Spying on America.

Here's what Murray Rothbard wrote 40 years ago, long before the explosive power of the internet:

"Wiretapping is a contemptible invasion of privacy and of property right, and of course should be outlawed as an invasive act."
"...it is itself criminal to invade the property of anyone not yet convicted of a crime. It may well be true, for example, that if the government employed a ten-million man espionage force to spy upon and tap the wires of the entire population, the total amount of private crime would be reduced.... But what would this be compared to the mass crime that would thus be committed, legally and without shame, by the government itself?"

Invasion of your privacy is nothing less than trespassing  on your property. Your property includes the ground outside your bedroom window (whether owned or rented) and the internet signals you generate on your desktop computer. Be aware of the agreement you signed with internet servers; most of your postings are public. If you want privacy, don't blab on the internet.

Obama on Rushmore?

Periodically, we hear about adding a face to Mount Rushmore, which includes sculptures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.

The problem is that there is no room for another face--unless we eliminate one. Washington, of course, can't be undone because he pioneered the birth of America by courageous military action and undying commitment; European kings and dictators were astounded by his personal dismissal of power and his voluntary retirement to private life.

Jefferson, in his turn, provided the intellectual justification for American liberty, the very source of the country called America

Later, during a national conflict resulting in civil war, President Lincoln stepped up--tortured by moral conflict though he was--to expand the breadth of American sovereignty and the depth of American liberty.

These three men were Fathers, in DEED, of our country.

Which leaves us with Teddy Roosevelt.
Why is he there? On Rushmore?

Well, to get approval of government funds for the sculpture, the project's advocates appealed to President Calvin Coolidge, who stipulated that the faces should include, in addition to Washington, two Republicans and one Democrat. Jefferson was the Democrat, Lincoln was the first Republican, and Roosevelt filled the bill, being a recent, popular Republican (Later, he formed the Bull Moose Party and became its candidate for President. The Bully Moose lost, but there on Rushmore, he remains).

I think we would be safe, in honor of America, to re-sculpt Roosevelt's face--but to whom?

Conservatives have championed Ronald Reagan, and liberals have suggested Barack Obama.

I think not.

Reagan was a champion of individual liberty and American values, but he can't rise, 200 years later, to the level of Rushmore, which can and should include only four of America's greatest intellectual leaders.

Obama, too, is not an option for the monument, even though he qualifies as an historic American figure--the first black man to head the nation. Although he is equally half white, he identifies--and is identified--as a man of the black race, a people who are a vital and integral part of America. A black man on Rushmore would be a perfectly appropriate reflection of our history and a profound  icon of the liberty on which the country was founded.

But Obama is an American by happenstance (like most of us), born and at least partially raised in the good old USA (a privileged place, indeed). I would love to see a black man on Rushmore, but one who was willing to give his life for American liberty to complete the promise of America. There were lots of such black men, now gone and forgotten, but, to me, the giant of American blacks was Frederick Douglass. Douglass risked his life every day to fight the institution of slavery and, later, added women's rights to his fight. He had the ear of Lincoln and carried the day by example. He was American to the core.

So, okay, if we can't get Douglass, let's at least replace Teddy the Bull Moose.

My nominations for Rushmore:
Frederick Douglass.
Samuel Adams.
Patrick Henry.

Reality Intrudes.

I recently read a blog about nuclear weapons sponsored--though not endorsed--by Scientific American magazine which attempted to destroy a couple of modern "myths." The point of the article was that nuclear weapons have proven useless, ergo, we should get rid of them.

Really?

Nuclear weapons are useless? Well, yeah, if you swallow the author's arguments.

The author of this specious blurb, Ashutosh Jogalekar,  relies on a book by Ward Wilson entitled, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons.

For one of these "myths:"

People believe that the dropping of atom bombs on two cities in Japan precipitated the end of World War II in the Pacific and saved uncountable lives, both Japanese and American, which would have been lost by an invasion of Japan.

The two authors, Jogalekar and Wilson, argue that  the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially no more effective than the conventional bombs already rained all over Japan by American bombers, and that Emperor Hirohito merely used the nuclear attack as an excuse for unconditional surrender to "save face" (national pride), as if the Japanese leaders had not noticed the difference between fire-bombing and nuclear holocaust. The authors imply, probably unintentionally, that atom bombs were horrific enough to justify abject surrender, as did Hirohito. In fact, the only faces Hirohito saved were those of American soldiers, young Japanese fighters, their women and their children.

We've heard such intellectualized armchair quarterbacking before, as when scholars claimed that even though Truman knew the war would be won by the United States, he dropped the Bomb to intimidate our future enemy--Soviet Russia--as in Don't Tread on Me--or, Don't Fuck With Us.
This may have crossed Truman's mind, but no one really knows his reasoning. It's all conjecture, most like halftime of the Super Bowl, when everyone heads to the kitchen to snack and crack another beer, with nothing else to do but talk.

Cold reality will intrude very shortly.

The second "myth" these authors try to deconstruct is the belief that nuclear weapons are a deterrence to war with hostile nations.They cite the Cuban missal crisis as the most famous example of "close calls" to prove that deterrence doesn't keep us safe because there have been a lots of "close calls," while admitting that it worked "by a very slim margin." This is an extremely weak argument. "Close call" is another term for "no cigar." In other words, nothing happened; there was no war. And, in the case of Cuba, the absence of war was not because Nikita Krushchev didn't like our neighborhood, or balked at the expense of building missal sites to threaten us.

Jogalekar's other favorite argument against the effectiveness of deterrence is Sherman's burning of Atlanta near the end of the Civil War. He claims that Sherman's march through the heart of the South did little to deter the fighting spirit of the Southern rebels, as if Confederate soldiers weren't worried about their families back home. Try that argument on Robert E. Lee when he decided that it would be best to surrender.

Finally, Jogalekar compares nuclear weapons to the inherent violence of Tyrannosaurus Rex (a useless dinosaur, obsolete and extinct--get it?). And, he goes on. Pop your eyes on this statement: "One could imagine a use for such a creature in extreme situations...".

Really? In what situation would we make use of a T-rex, with its animal brain? I assume that a T-rex could not be domesticated, like a hunting dog.
In contrast, nuclear weapons HAVE been domesticated. They have not been out of the house since 1945, shortly after they were invented, thanks to the control of the dominant nation on the planet, run by HUMAN brains.

I see that Jogalekar has quite the imagination, warped beyond reality. He argues a lot about what DIDN'T happen (like those "close calls" at halftime).

What DID happen was that Japan surrendered within days of absorbing a devastating atomic attack, and we never went to war against Soviet Russia over Cuba.

Cold reality intrudes again.