“Troubled by the Strikes”

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Recall the duration of school closures due, allegedly, to the Wuhan Virus situation in our nation. Not everyone is on board with the teachers unions’ attitude toward reopening our schools and getting our children back to in-person learning—where they actually could learn and where they, and school staff, would be far safer than either are cooped up at home.

Tommy Schultz, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the American Federation for Children:

For the past year, there has essentially been a national teachers union strike that has left tens of millions of families without access to an adequate education[.]

And

This will haunt our country for decades to come, and the teachers unions’ blatant refusal to [follow] science in the name of political extortion is outright shameful[.]

You bet. And the unions’ strike demands? A guarantee of perfect safety. Oh, and more money. Billions of dollars more money.

It’s not just the unions, though. Here’s a teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs.

Most good teachers are deeply troubled by the strikes. We never want to deny the children even one day of learning, and we understand that we are servant leaders to those children.

That is, to use the technical term, a crock; it’s just porch dog yapping. If “good teachers” actually were troubled by the strikes, they’d tell their union bosses to take a hike, and they would go back to the classroom.

Friedrichs also used to be a union official, and she was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v CTA, through which she and some of her colleagues tried to get the right for teachers, et al., to decide for themselves whether or not to fund unions. That makes her empty rhetoric all the more useless.

Moreover, although Friedrichs’ suit failed at the Supreme Court when the short-handed Court voted 4-4, nothing in that failure forced union members to stay union members. They were, they are, they always have been free to stop being card carriers, to leave the union, and thereby to regain their right to decide.

There’s also the meme that teachers are afraid to cross their unions. They may be, but they’re only afraid of their own mental creation of union responses—which in the end, are only words. And so we have more crockery.

Still, if teachers really are so timid, it’s time for adults to step up: school boards and local and State governing jurisdictions need to move to decertify the unions, fire the teachers who won’t go back to work, and redirect the funds originally allocated to closed schools to private, parochial, voucher, and charter schools that are open. After all, if a school isn’t operating, it doesn’t need any money.

‘Course, that takes the true adults—We the People, particularly us parents—to do our jobs and fire reluctant board members and politicians and elect those who will take prompt, decisive action.

A Couple of Test Outcomes

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…illustrate the problem.

Since schools across the US first closed last spring, sending about 50 million children to learn remotely, one looming question for educators, parents and children has been: how much has learning suffered?
Data from two national testing programs, Renaissance Learning Inc and NWEA, which are used widely by US public schools to assess students’ progress, show widespread performance declines at the start of this academic year, particularly in math.

These are the outcomes. The teachers unions don’t care, though. They don’t want their teachers to return to the classroom unless and until union leadership can be guaranteed absolute freedom from the risk of Wuhan Virus infection. Which is, of course, a deliberately impossible criterion.

Common Ground on Abortions

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That’s the claimed hope of the Progressive-Democrat HHS Secretary nominee Xavier Becerra—that he can find “common ground” on his late-term abortion goals.

Indeed, there’s this bit of disingenuousity from Becerra:

I understand that we may not always agree on where to go, but I think we can find some common ground on these issues because everyone wants to make sure that if you have an opportunity, you’re gonna have a healthy life[.]

Except for the aborted baby. That life gets no opportunity for health; that life is simply…terminated.

There is no common ground on abortion, late-term or otherwise: either there’s baby killing going on, or there’s not.

The only common ground at all related to abortion is the ground in which all those babies are buried.

Another Question

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…for President Joe Biden. The President has been decidedly slow to comment on the People’s Republic of China government’s treatment of the country’s Uighur population.

Biden, who vowed to be tough on China while on the campaign trail, has been careful not to classify the human rights abuses against the Uighurs since entering office. The Trump administration declared the actions by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as genocide one day before vacating the White House.
The president didn’t mention China’s human rights abuses during a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Tuesday. He said that the US and Canada are coordinating “approaches to better compete with China and to counter threats to our interests and values.”

So, Joe—can I call ya Joe?—is the PRC government committing genocide against the Uighurs? Is the PRC government at all mistreating the Uighurs?

We’ll wait for your answer, Joe.

But the Uighurs can’t.

Stop Worrying about Drilling Bans on Federal Land

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The United States actually had the right idea—several of them, in fact—years ago. Today, the Federal government “owns” around 640 million acres of land—28% of the land area of our nation. That’s way too much, and it’s the largest source of leverage the Feds have over oil and natural gas production by our private economy.

There are a couple of things Congress can do to reduce to irrelevance Executive Branch volatility regarding Executive Orders and access to Federal land for mineral extraction; both of them involve reduction of American land that the Federal government presumes to own.

One is to transfer the vast majority of those acres back to the States from which the acres were seized. Examples of this excessive “ownership” include

State Federal Land Acreage Total State Acreage Per Centage of Federal Land
Nevada 59,681,502 70,264,320 84.90%
Utah 34,202,920 52,696,960 64.90%
Idaho 32,621,631 52,933,120 61.60%
Alaska 223,803,098 365,481,600 61.20%
Oregon 32,614,185 61,598,720 52.90%
Wyoming 30,013,219 62,343,040 48.10%
California 45,864,800 100,206,720 45.80%
Arizona 28,064,307 72,688,000 38.60%
Colorado 23,870,652 66,485,760 35.90%
New Mexico 26,981,490 77,766,400 34.70%

Notice that: the Feds “own” over 50% of each of the top five States, and we have get below the top 10 before the Feds possess less than a third of a State.

The Federal government legitimately controls land important for protecting monumental land like the core of Yosemite, land holding military facilities, and the like. The Feds don’t need all those hundreds of millions of acres of land for that, though. Instead, the bulk of the currently possessed land should be restored to the States within whose boundaries the land sits. The States in our federal republic should be the ones managing their domestic affairs of mineral access.

Then there are moves for transfers to individual ownership—moves of those several years ago.

The Bounty-Land Acts of 1776 awarded tracts of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War (assuming, of course, that we won the war, which we did).

The Public Land Act of 1796 authorized the sale of Federal land in 640-acre blocks for $2/acre, or roughly $1,600/acre today (more or less, given the heroic assumptions regarding inflation over so long an interval).

The Preemption Act of 1841 gave squatters living on Federal land first call to buy up to 160 acres at $1.25/acre, or roughly $1,000/acre.

The Homestead Act of 1862 granted outright 160 acres to squatters who had lived on the land for at least five years and improved it (along with a couple of other requirements that amounted to filing intent, proof of improvement, and filing for ownership).

These and similar Acts, or some combination of them, could be modernized and used to transfer vast tracts of Federal lands to private ownership. Once there, the owners could sell/lease their mineral extraction rights to those evil drillers and earn income while the oil and gas companies could extract and continue to provide cheap energy to our nation and export cheap energy to the world.

‘Course all of that, or any of it, will be more likely with a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican President, or veto-proof Republican majorities in each of the House and Senate.