It’s No Choice

President Donald Trump (R) has put on the table a piece agreement between Ukraine and Russia that, if it’s being accurately described, amounts to abject surrender by Ukraine to the barbarian. The arrangement calls for Ukraine to cede to the barbarian occupied Crimea and all of the Donbas, including both the currently occupied and the unconquered parts. Ukraine also would be forced to at least partially disarm and cap its standing army at two-thirds of its current complement, and Ukraine would be forever barred from entering into any sort of defensive alliance.

Even the US would lose in this. Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed a deal wherein the US would develop Ukraine’s mineral deposits, including significant rare earths, in return for which the US would get a significant fraction of the outputs. Under the arrangement on offer now, we would lose access to those minerals and rare earths since the vast bulk of them are in the Donbas.

Zelenskyy addressed his people when presented with the peace “deal,” whatever it is in fact, and said that his nation, his people must choose between “dignity, or the risk of losing a key partner.”

If this “peace” thing is being described accurately in the press, Ukraine already has lost a key partner.

What He Said

Reposted from PowerLine:

Dear Anonymous Professor:
You are profoundly detached from the real issues affecting us, our families, our country, and the world today.
We are the most depressed, anxious, suicidal, obese, addicted, and indebted generation in American history, and the first to be worse off than our parents. We are forced to take pointless courses, buy outrageously expensive textbooks for information freely available online, and serve as a captive audience in a system where everyone—from publishers, administrators, and banks to professors like you—profits while we drown in debt.
The numbers don’t lie: almost 40% of students drop out, burdened by loans but no degree. Half of those who graduate end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place. A bachelor’s degree has become a $100,000 high school diploma.
What caused this collapse, you ask?
You and your ideologies did. You are no longer educating us to build, compete, and lead. You are indoctrinating us to deconstruct, resent, and surrender.
In economics, you promote Marx and Keynesian financialization, offshoring, and money printing—policies that make homes unaffordable and force us to work two jobs just to pay bills. You omit Austrian School economists like Mises and Hayek, who defended the free markets that built the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy today. You smear capitalism as “oppressive” while pushing the actually oppressive redistribution schemes that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.
In psychology, you idolize Alfred Kinsey as the father of the sexual revolution and John Money as the one who coined the word “gender” as separate from sex. Yet you never tell us that Kinsey gathered data from pedophiles who abused babies, and that Money’s theory was founded on his experiments with the Reimer twins, both of whom committed suicide from the trauma.
In literature, you replace Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dante with a racist DEI quota system, choosing books based on race and victimhood instead of merit. The more “marginalized” the author, the less their work is critiqued and the more you celebrate it.
In sociology, you force-feed us feminism, an ideology that teaches women to resent men, motherhood, and family. You glorify Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan but hide the inconvenient truth: that single, childless women are the unhappiest demographic, while married women in Christian households report the highest life and sexual satisfaction.
In history, you teach that slavery was America’s unique sin, ignoring that it was universal until White Christian nations abolished it first. You never mention the 600,000 Americans who died ending it, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron that liberated 150,000 slaves, or that slavery still thrives in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
In philosophy, you prioritize Marx, Freud, and Foucault—the philosophers of disorder—over Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke, who built the foundations of virtue, natural law, and liberty. You conveniently leave out that the philosophical purpose of freedom is to do what is good, not to do whatever we want.
In political science, you present the genocidal failures of Marxism, socialism, and communism as “viable alternatives” for academic debate, while downplaying the brilliant, liberty-ensuring architecture of our Constitution. You dismiss foundational mechanisms like the separation of powers and the Electoral College as archaic flaws, and ignore the wisdom of the Federalist Papers, because you are racist toward the White Christian males who authored them.
In the sciences, you deny the biological reality of sex, even though every single one of the 60 trillion cells in the human body is either male or female, and no amount of hormones can change that. Instead of helping people with body image and mental health issues, you promote their permanent and irreversible mutilation to virtue signal.
And we could go on. But the bitter irony is that you stand on the shoulders of the giants who built this country, this state, and this university, using your cushy job to spit on their legacy and the values that have given you everything you enjoy today. You take parents’ life savings and teach their kids to hate them, their faith, and their heritage, causing fights over Thanksgiving dinner.
You aren’t teaching us how to think; you’re teaching us what to think. You turned a marketplace of ideas, where each side is supposed to be heard equally, into an indoctrination camp where only the approved party line is parroted. You created the first generations in world history without love for their God, their family, or their country—and then wonder why they’re miserable.
Meanwhile, China, Russia, and our competitors teach their engineers calculus and physics, not gender studies and wokeness. They laugh at us as they dominate in AI, energy, and manufacturing.
So why are you scared when taxpayers demand a return to excellence? Why fear being recorded? What are you teaching that can’t stand scrutiny? Lobotomies and eugenics were once taught, too. The gender unicorn is just the current pseudoscience.
You’re not scared of politicians. You’re scared of losing your six-figure, taxpayer-funded salary because your indoctrination model is failing. What you’re seeing around you is a call on Texas A&M, the nation’s universities, and the West to become once more the leader of the educational world, as it is the leader of the free world. We need engineers, not ideologues: builders, not critics.
We need more Charlie Kirks, not more Ibram X. Kendis. We are your customers, your bosses, and your product is broken. Don’t gaslight us for demanding a better one.
Justino Russell
Texas A&M Student
P.S. I want to defend the truth, so I’ll sign my name. If you were teaching the truth, why didn’t you sign with yours?

What the student said, indeed. To which I add: is that cowardly anonymous “professor” even a professor, or is he just some random pogue BSing away?

Death for Seditionists?

Recall the six Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who called on senior military and intelligence officials to disobey “illegal” orders, all the while refusing to identify either the illegal order(s) in question or the statute(s) or constitutional clause(s) they allegedly violated.

President Donald Trump (R) has responded in his inimitable fashion:

“Their words cannot be allowed to stand,” Trump said. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.”

And later,

SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!

Now we have two more Progressive-Democratic Party politicians spouting yet more Leftist conspiracy theory foolishness.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

When Donald Trump uses the language of execution and treason, some of his supporters may very well listen[.]

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY):

…disgusting and dangerous death threats against Members of Congress….

Hmm….

Trump has, indeed, suggested, in 2016 campaign “lock her up” rhetoric style that the Six should be locked up for their seditious behavior. But death threats? No. He’s only saying sedition warrants execution, not anyone in particular. Not even in context.

Thus: the only way he could be calling for the execution of the six is if they actually are convicted of seditious behavior. From that, the only logical conclusion of Schumer’s and Jeffries’ claims is that they’re confessing the Six’ guilt of sedition.

“The trade in babies and women’s bodies is an affront to freedom.”

That Wall Street Journal subheadline is about surrogate motherhood and whether it ought be allowed to exist. Lois McLatchie Miller’s lede and next two paragraphs consist of this:

A New York ballroom filled with men discussing how to procure women’s bodies to produce babies, then discharge the mother from her role.
It sounds dystopian, but the September gathering was the latest conference of Men Having Babies, a group that helps gay couples—and single men, and even groups of three that call themselves “throuples”—form families through surrogacy. Online, they post photos of smiling male couples holding infants still slick from their mothers’ birth canals, celebrating a triumph of “modern family building.”
Those newborns know nothing of politics or reproductive technology. They know only the voice and scent of the woman who carried them for nine months—and whom they will never know again.

That truly is terrible, but it’s far from the norm. Surrogacy is broadly employed to provide healthy babies to families unable to have any of their own.

Alternatively, adopt a baby? Certainly. But the adoption, while also broadly beneficial to both the baby and the new parents, doesn’t get the parents a baby of their own blood, their own genetics. Surrogacy opens a path to that, wherein the father’s sperm is combined with the mother’s egg and the result implanted in the surrogate mother. Or a mother’s egg is combined with a sperm bank donor’s sperm and the result either implanted in the mother, or for her health reasons, implanted in a surrogate mother. Or the same with a donor’s egg and the father’s sperm.

The surrogate mother, then, in those cases carries the baby to term and then turns it over to the baby’s parents. That can be wrenching for the surrogate mother, but it isn’t always, and it does allow the surrogate mother to participate in the formation of a loving family. Even in the wrenching, the surrogacy contract takes care of the surrogate mother’s post-delivery needs.

Miller is a Senior Communications Officer at Alliance Defending Freedom International, so she should know better.

What’s necessary is not banning surrogate motherhood, nor even heavy regulation of it. What’s necessary are strong regulation, with heavy sanctions for misbehaviors and civil sanctions for egregious mistakes, of the outcomes. Along with that is the necessity of producing quality information that will allow childless families and prospective surrogate mothers to identify reliable and effective facilities—and each other—so as to allow both sides of the surrogacy to have satisfactory, rewarding outcomes.

Banning surrogacy altogether is what would be truly an affront to freedom. It would be an affront—a denial—of the freedom of families and individuals to decide for themselves how they will approach a family problem.

A Prediction

With the government newly fully operational again (the pundits’ hysteria notwithstanding, it never did fully shut down), the shutdown-delayed jobs report is out.

US job growth defied expectations in September, according to a Labor Department report issued nearly seven weeks late due to the government shutdown.

The headline was more specific.

Hiring Defied Expectations in September, With 119,000 New Jobs

This strikes me as a spike, not a resumption of a trend.

I don’t ordinarily make predictions on labor, but here’s one I make this time: the October jobs report, covering the bulk of the period of the “shutdown,” will reflect a spike down in new jobs, possibly even a negative number, paralleling August’s revised jobs report.

The October report will show me to be correct, or it will demonstrate why I don’t often make this kind of prediction.