Tag Archives: responsibilities

Not Her Fault—Not Entirely

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is being eviscerated for declaring, at a recent noon o’clock press conference, that illegal immigration was down by 90% since implementing President Biden’s immigration policies.

This is, of course, a straight up lie. While illegal immigration rates are down year-on-year, they’re nowhere near 90% down.

This is not Jean-Pierre’s lie, though; it’s Biden’s lie. The woman is only repeating the words she’s instructed to spout by her boss.

Jean-Pierre does, though, lack the personal integrity to resign rather than repeat her boss’ lies. She can, and should, be eviscerated for having so little personal integrity, while at the same time she should be deeply pitied for being so disturbingly lacking in self-respect.

“Dangerous and inhumane”

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That’s soon-to-be-ex-Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot’s (D) plaint to Texas Governor Gregg Abbott (R) over his bussing illegal aliens to Chicago.

But I beseech you anyway: treat these individuals with the respect and dignity that they deserve. To tell them to go to Chicago or to inhumanely bus them here is an inviable and misleading choice.

She also cried, as paraphrased by Fox News, that

the city has been responsible for the care of more than 8,000 people who had no resources of their own since the first buses arrived from Texas in August—adding that the number continues to grow.

All 8,000 of them. In nine months. That’s a fraction of the number of illegal aliens that cross the Texas border every week. Lightfoot knows this. Lightfoot knows, also, that those illegal aliens volunteer to go to Chicago (or they volunteer to go to New York City, to which they’re sent at Texas taxpayer expense, or to…); they’re not forced in any way.

No, what’s dangerous and inhumane is Lightfoot’s conscious decision to make Chicago a sanctuary city and then choose, further, to do nothing to treat those illegals, or even to prepare to treat those illegals, who take her up on her invitation with the respect and dignity, and safety, that they were promised by her.

If Chicago is unsafe for the openly invited illegal aliens that trickle in, it’s because Lightfoot has made the parallel deliberate decision to do nothing to keep anyone in the city safe, to instead reduce the police force’s ability to act against crime, large or small, and to support Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’ decision to not bother to prosecute a broad range of crimes.

If Lightfoot were serious, she’d have set up facilities to receive that small trickle of illegal aliens. And she’d have created a safe city environment for everyone, including those illegal aliens.

Debt and Spending

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Here’s a fun fact, one that every child from three years old and up who gets an allowance clearly learns, one that’s made explicit in any high school basic economics class, and one that’s driven home in junior college and college Econ 101 classes: when you spend more than take in, you owe the difference, either explicitly by borrowing separately to make up the arrears or implicitly by the existence of the deficit resulting from spending more than is taken in.

There are two outcomes that are absolutely critical to successfully resolving such a situation: pay the debt that has been incurred, and reduce spending to fit within income in the subsequent years so as to not incur that debt again.

So it is with our nation’s Federal budget.

We have, for decades, but especially with the Obama administration’s overwrought response to the Panic of 2008, again during the Trump administration’s overwrought response to the Wuhan Virus situation, but especially with the Biden administration’s deliberate explosion of spending in response to no particular “emergency,” and without any regard for actual Federal intake under its Grove of Money Trees Modern Monetary Theory foolishness. This is coupled with a statutorily set debt limit, a limit that stops the Federal government from borrowing at all when the amount of debt already incurred reaches that limit. The bar on further borrowing forces a complete stop in spending above current Federal income—which represents a significant spending cut.

Those spending cuts include not paying on existing Federal contracts, reductions in or complete halts of welfare program payments, reductions in Social Security and Medicare payments, and reductions in payments on Federal debt, the latter which would be reductions in principal payments. Payments at least of the interest owed are Constitutionally required, which especially drives reductions in or complete withholding of any or all of those other payments in order to be able to make the debt interest payments.

Which brings us to the Federal government’s only solutions to the current debt ceiling crisis: pay the debt and reduce spending to fit within Federal intake in the subsequent years. These must be done together, or we’ll just keep needing to raise the statutory limit on Federal debt accrued.

That, in turn, brings us to the current situation vis-à-vis debt and spending. For months Republicans and Conservatives in the House have sought negotiations with President Joe Biden (D). (Republicans and Conservatives in the Senate have been remarkably silent. Some of that is driven by the Constitutional requirement that revenue and spending bills must originate in the House, but some of it, also, is driven by the timidity of those Senators.) For months, Biden has refused to negotiate, refused to talk with House Republicans and Conservatives at all.

Lately, Speaker Kevin McCarthy put forward a bill that would raise the debt ceiling by enough to support excess spending for a year while clawing back various appropriated but unspent monies, cutting spending in other areas, and capping non-defense discretionary spending at 1% growth for each of the next 10 years. Associated with that is a proposal to use that year to negotiate serious spending reductions for the next budget year and subsequent years.

Biden has ignored the proposal. Biden’s stubbornness—a stubbornness that is born of the man’s ego-driven pride—is threatening our nation with default on our debt. Such a default will be Joe Biden’s doing, and no one else’s.

McCarthy wants a different outcome:

…Biden [to] return to the negotiating table for debt ceiling negotiations….
I think as president and the leader of the free world, this is one of the problems. We have challenges around this country, around the world. He needs to show leadership and come to the negotiating table instead of putting us in default. This is risky, what he’s doing.

Biden needs to get past his ego and stoop to negotiating.

Full stop.

Lose Your iPhone…

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…and lose your data, along with access to your financials. For instance,

thieves who stole [one man’s] iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change [his] Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

The thieves got his passcode by shoulder-surfing and watching him tap in his passcode before they stole his phone. And Apple can’t help him: without the recovery key, there’s nothing they can do. In addition to the money stolen, the man has lost the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters, which he was storing exclusively on his cell phone.

And this example:

After [a man’s] iPhone 13 Pro was stolen from a Boston bar in August, [he] said he spent hours on the phone with Apple customer support trying to regain access to over a decade of data.

Again, Apple was helpless to help without that now thief-altered recovery key.

The recovery key business is specific to Apple’s iPhones, and it’s irrelevant to my questions here. My questions apply to Android phones and other kinds of cell phones just as much.

My first question is this: when the cell phone owner was in any sort of public place—bar, office, park, etc, what was that cell phone doing anywhere but in the owner’s hot little hand or in an interior pocket? Leaving the cell phone out on a counter or a bar or a park bench, even if the owner is right there, is the same as taping a “Free for the Taking” sign on the phone.

My second question is this: convenience comes with a price, and these theft victims provide examples of the price to be paid for that convenience: the loss of those precious personal items, the loss of years of personally important data, or the loss of company or other business data and correspondence (whether text or email), the loss of the moneys in the various financial accounts to which the owner has given cell phone access, and on and on. Why are these data kept on cell phones at all? Why are they not, at the least, backed up on a separate device—a laptop, for instance, or the company’s desktop back at the office or in the home office?

There’s no excuse for the theft, but there’s no excuse, either, for the personal laziness that magnifies the outcome of the theft.

Progressive Idiocy

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The New York City Council is striking again. These wonders are pushing their cutely named Choose 2 Reuse bill, which

aims to improve sustainability in the restaurant business, but would add some friction to a customer experience that is typically defined by its convenience. Consumers would be asked to later return their reusable food containers, knives, forks, and chopsticks either through delivery or logistics partners who come to pick them up or in person via receptacles at participating restaurants. The bill doesn’t require reusable beverage containers.

It’s interesting that the City Council excludes beverage containers. There was a time when beverage containers—soda bottles, for instance—could be returned for a return of a deposit paid when the (sodas) were sold, a practice that enabled more than a few boys and girls to earn a bit of extra money by collecting up the bottles and doing the return. And there never was a problem cleaning the then-glass bottles for reuse, nor was there a liability problem arising from the reuse of inadequately cleaned bottles.

That sort of thing fell into disfavor when tin, and later aluminum, cans proved easier and cheaper to manufacture (and wend their way through the bottling process)—and far from being one-use disposable, they could be recycled through a different chain.

Now NYC is bent on reverting to that greater cost—never minding that one-use food containers for takeout are easily manufactured for breakdown and return to the soil when disposed of in landfills. Or in many jurisdictions, converted to mulch for DIY gardeners. Or recycled for yet other non-food related uses.

Now, in addition to the added costs inflicted on restaurants and consumers alike, the Wonders of the Council also want to expose the city’s restaurants to liability through suits centered on real or imagined food poisoning from allegedly inadequately cleaned-for-reuse containers and utensils. Even stipulating that utensils would no longer be included (presumably by restaurant choice; nothing in the proposed bill suggests this)—requiring consumers to use their own—the containers would need to be made sturdy enough to survive the restaurant’s dishwashers—or to survive the consumers’ dishwashers, should they be offered a discount for doing the cleaning for the restaurant. And which the restaurant would have no guarantee that the consumer had cleaned the containers well enough to meet the government standards imposed on the restaurant.