Quick Jots: December Review

Kate Brown Tells Oregonians to Snitch on Neighbors
Kate Brown, sympathetic to the "defund the police" movement just a few months prior, encouraged Oregonians to snitch on fellow Oregonians that might dare violate COVID-19 restrictions on Thanksgiving. The Oregon Gestapo thanks all participating informants for their service to the Fuhrer.

Tom Wood's Video Taken Down
Tom Woods released a video titled "The COVID Cult" on YouTube and it was taken down by the COVID Cult because of "misinformation" even though he cites his figures and sources in the video. The video received over a million views before being taken down. Facebook also removed the post with a detailed "fact check" reply. Tom Woods still hosts his video on his own website and released a podcast episode fact-checking the fact check from Facebook.

Reason Magazine Parts Ways with Shikha Dalmia
On her way out of the organization, Dalmia said she was let go because she had become "too out-of-step with the organization." She suggested her anti-Trump articles pushed her out. Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor-in-chief, disputes the claim and took the high road, complimenting Dalmia while refraining from throwing any punches like the editors at The Intercept did, at Glenn Greenwald. Dalmia's charge is strange since from what I've read, most of Reason's articles are pretty unfriendly toward Trump. Critics' charges against Reason were befuddling, calling Reason hypocritical to fire someone on an ideological basis when themselves criticizing other outlets for doing so. No, Reason criticized outlets like the New York Times, which claims to be an unbiased paper of record. Reason has always positioned itself as a specific ideological outlet and has always been upfront about it. They've never claimed to be a news journal. They also claim Reason engaged in cancel culture, which it has vehemently criticized. No, firing someone is not cancel culture. Cancel culture is where a mob makes life a living hell for someone (like the New York Times staff did to Bari Weiss) and/or actively censors them by leading boycotts or tarnishing their reputation (usually fraudulently) so they cannot land a job or find a platform elsewhere. Reason has done none of these things. Critics have also charged that donors influenced Katherine's decision to fire Dalmia, which, as Matt Welch points out on The Fifth Column, is ridiculous. Reason's editors have always been granted independence from donor actions.

California Continues to Hemorrhage Companies
Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that they would be relocating their headquarters to Houston. Likewise, Oracle, one of the Silicon Valley OGs, is packing their bags for Texas. These are just the latest in a string of companies and wealthy individuals like Palantir, Tesla, Dropbox, Peter Thiel, and Joe Rogan, leaving the state for a variety of political reasons such as high taxes, regulation, a high cost of living, and the recent lockdowns. The recent shift to remote work just suddenly made it that much easier to do so. I had known for a long time that businesses would eventually flee the state en masse, but I didn't think a virus would be the catalyst to do it.

RIP Walter Williams
I unfortunately haven't familiarized myself with Williams's work while he was alive, but he was a black libertarian economist who has written great books such as "The State Against Blacks" and "Race and Economics" that outline the state actions that harm black people and communities. He and his friend, Thomas Sowell, another great black libertarian economist, have written extensively on how the minimum wage had racist origins and continue to harm the job prospects of black people. He was a professor at George Mason University with the utmost integrity and refrained from indoctrinating students with his opinion in the classroom. He did what he loved, teaching, until the literal day that he died. I will need to read some of his books soon.

Eric Swalwell and a Chinese Spy
Damn, that just reads like a joke, doesn't it? Kind of like Swalwell himself. My US "Representative". Swalwell, on the House Intelligence Committee, was found to have had ties to a Chinese spy. As I understand it, he severed ties when he was notified she was a spy, so it's not like he was deliberately working for a foreign country. But he was one of the most vocal people in Congress to complain about Trump's alleged ties to Russia. It turns out Swalwell had more ties to a foreign rival country than Trump did. This whole thing reads like a joke.

Hunter Biden's Prosecution
As it turns out, despite what the corporate press had been trying to downplay and divert attention from, Hunter Biden is under federal investigation for not only his taxes, but potential ties and business deals with foreign companies. As it turns out, this investigation, at least the tax portion, had been ongoing since 2018. If we recall back to Trump's impeachment hearings, it was over his pressuring to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden. One would think this investigation would have been valuable information during these hearings.

Ted Cruz, Asshole
Ted Cruz, who some say is libertarian (no, he's not), has a father who fled Cuba to the United States and later requested political asylum, which he was granted. So you would think Cruz would be sympathetic to the people oppressed abroad. Nope. He blocked a bill that would have granted political asylum to people from Hong Kong seeking to escape the autocratic invasion of the Chinese Communist Party. Can we deport Ted Cruz to Cuba, please?

Massive Government Security Breach, Still Want Backdoors
Multiple government agencies, including the US Department of State, Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, and the National Institutes of Health, were hacked by Russia. Dubbed the SolarWinds hack, the hackers gained entry using outdated Solarwinds cybersecurity software in a supply chain attack. Reports show that the government agencies have been warned that the software they use only guarded against known attacks, completely insufficient when dealing with sophisticated espionage attacks from organized groups. Most agencies had not incorporated any of the seven fundamental security practices recommended to them. And yet, the federal government still wants backdoors to all Americans' encrypted information, which would put everybody's private information at risk to hackers. They also continue their massive databases that hold treasure troves of private information of Americans that have not been accused of any wrongdoing, creating a single point of failure for foreign governments to compromise massive amounts of information, including financial statements. 

2020 is Over!
It's been weird, 2020. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.