Tag Archives: ethics

PRC Economic Opening

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Liu He, head of the People’s Republic of China’s Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, says,

We’ll open wider to the world across the board[.]

Liu promised that the PRC would

  • “substantially” open up the services industry, particularly the financial sector
  • let foreign securities firms own majority stakes in their Chinese ventures and…scrap foreign ownership limits on Chinese banks
  • reiterated past promises to relax restrictions on foreign companies in manufacturing, including in railway equipment, and to gradually lower tariffs on imported products such as automobiles

Even if they do these things (and that’s no certain thing: notice those past, unkept, promises), Liu’s—and Xi’s—rhetoric is just wind in the trees as long as the PRC demands that

  • foreign companies partner with domestic companies as a condition of doing business in the PRC
  • foreign companies are required to “share” technology and other intellectual property
  • foreign companies are required to give backdoors to the PRC government for the latter’s entry into those companies’ critical software and other proprietary information.

This not only is “legalized” theft, it’s backdoor protectionism.

Federal Funds Redistributions

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The Department of Justice says it’s going to issue subpoenas, if necessary, to get sanctuary-related documents from cities who have proclaimed themselves sanctuary cities.  Sarah Isgur Flores, DoJ Public Affairs Director:

These are the jurisdictions that have politicians that release criminal aliens back onto the street.

In conjunction with that, she says that, if further necessary, DoJ will redirect Byrne Grant* funds to other jurisdictions that actively support law enforcement rather than picking and choosing those laws that are convenient to them and ignoring others.

Strange bedfellows: this sort of thing should get the Progressive-Democrats fronting for sanctuary jurisdictions on board with many of us Conservatives working to end Federal funds redistribution of one State’s citizens’ tax monies to another State’s government.  That would reduce the ability of the Federal government to push around any of the States on domestic matters.

 

*Byrne Grant: Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program, a major source of funding for state and local (and tribal) jurisdictions in their fight against crime.  Ironically, it’s named for NYPD Officer Edward Byrne, who was killed 40 years ago protecting an immigrant witness who was to testify against drug dealers.  Two things that sound mighty familiar today.

It’s Somebody Else’s Fault

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Recall the 50,000 “missing” FBI text messages between FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok that just by coincidence happen to have been exchanged in the most critical period of interest to Congressional investigations.

It turns out that not only has the FBI “lost” these emails, they tried to cover it up [emphasis added].

[A] pair of Republican senators [Senators Ron Johnson (R, WI) and Chuck Grassley (R, IA)] pressed the Justice Department’s watchdog [Inspector General Michael Horowitz] to explain why he did not inform them last month that the FBI “failed to preserve” five months of text messages between Strzok and Page.

It gets better: the FBI now is claiming that

the Samsung 5 mobile phones it provided to employees “did not capture or store text messages due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

Right.  That must be it.  On the other hand, there’s still that beachfront property north of Santa Fe….

No, this smacks of evidence tampering to me.  Especially since what those emails might have shed some light on concerned things exposed by the emails that have been turned over, things like FBI agents’ “secret society” and the “secret meetings off-site” that they were holding, and the “back up plan” and “insurance” that Strzok and Page in particular seem to have been hatching.

Or, it really is all Samsung’s fault; their bug must have been produced while writing software in the distracting environment north of Santa Fe.

A Grasping EU

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French President Emmanuel Macron has repeated the EU’s diktat that Great Britain, after leaving the European Union, cannot have full trade relations with the EU unless the British open their borders to anyone in the EU who wants in and accept the dominance of EU courts over the British government and laws.  In addition to that, the Brits must make a “contribution to the budget.”

This is just a naked power grab by the EU, and national sovereignty be damned.  What the EU is doing here is just a kinder, gentler western Europe version of what Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying against Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland, and Moldova with.

Not even Putin is demanding tribute, though.

Great Britain can’t get out of the EU soon enough.

An Exam

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President Donald Trump had his annual physical earlier this week, and at his request, a mental acuity exam was administered to him as well.  The White House doctor, Navy Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, who performed the exams was the same White House physician for George Bush the Younger and for Barack Obama.  The results were presented by Jackson at a Tuesday presser, and at Trump’s insistence, Jackson stayed to answer, completely—no doctor patient confidentiality—every question the NLMSM (my term; Trump has a different term for that subset of the nation’s press) might ask.

In short, Trump has high cholesterol and needs to take his cholesterol meds, and he’s overweight.  Trump also got a perfect score on the mental acuity exam.

In long, the press spent an hour quizzing Jackson about the exam’s results.  An hour to get the results of an exam.

That hour demonstrates the NLMSM’s desperation to find something—anything—with which to smear the President.  It’ll be interesting to see if the NLMSM will let go of this particular bit of dishonesty.

Nope.  Jackson hadn’t even left the briefing room when MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow put out this.

You know what? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and raise the possibility that this statement was not written by the White House physician. […]

I’m not basing my skepticism on the authorship of this statement on the “Trumpiness” of the statement itself. The reason I think this might not have actually been written by the White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, is because that is not how your spell Ronny Jackson.

This is the offending tweet that formed the stuff of Maddow’s fevered nightmare:

Jackson’s misspelled first name proves—proves!—that the whole thing is a stinking lie and Trump, according to the NLMSM, really is crazier than a hoot owl.

And a Newsweek headline, via Yahoo!:

Trump at Risk for a Heart Attack With Dangerous Weight and Skyrocketing Cholesterol