Tag Archives: responsibilities

Truth and Courage

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On the matter of woke culture and canceling, The Wall Street Journal editors wrote about McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski’s private text to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot following her visit to the McDonald’s restaurant that was the scene of the murder of a 7-year-old child. That text was, in pertinent part,

p.s. tragic shootings in last week, both at our restaurant yesterday and with Adam Toldeo [sic]. With both, the parents failed those kids which I know is something you can’t say. Even harder to fix[.]

The mob howled and Kempczinski went directly to his knees and begged forgiveness.

The Editors had this about the matter, and they’re right as far as they went.

It’s a sign of our destructive times that saying in a private text that adults have some responsibility for the fate of their children is unacceptable.

But that’s far from all of the matter. It’s also a sign of our destructive times that American CEOs like Chris Kempczinski are such abject cowards and beg to apologize for having spoken uncomfortable truths.

We don’t have a Canadian-style truth code, but with company pseudo-leaders like Kempczinski, we don’t need one.

Bipartisanship

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Joe Lieberman wants some, particularly regarding any nuclear weapons agreement with Iran.

The only way to assure that [bipartisan unity] is for President Biden to submit an agreement with Iran to the Senate as a treaty, needing 67 votes to be ratified. That would require support from members of both political parties. It would bring Washington, for a moment, back to bipartisanship in foreign policy.

And

Achieving an agreement with Iran that could get 67 votes in the Senate wouldn’t be easy, but it is worth the effort. It would restore the longtime bipartisan consensus in Washington about Iran….

What is it that Lieberman wants here–bipartisanship, which is a worthy step to a lasting worthy agreement?

Or a permissive path for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, which it then will use to destroy Israel, to sell to terrorists for attacks on Europe and the US, and to use itself around the world?b

An agreement that facilitates Iran getting nuclear weapons is not a worthy one.

Some Results of Illegal Immigration

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Here are some of those, just crossing our unprotected southern border.

  • 17,300 migrants illegally crossing our southern border, with prior convictions of other crimes, arrested. Up from 9,447 in fiscal 2020.
    • assault
    • battery
    • domestic violence
    • burglary
    • robbery
    • larceny
    • theft
    • fraud
    • DUI
    • homicide
    • manslaughter
    • illegal drug possession and trafficking
    • illegal reentry
    • illegal weapons possession and transport
    • sex offenses
  • additional 8,979 migrants arrested with outstanding arrest warrants against them from other law enforcement agencies
  • 27% of arrestees were repeat offenders previously caught in the same fiscal year

Sheriff Joe Martinez, of Val Verde County, Texas:

What’s scary…we don’t know where they [the got-aways] are going. How many were from terrorist groups from special interest countries?
That’s the unknown.

Indeed. But the Biden-Harris administration cares not a fig about any of this.

Nor is it just this flood of illegal aliens who also are seriously violent criminals.

Outgoing DEA El Paso Division Chief Kyle Williamson:

It’s the worst it’s ever been. There’s no good news here. And the amount of methamphetamine and fentanyl coming in right now is unprecedented.

From the DEA’s March National Drug Threat Assessment:

The violence, intimidation, theft, and financial crimes carried out by [Mexican] TCOs [Transnational Cartel Organizations], criminal groups, and violent gangs pose a significant threat to our nation. The criminal activities of these organizations operating in the United States extend well beyond drug trafficking and have a profoundly negative impact on the safety and security of US citizens. Their involvement in alien smuggling, firearms trafficking, and public corruption, coupled with the high levels of violence that result from these criminal endeavors, poses serious homeland security threats and public safety concerns.

The Biden-Harris administration cares not a fig about any of this, either.

Aside: Just the News refers to these as “migrants.” They are not. They are illegal aliens. Full stop. It’s sad that JtN has allowed itself to get so infected with political correctness.

The Cost of Aiding and Abetting

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$590 million dollars. That’s the cost of aiding and abetting ransomware criminals in the first half of this year. That’s what so-called victims of ransomware attacks paid to their putative attackers to reward them for their crimes. Moreover,

The average cost of reported ransomware payments per month in the US in 2021 was $102.3 million. If the current trend continues, the number of SARs filed in 2021 “are projected to have a higher ransomware-related transaction value than SARs filed in the previous 10 years combined,” the Treasury projects.

(The average cost and the total cost differ by about 4%, but the point remains valid.)

Andrew Lipow, Lipow Oil Associates LLC CEO, is busy ducking responsibility—and he’s sadly typical:

The anonymity of a digital currency has allowed ransomware attacks to flourish. If you can’t follow the money today, regulators need to either ban the digital currencies or implement regulations that enable the identification of people and accounts involved in these transactions—just like they would do for a real bank.

Sure. Because criminals engaged in ransomware attacks can be counted on to obey currency laws. What a copout.

Aside from that, whether digital currencies need to be regulated is wholly irrelevant. What’s required is for businessmen to stop paying the ransom, stop rewarding criminals for their crimes, stop actively aiding and abetting criminals. They’re only making their companies willing repeat targets.

Beyond that, this is more than just money out of these companies’ coffers. It’s money out of other companies’ coffers, too, those that are downstream in the supply chain from the company that decides it’s fine to reward the criminals. They have to pay the higher prices the “victim” companies charge to cover their payoffs ransom payments.

It’s also money out of the coffers of other, otherwise unrelated, companies as they must bear the added security costs accruing from having also been made targets by those putative victims so amply rewarding the crimes and the criminals engaged in them.

It’s money out of us consumers’ pockets, too, in the form of increased prices we have to pay as those company executives just treat the “ransom” payments as a cost center, a cost of doing business.

Facebook Employees and Virtue-Signaling

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Here are a couple of examples, from a batch of leaked Facebook internal emails.

Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer asked employees to “hang in there” as the company figured out its response. “We have been ‘hanging in there’ for years,” one person replied. “We must demand more action from our leaders. At this point, faith alone is not sufficient.” [Emphasis added]

And

“All due respect, but haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” another staffer responded. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

And

“I’m tired of platitudes; I want action items,” another staffer wrote.

And

[Y]et another staffer wrote[,] “History will not judge us kindly.”

And yet, none of these Precious Ones, along with so many of their cronies, cared enough about these failures and their claimed inability to do anything about them to resign rather than continue to go along with them.

All of these Precious Ones, along with so many of their cronies, plainly care more about their paychecks than they do about their integrity or their morality.

As the New York Post put it in a related piece summarizing The Atlantic article,

Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth has overridden ethical concerns and allowed hate speech and incitements to violence to spread unchecked….

That’s Facebook, from top to bottom, for all the…whining: management’s demand for growth above ethics and employees’ demand for paychecks above ethics.