Category Archives: War Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

As The Middle East Burns

4 Comments

…the White House fiddles:

The combination of grave and growing dangers in the Middle East with a lightweight policy response in Washington is genuinely frightening. We have no doubt that the administration wants a peaceful and stable Middle East that is moving toward greater democracy and greater respect for human rights. We share its desire to see this happen without massive US intervention. But the evidence is mounting that America’s present course in the Middle East is leading to a very bad place; real trouble looms unless the administration can begin to engage in a much more serious and thoughtful way.

Serious and thoughtful ways are not a hallmark of this administration. And this sort of fecklessness is no less than any intelligent person would have expected from the neophyte’s campaign rhetoric in 2008.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Chuck Hagel

5 Comments

Once again demonstrates his room-temperature IQ.

And the Senate actually confirmed him to run the Pentagon.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this:

According to the Sun and the Financial Times, Mr Obama apologised to the chancellor for calling him Jeffrey three times during the meeting – saying: “I’m sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R&B singer”.

We know how this would be covered by the media if that famous moron, George Bush, had made a similar gaffe.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Syria And Egypt

2 Comments

They can’t be fixed:

Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.

That first sentence could apply to us, on the route we’re on. If we allow the Democrats to remain in charge, it will be our fate, and sooner than later. We just have to hope that we’re not there already. And then there’s this:

This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber” consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.

Except it’s not funny. At all.

Business, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

An Internet War

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Has the US started one?

More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.

This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.

This may end badly.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The “Pragmatic Moderate” In Iran

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Just what is that’s “moderate” about this guy, again?

…if we are to speak objectively and without comparison to even more extreme actors, these “pragmatic moderates” are anything but moderate, and their insidious “pragmatism” — i.e., their pose as conventonal political operatives rather than fire-breathing jihadists — makes them more dangerous.

And Assad was a “reformer.” Just ask that idiot, Hillary Clinton.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Another Holocaust

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Bibi Netanyahu is prepared to prevent it, even if Barack Obama (among others) isn’t:

“The leaders of the Allies knew about the Holocaust in real time,” Netanyahu said at the opening of a permanent exhibit called “Shoah” in Block 27 at the Auschwitz- Birkenau State Museum.

“They understood exactly what was happening in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not.

“To us Jews the lesson is clear: We must not be complacent in the face of threats of annihilation. We must not bury our heads in the sand or allow others to do the work for us. We will never be helpless again.”

But the administration continues to fantasize that the barrier to the “peace process” is homes on the West Bank, rather than that one side that wants to destroy the other, while the other side refuses to acquiesce to its own destruction.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Sheep

10 Comments

…look up:

What is this but the nightmare of political modernism? The constant watchers with cold, unsympathetic eyes. The men in trench coats falling in step as you leave your home. The knock on the door at three in the morning. The monster state crushing the individual, the “boot stamping on a human face forever.”

You cannot answer this with legalisms or minutiae. By pointing out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts have been on the case since 1978, carefully overseeing all government surveillance programs, that the 1986 Electric Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), the Patriot Act, and its supplementary legislation provided for further and even more rigorous safeguards. Or that the “concept of privacy” is “evolving” under the pressure of new technology, being “redefined” into something vaguer and more metaphysical that it was.

You can’t make those arguments because, obviously enough, the safeguards didn’t work. If they had worked, nothing like this NSA program would have ever seen the light of day. If FISA courts had any real power, if government attorneys had any serious intention of serving the interests of the public, the NSA effort would have been limited to a paper proposal, like thousands of other crazy ideas. (For their own part, the conservative elite have waltzed their way into the dunce corner all by themselves with the argument that national security trumps everything. Memo to NRO, Commentary et al — it doesn’t. It never has.)

Americans know full well what “privacy” is. They know it simply involves being left alone, particularly by those in power. They know that it does not “evolve” without turning into something else completely. Privacy is an aspect of human nature and, like marriage, parenthood, ownership of property, or self-defense, cannot be destroyed or modified by legislation or government activity. Those who attempt to do so are challenging the fountains of the vasty deep, and will be washed away in the attempt.

Involving as it does the NSA, it’s unlikely we will ever learn exactly who was behind this, who gave the orders, and what the precise purpose was. But in a way, that doesn’t matter. We know what the source is, and the rest we can guess.

I think we’re going to find out a lot more before this is over, though. We won’t have to guess.

[Update a while later]

The new Panopticon — the all-seeing eye:

The other day, my college age son quietly went around the house and put electricians tape over the camera lenses on the displays of all our home computers. I laughed when I discovered what he had done. . .then paused: after all, it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to remotely turn that camera on and secretly watch me and my family. I left the tape on.

This is what it has come to. The revelations of recent days about the NSA being able to spy on the phone calls of millions of everyday Americans, without warrant, in search of a few possible terrorists has made everyone just a little more paranoid – and a little less trusting of the benign nature of our Federal government. The reality is that we may not yet be paranoid enough.

I keep my webcam on my desktop unplugged unless I’m using it, but maybe I should tape my laptop camera. And no, I’ve never trusted Google with my data. But so many people I email with are gmail users, it probably doesn’t matter.

And then there’s this:

No doubt once again there will be a mad scramble in the Capitol to do something – new regulations, new oversight, new attempts to protect civil liberties. But, thanks to Moore’s Law, the technology will have already moved on. Is it too much to ask, just once, that Congress get ahead of this mess before all of those newly-purchased copies of 1984 turn into tour guides? The leaders of many top Silicon Valley companies have besmirched the reputations of their companies (“Do no evil” indeed) and lost the hard-earned trust of their international customers in the last few days – for what? Haul them in before a Senate committee and find out what threats the NSA and other agencies made to make these powerful billionaires give up so much.

Meanwhile, Congress, get ahead of the technology curve for once. You can start by asking about where the data goes from cellphone cameras. Then talk to the GPS folks about the ability to track the location of private phones and use their phone and tablet cameras. Query Google about the future plans for those autonomous camera cars. Get Bill Gates and ask him about what he had to give up to quiet that Microsoft anti-trust case of a decade ago. All may prove dead-ends, but who can now be sure?

Who indeed?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Lois Lerner

24 Comments

Should be doing a long stint in Club Fed:

Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan; she also is a national security problem, because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.

The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

This is the danger of a too-powerful government.