Category Archives: ethics

What, Me Sanction?

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The White House has delayed its plan to impose new financial sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program, according to US officials, amid growing tensions with Iran over the nuclear deal struck earlier this year.

It gets worse.

US officials offered no definitive timeline for when the sanctions would be imposed after the decision was made Wednesday to delay them.

Never mind that Iran has been violating the nuclear weapons agreement since a very few days after Vienna. Never mind, either, that Iran still hasn’t actually signed the agreement. This administration is putting us and our friends and allies in a very dangerous position over the next year. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want more of the same, too.

“No Room for Negotiation”

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A French journalist is being tossed out of the People’s Republic of China because she wrote factual articles about the PRC’s behavior in Xinjiang province. Her visa to be in the PRC expires at the end of the year, and the government has told her it will not be renewed.

The proximate cause of her expulsion is an article she wrote noting that the PRC’s expressions of solidarity with France over the terrorist attacks in Paris last month were not motivated by sympathy or shared condemnation of terrorism, but were rather motivated by the PRC’s reach for sympathy for its own behaviors in Xinjiang regarding the generally Muslim Uighur population’s demurral from government mistreatment of Uighurs.

Ms [Beijing-based Ursula] Gauthier said Chinese officials had met her three times to protest over the article and had demanded a public apology each time, without specifying exactly what form the apology should take. She said a Chinese official telephoned her on Friday to demand again that she apologize, publicly acknowledge that China was a victim of terrorism, and distance herself from any organization suggesting her case was a violation of press freedom.

“He said there is no room for negotiation,” she said.

Indeed, there is none. Either there is freedom of the press, freedom of speech, or there is not. There can be no middle ground to be reached through…negotiation.

Update: Corrected an idiotic typo in the first paragraph.  I need a keyboard that types what I mean rather than mindlessly repeating the keystrokes I give it.

Another Thought on Encryption

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Apple’s Tim Cook had one [emphasis added].

On your iPhone, there’s likely health information, there’s financial information. There are intimate conversations with your family or your co-workers. There’s probably business secrets, and you should have the ability to protect it. And the only way we know how to do that is to encrypt it. Why is that? It’s because, if there’s a way to get in, then somebody will find the way in. There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is, if you put a back door in, that back door’s for everybody, for good guys and bad guys.

The Democrat District Attorney for Manhattan Cyrus Vance thinks Government should be in our pockets; he thinks Apple, et al., are undermining Government power.

IPhones are now the first consumer products in American history that are beyond the reach of lawful warrants. The result is crimes go unsolved and victims are left beyond the protection of law. Because Apple is unwilling to help solve this problem, the time for a national, legislative solution is now.

Here’s what our Constitution’s 3rd Amendment says:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner….

Vance just wants to skirt this by quartering virtual policemen in our cell phones. No. Government just needs to go back to doing actual police work, and not rely on such quartering.

Undermining? If anyone is undermining anything, it’s the New York Democrat, who’s undermining individual liberty. This is a clear and present demonstration of why Government cannot be trusted with such a weapon.

Maybe It’s Time

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I’ve written before about the…suboptimality…of the SEC using its own “court” system (in quotes because it’s more of a kangaroo court system, with the SEC serving as accuser, prosecutor, judge (no jury), punisher, and appellate “court”). The SEC has even pretended to be changing its ways.

Now, this.

After five years, four judges, three rulings, two appeals and the loss of their careers, John Flannery and James Hopkins this month won their legal battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The former State Street Corp executives’ long legal fight took place almost entirely in the SEC’s in-house court system, which agency officials have lauded as offering a fast-track alternative to federal court.

Their problem is all too typical of this SEC.

Since Mary Jo White became SEC chairman in April 2013, the median time for the agency to decide appeals of its in-house judges’ decisions has increased to 19 months….

Then there’s the excuse.

A key part of the agency’s argument has been that the internal tribunal is more efficient.

You bet it is. The conviction and upholding rate is through the roof compared with the rates from those cases that make it out of the SEC and into an actual Federal court.

Since the bureaucrats at the SEC place their own imperatives ahead of their job, maybe it’s time to disband the SEC and replace it with a securities industry overseer that will place its job ahead of the imperatives of the new, fresh personnel who will populate it.

Alternatively, maybe it’d be sufficient to replace the head bureaucrat with someone who understands for whom she works.

Sources

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President Barack Obama is well known for not knowing what’s going on in the world unless he reads about it in the NLMSM.

According to The New York Times (as reported by the New York Post because the NYT censored itself between the time it put its piece on line and the time it reprinted the piece in hard copy), this extends to television.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino Obama explained his failure to respond in any serious manner by telling the NYT that

he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino….

At least the Progressive/Democrat is consistent….