Category Archives: morality

More Government Intrusion

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Although the Internal Revenue Service denies that it actually does this, of course.  Documents obtained from the IRS by the ACLU pursuant to an FOIA request demonstrate that the IRS believes that it can snoop into private email without first obtaining a search warrant.  The warrant, of course, would require the IRS to convince a court both that they know with some specificity for what they’re searching and that they have probable cause for the searching.

According to a 2009 IRS employee handbook, though, the tax agency said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users don’t “have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.”

And

…the current online version of the IRS manual says that no warrant is required for emails that are stored by an Internet storage provider for more than 180 days.

Never mind the degree of mind reading required of the IRS (and the courts) to arrive at a conclusion concerning what a private citizen has in his own mind concerning his own expectations.  This is a blatant attempt by the IRS simply to slide past our courts as if they had no existence—or relevance to the Internal Revenue Service.

On that matter of email older than 180 days, or on opened email not requiring a warrant, it seems to me that the age and opening criteria create a false dichotomy in privacy and 4th Amendment rights.

Age is wholly irrelevant.  Privacy has no expiration date.

Having opened a correspondence in no way puts that correspondence, of necessity, into the public arena.  Opening a letter and leaving it on a table next to my couch at home certainly does not, nor does leaving an email on my personal PC or laptop.  Nor does having a copy of my email on an Internet service provider’s servers, whether I’ve opened the email or not.  The ISP’s failure to manage its storage in no way causes any alteration of my privacy.

Too, in what way are providers required to turn over that which does not belong to them—they’re pipelines, not publishers or authors in this context, after all?

Finally, a question: what’s the government’s “view” on encrypted correspondence that’s been left on a provider’s server for more than 180 days?  Am I obligated by that, somehow, to give up the encryption key on government demand with no warrant extant?

Personal Responsibility

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Richard and Melinda Armstrong, of Caldwell, said their family was camping in the Boise National Forest in September 2010 when a gust of wind blew over the dead tree.  It fell on their son, resulting in a large laceration, a compound fracture, and a puncture wound in his back that impaired his breathing.

The boy is recovering, although he may have permanent damage to a leg, and now the parents are suing the Forest Service for $1 million.

Their lawyer, Eric Rossman, has this to say about the incident:

The tree was clearly dead—had been dead for years—and was within eight feet of the fire ring, and within 48 feet of the Forest Service road.  It was an obvious hazard.

I have this to ask about the incident: “Why, then, did the Armstrongs choose to camp so close to the obviously hazardous tree?  Do they bear no responsibility for their boy’s injuries?”

“I Do Think at a Certain Point You’ve Saved Enough Money”

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Here we go, again.

President Barack Obama’s latest guess at a budget looks to cap Americans’ retirement accounts at roughly $3.4 million (never mind that what seems like a fairly substantial amount of money will shrink to insignificance in the coming Bernanke inflation).

On top of that, Obama wants to “return the estate tax to the parameters in place in 2009….  That move would drop the per-person exemption to $3.5 million (remarkably close to that retirement funding cap) from the present $5.25 million and increase the top tax rate on a deceased’s estate to 45% from 40%.

According to Obama, it isn’t really your money, and Big Government Knows Better what to do with it than you do, anyway.

In Which Die Tageszeitung Misses Badly

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Other, better writers have already eulogized the passing of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Baroness of Kesteven, and LG, OM, PC, FRS.  As happens with all great men and women, she has come in for no small amount of criticism on the occasion of her passing, some of it simply, puerilely, shameful.

Other criticisms, though, demonstrate a broad misunderstanding of the lady’s accomplishments, the good she did for the UK and for the world.  Die Tageszeitung (The Daily Newspaper) is one such that badly misses.  This newspaper demonstrates its left-wing (the liberal Spiegel International Online‘s characterization, not mine) cred with these remarks, and I cannot let them go unanswered, even at this late date.

Very few people get a political ideology named after them.  Thatcherism stands for deregulation, privatization and the destruction of the welfare state, as well as of a sense of community.  No one divided British society as much as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  She is responsible for the destruction of the trade unions and the ruin of the public sector, and especially of the National Health Service.

Actually, they got the first part of this right.  But then they talk about her being the cause of the reduction of union power and of the public sector as though these were bad things.  Britain’s unionism and its then public sector were at the heart of British economic malaise and symptomatic of the nation’s retreat from the world stage—and of Britain’s willingness to lie prostrate in the face of Soviet expansionism, hoping to be passed by, unnoticed.

The failures, the rate death through negligence of children, pensioners, and ages in between while in the tender mercies of the NHS is legendary.  Thatcher’s attempts to rein in this travesty did not achieve enough, unfortunately; although it wasn’t, as DT backhandedly notes, for her lack of effort.

Thatcher got away with her authoritarian leadership style for a long time.  She publicly snubbed difficult colleagues, or just sacked them.  During her time in office she used up more than 100 ministers and surrounded herself with yes-men.  The hope that she, as the first female leader of a major nation, would fan a feminist wind into politics went unfulfilled.  She was never interested in the women’s movement, and only one women made it into her cabinet during her long tenure.

If you can’t effectively attack Thatcher’s policies, attack her person.  And demonstrate a lack of understanding of leadership, and of what it is to be a “yes-man,” to boot.  If a subordinate is being…insubordinate…he should be terminated.  Dissension and debate are required while decisions are being worked out, but refusing to get fully behind a decision once taken is inexcusable.

And as for DT‘s feminist claptrap….  Thatcher was “never interested in the women’s movement” because she was the embodiment of everything that “movement” claims to stand for.  She was a Briton and a PM who happened to be a woman.

It’s hard to imagine greater success.

The Mouse that Roared?

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With The People’s Republic of China confirming the northern Korea has been conducting live-fire drills near its border with the PRC, and with northern Korea having closed the Kaesong factory complex jointly run by northern Korea and the Republic of Korea—the last formal tie between nK and the RoK—a rude thought occurs to me.

Is Kim the Youngest smarter, more Machiavellian, than we give him credit for?

He has to know, after vacationingschooling in Switzerland as a younger youth just how badly off the northern Korean people are.  He might even consider them “his” people.  If he does, and if he’s of a mind to do anything about it, he also has to know that proposing reunification talks—a lá occupied Germany and the FRG—both is a death sentence for him and will blow up the government.  After all, the PRC has not fallen, and so it can still prop up a follow-on nK government, even if like the failed Soviet Union, it has no interest in bettering the lives of commoners.  The blowup, then, would have no effect vis-à-vis the outside world; although it would make things even worse internally, especially during the turmoil.

So, what’s a boy to do?  Start a fight he knows he can’t win, lose the fight, and get occupied.  If he burns a few (tens of thousands of) innocent bodies in the process, well, he is the product of three-plus generations of give-a-s*t about human life.

About all of his bluster and buildup: it might be of a piece with prior blusters, now getting out of control in the hands of a tyro.  But his actions sure are guaranteeing that the ones he’s going to attack are very well prepared for that attack.

The rat that roared?

Nah.  Probably not.