Tag Archives: morality

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.

Sophie’s Choice, Is It?

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That’s the choice with which Ukraine is faced, at least according to Jillian Kay Melchior in her Wall Street Journal editorial. She summarized her view of the matter near the end of her piece.

That’s the temptation Ukraine faces as it considers sacrificing some territories ostensibly to save others. Many Ukrainians have loved ones in occupied regions, notes Yulia Marushevska, a Defense Ministry official: “Giving it up is not giving it up to keep it quiet there. It’s giving them up for destruction. It’s giving up your friend or brother.”

But that’s not the choice Ukraine presently faces. As the Russian state-owned and run outlet, RIA Novosti, put it in a headline as recently as 30 July,

There is no other option: no one should remain alive in Ukraine[.]

(It would help if Melchior had actually read the article in the original Russian or as translated into English. The headline she so carefully singled out is the outlet’s sarcastic summarization of its distortionate view of Ukrainian and Western persistence: Ukrainians must fight to the last soul. The article, though, does tout the Russian intent on encouraging that outcome if it’s what’s necessary for the barbarian to occupy the terrain.)

Nor is the article just editorial hype. The barbarian is bent on extermination of Ukraine as a polity and as a culture.

  • Putin is working to “eliminate Ukraine as a language and ethnicity, as an identity and culture, and as an independent state”
  • in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, retreating Russians left behind mass graves and civilian bodies bearing signs of torture, sexual violence and summary executions
  • Ukrainian authorities say they have information about nearly 20,000 cases in which Ukrainian children have been kidnapped to Russia

There is no Sophie’s choice for Ukraine here. Sophie had a choice: pick one of two children for the Nazis to murder. Ukraine has only national and cultural suicide on offer from the barbarian. Not some fraction of the nation to be murdered, but all of it.

It is the West—the Trump administration and Europe’s NATO member nations—which are faced with Sophie’s choice: pick one of several (so far, only Eastern European) nations for the Russian barbarian to murder in exchange for a phantom peace that would be nothing more than a small period of relative quietude.

There is, though, an actual choice. This one begins with changing the rhetoric from “Ukraine must be helped to fight on” and the more recent “cease fire right damn now” to “Ukraine must win.” That must be supported by overt and rapid transfers of arms and logistic support to Ukraine in the numbers and types the UA—with its superior and more current battlefield experience—says it needs and at the pace it says it needs them. Further, those transfers must come with no restrictions on the types and locations of targets against which the UA might employ them.

Failure of the VA

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The way the Department of Veterans Affairs is (mis)treating our veterans suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is appalling. Drug them up with a multiplicity (as many as five or more simultaneously) of psychiatric drugs and call it a day is the current protocol.

The VA’s own guidelines say no data support drug combinations to treat PTSD. The Food and Drug Administration warns that combining certain medications such as opioids and benzodiazepines can cause serious side effects, including death.
Nonetheless, prescribing cocktails of such drugs is one of the VA’s most common treatments for veterans with PTSD, and the number of veterans on multiple psychiatric drugs is a growing concern at the agency….

Aside from just drugging up these men and women who put their lives on the line for our nation, that “growing concern” is the sham of empty words unbacked by corrective action.

The VA has long been aware of the risks of overprescribing, and has internal research since at least 2016 showing the potential harms, including increased risk of suicide.
…
Studies by VA researchers link the simultaneous use of multiple psychiatric drugs to suicide risk among veterans, including a 2016 paper that found Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans taking five or more central nervous system drugs faced higher risks of overdose and suicidal behaviors.
Yet the agency has been slow to mandate changes. It has failed to implement nationwide electronic systems to alert doctors when they prescribe multiple psychiatric drugs, despite evidence from its own studies that these alerts improve care. The VA doesn’t uniformly require written informed consent for all psychiatric drugs with suicide risk, something that veterans groups and some members of Congress are urging. Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

Not only is the VA passively refusing to do anything about its mistreatment of our veterans, the agency and “doctors” are threatening our veterans if they don’t comply with those dangerously ineffective VA prescriptions.

Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

These men and women would be far better served, as would all of our veterans, if the VA were dissolved and its then-current and all future putative budgets converted to vouchers for each veteran which s/he could use to get treatment from a doctor, clinic, and hospital of his choice and on the schedule that suits him rather than the agency. Other “benefits” of the VA, viz., Home Loan Guarantee, Insurance, Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, GI Bill, and Compensation & Pension, are far better done from within HUD and DoD.

VA Secretary Doug Collins should have the mission of achieving that dissolution, to be completed by the end of 2028. Continuing to prop up the department is worse than a waste of our taxpayer money: it’s outright destructive of our veterans, who already have sacrificed so much for our benefit.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Wrong Answer

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William Galston is correct, and he’s dangerously wrong, in his Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

He acknowledges that Hamas will never surrender. This is where he’s correct. He then concluded that Israel should

declare victory and accept a cease-fire that returns all the remaining hostages and withdraws the IDF from Gaza.

He based that on the risible thesis that Israel has ended Hamas’s ability to threaten its security.

Hamas will never release all of its remaining hostages. That would eliminate far too much non-shooting leverage that Hamas has. The IDF is going to have to go get them, and that requires the complete destruction of Hamas.

Regarding Hamas’ threat to Israel’s security, formal cease fire or not, Hamas’ firing at Israel, Hamas’ terroristic assaults on Israel, will never cease until Hamas is utterly destroyed and cannot (not chooses not to) keep up its terrorism. Israel is absolutely correct on this, and its existence as a nation, as a society, depends on it. Leaving Gaza before that’s done would only let Hamas re-expand into the areas currently held by the IDF, refit, regrow, and carry on with its anti-Israeli terrorism.

Galston goes on at length, too, about how long it would take Israel to destroy Hamas. However, he shies away from the other side of this: that the destruction of Israel, were Hamas left extant and so potentially to succeed, would be forever.

That’s the long and the short of it.

Tacit Hamas Apologia

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United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said his nation would join France in recognizing a Palestinian state by the end of summer. Never mind that there is no state to recognize; the far larger problem and UK failure is this:

So today [Starmer said], as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations general assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.
This includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank. Meanwhile, our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal.
The Palestinian people have endured terrible suffering. Now, in Gaza, because of a catastrophic failure of aid we see starving babies, children too weak to stand—images that will stay with us for a lifetime.
The suffering must end. Yesterday I discussed this with President Trump and we are mounting a major effort to get humanitarian supplies back in, by air—and UK aid has been air-dropped into Gaza today—and, crucially, by land. We need to see at least 500 trucks entering Gaza every day.

The trouble with Starmer’s position is that it entirely mischaracterizes the source of the problem. It is Hamas that opposes peace and refuses any sort of ceasefire short of Israel’s abject surrender; it is Hamas that is actively interfering with delivery of humanitarian aid, actively interfering as it does with Gazans’ efforts to get to aid deliveries unless they come through Hamas, diverting UN-sourced aid from deliveries to Gazans toward itself, stealing delivered aid from Gazans; it is Hamas causing the Gazans’ suffering, especially that of children for the sake of the optics—which is rewarded by their effects on the naïve and those like Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, who should know better.

This is Starmer sub rosa (not sotto voce because he really does know better) supporting the terrorists. That’s the unequivocal message he has for Hamas. How far the UK has fallen.