Voting Machines and Elections Security

[EDIT: JMR202611040646JST]

Can I be allowed to say, "I told you so?" 

[END-EDIT: JMR202611040646JST] 

What I still have a hard time understanding is how so many people look at a machine with most of it's functional parts hidden, parts they probably couldn't understand even if they could see them, and don't seem to see that the machine can be used to alter their vote.

And that the probability that the machine will be used to alter their vote only increases with time.

Are people perhaps so incapable of understanding politics and elections that they just don't care?

Or do they fail to understand what it means for multiple eyeballs on the visible process when using paper ballots? Is it that hard?

The paper ballot can be machine countable, that's not a problem. 

The purpose of the paper ballot is to leave a record that ordinary people can check if necessary.

Electronic records require some tool between the ordinary person and the ballots, and the tool can be rigged without ordinary people noticing.

Here's how the paper ballot is supposed to work:

You identify yourself to the election officials, who are supposed to look at their voter lists to see if you are in the list of eligible voters for that location. Back in the days of small voting precincts, they probably knew you, and whether you were eligible to vote. If they didn't know you, they were supposed to require some sort of identification.

If you were properly identified as eligible to vote, they gave you a ballot. 

Typically the ballot came in three parts. 

1. There would be some sort of cover, so that you could keep the election officials from seeing how you voted. 
2. There would be the ballot proper, a list of candidates and measures, etc., where you would record your vote. 
3. The would be a stub attached to the ballot proper, with a serial number.

The cover would be used to protect you from someone trying to coerce or buy your vote.

The serial number would allow the election officials to be sure that they collected every ballot that they handed out, and only ballots they handed out, which helps protect against fraud. That serial number would be noted in the voter record by your name.

So when you hand the covered ballot to the election official, he or she would, without removing the cover or looking inside it, detach the serial number and put the ballot proper in a locked ballot box. The serial number stub would go in a locked stub box. 

They are stored separately, again, to prevent your ballot from being identified as your ballot. That's how your vote is kept secret, protecting you from coercion and/or vote-buying.

Election judges from at least the two largest parties must watch the entire process, to be sure that extra ballots don't go in the ballot box, and to be sure that every serial number is from a valid ballot, and that every valid ballot does go in the ballot box.  

When you count the ballots, you also count the stubs, to be sure that the counts match. If the counts don't match, something has gone wrong, and the precinct's ballot cannot be trusted.

At this time, most governments do not have a procedure in place for redoing a precinct where the counts don't match, and that is a bit of a problem.

At the end of the voting period, the ballot boxes are unlocked and opened under the watch of election judges from at least the two largest parties, and first the number of ballots and the number of stubs is counted to see if they match. Then, if the ballots are machine readable, the initial count of votes can be done by machine. If not, the initial hand-count proceeds.

The results are recorded, the ballots, stubs, and results are sealed up, again under lock transmitted to the central processing facilities -- still under watch of election judges from at least the two largest parties.

If any minor party sends a qualified judge, that judge must be allowed to observe the process as well. Any objections to the process by an election judge, or by any other observer, must be recorded and transmitted with the counts and initial results. 

All objections must be considered by election judges at the central processing location, with the option of disqualifying a precinct's results if too many irregularities, or irregularities of too serious a nature are found. 

* When I say judges from at least the two largest parties here, when there are more than two parties with significant presence, this should be understood to include a judge from the largest opposition party. 

Keeping the physical ballots and stubs makes a recount meaningful and possible, but only because the process is being observed by election judges from at least the two largest parties, in other words, from two parties which will not naturally be in collusion with each other.

That's four requirements:

1. Physical ballots and detached stubs that can be observed, ascertained, and counted by a person with ordinary skill,
2. Voting processes that can be observed and ascertained by election judges with ordinary skill without violating the private process of the voter selecting from the options on the ballot,
3. Verifiable storage of the ballots, stubs, and whatever count results have been obtained to that point,
4. The observation of election judges from a party not in coalition with the party in majority in each precinct.

If those requirements are not met, the balloting cannot be trusted by the people casting the ballots, and the entire process becomes meaningless, except as election theatre put on by the ruling party or ruling coalition. 

Mechanical voting machines never really met the requirement that the process be observable and verifiable by persons with ordinary skill. 

Punched-hole ballots clearly did not meet the verifiable process and storage requirements, witness the hanging chads problem in Florida in the 2000 election.

Electronic balloting machines clearly do not meet any of the four above requirements. 

Arguments such as "It's good enough for ATMs!" are specious. We all now know that ATMs aren't really secure. 

But more importantly, money can be replaced. Votes cannot. 

Election theatre, I should note, is a process in opposition to government that acknowledges that its right to rule is derived from the consent of the governed. 

 

---

One thing that I think is missing in most elections processes I've seen so far is the option to require a precinct to rerun the vote on a later day. In the past, when ballots were transmitted by horse over hundreds of miles, rerunning a local vote was not considered feasible. Only complete run-off elections were considered workable and necessary. 

But that's not a case any more, really -- and hasn't been for as long as I've been old enough to be an election judge.

---

[EDIT: JMR202611040647JST]

I had wanted to add some thoughts on assisted voting, mail-in voting, and ex-patriate voting, and now we have the machines themselves throwing a hissy fit. Can't get more any more irony in reality than this. (Well, we can, but I'm pretty sure we don't want to.)

Mail-in voting and assisted voting have a lot in common, and illuminate problems for people such as myself who reside long-term outside the United States. (Ergo, ex-patriates, most of whom are very much patriots, and I hope people understand the difference.) 

I'm inclined to think of assisted voting and mail-in voting as two variations on the same problem. 

You can't get to the voting place on the day of voting, or you have unreasonable difficulty in reading and filling in the ballot or in getting the completed ballot safely into the ballot box.

Difficulty should not be an argument. 

Freedom requires overcoming difficulties to stay free in the political sense of able to exercise your own responsibilities. 

Freedom without friction is the freedom to be unable to move, because motion itself requires friction. This is true of physics and it is true of psychology, and it is true of chemistry, and it is true of social interaction, and it is true of politics.

To what degree are difficulties reasonable? 

Some examples:

Having to tear a brick wall down while you live in a wheelchair is way too unreasonable. Being blocked by stairs when you can't just get out of the wheelchair and climb the stairs is basically the same problem. 

Having to take a little time to read and understand the ballot and struggle to mark the ballot is not unreasonable.

Being faced with a ballot that ordinary people can't read and understand, or with marking requirements or requirements on getting the ballot in the box that ordinary people can't meet is too unreasonable. 

Just for the record, voting machinery that fails is a situation that is way too unreasonable, including when scanners fail and prevent the voter from putting the ballot in the box. (This is one reason printing and scanning at the polls is just plain wrong. (And I'm having to rethink whether the votes themselves can be tallied at the polling place, and even whether the boxes should be opened and total ballot count ascertained before transporting.)

Assisted voting must be allowed, but it interferes with or even destroys anonymity. 

Therefore, the assistant must be an eligible voter, must assist no more than one person (I'll have to blog about why and how later.) and must record his or her or xeir name, signature, and date with the assisted voter's ballot. This restricts the influence that a single person or party can wield in the results of an election.

Viewed as assisted voting, we can see that mail-in voting must be restricted to cases of real necessity, and not just convenience. To mitigate the potential damage (and the temptation to tamper) of mail-in ballots, we need more careful control of the process of distributing and collecting the ballots. 

And, to mitigate the temptation to tamper, we also need an adjustment at the end of the process -- any election in which the percentage difference between the top candidates or options is less than the percentage of voters who used assistance or mail-in ballots must require a run-off election.

If 5% of the vote is mail-in, the winner must win by more than 5%. 

If half the vote is mail-in, the idea of the winner being required to win by more than 50% only elucidates the reasons why having half the vote be mail-in is a problem in itself. 

Machines to assist voting for people who have trouble handling the ballots is a reasonable solution, but the percentage of people using machines must be added in to the percentage using mail-in ballots in determining the margin that triggers the run-off. 

This needs more thinking and more discussing, but I have to go to work. 

[END-EDIT: JMR202611040647JST] 

A Response to the Abortion Question, to an Interlocutor on Social Media

I'm not going to link the post or the reply because I don't want some of my social media friends going there and attacking, and I know that some of them might.

But I posted this as a response to a question on my support of anti-abortion laws:

 

---

 

I was in my mid-teens when Roe vs. Wade was handed down. I have indeed considered the question rather carefully in the intervening time.

At the time, space flight was a common memetic topic, and the allegory of the abort sequence for rocket launches stuck in my mind -- there was an abort module that could carry the crew capsule off an exploding or otherwise failing main engine, far enough away that the main parachutes could be deployed and the capsule hopefully brought somewhat safely back to ground, or, rather, to the sea.

But the abort sequence was itself inherently dangerous, something that nobody wanted to use, because the chances of surviving the abort sequence were significantly better than the zero chance of the failing or exploding engines, but nowhere close to assured.

Aborting a pregnancy is, with modern medicine, significantly safer for the mother than it was even back in the 1970s, when it was not as dangerous as aborting a rocket launch. But it is still dangerous to the mother -- even if you don't consider the child.

My family was concerned, but the Church we attend advised us that abortion is not murder, even though it is a matter of serious risk and moral consequence; that it should be considered only in cases of serious danger to the life of the mother or the child; or that it could be prayerfully considered in cases of rape, incest, danger to the health of the mother, or clear probability of the baby not surviving or surviving with grave or life-threatening disability.

I have four sisters. They have friends. I have heard a variety of stories about dreams in which women see their babies before they are born, in which they feel the babies' presence from the moment of conception, and such.

I have also examined the math that the geneticists use and found some subtle errors in their math, errors that essentially require that mathematics of randomness cannot be the only process in play in genetics.

I am strongly impressed that the spirit of the unborn child is present at least from the moment of conception, and takes a direct hand in selecting the gametes, and in their growth as a fetus and as a baby, limited by the genetic and nutritional resources and other similar factors in their environment.

This understanding colors my approach to the question. I perceive that abortion is not murder, because the spirit is not yet inhabiting the body and can (if he or she dares) try again. But it is still a matter of serious consequence.

Until some point in the early 2000s, I was inclined to say that we should let the mother decide and just leave it at that. But I was aware, even in my teens, of guys around me who were saying things like "She can always get an abortion now." as their excuse for pushing their girlfriends to go all the way, as they would put it.

(You ain't gone all the way if you ain't taking care of the baby is what I sometimes pointed out in such conversations, to little effect.)

In the early 2000s, not only was it becoming clear that people were treating abortion as a prophylactic of last resort. It was also becoming clear that there were medical personnel profiting from abortion and actively trying to increase their profits.

Abortion has become an industry. I do not know how much people are aware of just how much it has become an industry.

Given the above, sure, nothing is black and white, as you say.

Let me give you a real-world example of predatory legal practice in medical matters.

My uncle was a psychiatrist. He was sued by a patient who jumped from a window and permanently disabled himself, who claimed that it was because of the treatment my uncle prescribed. That suit could have cost my uncle his practice and his ability to provide for my cousins, but he always documented his work and the reasons he prescribed the treatments carefully, and how the patient himself was following the treatment, and was able to avoid the worst outcome of the suit. His insurance company also helped.

It seems to me that we have basically the same questions being raised about abortion malpractice claims. You do understand that malpractice claims can see a psychiatrist or other doctor going to jail also, I think? Destroy their career, etc.?

You ask about one rogue doctor somewhere who will be willing to attack another doctor for moral points or profit?

Sure, they exist, but there are also doctors who are willing to take up questionable patient claims in other medical fields. My uncle faced a couple. Had to have his lawyer cross examine them and argue their claims in court.

On the other hand, we do have an industry that has gone way too far in promoting abortion, as I point out above.

On the subject of obstetrics, the doctor that attended my wife when my oldest was born was very popular where we lived and had more patients than he could handle. He was a good doc. On one occasion after my oldest was born, he was working on too little sleep and dropped a baby. There were mitigating circumstances, but he essentially lost his practice completely. I don't believe he went to jail, but I think he was fined. He was a good doc, trying too hard. Was that fair?

I do not see any reason for the panicking about this. Doctors who do not understand that they carry a burden of responsibility, and who cannot read the laws and listen to the people who wrote the laws and the people who must interpret them in court, well, they should read the laws and listen to the people that wrote them, and to the people who must interpret them in court, who say that they are trying really hard to write the laws in a way that on the one hand, allow legitimate medical procedures to continue, but on the other hand, put the brakes on an industry that should not have become an industry.

Liberalism vs. Reality

No government can make people free. The best a government csn do is promote the wise use of freedom and, otherwise, stay out of the way as much as possible.

When the time comes that the voice of the people chooses evil, there ain't much help for them left.

Equality before God is real. Equity is fake equality.

You can't try to force people to be good and proclaim freedom and maintain your integrity.

To Jus Soli or Not to Jus Soli, that Is Not the Question

From my reply to https://www.facebook.com/minoru.komura/posts/pfbid0cUSUhzFKkRTjpqWGCTmWbY2k81Ry79hycjiwNKe2xTiGDjeqymX6h7YE57puhGmPl

I think the controlling argument of the majority focused on how to determine the intent of the child, which seems ridiculous to me. The child has no control over where he or she is born, unless you count children who influence the dreams of their mothers before they are born, which, really, raises questions no human law can reach to.

It is not a punishment to the child to hold back from a child something that shouldn't have been offered, not a punishment to prevent a child from making a choice that the child shouldn't have been presented with.

Moreover, there are many children who consider being by-default natural-born US citizens because of the actions of their parents a burden rather than a blessing. Yet US law tries to force them to report their income to the IRS and potentially pay taxes. 

Legally rejecting their default citizenship status requires both time and money that they would rather not have to spend.

The controlling principle of the Amendment must be the original language and intent. It was intended to force the southern States to quit trying to prevent the African descent population from voting. The author of the amendment himself said that, of course, aliens and foreigners were not under the jurisdiction of US laws and would never be so considered.

Why should the African descent Americans be specifically included?

Because they were human and their parents had been working and living in the US for a substantial length of time, and they had  been born in the US. This was the condition under which the 14th Amendment was intended to have effect. 

Wong Kim Ark should be understood as a prime example of the court legislating from the bench, and the US courts have a bad record for legislating from the bench.

The president can't veto items in a bill by line (no line-item veto allowed), but the courts effectively can, and that destroys the integrity of legislation. Bills that are only partially effective don't do what they were supposed to do when they were passed.

Wong Kim Ark's parents had been in the US, operating a business more than a decade, clearly under the laws and jurisdiction of the US. The Chinese Exclusion Act prevented the 14th Amendment from having effect, and that is what should have been the decision. That would not have been politically acceptable at the time, so they re-interpreted the 14th Amendment as pure Jus Soli, which it was clearly not intended to be. 

(Insert reader's expletive of choice.)

I suppose we need an amendment that the courts, when finding a law unconstitutional, should direct Congress to fix the constitutionality problems within a specific time limit before the entire bill becomes null and void. 

I suppose, if the court is going to legislate from the bench, it should just bite the bullet and start behaving as if we actually had a clause in the Constitution, or an Amendment, that provides them the authority to set a deadline after which the entire bill will become ineffective and direct Congress to fix it by that deadline. That would allow them to avoid trying to fix things that should be fixed by legislation or Amendment.

Anyway, the clear solution in the current case is that people who insist on remaining in the US illegal have implicitly declared themselves outside the bounds of US law, and outside the coverage of the 14th Amendment. Their children are therefore not under US law or jurisdiction. Likewise parents who are appealing adverse decisions or applying for refugee or other relief are not yet properly under US law or jurisdiction. 

Congress could set a time limit after which a good work record and lack of criminal record would overrule paperwork difficulties, but Congress hasn't. 

Reasons to Hate

Started to post this to a friend, then I decided maybe it wasn't really relevant to what she was going through, and I was trying to delete the text I'd typed and then I hit a wrong key and posted the beginning of the post, and since she might have gotten a response notice and see the weird beginning before it got deleted, and then wonder where it went, and, ..., well, anyway, this might not be relevant.

And I don't remember who I've already told this about me or not.

When I was seven going on eight, I found myself facing a decision whether to be baptized or not.

I thought I was already in the enemy camp about church. I was already working out some of the standard concepts of atheism, some of the apparent contradictions, the old problem of evil and such; and I was already seeing lots of hypocrisy at church. I had already decided I didn't like the way God was doing things, and because of that I thought I was going to not believe in Him. Out of spite, by the way, because I still remembered Him. 

My dad told me I couldn't fight from the outside, but I wasn't sure i wanted to fight the bad stuff going on at church. I was thinking I would just rather to do other things.

My mom suggested that I work out my ideas, write them down, and we could discuss my alternate ideas for how the world ought to operate. My mom later told me she doesn't remember telling me this. But I took the idea seriously, even though I didn't actually start writing. I just started thinking the arguments through. Including the problem of evil.

Both of my parents told me that baptism was ultimately my decision -- timing, or whether to get baptized at all.

While I was working out my ideas for how the world should be run, I kept finding myself coming to conclusions that matched, not what I (thought I) was being taught in Sunday School or Primary, but what I was finding in the scriptures. I'm not claiming to be a scriptorian at eight. I just learned how to use the concordance and index.

It would be several years later that I made the connection to prayer, but I was essentially talking with God about the hypocrisy, and about who writes the rules and who writes the real rules, and about other such things.

God impressed on me at that time, that other people's hypocrisies were not my problem, and not my responsibilities. God also impressed on me that the hypocrites at church were all converts from somewhere (Even the life-long members have to be converted at some point.), working from what they understood, trying to prepare and teach lessons while they were themselves trying to make time to study what they were supposed to teach, while they were at the same time trying to pay rent, put food on the table, get the kids to school, do the laundry, keep the house clean, etc. And that I really should give them a break.

Yeah, lay clergy has a down side. The only thing worse is professional clergy. I figured that out why that is, as well.

The lying spirit was also working on me at the same time, still telling me that God was a bully for making life so hard for so many people and such. Oh, best not to dwell on what the lying spirit was saying, but I probably should note, -- I don't remember who all I have mentioned this to before -- that I had been groomed before I was five by friends of the family (neighbors, the family of my "best buddy", who were not members of the church) into queer and bisexual points of view, behaviors, and ways of thinking, and groomed to sexual fantasy. I had put the bi behaviors on hold by the time I was seven, but I was actively closet queer.

I hadn't fully formed my political ideas at eight, of course, but I was already reading science fiction that the teachers thought was middle school level, and that included the usual progressive/liberal authors. I was definitely leaning towards communist and democratic/socialist ideologies.

We had friends of the family who had runs-in with INS (back when it was INS). I had very negative opinions of laws limiting immigration. Also, the idea of bringing people into the US to teach them how to be free was a very attractive idea to me. Still is, to a certain extent.

This is not really a change in subject, but I have always struggled with budget issues and with deadlines. So much of the evil in the world has always seemed to me to derive from artificial (pseudo-Malthusian) assumptions of limits.

I'm rambling.

There is much to hate in this world, limits, particularly artificial limits being among the big ones.

But I spent the latter half of my third decade in this world essentially shoving all the limits aside and postponing them so I could do some fundamental research in computer science. My parents were kind enough to give me a place to live in my grandfather's house and enough money to get my own food.

Lack of limits allowed me to explore the need for limits and other such esoteria -- including reading scriptures several hours a day sometimes. It was useful in many ways, even if I was not able to do what Linus Thorvalds or Theo de Raadt did. 

But the lack of limits was actually the reason I was unable to do what Linus Thorvalds or Theo de Raadt did. No boundaries to my research meant I had no reason to get my feet on anything solid. I did learn some things that were useful to me, but I have never been able to turn what I learned to the sort of profit that would pay my rent.

Limits are important. 

My sister lived there as well, and we had room for some of our newly married cousins to have their own apartments at really good rent while they got their feet under them. One of the couples, the husband was a not-fully-documented alien and the wife was a foster daughter of one of our cousins. Really nice couple, and the cheap rent allowed them to get on their feet and move forward.

For a number of reasons, I am not natively inclined to be happy about the idea of kicking people out of the country just because they failed to successfully complete some paperwork. 

Nor am I naturally inclined to try to tell people how they have to deal with their sexuality. (If they ask and I think I can help, I may make some suggestions from my own experience, but I do not care to dictate to people about their sexuality/gender)

But there are limits that have been crossed in both immigration and in the gender wars.

Too many of the immigrants have been too willing to fail to respect basic boundaries -- too willing to appropriate anything that is not tied down. Too many are here to move and deal drugs. Too many are destabilizing factors like the guy who stabbed Iryna Zarutska. Trying to deal with them requires ICE to present a show of force, and it does require them to forcibly detain some people. 

[EDIT202606121205: 

Okay, my bad. Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. is apparently a US-born homeless man. Same courts turned him back out on the street, though, even against his mother's requests.

Abdul Jalloh, on the other hand, is a legitimate example of an immigrant who was prevented by such a court from being deported. Multiple stabbings and violent assaults, back on the streets to allegedly kill Stephanie Minter at a bus stop in 23 Feb 2026 in an allegedly unprovoked attack, stabbing her in the neck.

https://wjla.com/news/local/mother-of-woman-killed-in-fairfax-county-bus-stop-stabbing-speaks-about-daughter-stephanie-minter-abdul-jalloh-crime-illegal-immigrant-commonwealths-attorney-steve-descano-cheryl-minter 

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/02/28/illegal-alien-more-30-prior-arrests-fatally-stabs-woman-virginia-bus-stop-ice 

Unfortunately, there are too many more such examples to list here. 

]  

I'm not going to argue motivations, but the liberal/Democrat insistence on de-funding ICE is making it triply difficult to take care of people in custody. It leaves ICE with the dilemma of deciding whether to fight judges who release guys like Iryna's attacker back to the streets, because if they waste time and legal fees trying to keep criminals from being released back on the streets, that's fewer resources with which to take proper care of the people they have in custody.

I'm not going to argue here that the stories about wormy food are false, even though I think i have plenty of evidence that they are mostly less than true. There will be cases when the resources are not enough to take proper care of everyone. 

But fighting over funding will increase the number of such cases.

Yeah, if we could figure out who is safe to release back into society immediately, we could release them immediately and go after more real criminals, but the courts that should be helping figure that out are being hamstrung by people who don't have even less information than the courts and ICE. And some of the courts that should be helping are deliberately hindering. 

Figuring that kind of thing out takes time.

Most of the people, even the MAGA people, who want the illegal immigrants out of the country, will be plenty happy to just get the criminals out as much as possible.

Concerning the anti-trans movement, please understand that allowing self-id gives the worst sort of men license to use self-id in ways that I sure didn't intend when I used to say, let people self-identify. 

And I hope that you don't intend to give such men such license. 

I did used to say that. I did used to assume that biological men who thought they were women would not be inclined to harm women. Assuming that they are sincere in believing themselves to be women, they should be motivated to refrain from harming women or causing women to fear.

Some trans women are, indeed careful to avoid using their trans-ness to intimidate people around them.

But it turns out that many are so focused on their right to find happiness in their own way that they don't seem to care whether people around them are intimidated or harmed. 

You may have heard that it's all fake news, but I have seen long lists of names of men in prison for violent crimes, including sexual violence, who have self-identified themselves into women's prisons, and done serious violence to their cell mates there. This includes resulting in roommate pregnancy -- rape, and often violent rape. I've seen the lists, I've looked up some of the news reports that the names are taken from. 

I can't conclude that the lists are fiction.

I have also participated in discussions among ostensibly alpha male men -- military officers, police officers, top-level business management -- who have decided to transition, and in somewhat overlapping groups where wives of such men try to help each other figure out what to do next.

A common thread in these discussions is that the men are addicted to pornography. Somehow, that addiction doesn't magically go away when they transition. Maybe in a few cases it gets better, but It often gets worse.

I don't have the right, I suppose, to judge, but it is apparent to me, in watching these discussions, that the alpha male men who are transitioning have never been quite able to learn how to earn a woman's real trust, and therefore have never known real intimacy. Surface intimacy, yeah, but not the deep kind humans need. 

That's why they have turned to pornography, which just exacerbates the problems. And now we have this idea of self-identifying, and the men are thinking, this looks like a good short-cut to the intimacy that they haven't been able to find.

But it does not lead to real intimacy. Of course it doesn't. 

You can't force intimacy. When people are forced, they quickly build up walls to protect themselves, and those very walls prevent the intimacy they are reaching  for.

It tears marriages apart. Because self-identifying doesn't really magically make the men understand that women think differently from men, and that even alpha males have to let what happens happen. 

Among other such preconceptions that have been the actual source of the problems. 

We have this thing, this assumption, that if God is good, power must be right.

No, it's not right to make things harder for people than they have to be.

But trying too hard to make things easier sometimes backfires spectacularly. Often backfires. Sometimes spectacularly. And that is basically where we are as a society right now.

Hate.

Hate takes energy.

Sometimes, you need hate to motivate you to do things that are hard.

But hate usually takes resources away from better things that we could be doing.

I could, when I was a kid, have gotten stuck on hating the hypocrisy at church. I might have done better to have done more hating the hypocrisy, enough to get me to find ways and times to talk somewhat privately with the hypocrites and try to help them overcome their hypocrisies.

But God told me to focus first on getting past my own hypocrisies.

It was easy enough to think I would behave generously in a situation that I didn't know how to get myself into, but I needed to get myself into those situations before I could say for sure what I would really do. Otherwise, my liberal theories were hypocritical.

Sometimes I've hated God because the puzzles They gave me were just too difficult. I think you know how that ends?

Well, okay, it never ends the same, because each time is different. Except that God keeps trying to give you the best that God can give you. And puzzles are part of that.

In my patriarchal blessing, God told me not to focus on the things I have done wrong. Lately I've been doing what looks, from the outside, like exactly that. I've been working on alternative reality fiction where a fictional version of myself makes all the "right" decisions and finds himself in real trouble because of it. World-destroying trouble. (The parts that I've published in my blognovel blog haven't gotten anywhere close to there yet, just for the record.)

In the process of writing these stories, I find that many of the things I want to think I did wrong were not as wrong as I want to think they were.

Hate. Constructive hate can be love.

Anyway, I find that if I focus more on loving the people around me who need loved, God will help me find ways to hate constructively those who need to be hated constructively.

And I recommend that discovery. God will help you, too, if you let Them. 

(I duplicated this to my philosophy of freedom blog:

https://free-is-not-free.blogspot.com/2026/06/reasons-to-hate.html

) 

 

Fallout from Liberty Justice v. Trump

If I had millions of dollars to burn on activist suits, I would sue the Supreme Court to clarify its ruling in Liberty Justice (VOS Solutions) v. Trump and explain why the ruling does not illegally conflate taxes which apply internally with tariffs, which apply at borders, and explain how taxes are not illegally separated from other regulatory tools in the ruling.

If taxes are not regulatory in function, then all of the "federal" welfare regulation enabled by the income tax should be declared null and void, and the 16th Amendment itself should be declared non-functional, because it requires breaking parts of the Constitution that are not addressed in the Amendment. And the power to tax individuals should be returned to the individual states or below.

I personally don't like Congress giving the president powers like this, but Congress did. 

The decision, it it is valid, should limit itself to suspending further application of the law in question until Congress can fix it by removing the supposed ambiguity.

That would eliminate the post-facto legislative effects that the decision in its present form seems to incur.

It is not the responsibility of the courts to rewrite law.

Looking at Taxing the Ultra-RIch

I am not in favor of having lots of ultra-rich people around. Really, once you've got enough in the bank to retire twenty times over, I think you should -- and get out of the way of others who haven't gotten there yet. 

That aside, which is more deserving of being taxed:

(1) A man whose net worth is a trillion dollars, but actual disposable income is only a million a year, but operates ten or so companies employing 50,000 people?

(2) A man whose net worth is only a hundred million, but whose disposable income is only a million a year, a significant portion of which is made through investments that he made after being elected to or appointed to some political office some twenty years ago?

(2A) Does it make a difference if person (2) persistently votes to be liberal with tax money, but not his own?

For the record, this hypothetical does not match anyone in particular.

To make this a little more concrete, say the proposed tax is a one-shot 5% net worth tax.

Let's calculate the taxes on (1):

5% of $1,000,000,000 would be fifty million dollars.

Is it clear that he doesn't have enough disposable income to pay that? 

He would have to sell off a bunch of stock, likely resulting in companies being taken over in hostile transactions, to be drained dry for somebody else's profit, before being shut down. 

Now, let's calculate the taxes on (2):

5% of 100,000,000 is five million dollars. 

Is it clear that he also doesn't have enough disposable income to pay that with a year's wages?

He would also have to sell off some stock.

But that stock isn't likely to be the controlling stock for some company that employs thousands of people.

It would still make waves in the stock market. 

In point of fact, with a whole bunch of rich people being put in the position of having to sell off, short-selling investors are going to push the prices down, punishing both (1) and (2), as well as the market in general.

But the real answer is that we don't have enough information to know which of the above is more worthy of being taxed, unless our answer is that the punishment to the market indicates that neither of them should be suddenly hit by a tax, and that five percent sounds small but isn't.

(2) may need to be kicked out of office. Or not. Depends on lots of things.

(1) may need to retire and turn things over to a new generation. Or not. Depends on lots of things.

The other real answer is that taxes are stupid. We should not be depending on the government to do our good deeds for us.