Jimmy Tobias:

As Covid-19 was spreading fear and spurring lockdowns across the United States in early 2020, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper on March 17 titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Written by five renowned academic scientists, it played an important early role in shaping the debate about a fiercely controversial topic: the origin of the virus that has killed millions since it emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Did it spill from animals to humans in nature, on a farm, in a market? Or did it leak from a lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading center of coronavirus research in China? Drawing on “comparative analysis of genomic data,” the paper’s authors wrote that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated construct.” Toward the end of the paper, they added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” in explaining the origin of the virus. Instead, the scientists strongly favored a natural origin, arguing that the virus likely spilled from bats into humans, possibly by way of an intermediate animal host.

The peer-reviewed paper proved to be hugely influential. Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, announced its findings in a post on the agency’s website in late March 2020. When asked during an April 17 press briefing at the White House about concerns that SARS-CoV-2 had come out of a lab in China, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who recently stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, referenced the paper, describing its conclusions and calling its authors “a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists.” The paper has been accessed online more than 5.7 million times and has been cited by more than 2,000 media outlets. ABC News, for instance, ran an article on March 27 titled “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes Covid-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct.’” In that article, one of the paper’s authors, Robert Garry, is quoted saying, “There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level, so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin.”

Matt Taibbi:

It seems possible the advertised “braintrust” had leeway to make policy choices, up to a point. Klain for instance seems significantly responsible for the too-online-wokester quotient in the Biden presidency, trying to name pestilent Internet creature Neera Tanden to head the OMB. Having been “Ebola Czar” under Obama, he also seems to have been the force behind the push for mandates and the generally hyper-obnoxious tone of White House vaccine policy, appearing to physically arouse Chuck Todd when discussing vaccines during the peak of the pandemic.

On larger questions, it’s not clear Klain figured at all. Responding to criticisms that he let a helpless outpatient sink the 2024 ticket, Klain blamed voters. “There was no cover-up,” he just told The Guardian. “A Democratic congressman ran against him in the primary in 2024, with age as the only issue, and voters overwhelmingly voted for Biden.” This was after the party barred the congressman in question, Dean Phillips, from its numerous closed primaries and spent small fortunes on legal challenges to keep other candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, and the No Labels party from opposing Biden.

These are the key questions. Who fixed the primaries, directed the ballot access suits, crushed third parties, and green-lit myriad Trump prosecutions and other lawfare schemes? Most importantly, who kicked Biden off the ticket and replaced him with Kamala Harris? There’s not a lot of evidence that either Biden or Harris had much to do with those decisions. Jill Biden noted recently that “Joe has an incredible capacity to forgive,” but “that means I end up being the holder of grudges,” a remark seemingly directed toward Pelosi. As the Washington Post just put it, in a story that is about Jill Biden’s memories of last summer yet somehow completely avoids explaining who decided her husband’s career was over during that time:

Salem’s Zito

It had been less than a year since I’d written, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

This was just one more example of that.

Sarah Kuta

That’s where human volunteers come in. By transcribing digital pages, volunteers make it easier for scholars, genealogists and curious history buffs to find and read historical documents.

Getting started is easy: All you need to do is sign up online. The free program is open to anyone with an internet connection.

“There’s no application,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives, tells USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”

If you’re not confident in your cursive deciphering skills, the National Archives has other tasks available, too—such as “tagging” documents that other volunteers have already transcribed. Tagging helps improve the searchability of records.

Already, more than 5,000 volunteers have joined the Citizen Archivist program. Many are hard at work on “missions,” or groups of documents that need transcribing and tagging. For example, current missions include Revolutionary War pension files and employee contracts from 1866 to 1870.

Steven Greenhut:

Insurance is the foundation of homeownership and the economy, but California leaders have dilly-dallied in the face of a long-running crisis

The American Spectator might not be at the top of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reading list, but had it been, he would have known that California’s teetering insurance system was just one particularly bad wildfire away from disaster. Sure, he knew that insurers were fleeing the state in the face of its absurd price-control system that doesn’t allow them to price policies to reflect their actual risk, but that knowledge didn’t spur him to make the matter a priority.

In September 2023, I wrote the following on these pages after lawmakers decided to punt on insurance reform rather than take on their anti-corporate allies:

Julia Turner, Kathryn Blanchard, and Rajeev Darolia:

In this report, we explore which public sectors are most commonly represented among individuals who have benefitted, or are on track to benefit, from the PSLF program. Specifically, we present new data detailing which sectors borrowers have most commonly worked in to be eligible for PSLF. We show that the most common sector among those who have received forgiveness through PSLF is education, representing 43% of all employers associated with the program. The majority of these employers in the education sector are K-12 education systems, representing 28% of all employer occurrences in the data. Other common employer subsectors among borrowers who have received PSLF are state and local governments and healthcare organizations. Among the most frequent individual employers are those related to military service including the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the branches of the U.S. military.

Ashley Belanger

Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is “the most apolitical social platform in China”—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app’s Chinese users.

In the “TikTokCringe” subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

“RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area,” the Reddit poster said. “I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with

Becky Jacobs

Edgewood College’s plan to transition to a new name could cost as much as $250,000 and take a few years to fully implement, but changes are expected to start this summer.

“Edgewood University” will better reflect what the private Catholic school has evolved into since its founding in Madison nearly a century ago, said President Andrew Manion.

In 1927, Edgewood College operated as a junior college for women to study liberal arts. The institution then grew to train teachers on a coed campus. In more recent years, the school has essentially operated as a university without being designated as one, Manion said.

Henry Farrell

The Biden administration, in its final days, has laid out an extraordinarily ambitious plan to use its chokepoint on high end semiconductors to control global AI. The best explanation I’ve seen is this Bloomberg scoop by Mackenzie Hawkins and Jenny Leonard, published a few days before the draft plan was published. The draft plan itself is available on the Federal Register (warning – there is a lot of export controls lawyerly jargon).

The idea is to use export controls to restrict the selling and use of to achieve two U.S. policy goals. The first is its desire to keep the most advanced AI out of the grasp of China, for fear that China will use strong AI to undermine U.S. security. The second is its desire to allow some degree of continued access to semiconductors and AI in most countries, to mitigate the anticipated shrieks of protest from big U.S. firms that don’t want to see their export markets disappear.

Hence, this highly complex plan involves controlling access to the advanced semiconductors that are used to train advanced AI models, as well as the model ‘weights’ themselves. The plan continues to very sharply restrict China’s and some other countries’ access to highly advanced semiconductors (what Hawkins and Leonard call Tier 3 countries – the actual terminology is more technical and abstruse). It allows a much more liberal regime of exports without much in the way of controls to a small group of ‘Tier 1’ countries – important allies and other friendlies such as Norway and Ireland. Finally, there is a large intermediary zone of other countries, including some traditional U.S. allies, that will be allowed access to U.S. semiconductors, but under complex restrictions. This loosely extends the regime that the U.S. is trying to make Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates comply with (in which they would agree to detach their data centers from Chinese technologies in exchange for semiconductor access) to the rest of the world. As Hawkins and Leonard describe it:

Thomas Schatz:

The last time a comprehensive review of the federal government was completed, the budget was $848 billion, the national debt was $1.6 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio was 38 percent.  That was in 1984, when the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, better known as the Grace Commission, sent its final report to President Ronald Reagan. 

The budget is now $7 trillion, the national debt is $35.3 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio is 121.6 percent.  The need for a new government efficiency commission could not be clearer. 

Shaked Koplewitz writes:

Doesn’t Lynn’s IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?

That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn’t exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn’t we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?

And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense – they’d do equally badly at tests, but in their case it’s because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.

(Or a slightly more complicated version of this – e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don’t come naturally).

David Farenthold:

A nonprofit founded by Stacey Abrams, a Georgia Democrat, admitted on Wednesday that it had violated state law by concealing the fact that it had campaigned for her during her 2018 run for governor.

At the time of that campaign, the group was led by Raphael Warnock, who was later elected to the Senate as a Democrat from Georgia.

At a meeting of the state’s ethics commission, the nonprofit New Georgia Project conceded that it had paid for fliers and door-to-door canvassers telling voters to support Ms. Abrams and other Democrats.

Chris Rickert:

But while some changes were made, a check of all 16 of the school districts that serve Dane County found that 10 had SROs and four were looking at bringing them in for the first time or bringing them back.

The Deerfield School District, enrollment 746, was the only other district besides Madison not interested in having an officer in its schools.

On Monday, in response to inquiries from the Wisconsin State Journal, the Madison School Board released a statement saying the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School has “unsurprisingly … raised questions about what schools are doing to keep students and staff safe” and that “some of those questions are around the need for School Resource Officers.”

“While the Board does not advocate for installing school resource officers, we know that safe and secure schools require various systems and protocols,” the board said. “Our district has these items in place, and they are routinely evaluated to ensure they operate at the highest level. In partnership with our schools, the Office of Safety and local law enforcement, we maintain open communication and conduct safety training and emergency drills together.”

—-

In Milwaukee, police respond to thousands of calls to MPS: ‘Why do we call the police?’

Dan Lennington:

Below is the internal document from UW-Madison showing that their financial aid office employs a “whites only” criteria for the Kipp Scholarship every year. This is illegal: @WILawLiberty & @yaf have filed a complaint.

EXCLUSIVE: Amy Wax has sued the University of Pennsylvania for race discrimination, arguing that Penn punishes speech that offends racial minorities but not speech that offends Jews.

Here is a table from the complaint, which was filed in federal court this morning.🧵 pic.twitter.com/mIdKNDftfs

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 16, 2025

Maggie Macintosh:

The Manitoba Human Rights Commission’s probe into the struggles of students with reading disabilities is moving ahead, despite years of delays participants say have added to their frustration and suffering.

Executive director Karen Sharma told the Free Press that both stakeholder and public consultations have been postponed in recent months due to “other pressing priorities, including an unexpectedly busy litigation agenda.”

—-

more

Marc Andreessen

TRANSCRIPT: EMERGENCY BRIEFING ON WOKE CATASTROPHE – DAY 15
Location: Underground Bunker, Zhongnanhai Compound
Date: January 30, 2025
Time: 05:00 CST
Present: President Xi Jinping, Dr. Liu Ming (Digital Culture Specialist), Dr. Zhang Wei (Social Movements Analyst)

more.

Pre-Interview Energy Cleansing Ritual 🌸
Burned sage to cleanse Zhongnanhai of its problematic imperial energy while repeating my daily affirmation: “Every surveillance camera is a witness to my truth.” So blessed to be holding space for China’s journey toward radical compliance enforcement!

AJ Bayatpour

We’re doing profiles on all 3 candidates for state superintendent.

We start with Brittany Kinser’s first interview since her campaign launch. Would she accept Republicans raising funds for her?

“Anyone who aligns…I will work with anyone and attend a fundraiser from anyone”

——-

2 of 3 Madison School Board 2025 April election seats are unopposed ….

If you have coaches and a bad curriculum, what will the coaches be coaching you to do?

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

 taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

MARTÍN E. DE SIMONEFEDERICO TIBERTIWURAOLA MOSUROFEDERICO MANOLIOMARIA BARRONELIOT DIKORU:

“AI helps us to learn, it can serve as a tutor, it can be anything you want it to be, depending on the prompt you write,” says Omorogbe Uyiosa, known as “Uyi” by his friends, a student from the Edo Boys High School, in Benin City, Nigeria. His school was one of the beneficiaries of a pilot that used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to support learning through an after-school program.

A few months ago, we wrote a blog with some of the lessons from the implementation of this innovative program, including a video with voices from beneficiaries, such as Uyi. Back then, we promised that, if you stayed tuned, we would get back with the results of the pilot, which included an impact evaluation. So here we are with three primary findings from the pilot!

1.    The program boosted learning across the board

The results of the randomized evaluation, soon to be published, reveal overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes. After the six-week intervention between June and July 2024, students took a pen-and-paper test to assess their performance in three key areas: English language—the primary focus of the pilot—AI knowledge, and digital skills.

Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program significantly outperformed their peers who were not in all areas, including English, which was the main goal of the program. These findings provide strong evidence that generative AI, when implemented thoughtfully with teacher support, can function effectively as a virtual tutor.  

Ilya Shapiro:

Yesterday I laid out my how my personal experience led me to “do the work” and write Lawless. That research uncovered some disturbing differences from when I was in law school in the early 2000s. Back then, critical theory was a spent force. But now “the crits” are back, even stronger, and not just in literature and sociology departments.

Critical legal studies (CLS), which developed in the 1970s, teaches that laws enshrine biases against marginalized groups and thus preserve the status quo. CLS scholars also criticize formalism, which they see as overly focused on analyzing the logic of doctrines, principles, and texts without considering broader social and political implications. From their perspective, the law is simply the codification of the cultural and political preferences of those in power.

In 1973, Derrick Bell, the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, wrote that racism was a permanent feature of American life that couldn’t be remedied under existing legal structures. After he left Harvard to become dean at the University of Oregon, students began protesting their law school’s lack of diversity. The Harvard Law Review invited Bell to write the prestigious foreword to its 1984 Supreme Court volume, allowing him to dispense with academic rigor and instead present his theories of racial grievance as allegorical narratives. Those establishmentarian career-builders thus helped mainstream the ideas that would become CRT.

Austin Berg

S&P cites 2025 budget, little willingness to cut spending and uncertainty about the ability to raise taxes.

And:

A downgrade isn’t only a reputational hit; it could also increase the city’s cost to borrow money for long-term projects like Johnson’s $1.25 billion housing and development bond, which is slated to go to market early this year.

The city’s chief financial officer, Jill Jaworski, disagreed with the downgrade and said in a release that the rating does not “accurately reflect the strength of the City’s credit,” or its ability to meet steep debt and pension obligations.

——

—-Madison’s latest Standard & Poors debt ratings.

Lindsay Ellis

Landing a professional job in the U.S. has become so tough that even Harvard Business School says its M.B.A.s can’t solely rely on the university’s name to open doors anymore.

Twenty-three percent of job-seeking Harvard M.B.A.s who graduated last spring were still looking for work three months after leaving campus. That share is up from 20% the prior year, during a cooling white-collar labor market; the figure was 10% in 2022, according to the school. 

more.

Steve Hsu:

Superfocus.ai makes an AI that saves PE funds hundreds of hours of human professional work via automated document analysis. A lot of those hours are MBA/JD hours…

Julie Sedivy:

But that leads to a curious puzzle: Complex sentences are not ubiquitous among the world’s languages. Many languages have little use for them. They prefer to string together simple clauses. They may even lack certain words such as relative pronouns that and which or connectors like if, despite, and although—these words make it possible to link clauses together into larger sentences. Allegedly, the Pirahã language along the Maici River of Brazil lacks recursion altogether. According to linguist Dan Everett, Pirahã speakers avoid linguistic nesting of all kinds, even in structures such as John’s brother’s house. (Instead, they would say something like: Brother’s house. John has a brother. It is the same one.)

This can’t be pinned on biological evolution. All evidence suggests that humans around the world are born with more or less the same brains. Abundant childhood exposure to a language with layered sentences practically guarantees their mastery. Even adult Pirahã speakers, who have remained unusually isolated from European languages, pick up the trick of complex syntax, provided that they spend enough time interacting with speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, a language that offers an adequate diet of embedded structures.

Sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.

Corrinne Hess:

Act 20 was a bipartisan bill, proposed by Republicans who worked with DPI on the details. 

When it was approved, the Legislature created a separate, nearly $50 million appropriations bill for implementation. 

Then disagreements began over how that money would be used, and who would decide how to use it.

Wisconsin allows its governors to use partial vetoes on appropriations bills. Evers’ use of that power in February 2024 prompted a lawsuit in April from Legislative Republicans asking the $50 million be withheld from DPI. 

Evers and DPI then filed a counterclaim saying without the money, implementing the new law in time for the 2024-25 school year will be impossible.

In July, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 6-1 the GOP overstepped its constitutional authority by blocking Evers’ actions related to the Department of Natural Resources. But the court did not rule on the $50 million for DPI. 

Attorney General Josh Kaul has asked the high court to bypass the Appellate Court and rule on the matter. 

Joint Finance Committee co-chairs Sen.Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, and Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, said legislative Republicans have consistently supported efforts to increase literacy in Wisconsin. 

“This is why we allocated $50 million to create the Office of Literacy and passed Act 100 to lay the framework for DPI to implement this important initiative,” the two said in a statement. 

Evers’ partial veto in February 2024, known as Act 100,  struck language allocating  money for school boards and charter school compliance in the early literacy program.

——-

More.

If you have coaches and a bad curriculum, what will the coaches be coaching you to do?

Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

 taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Brittany Kinser:

“Only three out of ten students in Wisconsin are college and career ready – 32% is too little! Our kids deserve so much better. We must restore high standards and focus on reading, writing, and math to ensure every child can get a meaningful job, attend college, or master a trade,” stated Kinser.

Brittany’s campaign platform includes the following key priorities:

• Restore high standards for Wisconsin kids
• Refocus on teaching reading, writing, and math
• Partner with parents to champion their child’s education
• Ensure funding reaches the classroom and rewards good teachers
• Drive transparency, predictability and innovation at DPI

“I am excited to share more details about my campaign so voters can appreciate the clear contrast between me and the other candidates. Our grassroots effort to demand the best education possible for Wisconsin children is growing daily,” stated Kinser.

Jill Barshay:

A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion. 

In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found that children with disabilities learn more that way. Fuchs said the paper is slated to be published this spring in the Journal of Learning Disabilities and he expects it to be made public online sooner. 

“We’re not saying that the evidence indicates full inclusion cannot work,” said Fuchs. “We’re saying that the evidence in terms of where to place these children is extremely weak, is fundamentally flawed, and no conclusions can be drawn from the evidence.”

Fuchs also notes that there is a growing body of high-quality research on how to teach children with disabilities or those at risk of being diagnosed with a disability. These studies are randomized controlled trials of interventions that require hours of intense, specialized instruction. For many, if not most, students with disabilities, Fuchs argues, a separate setting, such as a separate classroom or even a separate school, might be the best way to get the instruction they need. 

——-

Madison’s one size fits all English 10, among many others.

More. And.

 Seth Barrett Tillman:

[T]here are numerous other methods that Trump will likely deploy on day one of his new administration to immunize himself and punish those who attempt to hold him accountable. The two most important of these would be to appoint an attorney general who could be counted on to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith in an attempt to end the federal prosecutions. Without a special counsel protecting the criminal trials, Trump could then demand that the attorney general withdraw the federal government from the D.C. and the Florida indictments. Second, Trump may attempt to pardon himself for any federal crimes or commute any sentences he has received up to that point. Although it seems likely that both of these acts would constitute criminal obstruction of justice by the President, the Trump v. United Statesruling could give Trump cover to do just that; according to the majority opinion, appointing and removing Justice Department officials is among his core constitutional powers to which absolute immunity attaches, and the same would be said for any exercise of the pardon power, given that it is an enumerated power under Article II. 

It is not overly dramatic to say that should these events occur, it would signal the end of the rule of law with respect to the presidency . . . .

Kayla Huynh:

Mary Erickson fondly remembers attending La Follette High School in the 1960s. 

Over the years, she held onto her high school memorabilia: The pins she received as a cheerleader rooting on the Lancers, the hand-written essays her teachers graded with A’s, the photos she captured for the yearbook and the prom dresses her mom sewed for her sister. 

Hoping to preserve those memories, Erickson donated a box of her decades-old items to the high school’s archives and history museum before it officially opened in 2002. She said she now regrets that decision after learning last year contents of the museum were thrown away.

The museum included “over 50 years worth of treasures,” Erickson said. 

Forrest Brazeal:

It’s pretty disorienting to me that smart people, secular people, particularly people in tech, view homeschooling as a high-status option now.

I was homeschooled for 13 years, from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade—you can tell that about me because I have essentially the same skill stack as Rapunzel from Tangled—and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.

“Homeschooled”, according to Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls, historically meant one of two things, and I was both of them:

• An academic freak who wins spelling bees.1 I was a two-time National Spelling Bee finalist in 2005-06. ESPN’s John Marvel once said he liked my odds for two reasons: 1) I was homeschooled and 2) I had a name he couldn’t pronounce.
• A religious freak who believes in young-earth creationism. The earth is thankfully old enough to have forgotten the full-length country-western musical I wrote in high school called “Creation vs Evolution: The West of the Story”.

Jill Barshay:

In a paper that reviews more than 50 years of research, Douglas Fuchs of Vanderbilt University and the American Institutes for Research, along with two other researchers, argues that the academic benefits of including students with disabilities in general education classrooms are not settled science despite the fact that numerous studies have found that children with disabilities learn more that way. Fuchs said the paper is slated to be published this spring in the Journal of Learning Disabilities and he expects it to be made public online sooner. 

“We’re not saying that the evidence indicates full inclusion cannot work,” said Fuchs. “We’re saying that the evidence in terms of where to place these children is extremely weak, is fundamentally flawed, and no conclusions can be drawn from the evidence.”

Fuchs also notes that there is a growing body of high-quality research on how to teach children with disabilities or those at risk of being diagnosed with a disability. These studies are randomized controlled trials of interventions that require hours of intense, specialized instruction. For many, if not most, students with disabilities, Fuchs argues, a separate setting, such as a separate classroom or even a separate school, might be the best way to get the instruction they need. 

“Some number of kids with disabilities can and should be in general classrooms,” Fuchs said. “It’s manifestly obvious that they’re doing reasonably well. They should stay there. But for a majority, they need intensive instruction, and we know how to provide intensive instruction. The evidence is, I dare say, overwhelming.”

Mark Dent:

But while the criticism of high fructose corn syrup is mainly about nutrition, its emergence and staying power have hinged on government subsidies, tariffs, and political favors connected to corporate largesse. Sugar is an economic issue, too — one that experts say benefits a few powerful entities while the rest of the country bears the cost

Riva-Melissa Tez

California’s education and public safety records are also abysmal. Despite devoting 50 percent of the state’s general fund to education, with the main share going to K-12, only 50 percent of students meet or exceed reading standards, consistently lagging behind the national average. Meanwhile, crime is spiraling out of control, with violent offenses surging 15.4 percent since 2019, homicides up 15.5 percent, and assaults 27.4 percent higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for 2025-2026 is $322 billion, surpassing even initial estimates. Many Californians missed our governor’s stealthy tax hike last year, increasing California’s top marginal income tax rate from 13.3 to 14.4 percent. This move, aimed at funding an expansion of paid family leave, is a thinly veiled attempt to plug the holes in California’s crumbling fiscal ship. 

These are the long-standing trends, and any observer can’t be too surprised at the consequences of this wildfire. If a natural disaster had been handled competently, it would have been an outlier for the Californian government. 

It’s time for Californians to shake off their complacency and demand a reckoning from those who are supposed to govern. For too long, we’ve tolerated a system that squanders our hard-earned wealth and is now destroying our property. The Romans built aqueducts stretching hundreds of miles in less time than it takes to permit an outbuilding in California — and their aqueducts actually held water. We deserve better — better stewardship of our finances and better management of our resources.

Paul Graham:

The word “prig” isn’t very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google’s isn’t bad:

A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.

This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.

There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

Alec MacGillis:

In both Ohio and Wisconsin, opponents, led by teachers’ unions, were challenging the programs on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld vouchers; a federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against them.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up a First Amendment challenge to vouchers, based on one of the Ohio cases, in February 2002. Robert Chanin, a lawyer for the National Education Association, told the court, “Under the Cleveland voucher program, millions of dollars in unrestricted public funds are transferred each year from the state treasury into the general coffers of sectarian private schools, and the money is used by those schools to provide an educational program in which the sectarian and the secular are interwoven.” Chanin noted that ­virtually all the students in the voucher program were attending religious schools, rather than secular private schools.

But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the likely swing vote in the case, interrupted to pick up on a point made by a state attorney who’d defended the vouchers. In evaluating Cleveland’s choice program, shouldn’t the court consider not only private schools but also other options available to students, such as public magnet schools and charter schools?

The question caught Chanin off guard. The issue was the constitutionality of private school vouchers, yet O’Connor was evoking public school options. The state pressed its advantage, with its lawyer stressing the limited scope of the pilot: “It didn’t take too much money away from the public schools, but gave enough for a limited program that is targeted to the most needy, to the poorest of the poor.”

Peter Savodnik:

But Chua’s Yale Law mentees aren’t just Republicans. They come from both sides of the political aisle and include the progressive reporter Ronan Farrowand Democratic congresswoman-elect Maggie Goodlander, who’s married to Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Chua has also taught the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director, Nabiha Syed, and Usha Chilukuri, who became Usha Vance, and sat in the front of the class while her future husband sat in the back. Chua’s classes were always oversubscribed, several sources told me. There was always a line of students waiting to speak with her at her office, on the third floor of the Sterling Law Building, which was built in 1931 and is meant to look like it was built in 1131.

“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student told The Free Press. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”

“It’s across the board—left wing, right wing,” Chua said of the students she’s advised. “I get a lot of immigrants.” She said she is also close with federal judges and Supreme Court justices of all political stripes. That includes the conservative Brett Kavanaugh, who Chua helped 10 of her students—eight of whom were women—land clerkships with. As well as Sonia Sotomayor, who has been dubbed the Court’s “most liberal” justice and attended the Washington, D.C., book party for Chua’s first novel, The Golden Gate.

“She has become the most important adviser and mentor of students at the Yale Law School in the entire time that I’ve been on the faculty, which is going on half a century,” said Kronman, a lifelong Democrat.

The “Ethical Skeptic”:

I share an equal frustration with the lack of genuine curiosity and rigorous investigative effort applied to interpreting the artifacts uncovered at Göbekli Tepe and other archaeological sites. For instance, why was I the first to recognize that the serpent image carved into the wall of Enclosure AA, or Hypogeum Pit, at Karahan Tepe represents Sheshanāgá, the cosmic shining serpent of ancient lore—an image tied to the Milky Way’s luminous center?² How could such a connection escape notice? Surely, this should not have been that hard to figure out. I am not even directly involved in the field, yet I was able to discern the meaning of the image within minutes of seeing it for the first time.

The builders of Göbekli Tepe made their message in the Pillars unmistakably clear, guiding us like children through precisely what they were observing and documenting. Yet, they likely underestimated just how obtuse the children of men would become.

This raises an uncomfortable question: if an outsider can make such connections so readily, what does it say about the level of curiosity and rigor being applied by those entrusted with unearthing and interpreting humanity’s ancient story? My concern goes beyond mere intellectual lethargy or bureaucratic stagnation. I sense that fear governs much of the work and conclusions produced within the discipline of archaeology. Fear of being labeled heretical, fear of diverging from the consensus, fear of professional censure and reductive categorization, and perhaps most troubling, fear of unseen powers whose agency and influence remain deliberately obscured.

An Alternative Interpretation of Pillar 43, Its ‘Handbags,’ ‘V’-Scoring, and Iconic ‘H’ Symbols

Michael Alcazar

Yet as dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialised in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. I remember noticing one officer’s medal above his NYPD shield: “sharpshooter”, it read.

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

WILL:

Join the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and 50CAN as we share the results of a new survey of parents on the state of educational opportunity in Wisconsin. Among the key findings are parent perspectives on education and the lack of information parents have access to regarding their local school system, the true costs of state spending on education, academic achievement and more. We will also look at how the Badger State compares nationally. The survey is organized into five categories of learning that families tell us are crucial for them and their children: 1) school quality and opportunity, 2) tutoring, summer and mental health, 3) out of school activities, 4) information and engagement, and 5) college and career readiness. A total of 403 parents and guardians of school-aged children across our state were surveyed between July 8 and August 22, 2024 as part of a nationwide research effort that reached more than 20,000 respondents

Matt:

Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.

It’s hard to describe it in words.

So, I use pictures.

Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Stephen Wolfram:

For more than a century people had wondered how simple the axioms of logic (Boolean algebra) could be. On January 29, 2000, I found the answer—and made the surprising discovery that they could be about twice as simple as anyone knew. (I also showed that what I found was the simplest possible.) 

It was an interesting result—that gave new intuition about just how simple the foundations of things can be, and for example helped inspire my efforts to find a simple underlying theory of physics. 

But how did I get the result? Well, I used automated theorem proving (specifically, what’s now FindEquationalProof in Wolfram Language). Automated theorem proving is something that’s been around since at least the 1950s, and its core methods haven’t changed in a long time. But in the rare cases it’s been used in mathematics it’s typically been to confirm things that were already believed to be true. And in fact, to my knowledge, my Boolean algebra axiom is actually the only truly unexpected result that’s ever been found for the first time using automated theorem proving.

A friend asked me if these statements from John Koskinen’s 8 January, 2025 Madison Rotary Club talk are true. Education topics begin about 48 minutes in.

Complete talk:

John Koskinen is Chief Economist at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

More on suburban enrollment growth

xlsx data

Kari Gensler Santistevan:

This report is prepared pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 118.51(15)(c), as amended in 2011 Wisconsin Act 114, which requires the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to: Annually submit a report to the governor and to the appropriate standing committees of the legislature under Wis. Stat. § 13.172(3).

The report under this paragraph shall include all of the following information:
• The number of pupils who applied to attend public school in a nonresident school district under the full-time open enrollment program;

• The number of applications received under the regular and alternative application procedures, and for the applications received under the alternative application procedure, the number of applications received under each of the criteria listed under the alternative application procedure;

• The number of applications denied and the bases for the denials;

• The number of pupils attending public school in a nonresident school district under the open enrollment program. The department shall specify, separately, the number of pupils attending public school in a nonresident school district whose applications were accepted under the regular application procedure and the alternative application procedure, and for the applications submitted under the alternative application procedures, the number of pupils attending under each of the criteria listed under the alternative application procedure.

The report covers school year 2023-24.

The report was prepared by Kari Gensler Santistevan, School Administration Consultant, with assistance from Bill Evans, IS Systems Development Services Specialist; Jennifer Demrow, School Administration Consultant; and Michael Bormett, Assistant Director, Parental Education Options Team. Data for the report was gathered and compiled through the Open Enrollment Application Log (OPAL), an online application and tracking system in use since the 2008-09 school year.

Much more on Open Enrollment, here.

Noah Carl:

Science, nominally the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, is at it again. In November, it published an editorial by Agustin Fuentes titled ‘Scientists as political advocates’. The gist is that scientists and scientific institutions need to be even more political than they already are.

Back in 2023, Fuentes wrote an editorial that claimed “being woke is just doing good 21st-century science”. And in 2021, he wrote one that described Charles Darwin as “an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices”. Indeed, the prolific Fuentes has penned no less than eight editorials for Science over the last four years – suggesting that the editors like what he’s selling.  

Returning to ‘Scientists as political advocates’, Fuentes begins by warning readers that science is “under attack”. Does he mean that it’s under attack from woke ideologues trying to bend science into a tool for promoting ‘diversity’? Or that it’s under attack from public health officials trying to shut down discussion over the harms of pandemic policies? Of course not. He means that it’s under attack from his political opponents.

Elizabeth Weiss:

I spoke of censorship in anthropology and archaeology — no longer are photos of skeletal remains allowed in many journals; museum exhibits are being shuttered; and professors are being prevented from showing students teaching materials.

Lukasz Olenjik:

Device fingerprinting involves collecting information about user devices, such as smartphones or computers, to create a unique identifier, often to track people or their activities as they browse around the web. This data may include IP addresses, browser user-agent strings, screen resolution, or even details like battery discharge rate. Fingerprinting is particularly concerning because it can be passive—requiring no user interaction. Data is collected without the user’s knowledge and linked to their device. Upon subsequent browsing, systems can recognize the same visitor, enabling ad tracking or uncovering private information, such as browsing habits.

This form of identification is neither transparent nor user-friendly. Users are often unaware it is happening, and when done without their consent, awareness, or other legal grounds, it breaches laws. Unlike cookies or other mechanisms, such identifiers cannot be easily “cleared,” making them especially invasive. Nevertheless, websites, advertising technologies, and others have continued to use them. Remarkably, large technology companies like Apple and Google once vowed not to engage in such practices. This commitment marked a major achievement for privacy, driven by advancements in privacy research and engineering. Large platforms even began competing to enhance user privacy, benefiting users’ welfare and reducing the risk of data misuse or leaks. This issue cannot simply be reduced to “Google does this, and the ICO critiques it.”

Asra Q. Nomani:

While hundreds of school district officials around the country are ringing alarm bells, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid has been silent this week about explosive news that cybercriminals hacked the “Student Information System” database managed by a global technology contractor, PowerSchool Holdings Inc., stealing highly sensitive student information, including names, addresses, grades, attendance, enrollment, parent names, Social Security numbers, and medical records, as well as teacher information.

FBI’s cybersecurity teams are investigating the hacking. According to accounts of the cyber-steal, PowerSchool, based in Folsom, Calif., paid a “ransom” to the hackers, who promised to delete the data. Technology experts worldwide have been scouring the Dark Web this past week to see if the guarantee holds true. Schools from Maine to California have been notifying their communities about the breach’s impact on their school districts.

The silence by the leaders at Fairfax County Public Schools raises many unanswered questions for parents, staff and community members and resurrects concerns about transparency in a school district with a massive $3.8 billion budget and salaries for executives on the superintendent’s team that run over $200,000. Fairfax County Public Schools officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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more

David Allen Green

This is why, for example, the most powerful corporation the world had then seen — the East India Company — was summarily dissolved by the British parliament in 1874. It is also why the Bell System of telecommunications companies was broken up by US antitrust law and policy in the 1980s. Companies can be very powerful — but there is always something stronger on which they depend for legal recognition.

Large companies therefore place great reliance on being able to influence public policy and lawmaking. This explains what Meta did, for instance, with the appointment of the pro-European former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg as vice-president of global affairs and communication. That was a good choice for a company seeking to constructively influence the formulation and implementation of EU policy.

As the surrender of Musk and X to the Brazilian courts shows, state power is likely to always ultimately win against the platforms if tested

Danielle DuCloss

“I work and reside in the community that everybody else does, and I think property taxes have increased at a rate that is unsustainable,” Ratzlaff said. “I just want to take a look and see if there’s anything we can do about that.”

During his 2020 Assembly campaign, Ratzlaff said he supports municipal levy limits on property tax revenue, according to a WisconsinEye interview at the time. He still holds that position, he said Thursday.

In that same 2020 interview, Ratzlaff said he backed having an independent group draw legislative district maps, rather than lawmakers themselves, as well as term limits for legislators.

Before serving as Dane County executive, Agard was a local and state politician for over a decade. Starting in 2020, Agard was a state senator for District 16, which includes parts of the Madison region, after serving eight years in the Assembly. She previously served on the County Board for two terms.

In campaign materials from the fall, Agard advocated for expanding affordable housing initiatives and access to behavioral health care. She backed building a county mental health facility, using opioid settlement funds to reduce addiction and establishing a regional transportation planning agency, which would require action from state lawmakers

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Madison is raising taxes and spending (and buildings) amidst declining enrollment .

Steve Hsu:

, comparable to the rest of the world combined: ~4x population base, individual students ~2x more likely to study STEM.

China vs. India: how human capital shaped two distinct economic paths

Between the 1910s and 2010, the education systems in China and India experienced remarkable growth, producing millions of skilled graduates and employing vast numbers of teachers each year. Educational spending also surged, rising from just 0.1–0.2% of gross national income in the early 20th century to 4–5% in the 21st century. However, beneath the surface of this shared expansion lie significant differences in the human capital accumulation and educational development paths, leading to divergent outcomes in inequality and economic growth.

Gideon Verdin

She believes being the first in her family to go to college will show the world that she is important and leave a powerful legacy for her family. She also credits her mother’s hard work and strength for inspiring her vision of success.

Wy’yana added, “Spelman’s model of ‘a choice to change the world’ was really embedded in me. Giving back and doing service has sparked my interest for a long time.” Wy’yana is also motivated by her love for her younger sisters. She wants to set a good example for them and show them that they can be anything they want to be.

Andrew Desiderio:

“If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people,” Gabbard said.

In private meetings, senators are questioning Gabbard about legislation she introduced in 2020 that would repeal Section 702.

However, Gabbard now appears to be walking that back, citing Fourth Amendment protections implemented since then to prevent the incidental collection of Americans’ data:

“My prior concerns about FISA were based on insufficient protections for civil liberties, particularly regarding the FBI’s misuse of warrantless search powers on American citizens. Significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues.”

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more.

Educhatter:

Teacher qualifications and shifts in Faculty of Education admissions policies once attracted little public attention. That all changed in November 2024 when the Canadian province of Manitoba made a fateful decision to remove minimum subject knowledge requirements from its admissions process. Leading Mathematics professors and subject specialists saw it as a ‘declaration of war’ against what remained of subject specialization in the preparation and certification of teachers.

Recent amendments to the Teaching Certificates and Qualifications Regulation by the Wab Kinew Government under The Education Administration Actstirred considerable public opposition.  University of Winnipeg Mathematics professor Anna Stokke and a vocal group mathematics professors objected to amendments which lifted subject-specific admissions qualifications and significantly reduced the subject-area expertise required for teacher certification.

Research Battleground – Mathematicians Shred Math Education Research Claims 

The educational controversy exploded into a firestorm when Mathematics Education professors came out in favour of relaxing subject knowledge requirements.  Dr. Martha Koch, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, claimed that teachers’ college admissions should be based upon “research” in a field known as the “Pedagogy of Math Knowledge.” Her brief in defense of the changes buttressed her claims with the familiar line “research shows” repeated 15 times in a commentary.

WILL

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against the Wauwatosa School District (WSD) for its plan to shut down the Wauwatosa STEM School, currently ranked the fifth-best elementary school in Wisconsin by U.S News and World Report. The District’s racially discriminatory plan also includes phasing out other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) programs because too many white students use the programs. In our complaint, WILL highlights a current WSD school board member, who will provide further evidence that WSD’s actions are racially motivated.  

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, declared, “Shutting down science and math programs because too many white students are in the program is despicable, and illegal. As we promised to do, WILL is taking every legal action available to reverse this damaging decision. If the Biden Administration does not open an investigation, we hope the new Trump Administration will.”  

WSD School Board Member, Michael Meier, stated, “Students and families deserve a high-quality education, which is why I am speaking out. The prolonged, arbitrary DEI-driven focus on racial composition has, in my view, undermined both education and safety, now culminating in the push to close the WSTEM school. I welcome a federal investigation and urge the public to join me in speaking out.” 

Quanta:

In June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would present a proof that one of the most famous numbers in mathematics — “zeta of 3,” or ζ(3), as mathematicians write it — could not be expressed as a fraction of two whole numbers. It was what mathematicians call “irrational.”

Conference attendees were skeptical. The Riemann zeta function is one of the most central functions in number theory, and mathematicians had been trying for centuries to prove the irrationality of ζ(3) — the number that the zeta function outputs when its input is 3. Apéry, who was 61, was not widely viewed as a top mathematician. He had the French equivalent of a hillbilly accent and a reputation as a provocateur. Many attendees, assuming Apéry was pulling an elaborate hoax, arrived ready to pay the prankster back in his own coin. As one mathematician later recounted, they “came to cause a ruckus.”

The lecture quickly descended into pandemonium. With little explanation, Apéry presented equation after equation, some involving impossible operations like dividing by zero. When asked where his formulas came from, he claimed, “They grow in my garden.” Mathematicians greeted his assertions with hoots of laughter, called out to friends across the room, and threw paper airplanes.

Peter Thiel:

The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.

It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein. But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects — Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles — gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure.

We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.” 

In that spirit, Morens and former chief US medical adviser Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania

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Mark Zuckerberg says the Biden admin called his employees and “screamed and cursed” at them to take down Covid/vaccine content. They wanted Meta to censor memes too.

When he pushed back, the Biden regime started investigating his companies.

“It was brutal.”

“They basically pushed us and said, ‘anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’”

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more.

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Izabella Kaminska

As I’ve been saying for months: Glasnost is coming. And glasnost = apocalpyse. I had not read this before I penned the intro to my newsletter this week (which is out this weekend and essentially makes a similar argument.)

Travis Hill:

Closely related to the agencies’ recent approach to digital assets is the problem of “debanking.”Over the past few years, there have been various accounts of individuals and businesses associated with the crypto industry losing access to bank accounts without explanation. This follows a long history of other types of customers experiencing the problem of debanking, including the politically disfavored business groups targeted by the original “Operation Choke Point,”¹¹ individuals associated with certain religious or political groups,¹² and many others.

Laura Shkylnik:

If you don’t know what Project Follow Through, this episode gives a great overview.

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Parents overestimate student achievement, underestimate spending

Related: Act 10

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

 taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?