Category Archives: morality

A Thought on Edward Snowden

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This one is prompted by a Letter to the Editor published in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  The relevant part of the letter is this:

If we start at the beginning, it was the US government, including the National Security Agency, that stole information that belonged to me—my phone and internet metadata. Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the government’s thieving. Now Mr Snowden is considered the thief.

Now Mr Snowden is considered the thief.  He is, and worse. That the NSA screwed up/stole private data/abused its role/what-have-you doesn’t alter that simple fact.

Were Snowden a whistleblower, he wouldn’t have run to the PRC’s Hong Kong and then proceeded to Russia where he’s continuing to give up American secrets.

Were Snowden engaged in civil disobedience, he would have returned long before now—indeed, would never have left—stood trial, making his case before the American people and a jury of his peers, and with his arrest and trial, emphasized the absurdity of the law that facilitated the NSA’s behavior.

But he did the one and didn’t do the other.

Repeal and Replace

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…the Food and Drug Administration.  I’ve written before about the FDA’s shameful obstruction of an experimental drug that showed great promise—before the FDA’s obstruction, so those persons knew all about it—in mitigating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy to the permanent detriment of the boys who have that ultimately fatal disease.

Here’s another shameful example of the FDA’s lethal obstruction, provided by Marc Thiessen in an end of the year piece for The Washington Post.  Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, is another fatal disease of the nervous system, this time one that destroys motor neurons in the spine so that muscles atrophy, including ultimately those that power the lungs, and the victim dies.  ALS is 100% fatal—or was until an experimental procedure was developed by the folks at the Center for ALS at the Emory University School of Medicine.  The procedure those folks developed involved injecting neural stem cells directly into the spinal regions where masses of the motor neurons affected by ALS are located.

Thiessen’s friend, afflicted with ALS, was fortunate to be able to have access to this procedure—which was so early in its development that the friend’s participation was in a trial stage whose purpose was nothing more than to show that the procedure was safe; it wouldn’t kill the receiving patients.  The procedure didn’t kill Thiessen’s friend.  Maybe it cured him (he died of brain cancer six years after his diagnosis of ALS, a post-treatment life span too short to say “cured” but plainly long enough to say “positive effect in putting the ALS into remission.”

That remission was the watchword is demonstrated by the fact that the man went from being unable even to walk to his mailbox for his mail to being able to walk Atlanta’s two-and-a-half-mile Walk to Defeat ALS four years in a row, and to do each with no problem.

Slam dunk for the procedure to go to final stage testing and production, right?

No.  Not with our FDA.  Thirty-two ALS victims have been allowed by the FDA to try the procedure in a time span during which 24,000 Americans have died of this disease.  Because the FDA demands proof of effectiveness through a Byzantine “testing and trial” sequence of experiments that only bureaucrats could find useful before it will approve a drug or a medical procedure.

It’s time to disband the Food and Drug Administration altogether and replace it in toto with an agency that will oversee such things, but that will approve on a showing of “does no harm.”  The efficacy of a drug or procedure belongs solely in the free market, with the doctor and patient making the use decisions.  This is not an area for Government, or Government’s bureaucrats, to interfere.

Democracy is a Racist Politic?

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That’s what John Kerry, the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, claimed Wednesday.

But here is a fundamental reality, if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both.

The “choice” of one state is, as even this guy knows full well, a cynically proffered strawman.  Israel is strongly in favor of a two-state solution; the only ones who refuse the option are the terrorists polities Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.  Absent that strawman dolly, the only thing left is the racist center of Kerry’s offensive sentence.

Kerry and his mentor President Barack Obama (D), both elite-school, Ivy League educated gentlemen also know full well this bit of history, recalled by Michael Oren, Israel’s Deputy Minister for Diplomacy, for Hugh Hewitt (h/t to my Lady for reminding me of this):

In 1947, the UN declared that Palestine, as it was then known, would be partitioned into two states—an Arab state and a Jewish state. Notice, not a Palestinian state, but an Arab state. The Palestinians didn’t quite exist, yet, and at least not on the international radar. And the Arabs went to war to destroy the Jewish state when it was created on May 14, 1948. And the city of Jerusalem was divided. The eastern part of the city was occupied by the Jordanians, the West Bank was occupied by the Jordanians. In June, 1967, the Jordanians attacked Israel again. Israel repulsed the attack, reunited Jerusalem under Israeli rule, and captured the West Bank, or as we call it, Judea and Samaria. It is not occupied by international law, because the West Bank and East Jerusalem was never part of a recognized sovereign country. Nobody in the world, except for Britain and Pakistan, recognized the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. So the entire international law claim is spurious.

The next 22 days cannot pass quickly enough; there’s too much damage able to be done by guys as disingenuous as Kerry and his mentor President Barack Obama (D).

Completely Despicable

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The Wall Street Journal accurately summed up President Barack Obama (D) regarding his betrayal of Israel with his decision to allow a nakedly anti-Israeli resolution before the UN Security Council to pass unopposed.

The decision by the United States to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel over its settlements on the West Bank is one of the most significant, defining moments of the Obama Presidency.

It defines this President’s extraordinary ability to transform matters of public policy into personal pique at adversaries.

Obama didn’t even have the courage to vote, through his UN mouthpiece Samantha Powers, for the resolution: he hid behind the moral cowardice of an abstention.

Although the WSJ‘s op-ed went on to describe as well other aspects of Obama’s act, those opening sentences sum up the man.  This is a petty, small man who has chosen throughout his reign [sic] to allow his ego and his penchant for hurt feelings to interfere with policy.  His legacy has become one of unbroken venality, failure, and betrayal of American values and of America’s friends and allies.

Students of Color Conference

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This one at the University of California encountered the reality of identity politics.  It collapsed into, as one of the conference-goers called it in her op-ed for the UCLA Daily Bruin, an oppression Olympics.

From the first link:

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East[.]

And

Above all, conference participants each wanted to focus on their own particular minority issue[.]

And the whole thing apparently turned a series of microaggressions, unsafe safe spaces, and canceled workshops.  UCLS student Robert Gardner:

I am very unhappy about how this conference was ran. There needs to be accountability for the trauma some of the organizers made. And I didn’t appreciate my workshop being cancelled….

Apparently grammar isn’t a safe space for young Master Gardner, either.  But he continued:

It was really hurtful to have other marginalized identities silenced because a small fringe of organizers decided that their oppressions are more important (talk about Oppression Olympics. …)

Stop oppressing me with your superior victimhood!