Category Archives: ethics

The Boston Lockdown

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While the second terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing still was being hunted, Boston and a number of surrounding suburbs were put on lockdown, as police recommended (strongly) that everyone should stay indoors while they searched for the terrorist, a terrorist who, as it turns out, had escaped the perimeter the police had set up to enclose a small part of the city.

During that lockdown, Boston took a number of hits, and so I have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the matter.

  • Pros:
    • easier to spot the terrorist on the move (which the police never did)
    • clearer lines of fire should they need to engage
  • Cons:
    • citizens were unable to participate in the manhunt, even though part of a citizen’s duty is to aid the police
    • citizens were unable to go about their own business, except at government behest
    • economic activity in the city came to a halt for the duration
    • a “go inside and hide” mentality makes it easier for a government to dominate its people

The city and people of Boston took hits from the impairment of their individual freedoms (this time, brief) and to their economic activity (this time, both brief and local).  In the end, too, the lockdown contributed very little to the actual tracking and capture of the remaining terrorist.

There are a couple of things about this: for one, these now are tools for subsequent terrorists in their subsequent activities.  On an individual basis, the loss to Boston and to Bostonians was small—but scaled up, with terrorists now acting so as to prompt further lockdowns, the losses can easily mount to a scope far beyond the reach of any physical terrorist act or collection of them done in concert.  Disruptions to our lives get us dancing to the terrorists’ tune as surely as actually killing us.

Widespread lockdowns also get us in the habit of letting the government corral us, for our own good.

Keep in mind Benjamin Franklin’s warning:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, will have neither Liberty nor Safety.

Although the warning might be hard for some to understand, it being older than one hundred years.

2nd Amendment Rights and Steamrolling

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President Barack Obama, in his dismay that he couldn’t dictate his position on gun control via demagoguery, expressed his dismay thusly:

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had “no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.  It came down to politics.”

“A minority was able to block it from moving forward” through “this continuing distortion of Senate rules.”

What Obama chose not to mention, though, is the steamrolling tactics he tried while coming down with his own politics, attempting to impose his minority position through an attempt to preempt actual discussion of the bills—by distorting Senate rules and while outright lying about his behavior and his role in the gun control bills’ failure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) could have forced an up-or-down vote on the Manchin-Toomey background check bill—it got 54 votes on the cloture motion, so he might have gotten the bill passed.  No, though.  He and Obama didn’t want debate, they didn’t want Americans—or our Senate stand-ins—to have a chance properly to study the bill and (the horror!) to propose amendments before voting on it.  We all would have gotten that chance because skipping the cloture vote would have required Obama and Reid to sit through 30 hours of public debate and amendment before the vote could happen.  The word came from on high: no scrutiny, do the cloture vote.

In the midst of his crocodile tears over the lost opportunity for the Newtown children, Obama angrily denounced fears over a national registry of gun owners—saying that the just defeated bill explicitly banned the creation of such a registry.  That ban was in the bill, true enough.  But the fears are no less real for that.

Were Progressives to win the 2014 mid-terms and regain control of the House, who can believe that the registry ban wouldn’t be promptly rescinded and a registry created making used of the now additional two years of background checks?

This is another failure of Obama’s doing.  As Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, Obama and his cronies have zero credibility after their shenanigans vis-à-vis Obamacare, border security, Dodd-Frank, the present gun control “debate,” demonizing—and slandering—all those who disagree throughout his administration’s rule, etc, etc, etc.  Obama’s blandishments about registry bans simply are unbelievable.

Meddling with Science Education

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Now the educators are politicizing the “science” to be taught our children.  Newly released national science standard “proposals” will include the pseudo-science of manmade climate change as a “core concept.”

The new standards claim

Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming)

without any regard for the lack of actual science, or even data, to support that thesis.

On the other hand, some of the objections to this politicization miss the point and, if these objections are the ones that successfully defeat the nonsense, they’ll create their own problems.  There is, for instance, the worry that

the very presence of climate change instruction in classrooms will create controversy.

So what?  That actually would be beneficial.  A proper handling of the controversy (of any controversy, come to that) would constitute an excellent mechanism for teaching critical thinking, to say nothing of the opportunity to teach the social aspects of dealing with controversial matters.

Of What are the Senate Progressives So Afraid?

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Or is it that, since they already know all the answers, they have no need for actual facts or discussion of them?

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D, VT) has decided that the massive immigration overhaul bill on which the Gang of Eight are working behind locked doors, only deserves a single hearing before the Democrats vote it up and send it to the House.

Shades of Obamacare.  How’s that working out for us?

Plainly, since Democrats are so embarrassed by this pending legislation that they don’t want it discussed in public in any serious form, it’s a bad bill and needs to be voted down.

Another Victory over Big Government

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Here’s the long and the short of it, as summarized in The Wall Street Journal:

A federal judge this week struck down a controversial set of laws allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seek people’s records without a court’s approval, saying the strict secrecy orders demanded by the laws are not constitutional.

US District Judge Susan Illston (Northern District of California) ordered the government to stop sending national security letters or to stop trying to enforce gag orders related to them, but she stayed her order pending the government’s appeal.

Of course, it’ll go to the 9th Circuit, which means it will go on to the Supreme Court, so the fight isn’t over.  But this is an excellent start.

Illston’s opinion decried these violations of Americans’ individual freedom:

[The] pervasive use of nondisclosure orders…creates too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted.

She added [emphasis added]:

[T]he statute impermissibly attempts to circumscribe a court’s ability to review the necessity of nondisclosure orders.  …the NSL nondisclosure provisions significantly infringe on speech regarding controversial government powers.  …  As written, the statute expressly limits a court’s powers to modify or set aside a nondisclosure order to [certain] situations….  The statute’s intent…is incompatible with the court’s duty to searchingly test restrictions on speech.

There are two problems with these letters.  One is that they allow searches without a court’s warrant.  The FBI can use them to search for phone data and for financial and electronic records, and all the FBI agent needs is his Field Office Special Agent in Charge to say it’s all jake.  This is a clear violation of our 4th Amendment.

The other problem worsens this exponentially: the FBI can require (or could before Illston’s ruling) the recipient of the letter to keep quiet about his receipt—denying the owner of the records any opportunity to respond to the search before it happens.  This also denies two critical aspects of the 1st Amendment: that right to speak of receipt and the duty of a court to adjudicate any allegation of a 1st Amendment violation.

Illston’s ruling can be read here.