Tag Archives: morality

Laughingstock

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That’s putting it mildly.  “Futile” also applies.  I’ve written earlier how President Barack Obama reduced himself to a laughingstock and is reducing the United States as a whole to a laughingstock.

Now those in Syria who’ve been begging us for help speak derisively about us as a result of Obama’s…behavior.  On the heels of Obama’s belated acknowledgment that his bright red bunting strewn upon the beach sands had been stepped on and over; followed by his decision to send small arms to Syrian rebels (which all of Arabia already is providing them) with which to fight al Assad’s helicopter, artillery, and tank assaults (supported by Hezbollah fighters and Iranian soldiers); coupled with Obama’s continued refusal to send the rebels the weapons with which to defeat those helicopters and, artillery tubes, and tanks; and his continued refusal to suppress al Assad’s air force in any way, the rebel beneficiaries of the Obama Munificence had this to say:

It’s all talk.  Until we see weapons in our hands here in Syria, they are just words floating in the air.

Obama’s team is cited at the WSJ link just above in this way:

While US officials acknowledge that Hezbollah and regime forces are closing in on Aleppo, they believe there is time to train rebels and improve their defenses—with or without a no-fly zone, officials say—underscoring their belief the conflict is nowhere near a conclusion.

Umm, maybe not.  This isn’t the mid-19th century, when a two week holdout at the Alamo was enough for Sam Houston to train his forces to effectively resist Santa Ana.  More importantly, whose fault is it that the conflict “is nowhere near a conclusion?”  It’s not the rebels’.

And those…officials…had this:

US officials question whether US and European arms alone will make a decisive difference in a country already awash in weapons.

What a breathtaking, willful ignorance.  Of what use to these persons think small arms—rifles and pistols, and the occasional light machine gun—are against helicopters, artillery, and tanks?

And where is Obama anyway on this seeming change of position concerning chemical attacks and arming the rebels?  Why is he sending out low-level functionaries to tell us, in vague terms, about this?

Of what is Obama so terrified that he can’t talk to us—in detail—personally?

A Whistleblower

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I offered this first as a comment to a Spiegel Online article.  Here it is with slight modifications to support its stand-alone status here.

Edward Snowden, of Verizon metadata and PRISM outing fame, thinks of himself as a whistleblower, and so do many who agree with him that the US’ PRISM program and its program for collecting metadata from cellphone providers are terribly wrong programs.

I agree that the programs are anathema to individual liberty.  However, the programs are legal under US law.  The only question here is whether the programs’ limits and checks are being honored–and that’s a matter of trust, since the programs and its procedures are secret.  That secrecy and the need for that blind trust in Government (not just the Obama administration, but any Government) form a large part of my dismay over the programs.

However, the programs’ legality mean Snowden cannot be a whistleblower; he’s simply a man who has illegally revealed classified data to the public.

What about civil disobedience, then?  Is he practicing this honorable means of protest of a government behavior to which he objects?

There are many legal avenues of calling legitimate attention to these flawed programs, including, for instance, any of the several formal whistleblower and Inspector General facilities to which he could have taken his case.  Given the damage already done by these programs (stipulating arguendo that damage to individual liberty has been done) any additional damage done through the delays of going through these legitimate programs would have been quite trivial.  Yet Snowden eschewed these programs and went directly public.  From within a foreign country.

Were this an act of civil disobedience, it would have had to satisfy two criteria: he would have had first to exhaust his legal remedies.  As I noted, he chose not to do so.

Secondly, he would have to have been willing to face the consequences of his actions.  It is, after all, those consequences and their absurdity in the face of the disobedience and the thing over which the disobedience is occurring that give force and credibility to the disobedience.  Snowden’s reason for being in Hong Kong, as stated by him, is to avoid facing those consequences.

If Snowden truly believes that what he has done is just, he must return to the US and face the outcomes of his actions in open court.  Let him make his case in front of the American people (where he’ll find no small measure of support) and convince our representatives in that court case–the jury of his peers–that his act was justified.

Of course he risks not being supported by our representatives, that jury, as there also are a large number of Americans who disagree with what he has done.

Snowden’s flight and so far refusal to return indicates he’s unwilling to take that risk, that he does not have the courage of his convictions.  In that case, Snowden did not commit an act of civil disobedience; he is simply a small man who is placing his ego above justice.

Leak Hypocrisy

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Recall the zeal with which President Barack Obama’s DoJ is attacking leakers, to the point of a broad-band raid on AP reporters’ and editors’ (with its collateral raid on Congressmen) telephone records and an accusation of a specific reporter having criminal culpability in order to get a search warrant to obtain his personal emails (with its collateral raid on the reporter’s parents’ email).

A (draft) Defense Inspector General report on ex-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s leaks had some interesting things to say.

The first instance [of a leak] was a July 15, 2011, interview of the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, by the [Osama bin Laden raid] film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal.  In that session Vickers gave them the name of a special operations planner whose identity was supposed to be protected from public release.

And

The second instance was a June 24, 2011, awards ceremony at CIA headquarters in which Panetta identified the ground commander of the SEALs raid, with Boal in attendance.  The report did not say whether Panetta knew Boal was present.

Of course Panetta knew, though.  Such gatherings at such a level in the government hierarchy are highly prestigious, if nothing else; additionally, the permissions/invites to attend are tightly controlled.  And what was a Hollywood screenwriter doing in a classified gathering, as this one had to be, with classified information like SEAL team identities being bandied about?

The IG report said the ground commander’s name was supposed to be protected from public release, under federal law.

Panetta then gave up the Pakistani doctor’s identity in a January ’12 60 Minutes interview:

[Afridi] was an individual, in fact that helped provide intelligence, that was very helpful in regards to this operation….

As a result of this report, Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission concluded that the doctor was acting as an American agent.

Many of the SEAL team members have since been killed, and the Pakistani doctor is now in a Pakistani jail.

Where’s the administration’s hue and cry over these leaks?  Or is it that when the SecDef does it, it’s not illegal?

A Bit of Climate

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What’s up with this?  Is it getting warmer?  Well, yes, maybe, depending on the time scale and the baseline of comparison.  It’s warmer today than during the last Ice Age.  It’s warmer today than during the Little Ice Age of some 3-4 hundred years ago and that ended around 1 hundred years ago.  It’s hard to say, though, how today’s temperature compares with the Medieval Warm Period of some 1,000 years ago, since data sets like NASA’s have been falsified to plus up the claimed warming of today.  We aren’t warmer than we were a decade and a half ago.

The claims of warming and of disastrous continued warming get their force in large part from climate models—more than 70 of them—all of which have been predicting warming rates ranging from worrisome to disastrous.  There’s nothing like actual observation, empirical data, to see what’s up, though.  Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That, has reprinted a graph from Dr Roy Spencer [“doctor” from his PhD in Meteorology, and currently Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama] that compares the year-by-year predictions of those models with satellite and balloon observational data.  The graph has been adjusted by Spencer to produce an artificial agreement between the models and reality in 1979, and then lets the predictions and the empirical data flow from there.

The squares and circles represent the satellite and balloon, respectively, actual observations; the various lines the predictions of the models; and the heavy black line the simple average of the models.  For the climate-worriers’ concerns of the dangerous effects of a 1.5ºC increase in temperature, the overstatement of the models compared to reality of nearly 1ºC lends incredulity to their claims.

Hmm….

A Death Panel Overruled

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A Death Panel of One, consisting of the woman who’ll be in charge of the death panel that will come into being with the full implementation of Obamacare.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius refused to intervene to overrule her own Department’s rule that would have left a 10-year-old girl to die because her chronological age left her too young to be eligible to compete for a lung transplant that could save her life.

Sebelius insisted she had no authority to waive the rule and so to allow the girl to compete with adults for an organ donor’s lung, never minding that the Congress that authorized her Department to have the rule assured her she did.

Sebelius insisted she didn’t want to play God and tear-jerkingly assured the House Committee on Education and the Workforce that she “can’t imagine anything more difficult” and that she “can’t imagine anything worse than one individual getting to pick who lives and who dies” while cynically ignoring the fact that by refusing to act, she was taking the “difficult” step of choosing “who lives and who dies.”

This Death Panel of One further justified her refusal by claiming

[T]there are about 40 seriously ill Pennsylvanians over the age of 12 also waiting for a lung transplant[.]

Never mind that the girl is at the top of the children’s list, so the other children’s status wouldn’t be affected, except through a slight improvement in their chances for getting a pediatric lung.  And that the girl wouldn’t go to the top of the adult’s list as a result of the rule’s waiver—she’d only be eligible to compete for a place in the list.

Fortunately, Federal District Judge Michael Baylson has overruled the Death Panel of One, at least temporarily, ordering Sebelius to waive the rule at least until 14 June, when he’ll have a full hearing on the rule.

But this is temporary, both for the 10-year-old and for Americans generally.  This is the sort of thing we can expect out of Obamacare’s more formal Death Panel, and too few Americans will have the resources to fight that one’s…decisions.