Apple/Tim Cook’s Folly....

Apple/Tim Cook’s Folly….

Sometime last year, I watched Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, make the rounds and berated a Christian couple because that couple, who were bakers by trade, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple in Indiana against the former Christian principles. Mr. Cook – and many of the gay advocates -­- did not care that there were plenty of bakeries who would have taken the business of making the cake… all that Mr. Cook apparently cared about was to punish the Traditional Christian couple for practicing their God given, codified, First Amendment’s Right of freedom of religion. Now, as poetic justice goes, the shoe is on the proverbial other foot and Mr. Cook is in a tizzy or is my saying ‘tizzy’ Politically Incorrect because Mr. Cook is openly gay? In case you are not privy to the news, the authorities are begging Mr. Cook to allow his Apple engineers to breach the codes, so as to enable the FBI to know who the Muslim terrorist couple were in cahoots with, if anyone else – lest we forget that they murdered fourteen people and it is prudent to know if there are other threats out there. This must be a farcical thought to Mr. Cook,

I know that the Apple logo, the bitten apple, is representative of rebellion: you know of Eve and Adam’s eating of the forbidden apple, as recorded in the Bible’s book of Genesis. Mr. Cook is may be living up to his company’s logo idea of being a rebel by piously taking refuge in our vaunted privacy clause, culled from that same venerable Constitution, that the Christian bakers relied upon in their refusal to cater to the gay couple. Mr. Cook is asking the United States’ government/America to understand that the privacy rights that may be violated from breaching Apple’s codes are of more import than the real life threats from Muslim jihadists. The folly of Mr. Cook and others of his ilk is that they make our Constitution out to be a suicidal document; and for Mr. Cook, in particular, is the typical “Hypocrat” in that he has had his sales’ people trying to sell Apple’s wares in countries that literally murder you for being gay - but alas, gaining a market share in those gay murdering countries is more important than to defend, though, you may vehemently disagree with, the Indiana Traditional Christian couple’s right to practice their religion.

I have this suspicious feeling that Mr. Cook does not have the courage of his conviction like he did when he castigated the Indiana Traditional Christian couple. The negative publicity and the potential pounding that Apple stock might undergo in the coming days might have Mr. Cook singing another tune, especially since he has to answer to a board and the stock owners who only care about the bottom line, instead of vacuous, convenient, quixotic idealism, at least to me. The Apple board and the Institutional equity holders will or are already reminding Mr. Cook that how he conveniently put aside his advocacy for gay rights when he tries to make inroads to sell Apple’s wares into Muslim countries that are lethally against gays.

Is there merit to Mr. Cook’s position, albeit it being selective and convenient – yes, notwithstanding the fact that we are told that the government request is specific and not comprehensive. The truth is that this is what the government always says in these situations, especially to those of us who are seeing George Orwell’s tome (1984) come to life. Here we are again trying to establish that seemingly equilibrium between privacy and safety, as is the wont of a Democracy governed by checks and balances. But the question that begs itself is Mr. Cook willing to die or let others die by not giving Apple’s engineers the green light to break the phone’s codes? What if there are other attacks that could be traced to the California murderous couple - is Tim Cook/Apple willing to pay that negative publicity price?

I am not one to operate in the abstract… I know that there are those out there rabidly trying to kill us and anything we can do to thwart such efforts must be used. If I recalled correctly, Bin Laden hid the funds in American banks that he used for the 911 operations; now many banks, compelled by the Patriot Act and working in tandem with the Bank-Secrecy-Act, have robust anti terrorism schemes to prevent what Bin Laden did. Apple is no different from the banks and should do all it can to assist the government, if not out of its Patriotism… then out of looking out for its share holders. There is merit in pre-emption and we should not wait until terrorist attack before we do something. To that end, we exercise to fend off diseases and we save for the proverbial rainy day… why is it any different when dealing with terrorism?

Those of us who have a modicum of objectivity left have seen this hypocrisy before, as practiced by the Tim Cooks of the world. You remembered the clarion calls from those who were members of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement who called for breaching duly negotiated contracts of those who were employed on Wall Street, but not those covenants signed by the vain-glorious of Hollywood; Black-Lives-Matter, but not for the dozens of Blacks that are going to be murdered this weekend alone by other Blacks; Slavery was the Peculiar Institution that was malignantly terrible, but not for the modern Black purveyors who enslave many Blacks today in certain parts of Africa; and Michael Vick is still considered an ogre by many for fighting dogs, but those of us who have carved out a murderous exception to the Hippocratic Oath for doctors… so that we could murder our babies - over 50 million so far - are not considered monsters. The examples are legion of this type of hypocrisy, but I am hoping that Mr. Cook does the right thing by going against the quixotic grain, even if in the end, his doing so will benefit the Apple stock holders, but with the positive by-products of Jihadist plots being thwarted, lives saved, and that it would also inspire more genuine acts of Patriotism!