Tag Archives: responsibilities

The UN’s Irrelevancy

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Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, the United Nations’ top human rights official, said US President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS and others could be seen as incitement to violence against journalists.

And he said that with a straight face, too.  Never mind that Trump has never threatened a journalist with violence; although, journalists have questioned his sanity and called for his elimination.

Deutsche Welle‘s own piece carrying the UN statement contributes to the distortion.  Their own link demonstrates the lie of DW‘s contention.

In February, he dubbed many mainstream media outlets “enemies of the American people.”

Here’s the tweet Trump actually sent.

I understand that American English is not the primary language of the translator of either DW piece, but surely he understands the nature of noun modifiers—after all, the German language uses them, too.  FAKE NEWS clearly fills that role and thereby limits the noun media to that subset that are purveyors of fake news.

Maybe DW is becoming irrelevant along with the UN.

The Left and the Left’s Police

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And the misrepresentation of the NLMSM.

A hundred members of Left-wing hate groups, including Antifa—hooded, no less, and armed with clubs—”broke through” police lines in Berkeley Sunday to attack the leader of a Conservative group, Patriot Prayer, which the NLMSM claims is “right-wing” rather than Conservative, and a separate group of four.

Notice that.  The Left’s hate groups are hooded and carrying weapons; their targets are unarmed with faces bare, not looking for trouble and unafraid of being identified.

There’s more:

The protesters who wore hoods to conceal their identities chased Patriot Prayer group leader Joey Gibson from Sunday’s rally in a Berkeley park. As Gibson backed away with his hands in the air, the protesters pepper sprayed him.
…
Separately, the anarchist group beat, kicked and punched four other people at the rally.

How did these thugs “break through” the police lines?  They didn’t.  The police deliberately let them through.

Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood says police made a strategic decision to let a group of more than 100 black-clad anarchists enter the park Sunday once it became clear there would not be dueling protests between right and left.

He said “the potential use of force became very problematic” because thousands of mostly peaceful left-wing protesters were already inside the park.

Greenwood said he decided to let the black-clad protesters demonstrate in the park because there was “no need for a confrontation over a grass patch.”

Of course, Greenwood knew there would be violence; that’s what  hooded Antifa, et al., were there for.  The confrontation over a grass patch that Greenwood wanted to avoid was between his police and the Left’s hate groups.

Equal protection under law only applies to the Left.  Other Americans don’t deserve it.

Another Cynical Mueller Leak

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Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’s becoming increasingly crystalline that, whatever purpose Special Counsel Robert Mueller has in his “investigation,” it’s a dishonest one.  That’s the only reason that occurs to me for his careful string of “leaks” to the public, of which this is only the latest.

Investigators working for Mr Mueller have been conducting interviews and collecting information as they seek to determine whether Mr Flynn was involved in Mr Smith’s effort, and if his son, Michael G Flynn, and the consulting firm Flynn Intel Group had a role, the people said.

There’s just no reason for these leaks to be occurring, and they could not be, in their number or in the length of the ongoing stream of them, without Mueller’s active approval.

And this especially potentially damaging leak:

US officials with knowledge of the intelligence said investigators also have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr Flynn via an intermediary.

While it’s easy enough for thinking persons to speculate that such intelligence agency reports exist, the fact of their existence is likely classified.  While it’s easy enough, also, for thinking persons to draw conclusions of their own consistent with what these leaked intel reports appear to claim, the reports’ contents and conclusions, even in general terms, likely are classified, also.  How is this sort of information being leaked?  Why is Mueller allowing it?

Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to comment.

Of course he did.  If Mueller or any of his team spoke on the record, they’d be unable to release as much “information” regarding this ongoing investigation.

My New Book Is Out

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Titled A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars, it’s available in Kindle format here.  It presents this Conservative’s view of the proper conduct of a just war: when it’s appropriate to join one, how it should be fought once joined (regardless of how or why it was joined), and importantly, what should be done with the nation that unjustly attacked.

Since St Augustine of Hippo’s exegeses of the early 5th century, Western thinkers have attempted to define Just War in their recognition that war is a part of the human condition. Through this, they hoped to limit the onset and scope of war and its damage to those innocently caught in it.

Many Just War theories center on the idea that human lives are God’s to take. Thus, war as a human endeavor begins inherently immoral and unjust, and it’s the war fighters’ responsibility to make the case that their war—this war, this time—is just and then to fight it justly.  My argument proceeds from that point.

Unfortunately, Just War arguments generally stop short of war’s true completion. The war is entered, it’s fought, it’s won or lost. But then…what? Just War theories until very recently haven’t asked that question, much less essayed an answer.

Is that all there is, though? Is a conflict over just because the enemy has been utterly defeated or a peace treaty signed? No, the conflict simply slides into a post-war recovery effort by the victor which may or may not include the loser.

In truth, peace by itself cannot be a just end of war; mere restoration of quietude is not a proper goal of victory. Nor can mere victory be the goal of war. True victory, victory in a just war must entail the restoration or creation of justice and freedom—of both, since neither can exist without the other.

Given justice in entering the war, the defender then must fight to a conclusion that not only redresses the wrong inflicted by the war’s attacker but also maximizes the probability that the aggressor will not—cannot—aggress again for a reasonably foreseeable future. Notice the implication: this requires the defender to fight to total, unconditioned victory.

Brain Burp

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[Because this is a family blog.]

I had this one this morning while out on one of my walks.  It concerns a free market economy, bankruptcy, the bankrupt company’s employees, and what we ought to do about those employees.

In an ideal world’s free market, then, here is my gaseous expulsion.  It comes against the backdrop of my long-held disdain for the citizens of one State being forced to send their tax dollars to another State via the mechanism of Federal transfer payments in order to indemnify the recipient against its own foolish spending.  That backdrop also includes James Madison’s remark, on the occasion of Congress’ considering money transfers to Haitians after a devastating earthquake

that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

However, our prosperity has grown to the point that our free market imperatives need not remain so cold, and it is in our society’s interests to help the dislocated—employees who’ve lost their jobs due to their employer’s bankruptcy, in the present case—get back on their feet and resume being productive members of their communities and the nation.

Thus: I say, regarding companies faced with bankruptcy, that if the participants in our free market economy—private citizens and their businesses—do not think a company worth saving, then the Federal government should accept that judgment and not intervene to bail out that company: the company, regardless of its size, should be allowed to fail.  I think the same tack should be taken by State governments, but that’s for the citizens of each State to decide.  In the event, Federal monies supporting bailouts should not go to those States that choose to do them.

Against that, I propose assistance to the employees of the bankrupt in the form of a Bankruptcy Jobs Retraining Program, which would operate along the following lines.

Employees below a certain level in the bankrupt company (the idea being, after all, to help the employees, not the “managers,” even if it was market events and not strictly management failure that generated the conditions leading to bankruptcy) would get a job retraining stipend.  It’s important to specify, too, that the stipend would not be an education stipend, but only a job (re)training stipend.  The stipend would have the following parameters:

  • expire after a specified number of days elapsed in training
  • be issued as a loan to the retrainee, with payments—principle and interest—due monthly. If the retrainee gets a job within a specified time after graduation and holds it for a continuous year (with “continuous” defined by the nature of the job: some, like construction, tend toward seasonality), the loan would be converted to a grant with no loan payments due.  Disposition of the loan in the event of the retrainee not working for a continuous year should include at a minimum these possibilities: the retrainee would make payments from the day of graduation, payments would simply accrue and not be due until failure to get a job or on leaving the job for any cause before the first year was up, retrainees aging out of the training program without graduation
  • could not be used more than once in any specified interval (for instance, a 10-year period). A lifetime cap seems infeasible because the (retrained) employee has no control over market events or management failures that might drive his new employer bankrupt
  • a retraining expense amount, not a living expense amount

The issuance of the stipend would be managed by two or three private enterprises that are independent of the Federal government and independent of each other.  These Stipend Issuers would be funded by no-strings grants from the government, and they would be solely responsible for dispensing the funds.

Stipend Issuers would develop market indices that identify and track the most employer-needed jobs that have the shortest labor supply—the largest job gap—independently of geography.  The Job Gap Indexes would rank the gaps, and the Stipend Issuers would pay the largest stipend to retrainees training for those jobs with the largest gap and that have the most expensive training.  Whether the expense and gap should be measured at a national level or regionally is a question to be settled in open debate.

Job Gap Indexes shouldn’t be that hard to develop.  Lots of investors and investment companies and other entities (e.g., The Wall Street Journal) already are quite skilled at developing indexes for assessing/tracking investment markets; a Job Gap index is not that different.

Retraining could be done anywhere, independently of where the retrained-to job is located.  A San Francisco resident, retraining for a job type where the largest gap is in New York, for instance, would be able to take the retraining program in San Francisco.

From that, Stipend Issuers would be authorized to commit a small per centage of their Federal Retraining Grants to relocation assistance, with the proviso that this diversion would be for assistance, not for the total cost of moving.

Since unions are, by their own definition, in the business of helping their membership, union members would see their stipends reduced by the total amount of union dues (including the portion the union claims was earmarked for political activities) paid by the union member retrainee in the twelve months prior to the employing company filing for bankruptcy.