Category Archives: culture

Red Flag Law in Action

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It seems an old veteran in Massachusetts had his legally-owned firearms confiscated by the local police—for no reason at all, other than a waitress chose to call the cops on him after eavesdropping on a part of a private conversation he was having with a friend in her restaurant. The waitress’ uninformed tattling also got him fired from his school-crossing guard job.

While he was at a local diner, [Stephen] Nichols was speaking to a friend about a school resource officer who apparently was constantly leaving his post to go for coffee in the morning.
Nichols said he was worried somebody would come in and “shoot up the school” while the officer was out on one of his coffee runs.

The waitress, having eavesdropped on only part of Nichols’ conversation (and I fail to see how she could not know she’d snooped on only part of the conversation), reported the “shoot up the school” part to the police.

There’s more:

[Tisbury Police Chief Mark] Saloio and another officer relieved Nichols of his crossing guard duties while he was in the midst of performing them and subsequently drove to his home and took away his firearms license and guns.
“He came up and told me what I said was a felony but he wasn’t going to charge me,” Nichols said of Saloio.

No charges, but his firearms were seized, anyway by the government’s officers.

And this:

Asked if he was given a letter or any paperwork for the seizure of his license, Nichols said, “No he just told me to hand it over so I took it out of my wallet and handed it to him.”
Nichols said he has been licensed for firearms since 1958.

Nichols has since had his crossing guard job reinstated, but the State still refuses to return to him his firearms license and his firearms.

This is the Progressive-Democrats’ (and too many Republicans’) red flag law in action.

The restaurant where this PC sewage went down is Linda Jean’s in Oak Bluffs, next door to Tisbury on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.  Linda Jean’s owner, Marc Hanover, appears to be trying to wash his hands of the whole sordid affair.

He said he believes one of his servers “overreacted.”

Hanover apparently has chosen to do nothing about his waitress, whose anonymity has been carefully protected, even as the woman has dragged a good man’s name through the mud.

A Thought on Brexit

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Supposedly, Great Britain and the EU are close to agreement on a deal governing the former’s departure from the latter. Absent a deal, Great Britain will leave the EU on its own terms.  That last is, I maintain, the best way out.

However.

There remain, as of Wednesday morning, three sticking points to any sort of deal, according to EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier.

  • Customs arrangements for the island of Ireland
  • The issue of giving Northern Irish authorities a greater say over regulatory arrangements, and the ability to veto them
  • Guarantees of a level playing field—that Britain will not be at an unfair advantage when it comes to business regulation

Customs arrangements for the entire island—even though one part of the island is a sovereign nation and EU member and the other part is a member country of the United Kingdom.  There should be nothing to discuss here. A major reason for the successful Leave vote was for Great Britain to regain control over its own borders—including its national border across the island of Ireland.

Giving Northern Ireland—that part of Great Britain—veto authority over the national government’s “regulatory arrangements”—devolution hasn’t gone that far, nor should it. This sticking point is nothing more than a naked early step in dismantling Great Britain in punishment for its effrontery in voting to leave the Holy Brussels Empire.

Guarantees of a level playing field—Great Britain is justified in seeking such guarantees, but it won’t get them, unless it accedes to what Brussels will define as “fair.”

These…sticking points…illustrate with crystalline clarity the EU’s bad faith in dealing with Great Britain—and they illustrate with equal clarity why a no-deal-Brexit is optimal for Great Britain.

Unfortunately, British PM Boris Johnson, in an agreement just concluded with Barnier, appears to have surrendered to the EU on the matter of Great Britain’s border with the Republic of Ireland:

Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK’s customs territory and will be an entry point into the EU’s single market. No customs checks will be done on the border between [the Republic of] Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Johnson surrendered on the second sticking point, also:

The Northern Irish assembly will have to give consent after Brexit for the region’s continued alignment with the EU regulatory regime every four years.

This cedes control of the British border to the EU, with all that that portends for the nation’s future. British sovereignty now hangs, ironically, on whether Labour MFWIC Jeremy Corbyn can deliver his party’s no vote.  Nigel Farage, Brexit Party head and strange bedfellow of Corbyn’s on this, also has come out against the deal, as have the Democratic Unionist Party, which in coalition with the Tories give Johnson a one-vote majority on most things, and the Scottish National Party, which have been NeverLeaveNoWay all along.

It could be, of course, that Johnson has included these poison pills so as to get this last minute agreement rejected by Parliament, and he can get his no-deal exit from the EU. That raises the question, though, of whether Johnson is that Machiavellian.

Johnson wants an up-or-down vote from Parliament Saturday.

Misinformed

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In his piece for Fox News about LeBron James quizzing NBA Commissioner Adam Silver over a General Manager’s tweet, Ryan Gaydos opened with this:

Amid the firestorm ignited by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tweet supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong

This is backwards. Morey simply tweeted a truth. The firestorm was ignited by the cowardly, picayune, and avaricious responses of the NBA and of arrogant ignoramuses like LeBron James and Steve Kerr to the PRC’s manufactured outrage.

Gaydos should know better, or is he one of those who are misinformed or not educated about this?

Focus on Health, Not Abortion

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That’s what Dr Beryl Rosenstein wants Louisiana to do in his Letter to The Wall Street Journal. He wrote in response to the WSJ‘s editorial supporting Louisiana’s newly passed law requiring doctors to have admitting privileges to a nearby hospital before they can perform abortions.

The good doctor provided a couple of health statistics in support of his thesis; one such is this one:

The neonatal mortality rate is 7.5/1,000 live births compared with the national rate of 5.8/1000 live births.

Since Rosenstein is so enamored of hard statistics, as he absolutely should be were he not so selective, here’s a hard statistic that he’s chosen to ignore: the prenatal mortality rate from abortion is 1000/0 live birth.

Louisiana and the entire nation could better invest its resources to actually improve the health and safety of all citizens, including our unborn babies.

Indeed, let’s do focus on health, not abortion.

Lack of Understanding

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This is demonstrated in the lead paragraph of a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Chief executives are taking vocal stands on issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration, but global affairs bring a different complexity and calculation, especially for companies doing business in China*.

After all,

In the aftermath of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet, the National Basketball Association has found the consequences of even implicitly criticizing Chinese policy can be swift and sizable.

Not to pick on the NBA in particular (although its behavior has been especially public, cowardly, and so reprehensible), Apple and Alphabet, among lots of others, also have sacrificed principle for company “security” in the PRC, while favoring yuan, also, over principle.

No, taking principled positions don’t get complexified by the environment in which they’re taken. The fundamental tenets of ethics, of morality, are universal and constant; the only adjustments are in the manner of their implementation.  There’s nothing at all complex about that. Company personnel are either principled, ethical, moral, or they are not. These are not matters of situation or convenience.

And this:

Executives have to thread a needle when a company’s commercial and financial interests clash with the CEO’s personal values and the cultural values of an enterprise and its home country, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leadership expert at the Yale School of Management. “One of the rarely discussed downsides of globalization is you get caught in those crosscurrents,” he said.

Those “cross-currents” are irrelevant. Either the CEO or the enterprise have principles worth standing by and sacrificing for, or the CEO or the enterprise have no principles. It’s that simple.

Another misunderstanding is this one by Paul Argenti, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Professor of Corporate Communication:

The job of a CEO is not to save the world or make the world safe for democracy[.]

No, but it is a core part of his job to be, at all times and in all circumstances, ethical, moral, and not hypocritical.  An example of business’ glaring hypocrisy: the Business Roundtable. That group is carefully and with deliberation silent on the NBA’s, et al., meek acquiescence to the PRC’s tyrants.

One last misunderstanding, this one by Rick Wartzman, Drucker Institute’s Director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society [paraphrased by WSJ]:

The fracas sparked by ephemeral statements can distract from more substantive questions of social responsibility[.]

And

“What concerns me is whether statements, while important, become a substitute for the more meaningful work around what it means to be a responsible company and take care of all your stakeholders[.]”

Again, no. The only way such things can distract is if the statement maker chooses to be distracted. Staying focused on the business of the company in such a circumstance may be hard to do, but being hard means it’s eminently possible.

 

*The WSJ, like most of the NLMSM, refers to the People’s Republic of China as though it were the one and only. They ignore the nation just across a narrow straight from the mainland, the Republic of China that sits on the island of Taiwan.