Category Archives: Morality

UPDATED: Who Is General Keith Alexander? (We Know What Charlie Rose Is)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Liberty, Media, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

Charlie Rose’s little-watched public television tête-à-tête is in the news because little Obama ran scared into Rose’s loving, all-forgiving embrace, to justify his National Security Agency’s unconstitutional, naturally illicit and all-round reprehensible spying programs.

A worthier and more trustworthy guest on Charlie Rose’s show was James Bamford, who appeared days before the despicable Barack Obama put in a cameo.

Do you want to know a thing or two about FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER—“the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar”—who dissembled his way through a House hearing today?

Ignore the “Ass with Ears,” aka Obama. Read “The Secret War: INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM, on WIRED magazine.

“FOR YEARS, FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.”

MORE on WIRED magazine.

UPDATE: “No Rose Can Mask the Stench of Obama’s Tyranny,” writes Brother William N. Grigg: “Like a skunk that has grown inured to its own smell, Barack Obama is oblivious to the dense musk of tyrannical arrogance that he customarily emits. As someone who is statist to down to his chromosomes, Mr. Obama considers government’s power to be illimitable, and individual freedom to be a revocable gift conferred by those who presume to rule the rest of us. This was made abundantly – and redundantly – clear in a recent interview Obama gave to the repellently sycophantic PBS host Charlie Rose regarding the totalitarian NSA surveillance program. …”

MORE.

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UPDATE II: The Kid Is Alright. Ditto The British Guardian (Which Exposed Indirectly Corrupt US Media)

Ethics, Government, Journalism, Justice, Media, Morality, Ron Paul, Technology, The State

People like Edward Snowden are the very people to whom we should say, “Thank you for your service.” Uncle Sam will destroy Edward Snowden, as it is destroying Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. Snowden knew it, yet he did what he did anyway.

Via The Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

The kid is more than alright. He’s a hero.

UPDATED: Corrupt US Media Usurped. An heroic American whistleblower chooses, oh-so wisely, to expose Uncle Sam’s usurpations to the veteran reporters of the British Guardian, and not to the partisan hacks of the American press: This tells you all you need to know about the state of US press and the entity (the state) to which it has sworn allegiance.

The best of Edward Snowden:

I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets,” he said.

…”We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”
Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. “I am not afraid,” he said calmly, “because this is the choice I’ve made.” …
… he learned just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities were, claiming “they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them”.
…He described how he once viewed the internet as “the most important invention in all of human history”. As an adolescent, he spent days at a time “speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own”. …
…But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. “I don’t see myself as a hero,” he said, “because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”
…Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA’s surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. “What they’re doing” poses “an existential threat to democracy”, he said. …
…there still remains the question: why did he do it? Giving up his freedom and a privileged lifestyle? “There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.”
…For him, it is a matter of principle. “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to,” he said.

AND:

“Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
‘I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,’ he said. ‘There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.'”

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

“I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

“The primary lesson from this experience was that ‘you can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.'”

UPDATE II: NO SURPRISE THERE; Edward Snowden had donated to libertarian Ron Paul.

Anti-Apartheid Does Not Mean Pro-Democracy

Democracy, Ethics, Etiquette, Individual Rights, Morality, South-Africa

Miguel write:

Mrs Mercer:

I purchased your book Into the Cannibal’s Pot and have just started reading it.

From your book and other sources on your website, I understand that you and your family (particularly your father) held an anti-apartheid stance.

Your book however, describes the current situation in SA, particularly after the multi-racial, democratic elections of 1994, as having resulted in a borderline lawless state.

My question to you is: Did you believe, prior to 1994, that the an end to the apartheid regime would bring a more beneficial political and quality of life process to SA.

Thanking you advance

It goes without saying that I make a point of replying to almost all letters I get, provide they’re polite. Thousands, since I began writing. As George Will once wrote, “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

I’ll address in a future post the issue of what failing to answer your mail says about you. For now, here’s my reply to Miguel:

Hello Miguel,

Thank you for reading Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

I believe that nowhere in my book do I state the belief below. Moreover, from the fact that I oppose state-enforced apartheid—it does not follow that I support what I call in The Cannibal, a “raw, ripe democracy.”

By the end of the book, you will better understand this perspective. My involvement in SA as a young woman was humanitarian, not political.

You are correct in your assessment of my father’s thinking.

ILANA Mercer

An Agency Of Thieves (IRS) Expected To Practice Theft And Intimidation With Fairness

Criminal Injustice, Government, Morality, Political Philosophy, Taxation, The State

“Tea party,” “patriot,” “the Constitution and Bill of Rights”: This is the stuff of the American Revolution. These are also the keywords that cued the rogue Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to target conservative organizations.

We are ruled by a traitor class and we’ve become traitors to our founding.

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, characteristically, understates the IRS’s abuse of “police power” as “an intrusive, ideologically targeted federal investigation of a political movement.”

WaPo’s Editorial Board stepped it up, conceding that “Any unequal application of the law based on ideological viewpoint is unpardonable — toxic to the legitimacy of the government’s vast law-enforcement authority.”

A forthcoming Treasury Department inspector general’s report finds that IRS staffers looked for applications for tax-exempt status from groups that used in their names words such as “Tea Party,” “Patriots” and “9/12,” as well as ones that contained expressions of concern about government spending or criticism of how the country is run. One manager worried — with reason — that this targeting might result in “over-inclusion” of applications that needed no such scrutiny. By 2011, IRS staff had set aside more than 100 applications for added review. It wasn’t just a couple of wayward staffers involved but rather a number of IRS agents and managers.
The inspector general also reports that Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt organization office, knew about the targeting in 2011; she seemed to say Friday that she learned about it from news reports last year. That inconsistency raises suspicions about the agency’s statements that higher-ups didn’t know about the targeting and that there was no political motivation.

Let us remember that the IRS’s activities are immoral, if not illegal. The IRS’s business is legalized theft. However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. Most of what the federal government does is in fact immoral, but not illegal, as it makes up the laws. After all, those in power determine what’s licit and what’s elicit.

Apparently, we expect an agency of thieves (the IRS) to practice theft and intimidation in an even and fair manner.

In a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft. The Founders intended for government to safeguard man’s natural rights. The 16th Amendment changed that—it gave government a limitless lien on a man’s property and, by extension, on his life. The Amendment turned government into the almighty source – rather than the protector – of man’s rights and Americans into indentured slaves.

No one in the US government ever gets punished or demoted. Pundits, no doubt, will soon turn to the question of suing the IRS. And most will agree about the “wisdom” of “governmental immunity,” intended as it is to “stop people from suing the government and government employees and officials in many cases.“

Indeed, legislators have used their position to pass laws exempting themselves and many others from liability.

The sovereign has immunity. And you call this a republic?