Tag Archives: responsibilities

A Next Step

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A step has been taken to mitigate the destructiveness of Obamacare.  A new rule has been promulgated by the Trump administration that will

allow for the proliferation of cheaper, less-comprehensive health plans that have been restricted by the former Obama administration.

Under the rule, actual health insurance plans will be allowed that cover a range of health-related matters that more closely align with a customer’s interests.  These plans also will be good for a year and be renewable for a total of three years, a drastic improvement over Obamacare’s limit of 90 days.  A further improvement of this rule:

The plans don’t have to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and insurers can charge higher premiums based on a consumer’s health status.

This is a good interim step, but more is necessary.  One additional step should be the elimination of the time limit on the duration/renewability of these plans.  What should be available in the health insurance market place should be a market decision—a decision of the buyers and sellers.  Government has nothing legitimate to say in this arena.

Are Syrian Refugees Human?

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Syrian MFWIC Bashar al-Assad wants Syrian refugees to come home.  The civil war is winding down, after all, and soon everything will be jake.

But obstacles the regime is throwing up to their return show that President Bashar al-Assad—mindful of the strain refugees are putting on neighboring countries—is willing to use the exiles as bargaining chips to secure foreign aid and sanctions relief, Western diplomats and analysts in Beirut say.

Al Assad still doesn’t see his own people (I’m using “his own” loosely) as human beings. To him, they’re not human at all, just chits to be cashed in for dollars and euros.

College Admissions and Diversity

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Harvard is claiming that it needs to select preferentially for race in its admissions in order to achieve its student body diversity goals.

…it has tried alternatives to race-conscious affirmative action to diversify its undergraduate student body, but such efforts would harm both the diversity and academic strength of the class.

This is nonsense.

“Affirmative action” programs, giving preferential treatment as they do (however small the preference is claimed to be) to persons based on their race (and/or sex in most other such programs), are fundamentally racist. More broadly, when there are limited classroom seats (let’s say) discriminating in favor of one group—whether by race or by merit—necessarily discriminates against other groups: those not preferred.

Harvard’s claim that they need race-based affirmative action admissions is at best cynical. Were Harvard serious about improving diversity, they’d be moving to improve the quality of education in K-12 schools so that diversity would fall out of the merit of those graduates and not out of race-based selection. Harvard is silent on its actions in that milieu.

Who’s Doing the Blocking?

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Yoram Hazony has a book coming out—The Virtue of Nationalism—that he wanted to advertise on Facebook.  Fat chance.  After he accepted Facebook’s Boost Post process, he got some boosted postings of his book, and then he got

Your ad was not approved because your Page has not been authorized to run ads with political content.

Never mind that the book is a history of the rise of the nation-state and a comparison of nationalism with imperialism.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s about nationalism, and so it’s political.

Hazony wrote an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal outlining his ultimately failed effort to get Facebook to let him promote his book on that social medium. The sub-headline on that piece summarizes the problem from Hazony’s perspective:

The robots won’t let me advertise my book on nationalism

His concern is mis-aimed, though. Hazony’s book advertising is not blocked by any Facebook algorithm (“robot”); it’s being blocked by Facebook’s management team. Facebook’s algorithms only do what they’re programmed to do. Facebook’s management team employs the programmers who program the algorithms, and those programmers are only doing what their bosses have employed them to do.

Facebook’s censorship is the direct result of instructions from Zuckerberg and his senior management team members.

Another Role for UNRWA

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A writer of a Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal wondered why the UNWRA still was involved in handling Palestinian refugees instead of the UNHCR, which handles all other refugees worldwide.  This includes Palestinian refugees in the Gulf states, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, but not those in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and other geography close to or abutting Israel.

Here’s what the UNWRA did in support of its “refugees,” in particular Hamas’ 2014 terrorist war against Israel in furtherance of their own Gaza “refugees.”

  • warehoused the terrorists’ rockets for them
  • allowed the terrorists to dig their tunnels under UNRWA facilities
  • participating in the terrorists’ staged propaganda

As another letter-writer in the same chain noted, UNRWA exists because those supporting terrorism demand it—especially, contra that writer, those in the UN.