War and Peace

Seth Barrett Tillman: The European Parliament’s 2016 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought

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Excerpt:

I suspect there is no General James Longstreet Prize, and if someone asked me if such a prize should be created, I would say “no”.
 
There is no Rommel Prize, and if someone asked if such a prize should be created, I would say “no”. (And—just to be clear—I am not comparing Longstreet and the Confederacy to Rommel and Nazi Germany.)
 
There is a Sakharov Prize, and if someone had asked me prior to its creation whether it should be created, I hope I would have had the moral clarity to say “no”. There were and there are other people in Europe and elsewhere who this prize could have been named for: persons who were not quite so morally ambiguous. E.g., Average people—people who were not heroic or even particularly bright. Perhaps it could have been called the Ivan Denisovich Prize. It speaks volumes about the modern European zeitgeist that a major prize is named for Sakharov, but the founders of NATO—which protected Europe from Sakharov’s warheads—remain largely unknown. It goes without saying that the American taxpayer who paid for Europe’s defence (and who continues to do so) is entirely lost from sight. Europe’s cosmopolitan transnational elites much prefer believing that the years of peace and plenty were their creation, as opposed to their being the beneficiary of American good will beyond their control.

Seth’s argument is well worth reading in full.

Seth Barrett Tillman: Letter to the Editor: Responding to Robert Fisk’s “To understand the Islamist beheading of a French priest ….”

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It is not “inevitable” in any civil war—no matter how brutal—that one side murder foreigners. Certainly, the GIA’s murdering foreigners—even during the brutal Algerian civil war—was not “inevitable”. It was a choice; it was the wrong choice…

Read the whole thing.

Hillary & FBI Director Comey’s Cyber-Security “Broken Window”

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When FBI Director Comey publicly took a dive and sold out the rule of law in refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton’s Cyber-security crimes.   He began a new chapter in providing evidence of the validity of “Broken Window Policing”   in the field of cyber-security. For which, see the following definition:

The broken windows model of policing…focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.

Hillary and the FBI Director Comey have advertised  both outrageous cyber-security weakness and more importantly the breakdown of social mores of “the rule of law” in Federal Government  cyber-security.   If you advertise you are weak,  stupid and capricious in enforcing  cyber-security, it is blood in the water for cyber-criminals of all sorts.

Consider this not exhaustive list busted e-mail security associated with Hillary Clinton and her Democratic Party surrogates.

1) Hillary’s email system on Bill Clinton’s server.
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2) The Hillary Controlled Democrat National Committee email server.
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3) The Democrat Congressional Candidates Committee server.
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4) Hillary’s election campaign server.
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5) Hillary’s several different illicit off-site email servers when she was Secretary of State.

This is a very small fraction of the “Broken Window theory” as applied to cyber-crime.   What we see related to Hillary.   The problem here is that this sort of political corruption cannot be centralized.   If Hillary can do it and get away with it.   Exactly how many other illicit off-site e-mail accounts filled with Federal secrets are there now?   And how many more will there be between now and Jan 2017?

Lois Lerner at IRS and the EPA director are both known to be using non-Federal government secured public e-mail systems as early as 2010.

Exactly how many other officials at the State Department, Defense Department, Interior Department (Can you say Secret Service?), other non-departmental American intelligence bureaucracies, and the Federal Reserves are there?

That is the real cyber-security “broken window” Hillary and FBI Director Comey have opened.  And this is the cyber-security nightmare that will be with America for decades, barring a massive and systematic purge of everyone high and low associated with such behavior by a new President or after another — likely nuclear — Pearl Harbor.

I’ll close with the following Sept 12, 2008 Obama campaign statement that applies in 2016:

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,”   “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

— Obama for President 2008 campaign spokesman Dan Pfeiffer.

 

Loyalty and Risk-Taking

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In one of the old Neptunus Lex posts that Bill Brandt has been rerunning at The Lexicans, Lex wrote about the man who was CO of his FA-18 training squadron:

My student cohort held him in awe: We’d been told that he had received an Air Medal during the war for saving a squadron mate’s life, or his liberty anyway. The latter had come off target badly hit and managed to limp only as far as the harbor at Hai Phong before his machine came apart. The pilot had been forced to eject and was floating in his raft a mile or so off shore, when he saw an NVA patrol craft bounding out to seize him. The unlucky aviator was contemplating the austere amenities of the Hanoi Hilton when our CO roared overhead at 500 feet, firing a Shrike missile in boresight mode.

The Shrike is an anti-radiation missile, designed to home on enemy radar and destroy it.  The radar-following mechanism is its only guidance system; the only way to hit a target that is not emitting radar is to get very close to it before you fire the missile–thereby placing yourself at considerable additional risk  Lex’s CO had taken that risk, destroying the North Vietnamese patrol craft, and making it possible for the shot-down pilot to be rescued by helicopter..

Reading the story, I couldn’t help wondering:  which if any of our current crop of political candidates and leaders would–in the extremely unlikely event that they ever found themselves flying combat aircraft–have made the same decision?

Seth Barrett Tillman: As A Legal Matter, MacArthur Was Right And Truman Was Wrong

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An interesting post.