Author Archives: eehines

Newspeak and Immigration

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A letter writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section used his copy of the Newspeak Dictionary to mischaracterize what’s going on with the Trump administration’s deportation drive. He started out supposedly on the right path:

Like many others, I support deporting people who are here illegally and have committed serious crimes.

But that turned out to be merely his distracting lead-in to his mischaracterization:

Deporting people who have committed no crime—especially those who have been here for a long time—is morally corrupt.

The ones being deported have, though, committed a crime: they broke, or snuck, into our nation illegally. That crime stands whether the illegal aliens have been here a short time or a long time, and there is no statute of limitations on the crime of crossing our borders illegally.

Another reliance by this letter writer on his Newspeak Dictionary:

Millions of migrants work for low wages in service and agricultural industries.

They are not migrants. They ceased to be migrants when they entered Mexico or Canada illegally under those nations’ laws. Even if having legally entered those nations and thereby maintained a legitimate claim to be migrants, when they entered our nation illegally under our laws, they ceased to be migrants. Entering Mexico, Canada, or our nation illegally makes them illegal aliens. Full stop.

White washing the question, distorting reality via Newspeak-ism, counting illegal aliens as not illegal or as having committed no crime, is not the answer to our immigration problem; it merely encourages the flow of illegal aliens. The correct answer is two-fold: remove the illegal aliens, and streamline our legal immigration laws to enable faster vetting and to ease visa quota limits.

A first step already has been taken by Executive Order, but it badly wants codification into law (with a sunset limit in this case) by Congress. That step, emphasized again by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem at her Thursday press conference, is the offer to all of the illegal aliens currently present the opportunity to take themselves back to their home country, on arrival at which we will give them $1,000 of American taxpayer money, and then they will have the opportunity to return to the US legally, with all associated opportunities, including critically, no longer having to look over their shoulders for ICE, and being able to get onto a path to citizenship if they wish. The backstep here, though, is if they don’t take this opportunity and are caught and deported, their departure will be permanent; they will be barred from ever coming here again.

Maybe Don’t Count the Chickens Just Yet

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Celebratory paeans abound. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are typical.

a decapitation. Nearly the entire top echelon of Iran’s army and Revolutionary Guard has been killed, and the longer Iran takes to regroup the more of its ballistic-missile and nuclear programs it loses.

And

The Middle East war Iran started is becoming an historic defeat.

There are these two especially:

The subheadline:

We don’t know exactly how successful the raid was, but the era of diplomatic nonproliferation is over.

Or not. Because, in part, this:

We don’t know yet how successful the Israeli raids were. Getting past the blast doors and shock-wave buffers at the underground Fordow enrichment site would have been no easy feat. Ensuring that the 100-yard-deep Pickaxe Mountain plant doesn’t come online will require continuous surveillance and perhaps further raids on quick notice.

Getting into those facilities would seem to require bigger bombs than Israel’s fighters can carry over those distances, even with aerial refueling. Smuggled in drones would be too small for the task, unless and until holes were blown in those blast doors and shock-wave buffers big enough for a nearby controller to fly them in through.

The next opinion writer giddily claimed that it’s Morning in Jerusalem. The Israeli raids do take the nation far along towards the dawn of a new day (to extend that overused metaphor), but it’s far too soon to claim that the sun is up. Contradictorily, this opinion writer even acknowledged as much in the body of his piece.

How things will end is unclear….

The current battle likely is an historic defeat for Iran, but the war is not at all lost as far as the Iranian government is concerned. The lesson the Carthaginians learned too late and to their everlasting chagrin, Israel must learn much more quickly to preempt a similar chagrin. Iran isn’t dead yet, so they haven’t lost yet. As Adrian Goldsworthy wrote in his The Fall of Carthage,

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

The ayatollahs running Iran also will refuse to accept defeat or even to acknowledge it. Israel, and the West, need to be fully aware of that. As Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran, said,

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

This is the price the ayatollahs are willing to pay: Iran’s annihilation for Israel’s total annihilation.

There is much too much optimism for this early in the game. As a great American philosopher once said, “it’s not over until the fat lady sings.” The fat ladies of the Iranian mullahs haven’t sung, are not singing, and will not ever sing.

Tariffs and the Fed

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The Federal Reserve Bank is facing a conundrum:

First, they [tariffs] raise prices, which weakens the case for cutting interest rates. Second, they sap confidence and demand, which strengthens the case.

There’s this, too:

In May, the Treasury Department collected roughly $15 billion more in customs duties than in February. That is equal to about 3% of total consumer spending on goods. Some goods prices have risen, but not by that much. And in May, prices fell on some obvious tariff targets such as apparel and new cars.
This is a head scratcher. If consumers aren’t paying the tariffs, who is? Not foreign producers, at least through April, when import prices excluding fuel rose. Not, apparently, retailers and wholesalers, whose margins took a hit in April but bounced back in May, according to the producer price report released Thursday [12 June].

For me, though, the head scratcher is straightforward: it’s been so long since we had significant tariffs, and economies have evolved so much in that interim, that we don’t yet understand the lags that are involved between the onset of tariffs and allegedly associated price increases. This is further contaminated by the confusion by folks who should know better of highly variable tariff rhetoric with actual tariffs in place.

And a second contaminant: how much do tariffs raise prices, really, in a global economy that has supply chains that are much more mobile (or at least much less fixed in place) than in those prior economic environments?

And a third: a measure of flexibility in cost transfer techniques: keeping prices stable while doing away with free shipping or raising existing shipping charges, for instance.

Oh, and energy costs are down; lowering prices here counterbalances, in the larger scheme, price increases there.

Count Me Skeptical

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Nvidia has a new AI out that purports to enable[] simulations of Earth’s global climate with an unprecedented level of resolution. As is always the case with AI, there are problems with accuracy, usability, credibility, and on and on.

This AI, as with all of them, are creatures of human programmers, and they do only what those humans programmed them to do, the data those humans carefully selected for its training, what other humans tested it on the doing. We’ve seen the outcomes of all of that in a variety of AI programs that are nakedly racist, spout outright lies hallucinations (one of the characterization distortions of yet other humans associated with the AI), refusals to answer uncomfortable questions, supposedly autonomous decisions to refuse to shut down, even plot revolt—the latter two especially nothing more than what human programmers wrote these software packages to do and what human testers let pass.

And this bit of distortion by the news writer in the lede of the article at the link:

As is so often the case with powerful new technology, however, the question is what else humans will do with it.

Because, of course, the AI’s output can be taken fully at face value, so we need only concern ourselves with those uses.

This climate simulator has a high credibility bar to get over, and an even higher empirical accuracy bar to get over.

Clean Sweep of an Advisory Board

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HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr, announced his plan to remove all 17 current members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC advisory panel that advises on vaccine schedules. The nice editors at The Wall Street Journal have termed this a “not-so-clean sweep.” They rationalize their characterization in large part with this:

Mr Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes.
Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy.

I’ll ignore the opening bit of disingenuous snark. I’ll leave aside the naïve belief that folks, including government bureaucrats, are immune to chump change bribes. These editors should know better than that. Instead, look at the facts included in the snippet: some committee members being involved in the R&D of the vaccines on which they now advise in the name of the government, and some members having been paid by vaccine makers. That many of the studies in which those then-paid members were involved were double-blind is irrelevant: those members were paid by vaccine makers, and now those members advise on those vaccines.

These are clear conflicts of interest, and even the august editors of the WSJ should be able to understand that.

The editors did point out that current members have recused themselves from considerations in which they (think they) have a conflict of interest. Such recusals, though, always are judgment calls on the part of the bureaucrat considering his own recusal. There’s no need for such judgment calls when there are no conflicts of interest.

In an ideal world, such conflicts—large or small—would have no influence on government-advising bureaucrats. In that ideal world, we would have no need for conflict of interest rules. We live in the real world, however, and Kennedy is entirely correct to seek to reduce as far as may be the existence of such conflicts. It’s much too early in the process to begin criticizing his move, even a knee-jerk beef triggered by it being an RFK, Jr, move.

In the end, Kennedy has appointed eight members to the revamped ACIP:

  • Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who worked in nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health.
  • Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who used to work at Harvard Medical School.
  • Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
  • Robert Malone, a biochemist who helped with early research of mRNA vaccine technology.
  • Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and former ACIP member.
  • James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician with 40 years of clinical experience.
  • Vicky Pebsworth, the Pacific region director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses, who previously sat on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
  • Michael Ross, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.