Tag Archives: responsibilities

Interagency Coordination

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Despite being dead for years, hundreds of veterans remained on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) payroll and received nearly $38 million in benefits, according to a report from the Social Security inspector general.

The SSA says this is the fault of the VA for not supplying accurate information, and it may well be.

Unfortunately, though, this failure isn’t unique to the VA.

The SSA, Medicare, and the IRS badly coordinate routinely, so that it’s often the case that Medicare recipients get overcharged for their Medicare premiums until the IRS and CMS (which runs Medicare) catch up with each other or the recipient appeals (which actually is a pretty prompt process, but it needn’t occur in the first place).

It’s also the case that the IRS and ObamaMart don’t coordinate well, so that Obamacare subsidies either are wrongly withheld or are wrongly paid.

It’s also the case at the State level, most blatantly in our voting records where the State agencies don’t coordinate to remove ineligible or non-existent voters from the rolls, or (more rarely, but at a non-zero rate) eligible voters are absent from the rolls.

Most Cabinets and Agencies fail to share information—sometimes for good reasons, but too often from laziness or incompetence or turf imperatives.

College Pupils and Administrators

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Jean Twenge, a Psychology Professor at San Diego State University, theorizes that the problems the current generation of college pupils has with free speech stems from their having spent “their entire adolescence with smartphones in their hands,” thereby avoiding missing the rough and tumble of face to face interactions with other children, and from their having led an otherwise dismayingly soft life:

iGen’ers grew up in an era of smaller families and protective parenting. They rode in car seats until they were in middle school, bounced on soft-surface playgrounds and rarely walked home from school. For them, unsurprisingly, safety remains a priority, even into early adulthood.

And

Nor are they just concerned about physical safety. The iGen teens I have interviewed also speak of their need for “emotional safety”—which, they say, can be more difficult to protect.  …  This is a distinctively iGen idea: that the world is an inherently dangerous place because every social interaction carries the risk of being hurt. You never know what someone is going to say, and there’s no way to protect yourself from it.

Twenge’s thesis certainly is a major component.  However, she has missed another major component.

School pupil populations always have had a significant fraction of crybabies and snowflakes. What’s also changed is the onset of cowardice by college/university faculty and administrators. When pupils look to college administrators to settle disputes, for instance, those administrators need to have the courage to say, “No, settle your own dispute” instead of taking the easy way and intervening in order to quiet the squawling toddlers.

When pupils cry that it’s administrators’ jobs to create homes and not an intellectually challenging environments, those administrators need to have the courage—here the integrity—to say, “No, go back home; this isn’t the place for you.”

When pupils riot over their manufactured hurt-feelings re speakers of whose speech they style themselves afraid or disapproving, those pupils need to be arrested and brought to trial for their crimes; administrators must encourage police in this rather than build their administrator escape hatches through which to scuttle away from a problem that, in large part, is of their creation.

Related—closely—is a Letter to the Editor by Oriel College, Oxford, albeit of uncertain provenance, addressing a pupil who decided to be offended by a statue to Cecil Rhodes.  Here’s the money quote, via WillowSpring, writing for Ricochet:

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students—a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter, and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means—and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case—then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”

And

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.

I might have added words with the effect of further calling out this precious snowflake: “This school exists in large part because of that Evil Man’s evil money, and so you’re able to present yourself with your whine in large part because of that Evil Man’s evil money.  Of course, you knew of Cecil Rhodes and his donation well in advance because Mumsy told you before you applied.  So, indeed: why are you here?”

Republicans and Obamacare

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Too many now are begging for surrender on repeal and replace.

[F]ew congressional Republicans have signaled they are ready to let the health-care market deteriorate while their constituents are still battling higher premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on the individual marketplace.

This means those Republicans are signaling that they don’t have the stomach to repeal Obamacare at all, which would be the ultimate deterioration of it.

This is a betrayal of their constituents along two dimensions: the cynical destruction of their promise to repeal and replace, and their decision to continue inflicting Obamacare with its steadily increasing premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on their constituents.

President Donald Trump’s move to just let Obamacare die on the vine and hope for something better to rise out of the sewage is just as foolish and immoral.  Republicans need to remember what they promised and who sent them to Congress to honor their promise and get back to work on repeal and replace.  On that score, Trump is entirely correct, even if the doable path is stages as originally proposed last winter or via another path proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC) and Bill Cassidy (R, LA) whose bill (as an interim step, I say) would “take ACA funding and distribute it to the states through block grants.”

Voters should remember this pending abject failure in the upcoming primary elections.

The UN’s Irrelevancy

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Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, the United Nations’ top human rights official, said US President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS and others could be seen as incitement to violence against journalists.

And he said that with a straight face, too.  Never mind that Trump has never threatened a journalist with violence; although, journalists have questioned his sanity and called for his elimination.

Deutsche Welle‘s own piece carrying the UN statement contributes to the distortion.  Their own link demonstrates the lie of DW‘s contention.

In February, he dubbed many mainstream media outlets “enemies of the American people.”

Here’s the tweet Trump actually sent.

I understand that American English is not the primary language of the translator of either DW piece, but surely he understands the nature of noun modifiers—after all, the German language uses them, too.  FAKE NEWS clearly fills that role and thereby limits the noun media to that subset that are purveyors of fake news.

Maybe DW is becoming irrelevant along with the UN.

The Left and the Left’s Police

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And the misrepresentation of the NLMSM.

A hundred members of Left-wing hate groups, including Antifa—hooded, no less, and armed with clubs—”broke through” police lines in Berkeley Sunday to attack the leader of a Conservative group, Patriot Prayer, which the NLMSM claims is “right-wing” rather than Conservative, and a separate group of four.

Notice that.  The Left’s hate groups are hooded and carrying weapons; their targets are unarmed with faces bare, not looking for trouble and unafraid of being identified.

There’s more:

The protesters who wore hoods to conceal their identities chased Patriot Prayer group leader Joey Gibson from Sunday’s rally in a Berkeley park. As Gibson backed away with his hands in the air, the protesters pepper sprayed him.
…
Separately, the anarchist group beat, kicked and punched four other people at the rally.

How did these thugs “break through” the police lines?  They didn’t.  The police deliberately let them through.

Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood says police made a strategic decision to let a group of more than 100 black-clad anarchists enter the park Sunday once it became clear there would not be dueling protests between right and left.

He said “the potential use of force became very problematic” because thousands of mostly peaceful left-wing protesters were already inside the park.

Greenwood said he decided to let the black-clad protesters demonstrate in the park because there was “no need for a confrontation over a grass patch.”

Of course, Greenwood knew there would be violence; that’s what  hooded Antifa, et al., were there for.  The confrontation over a grass patch that Greenwood wanted to avoid was between his police and the Left’s hate groups.

Equal protection under law only applies to the Left.  Other Americans don’t deserve it.