Category Archives: Morality

Steve Jobs & The Paramountcy Of Privacy

Business, Capitalism, Celebrity, Conservatism, Ethics, Human Accomplishment, Media, Morality, Pop-Culture, Technology, The Zeitgeist

THE PARAMOUNTCY OF PRIVACY. I’m not particularly familiar or enamored of the new gadgets, although I fully appreciate their contribution to humans and to humanity. I tend to stick with CDs (for the best in sound), books for reading, and the Internet and email for communicating.

Still, as a capitalist and a communicator, I admired Steve Jobs greatly. I particularly liked the precision and sophistication with which he used language. I appreciated the amalgamation of drama and simplicity in the Job’s message. Jobs was never a blabber mouth.

But most of all, I identified with Steve Jobs’ acute sense of privacy. He was a very private man.

For one of the most recognizable men on earth, Steve Jobs was quite elusive. To me, that is paramount—and the very essence of greatness. Privacy is what made Jobs a conservative persona. The fact that Jobs knew the importance of boundaries between what a person shared with the world and what he kept to himself gave him the bearing of a champion. Only a private man, in my view, can strive to true greatness.

When Jobs died I was wrapping up a WND column about yet another repulsive character that is about to join the pantheon of American exhibitionists—liars, cheats, whores (not the good kind), and worse—who’ve shared (or will share) a couch with that vulgarizer, Oprah. What a study in contrasts!

In Ayn Rand’s magnificent words, “civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.” The heroic and creative inner struggle is what brings out the best in man. I repeat myself, I know: My heroes are in the Greek tradition: silent, stoic, principled yet private. That is what I saw in Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs (1955–2011)

America, Business, Capitalism, Celebrity, Ethics, Human Accomplishment, Morality, Pop-Culture, Technology

Ryan McMaken at Mises.org eulogizes Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs, one of the most important entrepreneurs and innovators of both the 20th and 21st centuries, has died. Will he receive the sort of veneration reserved to politicians when they die? That’s unlikely, although Steve Jobs typically did more good for humanity every day before lunch time than any politician has ever done in his whole life.
Jobs should be considered a great American icon in the same way that Michelangelo is associated with Italy or Mozart with Austria.
When foreigners walk into “American-themed” gift shops in America, they should be greeted with commemorative plates bearing Jobs’s face.
Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen since we have to honor great humanitarians like nuker-in-chief Harry Truman instead.
And of course, Jobs did great things for all humans, and not just Americans.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs.

APPLE–Remembering Steve Jobs: “… Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built…”

Playboy before “The Girls Next Door”. Via LewRockwell.com, here is the definitive Playboy interview with Steven Jobs.

UPDATE II: One more Media Matters con man (A Liberal’s Moral Compass)

Classical Liberalism, Founding Fathers, Ilana Mercer, Journalism, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Rights, South-Africa

The following is excerpted from y “One more Media Matters con man,” now on WND.COM:

“Terry Krepel authors a website called ConWebWatch. ‘The focus of ConWebWatch,’ Krepel declares on the site, is ‘the ConWeb—large, well-funded, Internet-based conservative ‘news’ organizations [such as] NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and CNSNews.com.’ (I’ve inserted words in parenthesis so as to alert the reader to the edit. Accurate reporting should enable readers to distinguish editorial from authorial input.)

As a biographical note, Krepel adds that he ‘became employed by Media Matters for America in July 2004.’ At his Huffington-Post perch, Krepel is duly described as a ‘Media Matters senior editor.’ Media Matters for America purports to be a ‘progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.’

Our ace writer ought to have stated that he has been employed at Media Matters since 2004. ‘I became employed’ thus might be ugly English for, ‘I was once but am no longer employed by Media Matters.’ Conversely, perhaps this is a fellow whose intelligible written English is confined to the words ‘racial discrimination’?

Himself Krepel describes as ‘a veteran of 17 years in professional journalism as a newspaper writer, designer and editor. I know the ins and outs of the business and how it can be used and misused—and I see how the conservative Internet media is misusing journalism.’

His mission Krepel defines as documenting ‘the distortions, excesses and hypocrisy of these conservative media sites.’ Almost daily Krepel will dissect what Joseph Farah, Erik Rush, Aaron Klein, Jerome Corsi and others on WND.com and CNSNews.com have to say.

His method, crows Krepel, is to ‘hoist the conservative media on the petard of hypocrisy, accuracy and objectivity’ by ‘using their own words.’

Untrue; at least in my case.

Krepel has libeled me, but not by ‘using [my] own words'” … Disputes about democracy notwithstanding, there can be no disagreement over Krepel’s crappy journalism.”…

The complete column is “One more Media Matters con man,” now on WND.COM.

My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.

A newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy is also on sale.

UPDATE I (Sep. 2): With the same ease with which Krepel left-off quotations around my original words—so as to seamlessly introduce his interpretations of those words—so too could this purveyor of crappy journalism have suddenly “added” the required quotations, once exposed. In anticipation, I have captured the original (June 12) Krepel item. The omission begins with, “Washington and Westminster,” and ends with “the disaster that is post-apartheid South Africa.” Here it is in the original:

UPDATE II: A LIBERAL’S MORAL COMPASS. Terry Krepel thinks he has hit a home run on the Facebook thread at “One more Media Matters con man.” There, Krepel implies that Eugene Terre’Blanche deserved to die, even though the old man was the non-aggressor at the crime scene, and had served his time in jail for his past transgressions (which I am not here adjudicating).
Heaven’s! I’m speechless. All Krepel has demonstrated is that left-liberals (like himself) are every bit as blood thirsty and bereft of a moral compass as the neoconservatives they often critique.
Every remotely sane individual can see where this kind of sentiment leads. And every libertarian can see why the US is in such terrible moral shape. There is no difference between affiliates of the political factions as far as ethics go. “So long as my guy is killing off the guys I dislike—I’m WINNING”: That’s the pervading mindset. Justice be damned.

Treason Tarted-Up

Crime, Ethics, Free Speech, GUNS, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Law, Morality, Paleolibertarianism

“Fatally flawed.” “A colossal failure of leadership.” “Deadly miscalculation.” “Flawed assumptions.” These are some of the euphemisms used by America’s governing traitors to finesse their crimes against the people they swore to protect. A gang going by the acronym ATF—the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—watches over and gives cover to Mexican gangsters and their local gun-runners, who later use this ATF immunity to gun down innocent Americans.

Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by weapons purchased under the umbrella of an ATF gun-running operation called “Operation Fast and Furious.” When good guys like Agents John Dodson and Lee Casa questioned the practice, they were ordered to “stand down,” or confine their activities to “surveillance.”

I oppose regulation of firearms; I advocate throwing the detritus of humanity—the gangs and the cartels of Latin America—out of this country.

A decadent society is one where the law prohibits local militia and farmers from firing on trespassers, but supervises the arming of the gangs that would kill these very farmers and other innocents. That’s a decadent society right there. This is who we are.

Another sign of a corrupt culture: Law that encourages enforcers to touch and fondle the sexual organs of its citizens, but forbids the same force to ask, inquire—verbally, using words that waft into the ether—if a suspicious-looking ruffian, loitering around a kiddie’s park, is in the country legally.

A society has atrophied when it cannot sharply distinguish non-noxious speech (asking a ruffian for ID) from a noxious assault (TSA terrorism).