Without the military and police backing him, Gaddafi will be joining Mubarak.

The last six days of the Libyan protests.

“Civil War” is being used more and more to describe this.

Labor faces a moment of truth in Wisconsin

So far Walker isn’t flinching. Today I heard on NPR that he’s threatening to announce lay-offs.

Public-sector union members are “insulated from all economic shocks, immune to the vagaries that befall the common man.”

Is concealed carry the next win for gun advocates in Illinois?

• No concessions
• For a $15 national minimum wage or $5 an hour wage increase whichever is greater
• For a massive program of infrastructure spending to create jobs
• A 30- hour workweek with no cut in pay
• End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—bring the troops home
• Free public education at all levels
• No foreclosures
• Organize the unorganized
• No support for Democrats or Republicans, build an independent mass working people’s party

Many of these demands are outlandishly unreasonable, especially when the first demand is “no concessions.” What’s the difference between organized labor demanding less work for the same pay and an employer demanding more work for the same pay?

Collective ‘bargaining’ indeed.

To an astonishing extent, the unions are the government in many locales. They elect officials and then sit down to bargain with them over their salaries and benefits. Since they are essentially bargaining with themselves, they generally make out quite nicely. It’s a corrupt and ultimately unsustainable practice. Sooner or later, as Margaret Thatcher observed about socialism, they will run out of other people’s money.

And Rachel Maddow is correct in saying:

[W]hat’s going on right now in the American Midwest is about Republicans versus Democrats. It is about politics. It is about who wins the next election and the elections after that. That’s what’s going on right now in Wisconsin. This is about the survival of the Democratic Party. There are parts of the story that actually don’t make any sense unless you understand that.

That’s because the Unions are one of the key tools used by the Democrats to leverage their agenda and public-employee unions are far more dangerous than private sector unions because (emphasis mine):

In the case of a government workforce, those whose interests are served by keeping costs down would include all who pay taxes and fees to said government. In other words, the universe of folks represented by management is far larger than that represented by the union. This inherent tension is the invisible hand of reality that keeps collective bargaining in line.

However, public sector “collective bargaining” is a bad joke, given that there are only chairs on one side of the bargaining table. The bigger universe of interested parties have zero representation in the process. There is no natural force working to keep costs in line.

We have a system where people too often are rewarded for doing the wrong thing, and those who strive to do the best by their families are penalised. It is a system so out of control that it houses unemployed people in some of the most expensive accommodation in the land, while those who work hard on low incomes are forced to commute long distances because they can’t afford properties near work.

The US is working to expand ours…

The new bill that would provide additional unemployment benefits to 99ers — those who have exhausted all available benefits — now has 60 cosponsors, an unemployment advocate announced today.

…

Another participant at the press conference was Gerry DePietro, a 99er who has become an advocate for the unemployed. Commenting on her new-found activism, she said, “I realized there were people out there so much worse off than me and since I still had Internet access, I was going to ‘climb on board’ as they say.”

Because It Is Wrong is an inquiry into the legitimacy of torture and the expectation of privacy in the age of terror (although I cringe at the moniker ‘age of terror’). The father-son duo frame their debate of torture on the concept of deontology, which comes from the Greek word deon, “it is necessary” or “it must be done.”

An ethics based in deontology lays down commands: it says that we must do a certain thing for no other reason than because it is the right thing to do, and it commands we not do other things for no other reason than because they are wrong. For deontology, the standard of action is not that the result of a particular act may be good or bad, but that the act itself, apart from any consequences, is inherently right or wrong.¹

The authors argue that torture is wrong based on the intrinsic, inestimable value of human life and dignity and they frame that argument using the tenet that man was made in the image of God. “[T]he image of God is invoked to explain a prohibition: to kill a human being is to attack the image of God; as the image of god is inviolable, so are we.”² In secular terms; human beings are sacred and as such, torture is never justified, not for any reason. “The human form has a worth and divinity we do not want our action, our intelligence to be directed at defacing. This is the kind of judgement–moral or aesthetic or both, take your pick–that men and women live their lives by and may even give their lives for.”³

I think think this best sums up their statement against torture:

Torture grossly offends the bedrock premise that every human being is a locus of inestimable value: a being with plans, emotions, rational and aesthetic or spiritual capacities, and the capacity to form relations to other persons. Altogether, we would call these aspects of a person her soul. Torture offends that premise because it distorts, destroys, or impairs the physical envelope that contains, enables, and expresses the person’s soul.⁴

The root of the authors’ privacy debate is the privacy dilemma; man’s “inadequacy and our finitude.”

We are liable to be unjust, and so to be investigated. But our powers of knowledge and interpretation are limited, and so we may misconstrue what we find. To grant human investigators the powers of the divine is to give them a warrant that necessarily exceeds their abilities and will be misused and abused. The right of privacy is, admittedly, a second best, an acknowledgement of human imperfection. But it serves as a hedge against the worst excesses of that imperfection when it is married to political authority, even legitimate authority. Human beings should never stand absolutely naked before human authority.⁵

The authors argue that citizens have a reasonable right to privacy in that states must be authorized to violate our privacy, within legal limits, in order to protect the greater society. This caries them into the debate of the Bush era ‘terror surveillance program’, the key argument against which is the fact that it didn’t comply with FISA. Though both authors agree that the program was outside the law, they differ on how to deal with it’s illegality. One argues that by prosecuting the Bush administration, the law becomes a sword wielded by those in power against their opponents and thus a perversion of the law:

Thomas More was right that unwavering insistence on the law is a shild against tyrannical power; but in prosecutions and punishment, the law works not as a shild but as a sword. The decision to swing that sword, the decisions whether to prosecute or punish are questions of prudence, discretion, Aristotle’s epieikeia.⁶

In conclusion, I find the book extremely relevant to the debate on torture (or enhanced interrogation) and privacy and it has helped shape my opinions on both subjects, tremendously.

¹Charles Fried and Gregory Fried, Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) 14-15
²ibid. 39
³ibid. 48
⁴ibid. 55
⁵ibid. 98
⁶ibid. 169

In the second year of a brutal recession, the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in half a century and millions more are barely avoiding falling below the poverty line, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.

About 44 million Americans – one in seven – lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. That is the largest number of people since the census began tracking poverty 51 years ago.

The snapshot captured by the census for 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency, shows an America in the throes of economic upheaval.

My favorite part is this bit of propaganda:

Obama said the numbers could have been much worse were it not for government assistance.

It’s impossible to either prove or refute a statement like that. It’s just as easy to say ‘the numbers could have been much better were it not for government interference.’

However, we do know that just over 50% of the stimulus has been spent and we also know that the money was used to increase government employment by 10% since January of 2008 while private employment dropped by 6%.

From FastCompany.com:

BP’s report blames a handful of key players for the accident: Transocean (owner of the ill-fated rig), Halliburton (the company that cemented the well) and itself. The report identifies four critical factors that triggered the disaster, none of which should be too surprising to anyone who watched the oil spill unfold. BP notes that well integrity was not established, hydrocarbons entered the well undetected and well control was lost, hydrocarbons ignited on Deepwater Horizon, and the blowout preventer failed to seal the well.

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

This is the downside of hanging everything out there–Facebook, Twitter, WordPress; it all becomes incriminating information.

To give you some context on what shapes my opinion (in no specific order and obviously not an exhaustive list):

• I have strong libertarian beliefs. I believe my personal freedom is extremely important and to achieve that I’m willing to fight for your personal freedom.
  
• I served in the U.S. Army
  
• I read a lot, on a broad range of topics
  
• I don’t limit myself to ‘friendly’ sources of information
  

Now some of my thoughts on WikiLeaks:

• Governments should be held accountable for their actions
  
• A republic is bound by the rule of law, which is rooted in the shared values and morals of the citizenry
  
• In a republic, journalism is the primary means of gaining insight into the workings and dealings of the government
  
• Journalism then, has a moral and ethical responsibility to be unbiased and thorough in investigating and revealing the workings and dealings of the government. Anything short of that and journalism becomes a part of or an extension to the government.
  
• The funding of journalism must either be 100% transparent, or 100% double-blind; meaning neither the donors nor the recipients know where the money came from or where it’s going. Since there’s no mechanism for the later, we must stick to the former; 100% transparency in funding. This should be obvious; if a particular group of journalists owe their very existence to a particular funding source, that dependency can become a lever for ideological manipulation (consider Soros or Murdoch/Koch).
  

Therefore I strongly agree with the premise of WikiLeaks, which is in part:

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.

However, as I stated in a previous post, titled Collateral Damage In A War Of Choice (April 9, 2010), WikiLeaks has an established history of manipulating what they release and that defeats their stated purpose by removing transparency and adding a layer of deceit, regardless of how righteous they may believe they are acting. By editing or by cherry-picking what they leak, they completely destroy their credibility. By concealing their source of funding, they conceal their “owner/master.”

Only a free, unrestrained and unbiased press can effectively expose deception in government.