Monthly Archives: September 2014

An Example of the Immorality of Moral Equivalence

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In President Barack Obama’s speech before the UN earlier this week, he had this to say:

This group [ISIL, Obama’s term for ISIS] has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria. Mothers, sisters and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.

Then he said this in juxtaposition:

I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri—where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Because the shooting of one young man by a policeman, with the facts and circumstances of this not yet known, is equivalent to the butchery of ISIS’ terrorists.

Yeah.

Liberty, Security, and Encryption

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Moves by Apple Inc and Google Inc to put some smartphone data out of the reach of police and the courts are raising alarms inside US law-enforcement agencies, current and former officials say.

Of course the government is upset. Heaven forfend anything should interfere with its convenience in fishing for wrong-doing in our private correspondence. Privacy, though, is a necessary component of individual liberty and responsibility.

There is a trade-off, to be sure, between that and government’s ability to do the job of protecting us from others and from extra-national threats that we’ve hired it to do, but we must be very wary about how much of our liberty we surrender and how much of our responsibility we foist off, and we must be extremely chary of the trade-offs we make in that regard.

One Justice Department official said that if the new systems work as advertised, they will make it harder, if not impossible, to solve some cases. Another said the companies have promised customers “the equivalent of a house that can’t be searched, or a car trunk that could never be opened.”

“Harder to solve,” perhaps. “Impossible,” though, is a coarse exaggeration: our cops are better than that. Additionally, it’s long been American philosophy that it’s better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man gets locked up. Today’s threats aren’t enough to walk away from that bastion principle of liberty.

As to that second plaint, it’s another exaggeration. The searches might get harder, but the devices are easily controllable, and get a warrant.

And this:

Andrew Weissmann, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel, called Apple’s announcement outrageous, because even a judge’s decision that there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed won’t get Apple to help retrieve potential evidence. Apple is “announcing to criminals, ‘use this,’ ” he said. “You could have people who are defrauded, threatened, or even at the extreme, terrorists using it.”

However. It isn’t Apple that’s being accused, or suspected, or against whom probable cause is being alleged, it’s the cell phone owner. Searching Apple’s facility because the light is better there is…faulty.

Weissman also ignores both the right of an American citizen to protect himself against a government that has shown itself increasingly intrusive, avaricious, and controlling, and the fact that a warrant must be obtained on the one hand, and on the other, once a warrant has been obtained, the government can use its own facilities to conduct the search. These facilities include both the ability to sanction the phone’s owner for not providing the password and the use of government’s IT facilities for cracking the password.

Then there’s another question. Government cannot assume our responsibilities in our place morally. If government does assume our responsibilities in our place legally, we will have lost our individual liberties and responsibilities.

Without individual liberty and responsibility not only can there be no security, there can be no hope of security.

More Actual Facts

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…about climate change. In a paper, Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012, released last Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, roughly translated for us laymen by the AP, authors Jim Johnstone, at the time of his research with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, and Nathan Mantua, research scientist with the NOAA Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz, CA, found that northeast Pacific (that’s abeam the US) ocean warming since 1900 correlates better with naturally occurring wind pattern changes than with any pattern of human greenhouse gas injection into the atmosphere. According to Johnstone,

What we found was the somewhat surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve. So clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting those temperatures[.]

Also damaging to the climate panic-mongers’ case were these facts:

[O]ne steep ocean warming period from 1920 to 1940 predates the big increases in greenhouse gases, and an ocean cooling period from 1998 to 2013 came while global average temperatures were at or near all-time highs.

Of course the climate pseudo-science folks demur.

They pointed out that the study sees a correlation but did not do the rigorous statistical and computer analysis to show that the cause of the wind changes were natural—the kind of analysis done when scientists attribute weather extremes to global warming.

This would be the same computer analysis—computer modeling—that has found itself unable to predict, simultaneously, the past and the present, and which predictions of the future have been wildly variable and heavily dependent on the specific values assigned to a myriad of model inputs.

The abstract is here; the full article is behind the PNAS‘ login wall.

Coalition and Air Strikes

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The US has expanded its “air campaign” against ISIS to targets in Syria, including targets involving an affiliate of al Qaeda, a gang calling itself The Khorasan Group.

I used quotes around the term because the only ones calling it an air campaign are the Obama administration and the members of the coalition that flew into Syria along with the US. The coalition, the administration now is willing to say, consists of the US, France (which is limiting its participation to airstrikes in Iraq—recall that Syria was a French client before it became a Russian client) Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

The US, though, has declined to identify which targets which of our coalition mates struck, how much ordinance each of them delivered, or any other material battle participation information, except to note that Qatari aircraft merely accompanied American aircraft without releasing ordinance or conducting any pre- or post-strike reconnaissance. Apparently their pilots were simply filling a periodic cross-country nav currency square. It’s also clear that the size of the Arab participation was token only: each of the Arab coalition mates flew only two or four aircraft in the strikes.

The US led off the effort with a cluster of Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a ship in the Red Sea and one in the Arabian Gulf. Following that, the aircraft went in and struck a total of 24 targets. Count ’em.

Unfortunately, even a sustained series of strikes like these can hardly be called an air “campaign,” and it’s worth noting that no one—not the US, as Obama has repeatedly promised the ISIS terrorists—and not our putative Arab allies, who are even more proximately threatened, is willing to go up against these terrorists on the ground. (The sole exception are the Kurds, who are under direct attack, and we’re doing a woefully inadequate job of arming and training them. Even the Iraqi “army,” also under direct attack, cuts and runs at every opportunity, rather than going onto the offensive and attacking, on the ground, these terrorists.) Air strikes alone, even a serious campaign, cannot defeat an enemy that already occupies extensive territory.

No, the Syria strikes were just more potshots, in the style of our month-long series of strikes in Iraq; they’re not part of a serious campaign, in coordination with an equally extensive ground campaign, of striking simultaneously all across ISIS-held territory, attacking infrastructure, equipment, weapons and ammunition depots, the terrorists themselves—strategic as well as tactical targets.

In fact, given the loud, public advance notice President Barack Obama gave—two weeks’ worth—to anyone who would listen, including explicitly the Syrian and Iranian governments, very few ISIS terrorists—some 120, or so—were killed: the buildings hit, including a couple of ammo dumps and a command center, were largely empty when the coalition struck.

This isn’t a serious effort; it won’t be, as it runs counter to Obama’s six-year theme that if we only sit down and talk, things will be resolved amicably.

Given the different…goals…of Obama and the terrorists, I’m reminded, again, of the parable of the mouse and the owl. The mouse thinks the owl’s ways are wrong; the owl thinks the mouse is lunch.