Category Archives: Ethics

UPDATE II: CPUKE 2012 (FREEDOM WATCH: Teaching Tool, But Not the People’s Libertarianism)

Elections, Ethics, Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Neoconservatism, Private Property, Republicans, Ron Paul

OMIGOD: Look at the speaker lineup at CPAC 2012, currently underway. There is nary a place in this GOP for our ideas—also, those of the Founding Fathers. They’ve even called on little, retarded RINO Lolita SE Cupp to perform. Cupp can barely conceal her vacuity in this MSNBC clip, where she showcases her grasp of American liberties and her debating skills with the trademark wild grimaces and gestures. Desperately, she latches onto a catchy phrase the host has floated, so that a paraphrasing of the host replaces serious argument.

And where’s Ron Paul at CPUKE?

I call her The Helmet. Callista Gingrich speaks, or shall I say issues forth?

What would a Republican Party gathering be without the Synopohobic vulgarist, Donald Tramp

This looks interesting:

The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity
– Wilson C
Sponsored by: ProEnglish
Speakers: Robert Vandervoort, Executive Director, ProEnglish; John Derbyshire, contributing
editor at National Review and author of We Are Doomed; Peter Brimelow, author of The Patriot
Game: National Dreams and Political Realities and founder of VDARE.com; Dr. Serge
Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor for Chronicles magazine; & Dr. Rosalie Porter, author of
American Immigrant: My Life In Three Languages, chairwoman of the board, ProEnglish
Open to all CPAC attendees

The agenda item below is plain ridiculous, given that Baby Bush was every bit as bad for civil liberties as his “non-identical, evil ideological twin, Barack Obama.”

Obama’s Agents Are Reading Your Emails: Privacy Concerns of the Digital Age – Taylor
Sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute

A lot of awards conservatives give themselves. And lots of book peddling and signings by the pols, which, as you know, I believe to be a symptom of America’s rotten politics. And that includes the Ron Paul signings.

“Politicians—all public servants—should be put on a very tight leash and prohibited from exploiting their already exploitative positions for yet more profit. (Then again, you know that I believe government workers should be disqualified from voting. For one thing, they don’t pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. Taxpayers pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. For another, they are in the position to vote themselves higher and higher wages. Which they do.)”

Sure, I like that Paul gets our message out with his books, but I think that all US politicians should be barred from using their powerful positions to peddle products, however laudable. And freedom of speech has nothing to do with this. Freedom of speech is not immutable, but tethered to property. So long as they live on our dime; the oink sector should be prohibited from profiting on our dime.

The Founders would have been appalled by the celebrity and high profiles politicians pursue on the public purse.

Myron, or anyone else: Time permitting, do regale BAB readers with a precis of one of the speeches.

UPDATE I: FREEDOM WATCH NEWS. Sorry for your loss, John. I tuned in yesterday, then switched off when “good friends of the show” warrior Bob Barr (hardly a libertarian) and Kirstin Powers (banal brain) hogged the screen and were fawned upon. Again, I’m sorry for the fans, although I seldom watched an entire episode because of the typical, mainstream, buddy-buddy, close to power, Beltway think-tank bias that came to pervade and dominate it.

RELATED: “More Reasons to Secede From The Pundit Pantheons of Fox, MSNBC and CNN.” I guess I’m uncompromising.

UPDATE II (Feb. 13): MORE FREEDOM WATCH NEWS. We agree, John, but even if we didn’t: “respek,” as Ali G. would preach. As a general educational tool, The Judge did good. Still, I often had to switch off even mid-soliloquy, due to the endless annoying “What ifs”: “what if the government this, what if the government that”X 100. The style of the show—that includes the pompous music and the screaming—did damage to the contents. It bled into the content and damaged it. Ironically, I switched to RT on the day of the sad announcement, because I could not stomach the Powers and Barr combo. The show was full of these characters which turn off good, gun-touting, property minded Americans. It also crapped all over cops—continuously—often for rounding up illegal immigrants. Americans hate that. And it offered the hideous contradiction vis-a-vis immigration: when you like what the federal Frankenstein does (help illegals remain in the states), you stick up for Federal overreach, rather than for the right of the people of the states to evict trespassers. Sorry, John: This was not the libertarianism of The People.

UPDATE II: BHO: Uncle Sam’s Assassin (Killer Drones)

America, Barack Obama, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Just War, Law

The following is excerpted form “BHO: Uncle Sam’s Assassin,” , which you can catch on WND and on RT.

“Villagers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen already know it, although the people on the ground near American drone bases in Somalia and Ethiopia are still blissfully unaware of it—Barack Obama is the uncrowned king of the killer drone.

In Iraq, ordinary men and women scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, as promised, or targeted by Hellfire missiles. Ditto the Iranians, who recently downed, and promptly displayed to the world, an RQ-170 Sentinel, launched into Iranian airspace by Uncle Sam.

According to the Washington Post, ‘When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.’

The New America Foundation tabled the findings to reflect the carnage in Pakistan by presidency.

Between 2004 and 2007, when Genghis Bush reigned supreme, America killed 112 Pakistanis. The total number of Pakistanis eliminated by drone between 2004 and 2011 was 2,680!

The POTUS’s growing fleet of armed Predators and Reapers is operated by both the CIA and the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command, each, evidently, with its own Kill List, and all under, ‘a complicated web of overlapping authorities.’ …

On Google, Obama was sticking to his guns. ‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,’ the president insisted. How many innocents has Obama been willing to write-off as acceptable collateral damage? For every one militant assassinated, 15 civilians are murdered. …

Little Shakira is the poster child for Uncle Sam’s outreach in the region…”

READ THE COMPLETE COLUMN, “BHO: Uncle Sam’s Assassin,” now on WND or on RT.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “tweet” and “Share” the weekly column.

UPDATED I: “Killer Drones” on RT. Please click to “Like,” “Share” and Tweet.

UPDATE II (Feb. 7): Not that I put much stock in “American Democracy” (we were founded as a republic), but the information in this Atlantic essay is useful: “Waging War in Secret vs. American Democracy.”

Captain Coward Will Pay

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Crime, Ethics, Europe, Government, Morality

How does a subhuman like Francesco Schettino get a job ferrying 4000 people across the seas? It could be worse. Someone of George Bush’s ilk or Barack Obama’s caliber could—and did—get the endorsement of millions to shepherd them into war and economic ruin. Not once, but twice in Bush’s case. So, in counting the sick-making ways of the Captain who capsized the Costa Concordia off the Tuscan coast—causing the death of five, so far (least 15 people are still missing, including two Americans)—remember this: Schettino will be punished. Bush, Obama and their progeny will be pampered and paraded around with pride for the rest of their sorry lives. Back to Costa Concordia:

The dumb-as-a-rock captain blames a rock that was not supposed to be there.

Schettino insisted he was twice as far out and said the ship ran aground because the rocks weren’t marked on his nautical charts. “We were navigating approximately 300 meters (yards) from the rocks,” he told Mediaset television. “There shouldn’t have been such a rock. On the nautical chart it indicated that there was water deep below.”

What sickens me is that this excuse for a captain concedes to “maneuvering the ship in ‘touristic navigation,” a mere 300 meters from the shore, “implying a route that was a deviation from the norm and designed to entertain the tourists.”

Costa captains have occasionally steered the ship near port and sounded the siren in a special salute … Such a nautical “fly-by” was staged last August, prompting the town’s mayor to send a note of thanks to the commander for the treat it provided tourists who flock to the island, local news portal GiglioNews.it reported.

Schettino had been paid by the passengers of the Costa Concordia. Yet he was attempting to entertain and impress spectators at the cost of those who had trusted him with their lives, and had paid him too.

Not having a sense of who your asset is; where your financial/fiduciary loyalty/interests belong; who you should treat well because your endeavor depends on him: this is a phenomenon I’ve encountered a lot.

Also clear from the reports is that “the captain abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had escaped. According to the Italian navigation code, a captain who abandons a ship in danger can face up to 12 years in prison.”

A French couple who boarded the Concordia in Marseille, Ophelie Gondelle and David Du Pays, told the Associated Press they saw the captain in a lifeboat, covered by a blanket, well before all the passengers were off the ship.

This is not the first time that a captain of one of these floating cities jumped ship first.

UPDATE II: War Games: Smash ‘Em & Put Them Together Again

Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Terrorism, The State, War

Look; isn’t Uncle Sam wonderful? This little Pakistani girl below “was burned beyond recognition by a U.S. drone and left for dead in a trashcan. … She was found by a medical mission team two years ago and was described as ‘lucky’ by staff as two other children found with her were killed by the military attack.”

The child was “brought to the U.S. from her home in Pakistan,” where American surgeons patched her up, sort of. That’s the least we Americans can do. One of her new caregivers named the child Shakira, which means thankful. Evidently some dolt thinks little Shakira should be grateful that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men COULD put little Shakira together again.

UPDATE I (Dec. 23): FROM “JUST WAR FOR DUMMIES” (March 12, 2003):

I’m no pacifist. While I don’t condone the lingering American presence in Afghanistan, and while I doubt the abilities of the U.S. military to contain al-Qaida there, I supported going after bin Laden’s group in that country. That was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense, accommodated within St. Augustine’s teachings, whereby a just war is one “that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects.”
Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban openly succored the organization and its masterminding leadership. Mr. Bush had asked the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused, insisting on defending their murderous guests.

UPDATE II (Dec. 24): In reply to Theodor Lauppert below: And this writer “isn’t generally considered a source for” the strengthening of the positive law, international or other.