Category Archives: ethics

Privacy

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Now Facebook wants to hook up with banks to collect our financial information and our shopping habits as revealed by our credit card charging history.

No. Not ever. Not with Facebook’s lack of concern for our privacy or our personal data.

Facebook said it wouldn’t use the bank data for ad-targeting purposes or share it with third parties.

Sure. I might know about some beachfront property for sale north of Santa Fe, too.

Any bank that hooks up with Facebook in any way loses my business altogether.  Full stop.

An Oxymoron

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Apple has chosen to conceal accesses to Infowars by removing links to it from Apple’s podcast facility because Apple thinks Infowars is too far right for Apple’s taste and because the site pushes bad speech.

This is rank censorship.

Eliminating easy access to Infowars podcasts marks a rare, prominent foray for Apple into an issue confronting many major internet companies: how to remove hateful or conspiratorial messages from their platforms without infringing on free speech.

This is an impossible task to achieve legitimately.  Our 1st Amendment is explicitly intended to protect unpopular or disgusting or hateful speech as well as “approved” speech.  The Amendment recognizes the ability of individual American citizens to think for themselves and to evaluate for themselves what speech they choose to hear, free from Government “advice.”

It’s true enough that the Amendment enjoins Government and not private enterprise.  However, the principle the Amendment protects is a universal one; it applies to all of us, individuals and enterprises alike.

Apple’s MFWIC, Tim Cook, clearly thinks he’s above all of this.  His attaboy for resisting the FBI’s demand that Apple destroy individuals’ ability to encrypt effectively their private communications has been used up.

NLMSM

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They’ve completely thrown in the towel on their job and on their highly self-touted role as the Fourth Estate.  Even Fox News‘ Jon Scott, on his Sunday 1700CST/1800EST program, made the conscious decision to make pressmen’s hurt feelings from President Trump’s picking on them the lede and centerpiece of his “reporting.”

Our economy is going gangbusters after years of doldrums, our immigration situation is in flux, there’s a tariff conflict in progress, there’s an election later this week in a key Congressional district, the Russians are doing things, the PRC is doing things, northern Korea is doing things, Iran is doing things, the EU is doing things, and the Trump administration is doing things about all of those.

Scott, though, chose to wallow—at the top of his lungs while quoting persons of the NLMSM from other media outlets who were wallowing at the tops of their lungs—in the misery of his hurt feelings.

Because pressmen are the center of our nation’s doings, and not those doings themselves.

It’s disgusting, and it would be shameful, except the pressmen of the NLMSM don’t have the grace to know shame.

“I’m Confused”

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Here’s an exchange (edited slightly for spacing) between Senator Mazie Hirono (D, HI) and ICE Executive Associate Director for Enforcement and Removal Operations Matthew Albence as the latter testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary last Tuesday.

Albence: I think we’re missing the point. These individuals are there because they have broken a law.

Hirono interrupted, insisting that the illegal immigrants being held in the detention centers “have broken a law only as deemed so by” President Donald Trump.

Albence: No, Ma’am—they are there for violation of Title VIII of the US Immigration and Nationality Act, OK?  That’s illegal entry; it’s both a criminal and civil violation. They are in those [detention centers] pending the outcome of that civil immigration process. They have broken the law.

Hirono: My understanding is that under zero tolerance these are no longer civil proceedings, but in fact are criminal proceedings. Is that so?

Albence: They were criminal proceedings when the Border Patrol prosecuted them. But at the conclusion of that process—once the individual came into ICE custody—they would go through administrative proceedings.

Hirono: I’m confused.

That law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, is 66 years old, and it’s been enforced with varying degrees of diligence for all of those two-thirds of a century.

Hirono knows this.  Her pretended confusion says volumes about her; sadly, it adds not a syllable to any necessary discussion about our immigration laws and the appropriate disposition of those who break them.

Equal Outcomes

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New York has them.

A 7-yr-old in New York tried to sell lemonade from his stand last week, and he was shut down by the State’s Health Department.  He didn’t have the required business license, you see.

Up stepped Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who offered to pony up for the boy’s license next year.  As if a child needs one.  However, as the WSJ put it regarding this Progressive-Democrat version of largesse,

will [Cuomo] pay for every child in New York caught up in illicit lemonade sales?

And

New York can’t keep the subways from breaking down, its public housing has a lead-poisoning scandal, and Mr Cuomo’s crony capitalists who received state subsidies were recently convicted of corruption. But the Health Department is crackerjack at treating a 7-year-old selling lemonade like he’s dumping waste in our drinking water.

New York: an equal opportunity failure inducer.