Right Idea, Bad Plan

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Progressive-Democrat New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani wants to send $6 billion of city taxpayer money to a fancy, glittering new infrastructure of child care centers that he wants to build so mothers of small children—6 weeks old to 5 years old—can get back to work. (As if mothering children isn’t work in its own right, but that’s beyond the scope of this article). Erica Komisar, a psychoanalyst, wants that money sent, instead, directly to the parents for their use in raising their children their way.

That’s the right idea, but it’s a decidedly suboptimal plan.

Instead, reduce the city’s taxpayer bill by those $6 billion. Let all of the city’s taxpayers hang onto their money, instead of giving it up to the city’s government for spending on the favorite programs of whomever happens to be sitting in Gracie Mansion. Those parents of toddlers will benefit at least as much, from the increased city economic activity that tax reduction would generate, activity that would include increasing job availability; increasing wages; increasing availability of child care and babysitters at prices those parents actually could afford; increasing availability of employer-provided child care, not from government mandate but from it being a good business practice.

That economic flow-through won’t quickly develop; there’s a lot of economic destruction from prior city administrations’ Big Government impositions that needs to be corrected. That, though, simply puts a premium on getting a $6 billion reduction in city taxes enacted.

Convenient Misunderstanding

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The Trump administration is pressing its campaign in international waters against those entities smuggling deadly drugs into the United States. The Left and too many politicians, the latter from both parties, claim worry about the rights of these smugglers. Others criticize the tactics being used against them.

Critics say the alleged criminals aren’t in an armed conflict with the US, making strikes on them illegal and a possible war crime.

This is a denial flowing from a convenient misunderstanding of the facts of the matter. Last February, the State Department made no bones about who and what these…smugglers…are.

Today, the Department of State announces the designation of Tren de Aragua (TdA), Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Cártel del Noreste (CDN), La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM), Cártel de Golfo (CDG), and Cárteles Unidos (CU) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs).

Of course these smugglers, these terrorists, are in armed conflict with the United States; that’s what terrorists do vis-à-vis the nations they target. Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, today’s marijuana carefully bred to drastically increase its potency—all of these are smuggled in with two purposes: make money for the terrorists and hook our population on them to the detriment of our people’s ability to function.

Those are chicken feed attempts, though, and by themselves devastate thousands of lives but present no serious threat to our population as a whole or to our national security. However, that’s not all the terrorists are smuggling in. The terrorists are busily smuggling fentanyl into our nation in truly alarming, security-threatening amounts. In 2024 alone, government agents seized 23,256 kilograms of fentanyl. With a single kilogram being enough to kill 500,000 Americans, that would have been enough to kill more than 11.6 billion Americans—34 times our population.

Wars aren’t fought exclusively with guns and bombs. They’re also fought cybernetically…and with drugs designed to poison whole populations. Fentanyl smuggling, much more than the petty smuggling of those other drugs, is a direct attack on our nation, and these smugglers are soldiers in that war. Keep in mind, too, that the terrorist organizations managing this war assemble the fentanyl that their soldiers smuggle from constituent precursors they import from one of our enemy nations: the People’s Republic of China. The PRC is actively aiding and abetting this attack.

It is no war crime for us to defend ourselves in this war, and killing the enemy soldiers is entirely justified, right along with destroying the weapons themselves. It’s also safer for us to do this on the high seas than waiting for the weapons to enter our nation. The seizures outlined above are only a fraction, if apparently a major fraction given the fentanyl-related deaths actually occurring, of the weapons smuggled in. Like any other weapon of mass destruction, though, it would only take a very few successful mass smugglings to cause vast, national-security threatening damage.

An Empty Promise?

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Supposedly, the US has offered a security guarantee to Ukraine in the form of support[ing] European security guarantees and seek[ing] Senate backing for Washington’s promised role as a means of breaking the current peace talks impasse.

This supposed guarantee

would include monitoring, verification, and deconfliction, the officials said, and would lay out the role the US would play if Russia breached a peace deal and came back to attack Ukraine. They would also include the provision of weapons to deter a Russian force.

Yeah, sure. “Monitoring:” we see you, Russia, resuming your invasion, we’re watching the hell out of you. “Verification:” Yup, Russia really is resuming its invasion. “Deconfliction:” What does this mean? European forces entering Ukraine to fight the barbarian alongside Ukrainian forces? Traffic control to deconflict traffic jams on Ukrainian roads for Ukrainian forces and civilians moving in the other direction? Something else?

“Provision of weapons for deterrence:” This is risible. Europe already is refusing to provide the weapons the UA needs, in the numbers it needs them, or on the schedule it says it needs them. Excuses range from fear of provoking the barbarian to insisting the UA doesn’t really need them like that to claims they don’t have the weapons to provide the UA, having drawn down their armories already with transfers. That last, given Europe’s disdain for any thing military, at least has a measure of plausibility.

The supposed guarantee also purports to include

legally-binding commitments to come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a Russian attack.

What is the timeline for implementation of a related peace agreement? Would the agreement go into effect before or after “Senate support” had been secured? If after, what support for Ukraine’s continued fight for its survival would be in the offing pending that Senate agreement? If before, how would Ukraine recover or be aided in recovering, from the barbarian’s virtually guaranteed violation of the terms? What would be the Or Else should the barbarian violate the agreement—more monitoring, verification, and…”deconfliction?” All the nations’ governments—including, shamefully, our own—have already been slinking away, their tails covering their crown jewels, from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nattering on about nuclear weapons.

However sincerely offered, this seems like an empty promise. There’s no guarantee that the Senate, with its two-thirds majority treaty ratification requirement, would support such a thing. A simple Senate majority-voted resolution of support would be meaningless, legally, politically, and morally. Nor is there any guarantee that an alternate path to securing support—bills passed in both the House and Senate, which would require only majority votes (after a 60-vote cloture success in the Senate)—would succeed.

There’s this bit, too, that overhangs any security “guarantee” that might be offered Ukraine. Three of the participants in the Budapest Memorandum—the US, the UK, and France via its separate individual assurance—already have betrayed Ukraine by dishonoring the security and territorial integrity guarantees contained in that document. The Memorandum also was a legally binding commitment.

A Lesson for Republicans

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This one in the final outcome of Chile’s Presidential election, concluded last Sunday.

[Left-wing candidate Jeanette] Jara conceded with over 80% of the ballots counted. [Conservative candidate Antonio] Kast won with 58% of the votes in one of the most lopsided presidential victories since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.

A marked turnaround in the runoff from the original, in which Jara had won a solid plurality, 27%, with Kast having gotten 24%.

There’s a hint in all of that: Jara was the only one, or maybe of two, Leftist candidates in the pre-runoff electoin; there were more than a half-dozen right and right-wing candidates who, in the aggregate, diluted those final 58-ish% across the lot of them, denying each of them an outright victory in that stage. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that a lesser candidate than Kast, with that dilution, could have been the one making the runoff, potentially handing the final election to Jara.

Republicans could benefit from that hint by coalescing early in their primaries. One or two rounds should be sufficient for all but the most desperately egoistic candidate(s) to identify the only or the couple of candidates who would be viable in the final election. Those egoists hanging on purely out of pridefulness should be resoundingly outvoted to the point of political destruction.

Gun Control by the Weak

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Recall the mass shooting/killing just a few days ago on a Sydney beach. No one had firearms on that beach but the shooters, by design of the Australian laws. In the aftermath, we get this from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

Albanese called for tougher gun laws, saying that leaders would discuss limits on the number of guns that can be licensed and a review of licenses over time.
“People can be radicalized over a period of time. Licenses should not be in perpetuity,” he said in a press conference Monday.

Recall, also, the unarmed man—all one of him—on that beach who charged one of the shooters and took him down and disarmed him. And was not allowed to shoot him, under Australian law, and so the shooter got away. Fortunately, the police, arriving later (no knock on them, but they can only react when called, so their arrival will always be minutes after shooting has been in progress) got that one.

If armed citizens had been present, and it would not have taken many at all, the one shooter could have been stopped much sooner with far fewer dead and wounded, and the other shooter perhaps also by the time the police arrived.

But Albenese’s solution in the face of such mass shootings is to further disarm Australians, making them even more defenseless, even more helpless, in the face of such attacks.

Via my wife, but entirely a propos here: The cowards never started, the weak died along the way, that leaves us.