Monthly Archives: May 2022

Close in Spirit

Posted on by
Reply

…but wide of the mark. Wide of the target itself, even. In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer offered this on the matter of student loan debt:

The solution is to hold academic institutions accountable. If they want government to give my money to their students, they need to prove the value of their product. Set parameters: an 80% graduation rate in five years, and the ability to secure a job at a reasonable salary one year postgraduation. Failure results in withdrawal of federal money available to future students until parameters are met.

It’s entirely appropriate to hold the colleges and universities individually responsible for their product: students taught, successfully or not, for one or more years along with graduated students. But the writer’s suggestion still wants far more government intervention than is warranted.

Let the free market solve the puzzle, and here is where legitimate government intervention would be appropriate. Information is key. Require the colleges and universities to publish their dropout rates by number of years in school, graduation rates by major, and both the median and mean annual incomes, again by major, of graduated students five years after graduation.

One more path for government intervention: require the colleges and universities to be the primary lender to the student or to co-sign as borrower on the loan to their students. As part of the loan or co-signed loan document, require the borrowing student to answer the income survey.

A final act of government intervention: let the borrowing student discharge his student loan debt through personal bankruptcy, as with any other personal debt, and then deal with the economic and reputational consequences of that bankruptcy.

With this, there would be no need for government to lend to students or to guarantee any loans to students. Thus, a final final act of government intervention: government should withdraw entirely from the student loan industry.

Giving the Game Away

Posted on by
Reply

NBC‘s Lester Holt is a member of the journalism guild and another member of the Left who’s done so. He said, as part of his long list of our claimed failings in responding to the Wuhan Virus, while he determinedly emoted about the raw numbers of deaths from the Wuhan Virus, that

…we forgot about the unpredictability of free will….

Because we should have obeyed the “science” being put out by our Know Betters in Government. We should have meekly accepted those instructions.

We should have joined our Know Betters in ignoring the larger science behind Holt’s manufactured angst over his soul-crushing milestone of 1 million deaths from the Virus. We should have paid no attention to that larger science behind the curtain, the rest of the story that showed that the Virus’ mortality rate for fundamentally healthy adults is a small fraction of 1% and, for our children, nearly non-existent. That whole story, not the carefully selected bits and pieces that suit the Left’s artificially done hysteria, showed very strongly that the only folks truly at risk from the Virus are those with existing comorbidities and those who are older than 85-ish.

That Holt included in his tear-jerker monologue his concerns about obstructionist free will is entirely consistent with the Left’s contempt of us average Americans and the Left’s drive to reduce us to wards of an all-knowing, all-benevolent State run by those denizens of the Left.

A Clear Difference

Posted on by
Reply

Assume, for a moment, that the series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets near the border with Ukraine have been carried out by Ukrainian forces and are not just examples of shoddy Russian maintenance or done by disgruntled Russian protestors.

Compare, then, that damage with the damage done by Russian attacks inside Ukraine. “Ukraine’s attacks” have been carefully limited to facilities supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued prosecution of its unprovoked attack.

  • a fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod region directly opposite Kharkiv
  • an explosion sparked a blaze at an ammunition depot near the city of Belgorod
  • blasts have been reported inside the city
  • fires erupted at other oil depots, including one at a Russian military base
  • explosions have damaged rail lines in Kursk and Bryansk oblasts

Russian attacks, on the other hand, have been deliberately targeted at residential neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities, and have been aimed at deliberately razing whole cities to the ground (and of simply making the rubble bounce)—Kharkiv, Kherson, Izyum, Lyman, Bucha, Mariupol, to suggest a few—and nakedly, without regard for much of anything, attacking nuclear facilities at Zaporizhzhia or firing on “targets” very close to or having cruise missiles overfly the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant near Kostyantynivka in southern Ukraine and the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant near Netishyn in the northeast enroute to other targets, and blithely kicking up the potentially still lethal radioactive dirt around Chornobyl.

“The Leak” and Its Fall Impact

Posted on by
Reply

Short, and too the point. Assume the leaked Supreme Court Decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which seems to overturn Roe v Wade, is substantially the decision the Court will release in its June batch of opinion releases.

The hue and cry that’s occurring now from both sides of the question is the hue and cry that would have occurred in June following the Court’s release of its official opinion. That hue and cry will be very much watered down by this week’s leak reaction, to the point that I don’t see the reaction to the official opinion having much steam left for the summer and fall mid-term campaigns or for the fall elections.

That leads me to two possibilities for the leak. One is that the liberal Justice staff leaker, if that’s who it was, made a tactical blunder with his leak. He virtually eliminated the reaction the official release would have generated, a reaction much closer to the election and so much more likely to have an impact.

The other possibility is that the conservative Justice staff leaker, if that’s who it was, successfully defanged the reaction by stimulating it too early in the season to have much impact.

A clue regarding who the leaker is can be collected from the reactions to the leak. The Left, and especially the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, all are focused strictly on the putative outcome of the Court’s decision; they wholly ignore the fact of the leak. Here’s a canonical example of that disdain from the head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, President Joe Biden (D):

Not a syllable—not a minim—of concern or comment regarding the illegality of the leak. Indeed, this President’s sole critical caveat, the only thing about which he cares, is whether the leak actually reflects the upcoming ruling.

On the other hand, Conservatives and the Conservative and Republican politicians, while not ignoring the putative decision, strongly emphasize the leak and its illegality.

One side ignores the illegality of the matter; the other side decries the leak for its law-breaking nature. That’s strongly indicative of who the leaker is.

CO2 Emissions

Posted on by
Reply

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section concerning net-zero and carbon emissions, a writer asks

When can we have an honest discussion of a plan to reduce carbon emissions?

We cannot until we have an honest discussion of the context of carbon emissions and why we should care about them. That context includes all the epochs of higher planetary temperatures and lush life, epochs of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and lush life, and those separate sets of epochs’ lack of correlation with each other.