Category Archives: morality

Blinken Misunderstands

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Ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants a Palestinian state to be recognized, but his way and on his schedule, not those of France, UK, and Canada. I won’t go into those latter three’s offers, which individually and together amount to nothing more than Israel’s abject surrender.

Blinken, on the other hand, has centered his view on the idea that an Israeli occupation of Gaza

would perpetuate the misery of innocent Palestinians and be a recipe for an enduring insurgency that bleeds Israel militarily and morally.

Blinken’s position here, though, proceeds from a false premise, and given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s publicly stated position on the matter, I have a hard time believing Blinken is unaware of the falsity of his premise. It’s either that, or he thinks Netanyahu is lying.

The fact of the matter is that Netanyahu does not want to occupy Gaza. He has said—and he’s right about this—that it’s necessary for Israel to control by its physical presence all of Gaza in order to finish destroying Hamas and driving the remnants out of the strip. Following that, Israel would withdraw completely in favor of Arab governance of Gaza via a body assembled and operated by a collection of Arab states. That’s an Israeli occupation in name only, with a clearly stated and publicly measurable milestone for Israel leaving. That’s not occupation in the sense that Russia wants for Ukraine or that the People’s Republic of China wants for the Republic of China.

An extension of that offer from Netanyahu is this: he’s saying it’s time for the Arab nations of the Middle East to put up or shut up. Those nations’ leaderships must accept and honor their own responsibilities and do the things, with their own resources, necessary to govern Gaza and restore the residents to safety, prosperity, and the liberty of determining their futures themselves. With this, there would be no need for a “Palestinian state,” which is an idea that failed with the collapse of the Oslo Accords decades ago and has continued to fail ever since.

I claim that a good start to this process would be for the Arab members of the Abraham Accords to put up.

School Choice and a Teachers Union

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In Wyoming, the State’s legislature passed and the governor signed legislation to create school choice for the State’s parents and children.

Wyoming lawmakers created the state’s first K-12 education savings account (ESA) program in 2024, effective in the coming school year. This spring they expanded eligibility to families of any income. The $7,000 accounts can be used for private-school tuition, tutors, homeschooling, or other education expenses. Nearly 4,000 students applied for them this fall.

In the first year, those 4,000 students amount to about 3.5% of the State’s K-12 population (some arithmetic involved), a pretty rapid start to the take-up. The main teachers union in the State, the Wyoming Education Association, is busily objecting and hailing the State into court to get that legislation overturned. The union is claiming that the State’s constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, the State cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.”

This is a distortion of the facts, including of what the State’s constitution says. This is that constitution’s Art 7, Sect 1, in its entirety:

Legislature to provide for public schools. The legislature shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction, embracing free elementary schools of every needed kind and grade, a university with such technical and professional departments as the public good may require and the means of the state allow, and such other institutions as may be necessary.

That’s the short and sweet of it. There’s nothing in there that would preclude the State from establishing, supporting, or merely funding alternative means of education. Indeed, that last clause, and such other institutions as may be necessary, being separate from the clause mandating a system of public instruction, explicitly authorizes alternative means of education structured entirely differently from, or the same as, the public system.

This is just another example of a teachers union trying to deny parents their right to see to their children’s education in their own way. It’s the union way or nothing. That’s just union abuse of education and of the students in it out of its own greed: those alternative means would not be controlled by the union.

The Wyoming constitution can be read here.

Sophie’s Choice, Is It?

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That’s the choice with which Ukraine is faced, at least according to Jillian Kay Melchior in her Wall Street Journal editorial. She summarized her view of the matter near the end of her piece.

That’s the temptation Ukraine faces as it considers sacrificing some territories ostensibly to save others. Many Ukrainians have loved ones in occupied regions, notes Yulia Marushevska, a Defense Ministry official: “Giving it up is not giving it up to keep it quiet there. It’s giving them up for destruction. It’s giving up your friend or brother.”

But that’s not the choice Ukraine presently faces. As the Russian state-owned and run outlet, RIA Novosti, put it in a headline as recently as 30 July,

There is no other option: no one should remain alive in Ukraine[.]

(It would help if Melchior had actually read the article in the original Russian or as translated into English. The headline she so carefully singled out is the outlet’s sarcastic summarization of its distortionate view of Ukrainian and Western persistence: Ukrainians must fight to the last soul. The article, though, does tout the Russian intent on encouraging that outcome if it’s what’s necessary for the barbarian to occupy the terrain.)

Nor is the article just editorial hype. The barbarian is bent on extermination of Ukraine as a polity and as a culture.

  • Putin is working to “eliminate Ukraine as a language and ethnicity, as an identity and culture, and as an independent state”
  • in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, retreating Russians left behind mass graves and civilian bodies bearing signs of torture, sexual violence and summary executions
  • Ukrainian authorities say they have information about nearly 20,000 cases in which Ukrainian children have been kidnapped to Russia

There is no Sophie’s choice for Ukraine here. Sophie had a choice: pick one of two children for the Nazis to murder. Ukraine has only national and cultural suicide on offer from the barbarian. Not some fraction of the nation to be murdered, but all of it.

It is the West—the Trump administration and Europe’s NATO member nations—which are faced with Sophie’s choice: pick one of several (so far, only Eastern European) nations for the Russian barbarian to murder in exchange for a phantom peace that would be nothing more than a small period of relative quietude.

There is, though, an actual choice. This one begins with changing the rhetoric from “Ukraine must be helped to fight on” and the more recent “cease fire right damn now” to “Ukraine must win.” That must be supported by overt and rapid transfers of arms and logistic support to Ukraine in the numbers and types the UA—with its superior and more current battlefield experience—says it needs and at the pace it says it needs them. Further, those transfers must come with no restrictions on the types and locations of targets against which the UA might employ them.

Failure of the VA

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The way the Department of Veterans Affairs is (mis)treating our veterans suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is appalling. Drug them up with a multiplicity (as many as five or more simultaneously) of psychiatric drugs and call it a day is the current protocol.

The VA’s own guidelines say no data support drug combinations to treat PTSD. The Food and Drug Administration warns that combining certain medications such as opioids and benzodiazepines can cause serious side effects, including death.
Nonetheless, prescribing cocktails of such drugs is one of the VA’s most common treatments for veterans with PTSD, and the number of veterans on multiple psychiatric drugs is a growing concern at the agency….

Aside from just drugging up these men and women who put their lives on the line for our nation, that “growing concern” is the sham of empty words unbacked by corrective action.

The VA has long been aware of the risks of overprescribing, and has internal research since at least 2016 showing the potential harms, including increased risk of suicide.
…
Studies by VA researchers link the simultaneous use of multiple psychiatric drugs to suicide risk among veterans, including a 2016 paper that found Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans taking five or more central nervous system drugs faced higher risks of overdose and suicidal behaviors.
Yet the agency has been slow to mandate changes. It has failed to implement nationwide electronic systems to alert doctors when they prescribe multiple psychiatric drugs, despite evidence from its own studies that these alerts improve care. The VA doesn’t uniformly require written informed consent for all psychiatric drugs with suicide risk, something that veterans groups and some members of Congress are urging. Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

Not only is the VA passively refusing to do anything about its mistreatment of our veterans, the agency and “doctors” are threatening our veterans if they don’t comply with those dangerously ineffective VA prescriptions.

Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

These men and women would be far better served, as would all of our veterans, if the VA were dissolved and its then-current and all future putative budgets converted to vouchers for each veteran which s/he could use to get treatment from a doctor, clinic, and hospital of his choice and on the schedule that suits him rather than the agency. Other “benefits” of the VA, viz., Home Loan Guarantee, Insurance, Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, GI Bill, and Compensation & Pension, are far better done from within HUD and DoD.

VA Secretary Doug Collins should have the mission of achieving that dissolution, to be completed by the end of 2028. Continuing to prop up the department is worse than a waste of our taxpayer money: it’s outright destructive of our veterans, who already have sacrificed so much for our benefit.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Wrong Answer

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William Galston is correct, and he’s dangerously wrong, in his Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

He acknowledges that Hamas will never surrender. This is where he’s correct. He then concluded that Israel should

declare victory and accept a cease-fire that returns all the remaining hostages and withdraws the IDF from Gaza.

He based that on the risible thesis that Israel has ended Hamas’s ability to threaten its security.

Hamas will never release all of its remaining hostages. That would eliminate far too much non-shooting leverage that Hamas has. The IDF is going to have to go get them, and that requires the complete destruction of Hamas.

Regarding Hamas’ threat to Israel’s security, formal cease fire or not, Hamas’ firing at Israel, Hamas’ terroristic assaults on Israel, will never cease until Hamas is utterly destroyed and cannot (not chooses not to) keep up its terrorism. Israel is absolutely correct on this, and its existence as a nation, as a society, depends on it. Leaving Gaza before that’s done would only let Hamas re-expand into the areas currently held by the IDF, refit, regrow, and carry on with its anti-Israeli terrorism.

Galston goes on at length, too, about how long it would take Israel to destroy Hamas. However, he shies away from the other side of this: that the destruction of Israel, were Hamas left extant and so potentially to succeed, would be forever.

That’s the long and the short of it.