Category Archives: ethics

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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Michigan elects its appellate court judges from each of four geographical districts, centered on Detroit, Troy, Grand Rapids, and Lansing.  Now the State’s government is playing games with that process.  Judge Donald Owens, of the Lansing district, intends to resign just before his term expires.

A Michigan appeals court judge is resigning four hours before his term expires on 1 January, allowing Governor Rick Snyder to pick a replacement.

No special election will occur; this will not be a particularly temporary appointment.  The appointed judge will serve until the next general election in the State.

The move might be convenient to Conservatism (Snyder is a Republican, which makes him conservative relative to the State he governs), this time, but only this time, this short-term time.  The move sets an ugly example, however.  We can argue the merits of elected judges vs nominated and legislatively confirmed or rejected judges, but the Michigan law is quite clear in its intent.  This move is nothing more than a naked attempt to circumvent Michigan’s law, the will of Michigan citizens as expressed by their elected representatives having passed this law, and the will of Michigan citizens as expressed by their election of their judges.

Foolishness

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This time regarding the Iran nuclear weapons deal, exemplified by this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article concerning the Obama administration’s efforts to strengthen that deal during these last two months of overt lameduckness.

The picture they [Obama officials] plan to articulate for Mr Trump’s team is stark: if the agreement falls apart, and the US is blamed for its collapse, Iran would resume its nuclear program more aggressively. In that case, the US risks alienating Europe, as well as China and Russia, and limiting its ability to use sanctions again to contain Iran. Military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, these officials argue, could be the only alternative.

If the deal falls apart, Iran surely will accelerate its nuclear weapons development program.  But this is a program that Iran has never stopped, nor even held in abeyance, the deal notwithstanding.  Iran is aggressively pursuing development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads against Israel and Europe, and Iran already has been caught—twice—with more heavy water than the deal permits.  Honest mistakes, that water.  Sure.

The US risks alienating Russia and the PRC?  They already are alienated from us, and have been for some time: see Georgia, Ukraine, Kaliningrad, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the two nations’ cyber attacks against us, and on and on.

Limiting our ability to use sanctions again?  That was lost when the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John “Motorboat Skipper” Kerry, with President Barack Obama’s (D) backing, browbeat France into accepting a much weaker deal than even the French wanted.  It was lost, too, when the Obama administration lifted so many of our sanctions and agreed to the lifting of UN sanctions.

Military action is the only alternative left?  To the extent that’s true (and it isn’t; alternatives remain, even if many of them have been made harder to use by this administration), it is so strictly as the outcome of the Obama administration’s foolishness.

The Bias of the Press

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It’s going to continue, as Howard Kurtz, writing for FoxNews has recognized.

Many in the media, mostly on the liberal side, have come up with a verb that captures their disgust at the man who will be America’s 45th president.

It’s a word that clearly signals that they will remain in opposition, in a state of perpetual outrage, that, in truth, they don’t fully accept the results of the election.

Donald Trump, they say, should not be normalized.

Especially that perpetual outrage part.  That’s not normal; that’s pathology.  Here’s Slate, as cited by Kurtz, describing the typical NLMSM and its refusal (not inability) to accept Donald Trump as the duly elected next President:

In an essay for the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole wrote, of the days following Trump’s win, “All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion.” David Remnick told CNN, “We’ve normalized [the results] already. Less than a week after the election is over, suddenly Washington is going about its business talking about who’s going to get what jobs. You would think that Mitt Romney had won. It’s a hallucination.” …  “He is not normal,” insisted John Oliver over the weekend. “He is abnormal.”

The NLMSM as Fourth Estate?  Not anymore.

The Irony! The Irony!

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Outgoing President Barack Obama (D) was jointly interviewed by Germany’s public broadcasting network, ARD, and by Spiegel Online.  Obama had many things to say in this interview, but he had this in particular to say in response to ARD/Spiegel’s question about whether he would pardon Edward Snowden before he left office.  After declining to talk about the pardon itself on the grounds that Snowden hadn’t yet appeared in court, Obama said this:

I think that Mr Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.

Wow.  Just—wow.

Be Careful Out There

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…as you use your Android smartphones.  Some of them, courtesy of a People’s Republic of China company called Shanghai Adups Technology Co, are infected with malware at the point of manufacture.  Phone manufacturers include BLU Products, ZTE, and Huawei; although not all of BLU’s models are infected.  ZTE and Huawei both are State-owned, and both of these refused to answer Consumer Reports‘ requests for information.

The problem is that Shanghai Adups, a supplier of Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) update services for smartphones, has inserted code that it wrote for the purpose into these phones’ firmware that

transmit[] their owners’ personal data to a computer server in China. It’s not clear how the data was being used, though security experts say it could have been accessible by the Chinese government.

Heads up.