Michelle Obama's Pathetic Hashtag Photo Won't Help Kidnap Victims

My teenaged daughter has been invited to attend a protest march against the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militant group Boko Haram. The name Boko Haram means 'non-Muslim teaching is evil' and the group believes that Islam forbids the education of women entirely, which is why it targets girls in Nigerian state schools as kidnap victims (although the group's willingness to sell the girls into slavery suggests a more mercenary motive).

The protest will take place at Parliament Buildings in Wellington and has been organised by fellow pupils at her inner city girls school. To her credit, my daughter has decided not to join the protest, not because she doesn't care about the fate of the kidnapped girls - on the contrary, she is very upset by the matter - but because she realises the futility of protesting in New Zealand about the actions of terrorists half the world away. What these protestors want to achieve is unclear, unlike the aims of the kidnappers.

But as futile as the actions of these protestors are, they don't compare to the pathetic frivolousness of Michelle Obama's hashtag photo opportunity shown below. The US president's wife insults the victims of this horrible religious violence precisely because she is one of the few people in the world who has the ability to influence the outcome of this event.

There are only a handful of countries capable of rendering assistance to the kidnap victims. The United States, obviously, is one of these, but don't hold your breath waiting for President Obama to act. The President has shown himself to be a moral weakling where foreign policy is concerned. In Benghazi, he wasn't willing even to go to the aid of his own consular officials when the embassy there was attacked by an Al Qaeda militia on September 11, 2012. His so-called 'red-line' on the use of chemical weapons in Syria has counted for nothing, and his bluster on Ukraine is rightly treated as irrelevant by Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.

The first United States president to take his country to war against an external enemy was Thomas Jefferson, and the enemy in that case was Islamic pirates on the Barbary Coast who were kidnapping and enslaving American sailors. There is much that Jefferson would not admire today about the republic he helped establish but I think the thing he would least admire is the current president's lack of moral courage on matters of foreign policy. President Obama should be guided by the example of America's third president and take the fight to these Islamic extremists, wherever they are hiding, and his wife should drop the social media frivolity and urge her husband to grow a backbone.

Big Data, Big Brother and Donald Sterling

This week I read an article about a Princeton sociology professor, Janet Vertesi, who tried to hide the fact that she was pregnant from those who use 'big data', which sounds really scary but is really just a silly neologism for an old concept - trawling databases to find correlations that are useful to marketing people, researchers, intelligence agencies and the like. This woman seemed to be most concerned about marketers targeting her with product offers, but that is not something that particularly worries me. The worst that can result from receiving emails or telephone calls from people trying to sell you things is that you buy something.

The real concern is not big data but Big Brother, such as when Vertesi's husband tried to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift vouchers on her behalf and was told the transaction would be reported to the authorities. I am aware that in New Zealand any financial transaction of more than $10,000 is required to be reported to government under the AML-CFT (Anti-Money Laundering - Counter-Financing of Terrorism) laws and I understand this is the same in most Western countries, but obviously in America the threshold is now so low it covers transactions that are the equivalent of a modestly-priced suit of clothing or a good restaurant dinner.

Why would the government be interested in such trivial transactions? In this case it was clearly the anonymity of the transaction that led to the government's interest. The purpose of AML-CFT laws, as the name suggests, is terrorism and money laundering, but as we know from the recent revelations of the likes of Edward Snowden the US Government has used the powers it has garnered under anti-terrorism laws for all manner of purposes. Initially the expanded purview of such laws was serious crime such as drug trafficking, but ultimately governments cannot resist using such powers for any purpose they deem fit. In the case of Kim Dotcom, we saw the full power of New Zealand's state security apparatus including our GCSB spy agency used in a case of alleged copyright infringement.

Another interesting case this week was that of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Sterling came to our attention because his mistress released private communications in which Sterling objected to her bringing black men to Clippers' games. Clearly Sterling is a racist and, by all accounts, a sterling asshole, but as Mark Steyn points out in his blog, as bad as the comments Sterling made were, what the National Basketball Association has done to him is worse. Sterling made the comments in private and the NBA (which has fined him $2.5m and banned him from attending his own team's games for life) should have no interest in the matter. Neither should the media, especially the New Zealand media (many of which ran the story as their lead).

In the novel 1984, Winston Smith discovered that there is no freedom without privacy. If you cannot express your thoughts even to those whom you most trust without fear that you will be subject to a public witchhunt, or make a small, innocent purchase without inviting the surveillance of the authorities, then you don't have the freedom to think at all. And everything follows from that.

Royal Tour Reminds Us the Queen Should be our Last Monarch

You are no doubt already aware, irrespective of which country you are reading this in, that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are visiting New Zealand at this time. I have seen feature articles about the visit in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and even in Spanish language newspapers, hence my certainty about your knowledge of their visit. The royal couple have brought their infant son, George with them. The Duke and his son are third and fourth in line to the throne of New Zealand, which as a former British colony shares its monarchy with other British Commonwealth nations.

Most New Zealanders support the monarchy out of sense of tradition and probably because they find it provides a reassuring continuity in a rapidly changing world. I don't, for the simple reason that I find it offensive that a family from the other side of the world is qualified by virtue of its blood line to be the heads of state of New Zealand and my own children aren't. Our constitution conventions say that in respect of the right to occupy our top political office, all New Zealanders are second class citizens.

I cannot understand why we retain this vestige of feudalism in the 21st Century. The members of the royal family have no qualifications to be our heads of state other than their ancestry, an ancestry incidentally that is full of despotic thugs who practiced every manner of heinous crime known to mankind - ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass torture - to maintain their grip on power. And this is not all ancient history - the wealth of the current royal family came from the wholesale theft of Catholic lands and other property after the so-called Glorious Revolution. 

I have a fond spot for Queen Elizabeth II and think she has done as good a job as any modern monarch could, but I think the institution should die with her. Charles, her heir, has proven himself unfit for the job, with his ill-advised, partisan meddling in political matters such as the climate change debate and his admiration for despotic Islamic regimes. And the idea that William and his son George have some sort of legitimate claim to be head of state of New Zealand, or any country for that matter, is utterly ridiculous.

Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. ~ John Milton

Milton meant the freedom to think and speak is the foundation of all other liberties and without this most basic of freedoms, we cannot be truly free. At one time this was a given in Western liberal democracies but recently we have seen a great deal of evidence that many in the West regard freedom of speech to be dispensable.

Last week the CEO of Mozilla, Brandon Eich, was dismissed by the company because five years ago he gave a personal donation to the National Organisation for Marriage (NOM), an organisation that supported Proposition 8 in the 2008 Californian state ballot opposing gay marriage. Now I happen to be a supporter of gay marriage, but I'm an even bigger supporter of free speech and of the right of anyone to support the political causes they choose. In case you think Eich's political views are irredeemably rightwing, I'll remind you that Barack Obama only came out in favour of gay marriage in May 2012 and was opposed to it prior to that.

As unreasonable as Mozilla's position is, there is an even more sinister aspect to this whole business. How did the media find out that Eich supported NOM? They discovered his donation because NOM's tax return was leaked to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), NOM's main opponent in the campaign for Proposition 8, and published on HRC's website. The NOM return listing the donors appeared on the HRC website complete with obvious redacted codes that are placed on documents only after they are received by the IRS, so it must have been leaked by someone in the IRS. There has been no thorough or conclusive investigation into this leak, which is a serious criminal offence.

If you think all of this is acceptable then you need to imagine the boot being on the other political foot. Consider, for example, a conservative administration leaking the details of those who donated to women's groups that support abortion liberalisation. Would it be acceptable to hound a chief executive out of her job because she donated to such a group?

In New Zealand we are not immune from the same type of anti-free-speech witch hunts. Three years ago Employers and Manufacturers Assocation president Alisdair Thompson was hounded out of his job for making the point that women take more sickness leave than men because of their menstrual cycles. This is, of course, a statistical and medical fact but that wasn't any defence to the hysterical screams of the supposedly offended feminists. There are some things you just aren't allowed to say.

Free speech protections aren't for those things you want to hear. They are for the things you don't want to hear. I would have thought that was obvious. So when someone says, "I support free speech except for...," you know they are really saying they don't support free speech at all.

CIA Spying on Senator Feinstein A Step Too Far?

Just when you thought the revelations about out-of-control US government intelligence agencies couldn't get any more interesting, the latest news out of Washington DC has even hawkish conservatives shaking their heads in disbelief. It turns out that the CIA may have been illegally spying on the office of Dianne Feinstein, the geriatric Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee that audits the activities of the intelligence agencies themselves. The Feinstein allegations go further, that the CIA actually deleted documents from the senate committee's computers and destroyed documents on their own systems showing CIA malfeasance in its so-called rendition programmes where suspects were kidnapped by the CIA and taken to other countries for torture. These accusations are deliciously ironic because Feinstein has been one of the intelligence agencies' staunchest defenders against the revelations of whistle-blowers Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden.

Dan Carlin, the political and historical podcaster who is sufficiently well-regarded to have been asked to advise the US military on strategy, said in his most recent podcast that he believes the actions of the CIA might lead to President Obama's impeachment if it is revealed the president knew and approved what was going on (and the CIA has suggested this was the case). Even if that does not happen, it could lead to a constitutional crisis with Republican Senator Lindsay Graham saying 'Congress should declare war on the CIA.' As the CIA is part of the executive branch, this is a call for war on the White House.

I look forward to ongoing developments in this case.

Tony Benn was a great Socialist

I have been a libertarian since university but in politics I hold the greatest contempt not for those who have diametrically opposed political beliefs but rather for those who insist on always occupying the so-called "middle ground." At university one of my best friends was a revolutionary Marxist. He used to joke that "come the revolution you'll be first up against the wall...bang, bang, bang!" My response was always, "not if I get to you first!" We both knew that neither of us was entirely joking and that, given the right circumstances, we might one day find each other on opposite sides of a fight that involved more than just rhetoric, but we were best mates nevertheless and liked nothing more than a heated political debate. Occasionally we found common ground, such as our contempt for crony capitalism and religious conservatives.

When I lived in the UK in the 1980s there were two politicians whom I admired. Both towered over their peers in the philosophical sense. Margaret Thatcher, of course, was the first of these. The other was Tony Benn. The former Viscount Stansgate (for Tony Benn had renounced his peerage in the 1960s so he could sit in the House of Commons) was a doctrinaire Marxist and as such, I had little in common with him politically. But I admired his principled beliefs and his forthright manner in expressing them.

Benn believed in a pure, democratic Marxism that is, in my analysis, as illusory as fairy dust. He stuck to his principles, even when they put him in conflict with those who would ordinarily be his allies. He detested the Soviet Union and he was as much a thorn in the side of the Labour leadership as he was to the Tories. I had the impression that there was a reluctant mutual respect behind the open contempt between Benn and his political nemesis, Margaret Thatcher. Certainly, he had a sense of humour where Thatcher was concerned, introducing to parliament in 1990 a private members' bill entitled the Margaret Thatcher (Global Repeal) Bill.

Tony Benn died last week aged 88. I tip my hat to him as that rarity in politics these days - a man of principle and courage. Give me a Tony Benn any day over the unprincipled likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron or John Key.

The hypocrisy of the West towards Russia

Tomorrow, Crimean voters get to decide in a referendum whether they shall rejoin Russia. This vote has been condemned by Western leaders who, when it suits them, love to make a big issue out of self-determination.

Gauging the reaction to Russia's response to the state of affairs in the Ukraine, you'd think the former was the biggest threat to world peace since Nazi Germany. Western leaders such as Obama, whose countries have invaded numerous independent nations over the past couple of decades, posture and pontificate as though Putin was a foaming maniac who is about to launch another world war. Here's a few facts to consider.

Russia gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 when both countries were part of the USSR. As part of this deal, which survived the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia was allowed to maintain troops in Crimea. The Western media has reported that Russia has invaded Crimea. It hasn't, it was already there.

The events in Ukraine over the last few weeks have seen the (albeit somewhat corruptly) elected government of Viktor Yanukovych overthrown by violent protests by a unholy alliance of opposition groups that include a significant presence of Neo-Nazis. The symbolic leader of those groups is a former Yanukovych ally and gas industry oligarch named Yulia Tymoshenko, who heads the All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" party.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1990, the United States gave Mikhail Gorbachev assurances that it would not expand NATO east into former Soviet republics. These assurances counted for nothing with Germany joining NATO in 1990, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary joining in 1999, and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Croatia all joining since then. Thus NATO now virtually surrounds Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Is it any wonder the Russians are nervous about Ukraine moving into the Western European alliance? Imagine if Canada and Mexico had joined the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War and you get a sense of how Russia must see these developments.

We saw a further example of Western hypocrisy during the Sochi Olympics with Western politicians and celebrities jumping on the bandwagon to condemn Russia's new law against promoting homosexuality. Personally, I think this is a pretty despicable law, but it needs to be put in perspective - homosexuality is legal in Russia and remains so and eight US states still have similar laws on their books to that introduced by Russia. Besides, where was that chorus of protest from all those Western politicians and celebrities when Iran recently hung two men from cranes for their homosexuality?

Vladimir Putin's Russia is not a paragon of liberty and human rights, but neither are many Western nations.  President Obama claims the right to extra-judicial killing by drone of anyone, anywhere in the world. His government still imprisons suspected terrorists without trial or due process in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba, and his intelligence agencies claim the right to extra-judicial mass surveillance of law-abiding people both within the United States and abroad. Perhaps Obama and other Western leaders should put their own liberties in order before taking such a sanctimonious attitude towards Russia.