Monthly Archives: February 2021

“Working Off” Student Debt

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section posited an alternative to student debt: trade it for community service.

I would readily support loan forgiveness if the beneficiary were required to do community service for the forgiven debt.

Only so long as the community service work is low-skill, low-education work, with the student debt scofflaw—because that’s what he still would be—working directly under the controlling supervision of a low-skill, low-education person who’s had that job for a while.

Let the scofflaw see who he’s displacing with his preciousness and his debt-ducking.

Let him see the college student, during the school year, trying to earn some night shift money with which to pay for some college without “borrowing” money.

Let him see the high schooler trying to earn some summer job money and to obtain some initial, entry-level work experience for his future use in working his way up the employment and economic ladders.

On that last, especially, I employed a high school sophomore last summer to mow my lawn, edge it, and clean the sidewalk of the mowing and edging detritus. I ordinarily do my own yard work, but this enterprising young man, by his enterprise, earned the job. A student debt scofflaw would get this sort of work from me only if he worked under the hiring and firing authority of my high school sophomore contractor. Which would give the sophomore some valuable supervisory experience, too.

Which supervisory experience also would benefit those other low-skill, low-education workers for whom the community service debtors would be working.

Anti-Nobel Prize

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Frank Wilczek, himself a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, wants one, not for himself in particular, but for seemingly brilliant work that doesn’t work out.

For instance:

In the heady days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, many physicists—including me—thought they were on the cusp of achieving a unified theory of the fundamental forces. A striking prediction to emerge from this circle of ideas is that protons are unstable and will eventually decay, just as many radioactive nuclei do. It was widely hoped that experimenters would find ways to verify the prediction.
Sure enough, they did. Unfortunately, subsequent work revealed that the claimed observations of proton decay could not be correct, though the nature of the experiments’ flaws was never clarified completely. This story is not unique: In recent years a number of exotic physical phenomena—including magnetic monopoles, cosmological dark matter, axions and supersymmetric particles—have reportedly been detected, only for later, more sensitive experiments to come up empty.

Wilczek’s concept would work like this:

An anti-Nobel would be awarded for incorrect work that, had it been correct, would have merited a Nobel Prize. It would be awarded secretly, so no one need be embarrassed. The anti-Nobel prize would only come into play if the recipient did subsequent Prize-worthy work, in which case, the two would cancel each other out.

Cancel each other like matter-antimatter collisions.

We have, however, a similar prize already extant. It doesn’t directly address work that would be Nobel-worthy but for its failure, but it gets at the concept.

That prize is the Ig Noble Prize, awarded for work that gets its accolade from the monumental foolishness of the work.

Responding to Iran

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He is, indeed, being tested, and the world is, indeed, watching carefully. The editors over at The Wall Street Journal made a point of emphasizing that Tuesday, regarding the rocket attack on a military base the US and our coalition partners use in Erbil, Iraq.

But then the editors said this:

Mr Biden doesn’t need to escalate to Mr Trump’s level….

Yes, he does, and more. Every Iranian attack needs to be answered with a response more severe than the Iranian attack, and more severe than our prior response to a prior Iranian attack.

Thugs understand only force, and their force and force capability must be crushed.

The Obama-Biden finger wagging didn’t work then, and the Built Back The Same current Biden administration’s finger wagging won’t work any better.

Failure to Perform

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As the California Republican delegation to the US House of Representatives have shown, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is failing—in particular in getting Federally supplied Wuhan Virus vaccines actually injected into California’s citizens.

California’s distribution of supplied vaccines to locations where citizens can get injected is execrable. As a result, California’s injection rate is execrable. As a result of that cascade failure, California’s citizens are at severe—and unnecessary—risk.

The 11-member delegation are demanding answers from Newsom:

The state of California should explain to Californians why the vaccine distribution has had such failures, despite having months to prepare prior to the development of the vaccine[.]
…
We write to express our serious concerns regarding the State of California’s slow, opaque decision-making process, and ever-changing approach to distributing COVID vaccines, which has been met with confusion and frustration by our constituents, local public health officials, and front-line health care providers[.]

Concretely, out of 7.8 million vaccine doses delivered to California by the Federal government, the State has injected only a bit over 5 million. That leaves more than a third of the doses undelivered, potentially going to waste, since the current iterations of the vaccines have a relatively short shelf life.

Newsom’s excuse?

The issue at the end of the day is supply. We need to manufacture more Moderna vaccine, more Pfizer vaccine. We need to get the federal approval of the J&J vaccine. We need to provide ample supply so we can plan

That is, to use the technical term, a crock. It’s also insulting to our intelligence.

California, despite being told for months that one or more vaccines would be ready by the end of the year (originally by November, but medical developments don’t follow government schedules), declined to bother to plan for their delivery to the State, and so California failed to plan the logistics chain of getting delivered supplies injected into citizens.

Nor does California have a supply problem, not with that third of the supply they already have delivered undistributed and uninjected.

California—Newsom’s administration—has a performance problem. It’s still not bothering with the supplies on hand.

There’s another dark aspect to this failure to perform. That is that Newsom’s attitude is typical of Progressive-Democrats’ demand for and acceptance of control from the center. It’s also typical of the dual that is their avoidance of their personal and political responsibility as State governing personnel in our federal republic—a structure which makes States first and primarily responsible for their own domestic practices.

“Different Norms”

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That’s how President Joe Biden described the People’s Republic of China’s treatment of the people under PRC President Xi Jinping’s control and those Xi wants under his control, compared to how American citizens are treated by ourselves and the government we hire.

Culturally, there are different norms….

The treatment of Hong Kong citizens, who only are struggling for the freedoms they used to be allowed under the PRC’s handover agreement with Great Britain is just the PRC’s different norm. Because jailing some protesters, kidnapping others and sending them to the mainland, seizing escapees on the high seas—isn’t at all rank despotism. It’s just the PRC’s different way of doing things, it’s their different norm.

The treatment of the Uighurs in, as Biden put it, “the western mountains of China,” who only want the freedoms nominally promised in the PRC’s own 31-page, 138 Article …constitution…, much less actual liberties, is just the PRC’s different norm. Because jailing millions of Uighurs in Maoist “reeducation” camps, forcing abortions and sterilizations on Uighur women, attempting genocide against the Uighurs at large isn’t at all a demonstration of the intrinsic evil of the PRC’s government and the men and women populating it. It’s just the PRC’s different way of doing things, it’s their different norm.

The threats of war against the Republic of China, which only wants to be left alone to make its own way in the world is just the PRC’s different norm. Because conquering and occupying the island nation isn’t at all rank invasion, occupation, and destruction. It’s just the PRC’s different way of doing things, it’s their different norm.

Still, Biden did say that the PRC would face repercussions for those things. But all Biden has done and is doing is spout vapid rhetoric. For instance, here’s what he said through his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, on Blinken’s telecon with “a senior Chinese official:”

I made clear the US will defend our national interests, stand up for our democratic values, and hold Beijing accountable for its abuses of the international system[.]

Not a word about those PRC domestic and PRC wannabe domestic crimes.

And here’s a claim more directly from Biden, a statement following his own telecon with Xi:

Biden underscored his fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.

Finger-wagging, nothing to be taken seriously, by anyone.

Correction: Originally misnamed the Republic of China in the paragraph regarding threats of war. Bad mistake.