The Economist:

ONE LETTER does not normally cause controversy, yet a single squiggle has set the Spanish-speaking chattering classes to nattering. A new textbook issued in Mexico seemed to bless a non-standard ending on second-person singular verbs in the past tense: dijistes (you said), with an extra “s”, rather than the standard dijiste, and so on with other verbs. The squabble is instructive, and well beyond the Hispanophone world.

For critics, the sin was twofold. First, the textbook “approved” a usage that, though widespread, is not the official form, which is to say approved by the Royal Spanish Academy and observed by most Spanish-speakers (especially in writing). The second misdeed was that Mexico’s education authorities, by acting alone, threatened the unity of the Spanish-speaking world.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reacted with his own hauteur, saying that critics were trying to tell ordinary people to “speak physics” rather than in their natural way. He even played, as is his wont, an indigenous-versus-European card, saying that the Spanish spoken in Mexico “has to do with the roots of ancient cultures”.

The Economist:

Yet, resilient as the growth record has been, there are shadows. The middle class has seen its post-tax incomes rise by less than those of both the poorest and the richest. A group of people have fallen into hard times. The share of prime-age American men who are not in work has been rising for years and is higher than in Britain, France and Germany. And life expectancy in America lags shamefully behind others in the rich world, mainly on account of too many younger people dying from drug overdoses and gun violence. Tackling such problems should be easier when the economy as a whole is growing. But America’s poisonous politics are no help.

In addition, the more that Americans think their economy is a problem in need of fixing, the more likely their politicians are to mess up the next 30 years. Although America’s openness brought prosperity for its firms and its consumers, both Mr Trump and Mr Biden have turned to protectionism and the politics of immigration have become toxic. Subsidies could boost investment in deprived areas in the short term, but risk dulling market incentives to innovate. In the long run they will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying. The rise of China and the need to fight climate change both confront America with fresh challenges. All the more reason, then, to remember what has powered its long and successful run.

America’s $800bn climate splurge is feeding a new lobbying ecosystem.

Craig Simpson:

Jeeves and Wooster books have been rewritten to remove prose by PG Wodehouse deemed “unacceptable” by publishers, the Telegraph can reveal.

Original passages in the comic novels have been purged or reworked for new editions issued by Penguin Random House.

Trigger warnings have also been added to revised editions telling would-be Wodehouse readers that his themes and characters may be “outdated”.

One warning states that the writer’s prose has been altered because it was judged to be “unacceptable” by Penguin, a publishing house which enlists the services of sensitivity readers.

The disclaimer printed on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank you, Jeeves states:  “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated.

“In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”

I had a strong feeling that the NYT’s military reporter, @David_Philipps, would end up deleting his tweet (or being told to delete it) given what a revealing admission he made. So I screen-shot it last night just in case. It’s actually an amazing and important confession: pic.twitter.com/XyjVmI6fgv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2023

Terrence Jeffrey:

The federal deficit topped $1 trillion in the first six months of fiscal 2023 (October through March), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

This was despite the fact that federal tax revenues in the first six months of this fiscal year were $2,048,196,000,000, which was the second-highest in the nation’s history (when compared to the inflation-adjusted numbers for the tax revenues collected in the first six months of previous fiscal years).

From February to March, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, the fiscal 2023 federal deficit increased by $378,077,000,000, climbing from $722,627,000,000 to $1,100,704,000,000.

Patrick Mcilheran

Among the winks and nudges offered by Janet Protasiewicz on her way to the Supreme Court was that Act 10, the Gov. Scott Walker labor reforms, are toast.

Fist holding different denominations of US currency against a blue background.
“I marched at the Capitol in protest of Act 10,” she said.

Would she appropriately sit out a relitigation?

“Maybe.”

Wink, wink.

Democrat-friendly media spelled out that this isn’t just about public-sector unions at issue in Act 10, but a raft of policies that includes “an anti-union right-to-work law,” as a New York Times columnist put it.

Only 7.1% of Wisconsin employees are union members nowadays. But given how progressives, soon in majority on the Supreme Court, apparently see it as a free-range editor of laws they don’t like, Wisconsinites’ legal ability to be uninterested in joining a union is endangered. So what are unions like?

Let’s look to the federal agency they more or less own, the Department of Labor, which has an online primer, “Unions 101.” Across the screen is the welcoming portrait of the labor secretary and a line of people — all brandishing fists. As everyone saw during the 2011 progressive freakout over Act 10, unions love fist imagery. The thug vibe isn’t a stereotype; it’s branding.

Notes and links on act 10.

Amy Washbush:

I’ve recently started volunteering during my kid’s elementary school lunch as a small way to help make the MMSD school meals program better. I help out at service with the kindergarten, first, and second grades. I’ve learned a lot already about what this program is really like and also what change will require.

First, I’ve corrected some of my own misconceptions:

• The quality of the food is generally pretty good, at least comparable to what I see served at my workplace’s cafe or from the to-go counter of a typical grocery store. I’ve been impressed by the salads and other fresh produce like carrots and cherry tomatoes. The hot food often looks less appetizing but I really believe this is about the packaging more than anything. Really, can any meal look good steamed up inside a plastic container.
• At least at our school, the lunch environment is fun, casual, and fairly calm, not chaotic. Kids eat and talk with their friends, and the school staff assigned to lunch help open packages and visit with them. I enjoy sitting down and having chats with kids in ways that I can’t if I’m helping out in the classroom.
• Kids have enough time to eat (again, at least at our school). Kids have about 20-25 minutes to eat their food and they don’t seem rushed. Of course, some eat more quickly than others, but I don’t see kids cramming food in their faces or complaining of not having enough time. (In other words: If you pack your kids’ lunch and some of it’s coming home untouched, it’s likely because they didn’t like it. And if you give them a sweet treat in their lunch, I guarantee you they’re eating that first!)

Tony Oreglia

The first category is introspective journaling which is inward focused. It is generally retrospective. It is characterised by flow — that is, writing continuously without a filter. Just getting the naturally occurring thoughts onto the page. The purpose is to increase clarity by untangling thought and emotions. This approach is fundamentally meditative in that it externalises mental activity.

One great example of introspective journaling is the Daily Morning Pages as described in the book, “The Artist’s Way”.

If you want to try this method:

Hannah Grossman:

“Physicians who provide GAC will face a greater burden due to constraints in certain states… work to criminalize GAC for adolescents,” the article stated. “Especially as certain states work to criminalize GAC for adolescents, there will be an increased flux of patients traveling to seek care in states with more open legislation.” 

It called for more clinics to be opened up with targeted knowledge on the gender-affirming model. They outlined several steps “to improve capacity for this patient population” since “there will be an increased flux of patients traveling to seek care in states with more open legislation.”

Zachary Steiber

Slavitt and other White House officials questioned during one meeting with Twitter why Berenson hadn’t been “kicked off” from the platform, a Twitter employee said in an internal message. Rob Flaherty, one of the officials, recently recalled Slavitt “expressing his view that Twitter was not enforcing its content guidelines with respect to Alex Berenson’s tweets, and that employees from Twitter disagreed with that view.”

Hacker News:

Theresa Machemer:

Dasia Taylor has juiced about three dozen beets in the last 18 months. The root vegetables, she’s found, provide the perfect dye for her invention: suture thread that changes color, from bright red to dark purple, when a surgical wound becomes infected.

The 17-year-old student at Iowa City West High School in Iowa City, Iowa, began working on the project in October 2019, after her chemistry teacher shared information about state-wide science fairs with the class. As she developed her sutures, she nabbed awards at several regional science fairs, before advancing to the national stage. This January, Taylor was named one of 40 finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the country’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.

As any science fair veteran knows, at the core of a successful project is a problem in need of solving. Taylor had read about sutures coated with a conductive material that can sense the status of a wound by changes in electrical resistance, and relay that information to the smartphones or computers of patients and doctors. While these “smart” sutures could help in the United States, the expensive tool might be less applicable to people in developing countries, where internet access and mobile technology is sometimes lacking. And yet the need is there; on average, 11 percent of surgical wounds develop an infection in low- and middle-incoming countries, according to the World Health Organization, compared to between 2 and 4 percent of surgeries in the U.S.

Joseph Workman, Paul T. von Hippel, Joseph Merry

It is widely believed that (1) children lose months of reading and math skills over summer vacation and that (2) inequality in skills grows much faster during summer than during school. Concerns have been raised about the replicability of evidence for these claims, but an impression may exist that nonreplicable findings are limited to older studies. After reviewing the 100-year history of nonreplicable results on summer learning, we compared three recent data sources (ECLS- K:2011, NWEA, and Renaissance) that tracked U.S. elementary students’ skills through school years and summers in the 2010s. Most patterns did not generalize beyond a single test. Summer losses looked substantial on some tests but not on others. Score gaps—between schools and students of different income levels, ethnicities, and genders—grew on some tests but not on others. The total variance of scores grew on some tests but not on others. On tests where gaps and variance grew, they did not consistently grow faster during summer than during school. Future research should demonstrate that a summer learning pattern replicates before drawing broad conclusions about learning or inequality.

NY Post:

Families could have used that money to send their kids to private schools, likely with better results.

New York’s nation-leading per-student outlays have long been off the rails, but began soaring wildly as early as 2016. 

Between then and 2022, they grew 46.9% — more than double inflation.

With funding bloated by $7 billion in DC pandemic aid, and already-declining enrollments plummeting even faster, fiscal year 2022 spending per student rose 15.2% over the year before.

Olivia Herken:

As time runs out on the use federal COVID-19 relief funding, Wisconsin school districts are in a peculiar spot: The funds have eased, but also complicated, districts’ financial positions.

The funds have been a lifeline for financially strapped schools, but they come with expiration dates. School districts have looming deadlines by which they have to use the money, and when the money runs out, districts may be barreling toward fiscal cliffs, trying to find ways to sustain staff and services with insufficient funds.

Public schools across Wisconsin received nearly $2.4 billion in three rounds of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER funds, which are meant to help schools recover and emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Holy shit: this NYT news article by @michaelcrowley has 2 gigantic, glaring factual errors in the first 3 paragraphs:

1) Snowden didn’t give the archive to WikiLeaks for publication, but rather to me and Laura Poitras.

2) The Merkel story didn’t come from the Snowden archive: https://t.co/NV8Oj3l0ty pic.twitter.com/9beBloZQZN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2023

Quinn Clark:

After he lost the Elmbrook School Board election by 0.3%, Gregg Eberhardt on Wednesday sought a recount, citing “potential irregularities or illegalities,” in his recount petition.

The Board of Canvassers of the School District of Elmbrook, the same people who counted the first time, will recount the votes Friday, April 14 at 9 a.m. at the district office at 3555 North Calhoun Road, Brookfield. The recount is open to the public, but can also be streamed live at www.elmbrookschools.org/live.

Eberhardt ran against Dr. Preetha Kurudiyara for the Area 3 seat. In the end, Kurudiyara garnered 9,847 votes (50.1%) to Eberhardt’s 9,799 (49.8%).

Matt Taibbi:

On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

Notes and links on the restrict act.

Jarrett Stepman:

Why should American taxpayers be on the hook to pay for a highly partisan and ideological media outlet?

That’s an important discussion to be had after Twitter last week slapped a “state affiliated media” tag on National Public Radio’s Twitter profile. The move was met with much anger and frothing.

“NPR and our member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide,” John Lansing, NPR’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable.”

Uh huh. So, what do the powerful have to say about this situation?

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierredefended NPR, saying that while she wouldn’t comment on the specific policy, “there’s no doubt of the independence of NPR’s journalists.”

“NPR journalists work digitally to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people,” she continued.

A government official gushing about a media outlet is such an excellent way to disabuse people of the notion that it’s connected to the state.

NPR literally said “Federal funding is essential to public radio” on their own website (now taken down).

What hypocrites! pic.twitter.com/kYAXW0zpyl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 12, 2023

Irene Loewenson, Geoff Ziezulewicz:

The annals of U.S. military valor feature scores of heroes who concealed part of their medical history to serve their country.

Consider President John F. Kennedy. As a young man, he suffered a host of painful, disqualifying physical ailments, such as back pain and ulcers, but leaned on his father’s connections to get around the required Navy medical exams.

Lt. Kennedy went on to command a patrol torpedo boat that a Japanese warship sheared in half during World War II, and he later received a Purple Heart and Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

In recent decades, the lies told to enlist haven’t approached those extremes.

Nonetheless, fudging medical histories has been a key step on many troops’ path from applicant to recruit, according to a group of active-duty military recruiters who spoke with Military Times for this story.

“What it takes to get in the Army is, quite frankly, a lot of fraud and perjury,” one recruiter said.

The military comic strip “Terminal Lance” in 2021 poked fun at lying to enlist. (Adapted, with permission, from Terminal Lance creator Maximilian Uriarte.) 

But this tacit tradition — technically a crime — largely stopped in 2022, the same year the military’s recruiting numbers fell precipitously and today’s recruiting crisis came to the fore.

That year, the Defense Department brought a new medical records platform, known as Military Health System Genesis, online at Military Entrance Processing Stations, where applicants are medically examined before they can sign up.

Shelby Kearns:

Americans’ faith in college has reached a ten-year low, according to a new poll from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and NORC.

The WSJ reported results from over 1,000 respondents on Mar. 31. Since 2013, The WSJ and NORC, a data and research center at the University of Chicago, have documented the dwindling percentage of Americans who think that college is worth its cost. In the latest poll, only 42 percent of respondents say that it is.

Crushing student loan debt, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and low graduation rates are cited by The WSJ’s report as possible reasons behind Americans’ pessimism.

Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University economist, told The WSJ that “[c]olleges have squandered a lot of good will by pushing a dogmatic left-wing religion.”

Florian Trame`r† Nicholas Carlini Daphne Ippolito Chiyuan Zhang‡ Matthew Jagielski‡ Milad Nasr Christopher A. Choquette-Choo Katherine Lee:

Groups of the same authors often publish papers together. Many times, there is a clear first author or last author, and then a blob of people who all contributed equally, or whose contributions are too varied and nuanced to offer up an obvious ordering. In this work, we present several methods for choosing an author order given these constraints.

Robert Pondisco:

A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension. And we might be further along in raising reading achievement, closing achievement gaps, and broadly improving education outcomes if we’d been listening to him for the last few decades.

I’ve described countless times how teaching fifth grade in a low-scoring New York City public school made me a Hirsch disciple and a Core Knowledge enthusiast. Hirsch’s work—and only Hirsch’s work—described uncannily what I saw every day in my South Bronx classroom: children who could decode written text but struggled with reading comprehension. 

My school’s staff developers, district consultants and coaches, ed school professors, and the literacy gurus they assigned us to read and study had different explanations for students’ reading struggles: Children were bored by required texts that didn’t reflect their interests and personal experiences. If we let them read what they wished, it would be more pleasurable and they’d spend more time at it. Classroom instruction was built around an all-purpose suite of reading “skills and strategies” that students could apply to any book. We were to “teach the child not the lesson,” make them fall in love with books and develop a “lifelong love of reading.” When students who appeared to be successful under this “child-centered” vision of literacy struggled on standardized tests, there was an answer for that, too: test anxiety and “inauthentic” assessments.

For more than four decades, Hirsch has responded to all this with a simple, cognitively unimpeachable, hiding-in-plain sight rejoinder: No, it’s background knowledge. Sophisticated language is a kind of shorthand resting on a body of common knowledge, cultural references, allusions, idioms, and context broadly shared among the literate. Writers and speakers make assumptions about what readers and listeners know. When those assumptions are correct, when everyone is operating with the same store of background knowledge, language comprehension seems fluid and effortless. When they are incorrect, confusion quickly creeps in until all meaning is lost. If we want every child to be literate and to participate fully in American life, we must ensure all have access to the broad body of knowledge that the literate take for granted.

Journal of Free Black Thought:

A Minnesota mother resists Liberated Ethnic Studies

Kofi Montzka

Editors’ note: There are two models of Ethnic Studies curricula. “Liberated Ethnic Studies” (sometimes called “Critical Ethnic Studies”) presents the experiences of various ethnic groups in the USA in terms of “oppression” and endorses “resistance” by way of far-left political activism. In contrast, “Constructive Ethnic Studies” (sometimes called “Inclusive Ethnic Studies”) presents the contributions and accomplishments of ethnic groups without shying away from racism and bigotry but also without advocating any specific ideology or practice as the only appropriate response to such challenges. (For more on these two models of Ethnic Studies, see our discussion here.)

The “liberated” model of Ethnic Studies is currently being considered for adoption in Minnesota. Earlier this year, two bills, HF 1502, authored by Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), and HF 1476, authored by Rep. Mary Kunesh (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), were introduced in Minnesota’s legislature. These bills would mandate Ethnic Studies in elementary schools and middle schools and as a condition for graduation from high school and set up an Ethnic Studies Working Group to devise an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. A third bill, HF 1269, proposed by Governor Tim Walz (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), would require Ethnic Studies to be integrated into existing K-12 courses or to be the subject of new courses.

All three bills define Ethnic Studies in identical language (see below). This language is taken, with minor adaptations, from a definition supplied to the MN Department of Education by the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition (MESC). MESC along with coalition member Education for Liberation Minnesota support these bills. Among other things, the latter organization publishes a resource for teaching police abolition in K-12, “Teaching Abolition in the Classroom.” 

With a steady drip of evidence showing the massive amount of uniformed and undercover agents as well as informants, DOJ pushing hard against entrapment defense. Here’s one filing in case of Mark Sahady: pic.twitter.com/FxPvbqSoix

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 12, 2023

Paul Caron:

Following up on yesterday’s post, U.S. News Releases Preview Of 2024 Law School Rankings: Top 14 And New Methodology:  Every year, U.S. News sends reputation ballots to three groups of recipients provided by law schools:

• Peer Assessment Score (25% of last year’s overall ranking): Law schools provide names of deans, deans of academic affairs, chairs of faculty appointments, and the most recently tenured faculty member.
• Lawyers and Judges Assessment Score (15% of last year’s overall ranking): Law schools provide names of ten law firm hiring partners, lawyers, and judges.
• 13 Legal Specialties (100% of each specialty ranking): Law schools provide names of faculty in each specialty area.

From my earlier post, U.S. News Provides Additional Information On Forthcoming Law School Rankings:

The WPost urges the Biden DOJ to find and punish the leaker. It’s always bizarre to watch journalistic outlets urge the state to imprison leakers, especially ones whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”™, all while admitting the docs reveal little:https://t.co/eFwlVgY2MY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2023

Clare Halloran, Claire E. Hug, Rebecca Jack & Emily Oster:

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption in schooling in the U.S., and student test scores showed dramatic declines by the end of the 2020-21 school year. We use state test score data to analyze patterns of test score recovery over the 2021-22 school year. On average, we find that 20% of test score losses are recovered in English language arts (ELA) by 2022, compared to 37% in math. These recovery rates do not significantly vary across demographic characteristics, baseline achievement rates, in-person schooling rates in the pandemic school year, or category-based measures of recovery funding allocations. We observe large state-level variation in recovery rates in ELA – from full recovery to further losses. This evidence suggests state-level factors play an important role in students’ academic recovery, but we are unable to isolate particular state factors. Future work should focus on this variation to facilitate a broader recovery effort.

Alison Young:

And yet in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.

The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Kawaoka contended it would be “irresponsible not to study” how the virus might evolve in nature. “Some people have argued that the risks of such studies – misuse and accidental release, for example – outweigh the benefits. I counter that H5N1 viruses circulating in nature already pose a threat,” he said at the time.

Yet these groundbreaking scientific feats set off a heated international debate over the ethics and safety of “gain of function” research. The controversy continues to this day.

Concerns about the safety of biological research have taken on heightened urgency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and growing acceptance of the possibility that it was caused by a lab accident in China. In February, it was revealed that analysts at the U.S. Department of Energy had joined the FBI in leaning toward a lab accident as the most likely source of the pandemic, though other U.S. intelligence agencies lean toward a natural origin or are undecided.

Jessica Clements & Kari Nixon:

No coffee. No seafood. No bicycles. No deli meat. No alcohol. Almost as soon as she sees the telling double lines, the pregnant woman in modern America is bombarded with new regulations for her body. The dynamic, ever-changing nature of pregnancy seems to induce a state of risk aversion that demonstrates a key argument of our book “Optimal Motherhood and Other Lies Facebook Told Us” quite well: In spaces where scientific evidence is incomplete or unclear, the default is to subject women to more — not fewer — restrictions.

This dynamic is the result of a complex braid of U.S. risk aversion, the legacy of the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood (more on that in a bit), and a neoliberal culture that reveres a reductive version of science that does not make room for complex, nuanced answers. Like the Cult of True Womanhood and its new transfiguration, what we call Optimal Motherhood, these restrictions have a history.

Beginning with the development of germ theory and bacteriology in the 1880s, Western society increasingly believed that if risks could be identified, they could by definition be avoided. The formula was deceptively simple for a society still rocked by post-Darwinian secularism and on the lookout for new modes of understanding and thriving in an often chaotic world. Although the Victorians of the 1880s did not yet have antibiotics or other effective cures for infectious disease, product advertisements in periodicals, often promoting a variety of antiseptic panaceas, spoke to the instantaneous development of a fantasy of a risk-free life. This fantasy (for it remains and will always be a fantasy) was only emboldened by ever-evolving Western medicine, which, as the century rolled over, began to develop cures only imagined in the 1880s.

Jenni Younes:

According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.

That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.

Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.

For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.

But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.

The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”

Vinay Prasad:

I know the pandemic is winding down when I see ‘science influencers,’ ‘debunkers’ and the‘misinformation police’ return to focusing on issues that match their skill set: debunking vitamins, supplements, cupping, homeopathy, electric fields and other clearly unproven and implausible medical interventions. 

Previously, John Horigan called these the ‘soft targets’. He drew a distinction between non-mainstream, biologically-implausible interventions promoted by random individuals on the internet (soft targets) and the unproven interventions that pervade traditional medicine, and are sold based on exaggerated or distorted data (e.g. stenting stable coronary disease, or the use of aortic balloon pumps, selenexor in combination with velcade and dex, etc. etc.). These are the hard targets. They constitute the larger, more pervasive and caustic misuse of medical spending, often involving insurers to reallocate society’s resources rather than personal spending choices.

Rutgers has to stop relying on low paid adjuncts to teach its undergrad, liberal arts classes. The majority of my son’s first two years of classes were taught by low wage, transient profs who would open complain about wages in the middle of class. https://t.co/a734bMdRRZ

— Laura McKenna (@laura11D) April 10, 2023

Cliff Stoll:

Two generations ago a standard uniform identified engineers: white shirt, narrow tie, pocket protector and slide rule. The shirt and tie evolved into a T-shirt sporting some software advertisement. The pocket protector has been replaced by a cell phone holster. And the slide rule has become an electronic calculator.

Take another look at that slide rule. Pull it out of the drawer you stashed it in 30 years ago or make one of your own [see box on next page]. You’ll see why it was once so valuable.

Before the 1970s the slide rule, or slipstick, was as common as the typewriter or the mimeograph machine. A few seconds of fiddling let scientists and engineers multiply, divide and find square and cube roots. With a bit more effort, techies could also compute ratios, inverses, sines, cosines and tangents.

Inscribed with a dozen or more function scales, the slide rule symbolized the mysteries of arcane science. Truth is, though, two scales did most of the work, as many technical jobs boiled down to multiplication and division. A pianist might play most of the ivories on the keyboard, but rarely did any engineer use all the scales on his (almost never her) slide rule.

Patrick Healy, Kristen Soltis Anderson and Adrian J. Rivera

Seniors play an outsize role in politics: On Jan. 20, 2025, Joe Biden will be 82 years old, and Donald Trump will be 78. More than half of current U.S. senators are 65 or older, and millions of seniors make their voices heard every election cycle. But despite these facts, we don’t hear enough directly from regular Americans 65 or older.

That’s why we invited 12 seniors, ages 71 to 88 and from several states, to tell us about what it’s like to be an older person in American society today. For an hour and a half, they discussed and argued about the promise of aging, the perils of ageism and their views on the direction of the country today (and whether it should be led by a man in his 80s or late 70s).

Though many of our participants pointed to their favorite decades in the past, there was also a general sense that the so-called golden years really are golden. “Freedom from worry, struggle — this is the best decade of my life,” said Eugene, 80, one of the participants. “People should look forward to the future,” said Francis, 83. “I’m just going to make memory after memory.”

The participants were split on how old is too old to run for and hold elected office. “I go for younger ones. Get those old ones out of there,” said Elizabeth, 82. “For me,” said Elaine, 83, “it depends on the person. It’s not the age. It’s where they come down on these issues.”

Asked whether politicians cared very much about the needs of Americans in their 70s and 80s, not a single participant thought politicians did. “They take one look at a senior and say, ‘He’s not producing a thing. He’s doing nothing good for the people.’ And it’s wrong. They just look at us like we’re numbers,” said Francis. “So they look at us as irrelevant, I guess is the word. That’s how I feel,” said Elaine. We hope this focus group — and your reading it — is a step toward combating that feeling of irrelevance.

Scott Girard

The public records request came from NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, who requested all emails from Dec. 19, 2021, through Dec. 19, 2022, that contained her name or references to an NBC15 reporter. The district released hundreds of records related to the request, but per open records law notified LeMonds that the complaint would be part of the release and allowed him time to challenge that.

He did so, with his attorney arguing that the October 2022 complaint and related documents are “technically” responsive to the request, but were “not, themselves, the subject of the request.” The filing further argued that releasing the documents “would almost certainly cause irreparable harm to him, his reputation, the public’s perception of him, his standing in the community, and within MMSD itself.”

The briefing also states that an investigation of the complaint by the district’s legal and human resources department found that the accusations were “without merit.”

Olivia Herken:

A meeting in which the Madison School Board was to discuss its open records policy was effectively held behind closed doors Monday after a problem with its livestream kept the public from being able to see it.

The meeting was scheduled for 5 p.m. Monday and was legally noticed as a virtual meeting, with only school board members attending in person. But when officials couldn’t get the public’s livestream for the meeting to start, they decided to proceed with the meeting anyway and post a recording of it later.

A recording of the meeting has since been posted on the board's YouTube page.

I'm about 15 minutes into it so far, and there is no video, just audio, and it's been silent for at least the last 10 minutes.

— Olivia Herken (@oherken) April 11, 2023

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Interesting to see how newbie journalists frame issues with US reading instruction:

“Reading Recovery may be like a keto diet: you get results, you get them fast, but you’re not building the fundamentals needed to make sustainable, long-term progress” https://t.co/bxImGrLViu

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) April 10, 2023

Anyone paying taxes should watch this carefully. “You are not in charge. You are not allowed to question. You don’t understand. Just keep paying your taxes. And trust your government.” Government should be descoped massively. https://t.co/PyC1T1Cw28

— Scott McNealy (@scottmcnealy) April 10, 2023

Scott Langford

Tennessee hasn’t just trained teachers, we’ve given them the right tools: curriculum.

Teacher training has become increasingly-popular as a means to bring the Science of Reading into classrooms, for good reason. Tennessee didn’t forget this; our Reading360 initiative trained 30,000 Tennessee teachers over the last two summers, and our teachers have raved about the experience.

However, training isn’t enough. If you simply tell teachers what needs to change without giving them the tools to do it, you become that coach that yells, “Run” or “Tackle” on the sidelines, without providing the plays and the playbook required for success.

By 2019, the “Best for All” initiative ensured that all districts now use high-quality ELA curriculum.  This has been a game-changer. Curriculum enables the changes we’ve asked teachers to make to be tangible and feasible. It is the proverbial playbook.

This is the cornerstone of our improvement, and the backbone for everything else that follows.

David Zweig:

The Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca, set amid a pastoral idyll of rolling fields, a pond, and dandelion-stippled meadows, is just a few minutes’ ride from Ithaca College and Cornell University. Serving more than 220 students from preschool through eighth grade, the school features classrooms bathed in natural light, populated with the offspring of professors, doctors, and lawyers. And since the fall of 2020 through today, those children must be masked during class and on the playground, and have been barred from speaking during lunch.

Like every other school in the country, this private school—which charges between $11,000 to $18,000 a year, depending on the student’s age—closed to in-person classes in the spring of 2020. That fall, around the time the local public schools brought kids back, so did EACMSI, but with a list of mitigations. Some were typical and required by the state, such as distancing and indoor masking. But others, at least after a while, were less common or not recommended by health authorities—specifically, outdoor masking and a ban on speaking during lunch.

Luke Burgis:

Everyone is fighting for “rights” and the freedom to make various choices, yet few people seem to believe that we actually have any.

All ideas are in some sense correlated. In other words, your idea about one thing—especially something as fundamental as whether creation is good, or whether humans have the ability to act freely, or other metaphysical stances like a belief in the dignity of all human life, regardless of merit—affect your ability to accept or even to grasp other ideas. 

Some ideas are more correlated than others. They tend to create a cascade effect of other ideas and beliefs. For instance: if you accepted the idea that you have smoked too long and that “the damage is already done, so there is no use in quitting”, your actions are going to look very different than someone who has not accepted that idea—someone who believes change and recovery is possible. Ideas matter.

Keith McNulty:

This is because their proof uses trigonometry.

Now why is that such a big deal? Well, many of our trigonometric identities and laws depend on the Pythagorean Theorem, and so a number of mathematicians have suggested that any proof of the theorem using trigonometry is circular logic. Put another way, they argue that using trigonometry to prove Pythagoras is basically using A to prove B, when A already depends on B. One strong proponent of this point of view was the mathematician Elisha Loomis, who published a book in 1927 full of non-trigonometric proofs of the theorem, and explicitly stating that trigonometric proofs were impossible.

However, this point of view has been increasingly questioned in recent decades, and a few trigonometric proofs of Pythagoras have made the rounds since then. Claims in the media that Johnson and Jackson’s proof is the first trigonometric proof of Pythagoras are overblown, but their proof could well be the most beautiful and simplest trigonometric proof we have seen to date, and is clearly the work of young, sharp minds uncomplicated by the years of deep research that characterise the work of many experienced mathematicians.

Fitchburg Star:

FREE Movie for Parents about Dyslexia. Hosted by Feller School at Fitchburg Library. Reading experts from various literacy organizations on-site to offer guidance, help and solutions for your child.

“Blame it on Gutenberg,” is a documentary produced by Black Pearl Productions for parents with children struggling to learn to read with or without a dyslexia diagnosis. An eye opening introduction into the systems and bureaucracy that families face when dealing with dyslexia, other learning challenges and unresponsive school districts. If your child is not reading at grade level, come and watch this free movie. If your child is guessing at words consistently, come and see this movie. Do not wait for your child to fail or fall behind. Meet reading experts from various literacy organizations that can support you and your child in the journey of learning to read, write and spell to help empower your child’s future.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s largest supporter is the CEO of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The former CEO of Microsoft and an Enron/hedge fund trader are the other two.
Really great piece about how Washington works.https://t.co/pLNbTyOuJa

— David Dayen (@ddayen) April 10, 2023

related:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

and:

Policymakers often come to us before they write bills. It’s very clear when our footprint is on those bills, because we give feedback—usually off the record—about what the impacts would be if they try to achieve something one way versus another.”

Anna Nawaz:

• Well, clearly not enough. And it is a time of unprecedented resources.There are lots of things we can debate in education, but we know high-dosage tutoring, whether it’s physically, virtually, hybrid, works well. What our children need now is more time. So, what is more time? Being tutored after school, on weekends, or summer school. Our children missed so much time during the pandemic.I think we’re in a sprint between April and August, April and September, the next four or five months, to close this gap as much as we can, so children can enter the next school year ready to be successful. It’s got to be a massive sense of urgency on this. It’s not something we can wait on or discuss or debate.We have to get to work, use those resources to help parents and help kids get where they need to be.
• Amna Nawaz:There are some folks who look at the way the money’s been spent, and they see there are tutoring programs available. There have been virtual help lines set up.And the uptake has been pretty low in a number of places.Secretary Spellings, when you just look at staffing shortages, right, recent numbers from the end of last year showed 45 percent of public schools were operating without a full teaching staff. So, what can parents be advocating for, when most of them don’t seem to be taking up the virtual learning or the help lines that are there right now, and teaching staff isn’t at capacity?

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

It turns out Stanford stationed administrators at Duncan’s talk to prevent students from disrupting it, per @vimalnyt. That tells us two things:

1) Stanford did not trust its own students to obey university policy.

2) Some officials at the event were specifically there to… pic.twitter.com/7oi0lZRELL

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 9, 2023

J Scott Turner:

How thoroughly has diversity, equity and inclusion penetrated the sciences? “To the core!” at least if the recent travails of the National Audubon Society are any indication. For over two years, a woke storm has roiled the Society over whether it should purge its namesake, John James Audubon, from its title. After a year-long review, the Society’s Board of Directors recently announced its decision: Audubon’s name will stay.

The Society’s CEO, Elizabeth Gray, defended the decision on the sensible grounds that, for whatever his faults, Audubon remains a pivotal figure in the history of science in our once young republic. His legacy includes establishing ornithology as the burgeoning field that it is today, which draws both on professional experts and passionate amateurs. The board concluded that the Society’s mission, and ornithology in general, would best be served by keeping his name and the tradition it represents, while honestly acknowledging the man and who he was. This was accompanied by a promise to devote $25 million to the Society’s efforts to expand DEIB(Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, to use the Society’s rendering). This has not mollified the cancel campaigners, of course. Threats to rename state affiliate chapters, to withhold results from the Society’s famed Christmas Bird Count, and other retaliatory measures remain hot topics on Twitter.

One might ask: isn’t this just a small quibble among prickly and persnickety birdwatchers, much ado about nothing? Perhaps. But sometimes small controversies can provide great insights because they allow more detailed scrutiny than would be possible with a larger problem.

The brief against Audubon includes the usual tropes. He owned slaves. He had doubts about the emancipation of slaves. He was a plagiarist and a fabulist. He harbored other impure thoughts. The counter-argument is also familiar: he was a man of his times (1785-1851). This idea, that one cannot judge people by future moral standards (was Audubon a transphobe?), and that we are all capable of making our own judgments on gleaning the good men do from the chaff they leave, carries no water for the cancel campaigners. To say it’s all or nothing is to miss the point: nothing can stand in the face of such absolutism.

Estes

The SpaceX Falcon 9 is the world’s first human-rated reusable launch vehicle. This two-stage rocket can lift payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits, or even to Mars. There’s nothing else like it in the world! And now, Estes and SpaceX have collaborated to create a highly accurate 1:100 scale flying model of the remarkable Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Dragon Crew spacecraft. Looks great on its custom display stand or soaring up to 300 feet on a recommended Estes engine.

Washington Monthly

We rank four-year schools (national universities, liberal arts colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and master’s universities) based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: social mobility, research, and providing opportunities for public service. We also rank Best Bang for the Buck colleges, which help non-wealthy students obtain marketable degrees at affordable prices. Click here to read our methodology. Click here to read our 2022 College Guide magazine issue.

Tim Rosenberger

Asserting that Stanford’s very small and very moderate right-of-center contingent is “far-right” is precisely the kind of irrational intolerance that erodes the fabric of our discourse.

Washington Post:  Stanford Should Work on Diversity, But Bad-Faith Arguments Don’t Help (Part 2), by Robert Doubek (University of Illinois):

Tess Winston’s April 5 Wednesday Opinion essayreminded me of an experience I had at Georgetown’s law school 50 years ago, after having served in Vietnam. Among the few opportunities to really learn how to function as a lawyer were legal “clinics,” in which students actually would appear in court. Having applied and interviewed for all, to my chagrin, I was rejected by all.

Years later, I was drinking with a friend of a friend, who happened to be a professor running one of the clinics. He confirmed that we Vietnam veterans were rejected outright as we all were presumed to be right-wing zealots who would use the clinic experience to become prosecutors.

Wall Street Journal, First, Depoliticize the Stanford Admissions Office:

The law dean is playing with Marquess of Queensberry rules against social revolutionaries.

In Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance, Gerard Baker was right to point out that Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach’s clarification in your pages (Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford) is at best a case of “sorry, not sorry,” and at worst a doubling down on her hypothesis that freedom of speech might not be worth defending if feelings are hurt in the process.

Scott Girard:

Seven years later, Bah had improved her writing and journalism skills enough to receive the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association’s “2023 Wisconsin Journalist of the Year” recognition and is now competing for the title of National High School Journalist of the Year through the national Journalism Education Association.

Bah recently spoke with the Cap Times about the award and her budding journalism career, as she hopes to pursue English, journalism or “something in that realm” at a to-be-determined college next year.

Stella Paul:

Stanford University’s reputation is in freefall as this once-revered university makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Recently, a mob of law school students shut down a conservative judge’s speech, screeching insults at him to the approval of a Diversity Dean and the disgust of the country. Then there’s the FTX fiasco, in which a Stanford-linked cryptocurrency company collapsed amidst lurid charges of fraud and money laundering. Victor’s Davis Hanson’s lament “What Happened to Stanford?” adds other disasters to the list, including the arrest of a Chinese agent and the disclosure of $64 million in Chinese donations.

✅ Have the Biden Admin ignore court rulings they dislike

✅ Censor opponents in collusion with US Security State and Big Tech

✅ Imprison their leading political opponents (Lock Him Up!)

✅ Bankrupt main opposition media outlet

✅ Fight authoritarianism and fascism https://t.co/Wk7HqtUrXl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 8, 2023

Amy Kazmin and Chris Giles:

“It’s a demographic crisis — we are going to lose a lot of people in the future,” Testa said, adding that the forecast assumed a recovery in fertility rates to 1.5 children per woman. “It’s a pretty rapid change.”

If the fertility rate failed to rebound and instead stayed at current low rates, the decline in the population size would be even more drastic, she warned.

Prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has repeatedly expressed concern about the low number of births in Italy, and the implications for the country’s prospects.

Malcolm and Simone Collins:

People underestimate how quickly this effect will be felt. South Korea currently has a total fertility rate of 0.81. For every 100 South Korean great-grandparents, there will be 6.6 great-grandkids. At the 0.7 fertility rate predicted in South Korea by 2024, that amounts to 4.3 great-grandkids. It’s as if we knew a disease would kill 94 percent of South Koreans in the next century.

People underrate how quickly this can become serious, once it is felt. As recently as the mid-1990s, South Korea had a birth rate of 1.7, which is close to the U.S.’s present rate. A fertility collapse takes around thirty years before it causes a population collapse, and once that happens, the collapse is inevitable. If 70 percent of a nation’s population is over age 50, and even though many of those people have almost half their lifespan left they are not going to be having any more kids.

Across the world, we see a similar phenomenon: countries explode in population as access to modern wealth expands, then drop off and begin to collapse as incomes rise and lifestyle modernization sets in. While many countries have yet to reach this crescendo, most are well on their way. But why is this happening?

Consider your personal social group. If you are like most in the developed world, around a third of your peers will have no kids and about a third will have two kids. If that group is to hover just above the repopulation rate, the final third must have over four kids each.

Italian abortion data

Veronique de Rugy:

• After championing billions of dollars in new green energy spending and subsidies, progressive politicians are realizing that regulatory inefficiencies are hindering energy and climate progress.
• Permitting under NEPA for instance takes nearly five years to complete which discourages private sector investment and hurts grid reliability and innovation.
• While public investments in this space are important, lawmakers can spend money more efficiently and stretch taxpayer dollars further by modernizing regulations such as NEPA.

SCOOP: University of Florida has created a radical DEI bureaucracy that promotes racial preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a 12-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains segregated scholarships that violate civil rights law.

🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 7, 2023

More, here.

Dhruv Mehrotra

The outlier cases include custom summonses that sought records from a youth soccer league in Texas; surveillance video from a major abortion provider in Illinois; student records from an elementary school in Georgia; health records from a major state university’s student health services; data from three boards of elections or election departments; and data from a Lutheran organization that provides refugees with humanitarian and housing support.

In at least two instances, agents at ICE used the custom summons to pressure news organizations to reveal information about their sources.

Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman:

The secret contract — which The New York Times is disclosing for the first time — violates the Biden administration’s public policy, and still appears to be active. The contract, reviewed by The Times, stated that the “United States government” would be the ultimate user of the tool, although it is unclear which government agency authorized the deal and might be using the spyware. It specifically allowed the government to test, evaluate, and even deploy the spyware against targets of its choice in Mexico.

Asked about the contract, White House officials said it was news to them.

“We are not aware of this contract, and any use of this product would be highly concerning,” said a senior administration official, responding on the basis of anonymity to address a national security issue.

Spokesmen for the White House and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to make any further comment, leaving unresolved questions: What intelligence or law enforcement officials knew about the contract when it was signed? Did any government agency direct the deployment of the technology? Could the administration be dealing with a rogue government contractor evading Mr. Biden’s own policy? And why did the contract specify Mexico?

Fabien Sanglard:

When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.

To be fair, history was still in the making and there was not much to write about. But the least I can say is that time has made it up to me. There are so many good books now. Reading them is a great source of joy.

Janet Adams:

“No matter how much they increase your pay, everything else is going up,” said Kristy Morrow, a coordinator for a hospital who lives in Big Spring, Texas. “I do fear that for the kids.”

Which of the following best describes your financial situation?
My finances are in better condition than I expected for this stage in my life
In worse condition than I expected
About where I expected

Ms. Morrow, 37, said she’s concerned her children will be worse off because deep divisions in America have left people unable to fix the country’s problems. The single mother of two young boys and an adult daughter, who earns about $45,000 a year, said she traded her Chevrolet Tahoe for a GMC Terrain to lower her gas costs and is teaching her boys the importance of spending money on needs, not wants.

The findings showed fresh anxiety about the strength of the job market, which was a rare point of economic optimism as recently as last year. More than half of respondents said it wouldn’t be easy to find another job with comparable pay and benefits. That was the highest level since 2010, according to NORC’s General Social Survey.

Recent economic data show the labor market is strong despite job-cut announcements from large technology companies. Employers added more than 800,000 jobs in the first two months of the year and the unemployment rate is trending near a half-century low. Available jobs exceed the number of unemployed Americans seeking work and a broad gauge of layoffs is holding at low levels.

Jenny Peek:

The hope is that the new curriculum will improve dismal reading scores across the district.

According to the 2021-2022 State Report Card, prepared by the Department of Instruction, only 39.5% of K-12 students in Madison schools were proficient or advanced in reading that school year. The district’s Black students fare worse. In 2021-2022 only 8.8% of Black students were proficient or advanced in reading.

Jackson says it will take three to five years to see results as far as state tests go.

In the meantime, the district will focus on making sure students are excited about their lessons and growing teachers’ confidence in the curriculum.

Briggs says building a district of successful readers is going to take the support of families and the community.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Chuck Ross:

SKDK chief executive Doug Thornell and firm partner Oren Shur met on Dec. 20 with Caitlin Meloski, a special assistant to the National Economic Council, which advises the president on economic policy.

While details of the meeting are unclear, it raised questions about the degree of influence TikTok and its representatives have on the Biden White House. TikTok hired SKDK within the past few months to provide “communications support” as it fights a push to ban the app because of concerns that the Chinese government could use the platform to spy on Americans. SKDK reportedly advised TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for a congressional hearing last month in which he downplayed concerns about China’s control of the social media platform.

SKDK’s arrangement with TikTok has come under scrutiny because of the consulting firm’s relationship with the Biden administration. Most of that scrutiny has focused on Anita Dunn, an SKDK founding partner and one of Biden’s top aides. Government watchdog groups worry that SKDK, which received millions of dollars from the Biden campaign in 2020, could use its political connections to gain access for its corporate clients. Dunn advised firms like Salesforce, AT&T, and Pfizer until she left SKDK last year.

Blaise Lucey:

The recent New Yorker article “The End of the English Major” first came to my attention on Twitter. The responses rapidly rallied to deny the thesis, but The New Yorker presents compelling numbers to back up the clickbait: 

From 2012 to 2020: 

• Tufts lost ~50% of humanities majors 

• Boston University lost 42% of humanities majors 
• Notre Dame lost 50% of humanities majors
• The study of English and history at the college-level dropped by 33% 
• More than 60% of Harvard’s class of 2020 planned to enter tech, finance, and consulting jobs 

It’s an anonymous interview subject, a “late-stage career English professor,” who drives a stake in the heart of the humanities when he tells author Nathan Heller: 

The age of Anglophilia is over… I don’t think reading novels is now the only way to have a broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that people face.

It is this assumption – that the study of novels must necessarily offer a solution to a problem and not just a process with its own rewards – that has effectively ended the English Major. Blame Gen Z. Just like previous generations of college students, they want to make a difference. This time around, though, paying tens of thousands of dollars to be taught how to interpret books is seen as a hobby with no attributable outcome, not a career. College, an investment, must produce capital and careers are where one finds that capital. Capital is power and power propels purpose.

In this new understanding of humanities, passion is privilege and numbers are the truth. As Heller notes, one of the most popular classes at Harvard is now introductory statistics: enrollment rose from 90 students in 2005 to 700+ today. If my math is correct, that marks a 677.78% increase. Wow, what a graph.

Samuel Bowman:

The widespread public deployment of large lan- guage models (LLMs) in recent months has prompted a wave of new attention and engage- ment from advocates, policymakers, and scholars from many fields. This attention is a timely re- sponse to the many urgent questions that this tech- nology raises, but it can sometimes miss important considerations. This paper surveys the evidence for eight potentially surprising such points:

Dan Shipper:

In 1894, a Boston-based astronomer named Percivel Lowell found intelligent life on Mars.

Looking through a telescope from his private observatory he observed dark straight lines running across the Martian surface. He believed these lines to be evidence of canals built by an advanced but struggling alien civilization trying to tap water from the polar ice caps. 

He spent years making intricate drawings of these lines, and his findings captured public imagination at the time. But you’ve never heard of him because he turned out to be dead wrong. 

In the 1960s, NASA’s Mariner missions captured high-resolution images of Mars, revealing that these “canals” were nothing more than an optical illusion caused by the distribution of craters on the planet’s surface. With the low resolution available to his telescope at the time, these craters looked to Lowell like straight lines which, through a chain of reasoning, he theorized to be canals built by intelligent life.

Lowell’s story shows that there are at least two important components to thinking: reasoning and knowledge. Knowledge without reasoning is inert—you can’t do anything with it. But reasoning without knowledge can turn into compelling, confident fabrication.

Public Domain Review:

What is the cause of these afflictions? The reason men “grow pale with poring over books”? Some of Tissot’s prescriptions are those that physicians still endorse to combat the ills of deskwork: frequent exercise, enough sleep, good ventilation, proper posture and hygiene, avoiding the “excesses of gluttony”. And others, while based on long outdated models of the mind, feel relevant in our era of “dopamine fasting” and “digital detoxes”. Much of Tissot’s essay treats the nerves like electrical wires carrying too much current, which become gradually calcified by literary amperage — a kind of downregulation of neurotransmitters avant la lettre. As such, it is not the physical act of reading, but the quality of reading material that poses a danger.

SILVANUS P. THOMPSON:

WHAT ONE FOOL CAN DO, ANOTHER CAN.

Gerard Baker:

Ninety-seven of the nation’s top 100 law firms employ Stanford graduates as partners; 92 have Stanford alums as attorneys. For 48 consecutive years Stanford graduates have clerked on the Supreme Court. Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many other top firms have employed a graduate as general counsel.

So my question to the senior partners of law firms, corporate chief executives, judges and others who will employ these privileged people is: Do you stand with Jenny Martinez or do you cower behind Tirien Steinbach? Do you want your institutions to be places where the law is respected as the authority that mediates our disputes is blindfolded or are you going to continue to connive at the transformation of the law into a tool of the new identity-class struggle? Are you going to keep facilitating the degradation of the most basic of our freedoms—speech—or will you begin the long struggle against the controlling zeitgeist of totalitarianism?

A brief primer for those who haven’t followed the latest outbreak of modern Maoism on our campuses:

BREAKING: The Biden Education Department just dropped new Title IX rules that bar schools that receive federal funding from enforcing policies that ban biological males from playing girl’s sports.https://t.co/3VdHJarPKc pic.twitter.com/DbOMioI5yL

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 6, 2023

Amazing:

NPR, in trying to argue it’s not-state affiliated, didn’t only cite the praise of the WH press secretary for its “journalism.”

It also cited this bullshit self-proclaimed “disinformation expert” who works in a program funded by the Pentagon:https://t.co/g0RxjlR8op pic.twitter.com/5mhZDLdux4

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 5, 2023

Another day, another round of blatantly false information peddled by "disinformation" experts. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting publishes financial statements itemizing the "state-funding" it receives and disperses to NPR. The money is literally appropriated by Congress https://t.co/YZyOuUxgJh pic.twitter.com/WPIuviYkYu

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 5, 2023

Henry Mace:

Experts urge schools and parents to take a non-judgmental approach. “This is a conversation that requires acting a bit like an anthropologist,” says Barker. “Ask genuinely open-ended questions, don’t pass judgment, and don’t interfere — at first.” His organisation has put together a list of tips on how to talk to kids about radical influencers. It recommends parents do not preach or censor, but instead ask what their kids like and don’t like about a particular character. Start with open questions — such as “How does listening to them make you feel?”. After building trust, you can dig deeper: “Do you think the women in your life would be hurt by that point of view?” Parents can also talk to children about the nature of social media, about the fact that images and videos are heavily staged and produced. Sometimes the message comes best from older peers. Greater Manchester’s “Social Switch” programme trains boys from Year 10 (aged 14 and 15) to run sessions with Year 7s (aged 11 and 12), with the message that men can be emotional and do not need to treat women as inferior.

Jon Marcus:

When Santos Enrique Camara arrived at Shoreline Community College in Washington State to study audio engineering, he quickly felt lost.

“It’s like a weird maze,” remembered Camara, who was 19 at the time and had finished high school with a 4.0 grade-point average. “You need help with your classes and financial aid? Well, here, take a number and run from office to office and see if you can figure it out.”

In high school, he said, “it’s like they’re all working to get you through.” But at a community college, “it’s all on you.”

Advocates for community colleges defend them as the underdogs of America’s higher education system, left to serve the students who need the most support but without the money required to provide it. Critics contend that this has become an excuse for poor success rates that are only getting worse and for the kind of faceless bureaucracies that ultimately prompted Camara to drop out after two semesters; he now works in a restaurant and plays in two bands.

“I seriously tried,” Camara said. “I gave it my all. But you’re sort of screwed from the get-go.”

Tiempo:

A team of military medical researchers in China says it has inserted a gene from tardigrades into human embryonic stem cells that has significantly increased their resistance to radiation.

According to the researchers, the success of this unprecedented experiment could lead to super-hardy soldiers who could survive nuclear attacks.

The water bear, also known as the tardigrade, is an eight-legged animal smaller than 1 millimeter and the most durable creature on Earth. Through years of scientific testing, it has survived -200 degrees Celsius, more than an hour in boiling water and after flying into space.

The water bear’s resistance comes in part from a gene that can generate shield-like proteins to protect its cells from radiation and other effects caused by the outside environment.

The Chinese team said they found a way to insert this gene into human DNA using CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing tool currently available in most biological laboratories.

NCLA:

Judge David C. Guaderrama of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas has granted Plaintiff Veronica Gonzalez’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s discriminatory evaluation process for the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. The New Civil Liberties Alliance brought Edgar Ulloa Lujan, Samar Ahmad, and Veronica Gonzalez v. U.S. Department of Education, et al. in opposition to the Department’s “native language penalty.” NCLA believes the rule unlawfully discriminates based on national origin, because it essentially disqualifies American citizens who immigrated here from non-English-speaking countries and children of such immigrants from receiving the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to conduct dissertation research in any country that speaks the language of their national heritage.

Judge Guaderrama held that “the Department likely acted outside its statutory authority,” so Ms. Gonzalez is likely to succeed on the merits of her statutory claim. The Court vacated the challenged regulation until the Department issues a revised rule, but it declined to reach the constitutional equal-protection issue in the case.

Daniel Menninger:

In an interview two weeks ago, as a banking panic was leaking out of California, Mr. Khudairy said the Saudi bank would “absolutely not” give more capital to on-the-bubble Credit Suisse bank. In hours, that Saudi “absolutely not” had Switzerland itself headed for collapse.

Suddenly, a bank panic that originated inside a navel-gazing boutique regional bank in Silicon Valley had jumped across the Atlantic to threaten one of the world’s 30 “global systemically important” banks. Switzerland’s national authorities quickly compelled its other major bank, the massive UBS, to swallow Credit Suisse.

Here’s another fellow who never listened to his mother: Donald Trump. One must posit that despite, or perhaps because of, his habit of saying whatever enters his mind, Mr. Trump did get elected president of the United States. While Mr. Trump himself regrets nothing, much of the country likely regrets his compulsion to tweet, during the chaotic afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

My speech at Hillsdale College outlining the strategy for “laying siege to the institutions”: https://t.co/F0WfVXVW5C

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 5, 2023

Sen. Ron Johnson to Janet Yellen:
“You are going to drive the debt to $50 Trillion? “

Yellen: “Yes, but…” pic.twitter.com/WFJqFYOAF8

— 0420 (@FlipCrypt) April 6, 2023

US debt clock.

Texas has released its list of approved phonics programs.

The good news: some respected products like @ReadingHorizons & @Amplify on the list.

List is rounded out by seldom-praised products, tho, with some real surprises.

Such as: Wonders, really? https://t.co/OILDABazhs

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) April 6, 2023

Lawrence Reed:

On this 90th anniversary of the seizure, it behooves us to recall the details of it, for multiple reasons: It ranks as one of the most notorious abuses of power in a decade when there were almost too many to count. It’s an example of bad policy imposed on the guiltless by the government that created the conditions it used to justify it. And the very fact of compliance, however minimal, is a scary testimony to how fragile freedom is in the middle of a crisis.

Suddenly on April 5, 1933, FDR told Americans—in the form of Executive Order 6102—that they had less than a month to hand over their gold coins, bullion and gold certificates or face up to ten years in prison or a fine of $10,000, or both. After May 1, private ownership and possession of these things would be as illegal as Demon Rum. After Prohibition was repealed later the same year, the sober man with gold in his pocket was the criminal while the staggering drunk was no more than a nuisance.

Just the news:

A federal judge is allowing to proceed a class-action suit by University of Delaware students against the school for abruptly moving their classes online early in the COVID-19 pandemic, setting a worrisome precedent for other colleges that took similar measures.

The suit seeks damages and restitution from the school.

3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation as a trial judge, knocked down every argument by the university, including that the plaintiffs don’t have standing and a class is not “ascertainable.”

The plaintiffs are claiming breach of implied contract and unjust enrichment.

The students argue that “what they got was worth less than what they paid for” in tuition when in-person classes were banned, Bibas wrote in a Friday ruling. They seek to certify a class of all undergraduates who paid tuition in the spring 2020 semester: at least 9,000 out of 17,000 total students. (Bibas says the university took in $160 million that semester.)

The university clearly caused “injury in fact” by “moving classes online. And I could redress that injury by awarding damages or ordering restitution,” Bibas wrote. The class can be certified because “enrollment and payment are verifiable facts,” and the university can track who paid “some amount of tuition” that semester.

It’s not credible for the university to claim “it is impossible to know who actually paid tuition” because the sought class excludes students with “full rides,” and even students who “paid with money from outside sources … were parties to a contract” it allegedly broke, he said.

Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac:

On the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, Randal Quran Reid was driving his white Jeep to his mother’s home outside Atlanta when he was pulled over on a busy highway. A police officer approached his vehicle and asked for his driver’s license. Mr. Reid had left it at home, but he volunteered his name. After asking Mr. Reid if he had any weapons, the officer told him to step out of the Jeep and handcuffed him with the help of two other officers who had arrived.

“What did I do?” Mr. Reid asked. The officer said he had two theft warrants out of Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish, a district on the outskirts of New Orleans. Mr. Reid was confused; he said he had never been to Louisiana.

Mr. Reid, a transportation analyst, was booked at the DeKalb County jail, to await extradition from Georgia to Louisiana. It took days to find out exactly what he was accused of: using stolen credit cards to buy designer purses.

“I’m locked up for something I have no clue about,” Mr. Reid, 29, said.

His parents made phone calls, hired lawyers and spent thousands of dollars to figure out why the police thought he was responsible for the crime, eventually discovering it was because Mr. Reid bore a resemblance to a suspect who had been recorded by a surveillance camera. The case eventually fell apart and the warrants were recalled, but only after Mr. Reid spent six days in jail and missed a week of work.

Paul Caron:

The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) announced today that the national mean scaled score for the February 2023 Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) was 131.1, a decrease of 1.5 points compared to the February 2022 mean of 132.6. …

NCBE Director of Assessment and Research Rosemary Reshetar, EdD, commented:   “[W]e believe that an increase in the number of likely repeat examinees compared to February 2022 is a partial reason for the decrease in the average score this year.”

However, the higher number of repeat test takers does not in itself fully account for the drop in the mean this February. “We saw a decrease in performance across all groups of examinees, and the decrease was the greatest (about two scaled score points) for likely first-time test takers. Research in K-12 and undergraduate settings clearly shows that the global COVID-19 pandemic had a negative effect on learning, and surveys of law students similarly suggest that those students who began law school in 2019–2020 would have been significantly impacted by pandemic-related educational disruptions,” said Reshetar.

Wall Street Journal:

The heroes in Nashville were the police, who were on the scene quickly. With great discipline and courage, they entered the building, ran toward the shots, and killed the attacker once she was cornered. Two have been identified as Officer Rex Engelbert and Officer Michael Collazo. A timeline posted by the Tennesseean says the attacker entered the elementary school at 10:11 a.m., shooting out the glass doors. A call to police came at 10:13.

By 10:23, officers were inside the school. They shot the attacker at 10:25. Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters that “someone took control and said, ‘Lets go, lets go.’” The department has released body camera footage that is harrowing.

Waiting to confront the attacker was the mistake last year in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed. “Three minutes after the subject entered,” the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety later testified, “there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract and neutralize the subject.”

The DEI industry has become a bizarre synthesis of political Marxism, boutique genders, false compassion, and New Age spiritualism.

The University of Florida recently invited Sandra—”she/they”—to lead a workshop on dismantling “capitalism,” “patriarchy,” and “whiteness.” pic.twitter.com/DrbcejKl4N

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 4, 2023

ChatGPT strikes again. A journalist contacted me to research her profile on @lexfridman. ChatGPT informed her that @_KarenHao and I were his top critics. It cited articles we’d written about him, gave links, and summaries. Only problem: it’s all false. Here’s what she sent me: pic.twitter.com/Qy2XS0Vvep

— Kate Crawford (@katecrawford) April 4, 2023

Olivia Herken:

Moore said there is a growing desire among parents and students for private high schools, but not enough options in the area, specifically for Impact’s younger students on the West Side of the Madison metropolitan area. In addition to Impact Christian’s high school options, other private high schools in the area include Edgewood and St. Ambrose Academy.

“Depending on your child, you might be interested in public or a charter option, but there are a lot of parents who have been asking about a private option,” he said.

“There just aren’t a lot of high school options,” Moore said. “Now, there are a lot of great high schools in Madison, but not every school is for every parent, and we offer distinctives at our Christian schools that aren’t possible in a public school, just in the same way that the facilities that most of the wonderful schools in Madison are far above what we can offer.”

The Verona Athletic Center already houses a number of businesses, including an Anytime Fitness, Burn Boot Camp, Aspire Therapy clinic and a ballet school. Sporting tournaments frequently are held in the building’s athletic facility.

Moore doesn’t expect the school to displace anyone in the building.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Tunku Varadarajan:

Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

Andrew Kerr:

ActBlue’s leadership is handsomely compensated. At least 11 employees raked in over $200,000 in 2021, tax forms show. The company hired its first black female CEO in January after its prior leader stepped down after a 14-year stint. The new ActBlue CEO, Regina Wallace-Jones, is the former mayor of East Palo Alto, Calif., and has also held executive positions at Facebook, Yahoo, Ebay, and Lendstreet.

ActBlue said Monday the layoffs were part of a “restructuring” effort to ensure it can best deliver a strategic fundraising advantage to Democrats. The union’s allegations of ActBlue financial difficulties come as somewhat of a shock, however. ActBlue is the predominant fundraising vehicle for the progressive movement, having raised nearly $12 billion for left-of-center groups and politicians at the local, state, and national levels since 2004. ActBlue charges a flat 3.95 percent fee on every dollar it raises, which has enabled the organization to accumulate a veritable boatload of cash as it solidified its monopoly in the progressive fundraising scene.

ActBlue reported sitting on a cash reserve of $68.7 million at the end of 2022, according to its latest available Federal Election Commission filing.

But that’s just half of the picture. ActBlue Technical Services, the nonprofit organization that manages ActBlue’s technology infrastructure, reported holding net assets of $92.8 million at the end of 2021, according to its latest available financial disclosure.

Scott Girard:

Badri Lankella wants to serve his community.

Right now, the computer engineer working with the state Department of Natural Resources believes the best way he can do that is running for Seat 6 on the Madison School Board.

“Every issue, I look at the details,” Lankella said. “I’m going to talk to everyone. I’m the collaborator, I’m going to talk to teachers, I’m going to talk to the union, I’m going to talk to the administration.”

Lankella faces challenger Blair Feltham in the April 4 election to succeed Christina Gomez Schmidt, who decided not to run for reelectionafter her first term on the board. Nicki Vander Meulen is running unopposed for a third term in Seat 7.

The election comes at a key time for the Madison Metropolitan School District. Whoever wins will be part of choosing the next superintendent and making difficult budgetary decisions amid the ongoing staffing shortage.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Olivia Herken:

“A lot has changed since September of 2021,” Stampfli told the Madison School Board at a work group meeting Monday.

The original mandate requires staff to have the primary series of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is either the first two doses of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or the single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but it has not been updated with any of the boosters that have been introduced and administered in the nearly two years since.

There is also an increased immunity against the virus throughout the community, Stampfli said, as well as changes in the vaccine process, including a plan unveiled by the Food and Drug Administration that COVID-19 boosters should be provided annually, like the flu shot.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health mandates….

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

David Blaska:

The Squire of Stately Blaska Manor did the Danny Thomas coffee spray Sunday morning. In that long-ago sitcom, originally called Make Room for Daddy, his missus would relate some catastrophe and the comedian, mid-sip at breakfast, would spray Maxwell House into the atmosphere. 

The Wisconsin State Journal, the state capital’s newspaper of record, Sunday 04-02-23 endorsed Blair Mosner Feltham for Madison school board. Over Badri Lankella for the seat being vacated by Christina Gomez Schmidt.

Blair Mosner Feltham. The same one who says: 
“Our schools are products of white supremacy.”

That is pure, unadulterated critical race theory. Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D’Angelo (responsible for “the second-worst book ever written,” according to the author of Woke Racism), reparations advocate Ta-Nehisi Coates, and UW-Madison’s Gloria Ladson-Billings — none could have said it better!

“[Schools] reinforce white supremacy and if we want to talk about how we make sure all students are thriving on our schools, we need to fundamentally change both the structure of our schools and the purposes of them.”— Blair Mosner Feltham, WSJ endorsee for Madison school board

The first major national conference dedicated wholly to Critical Race Theory was held in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 7-12, 1989. — "CRT: a brief history"

Scott Girard:

“The Joint Committee on Finance does not need to bring in Dr. Underly to hear more empty promises about how DPI wants to better serve our kids,” Born said. “Republicans are gathering feedback from families and local school district officials across the state and will craft a budget that supports our kids and gives teachers and schools the tools they need to improve our students’ educational outcomes.”

The office of JFC co-chair Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, did not respond to a request for comment Monday on the decision.

Republican leaders reacted to Evers’ budget request in February by suggesting it was a non-starter, and legislators would instead mostly write their own base budget to start from. While school districts put together their budgets for the 2023-24 school year, they are awaiting information from the state on how much they’ll be able to spend and how much aid they’ll receive.

Under the proposal from Evers and Underly, districts would see increased revenue limits, boosted funding for special education and mental health initiatives and free school breakfasts and lunches for all students.

On Monday, Underly said she has spoken to individual representatives and senators, but not the JFC as a whole about the budget. She suggested there will be wide-ranging “repercussions” if legislators fail to provide enough funding, especially after two years of no increase in the per-pupil revenue limit, which governs how much districts can receive through the combination of state aid and local property taxes.

“Joint Finance has had opportunities to provide our students with resources that they’ve needed for success, even in years without this incredible surplus boon,” Underly said. “There are no excuses, they need to do their job.”

In the prepared remarks Underly would have delivered with an invitation, she used two example Wisconsin districts to illustrate the common and distinct challenges districts face.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Girard:

Option A would use a curriculum developed by Savvas for both English language arts and Spanish and dual literacy programs at a cost of $1.17 million. Option B would use Open Up for English and Savvas for Spanish and dual literacy programs for $2.1 million.

Whichever is selected, the district will use one-time federal COVID-19 relief funds for the purchase. Implementation will begin ahead of the 2023-24 school year.

Option B would be more similar to what the board chose a year ago, with Open Up as the vendor for English language arts at elementary schools and a different vendor as the choice for multi-language programs. The consistency with Open Up from elementary to middle school was one favorable point for administrators in Option B, as it would make the fifth to sixth grade transition easier for students.

Jackson explained that in Option A, Savvas’ curriculum prioritizes consistency within school buildings, while Option B’s Open Up choice would move toward coherence across the district.

Either way, she stressed the differences between English programs and dual-language programs and that even if they choose to use a single vendor for both, the way those programs function will be unique to each other.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Emma Green:

Hillsdale College, a school in southern Michigan with roughly sixteen hundred students, was founded by abolitionist, Free Will Baptist preachers in 1844. Today, the college is known as a home for smart young conservatives who wish to engage seriously with the liberal arts. The Hillsdale education has several hallmarks: a devotion to the Western canon, an emphasis on primary sources over academic theory, and a focus on equipping students to be able, virtuous citizens. There is no department of women’s and gender studies, no concentrations on race and ethnicity. It’s a model of education that some scholars consider dangerously incomplete. It’s also a model that communities across the country are looking to adopt.

In the past two decades, Hillsdale has vastly expanded its influence, partly through its ties to Republican politics. The college has had a presence in Washington, D.C., for fifty years, and in 2010 it opened a second campus there, largely for graduate students, in a row of town houses across from the Heritage Foundation. The faculty includes Michael Anton, the former Trump Administration official known for his essay “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he wrote that voting for Donald Trump was the only way to save America from doom, and David Azerrad, a former Heritage Foundation director who has described America as being run on a system of “Black privilege.” In recent years, speakers at Hillsdale events have included Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, then a circuit-court judge. Thomas, whose wife, Virginia, once served on the Hillsdale Board of Trustees, has referred to the college as “a shining city on a hill.” Alumni have gone on to serve in powerful government positions: Kevin McCarthy’s former deputy chief of staff, three Supreme Court clerks from the last term, and speechwriters for the Trump Administration all attended Hillsdale.

The school welcomes conservative provocateurs—Dinesh D’Souza and Andy Ngo, among others—to speak at events, publishing some of the talks in Imprimis, a monthly digest of speeches. In 2021, Hillsdale tapped two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—an open letter that advocated against widespread lockdowns early in the pandemic—to help launch the Academy for Science and Freedom, “to combat the recent and widespread abuses of individual and academic freedom made in the name of science.”

Michael Shellenberger:

But then I learned that DiResta had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The journalist Matt Taibbi pointed me to the investigative research into the censorship industry by Mike Benz, a former State Department official in charge of cybersecurity. Benz had discovered a little-viewed video of her supervisor at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos, mentioning in an off-hand way that DiResta had previously “worked for the CIA.”

In her response to my criticism of her on Joe Rogan, DiResta acknowledged but then waved away her CIA connection. “My purported secret-agent double life was an undergraduate student fellowship at CIA, ending in 2004 — years prior to Twitter’s founding,” she wrote. “I’ve had no affiliation since.”

But DiResta’s acknowledgment of her connection to the CIA is significant, if only because she hid it for so long. DiResta’s LinkedIn includes her undergraduate education at Stony Brook University, graduating in 2004, and her job as a trader at Jane Street from October 2004 to May 2011, but does not mention her time at the CIA.

And, notably, the CIA describes its fellowships as covering precisely the issues in which DiResta is an expert. “As an Intelligence Analyst Intern for CIA, you will work on teams alongside full-time analysts, studying and evaluating information from all available sources—classified and unclassified—and then analyzing it to provide timely and objective assessments to customers such as the President, National Security Council, and other U.S. policymakers.”

Unlike DiResta, Stamos didn’t appear to believe that DiResta’s time working for the CIA was too trivial, or too far in the past, to bother mentioning. When Stamos introduced DiResta to a Stanford audience, he described her as having “worked for,” not merely “interned” with, the CIA.

Emily Yoffe:

When he was 14 years old, Caroline’s son got a pharmaceutical implant in his arm that was supposed to help relieve his psychological distress. It was a puberty blocker called Supprelin, and it would continuously release a drug for about the next two years that would arrest further sexual development. Caroline, 43, had been queasy about approving this, but she was assured by the psychologist at the The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital that this was what her son needed—that it was the standard treatment for young patients experiencing discomfort with their sex.

Instead of providing relief, Caroline told The Free Press, her son experienced a devastating decline in his mental and physical health after this intervention. Among the side effects of Supprelin, according to a handout from the Transgender Center, are “mood changes, and weight changes.” The manufacturer’s website also lists “depression, including rare reports of suicidal ideation and attempt.” 

Casey (not his real name) soon experienced all of these. Within a semester, Casey went from all As and Bs to a report card dotted with Ds and Fs. Many days he found it impossible to get out of bed. He missed so much school that it triggered an official meeting about his truancy that included a circuit court judge. He gained more than 30 pounds. 

Most alarmingly, during one therapy session about seven months after he started the blocker, he told the center’s psychologist that he was having suicidal thoughts. She recommended he be immediately checked into the psychiatric ward at Children’s Hospital. When he came out, he was taking several drugs for depression and anxiety. 

Caroline felt desperate and helpless, and she’d had enough. In June of 2022, she wrote an email to the clinic demanding immediate removal of the puberty blocker. The doctors in charge disagreed.

The Supprelin is still in Casey’s arm.

Mike Antonucci:

* “Seattle Public Schools lays off more staff, but spares teachers for now”

“Washington’s largest school district is facing a projected $131 million budget shortfall next year due to declining enrollment, rising labor costs, and heightened student needs in the wake of the pandemic.”

* “Jefferson Federation of Teachers: biggest concern is keeping teachers employed”

“The Jefferson Parish School Board could be closing eight of their schools due to declining enrollment.”

Ingrid Forsler and Carina Guyard

In recent years, excessive screen time has been widely discussed not least in relation to children and young people. Parents are advised to limit the amount of time their kids spend using digital devices, such as smartphones, tablets or computers, and there is a wide selection of apps that parents can use to monitor and manage their children’s screen time. The arguments against spending too much time in front of different screens include fear of addiction, depression and other medical conditions, but also an increasing focus on how excessive screen time and constant connection affect social and cognitive abilities. Compulsory engagement with online technologies is assumed to make individuals absent- minded, easily distracted and indifferent to whatever goes around in the physical environment (Blum- Ross & Livingstone 2016; Kardefelt-Winther 2017). The latter debate emanates from the assumption that people, especially children and adolescents, are unable to control their impulsive behavior in relation to digital media. This inability among young people to resist their smartphones, although it might have negative outcomes, has sometimes been referred to as a contemporary moral panic in the media debate (c.f. Malik 2019; Orben, Etchells & Przybylski 2018; Therrien 2018).

Moral panics often occur when a new media technology is introduced and the users of these new media show disapproved forms of behavior, such as passivity or aggression. Historically there have been panic campaigns over a wide range of so-called low culture; comic books, rock ‘n’ roll, video nasties, et cetera, that is believed to degenerate in particular the younger generation due to violent or vulgar content (Buckingham & Strandgaard Jensen 2012; Carlsson 2010; Drotner 1999; Critcher 2008). Increasingly, though, the concerns in relation to new media technologies focus specifically on the use of the media rather than with any particular content. As Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingstone (2016; 2018) has shown, the term “screen time” indicates a homogenization of media activities that does not take different practices or modes of engagement into account, but only considers the amount of time spent online (see also Kardefelt-Winther 2017: 14). Indeed, the evidence cited in reports about screen time is dominated by short-time, quantitative studies that do not consider the broader life contexts of children. Additionally, in line with previous moral panics, they tend to focus on risks rather than on the opportunities of new media practices (Blum-Ross & Livingstone 2016: 13; Kardefelt-Winther 2017: 10). Other more qualitative inclined studies on children and media use have responded to this imbalance by highlighting the particularities of different media forms and uses as well as how parents react differently to advices on screen time depending on socio-economic and cultural factors (e.g. Blum-Ross & Livingstone 2016; 2018; boyd & Hargittai 2013; Clark 2012; Lee 2013; Livingstone, et al 2015; Livingstone & Byrne 2018). In this chapter, we wish to contribute to this body of research by questioning the dominant perspective on the impacts of excessive screen time on young people.

Barbie Latza Nadeau

Italians who use English and other foreign words in official communications could face fines of up to €100,000 ($108,705) under new legislation introduced by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. 

Fabio Rampelli, a member of the lower chamber of deputies, introduced the legislation, which is supported by the prime minister. 

While the legislation encompasses all foreign languages, it is particularly geared at “Anglomania” or use of English words, which the draft states “demeans and mortifies” the Italian language, adding that it is even worse because the UK is no longer part of the EU. 

The bill, which has yet to go up for parliamentary debate, requires anyone who holds an office in public administration to have “written and oral knowledge and mastery of the Italian language.” It also prohibits use of English in official documentation, including “acronyms and names” of job roles in companies operating in the country.

Roger Kimball:

That’s the way things are in totalitarian societies. No jokes allowed, especially not jokes told at the expense of the regime.

Thus it is that North Korea banned sarcasm and irony. 

Poor Ludvik suffered for his joke. But he got off easy compared to Douglass Mackey, a social media “influencer” who wrote under the pen name “Ricky Vaughn.” 

During the 2016 election cycle, Mackey/Vaughn posted a funny meme urging Hillary voters to “avoid the line and vote from home” by texting “Hillary” to a certain number. 

Who would be stupid enough to fall for such a joke? No one. But his satire was effective enough to get him banned from the pre-Elon Musk era Twitter. And the feds thought—or said they thought—that it was part of a “plot to disenfranchise black and women voters.” I guess that shows you what they think of black and women voters.