Tag Archives: freedom

German Intransigence

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Last Tuesday, the British Parliament voted to send Prime Minister Theresa May back to Brussels to renegotiate the status of Great Britain’s Northern Ireland border with the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the Brit-EU exit agreement that the Parliament had earlier rejected.  The same day, the Parliament also rejected an attempt by Labour to delay by nine months the actual departure of Great Britain from the EU, leaving the date set at 29 March.

European Council President Donald Tusk said through his spokesman

The backstop is part of the Withdrawal Agreement, and the Withdrawal Agreement is not open for renegotiation.

That’s standard fare for the EU, which never has negotiated in good faith and which has all along faced a negotiator, in May, whose heart never has been in leaving the EU.

It’s Germany, though, that not only refuses outright to renegotiate a small aspect of that failed departure agreement, now is directly interfering in the domestic affairs of Great Britain.  The nature of the current “agreement” would

keep Northern Ireland (and by extension the UK) in the EU customs union in order to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

A hard departure would take all of Great Britain (and by extension Northern Ireland) out of the EU and its internal free trade/free movement of goods and people zone altogether.  That might necessitate customs checks and border entry stations.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Mass:

We will not allow Ireland to be isolated on this issue.

Never mind that the only ones isolating the Republic of Ireland on this issue are Germany and the EU.  It gets worse, though.  Jürgen Trittin, Co-Chairman of Germany’s Green Party’:

It’s clear that we won’t accept a militarized border in Ireland[.]

Leaving aside the cynically constructed straw man nature of this claim—no one is talking about militarizing any border, only of the possibility of setting up customs stations—whether Great Britain chooses to “militarize” any of its borders is strictly a domestic matter for the Brits to decide.  They cannot, after all, station troops anywhere along any of their borders except on their side of them.  Trittin knows this.  (Beyond that, this ban also is a blatant interference in the internal affairs of the Republic of Ireland for the same reason.)

Aside from that, Trittin’s bar would result in…what, exactly?  What does Germany, or the EU, propose to do were the Brits to decide to “militarize” its border with the Republic of Ireland?  What concrete steps is Germany implying it, or the EU, would take to enforce its bar on the “militarization?”

Plainly, it’s an empty threat, intended only to intimidate and, worse, to meddle in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation—and so vindicating that nation’s decision to leave such an entity as the EU.

Talk and Sovereignty

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French President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on a “debating tour” of France in response to the uproar surrounding his gas tax increases, decision to impose from the center a “carbon free” economy on France, and the yellow vest demonstrations against first the tax increases and subsequently in broader opposition to that overweening centrality of governance.

And Macron laid bare his basic misunderstanding of his own political environment and of the nature of French sovereignty.  He’s already met with 600 mayors in Normandy, and there he laid out his basic tenets.

Macron said he was there to hear the concerns of the French and promised that the questions raised by the citizens would be given consideration.

Given consideration.  But no commitment actually to answer those questions satisfactorily to “the citizens.”  And this:

We won’t agree on everything, that’s normal, that’s democracy. But at least we’ll show we are a people who are not afraid to talk, exchange, and debate[.]

Talk, exchange, and debate.  Chit-chat, not action.  We’ll put on this show, though.

And who is this “we” that won’t agree on everything?  Disagreement among the citizens is, indeed, the stuff and core of democracy.  But government?  Government has nothing with which to agree or disagree; that’s a non sequitur.  Government has only to obey the instructions of its employers, those citizens.

Or does the French government (not only Macron, and not only the present administration), the head of a legal system one of whose basic tenets is that the burden is on a government-accused man to prove his innocence rather than on the government to prove his guilt, conceive that the people work for the government and not the other way around?

Not even Rousseau went that far.

A Telling Interview

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Progressive-Democrat from Texas, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke gave a wide-ranging, disjointed, somewhat confused interview to The Washington Post.  Here are some highlights.

Beto on the wall:

[It would] cut off access to the river, shrink the size of the United States and force the seizure of privately-held land.
[He] noted that most undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States in the past decade came not over the border but on visas that then expired.
WAPO: So what should be done to address visa overstays?
Beto: I don’t know[.]

What cut-off?  What river?  Walls aren’t contemplated, anymore, for the Rio Grande, just stepped up patrols and tech detection means.

Shrink the size of the US!?  Huh?

Seizure of privately-held land?  Has ol’ Beto read the Constitution?  The 5th Amendment has something to say about that.

Illegals come in via overstaying visas, so nothing should be done about curtailing their illegal entry across our border?  Apparently.  Because if a water pipe leaks over there, also, there’s no point in fixing it here and reducing the leaks’ flow.  All because he doesn’t know how to fix the leak over there.

O’Rourke insists the thorny immigration answers will come from everyday Americans. It’s an approach that puts off specifics that might define him or narrow his appeal in a presidential race….

Or, it’s an approach that allows Beto to virtue signal on the subject without offering anything concrete—or without exposing his ignorance on the matter, as his overstayed visa and his property seizure bits expose.

And this, larger, question:

Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?

Aside from our obvious lack of an empire—we don’t occupy anyone anywhere, we have no colonies, we have nothing of the trappings of empire—he’s badly mistaken about all of that.

This Progressive-Democrat is saying that the principles of limited government, individual liberty and responsibility, of morality are not universal, nor are they timeless.  He’s saying they’re matters of convenience and political expediency, and that convenience and expedience have evolved.

Watch out, and hold on to far more than your wallets when individual rights and obligations become what the men of government say they are and not what is permanently endowed in us by our Creator.

Privacy in a Technological World

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In a ruling rejecting an application for a search warrant, Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, operating in the Northern District of California, had this remark in particular.

Citizens do not contemplate waiving their civil rights when using new technology, and the Supreme Court has concluded that, to find otherwise, would leave individuals “at the mercy of advancing technology.”

Encouragingly, this remark also cited (via the quote in the remark above) a Supreme Court ruling, Carpenter v United States [citations omitted]:

We have kept this attention to Founding-era under-standings in mind when applying the Fourth Amendment to innovations in surveillance tools.  As technology has enhanced the Government’s capacity to encroach upon areas normally guarded from inquisitive eyes, this Court has sought to “assure[ ] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” For that reason, we rejected in Kyllo a “mechanical interpretation” of the Fourth Amendment and held that use of a thermal imager to detect heat radiating from the side of the defendant’s home was a search. Because any other conclusion would leave homeowners “at the mercy of advancing technology,” we determined that the Government—absent a warrant—could not capitalize on such new sense-enhancing technology to explore what was happening within the home.

The Founders wrote our Constitution to be technology agnostic, and in fact there is no mention of technology qua technology in it.

Westmore’s ruling can be read here. Carpenter can be read here (it’s long).

The Paranoid Hysteria of Progressive-Democrats

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Presumptive Progressive-Democratic Party primary candidate for President in 2020 Congressman Eric Swalwell (D, CA) (who already has touted the use of the government’s nuclear weapons against any who disagree with his wish to limit our ability to keep and bear arms) is a core example.  The question, he says,

has “shifted” from “whether the president is working with the Russians” to “what evidence exists that the president is not working with the Russians?”

Because guilty on proof by Swalwell’s say-so.

And

I think that an unwillingness to sit down with the special counsel demonstrates a continued effort to obstruct and delay the inevitable[.]

Because no man—not even a President—has an obligation to cooperate with an investigation of that man.  Oh, wait—yes, he does; Swalwell says so.

And

“now we know” the notes from the 2018 summit in Helsinki have been “effectively destroyed” by the president.

Because a newspaper said so.

If Donald Trump took them, as the Washington Post story states, then they’re effectively in the hands of the subject and, you know, I don’t trust Donald Trump to turn them over.  We actually know in the past that he’s known to just rip up important pieces of paper and destroy them—notes that are important for presidential records. There’s been reporting on that. So, I see it as we have no way of obtaining the physical evidence now other than getting it from Donald Trump, someone who’s been wholly uncooperative.

It’s been reported.  What more proof is needed?  Well, here’s more: Swalwell doesn’t trust the President.  There it is.  Never mind that not even in that newspaper evidentiary story was there a claim that Trump had destroyed anything.

Can our nation—already harried by the identity politics and divisiveness of the Progressive-Democratic Party—afford such irrationality in the White House?