bob dylan | Tom Balek - Rockin' On The Right Side

The United States has committed more than $75 billion to Ukraine, ostensibly to defend them from Russia, Russia, Russia. We can speculate how much of that taxpayer funding finds its way back to the Biden crime family and others, but that’s another story.

It is an enormous sum considering we have to borrow every penny of it. And for what? What is our national interest in the dispute between Ukraine and Russia? How many Americans have died in Ukraine in the last two years? Answer: Six.

Meanwhile, in the same period, how many Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses? Answer: 220,000.

Almost all of the fentanyl in our country comes through our open border with Mexico. And this only happens with, through, and by the Mexican drug cartels.

I join a group of friends every Wednesday morning for a men’s prayer meeting. Last week we were gathered at our fast food meeting place as always, and we invited a nearby diner named Philip to join us. He listened quietly as we complained about how badly things are going in the USA. Then he said he had a “miracle” testimony that might make us feel better, at least comparatively.

Philip said he had met his wife over 20 years ago in Matamoros, Mexico just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. She was a native Mexican translator at a Christian conference he attended. And even though she died a few years after their marriage, Philip still keeps in touch with her family, their son, and the church they supported in Matamoros.

On a recent phone call with his former father-in-law he learned that conditions in Matamoros are getting desperate – the drug cartels have taken over every aspect of daily life. It is now unsafe to venture out of your home at any time, and if you do, you must pay a bribe to the cartel for everything you do. There is no law and order and the economy is in shambles.

Philip told the story of a young member of his church in Matamoros who made a living buying cars in the USA and selling them in southern Mexico. On a recent trip he and two friends got caught in a cartel roadblock. They were robbed of their car, money, watches, and even their shoes. Then they were dragged into the ditch where his friends were both executed point blank. When the pistol was raised to his head he prayed for his life, and as he did the murderer’s cell phone rang. The thug turned and ran to his car, leaving the young Christian shocked but unhurt. With his miracle faith aflame, he soon became the new pastor of his church.

Just south of our border is a war zone. While we send endless billions to the Ukraine war where six Americans have died in two years, we do absolutely nothing to stop the war in our own backyard that kills over a hundred thousand young Americans, and countless other souls, every year. Quite the opposite, the Biden administration supports the cartels by enabling them to extort billions of dollars from their victims who have been invited by Biden to enter our country illegally.

Former presidents GW Bush, Obama, and Trump all tried minor military solutions to solve the border problem, without much success. During his term, Trump investigated more aggressive military options, even up to firing missiles into Mexico, according to Mark Esper, former defense secretary. But our current president, sheltered by fawning news and social media, clearly prefers sending military money and equipment to Ukraine, where he gets a cut returned to him, while the Mexican drug cartels run amok on our border.

Fortunately, most GOP presidential candidates are hawkish about the cartels. In addition to Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott agree that we should take unilateral action against the cartels if Mexican president Obrador refuses to. Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence remain soft on the cartels. Vivek Ramaswamy has said he would use our military to “defend our borders”.

I have a hunch that $75 billion would buy more than enough whoop-ass to eliminate the cartels and finally establish immigration control at our border.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Blowin’ In the Wind – Bob Dylan

Lately I have been spending a lot of time with teachers. It is encouraging and frustrating at the same time.

Many of them are highly skilled, engaged, and enthusiastic. There is that bunch in the middle – some are learning and improving, some are slacking a bit. And there are teachers who should find a line of work that is not so crucial to our families and our nation.

It’s not surprising. If you look at any group of employees you will find a mix of talent. But here’s something that concerns me: in the business world, where survival depends on real-world results, managers are selected, compensated, promoted and released based on their talent and contributions to the organization’s success. Successful businesses use this natural, competitive human resource development process to improve their performance on an ongoing basis.

Unlike business professionals, teachers are paid based on years of service and college credits, without regard for their teaching skill and success with students. Why? Is success in business more important than success in education? Is it too difficult to evaluate the performance level of teachers, compared to business managers? Do teachers not have the same proven motivations that all other humans do?

It surprises me that good teachers are so willing to have their earnings reduced to the lowest common denominator. I can understand that a hundred guys installing widgets on an assembly line are pretty interchangeable, and the only way to distinguish them is reliability and loyalty. But education is much more complex, and teacher performance is much more variable. It seems wrong that the top performers are held to the earning power of their weakest counterparts, who just happen to have the same tenure and step level. Wrong for those teachers who overachieve, wrong for the professionals who choose a different career where their talent and effort is rewarded, and wrong for our nation at a time when we are searching for ways to leverage our educational results.

If I owned an NFL team and chose to pay my players the same, based on their years on the roster but disregarding individual talent and contributions to the “W” column, how many games would I win? How long would I survive against the competitive teams?

The concept of “fairness” is a top priority of Democrats, the party in power. The teacher’s unions are rigidly supportive of the Democrats, and vice-versa. I can’t think of anything less fair than everyone being paid the same, regardless of their talent and contributions to success.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Well, I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more