Monthly Archives: December 2021

Seth Moulton’s Symbolism

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Congressman Seth Moulton (D, MA) had some thoughts on “saving Ukraine” in his Sunday WSJ op-ed. He began by announcing that our options are limited.

At this point, US options are limited. President Biden has already said he won’t send more troops.

Then he listed some things we could do, anyway, to show our support for Ukraine.

  • First, dramatically increase the speed of weapons procurement for Ukraine, and do so publicly. Washington must clearly articulate to the world how the weapons we provide will force Mr. Putin to incur substantial losses of Russian troops right away, not merely over time.
  • Second, organize effective sanctions. They must be targeted, powerful and widely agreed on in advance by NATO. … Mr Putin needs to know that he’ll have trouble buying a soda five minutes after he invades….
  • Third, clearly communicate the grave consequences of invading—not only to Mr. Putin, but to the Russian people.

All of those steps are necessary, but even in their aggregate, they’re insufficient. They’re especially so individually. We could—if the Progressive-Democratic Party, in control of Congress and the State and Defense Departments, were willing to stop slow-walking the supplies. But even if they were, it still would take weeks, at best, to get the weapons delivered in sufficient quantities, deployed, and the soldiers trained on them. Putin is ready to jump in days.

Effective sanctions? Certainly there is plenty of room to toughen them up, but consider: even if Putin were finding it hard to by a soda five minutes after invading—he’d still have Ukraine. There’s a real big so what factor in play here.

Clearly communicate the costs of invading…. On what basis does Moulton think either Putin or the Russian people would take anything Biden-Harris, or Blinken, or Austin—or Milley—have to say seriously? They’ve been weak and their words less than weak tea for the last eleven months.

No.

Also necessary is making concrete those suggestions. Biden-Harris must correct his assurance to Putin that he won’t resist Putin’s coming invasion of Ukraine (or of the Baltics, if Putin’s moves opposite Ukraine prove to be misdirection).

Biden-Harris must redeploy American troops (beginning from out of Germany, which disdains NATO, anyway, and so won’t miss them beyond the GIs’ spending on the German economy) into southern and northern Poland—opposite Ukraine and Kaliningrad—and into Lithuania.

Biden-Harris must move naval forces into US air strike range of Kaliningrad.

Biden-Harris must begin joint air training and CAP exercises with Ukrainian and Lithuanian air forces in those nations’ airspaces.

Absent these, the Progressive-Democrat’s suggestions are nothing but symbolism.

Student Loan Responsibility

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Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller wrote about student loan burdens in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, using New York University as a worst-case illustration. Their subheadline made a good summary of their thesis.

By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt….

A female graduate sold her eggs to cover some of her NYU costs even as she borrowed to cover more; she’s still selling her eggs to cover expenses and try to pay on her student loan debt as she remains essentially unemployed five months after graduation. In another example, a single mother of three had a $40,000/year income when her son started school in 2018. The mother still has her own $34,000 in loans from her own bachelor’s degree and she’s borrowing another $140,000 in Parent Plus loans to help her son pursue his degree.

And this:

An NYU master’s in publishing leaves recent graduates with median debt nearly triple that of the school with the next highest loan burden for which the Education Department released data. At NYU, the graduates borrowed a median $116,000 and earned a median $42,000 two years out.

And this:

NYU’s 2015 and 2016 public-health graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median $106,000 for the degree, the Journal’s analysis of Education Department data found; half earned roughly $61,000 or less two years after graduation.

And this deflection from NYU spokesman John Beckman:

Not everyone seeking an advanced degree is going into a lucrative field, and universities have no control over how our society values particular professions.

NYU is especially bad in this arena, but only by a matter of degree. The problem itself is both widespread and very serious.

The overall situation is one more argument for getting government all the way out of the student loan business, whether making the loans or guaranteeing them. That and the alternatives below are perfectly straightforward to implement, if exceedingly difficult to effect politically. But that just requires us sovereign citizens to put our foot down and fire the politicians who won’t go along and elect those who will.

After getting government out of the way, do these things:

  • make the schools publish the average and median 5-yr-after-graduation salaries for each of its majors
  • make the schools publish the per centages of their graduates finding employment in their major areas of study within one year of graduation
  • make the schools be the ones extending loans to their students or serve as co-borrower on any private financial institution student loans
  • let graduates discharge their loans through bankruptcy—stop disguising the risks from the lenders (and borrowers), and stop inuring the lenders from those risks.

One more Critical Item; although this is a change in mindset for all of us, not only school managers and politicians. Recognize for whom college is most appropriate. There’s a crying need for a whole lot of tradesmen, and good livings to be made there—and nothing an architect draws up or an engineer designs gets built without tradesmen. Doctors and lawyers have no place to ply their trades, other than in their homes, without tradesmen. Those homes don’t get built without tradesmen. And neither do the roads/bridges, power grids, communications grids, and on and on that connect those homes to those offices and office buildings—or mines and farms to anywhere—without those tradesmen.

Insisting on your Rights is Uncooperative

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That’s the view of one lawyer.

It seems that the actor Alec Baldwin wanted a search warrant before he would turn over his cell phone to the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Department. Supposedly, Baldwin asked for one even before the sheriff asked for his cell in the apparent expectation that the sheriff would be asking.

Lawyer Christopher Melcher says that’s being uncooperative.

It is spin by Alec’s lawyer to say that he suggested the warrant. He refused to provide his phone without a warrant. That is not cooperation or a proactive suggestion.

What we think of Baldwin doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter whether he asked for the search warrant before or after the sheriff asked for his cell phone. Not only his right to have a search warrant implied by our Constitution. The government’s requirement to get one before any search is written in black letters in our Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What would be uncooperative would be the sheriff demanding Baldwin give up his cell phone without that warrant (which is different from the sheriff asking for it before getting the warrant in order to save some administrative hassle).

It’s attitudes like Melcher’s that give law enforcement and prosecutorial proceedings a bad name, whether or not Melcher is associated with either.

Russia’s West Surrender Security Guarantees

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Russia has laid out its latest demand for security guarantees.

  • No North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion further eastward to include Ukraine
  • abandon all NATO military activities in all of Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia
  • no deployment of additional NATO troops and weapons outside the countries in which they were before any Eastern bloc nations joined the alliance in May 1997
  • each side should refrain from deploying intermediate and shorter-range missiles where they can hit the territory of the other side
  • not use territory of another state to carry out an armed attack against one another

Will Russia remove its theater nuclear weapons and its conventional weapons from Kaliningrad? Of course not.

Will Russia remove its military forces to east of the Urals? Of course not.

Will Russia withdraw from Crimea and eastern Ukraine? Of course not.

There’s nothing mutual about these guarantees; they’re more a Security of Russia Guarantee, while leaving Russia a free hand in moving west.

Russia’s demands should be a non-starter and not even discussed except for a one-word statement: “No.” In fact, these demands should be answered with an offer to Ukraine to join NATO.

But this is the Biden-Harris administration, and Germany has far too much influence in NATO.

Laws and Rules

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The Progressive-Democrats are unhappy that they haven’t had their way with our government, and so they insist on changing the rules so they can get their way forever after. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) took note of this from the Senate floor last Thursday.

In the span of a few hours, one Senate Democrat had renewed calls to nuke the Senate and break the rules, and another published a national op-ed arguing that Democrats should attack the rule of law and pack the Supreme Court.
Two frontal assaults on two branches of government, proposed in the space of about two hours. Entire generations of statesmen would have seen either one of those unhinged proposals as Armageddon for our institutions.

But this is the Progressive-Democratic Party. If they can’t have their way within the law, within the rules, they’ll change the law, change the rules. If they can’t change the law or the rules, they’ll simply ignore them.

The government of the People’s Republic of China, and of the predecessor nation on the mainland, operates and operated the same way. If the men of those governments don’t—didn’t then—like the outcomes of specific laws, or if the people become too unruly (in those government men’s eyes) under existing law, they alter the law to suit those men.

This is not to say the Progressive-Democratic Party is the same as the Communist Party of China. The attitudes and techniques of the two, though, are quite similar, and they produce the same outcome: a nation whose citizens are ruled by government men rather than a nation under law where all citizens are equal, including those government men, and government is subordinate to the citizens.