Category Archives: Ethics

UPDATED: What’s Jared Kushner Up To?

Donald Trump, Ethics, Family, Foreign Policy, War

Initially, is my guess, Jared Kushner was in IT to ensure that Princess Ivanka’s position in high society was not damaged by the antics of father Donald Trump. Jared’s own father, Charles Kushner, lost his standing in society. Son Jared could not allow the same to happen to his young family. Kushner’s psychological makeup is such that he’s exerting influence, to nudge President Trump toward mainstream positions, wherein lie acceptability and respectability.

But Kushner soon got carried away. Now he’s in the thick of the Trump Administration, allegedly at war with OUR MAN STEVE BANNON.

Had President Trump not flouted rules against nepotism, the Kushner controversy might have been averted. Via Vanity Fair:

… A 1967 law bans presidents from appointing family members to government jobs and Cabinet positions. (Shortly after his election in 1960, John Kennedy appointed his younger brother Bobby as attorney general.) And while Kushner’s proximity to the president raises all sorts of ethical questions, the more pressing curiosity is why Kushner is enduring all this tumult in the first place. Why would a mild-mannered Jewish kid from an establishment Democratic family, particularly one who enjoys a charmed life in Manhattan, defy what would seem to be his interests, his scruples, and his easy existence? …

Instead, “Jared Kushner[‘s] … national security portfolio—China, Mexico, even Iraq, where was he photographed last week flying over Baghdad in a helicopter—has been expanding at a breathtaking rate.”

Alarming indeed.

UPDATES:

No war in Syria!

Kushner couple Holding court.

Humanitarian wars bring society women together. Sick.

If true, why is Trump letting this woman run wild?

I said Tulsi.

More than we bargained for in Jared?

The orientation I care about is no wars for naught.

Make Syria Great Again? Is that it?

McCain: his daughter, dumber than dad, is on the Fox News Channel.

Demoting the Don.

Show me the evidence, but even that doesn’t justify war according to War Powers doctrine and Constitution:

A new deadly troika:

UPDATE IV (2/26): Julie Borowski’s Wrong: Judge Andrew Napolitano Is NO Rightist Libertarian

Ethics, Free Speech, libertarianism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property

I call Judge Andrew Napolitano a left-libertarian. I prove it. Have done so over years.

Consistency is the touchstone of truth. If you keep changing your philosophical orientation as evinced by your changing positions, you’re more of a creedal politician, than a principled thinker.

Julie Borowski, on the other hand, asserts that Judge Andrew Napolitano is a bona fide rightist libertarian.

Ms. Borowski, do some digging. A search on Barely A Blog is a start. Here’s some of the yield:

Andrew Napolitano: Some Libertarian

Ann Coulter Offers A Corrective To Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Napolitano’s Left-Libertarian Confusion

Fighting Words From Left-Libertarian Egalitarians

Napolitano-Koch Connection? (Sixth Sense)

The Neoconservative & Left-Libertarian Positions: Liberty Is Universal

14th Amendment Jurisprudence For Dummies

She is “speaking” (I wish I could do that baby-doll voice) in response to Richard Spencer crashing the Students for Liberty Conference, a bit of performance art that brought out the leftist in the apoplectic attendees. (Yes, free speech belongs to the person who paid for the event. Still, don’t be so rude.)

I’ve tracked the Judge for a while. Unless a recent political conversion makes you a creedal rightist, then he isn’t one. A LOT of libertarians have suddenly found their inner rightist recently, when they crashed into the reality of Trump Nation. I respect the likes of Julie Borowski more. She sticks with her left-libertarian positions.

So, do opportunistic libertarian converts who, say, were open-borders until Trump, count as principled, creedal rightists? What CRAP. Actually, a good percentage of Fox News commentators were Never Trumpsters. For example, the Schlapp couple now riding high:

Much like neocons or liberals, libertarians move in tribes (although I have yet to be invited to join any of their intramural gatherings). Certain groups position themselves as top dogs. They enjoy donor and think-tank backing, and can reinvent themselves the way a slut like Madonna does (although, to her credit, Madonna is consistent philosophically. It’s her face that keeps mutating).

Many of those dubbed Right libertarians flirted with open borders and other abominations (as has the Judge), until recently. At the same time, these libertarians have ostracized me for a consistent, restricted immigration position, and a support, since time immemorial, of Israel’s rights in the land (as against those of the MOPE, Most Oppressed People Ever, etc). Our reformed libertarians (many of whom fell out with me over Israel), now make their new-found case for Israel, ponderously, by citing obscure Israeli/Jewish teens. It’s amusing, and certainly leftist. Cultural leftists love “authoritative” kids. Maybe arguing with and citing kids is an intellectual cop-out (like Bill O’Reilly who feels more comfortable with a 22-year-old blondie on his show than with Ann Coulter).

To this hard rightist, there is no kid worth listening to (except for Milo , seriously). To quote Florence King: “… children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, ‘Do you have enough room in the toes?’ More on being culturally rightist in “THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES.”

In any event, Judge Nap is certainly not Right, although he’s smart enough to so position himself, since the Trump tsunami.

As for Jeffery Tucker. Yes, he has moved left. But, as a personal matter, Jeff has always been respectful and decent to me. (I know him as a good man.) When allowed, he also published my work (“Democratic Despotism,” for example). There is a saying in Hebrew, I remember you the grace of youth or beginnings …

UPDATE I (2/26): Love him, just don’t mislabel Judge Nap as a rightist libertarian:

UPDATE II: Facebook Thread.

UPDATE III: “Napolitano-Koch Connection? (Sixth Sense)”

UPDATE IV (2/27): Jack Kerwick has chronicled this phenomenon of Hollywood of the punditry like no other. Have fame, will travel. No matter what you say or promote, you get to redefine yourself anytime, anywhere.

UPDATE V (3/27): Civil Rights.

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Jack Ma Of Alibaba Way More Believable Than Mass Media

Business, Donald Trump, Ethics, Media

From the vantage point of the malfunctioning media, when it comes to President-elect Donald Trump, all news is bad news. Warn the warped minds of mass media: “Alibaba’s promise to Trump of 1 million jobs” is not to be believed.

Well of course.

Don’t be fooled by the latest billionaire meeting at Trump Tower claiming to have made “great” progress in American job creation: Alibaba won’t create 1 million jobs in the U.S. as promised, at least not directly. On Monday, Alibaba BABA, +0.88% Chief Executive Jack Ma became the latest CEO to tout job creation after a 40-minute meeting with Trump in the newly-minted politician’s gold-plated tower. There’s no better music to President-elect Donald Trump’s ears than pledges from CEOs to keep jobs in the U.S. or to create new ones. Trump ran much of his campaign on ensuring U.S. jobs are kept away from foreigners and aren’t outsourced to other countries, and he’s gone through great, highly-publicized lengths to prove his election is the reason why jobs are coming to or staying in America.

However, Ma’s assertion that he’s going to create a million new jobs in the U.S. by helping small businesses sell products and services to China is a stretch. The Chinese e-commerce giant is merely upping its own investments to appeal to U.S. small businesses, providing them with incentives, such as user data and logistics capabilities, in hopes that more American brands will sell items on its e-commerce sites. The increased demand on those U.S. goods from the Chinese middle class will prompt, it hopes, increased hiring as U.S. brands expand to meet the heightened demand. …

MORE.

One thing’s for sure: Jack Ma of Alibaba is more believable and credible than American media. Just about anyone is.

Making America’s Kids Great Again

Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, Etiquette, Family, Gender

A change of pace for a change is “Making America’s Kids Great Again,” now on The Daily Caller. An excerpt:

… True-blue cultural traditionalism doesn’t deify kids. Deification of The Child is the hallmark of an infantile—perhaps even an immoral—society, because inverting the natural order will often result in great social ill.

“In America,” observed Oscar Wilde, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”

In China, on the other hand, they’re inclined to consider a youth-obsessed society such as ours a silly society. The standard inquiry, I am told, made by Taiwanese engineers about their American counterparts in hardware engineering is, “How many grey hairs and no-hairs are in the group?” Unlike their youth-worshiping American colleagues, these wise Confucians reason that the presence of “grey hairs and no-hairs” in the collaborating high-tech team bodes better for the project. …

… Read the rest. “Making America’s Kids Great Again” is now on The Daily Caller. Share and Like.

And consider this familiar vignette, by way of an example: Today at Costco (that place would be perfect if it banned women), a mother and her young son straddled a counter I wanted to access. I waited patiently, my cart parked out of the way to allow others easy access. But there Miss Mom stood, oblivious to every other shopper, focused on teaching her brat consumerism. When I used to take my little girl to the local supermarket in South Africa, I taught her awareness not of the products, although there was some of that (and a lot of calculating the change we were owned from a note). But mainly, my daughter learned civility, social skills. If an elderly lady dropped something, the little girl was to pick it up. She was not to yell her demands out loud, although we’d always have a treat. She was to learn to make way, allow others access, say “excuse me,” if she bumped somebody or wanted a person to give way, and generally show awareness of her social milieu. Today, moms impart nothing but that the kid is the center of the universe, there to satisfy his contrived curiosity, his insatiable wants; do his label reading and list making at deafening decibels; get in everybody’s way, and generally impose himself on other shoppers.