Category Archives: Uncategorized

Insulting?

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Army Colonel Jeffery Nance, the presiding judge in the Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl desertion case has some concerns, officially because Bergdahl’s lawyers has them; unfortunately, Nance has his own, and they’re misplaced.

The judge…called video of [President Donald] Trump repeatedly calling Bergdahl a traitor during campaign speeches “disturbing” at a pre-trial hearing Monday.

He went further:

He also asked prosecutors pointed questions about whether Trump’s criticism has already created a public perception that Bergdahl won’t be treated fairly.

Nance exposed his own prejudgment with his characterization of a politician’s—a businessman as political tyro’s—campaign rhetoric as disturbing as though such blather might prejudice Bergdahl’s case.  Nance then deepened his failure with his implication that the trial participants—judge, lawyers, jury—might be influenced by doings from outside the courtroom.

It got worse.  Nance asked the prosecution lawyers,

You’re not at all concerned about the statement he made, “If I get in we will review his case”…after ranting and raving about no jail time?

Ranting?  More importantly, though, is Nance’s slur here against officers and NCOs in the United States Army—that they’re such cowards they’ll be swayed from their duty as jurors by campaign commentary.

The trial needs to go forward.  The Army and Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers deserve justice.  Bergdahl deserves justice: if the charges are dropped by this judge, Bergdahl can never be viewed as anything other than a deserter, even if he were not.  A fair trial—juried by officers and NCOs who aren’t the timid Milquetoasts Nance thinks they are—will determine Bergdahl’s guilt or innocence; ducking away from the trial cannot.

Moral Contextualizing

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Moral contextualizing is the Saul Alinsky-esque technique of applying a context to behaviors in order to assess their morality—in particular, to assess the behaviors of men in the past within the context of today’s views of morality rather than the views extant at the time.

Paul Isaac had some thoughts on the matter in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal:

The real issue is “contextualization” per se, which seems to be an aggressive technique to create false dialectics against historical straw men and to demand an implicit intellectual monopoly of the would-be contextualizers’ perspective on the defined hobbyhorse as the moral alternative, thereby defining other perspectives as both outdated and immoral.

That’s a big part of it.  Another part of the thing is the hypocrisy of the moral equivalence that these contextualizers assert in order to claim the holy superiority of their chosen, and debate-forbidden, positions.

Loosening Financial Regulations

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Felix Hufeld, President of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, is worried about an outcome of Donald Trump’s election.  He’s concerned that financial regulations laid on in the aftermath of the Panic of 2008, regulations that expanded the reach of Government into men’s financial lives, will begin to be loosened during a Trump administration.

Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation.

And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder.  That is not without risk.

To live life is to live with risk.  The thing about risk, though, is that the more Government tries to mandate rules against it, the more Government increases the risks that ordinary folks must live with.

Hufeld has this much right, though:

The [financial] industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity—not regulatory volatility[.]

Indeed.  Regulations need to be vastly reduced, Government gotten out of the way of free markets and the free citizens operating in them.  And then politicians and regulators need to leave the remainder alone and stable and not constantly be adding regulations and “tweaking” others.

The problem Hufeld and other bureaucrats of the Left—both in Europe and in the US—have is that they can’t conceive the idea the ordinary citizens are fully capable of making their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or these bureaucrats worry about their own loss of power were ordinary folks freed to make their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.

Or both.

Iran: Other Countries Mustn’t Dictate Syria’s Political Future

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Iranian officials say it is up to the Syrian people to decide whether he stays in power as part of any peace settlement.

The Syrian people have decided. But here is Iran, with Russian help, dictating at gunpoint that the Syrian people must accept the Iranian/Russian decreed government, the government against which the Syrian people have been rebelling these last several years.

“Other countries mustn’t dictate Syria’s political future.” No, Iran has reserved that task to itself.

I Have Use For…

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…those seized weapons. The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iranian-backed Houthi…rebels…in Yemen has seized an Iranian “fishing” boat laden with missile launchers and anti-tank weapons bound for those Houthis.

It would be good if the Saudis pass those weapons along to the Kurds, who are fighting the Daesh in northern Iraq. Those weapons would be put to good use by folks who know how to fight.

And they’ll be better than those un-armored “MRAPs” we shipped to them.