Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATED (4/7): How Does Lara Trump Intend To Close China’s Wet-Markets For Good?

Asia, China, Communism, Conservatism, Culture, Donald Trump, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Natural Law

Lara Trump is organizing a “broad coalition” to “close China’s bat, cat, and dog meat markets.”

How will she accomplish this? Regulations? How would she possibly orchestrate those? Perhaps the China-owned World Health Organization will mediate? Talks? Making nice? Getting her father-in-law to make nice, then pretending she’s achieved what she hasn’t?

Unless you punish people for their barbarity, you have little chance of changing behavior. And you know that if the Chinese state begins putting people in jail for wet-market activity, American conservatives will holler about the communist party proceeding unjustly against its wonderful people.

A good punishment is to buy American. Boycott everything to do with the vile Asian cultures whose people wallow in the blood of innocent creatures, captured from the wild, tortured alive and bled on the spot for the pleasure of their barbaric consumers.

The issue has always been finding product that isn’t made in China. However, free-market America is a magical agora. If the demand is there; it’ll deliver. Just quit purchasing cheap Chinese crap. (I often buy cheap mittens from Rite Aid. They cost about $2, and last 2 months. No more.)

And quit the crazy talk. WuFlu comes straight from the Wuhan’s wet markets. RNA doesn’t lie. As I wrote, first in a Townhall.com, Mar 13, 2020 column:

As for the country’s professional racism spotters, they wish only to uncouple coronavirus from Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China, where it originated.

Naturally, the ossified CDC has been scathing about the intellectually nimble sleuth work done by scientists not its own, in the course of the viral RNA sequencing mentioned. But epidemiology obligates this creaky bureaucracy to trace the origins of the virus.

And so it has. Writes the CDC:

“Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with … with this new virus (named SARS-CoV-2).
The SARS-CoV-2 virus [has its] origins in bats. The sequences from U.S. patients are similar to the one that China initially posted, suggesting a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir.
Early on, many of the patients at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, had some link to a large seafood and live animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. Later, a growing number of patients reportedly did not have exposure to animal markets, indicating person-to-person spread. Person-to-person spread was subsequently reported outside Hubei and in countries outside China, including in the United States.”

Writes Mark Sunwall on Facebook:

As a libertarian my idea of pan-human legal obligations is rather minimal, but can’t we at least advocate and seek the enforcement of the seven Noachide laws? In this case, the one which prohibits the torment of animals.

Laughable Impeachment: Libertarians (The Good Kind) LOVE Undermining Foreign Aid

Constitution, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Government, Law, Natural Law, Republicans

President Donald Trump will be impeached and then tried and acquitted. That’s the platform on which the Democrats are running a presidential campaign.

As to the substance of the articles of impeachment against President Trump:

First up is “Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine.”

At the behest of Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, Devin Nunes, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and with the active participation of Vice-President Mike Pence, and Mick Mulvaney, the chief of staff—the Office of Management and Budget implemented a hold on Ukraine’s assistance funds.

What’s not to like about a hold on foreign aid? It was a short-lived hold, but it was good while it lasted.

What we libertarians don’t like is that the funds were eventually released to Ukraine. No matter what, libertarians want to see foreign aid imperiled in any way possible, for as long as possible, preferably for good.

By contrast, the Beltway libertarians, the ones Tucker Carlson entertains, will map the ins-and-outs of the impeachment with the fastidiousness of a government bureaucrat. And they’ll go into the weeds of the Ukraine affair, what the Democrats and their supporters are calling “a sprawling, months-long campaign spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer.”

From where I’m perched, it’s a big yawn. “Impeachment [Is] Uninteresting To A Certain Kind Of Libertarian“:

Democrat or Republican initiated, impeachment as we’ve come to know it intimately, showcases the might of the American Administrative State in all its muscular display of extra-constitutional powers. There is nothing constitutional, and very little that is naturally licit, in this process, despite all the “solemn” references to the poor, unused document.

The second part of the Democrats’ report, leading up to the drawing up of articles of impeachment, entailed Trump and his “officials declining to take part in the impeachment inquiry …”

The report argues that Mr Trump’s blanket refusal is unprecedented—Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton all complied with House requests for information—and that such defiance represents “an existential threat to the nation’s constitutional system of checks and balances…and rule of law”.

Did you hear that? This is midriff-splitting funny.

Trump defying a corrupt and ossified body (that gave America one unjust, criminal war after the other) is said to constitute “an existential threat to the nation’s constitutional system of checks and balances…and rule of law.”

To libertarians, the good kind, that idea that congress represents some sort of bulwark against a mortal, existential danger is just uproariously funny.

  • Image is Adam Schiff courtesy “Cowdog“

 

Free Speech: When It’s ILLEGAL To Say ‘ILLEGAL Immigrant’

Constitution, Free Speech, Law, Natural Law, Regulation

This is a case of a city’s anti-discrimination ordinance overriding the U.S. Constitution.

Most of us are unaware that the First Amendment to the Constitution has been flagrantly compromised by a city’s anti-discrimination ordinance. In this case, the New York City Human Rights Law.

Last week, New York City’s Commission on Human Rights declared that using the term “illegal alien” pejoratively to describe an undocumented person violates laws designed to protect employees and tenants from discrimination, and could result in fines of up to $250,000.

How long before “merely calling someone an illegal alien on the street, or threatening to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on them, [becomes] illegal”?

The author at Reason seems to have confidence the above won’t occur, writing that, “It’s important to note that this guidance does not affect all kinds of speech: The law covers workplace harassment, tenants’ rights, and public accommodation.”

More moderate fluff from Reason:

The government cannot simply prohibit people from making politically incorrect statements about undocumented people—it must limit the scope of anti-discrimination mandates in order to satisfy the broad free speech guarantees enjoyed by all people.

Just you wait.

A way more principled analysis—as principled as the positive law can be—is Eugene Volokh’s. He has determined that “constitutionally protected speech [does not] lose its protection because of the speaker’s supposedly improper purpose.”

Also way better than the milquetoast Reason Magazine is “NYC Seeks to Curb Speech About Illegal Aliens” by Hans Bader.

Thinking of the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is just silly. Any vestiges of the natural law in the Constitution have long since been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.