Of course, since you asked so nicely:
Let me bookmark your site and also make bottles furthermore?
The NY Times pleads Snowden’s case
With its usual respect for details and logic (which means, “very little”), the New York Times says Edward Snowden should be given clemency and allowed back into the country. The title of the editorial, “Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower,” sets the tone for inaccuracy, because the term is not applicable to Snowden whether you support him or not.
I’m not going to rehash the many many thousands of words I’ve already written on the subject of Snowden, but if you care to refresh your memory on that score, here they are.
It is no surprise at all that the Times wants to encourage the leaking of government secrets by insiders to newspapers rather than using the usual whistle-blower route that bypasses them. The Times still considers one of its finest hours and biggest triumphs to have been the publication of the Pentagon Papers (the WaPo was part of this as well) and the court case they won against Nixon’s effort to stop them.
Many of you may think the Times was heroic back then. But I call your attention to this and this:
Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the [Pentagon Papers] documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.
In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.
But back to Edward Snowden. I have long contended that he used the method most damaging to the interests of the US and most self-aggrandizing, and that he showed either dangerous naivete or dangerous stupidity about the motives and agenda of the Chinese and the Russians. He should pay the price for stealing and then dumping classified information, and it doesn’t matter if you believe his intentions were good (I have grave doubts) and are glad we have the information about the NSA program (I am glad).
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air deals with the whistle-blower issue quite effectively:
The editorial presents a false binary choice ”” NSA officers or going on the lam. There are other channels, including presenting the evidence of wrongdoing to members of Congress. Snowden shrugged that off as well in his interview last month with the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, claiming that Congressional intel chairs’ “softball questions” to NSA and other intel leaders showed they wouldn’t do anything with the evidence if he provided it. That’s a dodge, though, especially since Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers aren’t the only two members of Congress. Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul were well-known opponents of domestic surveillance; why not go to them, or anyone else first before taking the cache elsewhere, especially to China and then Russia? The fact that the Times’ editors never even address that channel shows how weak their argument is ”” which is why they don’t really try to make the amnesty argument in the end.
The precedent that would be set by giving Snowden either amnesty or a reduced sentence would encourage future wannabees to do exactly what Snowden did. The security of our intelligence data—bad as it seems to be now—would become laughable.
Snowden is one of those topics that causes a firestorm of controversy whenever I tackle it, because he has many on the right and the left who defend him and consider him a hero. I have made it clear that I most definitely am not one of them.
[NOTE: See also this for some historical background about the Pentagon Papers.]
Tell them what you drink…
…and they’ll tell you who you vote for.
What about me? I hardly drink anything. Perhaps that makes me politically weird, which I already knew.
Dave Barry looks back at the year 2013…
…and it’s not pretty.
But some of it is pretty funny:
…In a shocking interview, Lance Armstrong, after years of denial, admits to Oprah Winfrey that he took illegal drugs in all seven of his Tour de France victories, as well as using a motorcycle for certain stages of the race and “occasionally” shooting opponents with poison-tipped darts. Also he played “a small role” in the JFK assassination…
Washington faces another crisis in the form of a “sequester” that will happen automatically unless Congress can agree on a budget, which seems unlikely inasmuch as Congress cannot agree on what planet this is. If the sequester goes into effect, federal spending will continue to rise, but not quite as fast as it would have risen without the sequester. To a normal human, this means government spending is still increasing, but to Washington, the sequester means “draconian cuts” and is a looming disaster of epic proportions. Panic grips the city, as grim-faced former student council presidents write talking points far into the night…
…Kerry, continuing to stress the dire urgency of the [Syria] situation, compares Assad to Hitler, only to declare a few days later ”” moments before his aides are able to fell him with a tranquilizer dart ”” that any strike against Assad will be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.” President Obama clarifies this by stating that “the United States military doesn’t do pinpricks.”
Just when it seems as if there is no good way out of the Syria mess, help miraculously arrives in the form of our generous old friends the Russians, who, despite being longtime allies of Syria, are willing to lend us a helping hand without any thought of benefiting themselves. Under their plan, Assad gets to remain in power but must give up his chemical weapons and go back to killing people in a more humane, less Hitlerish way. With the crisis averted, everybody in Washington heaves a sigh of relief, and that is the last we hear about the crisis in Syria…
…In other foreign-affairs news, Dennis Rodman travels to North Korea for a loon-to-loon meeting with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, who presents the former NBA star with a commemorative set of 50 political prisoners…
Diana Nyad completes an unprecedented swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat made all the more difficult by the fact that she had a family of five clinging to her back…
…[T]he federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park ”” ALL of it ”” is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.
By day 17, the situation has become so dire that Congress, resorting to desperate measures, decides to actually do something. It passes, and the president signs, a law raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring that the federal government can continue spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have until the next major totally unforeseeable government financial crisis, scheduled for February 2014.
Things do not go nearly as smoothly with the rollout of Obamacare , which turns out to have a lot of problems despite being conceived of by super-smart people with extensive experience in the field of being former student council presidents. The federal Web site, Healthcare.gov, is riddled with glitches, resulting in people being unable to log in, people getting cut off, people being electrocuted by their keyboards, people having their sensitive financial information suddenly appear on millions of TV screens during episodes of “Duck Dynasty,” etc.
Fortunately, as the initial rush of applicants tapers off, the system starts to work a little better, and by the end of the second week U.S. Secretary of Blame Kathleen Sebelius is able to announce that the program has amassed a total enrollment, nationwide, of nearly two people, one of whom later turns out to be imaginary. But this is not good enough for a visibly angry and frustrated and, of course, surprised President Obama, who promises to get the Web site fixed just as soon as somebody answers the Technical Support hotline, which has had the White House on hold for 73 hours…
On the Obamacare front, the administration declares that the federal Web site has been significantly improved, although there are still occasional glitches, such as one that enables a Milwaukee woman seeking to compare dental plans to accidentally launch a tactical nuclear strike against Guatemala. But as Secretary of Blame Sebelius notes, “This kind of thing happens all the time with Orbitz.”
Imperfect Polly
Today in the wee hours of the morning I saw an ad for this on TV (warning: autoplay video at the link). It is being marketed as the perfect pet—no upkeep and no bother, and yet reactive to your presence: a mechanical parakeet that moves its head and tail and sings its not-especially-mellifluous parakeet song when you look at it.
“Head & Tail Feathers Move Realistically!” “Sits on its Perch…Or Your Finger!” Has it come to this? Apparently.
Perfect Polly’s promoters might consider it flawless (or would certainly like you to think so), but Amazon customers who’ve ordered it seem to consider it a piece of bird excrement. It’s not the concept they have trouble with (after all, they liked it enough to have purchased it), it’s the execution. Apparently the bird is shoddily made and doesn’t quite work, and the its voice is very faint.
But for me the toy conjures up Hans Christian Anderson’s cautionary tale “The Nightingale”:
Then the artificial bird had to sing alone. It was just as great a success as the real one, and then it was so much prettier to look at; it glittered like bracelets and breast-pins.
It sang the same tune three and thirty times over, and yet it was not tired; people would willingly have heard it from the beginning again, but the emperor said that the real one must have a turn now-but where was it? No one had noticed that it had flown out of the open window, back to its own green woods.
That’s not the end of the story, of course.
Roman aqueducts weren’t built in a day
We all know those Roman aqueducts, the arched wonders of the ancient world. But did you ever wonder what happened afterward, on the way to Rome (where all roads led, as well)?
For example, I had not known until I read this article that the bulk of the famed Roman aqueduct system was underground:
“The famous arched, over-ground aqueducts we see today are just the tip of the iceberg; 95% of the network ran underground,” says Marco Placidi, head of the speleologists group [engaged in mapping the system], which is sharing its results with Italy’s culture ministry.
Slaking the thirst of the fast-growing imperial capital meant linking it to springs many miles from the city. The ancient Roman engineers were equal to the task, supplying a quantity of water that modern engineers didn’t manage to match until the 1930s.
One of the aqueducts is still in use today. Now, that’s infrastructure! And others might have survived as well, had not the German tribes dealt them some parting blows back in the fall-of-the-empire days. The system was built with incredible solidity.
Welcoming 2014
I like the look of the year so much better: “2014” is prettier than “2013.” And yes, that’s very numberist of me.
Fresh start. Clean slate. Even rather than odd. And right now I’m doing the two huge loads of laundry I’ve put off for a while.
And since I don’t drink, I don’t even have a hangover.
How about you?
The no-politics post
I’ve got hundreds (literally) of drafts for posts on the blog ready and waiting to be polished and put up (about half of them seem to be on the subject of Obamacare). But no matter; I’m not doing it today.
For one thing, I lost the prime time for writing earlier, when my host went down for several hours. But maybe it was a blessing in disguise, because do we really have to have more politics today? It’s New Year’s Eve, after all.
So I’m going to be wild and frivolous. Or what passes for wild and frivolous in my life these days, which is to can politics for the rest of the day/evening and go out to eat.
Hope you have something very fun to do. Or, if you just want to spend a quiet evening at home with those you like and/or those you love or even alone, that’s fine too. New Year’s Eve is a strange holiday, a cross between the raucous and the solemn, and you can go either way or just keep it low-key.
My resolution? Same as always, and some day I might even keep it: go to bed earlier.
Happy New Year!
Separated at birth
They didn’t look the least bit alike when they were young.
But in their declining/mature/twilight/golden years, they rather do (except for the ‘stache and some extra eyebrow bushiness):
Maybe it’s time…
…to just dispense with clothing and call it a day:
Why did the MSNBC panel feel free…
…to mock the Romneys for having a black grandchild?
The main reason: their audience is so tiny and leftophile that the panel members forgot they were on TV and thought they were talking amongst themselves. Although they’ve now issued apologies and semi-apologies, it probably wasn’t until liberal CNN criticized them that they realized they might have done anything that could be considered even the least bit objectionable.
After all, the Romneys are infinitely mockable to the left, and just as with Sarah Palin the mockery goes on even though the campaign has ended. Unlike Palin, Romney has retreated from public life, but that doesn’t stop the left from continuing with the fun game of making fun of everything he and his family do.
Plus, the child is obviously going to be a black Republican. Everybody knows that black Republicans are not really black people and are therefore fair game.
[ADDENDUM: And in an only tangentially-related article, Joan Walsh bends over backwards to prove she’s not one of those bad white people. She’s a good white person. So please don’t hate her.]
Hello again!
The blog’s host was down for about two hours; it’s so frustrating when that happens. But we’re back (for now; I’d better type quickly and post this before it disappears again).
I’ll be putting up some posts a little later if the host holds up. But I just wanted to get in a heartfelt Happy New Year to you all!! Let’s hope 2014 is a great one!
