Daily Archives: 8 January 2019

In Which the NLMSM and Politicians

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…of both parties jumped the gun in their blind panic to disparage an actual attempt to end a war.  Recall the hooraw over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw our forces from Syria and from a war with no coherent plan or victory conditions.

Now the facts of the withdrawal start to come out.  National Security Adviser John Bolton made these points in Jerusalem while on a diplomatic trip:

  • the safety of Kurdish allies is being considered as part of its pending withdrawal plan
  • [t]imetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal
  • Trump has told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that withdrawal is pending assurances that Turkey will protect Kurdish fighters who have long provided the US with solid support in the campaign against Islamic State militants
  • [a]ny use of chemical weapons will be met by very strong response, as we have done twice before
  • [t]he US could leave some troops at a key military outpost in southern Syria

Patience, Grasshoppers.

Union Greed

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Teachers union style.  The Los Angeles Unified School District is so close to out of money that, under California law, the LA county is obligated to take the district into functional receivership under its own control if money gets much shorter.

It’s about to, and they’re about to.  The United Teachers Los Angeles union has said it will strike the school district, demanding more money—twice as much as it’s been offered—if it can’t get more money for its teachers and get rival, and educationally superior, charter schools capped on the State resources they receive.

In addition to putting those charter school children at risk, the union is willing to put 480,000 children in the school district in educational harm’s way, if the union can’t get its lucre.  Nor does this union care about the low-income families’ working parents—the bulk of the district’s children come from such families—who must find other means for monitoring their kids, much less educating them, which will add to those parents’ costs.

Sure, sure, the district wants to try to keep the schools open even without the union teachers. District leadership intends to employ “educational software and substitutes.” Two things about that: if the educational software actually is all that, the district will discover that it doesn’t need all of those union teachers after all.  The other is that substitute teachers are just that—useful for short term classroom monitoring and a modicum of teaching, but they’re not the real thing.

And just to drive the point home:

On the last day of class before winter break began, teacher Meg DeCoux packed six boxes of books, whiteboard markers and art supplies from her first-grade classroom. She and other teachers bought some of the supplies with their own money and don’t want them to be available to administrators or other substitutes during a strike, she said.

I bought this stuff.  It’s mine.  Mine, mine, mine.  If I can’t use it, nobody can.

That’s union selfishness on top of union greed.