26 April 2014

Uncommon Commentary #402: Miscellaneous Musing #54 (and MM #54 Update) Follow-Up

All the revelations by Edward Snowden embarrass Uncle Sam, but, with just one possible exception of which I know, they in no way compromise our security. (An intelligence professional has said that targets of US government surveillance will change their behavior now that they know that the NSA is snooping on their, and everyone else's, electronic mails and telephone calls and so forth.)  The man is technically guilty of betraying a trust, but to speak of him as if he belonged in the same category as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who stole secrets that facilitated the USSR's acquisition of atomic weaponry, does more than strain the limits of credulity; it bursts right through them.

21 April 2014

Uncommon Commentary #401: Cry Me a River, Crimea Peninsula

Since "Great Russians" (the people whom we simply call "Russians" today) rather than Ukrainians (known historically as "Little Russians") have long made up most of the population of both the Crimean peninsula and the eastern, industrial belt of the Ukraine, it really makes more sense for these areas to be part of Russia than for them to remain Ukrainian; indeed, when both Russia (as the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) and the Ukraine (as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) were components of the USSR, Crimea was for some time part of the former rather than the latter.
This does not mean, however, that Russia's ongoing expansionism genuinely concerns ethnicity.  Since Great Russia made no attempt to absorb any part of Little Russia while the pro-Russian Yanukovych was in power in Kiev, we can safely assume that Vladimir Putin is trying to compensate for the overthrow of his client by carving off as much of the Ukraine as he thinks he can using nationalism as justification; it may be that what we are now seeing is one step in a divide-and-conquer policy that will lead to the swallowing-up of the entire Ukraine, and it may even be, as some have speculated, that the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the present situation demonstrate an intention on Putin's part to reassemble the Soviet empire.
Nor does it mean that we ought to ignore the current phase of Russia's aggrandizement or to go on pretending that our pathetic sanctions are an adequate response thereto.  The dissolution of the USSR left some of that state's atomic weapons within the boundaries of what had become the just-plain-republic of Ukraine; in return for the abolition of those nuclear arms, which the Ukrainians could have used to defend their land against what is currently happening, we promised in 1994 to uphold Ukrainian territorial integrity.  This theoretical guarantee justifies taking serious action to oppose Russia's annexation of Crimea and potential further acquisitions; we don't need to conjure hypocritical objections such as the Obombast administration's complaint that the Crimean decision to leave the Ukraine was not "legitimate". (I say "hypocritical" because the Obama Nation is itself a product of a unilateral declaration of independence, which was not preceded by a referendum in which 97 percent of the participants voted for secession.  Historians estimate that a mere third of the denizens of the Thirteen Colonies favored the independence movement.)
Confrontation with Russia therefore is diplomatically obligatory, but it seems to require more nerve than even so egotistical a man as Obama has; perhaps that's why he has referred to himself as a "community organizer" and not as an "international community" organizer.

13 April 2014

Uncommon Commentary #400!: And Since it's Not Made of Cheese Like the Moon, There's Nothing to Eat

Attempting to colonize Mars is a deplorable idea.  The Red Planet is almost completely unsuitable for human habitation, and there's really no reason to try to make it more suitable by, as has been proposed, monkeying with the atmosphere for the sake of engineering an "intentional greenhouse effect", because our own planet is generally far from crowded; the problem here is not one of excessive population but of extremely uneven distribution of that population.  Before we risk repeating elsewhere in the cosmos the same mistakes that we've made on our own world, let's put better effort into correcting what's gone wrong on Earth.

09 April 2014

The Even-Better of Uncommon Commentary

I had intended to make a new posting, which would form "Part Two" of a previous uncommon commentary, but I found a way to add the new material to what I had expounded on the same subject.  You will probably appreciate, therefore, revisiting the greatly expanded UC #387.

05 April 2014

Uncommon Commentary #399

The governmental disaster currently afflicting the USA is officially named the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; it's known informally (and deplorably; see the updated UC #219) as ObamaCare, and to me as ObamaCareless; most prosaically, it's sometimes simply "Obama's health-care law".  Instead of the last of these, and in consideration of the fact that anything that could have gone wrong with it has done so, why not call it "Murphy's law"?