Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.

A Thought on Physician-assisted Suicide

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The headline and subhead laid out the case in extreme terms:

Physician-Assisted Suicide Isn’t Healthcare
We all took an oath to do no harm. That includes killing our patients.

In the article the writer made the case against physician-assisted suicide in Biblical terms, and it’s a valid one:

Cain should have been put to death for what he did. But the Lord spared him, proclaiming that life and death belong to the Lord alone.

And

Medicine shouldn’t be entangled in the business of death. Killing isn’t healthcare.

Certainly. But what the Hippocratic Oath actually says is this:

I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman….

But that’s not what physician-assisted suicide does. If the patient wants to short-circuit an end-of-life period of misery, assisting his suicide isn’t “killing the patient;” it’s helping him move on. Withholding that assistance is most assuredly deeply injurious to the patient’s continuing body, and to his mind. Beyond that, it’s disastrous to the patient’s and his family’s emotional and economic well-being, consigning the latter, especially, to an extended life of impoverishment that could have been avoided. Physician-assisted suicide is palliative care in the extreme, but it is still palliative care.

The killing is the patient’s act, and that’s between him and God. Do no harm includes not getting between the patient and God. A doctor’s role assuredly does not include suggesting suicide; although, some governments do encourage it. A doctor’s role does, absolutely, include palliative care.

Along these lines, the Hippocratic Oath explicitly enjoins the physician from doing abortions:

Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.

I have to ask: how many abortions has this writer of the article at the first link performed? Plenty of his colleagues have done them, and proudly so, many even proclaiming abortions as “health care.”

Hungary’s Election

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The results of Hungary’s election last Sunday are pretty much in, and the upstart Tisza Party, led by Péter Magyar, has won a resounding victory, 53.6% of the votes compared with 37.8% for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, with 98% of the votes counted. That puts Tisza on track for a better than two-thirds majority in the nation’s unicameral Parliament.

Some on the Left in the US and in Europe are calling that a defeat of a traitorous right-wing Orbán and his party. Others have a different take on the outcome:

Notre Dame College Republicans
@NDRepublicans
Orbán was just voted out democratically and conceded. Meanwhile countries like France, Germany, and Romania ban opposition candidates from running, cancel elections, and surveil parties for “extremism” if they oppose immigration.

Rasmus Jarlov @RasmusJarlov · 19h
This is the biggest and most needed defeat for traitor right in Europe in modern times. It is not a victory for the left. But a victory for sane conservatism that believes in democracy and does not ally with the enemies of Europe. This is what….

In the event, we’ll see. Magyar wasn’t very unifying in his victory speech:

Together we replaced the Orbán system. Together we liberated Hungary and took back our country. Those who commit the sin of dividing the nation must leave power.

Neither was Orbán:

What today means for our homeland, we do not know, time will tell. In any case, we will serve our homeland even in opposition.

It appears, though, that the Notre Dame Republicans have the better read. Divisive rhetoric, or not, this was a more democratically achieved election outcome than those of the so-liberal France and Germany and Romania.

In Which the Editors Get One Right

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors this time. Don’t expel him [California Progressive-Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell] from Congress. Let California voters have their say, goes their subheadline.

Swalwell is about as unsavory a man, let alone a politician, as it gets this side of Tren de Aragua, and the sexual assault and rape charges being leveled against him are even worse. However, as the editors point out near the end of their editorial,

He deserves a chance to explain himself, while accusations alone shouldn’t be enough to drive an elected Representative out of office. ….
The [House] Ethics Committee can take up formal complaints, sift the evidence, and recommend an appropriate punishment.

That’s right. In our legal system, an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a trial court. The legalism doesn’t apply to Congress; each house can expel its members for any reason at all, if two-thirds of its members can be persuaded to the expulsion. However, the principle underlying the legalism assuredly does apply to Congress, as it does to all of us citizens.

Let the House Ethics Committee do its investigation and recommend the punishment it deems fit, but short of expulsion. Let the matter also come to serious criminal trial, and if he’s convicted, the Ethics Committee then can revisit the matter and recommend expulsion—and the House then should vote unanimously for that expulsion.

All of that may have become moot, though: Swalwell announced Monday that he was resigning from Congress with immediate effect. Withal, my claim regarding presumption of innocence remains unbloodied and unbowed.

Despotic Regime Staying Power

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Such polities have a staying power that the West has long been unable to understand. For instance,

Iran’s ability to resist despite large civilian casualties, the decapitation of much of the regime’s leadership, and severe economic damage shows the staying power of authoritarian governments. For decades, Tehran developed a toolbox that includes widespread political repression, relentless propaganda, an ideology of martyrdom and a powerful security apparatus—all aimed at protecting the state from enemies abroad and within.

But who (emphatically not what) is this state that’s being preserved?

The men and women populating the government and its levers of power are that “state.” These men and women don’t think like we do; in particular, they don’t put the same value on life that we do. What these personages value is their own power and their own lives; they don’t care a single minim about the value of the subjects over whom they reign, nor do they care a whit about the economic damage done to their nation as a whole or to those unvalued subjects. None of those tools of power are designed to protect their “authoritarian government,” they’re designed to protect the lives, personal power, and economic condition those men and women who manifest that government.

Nikolay Kozhanov, of Qatar University:

The state’s first priority was to ensure the survival of the regime. There are reasons why the government, elite, and to some extent the people, end up uniting around the regime.

Kozhanov needs to take that one step further: the state and the regime are those persons, not an impersonal, generalized institution to which we too often refer, in misleading shorthand, as “government” or “state” or “regime.” Those institutions don’t exist without the men and women who occupy the various positions in them.

The leadership…shares an ability to endure casualties and economic hardship, pain that is often borne by their populations. And when their people do rise up in protest, the regime’s foot soldiers have proven ready to use lethal violence to put down dissent.
“There is a much higher tolerance for pain among authoritarian regimes,” said Edward Howell, an international-relations lecturer at the University of Oxford. “That’s because we see very little evidence of them prioritizing the needs of their people.”

None of that should be a surprise. That leadership doesn’t care about the casualties of the people over whom they reign; those unfortunates are merely tools for maintaining/enhancing their own wealth, ego, power. Even a despotic regime’s “tolerance for pain” is a misnomer. They don’t feel the pain their subjects are experiencing, they feel only the pain they personally feel. Nor do they prioritize the needs of their subjects; their subjects are only tools.

In the end, there are only two ways to collapse a “state.” In many cases, those state men and women are pecuniary and can be bought off—Idi Amin, for example—especially if cut off from the money and material wealth sources of their physical comfort. A state comprised of ideologues, though, won’t collapse until the ideologues do: they’re cut off from life itself—they’re killed.