Tag Archives: freedom

In Which I Side with the “Liberal” Judges

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Regarding the NSA’s broad (much too broad, IMNSHO) surveillance of American citizens, the three judges hearing an appeal to the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court (Democrat appointees, all) expressed concern about that breadth. A Federal District Court had ruled the surveillance constitutional, and the ACLU is leading the appeal (and so I’m siding with that crowd, too, on this matter).

In an oral argument that was set for less than 30 minutes and lasted nearly two hours, three judges on a panel hearing the case at the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan probed claims by the ACLU that the federal government’s collection of data relating to “every phone call made or received by residents of the United States” is illegal and unconstitutional.

Indeed,

[Judge Gerard] Lynch asked how well briefed members of Congress were before voting, and questioned how much they understood about the program. At one point, [Judge Robert] Sack chimed in, “We don’t know what we don’t know” about NSA operations.

Lynch and [Judge Vernon] Broderick both questioned why the government’s justification for the bulk phone data collection program would not also extend to bank records, credit card transactions, and other personal data. Lynch asked if the government’s argument would not also entitle it to access “every American’s everything.”

It’s a fine line between the legitimate security needs of the Federal government if it’s to do the job for which we hired it—to protect us from foreign threats and from each other—on the one hand, and our individual liberty and responsibility on the other. Ben Franklin was right.

It’s necessary, also, to keep in mind that without our individual liberty and responsibility, we have no security. It matters not a whit whether we’d be enslaved by our own government or by a foreign power—we’d still be slaves.

Our Constitution has drawn that line: judge-issued warrants, on a showing of probable cause, are necessary to the legitimacy of the collection. These warrants also must be particular to the person and his property, and they also must be particular to the things being sought out. Fishing expeditions are not allowed.

True, “warrants” are sought in advance via a FISA court. But the FISA court is a secret court, a Star Chamber, no matter its currently good intentions. “Warrants” issued by it similarly are secret, which is to say, they don’t exist: they’re not public, and the person being “searched” under them has neither the ability to contest the warrant in court prior to its execution nor the ability to quash at trial the data discovered and/or seized. Nor can there be any guarantee that, given an ultimate victory, whether over an individual warrant that was discovered or over the process (the DC Circuit is hearing a similar appeal, and the thing is likely to find itself in front of the Supreme Court in the next session), the collected data actually will be expunged.

The 2nd Circuit’s case can be followed as American Civil Liberties Union v Clapper, 14-42, US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

What Does Europe Owe Ukraine?

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The crisis in Eastern Europe…is now entering its 10th month. What began with the collapse of an association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine can now be called a war.

Emphasis added.

All Ukraine wanted was to be free. Free from Russia; free to chart its own course; free to begin to escape its own history of governmental corruption; free to align itself with, learn from the association, and perhaps to prosper in its freedom. The EU implied, with that agreed association, that it would help Ukraine work toward those goals, using that association and EU’s vasty trade market.

When the collapse of the agreement occurred, the Ukrainian people tossed the mendacious government that had collapsed it—and those people—in favor of returning to the Russian sphere; in retaliation against the Ukrainians’ making their wishes, their demands, their very sovereignty over government known, Russia invaded Ukraine. First, the Russians occupied Crimea and then partitioned Ukraine, incorporating Crimea into itself. Then the Russians invaded eastern Ukraine, initially by supplying arms and ammunition to Russian “separatists” already present in the region, then by supplying Russian soldiers “on holiday,” and now openly, driving a Russian held corridor through southern Ukraine stretching along Ukraine’s erstwhile Sea of Azov coast from Russia to Crimea.

What is Europe doing about this? They’re talking. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin 25-35 times, to engage in idle chit-chat. The EU has applied pinprick “economic sanctions.” They do not supply arms and ammunition. The openly say they will not supply troops—which Ukraine already has said they do not want, but still….

What is the value of Europe’s agreements when they dishonor the implications of an association agreement? Even the one that was signed by the government which the Ukrainian people put in place a couple short months ago?

Democracy People’s Republic of China Style

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And democracy Hong Kong style.

The PRC’s view of elections in its satrapy is that only candidates acceptable to the Communist Party of China can stand for office in Hong Kong. Indeed, the Deputy Secretary General of the National People’s Congress’ Standing Committee, Li Fei, has said out loud that openly nominating candidates would create a “chaotic society.” He went further:

[R]ights come from laws, they don’t come from the sky. Many Hong Kong people have wasted a lot of time discussing things that are not appropriate and aren’t discussing things that are appropriate.

The contrast between freedom and tyranny could hardly be made more starkly clear.

Pursuant to Li’s remarks,

The…Standing Committee ruled that all candidates for chief executive must receive more than half of the votes from a special nominating body before going before voters.

And

[T]he 1,200-member nominating committee would select two or three candidates. After one is selected through universal suffrage, the chief executive-elect “will have to be appointed by the Central People’s Government.”

The good citizens of Hong Kong, though, have been holding massive demonstrations during the current run-up to the elections for governing positions there, demanding that actual democracy break out (as agreed by the PRC when the UK gave up Hong Kong to them at the end of the last century). These citizens demur from the PRC’s despotism.

Democracy, freedom, are messy and chaotic at times. That’s the price, and the strength, of free men working their way along a path of their own choosing, rather than suffering the order of government telling them what their path must be. The noisiness and seeming chaos are in the nature of every man being free, of every man having his say, of every man acting in his own time according to his own needs and wishes. It is a sign of a healthy society.

My suggestion, in the hubris associated with my position on the outside looking in: the citizenry should agree on a couple of candidates for the relevant posts—most particularly, for Chief Executive—and then, en masse, write those names in, and thereby elect one of them to each of those relevant posts. The citizens then should demand the PRC recognize that man as the Hong Kong Chief Executive and those men as the elects for those relevant posts.

Of course, such a prior arrangement is not different from what the Standing Committee has done, but as a one-time event to make an important statement and to make the PRC’s behavior internationally public, perhaps an exception can be made. After all, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is the citizens of Hong Kong’s right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

In such an event, extraordinary measures become necessary.

More Federal Arrogance

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…EPA style.

Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX) is highlighting [follow the links there for his letter to EPA Director Gina “Joe” McCarthy and for the EPA’s maps) a new example of this: EPA rule-making regarding waterways, particularly those on private land and how those private property owners must handle water on their property. In support of this new rule-making effort (although the EPA denies it’s in support), the EPA has generated highly detailed maps of every waterway in the US—down to what it classifies as “ephemeral streams,” or streams that only have water in them as a result of rain falling. Such “streams” include ditches on private property, runoff through a depression in someone’s yard, and so on.

EPA Press Secretary Liz Purchia insists, regarding any mapping effort related to this rule-making effort, that any maps actually related to their rule(s) would have to include ground surveys in order to support the proposed rule, and she said that would be “prohibitively expensive.”

We’re left to conclude, then, that the EPA is holding itself willfully ignorant of the extent and effect of its rule because finding that out would be inconvenient. Yet the EPA is going ahead with its rule, anyway.

Oh, and those extremely detailed maps—themselves expensive enough to generate that the EPA is reluctant to discuss the terms of the contract with the map generator—were generated on the taxpayer dime solely for…because.

Hmm….

Civics in Education

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A great part of what ails our country is ignorance of our history and so of who we are—how the US came to be, how we got where we are today, the nature of our culture and ethnicity. This hasn’t been taught with any seriousness since the middle of the last century, beyond a couple of semesters of civics-like courses in high school and a once-over lightly few units of American and European history in grade school and junior high. Throughout the current century, civics, American history, the form and style of American governance, and the like almost are not taught at all. Symptomatic of this is the growing emphasis on identity politics and the differences among those who live in the US, rather than our share culture. Too often, we African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Chinese- or Japanese-Americans, etc. There’s too little thought given to the concept that we’re all Americans, full stop. American, albeit some of us might have African heritage, some of us might have Hispanic heritage, some of us might have Chinese or Japanese heritage, etc.

If we don’t know whence we—our nation—came, how can we be expected to understand who we are, or where we ought to go?

Civics, though, and Government also, and American history, English and European history, Western Civilization, are too important to be taught in a couple of semesters in high school with a few short programs in grade school and junior high school. These subjects must be taught, in depth, throughout every child’s K-12 education. Furthermore, they must not be taught from a moral equivalent or moral relativist perspective—our culture is at the core of our greatness, after all, and Civics and Government must be taught from that perspective. In the end, too, these courses need to be especially intensive for our immigrant children, as they’ll have, depending on their age when they enter our school systems, quite a bit of catching up to do.

It is, after all, how we came to be, how we arrived at our social compact, that led to our American ethnicity and our American culture—the very things that made us so powerful, so prosperous, and for which others from all over the world go to lengths they do (highly risky lengths in a large per centage of the cases) to become a part of.

Our culture and ethnicity can be preserved and strengthened only through the education of our children in these components of our culture. We need to go back to taking that seriously.

This also demonstrates the…foolishness…of the moral relativism (masqueraded often as “cultural proficiency”) of folks like Oxnard Union School District Superintendent Dr Gabe Soumakian, with his insistence that the patriotic chant of “USA! USA!” is—or may be in some mythical context—racist, himself racist. One might ask of Dr Soumakian whose cultural proficiency?