Watching and Learning

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The Houthis, the gang of terrorists ruling over parts of Yemen, fired anti-ship missiles at USN combat ships in the Red Sea.

The Navy engaged three ballistic missiles provided to Yemen’s Houthis by Iran. It was the first time the Navy shot down an incoming anti-ship ballistic missile in combat, officials say.
Naval assets, including the USS Laboon and F/A-18 Super Hornets from the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, shot down 12 one-way attack drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles, and two land attack missiles fired by the Houthis over a 12-hour period, US Central Command said.

What troubles me about this, aside from Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s cowardice in not responding to these attacks in any serious manner, is this. There are three combat ships of the People’s Republic of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy in the immediate area.

Those three PLAN ships aren’t there to stop pirates or to protect commercial shipping from terrorist activity. They’re there to watch the US Navy engage anti-ship missiles and rockets. And to learn. This as the PRC prepares its invasion of the Republic of China and its…neutralization…of the USN in support of that invasion.

The PLAN—and the Russian navy, et al.—are going to watch what we do and where we do it; that’s unavoidable. Done right, though, the watching could be a deterrent as they see how capable we are and how we’re willing to use that capability. But done right, particularly in the present case, necessarily includes using our capability as a coup de main to eliminate Houthi ports and launch sites and the Iranian ports in a matter of some hours or a day or two, to eliminate the threat altogether.

There’s Educational Opportunity…

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…and there’s educational obstruction. This is the contest between charter schools (and, larger, school choice) and union public schools.

Charter enrollment is up 9% since 2019, while the number of students in district schools is down 3.5%, according to a new study from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Families have discovered choice,” the report says, “and they like it.”

And

The trend holds for states of all sizes and political persuasions. From 2019-2023, charter enrollment grew in 40 of the 42 states analyzed, while traditional schools lost students in 40 states.

Naturally, the unions that run the public schools don’t like it: reduced public school enrollment reduces the power of teachers unions, and that reduces the power of the unions’ managers, and those folks can’t stand that.

Which is why teachers union management teams are so strident in their opposition to State funding for charter schools, and for voucher schools, or even—as in New York City—to allowing unused public school buildings for charter schools. Better to leave those facilities empty than to use them for the betterment of children.

A Critical Item

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on the right track. In his Christmas Wall Street Journal op-ed, he laid out Israel’s three criteria for achieving real peace in the Gaza Strip:

Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized. These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.

Netanyahu is well down the right track, but I disagree with him to a slight extent.

The destruction of Hamas (and of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, I add) is the Critical Item in this trio, and so it is the sole prerequisite to peace in and with the Gaza Strip. Without this, the other two, necessary as they also are, become irrelevant.

Gaza will never be demilitarized so long as the terrorist organizations exist.

It is possible to deradicalize Palestinian society, but that at best will be a multi-generational task—and the Palestinians themselves must be willing, beginning with their letting go of their deeply emotional hatred of all things Jewish.

A Proposal for Harvard University

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Given the blatant antisemitic bigotry of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, as well as her dishonesty, demonstrated by her plagiarism—She plagiarized her acknowledgments—and the antisemitism demonstrated by the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, and its open condonement of Gay’s bigotry and dishonesty, when that body unanimously supported retaining her as President, it’s clear that drastic changes to Harvard University’s governance is badly needed.

A Harvard professor has suggested a pathway to that.

One faculty member, citing a carve-out in the Massachusetts Constitution that reserves authority over Harvard to the state legislature, has urged Massachusetts lawmakers to install a government official on the board to provide more transparency and public accountability.

Here is the relevant section of that constitution, from Chapter V, Section I, Article III:

…it is declared, that the governor, lieutenant governor, council and senate of this commonwealth, are and shall be deemed, their successors, who with the president of Harvard College, for the time being, together with the ministers of the congregational churches in the towns of Cambridge, Watertown, Charlestown, Boston, Roxbury, and Dorchester, mentioned in the said act, shall be, and hereby are, vested with all the powers and authority belonging, or in any way appertaining to the overseers of Harvard College; provided, that] nothing herein shall be construed to prevent the legislature of this commonwealth from making such alterations in the government of the said university, as shall be conducive to its advantage and the interest of the republic of letters….

The professor is on the right track, but one government rep on a board of 13 or 14 won’t accomplish anything. The State needs to revamp the Corporation board altogether—maybe put on the board reps from the ministers of the congregational churches in the towns of Cambridge, Watertown, Charlestown, Boston, Roxbury, and Dorchester in sufficient number that their aggregation outnumbers the remaining members, if they’re not, instead, to replace the incumbents. Additionally—these are Critical Items—the State needs to remove the President’s sole authority over the board’s agenda and to eliminate the board’s authority to select their own replacements.

 

Massachusetts’ constitution can be read in its entirety here.

A Biden Administration Oxymoron

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OK, another Biden administration oxymoron. This one is the latest to deprecate our national security and to not favorably impress our friends and allies. William Luti (Captain, USN Ret, and Hudson Institute Adjunct Fellow), got right to it in the lede of his Christmas Wall Street Journal op-ed, quoting, as he did there, Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh:

We’re not in an armed conflict with the Houthis…part of why we are in the region is to bolster our deterrence.

Because doing nothing in response to several multiples of overt attacks on US facilities, both military and civilian, deters the hell out of Iran and its terrorist satraps. It sure does: it deters the hell out of Iranian and terrorist restraint, and it declares open season on American facilities and on international shipping in international waters.

Contrary to the fetid imaginings of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his syndicate cronies SecDef Lloyd Austin and SecState Antony Blinken, actual deterrence includes, as Critical Items, actually shooting and killing those who attack us and our friends and allies.

Proper deterrence in the present case, real deterrence, would begin (not end) with destroying the two ports the Houthi terrorists have on the Red Sea and destroying the terrorists’ launch facilities inland. Proper deterrence would continue with the destruction of Iran’s ports on the Arabian Gulf, Hormuz Strait, and Gulf of Oman, which would limit the terrorist state’s ability to resupply its satrap in Yemen.

Proper deterrence would extend to destroying the attackers’ facilities in Syria and Iraq, limiting Iran’s satraps there. It would extend further to destroying Iran’s Ho Chi Minh Trail analog that runs from northwestern Iran through northern Iraq into Syria.

Deterrence does not consist of shooting down drones and rockets as the sum total. That just tells the terrorists that they’re down at the neighborhood gun range, practicing their shooting.

Luti described President Ronald Reagan’s response to an earlier Iranian attack, concluding his description with this:

As other Enterprise air-wing aircraft began their bombing runs, Reagan called off the attack after Joint Chiefs Chairman William Crowe said, “We’ve shed enough blood for one day.”

That was 35 years ago. Our enemies have gotten even worse. We won’t have done enough enemy blood shedding until those terrorist facilities are erased and Iran’s ability to resupply its satraps eliminated.

It’s time the Biden syndicate recognized the nature and the depth and breadth of the war that our enemies are inflicting on us and responded accordingly.