Tag Archives: politics

Preemption or Not?

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Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, has a piece in The Free Press in which he asks that question regarding Israel’s current situation against the backdrop of Israel’s decision to preempt at the outset of Israel’s 1967 defensive war vs Israel’s 1973 war for survival when it decided to let its enemies strike first.

I suggest the question has a broader historical scope than that. The question of preemption goes at least as far back as St Augustine’s early 5th century assertion that preemption was ipso facto immoral and so unjustified and unjustifiable. The pace of combat and the level of technology of those days gave practical support to the claim: an attacked nation could absorb the first blow and still have the wherewithal to respond and successfully defend itself.

Today is nothing like those days. Combat pacing and the technology in arms, mobility, and cyber make it very nearly suicidal for a nation under irrefutable threat of imminent attack to sit quietly and accept the enemy’s opening set of blows before responding. That opening set may well be fatal, with the attacked nation unable to respond at all. This is especially the case with nuclear weapons, which for instance, Iran is on the verge of achieving.

That makes sitting by today and accepting the enemy’s first strike, whether conventional, possibly coupled with cyber attacks, or nuclear the immoral move, as suicidal as sitting by may well prove to be.

Preemptive war does require strong evidence that the enemy intends to attack and that the enemy is about to do so. In Israel’s case, Hamas leadership has openly announced he intends to continue Hamas’ war of extermination—already underway. Iran’s leadership has announced that it intends to strike massive blows against Israel in response to the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran. Hezbollah’s leadership is prosecuting its own lower-key war of extermination from the north.

In 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol agonized for three weeks before deciding to preempt, and when he did, Israel settled that war in six days with far fewer casualties—friendly and enemy—than would have been the case had he decided Israel should absorb that first blow. This is demonstrated by Prime Minister Golda Meier’s decision to do exactly that in 1973’s war and that war’s costs.

Certainly preemption is more difficult when striking an amorphous network entity like the terrorist entities of Hamas and Hezbollah than it is against formal nation states like Iran. It’s no less important to be done for that, and “more difficult” means “possible.”

Preemption has become the moral imperative for the nation about to be attacked. That applies today for Israel, especially in the case of Iran, where preemption is not only necessary, it may well limit Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s abilities to continue.

Hmm….

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The wonders in New York City’s government has spent some $4.88 billion on means of support for illegal aliens “migrants” in the city over the two years ending with the end of FY2024.

Imagine the benefits to the city’s residents and to their city’s economy were those billions of dollars spent on a couple of alternatives:

  • increased policing with more cops on the beat, and/or
  • increased prosecution of criminals rather than releasing them on no bail, and/or
  • recriminalizing misbehaviors like shoplifting, vandalism, assaults

Even [trigger alert] leaving some of that money in the hands of city residents through tax rate reductions.

Even Axios is becoming Aware

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The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

And

The ads say that they are sponsored, but it’s not immediately clear that the text that accompanies real news links is written by the campaigns and not by the media publication itself.

That obfuscation is deliberate, done as it is by the self-identified smartest folks in the nation and by folks for whom words are their stock in trade.

And Progressive-Democrats call out “disinformation” moves by those to the right of them. That’s freedom of speech the Progressive-Democratic Party way. Speech is—literally—what Party says it is, free or not.

A Couple of Suitable Civil Sanctions

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General Motors is being sued by Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton for allegedly

unlawfully collecting driving data from users and selling it to other companies.

GMC allegedly

used technology that was installed in the majority of 2015 or newer General Motors vehicles that would “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data about each time a driver used their vehicle[.]”

That’s a long time to be collecting and peddling personal information without the permission of the vehicle’s owner.

After all,

Unbeknownst to customers, however, by enrolling in GM’s products, they were “agreeing” to General Motors’ collection and sale of their data. Despite lengthy and convoluted disclosures, General Motors never informed its customers of its actual conduct—the systematic collection and sale of their highly detailed driving data.

I see two suitable civil sanctions here, assuming conviction. One is to force GMC to disclose the amount of money it received over those two years from its sale of those data. It must then be required to pay that money to each person who bought a GMC vehicle from those two model years, whether the vehicle was bought new or used. Yes, yes, identifying all the used vehicle buyers will be difficult. Cry me a river. GMC should have thought about that beforehand.

The other isn’t really a sanction, per se. GMC should be required to disclose each of the buyers of those data, and then each of those buyers should be required to certify that it has purged all of the data of this type that GMC sold to it.

It would be suitable, also, to go after criminal sanctions against the GMC executives who authorized the illegal collection of the data, who authorized the sale of those illegally collected data, and who carried out the collections, and who carried out the sales.

It’s time to get draconian in sanctioning these data thefts. Bad enough we have to deal with hackers; we shouldn’t have to be subject to such thefts from allegedly mainstream companies.

A Silly Tradeoff

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In an editorial regarding former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump as “Central Banker”—The Wall Street Journal editors’ tongue-in-cheek term—those same editors noted this about the Federal Reserve’s economic models:

[T]he Fed staff’s models that are still rooted in the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.

The editors are right about that being a mistake; although they don’t expand on that claim with their reasoning about why that’s a mistake.

My claim about why that’s a mistake is this. First, the Fed’s situation is rooted in its statutorily mandated requirement to maintain price stability and to maintain full employment. The view from Congressional and White House politicians, the Fed, and so many economists is that these are separate, if not mutually opposing (and so not so separate) requirements.

My view, then, is that the two requirements are closely related, but in sequence, not in opposition. Keeping prices reasonably stable—the Fed’s nominal inflation target of 2% per year works well enough—greatly facilitates a healthy, growing economy. That healthy, growing economy itself pushes toward full employment. The Fed’s strongest move toward its full employment mandate, then, is to satisfy its mandate of maintaining price stability and to take no overt action regarding employment.