Tag Archives: politics

Green Card Residency

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The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote (I’m tempted to say “party line vote,” but CJ Roberts might demur were he not otherwise occupied at the moment), lifted a district court’s stay blocking implementation of the Trump administration’s public charge immigration rule. The rule blocks permanent residency and allows for denial of entry visas in the first place for those in our nation or entering it if they are considered likely to rely on our welfare programs. The stay removal allows the rule to be enforced while the underlying case wends its way through the courts.

Europe, exemplified by Deutsche Welle, is dismayed (even as many of the EU’s members demur from accepting immigrants making their passage from northern Africa).  It’s a harsher immigration law.  It significantly expands the criteria for denying legal residency. It disproportionately put[s] permanent residency out of reach for low-income applicants from developing countries.

The stay-issuing district judge, George Daniels, is in a high dudgeon, too. He wrote in his ruling that the rule was repugnant to the American Dream, and was a policy of exclusion in search of justification.

Last things first. The district judge was—and is—completely out of line in his ruling. His task, his duty as an American judge, is to find the law underlying the rule, or the rule itself, unconstitutional or, failing that, to apply the underlying law and the rule as they are written. Full stop.

Our Constitution and the judge’s oath of office, which enjoins him to uphold our Constitution, bar him from implementing his personal opinion or his personal view of what’s good or bad for our society.

Regarding the alleged disproportional impact on the poor or on third-world applicants, that may or may not be true. However, as is the case with all nations, those entering ours are expected to be beneficial to our nation, not drains on it.

On the beef that the rule makes it harder for an entrant to gain legal residency, that’s the point of borders. No one has an inherent right to come into another nation without that nation’s prior permission. No nation has an inherent obligation to grant that permission. Entry requirements and entrants are solely at the discretion of that nation.

Nor have we any obligation to extend the benefits of our already overstretched (and too inefficiently run) welfare programs to noncitizens. Such an extended overstretch can only work to the detriment of our citizens.

No Room

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There’s no room for certain disfavored Democrats in Pete Buttigieg’s Progressive-Democrat Party; he made that clear in Sunday night’s townhall hosted by Fox News.

A pro-life Democrat named Kristen Day asked Buttigieg whether he wanted the support of “people like me….”

First Buttigieg showed his courage by weasel-wording an evasive answer that in Day’s view completely ignored half her question.

I am pro-choice, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision[.]

Day:

He didn’t answer the second part of my question, and the second part was: the Democratic platform contains language that basically says, “we don’t belong, we have no part in the party because it says abortion should be legal up to nine months, the government should pay for it.” In 1996 and several years after that there was language in the Democratic platform that said, “We understand that people have very differing views on this issue but we are a big tent party that includes everybody and therefore we welcome you—people like me—into the party so we can work on issues that we agree on.”

Buttigieg on being challenged over his evasiveness:

I support the position of my party—that this kind of medical care needs to be available to everyone, and I support the Roe v Wade framework that holds that early in pregnancy there are very few restrictions and late in pregnancy there are very few exceptions.

Buttigieg paraphrased: “Screw you, lady. I’m pro-abortion, and that’s the end of it. Medical care needs to be available to everyone but the babies involved; aborting babies is perfectly fine medical care.”

Foolish Risks

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Great Britain has decided to let the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei—which by PRC law must cooperate with the PRC government whenever that government requires it—to play a role in Britain’s development and deployment of its 5G telecommunications network.

Great Britain says Huawei role will be limited, but in a computer network, such limits lie somewhere between chimera and pipe dream.

The Brits say that Huawei, and “high risk vendors” generally, would be excluded from the network “core.”

The Brits say they are

taking steps that would allow it “to mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat the range of threats, whether cybercriminals, or state-sponsored attacks.”

And that

high-risk vendors would be subject to a 35% cap on access to even non-sensitive parts of the network.

Thirty-five per cent. That’s a broad penetration of a network’s “non-sensitive parts,” a network’s periphery.

This is foolish.

Mitigating risks is not the same as preventing them. This isn’t a matter of the Internet going down for a bit, and our not being able to post our blog articles or do a Bing search for this or that. It’s not a matter of losing a cable connection so we can’t watch TV for a few minutes or an hour, nor is it a matter of a temporary drop of cell phone access.  This is a matter of national security, and the difference between mitigation and prevention is critical.

It takes only a single opening in a network’s outlying accesses to enable a nefarious entity to insert malware into the network. Once inserted, that malware can proliferate on its own, even penetrate the core, and then that malware is positioned to allow the entity to engage in cybercrime, cyberespionage, cyber-triggered sabotage of other infrastructure.

Even were the core adequately protected, malware in the periphery still can render the core impotent by isolating it from the periphery—much as biological damage can isolate a body’s core, its brain, from the body.

Authoritarian

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Recall the slowed down video of a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) press conference in which the slow-down was done to make Pelosi’s speech seem slurred. It was an obvious, if poor taste, parody of Pelosi’s speaking style and of the incoherence of her anti-Trump position, as viewed by many.

In a The Atlantic interview, Hillary Clinton expressed her outrage over Facebook’s handling of that video.

Google took it off YouTube…so I contacted Facebook. I said, “Why are you guys keeping this up? This is blatantly false. Your competitors have taken it down.” And their response was, “We think our users can make up their own minds.”

Zuckerberg’s view, according to the Atlantic‘s author, is this:

“It’s not about saying, ‘Here’s one view; here’s the other side’,” Zuckerberg had said when I’d asked him to reconcile the apparent contradiction between fact and opinion. “You should decide where you want to be.”

Then Clinton said, in response to the author’s prompting about that,

It’s Trumpian. It’s authoritarian.

It’s true enough that opinion should be clearly discriminated from fact. But underlying Clinton’s (and the author’s) angst is their dismay over people making up our own minds, rather than being told what to think, what to believe, by our Betters.  Not allowing journalistic gatekeepers and filters to control our opinions is somehow authoritarian.

This is highly instructive, and it should be kept in mind this fall as we vote.

Ultrafast Trading Costs

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British regulators have studied the “tax” imposed on ordinary traders by ultrafast traders. The latter use high speed computers and powerful algorithms to

“latency arbitrage,” in which ultrafast traders seek to react to fresh, market-moving information more quickly than others can.

The latency is the ultrafast traders’ ability to act on slightly out-of-date prices that are inaccessible to the bulk of us traders because we don’t have those fancy computers running those algorithms. The “tax” metaphor is the difference between those (very—a matter of microseconds) slightly dated prices and the prices available to us in more real time.

The “tax” amounts to some $5 billion gained globally by the ultrafast compared to the rest of us. That seems like a large number, but put it in perspective.

The value of the aggregated global stock markets was around $86 trillion in 2019. The “tax” from the ultrafast’s computing/time advantage amounts to a bit under 0.006%.

That’s not to say the artificial arbitrage shouldn’t be addressed, but it does suggest that the urgency isn’t great. We have time figure out how to level this tiny bump in the playing field without moving, for purely noneconomic reasons, to restrict some traders to the advantage of others.