Tag Archives: morality

Progressive-Democratic Party Disdain for Education

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Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor Josh Shapiro is providing the latest demonstration. As the WSJ editors noted in their piece,

Only a third of Philadelphia students were proficient in English, and a quarter in math, on state tests last year. That’s the horrifying return on school district spending of about $32,000 per student, according to the Commonwealth Foundation.

The State does offer tax credits to private entities and individuals who donate to privately run scholarship programs, but those programs don’t come close to covering the cost to parents of pulling their students out of the State’s failing public school systems and enrolling them in private schools.

Shapiro stands sharply in the way of any improvement, though.

Even though the State’s legislature is moving to increase the value of existing programs, Shapiro is demanding that much of the funds sought must be diverted public-school supplemental activities rather than private-school tuition.

Shapiro is actively blocking legislative efforts to create new tuition vouchers worth much more.

Shapiro refuses to opt the State into the Federal government’s education scholarship tax-credit program, even though that program is funded exclusively with Federal tax dollars and wouldn’t cost the State a single Continental.

This active obstruction of children’s education is as abusive as any direct emotional abuse. If we want our children actually to be educated, if we want this sub rosa abuse to be stopped, we need to stop electing Progressive-Democrats to office.

One Way to Reduce Welfare Fraud

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The lede laid out the breadth of the problem.

The Trump administration’s work to pare back waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government has reportedly exposed a vast network of taxpayer-fleecing scams, abuses of immigration, and of the citizenship process across all corners of the United States.

It’s necessary, certainly, to act to correct these abuses and to bring the abusers and fraudsters to justice—including State officials who ignored the problems in their States or were actively complicit in them.

It’s necessary, though, to act proactively against these frauds on the American people. One means of going on offense is simple and straightforward, if politically difficult (though only difficult in the minds of timid politicians). That is to set about reducing the opportunities for fraud. Eliminate some welfare programs that are redundant or overlapping and to greatly reduce the scope, eligibility for, and funding of the remaining welfare programs.

With less money to steal, there’ll be less opportunity to steal it, and more usefully, those attempts will be more readily detected and the fraud wannabes caught and jailed.

Hmm….

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I wrote a bit ago about Yale’s “Reform” report. Lauren Noble, Buckley Institute founder, in her Monday letter to The Wall Steet Journal‘ Letters section, pointed out a couple of glaring omissions in that report that she’d spotted.

First, in 2021 Yale eliminated the process by which alumni could run for a spot on its governing board by petition. Alumni now only have the illusion of choice in who guides their alma mater. They select between Yale’s hand-picked candidates whom Yale prohibits from publicly discussing their views on issues. How does Yale expect to earn back the trust of the public if it doesn’t even trust its own alumni?

The Party candidates aren’t even trusted by those who chose them to speak properly in public? Hmm….

Second, Yale’s DEI efforts aren’t addressed. A recent Buckley Institute report found there are over 200 DEI staff still at Yale almost a year after the university supposedly ended its signature DEI program. Seventy-five of those staff were given new titles with less controversial terms. Yale needs to confront rather than hide from the legacy of these programs.

Again, I say,

Hmm….

Is This Believable?

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Yale has completed a report based on self-criticism that evaluates the school’s adherence to academic seriousness.

After a useful summary of the problems, the report offers 20 recommendations that run from the obvious (“lead by example”) to the challenging (“grade like we mean it”). On grading, the report recommends a new mean policy of 3.0 from the current norm of nearly all A grades. Older readers will think a standard of 2.0 ought to be the real mean, but 3.0 is progress.
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Most encouraging is a full-throated endorsement of free inquiry and “enhancing open and critical debate on campus.” It urges each department, starting in 2026-27, to examine its “intellectual and methodological commitments” as well as the “range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty” and “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.”

No, this isn’t believable without corroboration. Phishing efforts have grown markedly in their skill and imitation of the real enterprises they’re imitating and from which they’re redirecting their victims’ responses to their own nefarious sites. This Yale report seems nothing more than a similarly skillfully done misdirection effort. As the WSJ noted toward the end of the piece,

the reforms will have to be implemented by the same people who had no problem with university failings until they began to cost dollars and public support.

Three corroborations must occur before Yale can be taken seriously. In the near term, those same people who had no problem with university failings must be replaced in toto by others actually committed to reforming, with those same people being removed from all connection, however remote, to the school. In the intermediate term and longer, those reforms must be put in place, adhered to, and strictly and draconianly enforced. In the longer term, the self-evaluation must be repeated after one year to evaluate success and failure and to determine further reforms that are necessary along with corrective action regarding those failures.

How Unfit is Unfit?

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UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer (Labour) is busily screwing the pooch. His latest failures are two, and both are related to his choice of Ambassador to the US.

For months, Starmer had insisted that his government followed “due process” in appointing Mandelson as US envoy, telling lawmakers repeatedly that Mandelson had been vetted and cleared by UK security services for the post.
On Thursday, it emerged that Mandelson had, in fact, failed his security clearance but was approved for the job anyway.

Then,

Starmer said Thursday he wasn’t aware Mandelson had failed his vetting process….

That Starmer blamed others for his ignorance and fired a scapegoat is neither here nor there against the enormity of his failures here.

The real upshot is that either Starmer has been lying through his…teeth…or he’s utterly incompetent. Either one alone demonstrates his unfitness for public office, much less for heading up the British government.

Parliament’s MPs shouldn’t be wasting time nattering on about how Starmer should resign. The MPs should simply dump him with a no-confidence vote. Absent that, they’re as timid, waffle-y, and incompetent or dishonest as Starmer.