automatically a U.S. citizen.
Granted, our government's view of the Constitution's citizenship mandate has morphed over the decades to what is now an absolute "birth on the soil no matter the circumstances" view—but that morphing does not appear to have begun until the late 1960s, after Kamala Harris' birth in 1964. The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico. Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.
So before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris' eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth. Were Harris' parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.
Interestingly, this recitation of the original meaning of the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause might also call into question Harris' eligibility for her current position as a United States senator. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution specifies that to be eligible for the office of senator, one must have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States." If Harris was not a citizen at birth, we would need to know when (if ever) she became a citizen. Her father's biographical page at Stanford University identifies his citizenship status as follows: "Jamaica (by birth); U.S. (by naturalization)." But there is some dispute over whether he was in fact ever naturalized, and it is also unclear whether Harris' mother ever became a naturalized citizen. If neither was ever naturalized, or at least not naturalized before Harris' 16th birthday (which would have allowed her to obtain citizenship derived from their naturalization under the immigration law, at the time), then she would have had to become naturalized herself in order to be a citizen. That does not appear to have ever happened, yet without it, she could not have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States" before her election to the U.S. Senate.
I have no doubt that this significant challenge to Harris' constitutional eligibility to the second-highest office in the land will be dismissed out of hand as so much antiquated constitutional tripe. But the concerns about divided allegiance that led our nation's Founders to include the "natural-born citizen" requirement for the office of president and commander-in-chief remain important; indeed, with persistent threats from Russia, China and others to our sovereignty and electoral process, those concerns are perhaps even more important today. It would be an inauspicious start for any campaign for the highest offices in the land to ignore the Constitution's eligibility requirements; how else could we possibly expect the candidates, if elected, to honor their oaths to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and...to the best of [their] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"
Dr. John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori professor of law & community service and former dean at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law. He is also the 2020-21 visitor scholar in conservative thought and policy at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Eastman is also a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and founding Director of the Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Eastman ran in the 2010 Republican primary as a candidate for attorney general; he lost to Steve Cooley, who lost to Kamala Harris in the general election. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Friday, August 7, 2020
Thursday, August 6, 2020
Investor funds fuel Trump muzzlers
Four powerful U.S. investment concerns are among principal owners of the tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet, which is parent to Google and YouTube. All three tech firms have been cracking down on the speech of President Trump and his supporters as the election campaign heats up.
Evidently the finance firms are unconcerned about the potential for backlash and boycott from those among Trump's supporters whose money they manage.
The four financial firms are BlackRock Inc., headed by Laurence D. Fink; Morgan Stanley, headed by James P. Gorman; Vanguard Group Inc., headed by Mortimer J. Buckley; and T. Rowe Price, headed by William J. Stromberg. Price is closely aligned with Mellon Bank, headed by Todd Gibbons.
Laurence D. Fink, top, and James P. Gorman*
Vanguard, which is one of the world's largest investment management companies with about $6.2 trillion in global assets, holds the largest stake in Twitter. Vanguard's stake represents roughly 83 million shares valued at $2 billion. This constitutes about 10.6% of all outstanding Twitter shares, giving Vanguard de facto control of the social media platform.
Vanguard's shares in Facebook are even more extensive, at 184 million shares worth about $37.7 billion.
In addition, Vanguard retains about 22.6 million Class C shares of Alphabet.
The second-largest shareholder of Twitter is the global investment manager BlackRock Inc., with $6.8 trillion in assets. BlackRock holds 51.7 million shares of Twitter with a value of $1.3 billion. This stake accounts for roughly 6.6% of all outstanding shares.
BlackRock also holds 158.2 million Facebook shares, with a combined value of $32.3 billion. The firm also retains 20 million Class C shares of Alphabet.
T. Rowe Price, which is a well-known investment management firm with $1.2 trillion in assets, holds about 107.8 million shares of Facebook totaling a combined market value of $22.1 billion, along with 12.2 million Class C shares of Alphabet.
A company partly owned by Price, Boston-based State Street Corp., with $3.1 trillion in assets, holds about 35.7 million shares of Twitter stock, with a value of about $876 million. This accounts for 4.5% of all outstanding Twitter shares.
In the world of finance, 4.5% is not necessarily a minor wedge, since it can be enough for de facto control.
In addition, Morgan Stanley, headed by Gorman, holds the third-largest stake in Twitter. Morgan Stanley styles itself as a "wealth management company" for roughly $2 trillion in customer assets. Morgan Stanley's stake in Twitter amounts to roughly 48 million shares with a market value of $1.2 billion, representing 6.1% of outstanding shares.
BlackRock's Fink, with seven others, founded the firm in 1988. Under Fink's leadership, the firm has grown into a "global leader in investment and technology solutions to help investors build better financial futures." Today, BlackRock manages "more money than any other investment firm in the world." Fink has been named one of the "World's Greatest Leaders" by Fortune, and Barron’s has named him one of the "World's Best CEOs" for 14 consecutive years.
Conservative writer Frank Gaffney asserts that Fink has been arm-twisting the companies he has money in to conform to the agenda of the "Green New Deal," meaning that Trump is anathema to Fink. Morgan Stanley's Gorman has publicly voiced opposition to Trump.
Google searches disclose no trace of political outspokenness by Vanguard's Buckley or Mellon's Gibbons, while Price's Stromberg shows up as mildly to moderately supportive of Trump's tax and business policies.
Another major social media investor is FMR LLC, which is one of the nation's largest financial services firms, with assets worth some $2.5 trillion. FMR's funds hold about 123.6 million shares of Facebook with a combined market value of $26.1 billion. Boston-based FMR is owned by the Johnson family and top executives and former executives.
Also a social media player is ClearBridge Investments, which is a global investment manager with $149.4 billion in assets. ClearBridge is parent of the financial firm Salomon Brothers. ClearBridge, which is an arm of Baltimore-based Legg Mason, is led by CEO Terrence Murphy. ClearBridge owns about 25.5 million shares of the messaging platform, with a value of $626.1 million. This represents about 3.2% of all outstanding Twitter shares.
Investopedia is a source of financial information on this page.
*Original Wikipedia photo removed without notification to me; interesting that that photo caused concern as, according to previous Google stats, I am the only viewer of this blog. On Nov. 18, 2020, Google Stats claims there is no data to show for views of this post.
Evidently the finance firms are unconcerned about the potential for backlash and boycott from those among Trump's supporters whose money they manage.
The four financial firms are BlackRock Inc., headed by Laurence D. Fink; Morgan Stanley, headed by James P. Gorman; Vanguard Group Inc., headed by Mortimer J. Buckley; and T. Rowe Price, headed by William J. Stromberg. Price is closely aligned with Mellon Bank, headed by Todd Gibbons.
Laurence D. Fink, top, and James P. Gorman*
Vanguard, which is one of the world's largest investment management companies with about $6.2 trillion in global assets, holds the largest stake in Twitter. Vanguard's stake represents roughly 83 million shares valued at $2 billion. This constitutes about 10.6% of all outstanding Twitter shares, giving Vanguard de facto control of the social media platform.
Vanguard's shares in Facebook are even more extensive, at 184 million shares worth about $37.7 billion.
In addition, Vanguard retains about 22.6 million Class C shares of Alphabet.
The second-largest shareholder of Twitter is the global investment manager BlackRock Inc., with $6.8 trillion in assets. BlackRock holds 51.7 million shares of Twitter with a value of $1.3 billion. This stake accounts for roughly 6.6% of all outstanding shares.
BlackRock also holds 158.2 million Facebook shares, with a combined value of $32.3 billion. The firm also retains 20 million Class C shares of Alphabet.
T. Rowe Price, which is a well-known investment management firm with $1.2 trillion in assets, holds about 107.8 million shares of Facebook totaling a combined market value of $22.1 billion, along with 12.2 million Class C shares of Alphabet.
A company partly owned by Price, Boston-based State Street Corp., with $3.1 trillion in assets, holds about 35.7 million shares of Twitter stock, with a value of about $876 million. This accounts for 4.5% of all outstanding Twitter shares.
In the world of finance, 4.5% is not necessarily a minor wedge, since it can be enough for de facto control.
In addition, Morgan Stanley, headed by Gorman, holds the third-largest stake in Twitter. Morgan Stanley styles itself as a "wealth management company" for roughly $2 trillion in customer assets. Morgan Stanley's stake in Twitter amounts to roughly 48 million shares with a market value of $1.2 billion, representing 6.1% of outstanding shares.
BlackRock's Fink, with seven others, founded the firm in 1988. Under Fink's leadership, the firm has grown into a "global leader in investment and technology solutions to help investors build better financial futures." Today, BlackRock manages "more money than any other investment firm in the world." Fink has been named one of the "World's Greatest Leaders" by Fortune, and Barron’s has named him one of the "World's Best CEOs" for 14 consecutive years.
Conservative writer Frank Gaffney asserts that Fink has been arm-twisting the companies he has money in to conform to the agenda of the "Green New Deal," meaning that Trump is anathema to Fink. Morgan Stanley's Gorman has publicly voiced opposition to Trump.
Google searches disclose no trace of political outspokenness by Vanguard's Buckley or Mellon's Gibbons, while Price's Stromberg shows up as mildly to moderately supportive of Trump's tax and business policies.
Another major social media investor is FMR LLC, which is one of the nation's largest financial services firms, with assets worth some $2.5 trillion. FMR's funds hold about 123.6 million shares of Facebook with a combined market value of $26.1 billion. Boston-based FMR is owned by the Johnson family and top executives and former executives.
Also a social media player is ClearBridge Investments, which is a global investment manager with $149.4 billion in assets. ClearBridge is parent of the financial firm Salomon Brothers. ClearBridge, which is an arm of Baltimore-based Legg Mason, is led by CEO Terrence Murphy. ClearBridge owns about 25.5 million shares of the messaging platform, with a value of $626.1 million. This represents about 3.2% of all outstanding Twitter shares.
Investopedia is a source of financial information on this page.
*Original Wikipedia photo removed without notification to me; interesting that that photo caused concern as, according to previous Google stats, I am the only viewer of this blog. On Nov. 18, 2020, Google Stats claims there is no data to show for views of this post.
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NEWS of the WORLD launched
The Invisible Man is being folded into the new site, NEWS of the WORLD, which has begun operation. Though this Invisible Man site is ce...
