The Lady [sic] Demonstrates Her Critics’ Point

Posted on by
Reply

University of California, Berkeley’s, Associate Director for its Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership Genevieve Macfarlane Smith succeeded in this with her letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section last Thursday. Smith began by complaining

Lawrence Krauss writes, “I have a hard time understanding how people can be so hurt by the use of some words and names.”

Then she proceeded to make Krauss’ point for him.

Take “illegal alien”: This term brands a person “illegal” and implies they’re not human but “alien.” Beyond dehumanizing, the term is imprecise: It implies criminality, but lacking immigration documents is a civil, not criminal, offense.

Of course, “illegal alien” does none of that. The term brands no one as illegal; the individual involved has made himself illegal by entering our nation illegally.

Nor does the term imply criminality. As Smith actually concedes, “lacking immigration documents—” being an illegal alien—is a civil offense: it’s simply illegal, with no implication of felonious or civil illegality.

Nor does the term imply that the illegal alien is in any way not human. Here are the American Heritage Dictionary‘s definitions of “alien:”

adj.
1. Owing political allegiance to another country or government; foreign: alien residents.
2. Belonging to, characteristic of, or constituting another and very different place, society, or person; strange.
3. Dissimilar, inconsistent, or opposed, as in nature: emotions alien to her temperament.
n.
Law
1. An unnaturalized foreign resident of a country. Also called noncitizen.
2. A person from another and very different family, people, or place.
3. A person who is not included in a group; an outsider.

There’s nothing in there about the illegal alien being not human.

Smith then asked,

Still agree with Mr Krauss that reflection on language is a “waste of time” or “silly”?

Yep. Smith was making Krauss’ case. Unsatisfied, though, she dug a bit deeper.

Mr Krauss discusses efforts to replace “master/slave” from computer code with “primary/secondary.” … This type of language can signal that black people aren’t welcome.

I’ve worked in the tech industry for years. No one, not a single minority colleague, felt unwelcome from such terms. We all understood the context; we were software engineers and managers, not…social engineers. And context matters. More than Smith seems to understand.

Perhaps if Smith and her cohorts weren’t so desperate to change the ordinary meaning of the words of our American English language in order to support their quest for offense, her victims, the ones she’s pretending to want to protect (apparently because she considers them incapable of protecting themselves) would experience considerably less angst.

Lies of our President

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) has made his announcement that he’ll only appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court, meaning that no one else—no white man or woman, or Hispanic man or woman, or Asian man or woman will even be considered. Biden has set a purely racist and sexist pair of requirements as his primary criteria for a Supreme Court Justice.

Now Biden is objecting to the hue and cry over his racism and sexism.

The White House is…saying that Republicans who are criticizing President Biden for his promise to appoint a Black female to the bench did not object when former President Trump made a similar promise to nominate a female to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020.

And through his White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates,

When Donald Trump promised to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court just over a year ago none of these members objected[.]

Biden, again through Bates, also claimed that then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan also promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

But Biden’s claims are patently false, as Jonathan Turley points out.

Trump, when he said that he would be putting a woman on the Supreme Court, had already spent months and months with a public short list that they’d been vetting. … And when he [Trump] said he was going to put a woman on the court, it was days before he was going to announce her name.

And

Reagan said that he would give one of his first positions, one of the vacancies, to a woman, but the White House stressed that was not a guarantee, and when O’Connor was selected, he had a short list with a majority of men on it.

And

What these presidents didn’t do is they didn’t say that they would not consider anyone else beyond people with this race, this gender[.]

Biden knows this as fully and as clearly as does Turley.

Lies are the blanket over the head of cowards.

Iranian Nuclear Weapons Capability

Posted on by
Reply

It never was seriously hindered by the JCPOA, and the US withdrew from it over that failure. Now the Biden-Harris administration is back-handedly acknowledging that, even as it continues to beg Iran to agree to another ineffective agreement.

Administration officials concluded late last year that Iran’s nuclear program had advanced too far to re-create the roughly 12-month so-called breakout period of the 2015 pact[.]

Ineffective agreement:

Under a restored deal…[t]he constraints on Iran’s nuclear research and development would gradually relax from 2024. Iran’s new breakout time could then fall rapidly after 2026 when the deal allows Tehran to deploy some advanced centrifuges.

In other words, the new agreement that Biden-Harris is so desperate to get still would permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons, just over a (maybe) longer time frame.

That time frame, though, is itself misleading, even were it to last as long as Biden-Harris hopes. One metric for this, and one that Biden-Harris seems to be hanging his hat on, is the breakout time, the time required to go from the end of any agreement to the production of enough weapons grade uranium to produce a single bomb.

The breakout time is different from how long it would take Iran to attain a nuclear weapon because, according to Western officials, Iran is believed not to have mastered all the skills to build the core of a bomb and attach a warhead to a missile.

There are two things about this question of breakout time and an agreement’s claimed delay in an Iranian nuclear weapons program. One is that the added time, to the extent there actually is any, is plainly usable by Iran to develop and execute the needed skills to build and attach a bomb to a missile. That’s in addition to the lack, in the JCPOA, of any constraints on an Iranian missile development program.

The other is that business of attaching a nuclear bomb to a missile. There are lots of ways to deliver a nuclear warhead to its target besides missiles, or aircraft. One of those other ways is by land. One of the reasons (albeit far from an exclusive one) for Iran’s zeal in keeping a land bridge from Iran into Syria open and operational is for land delivery of weapons to its Syrian terrorist surrogates. Such a land bridge easily could accommodate nuclear bomb delivery either for Iran’s Syrian terrorists to deliver over the last mile into Israel or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to deliver directly.

And there’s the dishonesty of Iran’s blandishments that their nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes. A peaceful nuclear program, for developing and building out nuclear reactors for electricity generation, for instance, needs only the 3.67% uranium purity that always has been allowed. Yet Iran already has 2.5 tons of 20% and greater purity uranium. That level of purity in uranium has no intrinsic use—it’s too rich, for instance, to be usable in a reactor. 20% purity has utility only as an intermediate step on the path to weapons-grade purity.

Taxing the Rich

Posted on by
Reply

Washington State is at it.

Washington state multibillionaires would pay a wealth tax under a proposal that got a public hearing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Senate Bill 5426 would impose a 1% tax on intangible financial property such as stocks, and bonds, futures contracts, and publicly traded options. The first $1 billion of assessed wealth would be exempt from the tax, which “equals one percent multiplied by a resident’s taxable worldwide wealth.”

Leave aside questions of the legitimacy of taxing an American citizen’s foreign-held wealth, intangible or otherwise. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Sam Hunt (D, Olympia) has given the larger game away.

This is a great attempt to bring fairness to our tax structure which is pretty upside down with the lower income paying 17% of their income in taxes and the upper 1% paying 1% or less[.]

That is pretty upside down.

Another solution would be to lower the tax rates on those with the lower income. However, that would involve lowering tax rates rather than increasing them, and lowering tax rates is completely inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.

Update: Some have interpreted my “lower the tax rates on those with the lower income to mean lowering income tax rates. Washington has no income tax, only sales taxes (State and local), business taxes, and property taxes. Sales and property taxes are highly regressive and hit the lower income folks the hardest, the former directly through taking a far higher per centage of their income and the latter through driving up the cost of housing, whether owning or renting.

Lowering business taxes (eliminating them, I say) would foster job growth, which would benefit the lower- and no-income folks the most.

Government-Funded Pre-K Schooling

Posted on by
Reply

Vanderbilt University has a longitudinal study of the effects of such a program on children’s academic success through the 6th grade.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been running a long-term study on Tennessee’s state pre-K program, following 2,990 low-income children. The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in a program versus those who were turned away. This means all the children had parents motivated to sign them up for pre-K, which makes for a statistically appropriate control group.

The researchers found, in sum,

[C]hildren randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.
…
A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.

In a spate of academic integrity, the researchers also wrote,

…no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings.

The Wall Street Journal offered one possible explanation:

One theory worth a hearing is that these programs expose children to more rigid academic settings before it is developmentally appropriate.

I offer another possibility, one that is not at odds with the WSJ‘s. It may be that the parents of children who got into the Pre-K program, thinking their children’s future is secured, relaxed their close and constant oversight of their children’s schooling, performance, execution of homework, and so on relative to that of the parents whose children didn’t get in. That parental oversight and supervision also is a Critical Item in children’s academic performance, especially in those first years of school.

Either possibility, especially in combination with the study’s outcome, suggests that, particularly from the Federal level, government funding of grade school programs is at best a waste of taxpayer money.

The study itself can be found behind this paywall.