Tag Archives: responsibilities

On Some Letters

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Some letters in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section want comment.

Even though they [Paul Ehrlich and his wife] included in the book the warning that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,” the scenarios became tools of critics.

And justifiably so. The Ehrlichs correctly observed that the details of their warnings would vary with reality, but they were insisting that the thrust and core of their predicted scenarios must inevitably occur.

…it is hard to dispute that the earth has finite natural resources, limited human carrying capacity and that excessive growth has resulted in environmental destruction.

It’s true enough that the planet, being of finite size, must have finite resources. But those upper bounds are so far beyond the reach of “human carrying capacity,” as to be laughable as limits. And coring an entire planet is about the only limit demonstrable to human carrying capacity. Nor has there been any “excessive growth” leading to environmental destruction. It’s uncontrolled, irresponsible growth that has done that, and when controls are applied, while not limiting growth with them, prosperity has occurred and existing destruction repaired. See, for instance, the terrors of acid rain and the ozone hole.

Ehrlich wasn’t a prognosticator, a modern-day Nostradamus. He was writing—and I assume hoping to sell—a book. Catastrophe and fear of the unknown sell better than optimism and serendipity.

Gee, I write private detective novels and a few political philosophy books, all of which I hope to sell. Each of them contains a measure of catastrophe and fear, or predictions of catastrophe. Maybe I can be a population bomb or climate expert, too.

People who deal in hypotheticals and emotions are generally unswayed by facts. Likewise, those who deal in proven outcomes are unmoved by feelings and theoretical futures. Thus, we speak (or yell) past each other, using very different languages. I don’t know how this ends.

One way in which it ends is those hypotheticals and hysterical feelings are continually falsified by unrolling reality, facilitating an increasing ability simply to ignore the fear-mongers and leave them behind.

Mistaken Responsibility

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A letter writer in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote of the need for cooperation in the American-Israeli war against Iran. He was right that the war would benefit from the cooperation of serious players. He had this, though, on that war:

Making the case to other nations helps legitimize the mission and its necessity.

This is the letter-writer’s misapprehension. The legitimacy of the mission and its necessity is inherent in that mission: Iran is the world’s moneybags for terrorists and terrorist activities, the most significant of which are Iran’s satraps, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, which it would promptly use to erase Israel and to peddle to terrorists for use outside the Middle East. Iran is bent on building ICBMs with which to shoot its nuclear bombs at us.

The mission is the elimination of Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons, the elimination of Iran’s ability to build missiles of any reach, the elimination of Iran’s ability to fund or otherwise support other terrorists anywhere. Those efforts have been badly damaged by the actions of last summer and, so far, the current mission.

This war has cooperation between the serious players: the US and Israel. Natterers, including the British PM and the German Chancellor, though, are not at all serious players.

The responsibility for cooperating with the US and Israel and joining the mission lies solely with those “other nations.” Their decisions to remain absent, to shirk their responsibility to Europe for the restoration of oil and natural gas flows through the Strait of Hormuz, says volumes about their alleged reliability in any crisis.

So far, Japan has signed on to assist with reopening the Strait of Hormuz amid the war with Iran. So, lately, have France, Germany, Italy, and Netherlands after their initial reluctance. The five nations’ joint statement can be read here. The TL;DR is this:

We condemn in the strongest terms recent attacks by Iran on unarmed commercial vessels in the Gulf, attacks on civilian infrastructure including oil and gas installations, and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces.
…
We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning.

Whatever “appropriate effort” means. “Preparatory planning” is just a weasel-word phrase meaning “but we’re in no hurry to do anything more than shake our fingers in the strongest terms.”

Japan’s assistance likely will be concrete; the units they send would gain valuable experience when the People’s Republic of China attacks the Republic of China and Japan needs to respond in answer of its commitment to RoC and to protect its South and East China Seas holdings. Those European nations? They’ll be busy hiding behind their definition of “appropriate effort” while they endlessly plan.

Black Boxes

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Folks buying into a private lending fund are learning, I trust, a valuable lesson, and the rest of us should take that lesson to heart, also. This is especially the case when the fund restricts withdrawals. The fund singled out by The Wall Street Journal for its example is Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund.

Investors are fleeing the $42 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund, among the latest of its kind to limit redemptions for shareholders. Many investors appear to believe the private-credit fund’s official net asset value is inflated, prompting them to sell their shares, or try to.
One reason many are rushing for the exits: it can be difficult for shareholders to understand what they own. The disclosures at funds like this often are as impenetrable as they are voluminous.

If the claims are not independently verifiable, including by a potential investor, they are not reliable, and a potential investor should not invest.

This, though, is not an excuse for Government to step in and “regulate.” Caveat emptor; investors, like any other American, ought to face the consequences—good or bad—of their decisions on their own, without government taking tastes from successes or doing bailouts for failures.

Bogus

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A Wall Street Journal article on the requirements to vote under the SAVE Act had this bit of nonsense:

What happens if someone doesn’t have a passport or birth certificate?
The University of Maryland estimated in 2023 that more than 21 million American citizens don’t have ready access to a passport or other documentary evidence of citizenship. ….

Birth certificates are, most definitely, readily available, even if they’re not already in the prospective voter’s immediate possession. It’s straightforward to write to the hospital in which he was born, or the county, if the hospital is no longer operational. Even adoptees, in almost all cases, can determine their birthplace; it’s in their adoption records. It’s a bit more cumbersome when the adoption records have been sealed, but many of those can be opened by a court and the birthplace revealed. The few cases where that’s still not possible are very few, indeed, and present no excuse at all for blocking securing our elections against voter fraud. The fee for birth certificate copies is nominal.

Passports also are readily available; although the timeline for getting one is longer, and the fee is larger.

And this:

What about people who change their name when they get married or due to other circumstances?
The legislation doesn’t explicitly mention married voters or name changes, but does account for situations where a voter’s documents might not perfectly align by addressing “discrepancies in documentation.” Under the bill, an applicant would need to provide additional documentation to election officials to prove their citizenship.

In the particular case of married voters—the vast majority of whom are women—the changed name is an easily solved non-issue. It’s straightforward here, as with birth certificates, to write to the county where the marriage license/certificate was issued. Again, the fee is nominal. Most women in common law marriages haven’t changed their names. Those few occasions where they did and cannot provide documentation can follow the alternative procedures; in any event, these cases also present no excuse for holding up securing our elections.

Those who’ve changed their names “due to other circumstances” can write to the court in which they changed their name and get a copy of the documents recording the change. Here, too, the fee is nominal. The timeline for getting the copies might vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The plaint that evidence of voter fraud being scant is a red herring. It exists; this is an easy way to reduce it further. The thousands of “voters” illegally present in States’ voter rolls presents far too exploitable an opening for fraud. The fact that someone never locks his house door and hasn’t been robbed presents no rationale for continuing the foolishness.

This sort of misinformation, more likely borne of lazily repeating other news writers’ claims rather than doing actual original reporting, is yet another reason why it’s increasingly difficult to take a new writer’s natter seriously.

A Small Separate Matter

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A US Federal Circuit Court judge has been suspended from hearing additional cases, and she’s suing and looking to get the Supreme Court to hear the matter. Her suspension is unconstitutional, she argues.

She’s right, but my concern concerns this claim, which Just the News included at the end of its article. The claim is from the DC Circuit, which heard the judge’s initial appeal of her suspension:

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit last summer found its binding precedent barred review of her claims.

This is, to use a term of the art, idiotic. No precedent is completely binding, to the point of preventing and other outcome, on the court that issued the precedent. Every court that issues a precedential ruling is fully capable of modifying, overruling, or rescinding its own precedent. Even the judges of this famously liberal circuit court understand this.