RUTHFULLY YOURS

When local jurisdictions shield aliens wanted by the feds, the aliens can commit more crimes.

The Kathryn Steinle murder case in San Francisco is a tragic but textbook example of the public-safety problems that are created when local governments obstruct immigration enforcement by adopting so-called sanctuary policies. The man who has admitted killing Steinle, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, is an illegal alien who has been deported five times and racked up seven felony convictions. ICE had started the deportation process, but San Francisco asked for custody of Sanchez to pursue prior drug charges. These were dropped, and in early April, instead of turning him back over to ICE for deportation, the San Francisco sheriff’s department released Sanchez, in keeping with the city’s longstanding sanctuary policies, without notification to ICE. Less than three months later, Sanchez shot and killed Kathryn Steinle.

This tragedy was not an isolated incident; sanctuary policies are one of the most serious challenges facing ICE. More than 300 jurisdictions now refuse to turn over criminal aliens to ICE.

According to ICE records, from January 1 to August 31, 2014, more than 8,100 deportable aliens were released after arrest in approximately 300 local sanctuary jurisdictions, even though ICE had issued a detainer seeking custody in advance of deporting them. Some 62 percent of these offenders had a prior criminal history, like Sanchez. Roughly 3,000 were felons, as was Sanchez.

Barbarians at the gate usually don’t bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass epidemics such as the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture.

Far more dangerous are institutionalized corruption, a lack of transparency, and creeping neglect of existing laws. All the German euros in the world will not save Greece if Greeks continue to dodge taxes, featherbed government, and see corruption as a business model.

Even obeying so-called minor laws counts. It is no coincidence that a country where drivers routinely flout traffic laws and throw trash out the window is also a country that cooks its books and lies to its creditors. Everything from littering to speeding seems negotiable in Athens in a way not true of Munich, Zurich, or London.

The New York Times is very keen that somebody, anybody, “lend” Greece more money so that it can stay in the eurozone a bit longer.

I put scare quotes around the word “lend” because, as everyone knows, any money that is shoveled into Athens’s coffers will be spent and not repaid. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” advised Polonius, “for loan oft loseth both itself and friend, and borrowing dulleth the edge of husbandry.” Shakespeare is not popular by the Piraeus.

No, Greece faces what the economist Steve Moore, writing yesterday in the Wall Street Journal [1], called “financial oblivion.” There are about 11 million Greeks. They owe some $350 billion.

Jeb Bush wants you to know that he is the ultimate multitasker! He says that he can love his Mexican-born wife, Columba, and control the Mexican border at the same time! I remember how President Clinton “compartmentalized” himself so that while the upper half of him handled affairs of state, the lower half handled affairs with Monica Lewinsky. So I suppose this is possible.

“You can love the Mexican culture, you can love your Mexican-American wife and also believe that we need to control the border,” Bush told the crowd. “This is a bizarre kind of idea that somehow you can have an affection for people in a different country and not think the rule of law should apply.”

Jeb supports the rule of law? He’s got my vote!

He added that he would push to deploy “forward-leaning border control agents” closer to the actual border; use new technologies, including drones, to monitor border traffic …

This is great! Jeb plans to monitor the flow of illegal aliens!

At the July 3 Nobel laureates conference on Mainau Island, 30 of the 65 attendees signed a media-reported letter urging action against global warming. Not reported by the media: the attendees listened to Norway’s 1973 Nobel physics laureate, Ivar Giaever, give a truth-telling “Emperor’s New Clothes” speech. Also, the majority of the Nobel laureates refused to sign the alarmist global-warming letter.

Giaever gave a great speech. His explanations were clear. His graphs were persuasive. He took the part of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes folktale. The boy saw the emperor parading around naked and cried out, “The emperor has no clothes on!” Giaever was saying that the fraction-of-a-degree differences in temperature upon which global warming theory is based are as invisible as the Emperor’s new clothes. He said (on this video at the 6:45 mark):

The president — Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces — does not have to be a military man. Or maybe should not be a military man; a civilian perspective on issues of war is essential. But that being so, the civilian CinC should be wary of inventing military doctrine.

President Obama had a brief — and unusual — visit to the Pentagon this week. Normally, he receives his national security briefings in the White House, but he had a message to deliver about America’s war against ISIS. “Ideologies,” he said, “are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas.”

“Climate change hysteria, having debilitated science and heavily infected the media, NGOs, politics and sundry interest groups, now appears to have morphed into a virulent strain of fundamentalist belief to which even the Pope seems to have no immunity.”

Theologians once devoted their energies to calculating the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin. Today, in the thrall of dubious science and warmist pamphleteers, Pope Francis has put his seal on a document larded with ‘facts’ no less improbable than those cavorting cherubim of old.

While the infallibility of the Pope is a matter of debate and doctrinal subtlety, the fallibility of whoever wrote the Pontiff’s encyclical, On Care for Our Common Home, is irrefutable. In incorporating an undigested, evidence-free regurgitation of alarmist hype and misinformation, it does no service to the Church or humanity. While the document’s general concern for our planet’s environment is laudable, the focus on threats and problems, while largely ignoring the numerous successes and improvements, serves more to proclaim the authors’ conspicuous righteousness than to encourage further betterment.

Sensing weakness in the West, the absence of conviction and resolve, illegal migrants of all kinds pour into Europe. More drown. The problem gets bigger. And worse. Nations can only be generous if they feel secure. Australia has absorbed that lesson. The international community … not so much
In 1957 I took out my first subscription to a “small magazine”. I did so through my school, St Mary’s College in Crosby, Lancashire, which encouraged its boys to take the Times and magazines such as the Spectator and the New Statesman as first steps to becoming leaders of society. My English teacher, Mr Hughes, had never heard of the magazine I chose, however. It was called Crossbow, the house journal of the Bow Group, itself quite a new body of young Tory intellectuals who wanted to continue talking politics late at night despite having left university. Perhaps because so many Bow Groupers worked in the London media, Crossbow’s launch had been covered by the BBC news. It still exists, incidentally, though mainly on the internet, where a search for it may mis-direct you to a magazine for electric crossbow enthusiasts.

President Obama delivered on upbeat progress report Monday on the fight against Islamic State, and we can only hope that this time he’s right. A reason for skepticism is that Mr. Obama has offered similarly confident predictions of eventual victory before.

Speaking at the Pentagon, the President noted that Islamic State had been hit by more than 5,000 air strikes, “lost more than a quarter of the populated areas that it had seized in Iraq,” failed in key battles at Kobani, Mosul Dam and Tikrit, “alienated those under its rule” and united the world against it. He also promised an intensified air campaign against its leadership in Syria and its oil facilities in Iraq, along with an intensified effort to train and equip friendly local forces.

It started with a course boycott and ended with a Nazi cartoon.

In the spring of 2014, a series of ugly incidents rocked the campus of Vassar College, a small liberal arts college just north of New York City.

It started with a boycott protest against a course that involved travel to Israel and the West Bank, including forcing a professor and students to walk a gauntlet of people ululating (audio example here). It culminated in the posting on social media of a Nazi cartoon portraying Jewish control of the U.S.

The group mounting the protest and posting the plainly anti-Semitic cartoon was Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine.