Sasha Stone

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” 
― John Steinbeck

I wish I could say I always had the moral clarity of someone like Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald. But for most of my life, I didn’t. I was a devoted Democrat, a good soldier for the Left. I went along with everything, even when I knew it was wrong, even when I knew I was lying, because I had convinced myself that winning meant more than just putting a president in power. 

I have been a willing participant in taking us to this desperate moment we now face, where both political parties seem crippled and bottlenecked, but only one of them has turned to corruption to stay in power. Only one of them has blocked any challengers to their preferred candidate. And unfortunately, it’s the one I chose to support. 

I supported a party that became corrupt over time, and in supporting them, I became corrupt too. If you’re wondering how seemingly respectable people like Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, Rob Reiner, Barbra Streisand, or Stephen King can go along with such obvious corruption of our trusted institutions, that’s why. They are who I used to be. 

They believe they are fighting the good fight, taking down the bad guy. But they’re wrong. They’re caught up in something they don’t fully understand because no one will tell them the truth, least of all the legacy press.

Who’s going to call them out on it? NPR? PBS? The New York Times? The Washington Post? MSNBC? Not a chance. They’re complicit. PBS’s Frontline just did a lengthy segment about the so-called “threat” to so-called “democracy.” But really, it’s a story as old as civilization itself: the powerful refusing to relinquish power.

Abbey Machtig and Dean Mosiman:

the district had to pull $28 million from its general education fund to cover the extra expenses.

The city, which has a growing population and a $405.4 million general fund operating budget for 2024, and the school district, which has a $591 million budget for the 2023-24 school year, both point to the state as a source of their financial struggles.

Closing the budget gap exclusively from the property tax through a referendum would add $284 to the city tax bill on the average home, now valued at $424,400, with a city bill of $3,017 for the current year. That would be an additional 3.7% rise for the average home and roughly 9% increase in the total city levy, according to Schmiedicke’s report.

To do so from revenue sources outside the property tax would require a 50% increase in each individual tax, fee and charge in these categories, it says. 

The school district is considering referendums in part to fund commitments it has made to students and staff. Last year, the School Board approved an 8% wage increase for district employees, along with hourly pay bumps for custodial and trade staff. Additionally, when inflation and supply costs meant 2020 referendum construction projects went over budget, the district had to pull $28 million from its general education fund to cover the extra expenses.

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More on Madison’s well funded K-12 system.

Accountability? A Milwaukee business leader says that it is time to vote no on their tax and $pending increase referendum. Madison business leaders: radio silence.

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Politics and the taxpayer funded DPI.

Wisconsin DPI Reading Curriculum Evaluation list

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“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.

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

Adam Townsend:

This post is a timeline of the Biden regime policies to move people on an immigration conveyer belt into the United States

January, 2021:

• President Biden terminated the National Emergency at the Southwest border (Proclamation 9844), thereby halting emergency construction of a border wall.
• President Biden issued an Executive Order (EO) further entrenching the unlawful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. With his action, President Biden directed the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Attorney General, “to preserve and fortify DACA”, signaling to illegal aliens that his Administration supports amnesty and that illegal aliens need not fear coming to the U.S. or worry about immigration enforcement.
• President Biden unveiled the U.S. Citizenship Act, which would provide amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in the U.S., demonstrating intent to reward illegal border crossers with a path to citizenship.
• President Biden revoked Trump-era Executive Order that was designed to ensure there was meaningful enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.
• The Administration issued an Executive action ending limitations and restrictions against immigration from certain countries associated with terrorism.
• The Biden Administration announced a 100-day moratorium on deportations and immigration enforcement, effectively providing amnesty to criminal and other removable aliens and sending the signal the Biden Administration would not enforce the law. The Administration also announced interim immigration enforcement guidelines that signaled to illegal aliens that they do not have to worry about the possibility of deportation.

Eleanor Pringle:

Among the illustrious nameplates adorning the offices of Ivy League business schools is one Joao Gomes. A Wharton Business School finance professor, Gomes is issuing a warning cry many of his peers so far have chosen to ignore: America’s burgeoning public debt mountain. 

Professor Gomes is what some might call up-and-coming: He added the University of Pennsylvania’s Marshall Blume Prize to his CV in 2018 and was appointed senior vice dean of research in 2021. 

But the fresh-faced expert isn’t afraid to step away from the pack if it means pushing presidential hopefuls for some answers. Gomes admits he’s “probably” more worried than his colleagues about government debt, but refuses to stay silent on a broiling issue he believes will throw the global economy into disarray. 

Gomes predicts America’s $34 trillion debt burden may upset the world’s financial markets as early as next year—should a president-elect announce a raft of expensive policies.

Beanie Geoghegan

Teaching is a profession. As with any profession, it is sometimes necessary to hone or fine-tune the skills that improve performance, or productivity. But the question remains: why do so many school districts patronize and condescend to teachers by requiring them to participate in “professional development” sessions that not only don’t help them become more effective teachers, but are demeaning to their intelligence, experience, and education level? 

When DEI Hijacks Professional Development 

For instance, this February during Black History Month, some districts opted to focus on divisive ideologies and agendas rather than offering professional development highlighting the fantastic contributions, achievements, and successes of so many Black Americans over the years. In the largest district in Kentucky- Jefferson County- teachers were required to participate in an “Implicit Bias Training” designed by Millennium Learning Concepts. The training titled,  “A Walk in My Shoes” is a four-hour series of lessons “that will raise awareness, provoke thought, and encourage action around implicit bias.” Every teacher must also submit a Racial Equity Improvement Plan to the administration following the training. 

Katya Hoyer

I learnt that new Social Democratic President Friedrich Ebert was well aware of this dilemma and gave them all the option to retire with full pensions. Few took him up on the offer. Instead, this body of conservative judges began to serve in a system whose laws it often despised. Statistics of convictions reveal the inherent sympathy towards those who sought to undermine democracy from the right with extremists like Hitler receiving much lighter sentences than socialists and communists on the left. 

Düwell concluded that the independence of the judiciary from politics (a principle Ebert respected) can be a dangerous thing. If Ebert had culled the body of judges appointed under Kaiser Wilhelm II and made commitment to parliamentary democracy a precondition for installing new people in their place, he argued, Germany could have saved itself and the world a lot of misery. 

Victor Davis Hanson:

How To Destroy the American Legal System

By either listening to testimonies or reading transcripts of the various 2024 Trump election-related court cases and testimonies, what we are left with is an epidemic of lies.

1) Hunter Biden’s current testimonies are contradicted by his own text messages, bank records, phone records, and testimonies of some of his associates. Anytime he is trapped in inconsistencies, he falls back on his addiction. Translated, that means we are sometimes supposed to believe he is a Yale-trained lawyer, experienced corporate grandee, and skilled negotiator, and thus carefully avoided involving his father in the family’s various schemes. And then again, sometimes when the evidence is damning and overwhelming, he simply cannot remember, or claims he was addled at the time in question due to his medical “addiction”.

2) In the Georgia Trump case, lawyers Terence Bradley, Nathan Wade, and Prosecutor Fani Willis all testified under oath to events that are contradicted by either prior other witness testimonies, or their own previous statements, or electronic phone records, and thus, to square the record, either have claimed amnesia, ignorance, or larger racist forces at work. Two of the three are leading the effort to indict a former president and current leading candidate for the presidency on a racketeering charge never before used in a Georgia election interference case, and to be tried by prosecutors who have either zero experience in felony criminal cases or no experience in racketeering cases or both.

Wall Street Journal:

Can government tell Big Tech companies how to edit content and police their platforms? That’s the question before the Supreme Court on Monday in two cases with major First Amendment implications (Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton).

NetChoice, a tech industry group, is challenging Texas and Florida laws that seek to prevent social-media platforms from silencing conservatives. Republicans are rightly frustrated by censorship that often tilts against conservatives, including us. But the solution to business censorship of conservatives isn’t government censorship of business.

***
The Florida law bans large social-media platforms from removing the accounts of political candidates, or suppressing posts by or about them. Platforms also can’t take “any action to censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast,” and they must apply their standards “in a consistent manner” among their users.

Lessig:

The idea that any state judge could declare a presidential candidate an “insurrectionist,” and thereby exclude him or her from the ballot, is wrong. Obviously, there needs to be a regular procedure to make that determination, and obviously, there can’t be 51 different procedures in all the jurisdictions that send electoral votes to Congress. So, obviously, this is not a matter for the states; it is a matter for the federal government.

Naomi Martin:

In January, 10 months after embarking on the project, my reporting partner Mandy McLaren and I published our full series, “Lost in a World of Words.” It explored flawed reading instruction in Massachusetts and the harm it causes families. Among the facts we revealed: more than half of Massachusetts third graders don’t meet the state’s proficiency benchmark for reading. Almost half the state’s school districts used reading curriculums last year that experts and the state itself deem “low quality.” The state’s wealthiest school districts are more likely to use low-quality curricula and often have larger reading achievement gaps than less affluent districts. And nearly 80% of teenagers who fall short of the state’s bar for 10th Grade English-Language Arts proficiency are from low-income families.

This was tough reporting and writing, but it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my nearly 15- year career. After all, as parents repeatedly told us, what’s the point of school if you can’t read?

We’ve already seen some impact: Gov. Maura Healey announced a five-year plan to improve reading instruction, starting with a $30 million budget proposed for next year to boost teacher training. And parents in some school districts we spotlighted are pushing with renewed vigor for changes to reading instruction, prompting officials to signal they’re taking these complaints more seriously now.

However, discerning the key elements of low-quality literacy instruction was much more complicated than I had expected. Here’s what I learned — along with some resources that you might find helpful in your work. But first: Deep breaths. There’s no need to feel intimidated or overwhelmed.

Josh Blackman:

Professor Shugerman speculates that the President and Vice President were not included on the list because the “Senate didn’t confirm those [two] offices.” The Sinecure Clause does not merely apply to those principal officers confirmed by the Senate. The text applies to those who hold “civil office under the Authority of the United States.” This category would also include inferior officers, who are not Senate confirmed, as well as appointed positions in Congress, such as the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate. Indeed, the House and Senate would have better records than Hamilton about House and Senate officers who drew compensation from the legislature. Moreover, the 1793 Hamilton document includes many more than a few appointees who were not confirmed by the Senate. Such appointees included positions entirely outside the Executive Branch, e.g., appointees in the legislature, such as the Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate, and clerks of the federal courts. Shugerman’s speculation is entirely disconnected from the text of the document he seeks to understand. 

Alan Borsuk:

The approach is best known for emphasizing phonics-based instruction, which teaches children the sounds of letters and how to put the sounds together into words. But when done right, it involves more than that — incorporating things such as developing vocabulary, comprehension skills and general knowledge.

More:What is phonics? Here’s a guide to reading terms parents should know

The approach differs from the “balanced literacy” approach widely used in recent decades, which generally downplayed sounding out letters. One well-known balanced literacy approach, called “three-cueing,” will be illegal in Wisconsin in all public schools, charter schools and private schools taking part in the state’s voucher program as of this fall.  

What curriculums will be recommended? 

Good question. The law created an Early Literacy Curriculum Council with nine members, generally educators from around the state, to make recommendations. The council had a big job and got behind schedule. But it recently recommended four curriculums, generally ones regarded favorably by prominent “science of reading” advocates.

The state Department of Public Instruction has been critical of aspects of the council’s work, including saying that council members didn’t stick strictly to the requirements of the new law. DPI took the council’s recommendations, deleted one, and added eight to come up with 11 curriculum choices that it said meet the law’s requirements.

Some literacy council members and other advocates have criticized the DPI list for including programs that are not as good as the ones the council recommended.  

Can you give examples?  

Sure. “Into Reading,” by HMH (also known as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is a popular program. It is one of three programs now being used by schools in New York City, the largest district in the country. And Milwaukee Public Schools has been using “Into Reading” for a couple years. It is considered to meet “science of reading” standards, but some experts regard other curriculums as better.

The literacy council did not include “Into Reading” on its list. The DPI included it. For one thing, including it could lead to saving districts, including MPS, large sums of money by not putting them under pressure to get new textbooks and other materials.    

And then there is “Bookworms.” This curriculum has some distinctive aspects, and some advocates, such as well-known curriculum analyst Karen Vaites of New York, regard it highly and say schools using it have had good results. The literacy council included “Bookworms” on its list. DPI did not and said the program did not meet all the standards of the new law.  

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Politics and the taxpayer funded DPI.

Wisconsin DPI Reading Curriculum Evaluation list

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“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.

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

Jill Underly:

“Wisconsin, everything is on the line. Our democracy and our civil rights. Our children’s future. Our character as a nation.”

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Media commentary.

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The Wisconsin DPI and our long term, disastrous reading results.

Much more on Jill Underly.

Kathleen Stock:

Is it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there were some classic stories served up this week for civilians to laugh at.

In the Daily Mail we read that policies at Glasgow University and Imperial College London now direct staff and students to avoid the phrase “the most qualified person should get the job” because this counts as a microaggression. Over in the US, yet another professor resplendent in beadwork and buckskin has admitted to falsely claiming possession of Native American ancestry. And an article just out in the Applied Linguistics Review provides a brand new excuse to lazy researchers: the requirement of a literature review in some disciplines imposes “particular configurations of privileged knowledge” amounting to an “enactment of symbolic violence”. Or, at least, that’s what students will be telling linguistics lecturers from now on.

The organisation that first uncovered the story about microaggressions is the Committee for Academic Freedom, newly formed by philosophy lecturer Edward Skidelsky to push back against institutional incursions on free inquiry. During drinks at the committee’s launch, where I was a guest speaker, more astonishing tales were aired. I heard of endocrinologists at one Russell Group institution being forced to disavow binary theories of biological sex; of male trans-identified dance students at a prestigious arts establishment insisting they be allowed to perform lead ballerina roles and be hoisted aloft during lifts; and of a reading list in one department with pronouns added for every cited author, including those of Osama Bin Laden (“He/Him”, in case you’re wondering). As I mingled, I added each new tale to my mental inventory of university batshittery, already creaking at the seams.

Dorothy Sayers:

Up to a certain point, and provided that the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. Too much specialisation is not a good thing. There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing—perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing—our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.

Without apology, then, I will begin. But since much that I have to say is highly controversial, it will be pleasant to start with a proposition with which, I feel confident, all teachers will cordially agree; and that is, that they all work much too hard and have far too many things to do. One has only to look at any school or examination syllabus to see that it is cluttered up with a great variety of exhausting subjects which they are called upon to teach, and the teaching of which sadly interferes with what every thoughtful mind will allow to be their proper duties, such as distributing milk, supervising meals, taking cloak-room duty, weighing and measuring pupils, keeping their eyes open for incipient mumps, measles and chicken-pox, making out lists, escorting parties round the Victoria and Albert Museum, filling up forms, interviewing parents, and devising end-of-term reports which shall combine a deep veneration for truth with a tender respect for the feelings of all concerned.

Upon these really important duties I will not enlarge. I propose only to deal with the subject of teaching, properly so-called. I want to inquire whether, amid all the multitudinous subjects which figure in the syllabuses, we are really teaching the right things in the right way; and whether, by teaching fewer things, differently, we might not succeed in “shedding the load” (as the fashionable phrase goes) and, at the same time, producing a better result.

This prospect need arouse neither hope nor alarm. It is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the Ministry of Education would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.

Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase—reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti, or whatever tag comes first to hand—I will ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and occasionally pop out to worry us.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to the University in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society. The stock argument in favour of postponing the school leavingage and prolonging the period of education generally is that there is now so much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages. This is partly true, but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjectsbut does that always mean that they are actually more learned and know more? That is the very point which we are going to consider

Sarah Shaffer:

Coming together around the question ​“What could we win together?” this broad cross section of Minnesota’s working class decided to go on the offensive, developing a set of guiding principles over months, made possible in turn by years of relationship building through street uprisings and overlapping crises.

Shortly after we spoke that day, Villanueva and her colleagues felt that collective power manifest: reaching a tentative agreement with their employers after months of bargaining. The strike they’d authorized to begin March 4 would not be necessary: they won a 17% increase in base pay, an improved healthcare plan, more paid time off, and their first-ever paid holidays on Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

The next day, the building security workers who were negotiating nearby on the same property, also reached an agreement, one that included pay raises of up to 27%, employer-paid 401Ks, and a Juneteenth paid holiday. 

This broad cross section of Minnesota’s working class decided to go on the offensive, developing a set of guiding principles over months, made possible in turn by years of relationship building through street uprisings and overlapping crises.

What is happening in the Twin Cities could be a powerful model for the working class everywhere: a movement ecosystem whose members show up in deep solidarity across differences, that thinks strategically and builds for the long term while maximizing its current power. That understands workers are also renters, neighbors, people who want a livable city and climate — and that they can exponentially amplify their power by acting together. 

“We have learned over and over again,” Local 26President Greg Nammacher explained, “when we try and push for justice in each of our own separate lanes, we are not as successful as if we push for justice together across our different organizations.” 

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Act 10.

The Milwaukee pension scandal and political implications.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Jemima Kelly:

But there is plenty to be positive about too. I don’t intend to list it all here, but just last year infant mortality hit a new record low, a breakthrough came in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, a cheap and effective malaria vaccine was approved and golden eagles reached record numbers in Scotland following a conservation project.

We might think we are being clever when we are being pessimistic, but research would suggest otherwise: a 2017 study of 28 countries by Ipsos Mori found that respondents who were least informed about various measures of human progress were also the most pessimistic about the future.

While 52 per cent of respondents overall wrongly believed extreme poverty was getting worse (about 100,000 people escape extreme poverty every day), those in poorer countries were both more knowledgeable about this and more optimistic about the future.

While some 41 per cent of Chinese respondents said they agreed that “the world is getting better”, only 4 per cent of Britons and 6 per cent of Americans agreed (the French were the most misérable, at just 3 per cent).

Elisabeth Pilar:

One of my students wrote his Bachelor thesis on East (and West) German criticism of the Marshall Plan and it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Throughout, East German media sought to present the MP as not only militarist and imperialist but also as a catastrophic failure

Christopher Plain:

By joining a program that was announced less than three months ago, the newly awarded partner companies will create a universal system that can equip existing drones with the capability to act autonomously and finish their mission even when the connection to their human operator has been lost.

Joe Barrett:

A dead horse and crash debris were still strewn along a country road when a woman in a black jacket approached a sheriff’s deputy and said she had been driving the SUV that struck an Amish buggy.

Deputies took her statement but grew suspicious. Petersen matched the witness description of the driver as a blond woman, but wasn’t she supposed to be wearing a red-and-black Hy-Vee shirt? And why was a second, similar-looking blond woman spotted at the crash site?

A deputy had turned on his digital recorder and left it running in the cab of his truck. What investigators ultimately concluded shocked people in this corner of southeastern Minnesota, an area of rolling farmland marked by the bluffs of the Mississippi River and the city of Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic.

Officials filed felony charges this month against Sarah Petersen—and her identical twin sister, Samantha. Authorities allege that the sisters hatched a plot to switch places and pretend Sarah had been driving during the deadly crash to spare Samantha, who was high on methamphetamine, from prison.

Patrick Mcilheran

And the unfortunate kid doesn’t get it because, while many of her ancestors were Native Americans, not enough of her Mohican and Menominee ancestry is from any one particular tribe to meet tribal rules for enrolled membership. So no debt-free degree deal for her, apparently.

The student and her family are blameless — one wishes her well in her studies — and the Mohican and the Menominee are free to say who’s a member or not. Those are private issues. 

Public policy enters when it’s the state, through its university, doing something that American law and most Wisconsinites don’t want: passing out favors on the basis of race. 

The law does not allow Wisconsin to give anyone a free ride based on racial identity such as being Native American. So instead, UW-Madison is basing the cost waiver on membership in one of 11 federally recognized Wisconsin tribes. 

Most would say it amounts to pretty much the same thing, a distinction without a difference. But there’s a legal reason they’re doing the end-around. 

by Jamais Cascio

“There are two critical uncertainties as we imagine 2040 scenarios:

Do citizens have the ability to see the role AI plays in their day-to-day lives, and, ideally, have the ability to make choices about its use?
Does the AI have the capacity to recognize how its actions could lead to violations of law and human rights and refuse to carry out those actions, even if given a direct instruction?
“In other words, can humans say ‘no’ to AI, and can AI say ‘no’ to humans? Note that the existence of AIs that say ‘no’ does not depend upon the presence of AGI; a non-sapient autonomous system that can extrapolate likely outcomes from current instructions and current context could well identify results that would be illegal (or even unethical).

A world in which most people can’t control or understand how AI affects their lives and the AI itself cannot evaluate the legality or ethics of the consequences of its processes is unlikely to be one that is happy for more than a small number of people. I don’t believe that AI will lead to a cataclysm on its own; any AI apocalypse that might come about will be the probably-unintended consequence of the short-term decisions and greed of its operators.

“It’s uncertain whether people would intentionally program AIs to refuse instructions without regulatory or legal pressure, however; it likely requires as a catalyst some awful event that could have been avoided had AIs been able to refuse illegal orders.

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As ever, it is up to us.

Alex Newman:

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

Mark Tapscott:

Officials from the National Science Foundation tried to conceal the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on research and development for artificial intelligence tools used to censor political speech and influence the outcome of elections, according to a new congressional report.

The report looking into the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that critics claim shows federal officials—especially at the FBI and the CIA—are creating a “censorship-industrial complex” to monitor American public expression and suppress speech disfavored by the government.

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Gemini’s result when Cynical Publius asked it to “create images of Henry Ford.”

When DEI merges with AI, the post-truth dystopia will become impossible to escape.

Andrew Sullivan:

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free,” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

It’s not as if James Damore didn’t warn us.

Remember Damore? He was the doe-eyed Silicon Valley nerd who dared to offer a critique of DEI at Google back in the summer of 2017. When a diversity program solicited feedback over the question of why 50 percent of Google’s engineers were not women, as social justice would surely mandate, he wrote a modest memo. He accepted that sexism had a part to play, and should be countered. But then:

Chris Bray:

The  lawyer and former congressman Clement Vallandigham was arrested by soldiers and tried by a military court for (among other things) calling Abraham Lincoln a tyrannical king who had usurped power by unilaterally suspending the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War.

The administration of Woodrow Wilson shut down dozens of newspapers and magazines for criticizing American participation in World War I and questioning the use of conscription, while the socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were prosecuted for distributing leaflets that encouraged men to resist the draft.

From time to time throughout our history, the federal government arrests people for saying things the government doesn’t like. It’s a tradition, like beer luge or bad cover bands.

Steve Baker is about to get the Late Federalist shaming parade for covering the January 6 protest as an independent journalist. As he recently wrote, his arrest on Friday is being stage-managed for optics: “The prosecutor informed my attorney that I am to arrive at the @FBI field office wearing ‘shorts and sandals. …’ Rather than issuing a simple order to appear, they seem to feel the need to give me a dose of the personal humiliation treatment.”

Jill Tucker:

District officials have concluded that San Francisco has more public schools than it needs and if all goes as planned, there will be fewer by the fall of 2025, they told the Chronicle.

What parents and educators have long feared is now being said out loud: Schools are going to close.

San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Matt Wayne outlined his plan for school closures at the annual school planning summit Saturday, but spoke to the Chronicle in advance to explain his reasoning and what will happen in the coming months. 

Peter J. Boettke:

The scholarly world celebrated Adam Smith’s 300th birthday throughout 2023. This article attempts to lay out the case on why we should still be reading Adam Smith today. The argument isn’t because we want to honor the founder of a scientific discipline. But, instead, it argues that Smith’s work is still relevant for our contemporary conversations in economic science, political economy and social philosophy. 

Keywords: Adam Smith, History of Economic Thought, Political Economy, Social Philosophy

Jean Mackenzie:

Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life. 

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year. 

Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72. 

This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1. 

If this trend continues, Korea’s population is estimated to halve by the year 2100. 

Joanne Jacobs:

Most never catch up. The vast majority who start in non-college-level jobs “remain underemployed a decade later,” according to Talent Disrupted, a study by Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Education Foundation. Five years after graduation, 88 percent of underemployed graduates are in jobs that require only a high school diploma or less, such as office support, retail sales, food service and construction.

“Getting stuck early on in such jobs can ripple across a lifetime of earnings, since the premium from a college degree multiplies over the span of a person’s career,” write Fuhrmans and Ellis.

Wall Street Silver:

The US national debt is $34.471 trillion and rising $1 trillion every 100 days

David Blaska:

The great coffee shop debate in greater Madison is this: Does Miriam Potter Carre want to go to a jury trial to decide whether she was complicit in the murder of her adoptive parents?

The parents’ natural children, Ezra and Jonah Carre, are suing to prevent Miriam from collecting any of their inheritance. They claim Miriam, with her boyfriend Khari Sanford, planned to burglarize her parents’ home — or worse, kill them — four years ago this month. At the least, according to the theory, a burglary-only plan led to their parents’ death; ergo, she should not benefit from the will. Probate Judge Diane Schlipper ordered the dispute go to trial “because a jury could believe that Miriam conspired in the killing of Robin and Beth.”

Jill Tucker

After two years and $34 million trying to make a disastrous payroll system work, San Francisco school officials are giving up and are ready to pay another $5.6 million to start over with another company.

The EMPower payroll system has caused chaos since it was launched in January 2022, resulting in error-filled paychecks — if teachers and other staff were paid at all. The problems filtered into health and retirement benefits, leaving some employees temporarily without medical coverage and others without payments into pensions.

In one case, a principal wrote a personal check for $4,500 to help a teacher cover rent until she was paid.

Joanna Spencer-Segal

But the pattern holds true across the district. No matter the subject (reading or math), no matter the demographic, test scores have fallen continuously since the fall of 2019, with really significant declines happening in the past year. 6/12

Culturally, academic achievement has been devalued at the elementary level. 11/12

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More.

Elaine Chen:

Obesity rates grew particularly fast among children and teens, quadrupling from 1990 to 2022, the latest year the analysis looked at, while rates among adults more than doubled. That comes to 159 million children and teens with obesity, and 879 million adults, according to the study, published Thursday in the Lancet and conducted by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, a group of researchers around the world studying noncommunicable diseases.

Obesity is flaring in low- and middle-income countries, the study found. Some of the biggest increases in youth obesity rates occurred in Polynesia and Micronesia and the Caribbean. Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa are also experiencing much more obesity than underweight, the study said.

Matt Taibbi:

After yesterday’s Racket story about misadventures with Google’s creepy new AI product, Gemini, I got a note about a Bloomberg story from earlier this week. From US Used AI to Help Find Middle East Targets for Airstrikes:

The US used artificial intelligence to identify targets hit by air strikes in the Middle East this month, a defense official said, revealing growing military use of the technology for combat… Machine learning algorithms that can teach themselves to identify objects helped to narrow down targets for more than 85 US air strikes on Feb. 2…

The U.S. formally admitting to using AI to target human beings was a first of sorts, but Google’s decision to release a moronic image generator that mass-produces black Popes and Chinese founding fathers was the story that garnered the ink and outrage. The irony is the military tale is equally frightening, and related in unsettling ways:

Shaminder Dulai:

It’s not an overstatement to say his technology changed the world. We may look at our smartphones, turn on the TV, or use a webcam for virtual meetings. When we leave our homes, we may back a car out of a parking space with a backup camera, be seen by security cameras or be captured in the background of social media videos. A CMOS image sensor makes these devices possible in each of these instances.

The funny thing is, this father of modern photography didn’t even care much for the medium growing up.

“I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t say I was fascinated by it,” Fossum said about cameras and photography during his youth.

To put it into context, Fosum was born in October 1957 (the same year Sputnik was launched, but more on that later), and picture-taking was an expensive endeavor. He recalled his parents giving him permission to use the family’s Kodak Brownie to take a picture on rare occasions and then just one, saying things like, “Okay, today is Wednesday; you can take another picture.”

Sergiu Klanerman:

Lifting the Iron Curtain from academia won’t be easy. Then again, we have no choice.

In the wake of Harvard, Penn, and MIT’s congressional testimony debacle, followed by the plagiarizing travails of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and her reluctant and ungracious resignation, it is broadly recognized that America’s elite universities are afflicted by a rapidly metastasizing cancer. Harvard, our oldest and most admired university, is now the poster child for this terrible affliction.

Calls for reform are widespread, with some pointing, correctly, to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as a uniquely destructive bureaucratic instrument that needs to be abolished. Specific measures to improve our campuses include reviving free speech, institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, and individual merit as the only admissible criteria of selection for hiring and promotion. Such reforms are all self-evident within the framework of the traditional telos of the university, which prizes uncompromising dedication to truth and the pursuit of wisdom. If these ideas are controversial at all, it is only because the old telos has been eroded by new demands made in the name of social justice, in which every visible disparity between groups has its origin in discrimination.

As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy. 

Steven Overly:

I’d point to the example of an Arizona man who was arrested because law enforcement saw that there were phones moving between a restaurant he owned on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexico. They figured out that there was a tunnel there and found a pretense to search his car and found drugs. [They] later got a search warrant to search his restaurant. So, we’ve seen it used in a wide variety of areas, including in situations where the government would otherwise need a warrant or some other sort of court order to get data on American citizens.

You compare to some degree the state of surveillance in China versus the U.S. You write that China wants its citizens to know that they’re being tracked, whereas in the U.S., “the success lies in the secrecy.” What did you mean by that?

That was a line that came in an email from a police officer in the United States who got access to a geolocation tool that allowed him to look at the movement of phones. And he was essentially talking about how great this tool was because it wasn’t widely, publicly known. The police could buy up your geolocation movements and look at them without a warrant. And so he was essentially saying that the success lies in the secrecy, that if people were to know that this was what the police department was doing, they would ditch their phones or they would not download certain apps.

John Robb:

Here’s a quick summary:

• Defeat. Three years ago, the US evacuated Afghanistan (it even featured people falling from the landing gear of departing planes), driven from the country by a ragtag militia it had spent $2.5 trillion ‘rebuilding.’ Now, the US attempt to punish Russia for interference in US elections by extending NATO membership to Ukraine has turned into a disaster. Ukraine, despite massive amounts of aid from the US and NATO, is on the verge of disastrous defeat. 
• Debasement. In a misguided attempt to defend Israel against genocide charges (that the vast majority of the world supports), the US is actively undermining the ICJ (International Court of Justice) and defunding the relief agencies it built to be the centerpiece of the post-WW2 rules-based order. PS: a good ally would have prevented Israel from saying and doing the things it did to protect it from itself, not enable it.
• Delusion. The US southern border has collapsed, and the US government has found itself incapable of stopping it. Over ten million people from around the world (from China to India to Uzbekistan to Venezuela) have illegally entered the US over the last three years, with no end in sight.

The current US strategic collapse isn’t due to a lack of information, bureaucratic processes, funding, or physical capabilities. It was an inevitable outcome of the ongoing failure of national decision-making. More specifically, it is a failure of something in decision-making called ‘orientation.’ Let’s dig in.

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Unfortunately, rather than allow traditional US orientation to guide our actions in the new century, America was misled by those promoting flimsy theoretical constructs, false loyalties, and naive ideologies.

Rep. Thomas Massie:

Breanna Morello:

in just a few moments, journalist Steve Baker (@TPC4USA) will be turning himself in to the Dallas FBI field office.

He is being arrested for his coverage of January 6.

The charges are currently unknown.

I’ll be covering everything from inside the courtroom later today.

And:

JUST IN: A federal judge has found former CBS/Fox reporter Catherine Herridge in civil contempt of court, fining her $800 a day until she reveals the source of a story that is the subject of a defamation/leak lawsuit.

Deeper Dive:

and:

Germany was accused of a “flagrant abuse of intelligence” after revealing that British soldiers are supporting Ukrainian forces launching long-range Storm Shadow missiles…

And:

Those who pontificate about “threats to our democracy” should take a hard look at the threats to freedom of the press.

Mandy McLaren:

Under fire from parents who say the district’s reading curriculum fails its most vulnerable students, Winchester Public Schools will hire an outside evaluator to review its current literacy practices, Superintendent Frank Hackett said Tuesday night.

During a evening School Committee meeting, Hackett called the move a “critical” and “urgent” priority.

“This is really us acknowledging that we need to strengthen our early literacy program,” Hackett said.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is moving forward with the installation of a plaque in Van Hise Hall that would explain the legacy of the building’s namesake, Charles Van Hise, and his promotion of eugenics.

Eugenics is selective breeding, often by forced sterilization, to remove “undesirables” from society, such as people of color and those with disabilities.

The intent of the plaque is to spark a broader conversation about a relatively unknown and painful chapter in state history, and the university’s role in it, said Kacie Luccini Butcher, director of the UW-Madison Public History Project who conducted research on the topic.

Who was Charles Van Hise?

Van Hise received four degrees from UW-Madison, including the first Ph.D. degree granted by the university. He is the university’s longest serving leader, serving as president from 1903 until his death in 1918. During his tenure, UW-Madison established a graduate division, founded a medical school and increased its faculty from 200 to 750 professors.

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Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood) and eugenics.

Kay Hymowitz:

Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy, an astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis now afflicting adolescents, may cause a similar emotional meltdown in some corners of American culture. Shrier’s target is more expansive than it was in Irreversible Damage; she aims her fire at the therapeutic mindset that pervades not just the offices of psychologists and counsellors, but elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, best-seller lists, middle-class homes, and government agencies. It’s a pernicious development because a therapeutic mindset easily paralyzes kids’ natural defenses and resilience, hence the crisis we confront today. Assuming a Bad Therapy backlash comes, it is unlikely to be as heated as it was in the case of Irreversible Damage—therapists, who have the most to lose if Shrier’s analysis were to win out, are a more sedate crowd than trans activists—but one hopes that for the sake of the rising generation, any pushback won’t prevent people from heeding the warnings of this important book. 

Aaron Garth Smith, Christian Barnard And Jordan Campbell

Public education is grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. For starters, nationwide public school enrollment is down by over 1.2 million students compared with pre-pandemic levels, including losses exceeding 5% in New York, Oregon, and Mississippi. 

Research suggests that families are increasingly choosing homeschooling or private schools, with demographic factors—such as drops in school-age populations—also contributing to enrollment declines. Because states generally tie funding to student counts, this could have substantial effects on school district budgets.

Students also fell behind during COVID-19, with 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress results showing historic losses for 4th and 8th graders in both reading and math.

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Aaron Smith:

5. There isn’t a consistent relationship between education funding growth and student outcomes across states.

For example, New York had a substantial increase in per-student funding between 2002 and 2020—ranking first in the nation at 70.2% growth.

Despite the increased spending, New York’s NAEP scores were largely flat during that period, including declines in both 4th and 8th grade reading scores.

Richard Vedder:

A story in Inside Higher Ed last week revealed that two more Ivy League schools, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, have stoppedpublishing “dean’s lists” that recognize high levels of academic achievement. As one anonymous Penn alumnus put it, “The war against individual achievement continues unabated.” Other Ivies (e.g., Brown and Harvard) had already abandoned—or never really embraced—the concept of recognizing merit in this manner.

Why is this happening? As Inside Higher Ed interpreted it, “Some universities are working to address a culture of perfectionism on campus, where students feel pressured to earn the highest grades, participate in the most extracurriculars or land the most elite internships.”

Much of higher education is contemptuous of the values that produced American exceptionalism.Let’s stamp out excellence, the pernicious act of striving to do better, learning more, and becoming more productive students and citizens. In short, let’s show disdain for the attributes that made the United States the most prosperous nation in the world and attracted millions of Americans to its shores.

Additionally, if we reduce published indicators or even our knowledge of student success or potential, we can better disguise our efforts to get around the Supreme Court’s mandate, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that colleges stop employing blatant racial discrimination in admissions. This no doubt is a factor in many elite schools abandoning the SAT or ACT as a requirement for admission. (Kudos to Dartmouth and Yale, however, for recently restoring test requirements.) To some college administrators, ignorance is bliss.

Kara Arundel:

In 2018-19, the first year that Lori Webster was director of Mountain Mahogany Community School, the previous school year’s data showed only 32% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient in reading, she said.

To improve reading proficiency rates, the K-8 public charter school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “started very small,” Webster said. 

She hired Alexandra Wilcox, a parent at the school, as a reading interventionist, who became trained in using science of reading approaches, which explicitly teaches students the connections between letters and sounds. 

As Wilcox started using those approaches with the youngest students in grades K-2, other teachers became interested in the science of reading training. The school also switched its reading and writing curricula, altered its school schedule and changed instructional routines in classrooms — all to support the focus on improved literacy.

The efforts are producing results. In 2022, 52% of students grades 3-8 tested proficient in reading. About 230 students attend the K-8 school.

Beanie Geoghegan:

Since the 2017-18 school year, homeschooling has increased exponentially in almost every state. The school closures during the pandemic served as a catalyst to entice more families to explore educating their children at home permanently. While school districts in large cities saw parents choosing homeschooling due to concerning contentin the curriculum, rural school districts experienced their own homeschool exodus. In Pulaski County, KY, a district with fewer than 7,800 students, there has been a 75 percent increase in homeschooling since 2017. The reasons for the decision vary, but the overarching message is that parents are reclaiming their roles in their children’s education. 

How Was Great Oaks Born? 

In Campbellsville- a little town in Kentucky with a population of just over 11,000 people- about 90 miles south of Louisville, the idea of homeschooling fell on fertile soil, grew strong roots, and is developing into a mighty oak tree. In fact, this homeschool co-op was born out of the concern two mothers had about their own children’s education. They aptly named the co-op “Acorns To Great Oaks,” which has grown to serve 50 families and 115 children across Green, Taylor, and Adair counties.