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Monthly Archives: January 2025
Thank God For The Amish
On Tuesday, Red State posted an article about the ongoing recovery efforts in western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene (in late September). There are still people sleeping in tents, and western North Carolina is cold right now!
The article reports:
The people of Western North Carolina have had a stable Christmas and will definitely have a happier New Year thanks to a number of organizations, from Samaritan’s Purse to United Cajun Navy to individuals like Shawn Hendrix, Chris Hall, and so many others. They have worked (and are still working) to provide food, shelter, and resources to the families affected by September’s Hurricane Helene disaster, and they also brought Christmas to everyone in the region who experienced the devastation of their homes and their lives.
But the Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have risen like cream to the top. This is not even their region of the country, but a group of them with “Cabins for Christ” came down in October, created campsites for themselves away from the wreckage so that they would not disrupt the cleanup and assessment, and set themselves to build homes for the people who had lost theirs.
But to no one’s surprise, the resurrection of Western North Carolina will have little to do with the governmental agency that is supposed to be boots on the ground in the midst of disaster: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They claim, “Our mission is helping people before, during and after disasters. Our core values and goals help us achieve it.” Tragically, despite billions being poured into their coffers, they haven’t achieved much for the citizens of Western North Carolina who had their homes destroyed by Helene. And winter is already here, and more storms are coming.
Twelve homes in 48 hours versus three homes over three months.
The article includes the following:
A spokesperson for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, apologized Wednesday in response to a question from WBTV about why the agency failed to deliver dozens of travel trailers and manufactured homes to North Carolina residents displaced by Hurricane Helene.
Our questions came after a FEMA spokesperson told WBTV the week of Thanksgiving that the agency would deliver a total of 103 temporary travel trailers and manufactured homes to families in North Carolina by the end of that week. At the time, FEMA had delivered 27 homes.
By Wednesday, Dec. 4, FEMA had still only delivered 46 homes — well short of the number of promised temporary homes.
WBTV learned that more than 500 families have been approved for a FEMA travel trailer or manufactured home in the wake of Helene. The agency’s slow deployment of the homes means hundreds of families are weathering the snow and freezing temperatures currently hitting the North Carolina mountains.
This is unacceptable and hopefully will change in the next month.
The Upside Down Country We Currently Have
On December 22, a woman sleeping on the New York City subway was set on fire and killed. The person who is accused of the murder was a 33-year-old is from Guatemala and entered the U.S. illegally.
Headline USA reports:
New York Police announced Tuesday they’ve identified the woman who died on Dec. 22 after being set on fire while inside a New York subway train as a 61-year-old from New Jersey.
The woman, Debrina Kawam, had a Toms River, New Jersey, address, according to NYPD.
…New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday that Kawam had a “brief stint in our homeless shelter system” and that authorities had been in contact with her next of kin. He did not say when Kawam was in the homeless system.
“Hearts go out to the family, a horrific incident to have to live through,” Adams said at an unrelated press briefing.
“It impacts on how New Yorkers feel,” he continued. “But it really reinforces what I’ve been saying: People should not be living on our subway system, they should be in a place of care. No matter where she lived that should not have happened.”
I have questions. Was the murderer being provided with housing and food in one of New York City’s hotels? Was he being sheltered while an American citizen was not? I realize that the homeless problem will be difficult to solve, but I believe it can be solved. Obviously the current homeless shelter system in New York City did not protect this woman. A lot of homelessness has to do with mental illness or drug use. You can’t clean up a drug user unless he wants to clean up, but you can take him off the streets with some sort of tiny house or place to sleep. Many of the homeless can be helped through mental health services. We need to find a way to put them in places where they can get help and get used to living in rooms or houses and find their way back into society. The current level of homelessness in America should not be acceptable to anyone.
Disturbing
On Wednesday, Breitbart reported that the driver of the truck that drove into the crowd in New Orleans was a U.S. Citizen and an Army veteran who carried an ISIS flag in his truck.
The article reports:
The suspect accused of plowing a pickup truck through a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 15 and injuring at least 30 on New Year’s Day, is named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The article includes a statement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):
The subject has been identified as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas. He was driving a Ford pickup truck, which appears to have been rented, and we are working to confirm how the subject came into possession of the vehicle.
An ISIS flag was located in the vehicle, and the FBI is working to determine the subject’s potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organizations.
Weapons and a potential IED were located in the subject’s vehicle. Other potential IEDs were also located in the French Quarter. The FBI’s special agent bomb technicians are working with our law enforcement partners to determine if any of these devices are viable, and they will work to render those devices safe.
At what point (and how) was this person radicalized? It is disturbing to me that the man was an Army veteran. Was he a radical who joined the army without revealing his views or was he radicalized during or after his service? I think it would be helpful to know that.
Is This The Solution?
On Monday, The Daily Caller posted an article about a change in teacher certification in New Jersey. The change is supposed to help address a teacher shortage.
The article reports:
A New Jersey law that removes a requirement for teachers to pass a reading, writing and mathematics test for certification will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.
The law, Act 1669, was passed by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June in an effort to address a shortage of teachers in the state, according to the New Jersey Monitor. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass a “basic skills” test administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education.
This is just a wild guess, but I suspect that most people over the age of fifty could pass that test. The fact that the test is being eliminated illustrates the deterioration of our education system since the introduction of the Department of Education in 1979.
The article notes:
New Jersey followed the example of New York, which scrapped basic literacy requirements for teachers in 2017 in the name of “diversity.”
Other states such as California and Arizona also lower requirements for teacher certification by implementing fast-track options for substitute teachers to become full-time educators and eliminating exam requirements in order to make up for shortages in the field that were worsened by Covid, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
We need qualified teachers, but we also need to get back to basic curriculum that teaches the things students will need to know as contributing members of society. I loved my daughters’ fifth-grade teacher who taught them how to create a budget, balance a checkbook, read a map (yes, I realize that skill is now somewhat obsolete), how the stock market works, and how to critically watch a commercial. Those skills were all included in a basic math class.
The article concludes:
Teachers unions continue to hold major bargaining power in some blue states, pushing legislation that protects teachers despite their failure to improve learning outcomes for students. Only about half of New York students in grades three through eight tested as proficient in English and Math in the 2022 to 2023 school year despite the state spending almost twice the national average on education and New York teachers remaining some of the highest-paid in the country, according to the National Education Association.
Murphy’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Exactly What Is The Solution?
America is drowning in debt, and is also drowning in a flood of people who have entered the country illegally without any vetting. The solution to both problems may be the same.
On Monday, The Federalist reported:
In testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, American Immigration Council (AIC) Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick remarked last week that mass deportations would cost “at a minimum” $316 billion.
The AIC estimates that there is an annual cost of $88 billion to deport one million illegal aliens each year. That breaks down to $7 billion for arrests, $66 billion for detentions, $12.6 billion to go through the legal process, and $2.1 billion to transport deportees out of the country. It works out to $88,000 per deportee, but the council claims this is a “highly conservative estimate.” They conclude there is “a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.”
…The AIC’s estimates depend on a lot of assumptions. Take their estimated costs of detention, which account for three-quarters of their total estimate. To deport one million people in a year doesn’t mean that you have to have enough detention facilities to house one million people for an entire year. Even if you take AIC’s claim that people will be detained for a little under two months on average, that means you would only have to house about 167,000 at any point in time. Others put the average detention time at around a month, so you only have to build facilities to house 83,000 and, according to AIC, we already have the facilities necessary to house 41,500.
The AIC assumes each facility holds 500 beds, so 83 new facilities will have to be built. With each facility costing $35.91 million, that comes to a cost of $3 billion, a fraction of the $66 billion.
The problem with the AIC numbers is even worse than that because they must rebuild 216 completely new facilities each and every year, but that isn’t necessary as these facilities will last for years.
The article concludes:
In September, the Deputy Director for ICE noted that of the 7.4 million “non-detained” noncitizens with pending cases that were released into the United States, 662,566 have a criminal record. Our estimates indicate that it would cost about $8 billion to arrest and deport these criminals.
By contrast, if these illegal aliens commit a crime resembling the most serious crime that they have previously been convicted or charged with, the victimization costs amount to at least $166.5 billion. The National Institute of Justice estimated the costs to victims by including medical bills, lost wages, social/victim services, property loss/damage, police/fire service costs, and pain and suffering.
The costs of crime are roughly at least 21 times higher than deportation costs.
When the AIC cost estimates are six to seven times larger than the per deportee costs that we have actually observed over the last decade, you would hope people would be skeptical. Unfortunately, the news media was only too willing to uncritically repeat their claims.
Also, how much money are states spending on feeding and housing people who are breaking the law by being here?