Tag Archives: politics

Ya Think?

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The Just the News headline says it:

UN-backed Gaza City famine determination may be flawed by reliance on incomplete data

This fleshing out:

While the world is bombarded with heart-wrenching images—many of them fake or staged—of starving children, a review of the data shows that the IPC appears to have relied on incomplete survey results for the month of July to make its claim [of famine].

It also turns out that the UN’s IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) used carefully selected “sample” data from Gaza with which to manufacture its claim.

The IPC relied on a sample of 7,519 subjects in the Gaza Governorate to calculate the malnutrition rates.

However:

Nutrition Cluster published the full health data from the Gaza Governorate in July, which showed a sample size of 15,749 subjects.

This dishonesty was exacerbated by the intrinsically dishonest press’ bruiting about those inaccurate, incomplete, and openly falsified “data” as though they were factual and told the whole story.

Israel and its IDF is fighting a three-front war, not just the terrorists in Gaza.

The Core of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s moving ever closer to Party’s grass roots. The face of that core is Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his parallel membership in Democratic Socialists of America. DSA’s core position is

“dismantle and move beyond” America’s capitalist society and create a “wholesale socialist transformation of our national and global economy.”

DSA’s platform is specific, too, including such nakedly socialist things as these:

  • city-run grocery stores
  • free bus rides
  • increased public funding for hormone therapy and surgery for transgender people
  • rent freeze, not just rent control
  • ending “all misdemeanor offenses”

It’s not just Mamdani, either. The Progressive-Democratic Party selected its own socialist candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, Omar Fateh, who is a carbon copy of Mamdani. It’s true enough that Party then unendorsed (leaving him on the ballot) Fateh, but only on a technicality regarding their convention nominating process and only in response to some opprobrium. But here, Party spoke their truth in selecting Fateh and now only is covering its political behind.

In the end, the two, these most public two, are simply concretizing prior Party commitments: then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s brag just prior to his first election that he was just “days away from fundamentally transforming” our nation, and then-Progressive-Democratic Party President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address saying that he intended to “fundamentally change” our nation’s economy.

This is Party initially acting at the national level and now trying to move down into our cities.

A Weakness in Good People

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A letter writer in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal is deeply along the right track.

The most reliable way to understand dictators’ thoughts is to read their own writing…. From Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” (1902) to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (1925) and Mao’s “On New Democracy” (1940), the blueprints for conquest are there in black and white. So it is with Vladimir Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (2021).

Add Stalin to that, and there are a host of others in recent and distant history. A weakness that good people have, though, is that having read those dictators’ words, as many of us (most of us, at least of some of them?) have, too many of us don’t believe they really mean it—they’re just exaggerating for effect, or they’re too mad to be taken seriously, or…any excuse to dismiss avert our eyes will do.

It is a serious weakness: good people have an extremely difficult—often fatal—time believing the depth of evil and depravity that exists in dictators and especially of their willingness and intent on acting on their written intensions.

It’s necessary to take them at their word. And then to take the necessary next step: hold them to their word and move sternly to preempt them. And where preemption fails, to counter them decisively and totally, as we finally did in eradicating Nazi Germany and fascist Japan and Italy, remaking those nations as friendly to and respective of their neighbors.

Bureaucrats Leaving

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This time from the CDC. Following Susan Monarez’ removal as CDC Director (which she was contesting as I wrote this, but my point remains the same), several top CDC officials resigned. This isn’t the chaotic mess that some pundits want us to believe, though.

Monarez is on her way out, one way or another, because she repeatedly

clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and members of his staff….

Kennedy is her boss, and her insubordination was actively cheered by the Progressive-Democrats in Congress. Senator Patty Murray (D, WA):

I had serious doubts about CDC Director Monarez’s willingness to stand up against RFK Jr’s personal mission to destroy public health in America—I’m glad that I was wrong[.]

I’ll elide comment on the Progressive-Democrat’s cynically conclusory characterization of Kennedy’s “mission.” There are a couple of reasons why government bureaucrats these days leave beside wanting to move on after having been in such high pressure jobs for some time. One is that they’re disgruntled that they’re no longer in control of government policy (viz., Fiona Hill’s infamous “quite cross” testimony during Trump I’s first impeachment) and are instead relegated to their proper role of carrying out the directives of their bosses and of their bosses’ boss, the President. In frustration, they quit or are fired.

Another reason is that they disagree with those policies and they believe that they cannot in good conscience support them, so they resign. Of the latter two departure reasons, this is the honorable one.

In either case, the disagreements are good things to argue during the discussions at the heart of any decision process. Those discussions should necessarily be private, and once the boss has made his decision, the only honest thing to do is to carry them out, the bureaucrats’ disagreements no longer being relevant, or to resign. Continuing to resist, especially leaking their disagreements to the press, exposes such individuals for what they are: self-important bureaucrats who happen to have, in the present cases, medical or science degrees. They are, on net, no loss when they go.

In the end, a net benefit: the President—whomever he might be from administration to administration—gets a crop of bureaucrats who are on board with his policies rather than being saddled with self-important Know Betters believing themselves the government’s policy makers.

And then We the People can then make a more informed decision about whom to hire into the White House, more confident—or at least less unconfident—in the premise that the policies we’re voting up or down have been his and not those of that crop of bureaucrats.

“Unprecedented Violation of Norms”

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That’s what Greg Ip said about removing Federal Reserve Bank Presidents in his Wall Street Journal piece decrying (otherwise generally legitimately) the Federal Reserve’s potential loss of its independence.

Removing bank presidents would be an unprecedented violation of norms. But Trump has demonstrated repeatedly he is willing to violate norms.

Couple things wrong with that claim. First, such a removal would certainly go against norms, but there would be—can be—no violation. Norms are habits, even traditions, but there is nothing at all binding in them. Calling moves against norms “violations” is exaggeration even if the phrasing is…the norm.

Second, and most importantly, using the idea that such a move would be unprecedented, never before done, to argue that it ought not be done here is, at best, singularly bad logic. Everything humans do—every single thing nature does—was once done for the first time, was once unprecedented. If we never did anything that had never been done before, 10,000 years of human hunter-gathering, civilization, and advance would never have happened, and we’d still be competing with apex predators for road kill on the savannah.

Tending to not doing something never before done, tending to stay within “norms,” is highly useful: it lends a measure of stability and predictability to human actions, and that’s especially useful in matters of law. That cannot, though, be allowed to prevent doing something better just because that better something is unprecedented.

Tying back to the center of Ip’s piece, removing Fed Bank Presidents before their term is up, removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook before her term is up, may or may not be good ideas, but they should be decided on the merits of the individual cases, not on the never-been-done-before nature of the removals.