Again: ‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden’

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Homeland Security, Technology, Terrorism

“I think patriot is a word that’s — that’s thrown around so much that it can be devalued nowadays. But being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen from the — the violations of an — and encroachments of adversaries.” So said Edward Snowden to “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, to whom he spoke in a hotel in Moscow.

And:

“… there have been times throughout history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law.”

The guy is the real deal. Again: “‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden'”

Kate’s Keister

Britain, Etiquette, Feminism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Correctness

Unlike Kim and Khloé Kardashian’s “ass elephantiasis,” Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, has a very nice keister. That’s not in question. On American TV, however, no questions are permitted about the propriety of a woman’s attire.

Watch Brook Baldwin, of the PC brigade at CNN, terrify London correspondent Max Foster, who questions Kate’s choice of wearing “the skimpiest knickers in her drawer.” To me it looks as though Kate has no underwear on. “As a woman I get frustrated,” Baldwin hissed at Foster. “Keep it out of the headlines,” she threatened.

(Via Bild)

‘Collect It All’

Homeland Security, Intelligence, Journalism, Technology, Terrorism

It’s his biggest revelation so far. Glenn Greenwald says he has been “saving the best for last”: names of Americans targeted by the National Security Agency. Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide, is purported to contain scans of the many secret documents he has published. At the top of each document is the NSA’s motto: “Collect It All.” (Via Fox News.)

One question the journos interviewing Greenwald across US studios have failed to ask: The US government had promised to arrest Greenwald if and when he returned to the US. What happened? Why don’t media ask?

To ask a question about why the chronically incurious are chronically incurious is to answer it.

What Is True Patriotism?

Homeland Security, Military, Nationhood, Propaganda, War

American soldiers are “citizens of the world,” I wrote in “The International Highway to Hell.” “We pay their wages, but their hearts belong in faraway exotic places with which Main Street U.S.A can hardly hope to compete” for affection. This year’s Memorial Day Message” is gentler than that 2005 antiwar.com column, which was not as understanding about the specter of “misplaced loyalties,” where,

soldier after American soldier burbles on about how freeing Iraqis [Libyans, Afghans, etc.] inspires him … Or, if injured, … how eager he is to get back to his “buddies,” those he considers his real family. …

Celebrated on Memorial Day are “the … self-destructive sentiments too many American soldiers express – their willingness to give their lives for Iraqis [Libyans, Afghans, etc.]; their wish to rejoin their battalions as soon as they heal from being carved up in combat.”

But these point to a “profound alienation from all that’s important.”

And what it important? Not to live a contradiction and a lie, the one Jack Kerwick pinpoints in “The Consequences of American Patriotism” :

if morality consists in the observance of universal principles like “human rights,” then one of two things follow.
Either the partiality that we have toward our spouses, our friends, and our families is beyond the moral realm altogether, or it is actually immoral. There is no way to avoid this conclusion. Any morality affirming universal principles requires impartiality. In glaring contrast, the intimate relationships from which we derive our identities — “the little platoons,” as Burke described them — require partiality.
Thus, either patriotism is a moral fiction or our “little platoons” are.

Or perhaps “patriotism” is a devotion to “our little platoons”?

Perturbed I was back in 2005 “by the sight of compatriots who remain vested in a foreign polity.”

And convinced I was—still am—that “healthy patriotism is associated with robust particularism – petty provincialism, if you like – and certainly not with the deracinated globalism exhibited by our GI Joes and Janes.”