Too Precious

That’s the British press, in comparison with which even our own press is…inadequately endowed.

It seems that Henry Charles Albert David, a Duke of Sussex (the latest in that line, in fact) gave an interview to an American television late night talk show host.

Oh, woe. Oh, the angst. Oh, the world is coming to an end.

The British press is up in arms because its morning coverage of Harry’s interview somehow clashed with the effort of the British Queen, Elizabeth, to get word out regarding the wisdom of getting vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus.  “A source” complained

When the Queen speaks, as she has done about the vaccine, it is accepted that she has a clear field[.]

I’m not sure by whom it is accepted, but that’s neither here nor there. The “source” has misplaced his dismay. Here’s the kicker:

News of Harry’s late-night chat filled the British media Friday morning, hours after the Queen was trying to give a booster shot to the vaccine with an address in which she encouraged the UK public to get jabbed[.]

To the extent the British queen’s message was stepped on (“hours after?” Really? The field still isn’t clear?), it was the deliberate, carefully thought out decision of the British press to fill itself with coverage of Harry’s interview. The man had nothing to do with that.

“Troubled by the Strikes”

Recall the duration of school closures due, allegedly, to the Wuhan Virus situation in our nation. Not everyone is on board with the teachers unions’ attitude toward reopening our schools and getting our children back to in-person learning—where they actually could learn and where they, and school staff, would be far safer than either are cooped up at home.

Tommy Schultz, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the American Federation for Children:

For the past year, there has essentially been a national teachers union strike that has left tens of millions of families without access to an adequate education[.]

And

This will haunt our country for decades to come, and the teachers unions’ blatant refusal to [follow] science in the name of political extortion is outright shameful[.]

You bet. And the unions’ strike demands? A guarantee of perfect safety. Oh, and more money. Billions of dollars more money.

It’s not just the unions, though. Here’s a teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs.

Most good teachers are deeply troubled by the strikes. We never want to deny the children even one day of learning, and we understand that we are servant leaders to those children.

That is, to use the technical term, a crock; it’s just porch dog yapping. If “good teachers” actually were troubled by the strikes, they’d tell their union bosses to take a hike, and they would go back to the classroom.

Friedrichs also used to be a union official, and she was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v CTA, through which she and some of her colleagues tried to get the right for teachers, et al., to decide for themselves whether or not to fund unions. That makes her empty rhetoric all the more useless.

Moreover, although Friedrichs’ suit failed at the Supreme Court when the short-handed Court voted 4-4, nothing in that failure forced union members to stay union members. They were, they are, they always have been free to stop being card carriers, to leave the union, and thereby to regain their right to decide.

There’s also the meme that teachers are afraid to cross their unions. They may be, but they’re only afraid of their own mental creation of union responses—which in the end, are only words. And so we have more crockery.

Still, if teachers really are so timid, it’s time for adults to step up: school boards and local and State governing jurisdictions need to move to decertify the unions, fire the teachers who won’t go back to work, and redirect the funds originally allocated to closed schools to private, parochial, voucher, and charter schools that are open. After all, if a school isn’t operating, it doesn’t need any money.

‘Course, that takes the true adults—We the People, particularly us parents—to do our jobs and fire reluctant board members and politicians and elect those who will take prompt, decisive action.

A Couple of Test Outcomes

illustrate the problem.

Since schools across the US first closed last spring, sending about 50 million children to learn remotely, one looming question for educators, parents and children has been: how much has learning suffered?
Data from two national testing programs, Renaissance Learning Inc and NWEA, which are used widely by US public schools to assess students’ progress, show widespread performance declines at the start of this academic year, particularly in math.

These are the outcomes. The teachers unions don’t care, though. They don’t want their teachers to return to the classroom unless and until union leadership can be guaranteed absolute freedom from the risk of Wuhan Virus infection. Which is, of course, a deliberately impossible criterion.

Common Ground on Abortions

That’s the claimed hope of the Progressive-Democrat HHS Secretary nominee Xavier Becerra—that he can find “common ground” on his late-term abortion goals.

Indeed, there’s this bit of disingenuousity from Becerra:

I understand that we may not always agree on where to go, but I think we can find some common ground on these issues because everyone wants to make sure that if you have an opportunity, you’re gonna have a healthy life[.]

Except for the aborted baby. That life gets no opportunity for health; that life is simply…terminated.

There is no common ground on abortion, late-term or otherwise: either there’s baby killing going on, or there’s not.

The only common ground at all related to abortion is the ground in which all those babies are buried.

Another Question

…for President Joe Biden. The President has been decidedly slow to comment on the People’s Republic of China government’s treatment of the country’s Uighur population.

Biden, who vowed to be tough on China while on the campaign trail, has been careful not to classify the human rights abuses against the Uighurs since entering office. The Trump administration declared the actions by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as genocide one day before vacating the White House.
The president didn’t mention China’s human rights abuses during a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Tuesday. He said that the US and Canada are coordinating “approaches to better compete with China and to counter threats to our interests and values.”

So, Joe—can I call ya Joe?—is the PRC government committing genocide against the Uighurs? Is the PRC government at all mistreating the Uighurs?

We’ll wait for your answer, Joe.

But the Uighurs can’t.