Tag Archives: morality

Another VA Problem

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This one, though, isn’t primarily the Veterans Affair’s doing.

Veterans at the Shreveport, LA, Veterans Administration hospital have been going without toothbrushes, toothpaste, pajamas, sheets, and blankets while department officials spend money on new Canadian-made furniture, televisions to run public service announcements and solar panels….

Some specifics:

According to the VA, the department spent $74,412 on 24 flat screen TVs for “patient/employee information”—one 50 inches wide and the others 42 inches. The furniture cost $134,082, and the solar project was approximately $3 million.

This is shameful, but this falls on Congress. Under Federal funding rules, capital equipment—the TVs, solar, etc—fall into one funding category, and supplies—toothbrushes and paste, blankets, etc—fall into a separate category. Under those same rules, the VA (and any other agency whose funding falls into different categories) cannot take funds from, say, capital equipment, and spend it on, say, supplies. It gets even more bureaucratic than that. Agencies can’t reallocate capital expenses from one capital item to another: the VA can’t, for instance, take some of those $3 million from solar and buy more TVs with it. Only Congress can authorize such reallocations.

No, Congress must answer for this misallocation. That it’s what the VA asked for in its budget request may be true, but Congress—that collection of our directly elected representatives—isn’t supposed to be a rubber stamp for every request for money that wanders by. It’s our money Congress is allocating, not Congress’ and not the VA’s.

It’s true enough that the VA could have—should have—gone to Congress and asked for a reallocation on recognition of the supply funding shortfall. That it seems not to have is an internal VA problem that supports my argument for disbanding the VA and using the budget to fund vouchers sent directly to our veterans.

There are other problems described at the Watchdog.org link above that are entirely within the VA’s ability to correct, but this one is not.

A Thought on Birth Control

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Dr Manny Alvarez, one of the house doctors for Fox News, had a useful piece the other day on teen birth control, in particular IUDs. He’s basically spring-loaded against them for teenage girls, for a number of reasons.

Very common side effects of placing this foreign object inside the womb include cramping, spotting, heavy menstrual flow and possibly even an infection that could lead to a condition called pelvic inflammatory disease, ultimately rendering the individual infertile.

Not to mention, uterine perforation—although extremely rare….

Rather than IUDs, Alvarez pushed for more sexual education information from (and for, say I) parents and physicians.

This is a right step, but I think there’s another aspect to IUD use that’s overlooked. Pregnancy is a serious thing that disrupts and alters lives and is the creation of a new one, and pregnancy does this whether it’s wanted or accidental.

An IUD, leaving aside its side effects, is a fire-and-forget device: by design, it’s intended to block pregnancy for a long time, so the woman and her partner don’t have to think about it while they’re being sexually active. This is fine for adults.

However, the teen years are where habits are being set on matters regarding sex and the outcomes of sex. It’s useful, then—it’s actively beneficial—for the teen girl to think about this more than on just the single occasion of getting the IUD installed. She’ll form better habits regarding safe sex (including STDs, even though birth control, per se, does nothing to counter these) if she’s encouraged to think about it more often, at the least on the occasion of taking her daily birth control pill.

The same habit benefit accrues to the each time use of a condom by the boy, even if the condom isn’t as effective as a birth control pill.

A Geopolitical Misunderstanding

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…if The Wall Street Journal‘s interpretation is accurate, and a lack of political courage [emphasis added].

A solution to the Ukraine crisis is still far off, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned on Saturday, as his Russian counterpart accused the West of seeking to create chaos in the Kremlin’s geographic sphere.

And

Steinmeier said that a few weeks ago “we were on the brink of direct confrontation” between Russian and Ukrainian armed forces but that diplomacy had “prevented the worst.” However, he said, “I am under no illusion. A political solution is still a long way off.”

Last things first. Diplomacy has “prevented the worst?” Only if the worst is taken as the conquering and occupation of Ukraine as a whole, which is not an implausible view. However, diplomacy has failed to prevent the near-worst: Russian occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, together with a drive along Ukraine’s Sea of Azov coast with a view toward opening a land route to occupied Crimea, solidifying militarily the occupation.

Diplomacy alone—talking alone—can achieve very little beyond abject acceptance of these military facts. Diplomacy, to have any material effect, must be backed by, must be animated by, force—economic, military, and/or their combination. To date, there has been no force backing the West’s…diplomacy. The West has been too timid even to apply economic force against the Russians, only pin pricks that give western leaders a means of comforting themselves through the night.

Now to this:

[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] reiterated the conditions Moscow requires for the crisis to be resolved, including acceptance of Ukraine as a “neutral and non-bloc country,” meaning one that would remain outside of the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This brings us back to the first thing. Neither Ukraine, nor any other of the nations bordering on Russia, belong in any way to Russia or to “the Kremlin’s geographic sphere.” These are sovereign nations, and they’re free to chart their own course—including aligning themselves with the West, joining the prosperity of Western free market economics, even taking in the essential sovereignty of a people over their government. No matter how uncomfortable this might make Russia.

And no, Mr Lavrov, not all cultures are equal, and neither are all polities morally equivalent.

A Little Bit About Fighting

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This came up a while ago from Bing West’s book, The Wrong War.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm Michael Mullen, was fond of saying, “we can’t kill our way to victory.” That was political drivel. If the Taliban weren’t killing people, there wouldn’t be 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan. It was comparable to a police chief saying, “Arrests are not the solution to crime”—a vacuity sure to result in fewer arrests. War is centered on killing. The grunts knew that, even if their own generals did not. Killing was not the solution, but it was the means to the solution.

It’s still true, and it’s especially applicable today as the Obama administration pays lip service to taking on ISIS. We need to take this war seriously, and set about doing a couple of things:

  • getting serious about fighting—and killing—these terrorists, rather than just taking potshots from the air
  • repairing our reputation with our friends, allies, and enemies so that we can get a real coalition going and take the fight to these terrorists, on the ground as well as from the air.

It’s also applicable today as so many on the Left argue that this isn’t a war we should be fighting, it’s a wrong war. Never mind that if we don’t fight today, there, the terrorists will force us to fight tomorrow, here.

The time for talking is long past. Three administrations have tried talking, including the present one for six interminable years. Words don’t stop terrorists.

An Example of the Immorality of Moral Equivalence

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In President Barack Obama’s speech before the UN earlier this week, he had this to say:

This group [ISIL, Obama’s term for ISIS] has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria. Mothers, sisters and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.

Then he said this in juxtaposition:

I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri—where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Because the shooting of one young man by a policeman, with the facts and circumstances of this not yet known, is equivalent to the butchery of ISIS’ terrorists.

Yeah.