On Safety and Liberty

I watched clips of Obama’s response to the revelations regarding the NSA surveillance issues yesterday, and to say that I heard echoes of George W. Bush would be an understatement. He spoke of “striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy, because, there are some trade-offs involved,” and assured us that the programs in question “help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

“But I think its important to recognize that you can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're gonna have to make some choices as a society. And I can say in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our ability to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.”

The juxtaposition between his assertions of “100% security” and “possible terrorist activity” is rank Bushism, with the former being impossible and the latter blatant fear mongering.

He assured us that no one was listening to our phone calls which was distraction, since nobody ever claimed that any such thing was happening and that was not anyone’s concern regarding the illegal program. The fact is that obtaining a record of a person’s telephone activity requires a court order, and this program is making a database of everyone’s telephone activity which can be accessed at will. It is a massive violation of law, and Obama tries to palm it off as “keeping us safe” just as Bush did.

Obama goes on to say that whatever potential this program has for government abuse, such as repressing protest, that we should trust him not to engage in such abuse, and assures us that he will use to program only to “keep us safe from terrorists.” I don’t know if I trust him or not, I’m pretty sure I don’t. This is a man who says he finds it easy to give an order to assassinate an American citizen without due process of law, and I’m supposed to trust him?

Trusting him or not is not the point. Our constitution spells out a form of government which makes it unnecessary to trust any individual. Obama is violating that constitution, and then asking us to trust him not to abuse the product of that violation. That’s like a bank robber asking us to trust him to spend the stolen money wisely.

Organ of the State

CBS Evening News covered the various spying leaks last night in a manner that I have come to know as typical of them. They discussed the leaks in terms of how the leaks happened and who published them, and then went into a discussion of how the “whistleblowers” would be hunted down and punished by the government.

The content of the leaks, the fact that our government is illegally collecting data about its citizens, that it continues to do under Obama what was decried as illegal under Bush, was essentially ignored. It was about “enemies of the state” who dare to reveal to the public what its government is doing.

Arguing In Good Faith

Krugman today accuses one Arvik Roy of arguing “health care reform” in bad faith because he claims facts which are not true in making his points. Krugman does not say which untrue facts Mr. Roy claims, but that’s okay, because Krugman is undoubtedly correct in his accusation. My problem with Dr. Krugman is that I’m wondering where he gets off making such accusations, given his proclivity for spouting nonsense himself.

Let’s take, for instance, Krugman’s assertion that the government should borrow money without restraint at this time because interest rates are really low. Add that to the statement that he has made many times that governments never repay debts and you have an assertion by Krugman which is completely inconsistent with reality. Krugman knows that government debt is, essentially, adjustable rate debt and that interest rates are certainly not going to stay low forever, so he cannot possibly believe that his claim regarding the cost of government borrowing is true as he posits it.

It might be true if the government were to retire the debt when its term expired, but Krugman specifically asserts that government does not do that. It might be true if the debt were not time limited, but Krugman knows very well that such is not the case. So is Krugman “arguing in good faith” when he claims that the government should borrow without restraint because interest rates are low at this moment? I think not.

Let’s also examine Krugman using the writings of John Maynard Keynes as authority for why government should spend money in economic hard times. All well and good, but then he abandons Keynes altogether in arguing that we should strive for inflation because it “makes debt easier to repay.” Keynes abhorred inflation, and with good reason, in that it rewards debt, punishes savings and diminishes capital formation. Keynes also advised that, while government should spend in times of economic stress, he advocated that it should repay the incurred debt in economic good times, something which Krugman specifically decries.

Can anyone claim that selectively citing a source and quoting only those portions that fit your agenda is “arguing in good faith” on any topic?

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Is This Going To Be A Turkey Shoot?

It will be interesting to see how this mess develops, because it reminds me of two things which led to entirely opposite outcomes.

The first is the treatment which Occupy Wall Street received at the hands of various police forces in the United States. That, of course, led nowhere but to the irrelevancy of the movement formerly known as Occupy Wall Street, which is still around but is almost totally ignored. There were a few words of outrage, outrage I tell you, regarding the harsh treatment by “police thugs,” but no one in this country takes that kind of outrage seriously, so…

The other thing it reminds me of is, of course, Tahrir Square in Egypt, and we all know how that turned out. We don’t have Hillary Clinton around to tell us how Erdogan is a “dear friend of the family,” but John Kerry has probably been to yacht races with him on the Bosporus Gold Coast, so that might serve the same purpose. Obama is already hyperventilating about the noble qualities of Erdogan while urging both sides to remain calm and use “peaceful measures,” so we’re all set for that phase of things.

People in the Middle East are serious about their protests, though, and unlike this country they meet police thuggery with an escalation of violence instead of stealing off into the woodwork. So we will see before long if this is going to proceed to the phase where Obama is telling the world that Erdogan has “lost his authority to govern,” and that he must “step down immediately” or face some "serious consequences" which Obama will refuse to describe.

Events in the Middle East are not always easy to forecast, but Barack Obama is completely and entirely predictable.

The Absurdity That Is Salon

This is the headline at salon.com for an essay by Lewis Lapham, describing his upbringing in a shipping family and his first time at sea. The episode of his shipmates taking him to a whorehouse is a very minor episode, taking less than one paragraph in a fairly lengthy tale, and is in no way actually relevant to his seagoing experience. The headline, however, illustrates the kind of thinking that prevails at what used to be... Oh, to hell with it.

Strawberry Shortcake Dessert

My Sister-in-law got me started on this delicious dessert.

 It's yummy!

It a poke cake

{where you poke holes in the cake then pour flavored syrup in them}

Topped with fresh strawberries, cream and a sprinkle of Almond Roca

Perfect for summer!!

Right click the recipe and save it to your computer to print. 

On Morals And Ethics

Ian Welsh had a piece on ethics this week in which he defined the difference between morals and ethics as, “…morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.” I rather liked that definition at first reading, even though it sounded a little bit “too good to be true.” The more I pondered it, though, the more it held up, and I came to like it very much indeed.

His discussion regarding the definition is well said and and makes some good points. Like most of what he writes, I recommend it as good reading.

He also, in this piece, resonates with my thinking regarding a major breakdown in our governance that has been a burr under my saddle for a long time and which no one ever talks about. That is that our legislators keep thrashing around in a misguided efforts to arrive at moral legislation, such as abortion and gay marriage, and have abandoned completely any effort at ethical governance, as is revealed by their oft-repeated statement that, “My responsibility is to serve the best interest of my state/district.”

Actually, we should have no laws regarding the moral issue of abortion, either permitting or banning it, and the ethical responsibility of a federal legislator is to represent the principles of his state/district in serving the best interest of the nation as a whole.

The voters, of course, contribute to the ethical failure by reelecting incumbents because they want to “maintain seniority in Congress.” What that actually means is that they want to assure that their representation has sufficient “pull” in Congress to secure the maximum amount of pork for their state, and they vote for legislators based on the amount of pork which the representative is able to bring home.

During the Civil War it was said that “a nation divided against itself cannot stand.” That was at a time when this nation was divided into two halves. We are now divided into fifty greedy, self serving states, each trying to suck the maximum resources from the federal coffers for its own benefit and each willing to throw the nation under the bus in order to gain a “leg up” over its 49 competitors.

Whenever I bring up this concept in discussion, especially in liberal discussion, I am roundly slapped down and told that the true and proper role of a federal legislator is precisely to serve the best interest of his state/district. “If they don’t serve my interests,” I am asked, “who will?”

It never occurs to them that in matters of national governance perhaps their parochial interests should not be served at all, by anyone.

The rise of the Tea Party was actually a triumph of principle over greed, because for the first time the voters were in significant measure willing to elect legislators based on the principles they espoused rather than on what they could do for the district’s parochial self interest. Whether those principles represented valid governance is beside the point, the Tea Party was not based on “I’m going to bring federal money into your area.”

Yes, there was an element of self interest in voting Tea Party, in wanting lower taxes and smaller government, but it was not parochial self interest. These legislators were elected based on principles of national governance.