Monthly Archives: March 2016

Stem the Flow of Migrants

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That’s what the EU is trying to persuade Turkey to do according to a Wall Street Journal article.

Before I get into that, there are a couple of points of clarification that are necessary. First, there is confusion on the part of the WSJ and/or the European Union leadership regarding who it is that’s traveling. Most of the present flow consists of refugees, not migrants; although there are certainly migrants in the mix, along with terrorists.

From that, it’s easy to see the moral distinction among the three concerning their “right” of entry into any nation of the EU or into the EU generally. Terrorists have no right to do anything but die. Migrants have no moral right to enter a nation that doesn’t want them—the nation is sovereign over its own territory; sovereignty is the purpose of borders. It’s a highly useful thing, from a mutual prosperity perspective, to permit an influx (and outflow) of migrants, but that utility is purely…utilitarian. There is a moral obligation to permit entry of refugees, but that entry cannot be without limits and controls: the receiving nation must be able to set the conditions under which the refugees can enter, under which they can stay, and for how long they can stay, or else the nation will be unable to handle those refugees in anything approaching a humane manner.

Within that, then, there’s this about the EU’s pushing Turkey to impose a metaphorical, if not physical, barrier on the flow of refugees (not “migrants”) at the Turkish borders.

In a draft statement to be adopted later on Monday, the [EU] leaders are set to tell migrants that the route north of Greece is completely closed, a move that without Turkey’s help will leave huge numbers of people trapped within the already overwhelmed country.

Here’s Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel:

There is only one possible solution: make sure the Schengen borders are perfectly hermetic against uncontrolled and illegal migrant flows[.]

Sure. And do what with them? The originating situation does not permit them to go back. Where they are cannot sustain them.

What the EU is proposing (instead?) makes little sense. They want Turkey to agree to take back refugees that have already made it into continental Europe (even Metropolitan Europe, to stretch an analogy), including Greece, and the EU will accept via direct transport (no harrowing and dangerous overland treks) “registered” refugees taken straight from UN-run camps in Turkey.

This raises a couple of questions. One is the nature of that registration: on what basis is the UN registering anybody, on what basis is the UN vetting anybody who’s being registered, on what basis do we even trust the UN to make a serious attempt at vetting? The other question concerns Turkey: the take backs and the direct-from-camp transports amount to little more than swaps of one population for another. How does this help Turkey deal humanely with the existing supply of millions of refugees already within its borders? There’s no easing of stress here.

Here’s an example of that stress, in one Turkish border town. Kilis sits within kilometers of the Syrian border and so is an early stop on refugees’ travels.

Home to about 100,000 Turks before the Syrian war, Kilis is straining from the arrival of more than 125,000 Syrians. The town’s water and sewage systems are struggling to cope. Schools are filled to capacity. Although Turkey is developing plans to build more classrooms, for now many Syrian children roam the streets, stay at home, or spend their days working in shops, cafes, and factories.

It’s been downhill from there, for the local Turks, for the refugees, for the nation of Turkey.

The Need for a Republican President

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The need is starkly illustrated by a couple of developments involving cases, the Supreme Court, and Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

One development is this:

Dow Chemical Co had agreed to pay $835 million to settle a class-action case rather than risk an appeal without the conservative justice.

The other is this:

The state Rifle and Pistol Association decided against filing a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case fearing the conservative Scalia’s death will make winning the case virtually impossible.

[Rifle and Pistol Association President and National Rifle Association board member, Tom] King said his lawyers advised that going forward could damage the case because the High Court at the very least would likely deliver a split 4-4 decision that would leave the law in place.

This puts a very high premium on electing a Republican president, so we have a good chance of nominating and confirming a conservative judge to the Supreme Court.

The Left’s Iron Curtain

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…is getting a bit taller. I wrote earlier about the Democratic-Progressive Party’s wish to erect an Iron Curtain to keep American companies from leaving for more economically (read: tax) sound environments. Now, Democratic-Progressive Party Presidential candidate and proud Progressive Hillary Clinton is enlarging her Iron curtain. Clinton now is proposing this:

Companies that move jobs and production out of the US would lose previous years’ tax breaks under a proposal Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released Friday during a speech in Detroit.

The US would seek to “claw back” previous tax incentives for research and development and for domestic manufacturing associated with facilities or jobs that move abroad.

On top of that,

The Clinton campaign didn’t have an estimate of how much money its tax plan would generate for the government.

Of course not. The purpose isn’t to recover monies foregone as incentives to do this or that, it’s strictly to imprison private enterprises within the US, Soviet-style—because private enterprises aren’t jobs factories, rather they are, according to this candidate, jobs welfare programs.

Remember this in the fall.

Upsetting Someone

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I seem to be, anyway. Some of you may have noticed that I take a dim view of the People’s Republic of China’s aggression and acquisitiveness in the East and South China Seas.

So, apparently, do the folks of the PRC government take a dim view of my dim view. For the last several days, this blog has been getting hit by spam comments from a series of IP addresses owned by Chinanet, which is headquartered in Jiangsu Province in the PRC.

Hmm….

Clinton’s Handling of Classified Material

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Fox News‘ Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne have a piece centered on the potential for password exchanges among Democratic Party Presidential candidate and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a number of her minions as the means of getting access to classified information and to Clinton’s unclassified and unprotected personal email server. In that piece, a number of scenarios were posited for “jumping the gap,” a physical gap between the classified network and the unclassified network—the World Wide Web that is the Internet on which Clinton’s personal server existed—there is no connection other than the air we breathe between those two networks. Those scenarios were

  • Reading intelligence reports or briefings, and then summarizing the findings in emails sent on Clinton’s unsecured personal server.
  • Accessing the classified intelligence computer network, and then lifting sections by typing them verbatim into a device such as an iPad or BlackBerry.
  • Taking pictures of a computer screen to capture the intelligence.
  • Using a thumb drive or disk to physically move the intelligence, but this would require access to a data center. It’s unclear whether Clinton’s former IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, who as first reported by The Washington Post has reached an immunity deal with the Justice Department, or others had sufficient administrator privileges to physically transfer data.

The problem with the last three is that cell phones and tablets aren’t allowed into areas where classified material exists: they have radios. Neither are laptops, or any computing device, including cell phones and tablets, that are not owned by the facility containing the classified material. Cameras and other recording devices—optical or magnetic—also are banned from such facilities, including thumb drives or anything else that might be plugged into an existing computer or storage device. Bringing these sorts of things into those areas, more than once, would have to be a deliberate—and so criminal—act.

Even a single occurrence, absent-mindedly done, is a fireable offense: folks who are granted access to classified material, whether in those secured areas or elsewhere are too well trained and no better.