Daily Archives: 20 July 2017

The Fruits of Timidity

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Rebel forces in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday announced that they plan to hold a referendum calling for the creation of a new state known as Malorossiya, which translates as “Little Russia.”

In a statement published on the rebel-aligned Donetsk News Agency, rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that the new state would aspire to include not only the areas under insurgent control, but also the rest of Ukraine.

This wouldn’t be occurring now, had our government and those of Europe hadn’t been so meek in the face of Russian aggression in the two eastern oblasts and then without a whimper accepting Russian partition of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.

Maybe now, the lot of us will stop bleating about the Minsk accord and remind Russia of its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.  Maybe now the lot of us will start selling/leasing/granting Ukraine the weapons and supplies it needs to defend itself and to take back from Russia the three oblasts.

EPA Jobs?

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The Environmental Protection Agency has sent out more than 1,000 buy-out notices to its employees….

The positions are being eliminated, and the incumbents aren’t being offered positions elsewhere on the government’s teat payroll.  The horror.  The union-demanded, if not God-given, sinecures are not sinecures, after all.  American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 President Michael Mikulka is quite vocal with his dismay.

EPA wants over 1,200 of us to leave, purportedly to save money going forward and claiming that they no longer need the positions occupied by staff that in some cases worked at EPA for over 30 years[.]

Because the existence of a union-protected job means the employer needs that job, and the longer its existence, the deeper into perpetuity that need must be.  Sure.

Mikulka also insisted that the EPA would be less active without those jobs, speaking like that would be a bad thing.  He said this, too:

We’re going to have to do less with less.

Recall that, during the Obama government shutdown in 2011, the EPA rated over 90% of its workforce as unessential and furloughed them for the duration of the shutdown.  Certainly, that per centage was true only for the short-term, but a huge fraction of those 90% really are unessential, and they could be released were the EPA to be returned to its original mission of science-based protection of the environment and moved away from supporting its politically motivated pseudo-science climate funding industry.

The agency certainly can do less with less.  And it should.