Tag Archives: morality

I Have a Suggestion

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Alexander Ward, Alex Leary, and Matthew Luxmoore are rightly skeptical about any agreements Russian President Vladimir Putin might make vis-à-vis Ukraine that would be short of his outright conquering Ukraine or include NATO troops on Ukrainian soil as guarantor of an agreement, even were those troops nationally provided rather than as a NATO contingent.

One of the lesser questions requiring an answer is the location of any meeting among Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin, the principals, and President Donald Trump (R), currently the primary broker of any deal. On this, I have a suggestion, stipulating that the negotiations would proceed in two phases.

The first phase negotiations should be held in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (not the village Bucha, which is a bit south of the city.) The second phase should take place in the Ukrainian city of Makariv, about 20 miles west of Bucha.

These locations, even three years after the fact, would let both Putin and Trump see the results of the desolation and butchery Putin’s barbarian hordes inflicted on Ukrainian civilians in those early days of the barbarian invasion.

Homicide Rates

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These data are from USAFacts, and they’re at the county level, since that’s the maximum data fineness that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USAFacts‘ source, publishes.

The top 10 homicide rates—homicides per 100,000 population—were in these counties as of 2023 (the latest data available from CDC):

The closest major city is for context; the rates are for the indicated county.

Every single one of these counties is run by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

The 10 counties with the largest increase in homicide rates, 2023 over 2018, are these:

Again, the closest major city is for context; the rates are for the indicated county. All of these counties are Party run, also. Given the overlap between high rates and rising rates, it shouldn’t be surprising that at least most of these are Party run.

One item of note here, while acknowledging that these data are a year and a half-ish old, is DC. That county had the third highest homicide rate and the ninth highest rate of increase in its homicide rate. It seems true that DC’s homicide rate is lower today than in 2023, but it’s still among the highest in the nation.

No less a light than PBS cited a Rochester Institute of Technology report that indicated that DC’s homicide rate per 100,000 had fallen in 2024 to 27.3. What those “fact checkers” chose to ignore was that even in the RIT report, DC’s rate was the fourth highest of the 24 cities that RIT looked at, and it’s still higher than that 2018 starting figure by 33%. That last, though, is my calculation from comparing RIT‘s 2024 value with the starting value in the second figure above. The RIT report did not look at rates of increase of homicide rates.

Yet this is the poor performance of DC’s governance that Party is so desperate to defend as they zealously oppose President Donald Trump’s (R) concerted effort to clean the place up.

Not Entirely Sufficient

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Harvard University and the Federal government apparently are nearing a deal that would pressure Harvard to abide by federal regulations around merit-based hiring and admissions as well as protecting students’ civil rights in return for a $500 million payment to “workforce and vocational programs.”

Pressure only, though, no overt, absolute requirement.

The administration wouldn’t appoint a monitor to oversee Harvard’s compliance with the deal. The university would pledge to continue to abide….

That’s a serious weakness in the supposed deal. Harvard’s management team already isn’t abiding by those regulations, and it already isn’t protecting its students’ civil rights—much less better reducing the school’s antisemitic bigotry and its pro-terrorist stance. Since it’s not doing, it can’t be continuing.

An addition to this deal is needed: Harvard should be required to put up a cash bond, say $500 million, for 10 years against its performance of its pledge. At the end of those 10 years, should the university actually have abided, the principal would be returned, and the accrued earnings on the principal paid to those workforce and vocational programs.

Blinken Misunderstands

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Ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants a Palestinian state to be recognized, but his way and on his schedule, not those of France, UK, and Canada. I won’t go into those latter three’s offers, which individually and together amount to nothing more than Israel’s abject surrender.

Blinken, on the other hand, has centered his view on the idea that an Israeli occupation of Gaza

would perpetuate the misery of innocent Palestinians and be a recipe for an enduring insurgency that bleeds Israel militarily and morally.

Blinken’s position here, though, proceeds from a false premise, and given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s publicly stated position on the matter, I have a hard time believing Blinken is unaware of the falsity of his premise. It’s either that, or he thinks Netanyahu is lying.

The fact of the matter is that Netanyahu does not want to occupy Gaza. He has said—and he’s right about this—that it’s necessary for Israel to control by its physical presence all of Gaza in order to finish destroying Hamas and driving the remnants out of the strip. Following that, Israel would withdraw completely in favor of Arab governance of Gaza via a body assembled and operated by a collection of Arab states. That’s an Israeli occupation in name only, with a clearly stated and publicly measurable milestone for Israel leaving. That’s not occupation in the sense that Russia wants for Ukraine or that the People’s Republic of China wants for the Republic of China.

An extension of that offer from Netanyahu is this: he’s saying it’s time for the Arab nations of the Middle East to put up or shut up. Those nations’ leaderships must accept and honor their own responsibilities and do the things, with their own resources, necessary to govern Gaza and restore the residents to safety, prosperity, and the liberty of determining their futures themselves. With this, there would be no need for a “Palestinian state,” which is an idea that failed with the collapse of the Oslo Accords decades ago and has continued to fail ever since.

I claim that a good start to this process would be for the Arab members of the Abraham Accords to put up.

School Choice and a Teachers Union

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In Wyoming, the State’s legislature passed and the governor signed legislation to create school choice for the State’s parents and children.

Wyoming lawmakers created the state’s first K-12 education savings account (ESA) program in 2024, effective in the coming school year. This spring they expanded eligibility to families of any income. The $7,000 accounts can be used for private-school tuition, tutors, homeschooling, or other education expenses. Nearly 4,000 students applied for them this fall.

In the first year, those 4,000 students amount to about 3.5% of the State’s K-12 population (some arithmetic involved), a pretty rapid start to the take-up. The main teachers union in the State, the Wyoming Education Association, is busily objecting and hailing the State into court to get that legislation overturned. The union is claiming that the State’s constitution requires the Legislature to maintain a “complete and uniform” public school system, the State cannot fund “private education that is not uniform.”

This is a distortion of the facts, including of what the State’s constitution says. This is that constitution’s Art 7, Sect 1, in its entirety:

Legislature to provide for public schools. The legislature shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction, embracing free elementary schools of every needed kind and grade, a university with such technical and professional departments as the public good may require and the means of the state allow, and such other institutions as may be necessary.

That’s the short and sweet of it. There’s nothing in there that would preclude the State from establishing, supporting, or merely funding alternative means of education. Indeed, that last clause, and such other institutions as may be necessary, being separate from the clause mandating a system of public instruction, explicitly authorizes alternative means of education structured entirely differently from, or the same as, the public system.

This is just another example of a teachers union trying to deny parents their right to see to their children’s education in their own way. It’s the union way or nothing. That’s just union abuse of education and of the students in it out of its own greed: those alternative means would not be controlled by the union.

The Wyoming constitution can be read here.