Category Archives: morality

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.

Is Harvard Worth Saving?

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That’s the question The Wall Street Journal asked, ironically, on D-Day. The news outlet also asked “How?” but I’m setting that aside as irrelevant: Harvard doesn’t need saving, at least not financially.

Harvard has that $53+ billion endowment, with its annualized return on that endowment of roughly 11% over the last 50-ish years. The question proceeds from the false premise that it needs saving.

Harvard doesn’t need our taxpayer money. More than that, if it no longer gets our money, it’ll be free of government strictures on what it does with the money it receives—the school can do whatever it wants, politically and scholastically, including reforming itself and ridding itself of its institutional antisemitic behavior and ridding itself of those in its employ or student population who act overtly on their own antisemitic behavior, illegalities like seizing and occupying buildings, denying its owners their own property; vandalizing those buildings and others on campus; openly denying Jewish students access to their classes; overtly threatening Jewish students with violence and delivering that violence; and actively denying those who disagree with them their own rights to free speech. That’s the short subset of a very long list.

Or Harvard can choose to continue those bigotries, absent government funding and attached strings. With either choice, though, it cannot continue—must not be allowed to continue—the illegal behaviors in which so many of the school’s bigots openly engage. A school that chooses to continue those behaviors and to condone them among its population doesn’t deserve saving, even with its own money.

Fear-Mongering Lies

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The editors at The Wall Street Journal opined about the CBO joining the Left’s scaremongering regarding those disastrous cuts to Medicaid that the Evil Republicans are bent on inflicting. The dishonesty is much broader than that of the CBO, though. The lede image illustrates the magnitude and the breadth and depth of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s participation in the lie.

Here are some facts buried by the CBO in its report, but still there in its Black Letter Report. CBO isn’t the only crowd focusing on the top number, that some 10.9 million folks would lose Medicaid coverage under the House Republican reconciliation bill.

  • 2 million able-bodied adults on Medicaid would lose coverage owing to the bill’s work requirements
  • 700,000 would lose coverage through the bill’s more frequent Medicaid eligibility verification requirements
  • 4 million undocumented migrants would lose coverage
  • 1 million non-permanent immigrants and asylum seekers would lose Obamacare subsidies

That’s 8.3 million of those 10.9 million who would lose coverage. Those millions consist of folks who should be working rather than shirking and freeloading, others who are not entitled to coverage due to their status as illegal aliens, their status as non-citizens and so not entitled to subsidies, or their lack of eligibility because they’ve moved out of state, or their incomes have increased sufficiently.

Those remaining 2.6 million might or might not still be eligible for coverage, and if so, they’ll easily be covered by their States through the savings in Medicaid outlays no longer being sent to those 8.3 million.

Hospitals won’t close, unless a State chooses to cut them off from Medicaid outlays out of a politician snit, and the only folks who would die would be those dumped onto the street by a State’s decision to close those hospitals.

Of course House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) and his supporters know these things full well. As highly talented and thoroughly educated politicians, they are, of course, entirely literate and responsible politicians that they also are, they’ve read the entire CBO report.

Instead, they illustrate why our nation cannot have nice things were they to return to political power.

It’s Not Only That

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote, regarding who or what is responsible for safeguarding our rights and liberties,

the security of our rights depends on ourselves. When one considers what we hold self-evident—that government doesn’t possess the power to grant or deny our inherent and unalienable natural rights—we find that all we got from Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues was a federal government that has rarely upheld the terms of our social contract and poses the greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity.

That’s not all we got from Franklin, though. The letter writer missed Franklin’s critical criterion, included in his 17 April 1787 letter to the Abbes Chalut and Arnaud, that defines “ourselves:”

Let me add, that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.

Our pursuit of being virtuous, though—especially today—requires a complete revamp of our education system to emphasize performance, merit, Western Civilization values and history, along with STEM, all of that being done from pre-K through whatever degree level a student might pursue. And an elimination of professoriate opinion in the teaching of facts along with a strong demand for free and open debate on the meaning of those facts, a debate informed solely by logic and additional facts.

And at least as critically, the active participation of parents in the raising of our children and in their education. Schools cannot, profitably for the weal of our nation, be treated as babysitters, child care centers, or even ex loco parentis facilities.