Tag Archives: Priscilla Chan

Let’s Suppress Fraudulent Votes

11 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by in Corruption, Election Fraud

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No matter how you feel about the 2020 presidential election, whether you think it was conducted fairly or that it was “stolen” from Donald Trump, you should at least come to grips with the reality that our electoral process is quite vulnerable to manipulation. Most voters agree that election fraud is a problem. A recent poll found that 56% of likely voters agree that “every state should require that ballots be available immediately after elections for bipartisan voter reviews to enhance election confidence and transparency. Only 23% are against ballot reviews…”. So these respondents also agree that compromises to the integrity of elections should be addressed.

Local Fraud, National Scope

There is plenty of evidence that the 2020 election was manipulated by agents both inside and outside the government, if only the mainstream press could be bothered to look at it. Nuts and bolts election fraud is largely a local phenomenon, though there is likely some coordination at higher levels. Robert Zimmerman provides this summary of the election fraud in the 2020 election in Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia:

Fulton County and its elections are controlled by democrats, much as in other large cities. Localized fraud in deep blue urban centers doesn’t have much if any effect on local races, but it throws statewide and national races into doubt. Of these deep blue enclaves, Zimmerman says:

“… the government is essentially a one-party Democrat operation. Many election districts in these cities have no Republican election judges at all. If the Democrats wish to commit election fraud, there is no one looking over their shoulder to question them, with some districts actually taking aggressive action in 2020 to illegally keep Republican poll watchers out. … Thus we saw strong evidence in all of these cities of pro-Democrat ballot-stuffing, of all types, from fake ballots to ballots counted multiple times to evidence the votes on the ballots themselves were changed by computer.”

In Wisconsin, the State Supreme Court finally ruled last month that the placement of hundreds of drop boxes in its largest cities was illegal. Those unsupervised drop boxes made it a simple matter for hundreds of “mules” to deposit stacks of fraudulent ballots, not to mention enabling other kinds of ballot harvesting on a massive scale. This was not limited to Wisconsin. Zimmerman also discusses Arizona’s Maricopa County (Phoenix), where there were a host of different issues casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election results. The race in Arizona was very close, and this kind of vote tampering likely threw the state into Biden’s column:

If you doubt the ease with which “mishaps” occur when ballots are counted, take a look at the following tweet from three weeks ago:

The point is that it’s amazingly easy for fraud to occur given the lax standards of accountability often seen in elections, particularly in one-party jurisdictions.

The New Front

Will the Left seize control of elections or leverage that control more aggressively, particularly in deep blue areas? With that control, they can reinforce their ability to swing elections for statewide offices and electoral votes, and they are certainly trying. The link just above describes some well-funded organizations channeling funds to support progressive candidates running for down-ballot positions with supervisory authority over local elections and their procedures. Charities founded by billionaire George Soros, Hilary Clinton, and Mark Zuckerberg are just some of the players involved. This activity has its parallel in Soros’ successful efforts to fund the campaigns of radical leftists for prosecutor jobs in many cities.

There is also the matter of private grants to local election offices, ostensibly to support the “health” of voters and election workers, but mostly used to “get out the vote”. This was the approach used by the activist group funded by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan:

“In 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a left-leaning group that distributed grants to mostly Democrat-dominated precincts, driving up the vote. The Zuckerbergs’ grants, dubbed Zuckerbucks, helped finance drop boxes and expanded mail-in balloting, among other activities.”

Pennsylvania recently prohibited private election grants in order to reduce outside influence on elections, a wise response to the violations of state law that occurred in the 2020 election. The ban covers nonprofits like the Center for Tech and Civic Life. Zuckerberg asserts that the organization distributed more grants to Republican jurisdictions (anywhere Trump won in 2020) than elsewhere, but that claim is dubious based on the amounts of those donations:

“… Republican jurisdictions were far more likely to receive grants of less than $50,000, which would likely not be enough to materially change election practices in the recipient jurisdiction.”

Pennsylvania is not alone in its bid to restore integrity by banning these grants. At least 20 states have passed similar laws since the 2020 election, with varying degrees of stringency. That’s good news, but it won’t stop tampering by officials elected with the aid of organizations intent on controlling election procedures.

Corrupting Federal Institutions

There have been, and still are, machinations at levels much higher than local election authorities. The FBI engaged in election sabotage in 2020 to destroy Donald Trump, a sitting U.S. President. This occurred on at least two fronts. There was the staged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Windmere in October 2020, with all hands attempting to implicate Trump and his supporters. Trump’s prospects fell in Michigan after the announcement of this foiled “kidnapping”, which was subsequently discovered to be a plot by the FBI to entrap a few rubes. Equally disturbing was the flagrant attempt by the Justice Department before the election to discount evidence that Hunter Biden had been engaged in influence peddling for years. That discounting continues to this day, of course.

These maneuvers followed the FBI’s complicity in the Russia Hoax, which was conceived in opposition research by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. The agency made use of a dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of a Clinton campaign contractor. Despite strong suspicions that the dossier was fabricated as well as politically motivated, it was used to obtain clearance from a FISA Court to surveil Trump’s presidential campaign. The FBI continued its misrepresentation of the Steele dossier throughout the Mueller investigation, which ultimately found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia

Today, we know the FBI and the Department of Justice are still at it. Their attempts to destroy Trump, just 80 days ahead of the 2022 midterms, are transparently motivated by politics, culminating in the raid on Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in search of “classified documents”. It is also likely a fishing expedition that they hope might turn up evidence of a “planned insurrection”. Note that neither Hillary Clinton nor Sandy Berger (President Clinton’s National Security Advisor) had their private residences raided despite personal and illegal possession of classified documents. The hypocrisy is jaw dropping, but it seems clear the Mar-a-Lago raid was another example of efforts within federal law enforcement to influence elections.

Another recent example of likely election influencing within a federal institution is how the Census Bureau managed to “significantly” miscount the populations of 14 states in the 2020 Census. Five of the six undercounted states were “red” states. Six of the eight over-counted states were “blue” states, including New York. The admission of the miscount by the Census Bureau occurred after redistricting took place, a process that surely would have been impacted by the count. So the Democrats picked up congressional seats by virtue of the miscounting. In addition, according to Matt Margolis, the miscounts will give the next democrat presidential candidate nine extra votes in the Electoral College.

Efforts to wholly eliminate the Electoral College are another example of the Left’s efforts to seize control of the Executive Branch, once and for all. The popular vote would be replaced and control ceded to a group of highly populated coastal states. As I’ve written before, the Electoral College was an arrangement necessary to obtain the agreement of all states to join the union. There is no doubt that many states would insist upon a similar arrangement today if we were to do it all over again.

Conclusion

There is very real potential for ongoing election tampering and vote fraud in elections, and the Left has demonstrated a wholehearted willingness to engage in this effort. Much of this activity takes place at the local level in jurisdictions in which election supervision is controlled by one party. The looser the rules, the greater potential there is for abuse. This also explains the motivation to pour resources into electing certain candidates to offices with supervisory power over elections. Also disturbing is the complicity of federal law enforcement in attempts to influence presidential elections. Our Republic cannot withstand the unbridled partisanship we’ve witnessed in the election process. Addressing these problems is likely to require a major clean-up and reorganization of the FBI and possibly the DOJ, but restoring the integrity of those institutions will probably require significant election successes for Republicans in 2022 and 2024. Yes, there really is a deep state!

May You Live For a Thousand Years

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Human Welfare, Life Extension, Progressivism

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What if human life expectancy doubles over the next 50 years? Triples? Mark Zuckerberg and many others with money to spend, such as Peter Theil and Larry Ellison, want to accomplish that and more. For example, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged $3 billion over the next decade to “rid the world of disease”. The implications are fascinating to ponder. In developed countries, most of the life extension would come from reducing mortality in adulthood and late in life, simply because childhood mortality has already reached very low levels. Assuming that the additional years are healthful, the dynamics of population growth and the labor force would change. Family structure could take new directions, especially if extended fertility takes place along with life extension. The coexistence of six, nine, or more generations might make one’s descendants virtual strangers. And it might be possible for an individual to have children who are younger than the great-grandchildren of progeny conceived early in one’s adulthood. For love or money, your great-grandchild might couple with an individual a generation or more ahead of you. Scandalous!

Some pundits foresee dark implications for humanity. Alex Tabarrok comments on some musings in The Telegraph by Jemima Lewis, providing the following Lewis quote:

“We’d better hope they don’t succeed. What would it do to the human race if we were granted eternal health, and therefore life? Without any deaths to offset all the births, we would have to make room on earth for an extra 208,400 people a day, or 76,066,000 a year – and that’s before those babies grow old enough to reproduce themselves.

Within a month of Mr Zuckerberg curing mortality, the first wars over water resources would break out. Within a year, the World Health Organisation would be embarking on an emergency sterilisation programme. Give it a decade and we’d all be dead from starvation, apart from a handful of straggle-bearded tech billionaires, living in well-stocked bunkers under San Francisco.“

Of course, people will still die in accidents and from some illnesses that cannot be anticipated; some people will always engage in self-destructive behavior; and there will always be natural calamities that will take human life, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Nevertheless, life-extending technologies will increase the human population, all else equal. I say bring it on! But Lewis’ attitude is that increasing life expectancy is a bad thing, contrary to our almost uniformly positive experience with longer lives thus far, including improvements in the quality of life for aging seniors. More fundamentally, her view is that people are a liability, a collection of helpless gobblers, rather than valuable resources with the promise of providing themselves with an increasingly rich existence.

Lewis’ article demonstrates a special brand of ignorance, now common to many on the left, going back at least to the time of Robert Malthus, at about the turn of the 19th century. Malthus’ pessimism about the world’s ability to provide for the needs of an expanding population is well known, and wrong. The Club of Rome‘s report “The Limits To Growth“, published in 1972, pretty much continued in the Malthusian tradition. That report predicted increasing shortages and mass starvation. Of course, the Club erred both empirically and theoretically, as Julian Simon forcefully argued in the 1980s and 1990s. The crux of Simon’s argument was the existence of a renewable resource of vast promise: human ingenuity:

“Because of increases in knowledge, the earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ has been increasing throughout the decades and centuries and millennia to such an extent that the term ‘carrying capacity’ has by now no useful meaning. These trends strongly suggest a progressive improvement and enrichment of the earth’s natural resource base, and of mankind’s lot on earth.“

There are certain conditions that must be in place for the planet to provide for ongoing advances in human well-being. Markets must be operative in order for prices to provide accurate signals about the relative scarcity of different resources. When particular resources become more scarce, their prices provide an incentive to use existing substitutes and innovative alternatives. Competition facilitates and helps perfect this process, as new producers continuously seek to introduce innovations. Needless to say, the more restrictions imposed by government, and the more the state gets involved in picking favorites and protecting incumbents, the less effective this process becomes.

From a global perspective, the human race has done quite well in eliminating poverty during the industrial era. Impressive measures of progress across many dimensions are chronicled at the Human Progress blog, where Marian Tupy writes of “Looking Forward To the Future“. These improvements fly in the face of predictions from the environmental left, and they demonstrate that humanity is likely to find many ways in which extended lifespans can be both enjoyed and contribute to the world’s productive potential.

Extended lifespans will bring changes in the way we think about our working years and retirement. Both parts of our lives are likely to be extended. Job experience utilizing incumbent technologies will become less scarce, and will thus command a lower premium. Continuing education will increase in importance with new waves of technology. There will be changes in the time patterns of saving and investment and the design of retirement benefits offered by employers, but long periods of compounding might reduce the pressure to save aggressively. Bequest motives would almost surely change. Mechanisms like family endowments benefitting members of an extended family via education funding, medical technology and end-of-life care might become common.

There will have to be many changes in our physical makeup to ensure that life extension buys mostly “quality time”. For example, it’s probably not possible for many parts of the human body to function reliably after a century of use. The technologies of skeletal, organ and muscle replacement, or rejuvenation, will have to advance significantly to ensure a reasonable quality of life in an older population. The bodies of older humans will either be cyborgized or freshly regenerated as life extension becomes a reality.

As more radical life extension begins in earnest, it’s likely to begin as the exclusive province  of the rich. However, like everything else, the technologies and benefits will eventually diffuse to the broader population as long as competitive pressures are present in the relevant markets. It will be a matter of choice, and perhaps the most unhappy among us will choose to forego these opportunities. However, such technologies, to the extent that they become a reality, would have the potential to improve the physical well- being of almost anyone.

Dramatically extending the human life span will bring dramatic change and many social challenges, but ending disease is a worthy goal, and one that most certainly will benefit mankind. Tabarrok casts Jenima Lewis as an Ayn Rand villain, though he must realize that she is simply ignorant of the forces that create growth and an improving existence. Unfortunately, she is one of many on the left enamored with a perspective that is “anti-mind, anti-man, anti-life” (to quote Tabarrok quoting Rand).

For additional reading on the left’s anti-human agenda, see this Fred Siegel piece in the City Journal, “Progressives Against Progress” (HT: Glenn Reynolds).