by Bob Barr | May 15, 2019 | Townhall Article |
Townhall.com In recent weeks, the once wide, online dominion of Right-leaning pot stirrers like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Laura Loomer, has shrunk considerably, as Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, and Twitter have shut down their accounts, despite the large followings enjoyed by such individuals. “We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” Facebook piously declared earlier this month after booting a number of “far-right” individuals, including those above, from its platforms. Necessarily, of course, decisions about what is “civil” and “safe” for users of social media are based not on the “likes” or “dislikes” of the individual consumers themselves, but on algorithms devised by employees of the social media companies. What may be even more disturbing than the censorial actions by the social media platforms, is the sneaky role being played in all this by a new breed of liberal CEOs with billions in ad dollars as their weapon of choice – and when these “Mad Men” talk, social media listens. Social media CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey may fancy themselves as the “good guys” in making the “hard decisions” like banning people on their platforms in pursuit of civility online, but it is advertising dollars that actually are at the core of their motivations. Therefore, when Marc Pritchard, the chief marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, a $66 billion company, makes pointed comments such as “we prefer to work with those who don’t allow anonymity to be a weapon,” or “while today everyone can have a microphone, it doesn’t mean every voice needs to be amplified” – it is hardly a...
by Bob Barr | May 8, 2019 | Townhall Article |
Townhall.com Riley Howell was laid to rest Sunday in Waynesville, North Carolina, at a funeral service with full military honors. He was not killed in a Middle East war zone; he was not even an enlisted member of the Armed Services. Riley was a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who died rushing toward a person who entered his classroom with a pistol and began shooting. Riley’s parents say he was shot three times at close range as he charged forward, but still managed to take the shooter to the ground so hard that he whined to first responders of internal injuries. It happened in the blink of an eye, but Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney credits Riley with saving countless lives and giving police, who fortunately were nearby, time to get to the classroom and detain the shooter. “But for [Riley Howell’s] work, the assailant might not have been disarmed . . . his sacrifice saved lives,” Putney said. Indeed, Riley’s final act in life – saving others regardless of cost – was an ultimate expression of humanity, tragically juxtaposed to that of the extreme inhumanity exhibited by his killer. But, in leaving behind a legacy of heroism, he also offers an important lesson for us all. We are told by the Department of Homeland Security that the appropriate response to an active shooter situation is “run, hide, fight,” in descending order of priority. Though perhaps effective for self-preservation, such instructions reflect a disturbing truth that we have in many respects lost the collective courage of our forefathers; and have become in large measure a nation that encourages the role of the victim and the...
by Bob Barr | May 2, 2019 | Townhall Article |
Townhall.com In the wake of last week’s tragic shooting at a Jewish temple outside San Diego, California, attention is once again focused largely on the instruments used in the murder, rather on the root causes of the incident; especially the depraved internet community in which this and other recent murderers live. Except for the victims of these murderous rampages and the brave public safety first responders, we citizens are largely insulated from the actual horrors of mass murder. We are spared the horrendous visuals of bodies torn apart from bombs and bullets; the stomach-churning screams of victims as they’re stalked and murdered at point blank range; the stench of death mixed with ammunition propellant. These details are far too unsettling for public consumption (properly so), which is why conventional wisdom leads many to believe such violence is more common than it really is; as if picking up a gun and shooting-up a church is as easy as playing a video game. It is not. The mass killings of strangers is not a normal act for a human being; even for most hardened criminals. We simply are not programed for emotionless, indiscriminate killing; that is, unless we cease to view other people as human. This is how the Holocaust occurred in a highly educated, industrialized nation; or how a 19-year-old from San Diego could walk into a synagogue with a single goal in mind – to kill other people. By focusing our emotional attention after such tragedies debating (as we do with excruciating predictability) the type of firearm used, or whether the First Amendment should protect hate speech, we fail to address the greatest danger of all,...
by Bob Barr | Apr 29, 2019 | Townhall Article |
The Washington Times The world is changing, and in the “Internet Age” the pace of change is relentless. Examples abound of victims of such change. Kodak — the company that less than a generation ago was the world leader in providing film for the ubiquitous 35mm cameras around the necks of tourists from San Francisco to Cairo — is a pale shadow of its former self. Landline telephone companies that for over a century provided the primary communications link for families through two world wars, the Great Depression and the advent of the Space Age, is today a virtual technology dinosaur. The means by which virtually every American home receives television services is not immune from such change. The new kids on the block — streaming video services offered by Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video, soon Disney, and many others — already are pulling serious numbers of customers from the established providers of paid TV services: Cable and satellite TV. Instead of letting this expanding market thrive, Congress is instead considering renewing a 30-year-old, outdated and totally unnecessary law offering unfair advantage to satellite providers. The initial legislative vehicle for this regulatory throwback was passed by Congress in 1988 as the Satellite Home Viewer Act (SHVA), and is now titled the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act Reauthorization (STELAR). Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web had not even been formally developed and made available to individuals and companies around the globe for mass use. At the time, a perhaps credible argument could be made that then-upstart satellite TV service providers needed a degree of help in competing against then well-entrenched cable providers. In...
by Bob Barr | Apr 22, 2019 | Townhall Article |
The Daily Caller The expression “cut off your nose to spite your face” has been in use for centuries. I’m not sure it translates easily into Spanish, but it reflects accurately what the Trump administration did earlier this month in nixing a pending agreement between Major League Baseball (“MLB”) and its Cuban counterpart (the “FCB”). The MLB had spent years hashing out an agreement with the FCB that would establish a lawful and workable process by which Cuban ballplayers could be scouted in Cuba by U.S. major league teams, and then signed to gainful contracts. The proposed deal would have freed Cuban players from having to rely — as they now must — on dealing with smugglers and unscrupulous agents in order to secure passage out of their home country and into the United States in order to participate in “America’s pastime.” This is because under the existing embargo rules governing U.S.-Cuba relations, players in that country cannot negotiate as free agents while still in Cuba. Thus, these players, including many eagerly sought-after by MLB scouts, have to find surreptitious (and dangerous) ways to leave their island nation; evading the many obstacles placed in their way by the Cuban government. The Dec. 19 agreement would have solved those problems, and by every reasonable standard would have been a win for players, MLB teams, and baseball fans. Importantly, the MLB made sure the proposed agreement was vetted through the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC). This is the agency charged with ensuring that no U.S. national security interests are compromised in arrangements between American and foreign entities....
by Bob Barr | Apr 17, 2019 | Townhall Article |
Townhall.com Last week, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London by a phalanx of British police officers; abruptly ending his nearly seven years of self-imposed political asylum in those cramped quarters. Far from ending the saga that began almost a decade ago when WikiLeaks published the trove of classified materials pilfered from the U.S. government by convicted spy Chelsea (formerly, Bradley) Manning, last week’s drama raises a slew of new questions about Washington’s sudden, high-level interest in this 48-year old Australian entrepreneur, computer programmer, and publisher. Extradition proceedings in the U.K. will launch what is certain to be a lengthy and complex legal battle that ultimately will determine if Assange will be prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice; or even if he can be prosecuted by our government. Where this will end up – and who will be the winners — is far from certain. The Justice Department last week unsealed a year-old indictment charging that Assange conspired with Manning in 2010 to break into Defense Department computers. According to this remarkably short (six-page) indictment, Manning then was able to download and copy hundreds of thousands of classified documents, mostly having to do with military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan; and many of which WikiLeaks published on its website over the course of the next year. Interestingly, Assange is not charged with any substantive offense; only with conspiring to help Manning in the acts that eventually saw her convicted of espionage by a court martial. Assange is sure to defend against federal prosecution based on the claim that — since he published the...
