Mark Perry:

Based on data from the @AAMCtoday, the MCAT of the average black medical student (505.7/66th percentile) is one standard deviation below the average Asian (514.3/88th percentile) and white student (512.4/83rd percentile). Also, the GPA of the average black student (3.59) is below the average GPA of Asians (3.83) and whites (3.80) at an extremely statistically significant level.

Santiago Pliego:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

A few years ago, a software engineer at Google named James Damore published an internal memo—in response to a mandatory diversity training program he attended—titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”. 

Damore, by all conceivable metrics the kind of competent, curious engineer that tech companies pay mountains of money to retain, made the unforgivable mistake of essentially asking: “Hey, what if Reality—and not targeted misogyny—accounts for the fact that more men than women work in tech? Also, why does it feel like I could get fired for asking this?”

He was, of course, fired less than three months later for “[advancing] incorrect assumptions about gender” and for raising a perspective that “is not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes, or encourages,” said Danielle Browne, Google’s VP of Diversity, Integrity, and Governance.

——

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. 

Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition. 

CDR Salamander:

When just papered over the festering rot of systems that are same structures, policies, culture, and in many cases people who brought us here. Why would one expect any difference in outcome?

We lied to each other. We lied to Congress. We lied to the world. From Arkansas to AUKUS, this moment will have impact.

Eventually the music will stop. We are now on the second generation of leaders who have been happy to ignore this systemic failure of performance as if it is a force of nature to endure, and not a creation of man that can be changed.

If you are waiting for the uniformed leadership to speak clearly on this, you simply have not been paying attention.

If you think the Executive Branch leadership will address this, you have not been awake the last 26-months.

The only solution to this wholesale institutional failure will be in Congress. It will need the will, power, and wisdom to do what Alexander did in Gordium, and be content to do it making no friends, and receiving no personal benefit or fame.

Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney:

A federal judge tore into the Justice Department on Friday for blowing off Hunter Biden-related subpoenas issued in the impeachment probe of his father, President Joe Biden, pointing out that a former aide to Donald Trump is sitting in prison for similar defiance of Congress.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee on the federal District Court in Washington, spent nearly an hour accusing Justice Department attorneys of rank hypocrisy for instructing two other lawyers in the DOJ Tax Division not to comply with the House subpoenas.

Natalie Sherman:

Google has agreed to delete billions of records and submit to some restrictions on its power to track users, under the terms of a proposed legal settlement.

The deal aims to resolve a class action lawsuit brought in the US in 2020, which had accused the tech giant of invading people’s privacy by collecting user data even when they were browsing in “private mode”.

The suit had sought $5bn in damages. 

Google is supporting the deal, though it disputes the claims.

It has already made changes in response to the lawsuit.

—-

In q tel and Google.

—-

Many taxpayer funded k-12 systems use Google services, including Madison

Jessica Winter:

In truth, the crisis was a collision of multiple issues: racial tension, union power, the respectful treatment of queer and trans kids, and the place of religion in schools—not to mention the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and what it has done to the fabric of civic life in the U.S. The public schools in Amherst were slow to return to pre-pandemic normalcy; they reopened for a mix of in-person and remote learning in April, 2021, only after they were forced to by the state of Massachusetts. “We had physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and parents writing to us in despair about the impact that remote learning was having on the emotional and mental health of the children in our community,” Allison Bleyler McDonald, a former school-committee member, told me. Leaders of the Amherst teachers’ union “refused to even speak to us about the possibility of opening up schools and classrooms,” she said.

Talking to people in town, one gets the sense that the discord of that period has never fully gone away. “Things really ramped up with covid,” Ben Herrington, who is also a former member of the school committee, told me. “The language changed. People became comfortable with being blatantly hostile. We were no longer having normal conversations.” Several people told me about an incident from the fall of 2021, when the school committee approved a policy that would have allowed some unvaccinated staffers into school provided that they wore masks. In response, McDonald said, the union’s president at the time, Lamikco Magee, “accused us of wanting to inflict genocide on teachers.” (Magee denies invoking genocide.)

The ongoing fight in Amherst seems to press against every bruise that public schools have sustained in recent years, and the continued fallout—multiple investigations, resignations, a persistent leadership vacuum in the schools—doesn’t inspire confidence in our collective capacity to work through the inevitable frictions of a pluralistic society. Even in a liberal and largely affluent district, certain conflicts and tensions have come to feel irresolvable. As one person I spoke to in town told me, “The left is eating its own all over the country—it’s not just Amherst.”

Albert Cory:

All those things happened in 1894. If you think people hate “tech billionaires” now: they reallyhated railroad executives back then. The hatred exploded into riots when the strike happened. Railroad workers all over the country refused to allow any train with Pullman cars to run, and the railroads refused to break their contracts with Pullman and eliminate them. The rail barons also wanted to maintain ranks against the American Railway Union. Eugene Debs tried to escalate even further and call a general strike of all labor, everywhere. That didn’t happen.

The Government’s Response

The US Attorney General, Richard Olney, said the country was on “the ragged edge of anarchy.” Imagine if the Internet went down for weeks: that’s what railroads meant in late 19th Century America. The Pullman strike disrupted the entire country, but in the end it was defeated completely, and its leader, Eugene Debs, went to jail. 

George Pullman refused to even meet with the union, let alone accede to their demand for arbitration, despite the appeals of the Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois. Somehow he got away with it and the strike failed. Nowadays, we have the National Labor Relations Board, political leaders routinely mediate disputes, and unions are a fact of life. Back then, there was none of that. Arguably, the failed Pullman strike was a leading cause of the labor reforms in the 1930’s, although Eugene Debs died too soon to see them.

BY DANIELLE KAEDING 

Northland College in Ashland declared a financial emergency on Thursday, buying another two weeks to raise enough funds and make changes to avoid closure.

On March 12, college leaders announced the campus needed to raise $12 million by April 3 to avoid closing its doors, saying it had insufficient resources to continue operations. Since then, the college has raised around $1.5 million from more than 900 donations.

The Northland Board of Trustees voted to declare financial exigency, which means the financial crisis requires immediate steps to resolve. Now, they plan to make a final decision in two weeks. Ted Bristol, the board’s chair, told WPR the decision came in response to the extraordinary effort of the community, faculty, staff and others.

“We really wanted to take another look at our options, and we were also, frankly, deeply reluctant to make a decision to close,” Bristol said. “During the past three weeks, we recognize this widespread commitment to help, and we decided that we really wanted to explore this further to see if there still might be a path forward.”

Babylon Bee:

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon says a lot of things. This time, it’s an important message about the battle against censorship.

Charlie Billelo:

Meanwhile, average hourly earnings in the US have increased 21% over the past 4 years (+4.9% per year). Why many Americans feel like they’re falling behind.

More.

“The chief Nerd”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr on the DNC Paying Homeless People to Protest Outside His Event

“I was very happy today to see the protesters outside. When our staff interviewed them they said, ‘Yeah, we were all paid to be here.’ And their posters were all written by the same guy…But I’m glad because I’m glad that the DNC and the White House are finally doing something to help poor people in this country.”

David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew:

Rapid relative wage growth at the bottom of the distribution reduced the college wage premium and counteracted nearly 40% of the four-decade increase in aggregate 90-10 log wage inequality. Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers. Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression. Simultaneously, the wage-separation elasticity—a key measure of labor market competitionrose among young non-college workers, with wage gains concentrated among workers who changed employers. Seen through the lens of a canonical job ladder model, the pandemic increased the elasticity of labor supply to firms in the low-wage labor market, reducing employer market power and spurring rapid relative wage growth among young noncollege workers who disproportionately moved from lower-paying to higher-paying and potentially more-productive jobs.

Blake Habyan:

This graph should be alarming to anyone who prioritizes the safety and security of The United States and its citizens.

• 🟧 Orange indicates single adults.
• 🟦 Blue indicates families.
• 🟥 Red indicates minors.

Illegals from over 160 countries have crossed into the US to date.

How many are unaccounted for?

The Biden admin and Democrat open-border policies are facilitating the largest invasion in the country’s history.

More.

Daniel Klein:

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last month in the momentous case of Murthy v. Missouri. At issue is the constitutionality of what government authorities did to censor speech that departed from preferred narratives.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson posed a hypothetical to Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga: “Suppose someone started posting about a new teen challenge that involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations. . . . Kids all over the country start doing this. There is an epidemic. Children are seriously injuring or even killing themselves in situations. Is it your view that government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage social media platforms to take down the information that is instigating this problem?”

Lisa Carr:

Eva Edl, Eva Zastrow, James Zastrow, and Paul Place had charges brought against them for being part of a peaceful protest on March 5, 2021. They gathered on the second floor of an office building in the hallway outside the Carafem Health Center Clinic. The group prayed, sang hymns, and urged women showing up to the clinic to not get abortions. 

It seems as though Edl, the Zastrows and Place violated the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) of 1994. They face up to a year in prison and thousands of dollars of fines. Their sentencing is on July 30, 2024.

Christopher Rufo:

I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?

Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.

In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We built a single-point failure in a system that should have no single-point failures. The second crash that followed—we cannot say this from a legal standpoint, with the FAA—looked like pilot error. But, in any case, a company cannot survive two crashes from a single aircraft type. Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress, defended the engineering, defended the work—and that protected the workforce, but it also prodded the board and stoked public fear, which resulted in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.

So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders. The current CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO whom he brought in. And we have a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. The head of our commercial-airplanes unit in Seattle, who was fired last week, was one of the last engineers in the executive council.

The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The head of HR lives in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.

In this business, the workforce knows if you love the thing you are building or if it’s just another set of assets to you. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most important story of all. There is no visible center of the company, and people are wondering what they are connected to.

…

DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: “Inclusion makes us better.” This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.

If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it’s a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.

The radicalization of HR doesn’t hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they’re making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. Because they are paying 30 percent or 40 percent more than the competition in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the “DEI tax” and still find top people.

Stephanie Stamm and Jesse Newman:

Prices for hundreds of grocery items have increased more than 50% since 2019 as food companies raised their prices. Executives have said that higher prices were needed to offset their own rising costs for ingredients, transportation and labor. Some U.S. lawmakers and the Biden administration have criticized food companies for using tactics such as shrinkflation, in which companies shrink their products—but not their prices.

Kathy Rice:

I love the wayback internet archive machine! Check out what had been scrubbed off of the @FountasPinnell blog! I need to check the @rrcna_org too 😉

Leon Sapor:

Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQand brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percentof kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.” For all these reasons, health authorities in a growing number of countries, including some of the most LGBT-friendly, are now prioritizing talk therapy.

Adam Andrzejewski

But in order for a Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) to stuff $50 million into the University of Alabama’s endowment fund (a university that hosts his Senate archive), we also get gems like these from Squad members:

• $1 million to build “a network of intergenerational, trauma-informed waterfront green spaces,” won by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). The project had previously won $792,000 more in a 2022 earmark. Do we ask the obvious? How exactly does trauma dictate a park design?
• $1 million for the San Antonio College Empowerment Center, which runs an Undocumented Student Support Program to help immigrants enroll in the school. The sponsor is Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who is closer to the illegal immigration crisis than most, but wants to create a college education magnet for them.
• $850,000 to create jobs and affordable housing near George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, won by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The square was reportedly a “no-go” zone for police amid the riots following Floyd’s death. Now, Omar saysthat “added to the stress faced by the community and increased the need for support and stability in housing and commerce.” In other words, federal taxpayers need to step in and clean up the damage.

Following last week’s 2 a.m. passage of the final six spending bills for this year, the Squad’s total ticked up from $218 million to $224.1 million—all borrowed against our enormous national debt. The two “minibus” packages this month alone contained 215 earmarks from these eight individuals.

Te-ping Chin:

America needs more plumbers, and Gen Z is answering the call.

Long beset by a labor crunch, the skilled trades are newly appealing to the youngest cohort of American workers, many of whom are choosing to leave the college path. Rising pay and new technologies in fields from welding to machine tooling are giving trade professions a face-lift, helping them shed the image of being dirty, low-end work. Growing skepticism about the return on a college education, the cost of which has soared in recent decades, is adding to their shine. 

Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging as overall enrollment in community colleges and four-year institutions has fallen. The number of students enrolled in vocational-focused community colleges rose 16% last year to its highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking such data in 2018. The ranks of students studying construction trades rose 23% during that time, while those in programs covering HVAC and vehicle maintenance and repair increased 7%. 

“It’s a really smart route for kids who want to find something and aren’t gung ho on going to college,” says Tanner Burgess, 20, who graduated from a nine-month welding program last fall. 

The Economist:

Home of America’s most progressive policies, from criminal justice to vehicle emissions, California serves a unique role as a punchbag for right-wing politicians. Every few years it becomes fashionable to declare that it is a failed state, or that the California dream is turning into a nightmare. This rhetoric is often overblown: in terms of pure economic heft California remains the most powerful American state. But for all its continuing prowess in innovation (not least in artificial intelligence), California again appears to be entering one of its periodic rough patches.

The state faces three overlapping challenges: rising unemployment, growing fiscal strains and population outflows. All of these should abate over time, but for now they mark out California as a pocket of relative weakness in an otherwise robust American economy.

APM Reports:

Banks: We have not taught the kids the basic fundamental structures of how to read. 

David Banks is the chancellor of the New York City public schools.  

Banks: We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. And many of us follow the same prescript of balanced literacy. And… 

Balanced literacy is the approach to teaching reading we focused on in Sold a Story. 

—-

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?

Christopher Peak and Emily Haavik

Pressure is mounting on two universities to change the way they train on-the-job educators to teach reading. 

The Ohio State University in Columbus and Lesley University near Boston both run prominent literacy training programs that include a theorycontradicted by decades of cognitive science research. Amid a $660 million effort to retrain teachers that’s underway in 36 states, other academic institutions are updating their professional development. Yet Ohio State and Lesley are resisting criticism and standing by their training. 

For decades, their Literacy Collaborative programs deemphasized teaching beginning readers how to sound out words. These programs do cover some phonics, but they also teach that students can use context clues to decipher unfamiliar words. Studies have repeatedly shown that guessing words from context is inefficient, unreliable and counterproductive. Twelve states have effectively banned school districts from using that flawed approach. 

The approach, sometimes called “cueing,” originated in the 1960s in the United States and New Zealand, and was popularized in American reading instruction by Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas, professors at the two universities. Pinnell, who is now retired, founded OSU’s Literacy Collaborative, and Fountas founded and still directs Lesley’s Center for Reading Recovery & Literacy Collaborative.  

—-

Jenny Warner shares:

As if they took a cue from @FountasPinnell, @OhioState won’t speak publicly, lucky for us @lesley_u took their cue from Calkins and shared their adoration for @rrcna_org and how they haven’t altered how they teach future teachers how to read, but rather how teach them to be “politically savvy.”

—

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?

Milwaukee Teachers Union, via Debbie Kuether:

Fascinating maps of referendum results! Support for the referendum was moderately correlated with race (won in most majorty white wards) but even more strongly correlated with (not) having kids. In wards where 20% or less of residents have children, the referendum overwhelmingly passed with ~2/3 of the vote. Wards where more than 40% have kids? Lost by nearly 5 points.

In other words, the referendum was most popular in the parts of the city with the fewest children, and in the parts of the city with the most white, affluent residents.

I know most here are happy about the referendum-I myself voted “yes.” Regardless, these figures do say a lot – and if you’re not thinking long and hard about the implications and the work/listening we have to do going forward to best serve our Milwaukee community…l’d ask yourself why that is.

Referendum vote by the share of households wit lose size corresponds to the number of votes cast.

Quinton Klabon:

It’s official! Milwaukee Public Schools has become 1 of the highest-funded big districts in America!

This is a chance to make MPS as good as our kids deserve.

John Johnson:

On balance, the MPS referendum won wards with few children and lost wards with lots of children. Yes, you read that right.

Will Flanders

Sen. Larson leaves out a key out key point that makes his message misleading: school districts also get local funding. This takes the per pupil amount above the average voucher ($10,573) in every district. Below is the pupil spending in all districts. All are above voucher.

James Samuel:

A relatively new report outlines how universities nationwide have signed over students’ private FERPA data to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal information to help study college students’ voting trends.

The nine-page report describes how a national voting study run out of Tufts’ Institute for Democracy in Higher Education gets university administrators from across the country to agree to release students’ Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, where its kept, to a voter data company.

“This is an extraordinary violation of student privacy and is not consistent with FERPA,” said Heather Honey, an investigator with Verity Vote, in a recent interview with The College Fix.

Verity Vote is an organization that works to ensure government transparency, including election integrity issues, she said, and published its findings on the student voting issue in July 2023.

At issue is Tufts’ institute’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, launched during the Obama administration in response to a “call to action,” the report states.

JK Rowling:

name-calling and the threat of mental health is being used as emotional blackmail to keep us all quiet while women are harmed and devalued.’

More.

and.

Daniel Buck:

Last week, I did something unorthodox. I asked teachers to message me directly via X (formerly known as Twitter) to vent their frustrations. Within hours, I received almost 200 messages expressing not only frustration, but also hope, humor, fatalism, and quite a bit of hesitancy to converse with a complete stranger on the internet. Without a doubt, these messages represent a very thin slice of the teaching workforce, but a thin slice supplies at least a taste of the whole pie.

Responses ranged from expected complaints about low pay to idiosyncratic observations about processed school breakfasts. Teachers have a lot on their minds. That few mentioned politics surprised me. Considering I aimed my invitation to conservative teachers specifically, I expected laments over liberal dogma and progressive pieties to abound. And certainly, some teachers mentioned such things, but these were a minority.

Instead, one theme surfaced over and again, illustrated by these two examples:

• “Our school isn’t safe. The energy in the hallways feels like something is going to happen at any moment. Fights are constant with little consequence.”
• “We allow behavior that would not be acceptable in any public square. Teachers are cussed out, threatened, disrespected with no consequences. The general public doesn’t understand the crisis we are in. It’s embarrassing. It’s tragic.”

After hours spent reading through these lamentations and conversing with some of the teachers who sent them, it seems there’s a deeper issue here than a mere lack of consequences. Students lack accountability of any kind. Teachers face an ever-mounting list of responsibilities and pressures, while students face ever fewer.

Glenn Reynolds:

That Ehrlich made a bundle on wrong predictions isn’t such a big deal — we’ve had dozens of doomsaying futurists who’ve cashed in on fears that never materialized. 

The problem is people listened to him.

Across the world, governments adopted population-trimming policies, from massively subsidized birth control to promoting two-worker households to China’s draconian “one child” policy, in which each couple was allowed only one child.

That has left China with crippling demographic problems just as it hopes to burst forth as a superpower on the global scene; it’s now trying to encourage people to have more babies, as its leadership realizes it’s hard to be a superpower when your military-age population is shrinking (and, as only children, too valued by their parents to safely be employed as cannon fodder), your elderly population is growing and your society is stagnating.

Michael Pettis:

Debt is rising more quickly in the United States than most people would prefer. This is happening in part because the U.S. current account deficit and the country’s high level of income inequality distort the structure and amount of American savings.

Many Americans are worried about the seemingly inexorable rise in U.S. debt, whether government debt, household debt, or business debt. They are right to be concerned. Rapidly rising debt is a problem not just in the United States but in many other countries too, including China, parts of Europe, and most of the developing world. In today’s environment, it seems, reasonable levels of economic growth cannot be achieved unless boosted by even faster growth in debt.

With so much debt in the world, and with debt levels rising so quickly, people tend to think that economists have studied this issue deeply and fully understand it. But there continues to be a great deal of confusion about debt and about whether and why excessive debt levels can harm growth prospects. To try to address these issues, this blog post is divided into two parts. The first part discusses debt and some of the conditions under which it affects the prospects for economic growth.

——

The article quotes Yellen as saying: “People like me grew up with the view: If people send you cheap goods, you should send a thank-you note. That’s what standard economics basically says,” she said. “I would never ever again say, ‘Send a thank-you note.’ ”

Batya Ungar-Sargon

But what if I told you that the people in the political and media classes are the ones who are polarized—in fact, they are the onlyones who are so polarized?

This is obvious to most Americans, even—perhaps especially—to those who have neighbors or friends or colleagues who vote differently than they do. Regular Americans know we are more united than divided on the issues that are supposedly tearing us apart.

Democrats portray conservatives as characters out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Republicans portray liberals as “baby killers.” Yet two-thirds of Americans agree that abortion should be rare and also legal.

Democrats like to tell us that Republicans are gung ho on school shootings, and Republicans are fond of saying Democrats want to steal our guns. Yet 61 percent of usbelieve that the Second Amendment should stand, but it’s too easy to get a gun. 

Democrats tell us Republicans hate gays and Republicans tell us that Democrats want every child to be queer. Yet average Americans believe that sex is determined at birth and that trans people should be protected from discrimination, though when it comes to sports, trans people should compete on teams that match the sex they were born with. This is how six in ten of us feel. 

The partisan claims of a polarized America ring especially false to working-class Americans. This is because—unlike the college-educated elites who run the country—they don’t identify with the full list of policy proposals produced by either party. 

Jarrett Skorup:

Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of an article from Dec. 15, 2009, written shortly after Dr. Borlaug passed away. It features a new introduction and is written to honor the man who would have been 110 years old on March 25, 2024. 

In the winters, I spend my time officiating high school wrestling. Last year, while going through my pre-meet duties, I noticed a wrestler with the last name Borlaug. I asked him if he knew who Norman Borlaug was and was delighted to learn that wrestler was his great-nephew.

Wrestling must be in the family blood, because Norman Borlaug was an accomplished high school and college wrestler who helped expand the popularity of sport at the high school level in Minnesota. (He also worked as a referee). He was inducted into the  National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

The coach of Borlaug’s great nephew, a high school civics and history teacher, overheard our conversation and asked, “Who’s Norman Borlaug?”

That’s a typical response whenever I mention him. In fact, I didn’t learn of him until after completing my college degree. It’s a shame how few people know the name or the remarkable achievements of the man who took action to feed the world’s population at a time when much of the scientific establishment believed we were on the verge of an inevitable global famine.

Joel Kotkin:

In the US, nonprofits’ assets have grown 16-fold since 1980. In 2020, nonprofits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting more than five per cent of the US economy. Ironically, foundations that are funded with the great fortunes of Henry Ford, John D Rockefeller and John D MacArthur, all right-wing figures, have become some of the key financiers of ‘progressive’ causes.

Deedy

Facebook gave Netflix all your private messages on Messenger in exchange for all your watch history,

MJ Koch:

America’s national debt is skyrocketing to historic levels, as the partisan divide over how much voters care about the issue is greater than ever.  

By the end of fiscal 2025, federal debt held by the public will add up to $29.7 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office reports, exceeding America’s gross domestic product. 

National debt is a responsibility shared by both of the presidential candidates, yet it’s much more of a concern for Republicans than Democrats, at least according to one recent survey.

Derek Thompson:

As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.

More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious. In kindergarten, my parents encouraged my sister and me to enthusiastically celebrate Hanukkah—and, just as fervently, to believe in Santa Claus.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.

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Aaron Sibarium:

In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth,” as she described it—with their fists.

At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about “Housing (In)Justice,” proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving “what the settlers call L.A.,” according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s “herstory.”

The prayer also included a benediction for “black,” “brown,” and “houseless people” who die because of the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.”

“Mama earth,” Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, “was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played.”

So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described “poverty scholar,” led the class in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” as faculty and staff looked on in silence, according to people in the course and contemporaneous text messages reviewed by the Free Beacon.

Cheyenne MacDonald

Long before Gmail became smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was buttering up the public for a fate that defined the internet age: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

When Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and the timing of its release reportedly had people assuming it was a joke. It wasn’t the first web-based email provider — Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had already been around for years — but Gmail was offering faster service, automatic conversation grouping for messages, integrated search functions and 1GB of storage, which was at the time a huge leap forward in personal cloud storage. Google in its press release boasted that a gigabyte was “more than 100 times” what its competitors offered. All of that, for free.

Except, as Gmail and countless tech companies in its wake have taught us, there’s no such thing as free. Using Gmail came with a tradeoff that’s now commonplace: You get access to its service, and in exchange, Google gets your data. Specifically, its software could scan the contents of account holders’ emails and use that information to serve them personalized ads on the site’s sidebar. For better or worse, it was a groundbreaking approach.

“Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it’s the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” tech journalist Paul Boutin wrote for Slate when Gmail launched. (Boutin, one of its early media testers, wrote favorably about Google’s email scanning but suggested the company implement a way for users to opt out lest they reject it entirely.)

Marc Andreessen

• User submits query
• Preprocessor #1 removes misinformation
• Preprocessor #2 removes hate speech
• Preprocessor #3 removes climate denial
• Preprocessor #4 removes non-far-left political leaning
• Preprocessor #5 removes non-expert statements
• Preprocessor #6 removes anything that might make anyone uncomfortable
• Preprocessor #7 removes anything not endorsed by the New York Times
• Preprocessor #8 adds many references to race, gender, and sexuality
• Query is processed, answer generated
• Postprocessor #1 removes bad words
• Postprocessor #2 removes bad thoughts
• Postprocessor #3 removes non-far-left political leaning
• Postprocessor #4 removes anything not endorsed by the New York Times
• Postprocessor #5 removes anything interesting

Russell Berman:

The tragedy hardened Longo’s views on crime and abortion. “I could not vote for President Biden,” he said. Khanna sat quietly as Longo spoke. “One of the challenges we have as a country is we have a wrong stereotypical view of the Trump voter,” Khanna said to us after the conversation had moved on. “The Trump voter includes possibly the teacher you most respect.”

Longo spoke highly of Khanna, praising his slogan of “progressive capitalism” and his push to use technology to create economic opportunity. He even said he might be able to vote for Khanna one day. “A Trump-Khanna voter!” Khanna marveled.

AT&T

AT&T* has determined that AT&T data-specific fields were contained in a data set released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago. While AT&T has made this determination, it is not yet known whether the data in those fields originated from AT&T or one of its vendors. With respect to the balance of the data set, which includes personal information such as social security numbers, the source of the data is still being assessed.

AT&T has launched a robust investigation supported by internal and external cybersecurity experts. Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former account holders.

——

More.

John Tierney:

The response to Covid was the greatest mistake in the history of the public-health profession, but the officials responsible for it are determined to do even worse. With the support of the Biden administration, the World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking unprecedented powers to impose its policies on the United States and the rest of the world during the next pandemic.

It was bad enough that America and other countries voluntarily followed WHO bureaucrats’ disastrous pandemic advice instead of heeding the scientists who had presciently warned, long before 2020, that lockdowns, school closures, and mandates for masks and vaccines would be futile, destructive, and unethical. It was bad enough that U.S. officials and the corporate media parroted the WHO’s false claims and ludicrous praise of China’s response. But now the WHO wants new authority to make its bureaucrats’ whims mandatory—and to censor those who disagree with their version of “the science.” 

The WHO hopes to begin this power grab in May at its annual assembly in Geneva, where members will vote on proposed changes in international health regulations and a new treaty governing pandemics. Pamela Hamamoto, the State Department official representing the U.S. in negotiations, has already declared that America is committed to signing a pandemic treaty that will “build a stronger global health architecture,” which is precisely what we don’t need. 

Matt Barnum:

Nationally, average teacher pay has barely budged since 1990, despite states pumping more funding into public schools. Across the country, new education dollars have instead gone toward additional staff, rising healthcare costs and pension obligations.

Now, some lawmakers are championing new pay mandates to force the issue, amid elevated teacher-turnover rates and a decline in people training to become teachers.

In South Dakota earlier this month, Gov. Kristi Noem signed into law a minimum teacher salary of $45,000, which will rise with inflation.

“If you want to have quality teachers enter the workforce and stay in the workforce, you have to pay them,” state representative Tony Venhuizen said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “When the state puts money into the schools, we want to see that money get into the teachers’ pockets.”

Last year, Arkansas set starting teacher pay at $50,000, a five-figure increase in many districts. The legislation also guaranteed every teacher at least a $2,000 raise. In 2026, $50,000 and $60,000 minimums will go into effect in Tennessee and Maryland, respectively.

The Economist:

In 2020 XKCD, a popular online comic strip, published a cartoon depicting a teetering arrangement of blocks with the label: “all modern digital infrastructure”. Perched precariously at the bottom, holding everything up, was a lone, slender brick: “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” The illustration quickly became a cult classic among the technically minded, for it highlighted a harsh truth: the software at the heart of the internet is maintained not by giant corporations or sprawling bureaucracies but by a handful of earnest volunteers toiling in obscurity. A cyber-security scare in recent days shows how the result can be near-disaster.

On March 29th Andres Freund, an engineer at Microsoft, published a short detective story. In recent weeks he had noticed that ssh—a system to log on securely to another device over the internet—was running about 500 milliseconds more slowly than expected. Closer inspection revealed malicious code embedded deep inside xz Utils, a piece of software designed for compressing data used inside the Linux operating system, which runs on virtually all publicly accessible internet servers.

Aaron Smith:

Congress doled out $190 billion to states for K-12 education during the pandemic, $122 billion of which was part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP).

By the time ARP was passed schools had received $68 billion. Research indicates that this was more than enough to cover the costs of reopening.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether an extra $122 billion was needed, but have these dollars been put to good use?

Three years later, the answer seems like a clear “No”

1/5

Mark Cuban and Christopher Rufo:

Cuban argues that corporations do not define “equity” as “equality of outcome,” but here are the official DEI materials from Raytheon and Disney, which explicitly reject “equality” in favor of “equity,” defined as “equality of outcome.”

Sidney K. Lee and Thomas J. Mete

Harvard spent $530,000 on lobbying the federal government in 2023, the lowest amount spent by the University in the past nine years.

While collective Ivy League federal lobbying expenditures surged by 12.4 percent last year, reaching an all time high during the Biden administration, Harvard’s own lobbying levels dipped from past years.

The University’s lobbying expenditures fell $40,000 from last year’s total to its lowest levels since the 2014 fiscal year. Harvard’s lobbying efforts peaked during the first three years of the Trump administration, when the University routinely spent roughly $600,000 annually on federal lobbying.

——

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

Randall Kennedy:

On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.”

By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

A closer look at the Bok Center’s page on diversity statements illustrates how.

For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests answering questions such as: “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”; “How do you design course assessments with EDIB in mind?”; and “How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?”

Eli Motycka:

Seen as the architect of the university’s ongoing response to protesters, Diermeier faces the brunt of criticism from the university’s various stakeholders. The ongoing fiasco puts the German-born academic in the driver’s seat of an actual reputational crisis, the specific niche Diermeier has spent decades studying as a business professor. He specifically addresses corporate responses to activist pressure and public relations scandals in academic articles and books, like 2011’s Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building your Company’s Most Valuable Asset.

More.

Rob:

It’s hard to overstate how important – and strategically brilliant – @jk_rowling’s power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectively
neutered Scotland’s dangerous new #HateCrimeBill. By openly and unambiguously breaking this law – on a massive public platform – on its very first day, she has in effect nullified the law by forcing the authorities in Scotland into a corner where they only have two options, both of which will be this laws downfall. They can:

Balaji:

More people follow JK Rowling (14M) than the entire population of Scotland (5.5M). So she can summon her people online to push back on freedom-of-speech restrictions offline.

The Network is growing stronger than the State.

James Cook & Paul Hastie.

Chris Brunet:

A new paper published today in @EconJWatch finds these results can’t be replicated.

”Our inability to [replicate] their results suggests that … they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.”

Cremieux:

McKinsey’s bizarre regressions of executive diversity against firm-level financial performance are not only potentially reverse-causal, they don’t replicate in newer data.

John Robb:

Packetized media is now the dominant media system. It has altered the way we think and is in the process of reorganizing society. Disruption and opportunity await.

The media we produce and consume is rapidly getting more granular and dynamic. 

• Books —> Essays and articles —> Posts (X, Reddit, etc.)
• Movies and plays —> TV shows —> YouTube —> TikTok and X
• Paintings —> photos —> Instagram and X
• Letters —> e-mails —> messaging —> slang and emojis 

By packetizing our media, we are doing something similar to what the Internet does to data. 

• Packetization deconstructs our information media into independently transmissible packets of facts, news items, ideas, feelings, and perspectives. 
• Packets flow into the network like puzzle pieces, searching for a puzzle they will fit into. 
• When we find a packet that may fit into a pattern we are developing (pattern matching), we pluck it from the torrential flow of packets streaming past us.
• We then stitch these packets together — as individuals or in collaboration with loosely connected networked groups — to construct larger social constructs. 

Packetized media has rapidly become the dominant form of media, although it’s important to note that dominance doesn’t mean replacement since the earlier forms of media don’t disappear; instead, as we’ve seen, these older types will be integrated into the new dominant form. Here’s how this shift happened.

JEFFREY J. MCHENRY, LEAETTA M. HOUGH, JODY L. TOQUAM, MARY ANN HANSON, STEVEN ASHWORTH

A predictor battery of cognitive ability, perceptual-psychomotor ability, temperament/personality, interest, and job outcome preference measures was administered to enlisted soldiers in nine Army jobs. These measures were summarized in terms of 24 composite scores. The relationships between the predictor composite scores and five components of job performance were analyzed. Scores from the cognitive and perceptual-psychomotor ability tests provided the best prediction of job-specific and general task proficiency, while the temperament/personality composites were the best predictors of giving extra effort, supporting peers, and exhibiting personal discipline. Composite scores derived from the interest inventory were correlated more highly with task proficiency than with demonstrating effort and peer support. In particular, vocational interests were among the best predictors of task proficiency in combat jobs. The results suggest that the Army can improve the prediction of job performance by adding non-cognitive predictors to its present battery of predictor tests.

——-

More.

Abbey Machtig:

A pair of local high school students are bringing their love of politics and competition to Forward Theater Company’s next production as they debate the Constitution live onstage.

Opening Thursday night at Overture Center, “What the Constitution Means to Me” follows character Heidi Schreck as she discusses women’s rights, immigration, domestic abuse and the history of the United States — all in the context of how they have been interpreted through the nation’s charter. Schreck is played by actor Colleen Madden.v

Jon Levine and Rich Calder: 

Two major Democratic clients of the daughter of the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have raised at least $93 million in campaign donations — and used the case in their solicitation emails — raising renewed concerns that the jurist has a major conflict of interest.

Trump’s attorneys are considering filing another motion demanding Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan recuse himself from the trial set to begin April 15, sources said.

The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of Authentic Campaigns, a Chicago-based progressive political consulting firm whose top clients include Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and the Senate Majority PAC, a major party fundraiser.

Mike Benz:

A judge is supposed to avoid “even the appearance of impropriety” or else recuse. Instead of recusing himself, the Trump Trial Judge is simply censoring all journalism about the impropriety.

CNN & RFK, Jr.

CNN: “When people talk about the threat to democracy that Trump poses, do you really think that is equal to Biden?”

RFK JR: “Biden is much worse threat to democracy.. President Biden is the first president history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech”

Kelly Meyerhofer

At noon, Rothman and Mnookin videoconferenced with Vos. The deal called for restructuring 43 DEI positions to focus on broader student success efforts. In exchange, lawmakers would approve the pay raises, fund the engineering building and reverse a $32 million budget cut.

“Frankly, I think it’s a reasonable compromise deal in both directions – though we are still not over the finish line and so til that happens … who knows?” Mnookin texted a friend around 1:30 p.m.

The Journal Sentinel and other media outlets reported on the proposed terms, which had yet to be officially announced. State Democratic lawmakers urged students to contact board members and declare DEI non-negotiable.

“I am concerned that others will frame this agreement, and we will not look good,” Diana Harvey, the UW-Madison vice chancellor for strategic communication, texted Mnookin around 4 p.m. “I hate the fact that we are surrendering the narrative on this.”

The chancellor’s inbox filled with opinions. One alumna said UW-Madison would survive without new buildings, but could not survive giving up its principles. The email’s subject line itself was a plea.

“Please don’t.”

Negin Sadat Babaiha a b, Sathvik Guru Rao a, Jürgen Klein a, Bruce Schultz a, Marc Jacobs a, Martin Hofmann-Apitius:

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) hold valuable information regarding biomedical entities such as genes, diseases, biological processes, and drugs. KGs have been successfully employed in challenging biomedical areas such as the identification of pathophysiology mechanisms or drug repurposing. The creation of high-quality KGs typically requires labor-intensive multi-database integration or substantial human expert curation, both of which take time and contribute to the workload of data processing and annotation. Therefore, the use of automatic systems for KG building and maintenance is a prerequisite for the wide uptake and utilization of KGs. 

The Economist:

Unpicking what is going on is not simple. A good place to start is to note that young women are soaring ahead of their male peers academically. In the European Union fully 46% of them earn degrees, versus 35% of young men, a gap that has doubled since 2002. One consequence is that young women are more likely than men to spend their early adulthood in a cocoon of campus liberalism. Meanwhile, boys outnumber girls at the bottom end of the scholastic scale. Across rich countries, 28% of them fail to learn to read to a basic level. That is true of only 18% of girls.

Joanne Jacobs:

Are the liberal arts conservative?, asks Emma Green in a New Yorker story about the revival of “classical education.” A growing number of classical-ed charter and private schools are offering “a traditional liberal-arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.”

Unlike many traditional public schools, “classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems,” she writes.

Reading lists aren’t trendy. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante,” writes Green. “In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.”

At Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, the middle school is calm and phone free, she writes.

Debbie Kuether

Be sure to watch all 15 parts of the Aisha Carr deposition. Very Different than her recent media appearances.

Sophia Sun:

(Obviously this is a joke. We did once survey a 10-phd bbq party, and marriage was the most statistically significant positive correlator. But that’s a story for another time.)

Richard Hamming’s inspiring and influential talk You and Your Research is what convinced me to do a phd. I wanted to work on important problems and aspired to contribute to the advancement of human knowledge. Oh, to be a scientist! 3 years in I felt like there was no hope; I’ve toiled away all my time and the only way out is to quit.

So I sought advice from my parents. They asked me to think about the least accomplished PhD graduate I know – Can I do as much as they did? What would a minimum effort phd look like? I answered that would result in a pretty bad thesis. And they said, that’s fine, bad is ok, go do what you can. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

And here we are.

Christian Thorsberg:

The 2024 Abel Prize—the mathematics world’s Nobel Prize equivalent—has been awarded to Michel Talagrand for his advances in describing and predicting the universe’s randomness. Talagrand’s path into mathematics was marked with personal struggle and resilience, and his recognition came as a shock to him.

“There was a total blank in my mind for at least four seconds,” Talagrand tells Nature News’ Davide Castelvecchi, describing when he heard the news of his award. “If I had been told an alien ship had landed in front of the White House, I would not have been more surprised.”

These Birds Become Really Playful When They Hear This Sound

Benjamin Eastman and Christina Wheatland 

If the Electoral Count Act unambiguously did not allow for the vice president’s involvement, as some have contended, why did Congress quietly modify the law in an omnibus bill to clarify that the vice president’s role in the certification of elections was merely ministerial — a high-priced letter opener?

Finally, the legacy media would tar and feather Eastman before they admitted his claims of election illegality were, at the very least, credible and at most that the illegality and fraud were significant enough to steal the 2020 election. In fact, polls show that between one-third and two-thirds of right-leaning Americans believe the former and a growing number are inclined to think the latter.

Since Eastman’s appearance at the Ellipse, he has endured three years of malicious lawsuits, bar complaints, subpoenas, and testimony before the House January 6 committee.

These include criminal charges. Eastman — alongside President Trump and 17 other “co-conspirators” — was indicted with absurd and unprecedented racketeering charges in Georgia by a rogue district attorney, Fani Willis, who appears to have committed perjury while testifying under oath about the details of her affair with the prosecutor she hired for the RICO case.

Holy Week brought a new set of horrors. An action we foresaw based on the predictable conclusion of lawfare was taken Wednesday that shook two centuries of American jurisprudence to its core. After what one commentator has described as the longest (32 days of trial over 10 weeks), most expensive (more than half a million dollars) bar trial in this country’s history, a bar court judge who has continued to make donationsto Democrat politicians even after taking the bench has recommended the disbarment of Eastman.

Matthew Patti:

The FBI spends “every day, all day long” interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that’s what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity. 

Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad’s house and said that they had been given “screenshots” of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online on Wednesday.

Abdeljawad told agents that she didn’t want to talk and asked them to show their badges on camera, which the agents refused to do. She wrote on Facebook that she later confirmed with local police that the FBI agents really were FBI agents.

“Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account,” one agent in a gray shirt said in the video.

“So we no longer live in a free country and we can’t say what we want?” replied Abdeljawad.

WiSJ:

But the odd way Madison elects its School Board is a significant factor that needs fixing. State law requires candidates in cities with populations between 150,000 and 500,000 — meaning only Madison — to run citywide in seven numbered seats for three-year terms.

So every spring, candidates must choose which of two or three seats they will seek. For competitive reasons, new candidates tend to run for seats that incumbents don’t already hold. That lets incumbents avoid scrutiny.

It also can deny voters choices. For example, an incumbent ran unopposed for Seat 7 last spring, while two new candidates ran for Seat 6. But what if a voter preferred the two newbies over the incumbent? Voters can’t select those two on their ballots. 

In theory, a candidate with fewer votes could even win election. 

A better system would pit all candidates for Madison School Board in the same pool, with the top vote-getters earning however many seats are available. That’s how most school boards across Wisconsin conduct their elections. Or they assign seats to geographic areas.

——

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?

Dan McLaughlin

But are parental rights really just a hollow abstraction? I’d say no, and Hochman doesn’t really make the case that they are. He concedes that strong families are a bulwark against totalitarian governments, and are despised for that reason by statists, but in assessing the value of the family, Hochman lapses into utilitarianism:

As Nisbet alludes to, the “mediating institutions” that sit in the space between the state and the individual — the family, the church, the community centers, parochial schools, and so on — are the basis of civic virtue. For those institutions to flourish, the political regime must allow them a wide sphere of freedom. In this sense, parental freedom is a cornerstone of a good society. But the “freedom” is the means; the “good” is the end.

There is something very important missing here: The family is a good in itself. Its very existence is one of the ends for which we constitute a society and a civilization. It is more important to most people than politics or civic health. The duty of parents to bring up their children, and of parents to obey them, is deeply grounded in Christian and other faiths; from the Fourth Commandment forward, it is emphasized throughout the Bible. Catholic men are instructed in the model of St. Joseph for that reason. Strong parental authority over the upbringing of children is one of the things that parents value and children need and deserve. That’s why it’s long been recognized as fundamental to our laws, even when that meant giving parents broad latitude to bring up kids in ideas, faiths, and languages that the majority mistrusts or disapproves of. To say that conservatives value parental rights and parental authority is not to say that conservatives are obsessed with some stale procedural formula but that we treasure what matters most.

Candice Rodgers:

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers¹.

These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message^2–5. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally⁶. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use⁷. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

Of course, our current understanding is incomplete, and more research is always needed. As a psychologist who has studied children’s and adolescents’ mental health for the past 20 years and tracked their well-being and digital-technology use, I appreciate the frustration and desire for simple answers. As a parent of adolescents, I would also like to identify a simple source for the sadness and pain that this generation is reporting.

A complex problem

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors⁸.

——

More.

“religion seems linked to better mental health in young people”.

By Sharyl Attkisson 

Underscoring the point that many self-proclaimed factcheck and misinformation groups are actually propagandists distributing misinformation themselves, the founder of “the independent research group MisinformationKills” is now apologizing to several doctors who are on the leading edge of treating Covid and Covid vaccine injuries.

Dr. Allison Neitzel repeatedly disparaged Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory, founders of Front Line Covid Critical Care (FLCCC). Her criticisms included a study by Dr. Marik on the effect of Vitamin C on sepsis, and a meta-analysis by Drs. Marik and Kory on the use of ivermectin to treat Covid.

I regret my use of words like fraudulent and grift, which I should not have used. I apologize to the FLCCC, Dr. Marik and Dr. Kory.Dr. Allison Neitzel, founder of the propaganda group “MisinformationKills”

Neitzel has attacked other vaccine industry foes, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. She also claims Aaron Rodgers spread of misinformation about Covid vaccines. The football star declined to get vaccinated.

Read more of Neitzel’s apology below.

William C. Ratcliff:

Many scientists approach speaking as they do writing a paper: an opportunity to present their data. But data without proper context is difficult to absorb. In this article, I describe a philosophy and set of heuristics for giving an engaging, narratively driven talk, inspired by the legendary documentaries of Sir David Attenborough.

Kimberley Strasser:

Democrats are finally alive to the threat of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and it’s about time. They worry not only that the gadfly might pull crucial votes away from Joe Biden. They worry more that Republicans will help make that happen—by running the same playbook Democrats honed in GOP primaries. And why not? All’s fair in love and meddling.

Mr. Kennedy’s announcement this week of a running mate—tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan—was met with louder-than-usual howls of “Spoiler!” The Democratic National Committee is assembling a team dedicated to the destruction of Mr. Kennedy and other third-party candidates, led by veteran strategist Mary Beth Cahill. Left-wing groups are already working to block Mr. Kennedy from the ballot in key swing states, rolling out liberal legal titan Marc Elias to file complaints of campaign irregularities.

Lola Fadalu

Some parents of students at the University of California, Berkeley, hired private security workers to patrol near the campus, something the school says should be left up to the campus police.

The group, called SafeBears, says it represents more than 1,300 parents of students at the university. It said it decided to hire the security guards after several crimes involving students last year, including a carjacking near a fraternity house and another one near campus.

The university, which has about 45,000 students, said in a statement that the hiring raised concerns about training and experience, and that “university funds are better spent hiring more” campus police officers.

Matt Taibbi:

I almost blew a top reading Brandy Zadrozny’s NBC piece that claimed it was “conspiracy theory” to suggest organizations like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) acted as “proxies” for government censorship. Three different groups — Twitter Files reporters, staffers for House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government Committee, and lawyers in the Murthy v. Missouri case — spent more than a year of work building that case. We didn’t come to the exact same conclusions, but all three investigations agreed on the basic premise, backed by a mountain of documentation.

Many emails and other communications describing the creation of the EIP (and outlining the platforms’ relationship to agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security) were never published. Zadrozny’s piece was sufficiently irritating that I decided to lay out, one more time, just how overwhelming and even redundant the evidence is that agencies like the DHS designed these programs to be pliant cutouts for state content control:

Peter Hartlaub:

The result was the four-part “Undercover Student” project, a front-page exposé that today is both increasingly fascinating and increasingly shocking, as time has made the decision to send a reporter into the maw of a high school ecosystem seem more like fiction than reality. This is the plot of the 1999 Drew Barrymore romantic comedy “Never Been Kissed,” not real life, where there are ramifications.

Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris

But perhaps no issue has been as stubborn and pervasive as a sharp increase in student absenteeism, a problem that cuts across demographics and has continued long after schools reopened.

Nationally, an estimated 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent last school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic, according to the most recent data, from 40 states and Washington, D.C., compiled by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Chronic absence is typically defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or about 18 days, for any reason.

Brandy Perez:

The Mellon Foundation granted the funds to Brown University Professor Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Dan-el Peralta, a Princeton University professor, for their “Racing the Classics” fellowship.

Neither responded to two emailed requests for comment sent in the past two weeks. The College Fix asked for more information on the program, including if the goal was to inspire activism against current representations of classics.

Specifically, The Fix asked about a failedeffort at Brown to remove Greek and Roman status on campus because they represented white supremacy. Activists called their campaign “one step in a broader project of decolonization by confronting Brown’s institutional and ideological legacies of colonialism and white supremacy.”

I/o

At that 91% non-white high school in San Francisco that has a higher acceptance rate at Berkeley than most of the top-rated high schools in the state:

Math proficiency: 7%
Science: 6%

——

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”

Jay Bhattachary:

If you are reading the work of a ‘misinformation’ ‘scientist’, odds are you are being misinformed.

If you are reading the work of a ‘fact’ ‘checker’, odds are you are being misled.

If you are reading the work of a ‘debunker’, odds are you are being manipulated.

——

“We Had to Destroy the Democracy to Save It”

Mitchell Schmidt:

Ripp said she ultimately accepted an in-kind donation from the state party that provided access to a mailing list of area residents who have historically voted for Democratic candidates. Later, she accepted an offer from DPW for a mailer highlighting her campaign goals.

“I was thinking this is a great opportunity to reach a lot more people who are probably like-minded who would be interested in voting for me,” Ripp said.

The flyer identifies Ripp as a “progressive candidate for Lodi schools” and highlights three campaign goals: ensuring schools have proper funding and resources, recruiting and retaining teachers and preparing students for success after graduation.

Anna Bryson

On Thursday, board member Andy Rotherham, a Youngkin appointee who also served on the board from 2005 to 2009 as an appointee of Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, pushed back on Holton’s criticisms of the adopted system.

He said the grade does not have to be an A to F system, and that talking about it as such is a way to “get everybody spun out and create a … big political storm.”

“You can call it a blow, but Ms. Holton, respectfully, telling the truth is not a blow. It is our obligation, and it’s an obligation we have failed for far, far too long,” said Rotherham, who is a co-founder of the national nonprofit Bellwether.

The A-F school rating system is used in at least 10 other states including Florida and North Carolina, but is generally not viewed favorably in Virginia and has been voted down by the state legislature.

Discovery Brief:

FILED UNDER SEAL May 31, 2023 Via CM/ECF Re: Klein v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:20-cv-08570-JD (N.D. Cal.) Dear Judge Donato: Advertiser Plaintiffs (“Advertisers”) respectfully request that the Court find that a prima facie case exists under the crime-fraud exception with respect to certain communications currently being withheld by Defendant Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Facebook”) as attorney-client privileged. The communications at issue relate to Facebook’s so-called In-App Action Panel (“IAAP”) program, which existed between June 2016 and approximately May 2019. The IAAP program, launched at the request of Mark Zuckerberg, used a cyberattack method called “SSL man-in-the-middle” to intercept and decrypt Snapchat’s—and later YouTube’s and Amazon’s—SSL-protected analytics traffic to inform Facebook’s competitive decisionmaking. As described below, Facebook’s IAAP program conduct was not merely anticompetitive, but criminal—the program violated 18 U.S.C. § 2511(a) and (d), the so-called “Wiretap Act,” with no applicable exception. Facebook’s attorneys were pervasively involved in the design, execution, and expansion of this program. On May 15, 2023, Advertisers sent Facebook a nineteen-page single-spaced letter providing screenshots, quotations from documents, and evidentiary citations setting forth the company’s applicable conduct; analyzing that conduct under 18 U.S.C. § 2511, et seq. and under the Ninth Circuit’s crime-fraud test, see In re Grand Jury Investigation, 810 F.3d 1110, 1113 (9th Cir. 2016); and seeking a prompt meet-and-confer.1 Over the next two weeks, Advertisers sent additional letters and emails. On May 31, the parties met and conferred and reached impasse. I. Facebook’s IAAP Program Targets Competition By Wiretapping Competitors On June 9, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg emailed three of the company’s top executives a message titled “Snapchat analytics.” PX 2255 (PALM-016564834) at 3. According to Zuckerberg: Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . . Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this. Id. Javier Olivan, now Facebook’s COO, promptly replied, “fully agree[ing] that this was one of the most important market analysis questions we need to answer.” Id. However, Olivan “ha[d] been looking into this with the onavo team” and the technology to look inside Snapchat’s SSL- protected analytics traffic “[wa]s really complicated,” likely “requir[ing] legal approval.” Id. Five minutes later, Olivan forwarded Zuckerberg’s email to Facebook’s Onavo team, asking for “out of the box thinking” on a task that “is really important.” Id. at 2. Olivan suggested potentially paying users to “let us install a really heavy piece of software (that could even do man in the middle, etc.).” Id. Later that morning, Onavo founder Guy Rosen replied: “we are going to figure out a plan for a lockdown effort during June to bring a step change to our Snapchat visibility. This is an opportunity for our team to shine.” Id. at 1. Two days later, Olivan forwarded the whole email thread to then-General Counsel Colin Stretch, saying “[w]e should move as fast as possible on this (budget will not be an issue assuming Colin greenlights this type of research on the thread @ Colin 1 Advertisers stand ready to provide full briefing, exhibits, and/or Advertisers’ letters to Facebook at the Court’s request. Case 3:20-cv-08570-JD

John Hindraker:

Whether or not the influx of millions of illegals across the southern border is an invasion in constitutional terms, it certainly is an invasion in common parlance. And for a border state like Texas, it is a comprehensive disaster. The people of Texas plainly have a right to defend themselves against this evil. If being part of the Union makes it legally impossible to defend themselves, it is only right that they should consider whether they want to remain in the Union. This is doubly true if the problem arises from a malicious determination on the part of the federal government to abandon, indeed subvert, one of the basic responsibilities that Texas and other states have delegated to that government.

Veronique de Rugy:

The economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are up, and inflation is down. However, the American people remain grumpy about the state of the economy. This puzzle was just investigated by four economists. They found that people often know that something is wrong even if statistics don’t reflect the problem. In this case, people are perceiving that inflation is still, in fact, high.

For months now, Americans have been told that inflation’s downward trend, from almost 9 percent annually to around 3 percent, should make them feel good about the economy. But it isn’t working. A recent Gallup poll found that 63 percent say the state of the economy is getting worse and 45 percent think it’s already “poor.” One reason, many have speculated, is that while the rate at which prices are rising might have slowed considerably, prices remain very high. Food and rent in particular are still expensive. These prices are felt everyday by Americans when they pay for their housing and go to the supermarket.

Walter Russell Mead:

Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time. If you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the “go along to get along” principle and who recognizes only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college when the future of civilization is on the line. And if you are someone who believes that “misgenderment” is a serious offense that demands heavy punishment while calls for the murder of Jews fall into a gray zone, you will likely lead a happier and more useful life if you avoid the public sphere.

The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.

Yakko:

For instance, with the way things are going (i.e. me not being close to having kids), my parents will likely become grandparents when they’re nearing 70, a couple decades later than my grandmother. 

In Brazil, where I’m from, this shift is quite recent. Until just one or two generations ago people were having multiple kids, and at very young ages. Now, I don’t have a single friend in my mid-to-late twenties friend group who has already had a kid.

So while the older generations are living longer and giving themselves a better shot at having great-grandkids, their descendants’ habits aren’t really helping.

But even more interesting is that this “age of great-grandmothers” as I like to call it not only is ending, but it hasn’t been here for long either.

River Simard and Rebecca Bloome

The digital signs installed by the Cambridge startup Soofa, have a hidden feature unknown to most who pass them: collecting data from people’s phones to count the number of pedestrians who walk by, and then sharing that information with the town.

Soofa says the company does not pull in any personal data from the phones, but a privacy expert with the ACLU told Brookline.News that the practice is troubling.

Matt Taibbi:

Ask your average Russian or Cuban what overempowered pseudo-intellectuals are capable of.

China Heritage:

Today, China Experts and China Watchers flourish once more. A once nearly-defunct claque of people working in government for national political ends, journalists, academics, ne’er-do-wells, as well as the talented curious and literary dilettantes jostle and contend with each other in the New Epoch of Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping. The long-overlooked, or underestimated, skills of being able to read, listen to and understand the bloviations of the Chinese party-state are even somewhat in vogue. Although Xi Jinping has been a boon for strategic thinkers, think tanks and academic opinionators in Euramerica, China’s own market for strategists — 戰略家、謀略家、謀士、縱橫家、說客, and so on — has fallen under the sway of the Communist Party. [Note: The colourful and wildly imaginative efforts of the previous ‘hundred schools’ have been reduced to a far more modest and grey palette of opinion. Those on both sides of the divide do, nonetheless, share similar ambitions: to serve ideological interests, to make a name, curry favour and influence while enjoying a slice of the cake that through their efforts is ever bigger. One of the time-honoured ways of grabbing the discursive spotlight is to formulate an expression or catch-phrase that gains currency.

Book launch, simulcast dialogue with a Party apparatchiki, media coverage and book sales all topped off by meeting with and addressing The One, Xi Jinping — Professor Allison delights in an ego trap of his own making.

National Literacy Institute:

• 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
• 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
• Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.
• 34% of adults lacking literacy proficiency were born outside the US.
• Massachusetts was the state with the highest rate of child literacy.
• New Mexico was the state with the lowest child literacy rate.
• New Hampshire was the state with the highest percentage of adults considered literate.
• The state with the lowest adult literacy rate was California.

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?

John Baez:

I don’t really think mathematics is boring. I hope you don’t either. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve launched into reading a math paper, dewy-eyed and eager to learn, only to have my enthusiasm slowly but remorselessly crushed by pages and pages of bad writing. There are many ways math writing can be bad. But here I want to focus on just one: it can be dull. This happens when it neglects the human dimension.

The reader’s interest a delicate thing. It can die at any moment. But properly fed, and encouraged, it can grow to a powerful force. Clarity, well-organized prose, saying just enough at just the right time — these are tremendously important. You can learn these virtues from good math writers. But it also makes sense to look to people whose whole business is keeping us interested: story-tellers.

Everyone loves a good story. We have been telling and listening to stories for untold millennia. Stories are one of our basic ways of understanding the world. I believe that when we read a piece of mathematics, part of us is reading it as a highly refined and sublimated sort of story, with characters and a plot, conflict and resolution. 

If this is true, maybe we should consider some tips for short story writers, taken from a typical online guide [K] and see how they can be applied — in transmuted form — to the writing of mathematics. These tips may sound a bit crass. But they go straight to the heart of what gets people interested, and keeps them interested

Corri Hess:

.@GovEvers just vetoed a bill that would have allowed Wisconsin school administrators to be hired without a license or experience.
Previous:

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

And:

Quinton Klabon:

The teacher shortage is massive. @GovEvers vetoed @RepPenterman’s bill to fix it with teacher apprenticeships to do his version. Okay.

More.

Governor Evers Vetoes Local Control and Workforce Relief

Madison, WI – Governor Evers vetoed SB 335, which would have removed the requirement that school districts only hire a person DPI has licensed to be a superintendent for their school district. Senator Duey Stroebel (R – Cedarburg) issued the following statement in response to both the veto and Governor Evers’ press release on his action:

“The people of Wisconsin should look at actions, not words. Governor Evers just proudly vetoed a bill that would have allowed school boards to exercise local control by choosing the superintendent of their liking. As a result, we remain locked in with some of the strictest licensing requirements in the region, which exacerbates our workforce problems.

Being superintendent is like being the CEO of a company. One does not need to have spent a lifetime in the field to effectively manage the professionals working for you. There are probably thousands of Wisconsinites who would do a great job serving their communities in this role who have not spent their entire careers licensed in a classroom.

This veto maintains the absolute prohibition on locally elected officials considering anyone outside the box.

No matter what he may say about addressing workforce problems for our kids, Governor Evers thinks DPI’s paper pushers know better than local communities. After making headway with bipartisan education efforts this session, like school choice expansion and science-based literacy reform, it is disappointing to see the Governor return to tribal politics despite some school districts having requested these flexibilities.

Senator Stroebel represents the 20th Senate District, which until 2023 Act 94 included parts of Ozaukee, Washington, Fond du Lac, Calumet and Sheboygan Counties. He now resides in the 8th Senate District, which includes parts of Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha and Milwaukee Counties.

###

AP Dillon:

Earlier this month, the anniversary of one of the most impactful and controversial decisions in North Carolina education history passed without so much as a mention from state officials.

On March 10, 2020, Gov. Roy Cooper issued executive order No. 116, declaring a state of emergency because of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. Four days later, Cooper followed that with executive order No. 117, which prohibited mass gatherings and also closed public schools through the end of the month.

Just over six weeks later, Cooper announced all schools would remain closed through the rest of the school year.

N.C. Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) Secretary Mandy Cohen, now director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the Biden administration, unveiled the “Strong Schools Toolkit” in June 2020 to provide guidance during the pandemic.

Shannon Larson:

Boston University, Tufts, Wellesley, and Yale will now top $90,000 a year for tuition, housing, and other expenses, according to the schools’admissions websites. Other private colleges around New England are also likely to cross the $90,000 annual threshold, but haven’t released their updated costs.

Let’s pause for a moment here. More than $90,000. A year. For college.What does look like? Well, at BU, the total cost for the 2024-2025 academic year includes $66,670 in tuition, $19,020 for housing and food, plus the cost of books and various fees for a grand total of $90,207. That’s a nearly 42 percent jump from a decade ago, the 2014-2015 academic year, when the all-in cost for a year at BU was $63,644.

Corrinne Hess:

Wisconsin’s in-state undergraduate students will see a tuition hike of 3.75 percent in the fall, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman announced Thursday.

The proposal will be considered by the Board of Regents April 4. 

This year tuition increased 5 percent. That was the first increase in 10 years. It came after the state lifted an in-state tuition freeze originally put in place by Republican legislators in 2013.

Jessica Gould:

But since announcing an overhaul of readinginstruction and implementing new curricula in half of all elementary schools last September, the city education department has declined to release data from seasonal assessments, called “screeners,” saying it would be premature.

Gothamist has now obtained preliminary screener data shared with some public school educators that shows stubbornly low proficiency rates among students. According to the data, two-thirds of students are not meeting reading targets, which resembles literacy rates Banks slammed as a “betrayal” when he was first appointed chancellor more than two years ago. The data shows proficiency at schools using the new curricula dropped slightly more than at schools using other materials. Education officials insisted such a comparison was inaccurate because of demographic differences and other variables between the sets of schools.

Banks and other top education officials did not have a clear answer when asked when the department will be able to assess the effectiveness of the literacy overhaul, saying such a major shift will need more time to show results.

“To reset New York City’s reading and literacy foundation as an entire system is probably one of the biggest undertakings the system has ever had,” Banks said on Thursday. “And it does not happen easily.”

AJ and Quinton

MTEA President Ingrid Walker-Henry says consolidating schools is a non-starter.

“We are talking about impacting Black children and Black families, and closing their schools.”

—

More.

Corrinne Hess:

Fund 80 is a special fund for non-classroom activities that serve the entire community including adult education, recreation and day care services. 

By increasing the fund, the district’s total tax levy is $320 million this year. 

MPS officials told the Policy Forum that over $40 million of the Fund 80 increase will be spent on a new recreation community center and aquatic facility at the former Browning School and Browning Playfield location that has been in the planning stages since 2018. 

The district had previously considered issuing debt for the project but now will pay cash to avoid interest costs. The remaining amount will be used to address a backlog of repair needs for other MPS-owned recreational facilities.

The $77.7 million could have been used to reduce taxes this year. 

——

Over the last few months, the central argument from MPS and referendum proponents has been that these resources will preserve the status quo for the next five years, and they have laid out no certain path toward improvement in educational outcomes. Preservation of the current state should be acceptable to no one. 

Stev McGuire:

It means his team’s “application is more likely to lose on ‘diversity’ grounds,” but he thinks it’s “immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application.”

The NIH’s insistence on DEI criteria is “a double wrong. Not only is the system rigged based on nonscientific—and possibly illegal—criteria; it encourages me to join in the rigging.”

Kevin Jon Williams:

Do I deserve to jump the line? If I say yes, I may play a leading role in ending the scourge of atherosclerosis—also known as hardening of the arteries. If I play fair, I may lose the opportunity to save people around the world from heart attacks and strokes. I’m angry at the National Institutes of Health for putting me in this position. I’m even angrier it has done so in the name of racial equity. 

My quandary comes down to whether I should “check the box” on an upcoming NIH grant application attesting to my recent African heritage. Since at least 2015, the NIH has asserted its belief in the intrinsic superiority of racially diverse research teams, all but stating that such diversity influences funding decisions. My family’s origins qualify me under the federal definition of African-American. Yet I feel it’s immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application and the body of my work, which is generally accepted as foundational in atherosclerosis research.

Susie Cohen:

A former New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “clearly” misleading him over the Covid lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic.

Donald McNeil Jr said he became sceptical of the hypothesis the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab after several top epidemiological virologists insisted it wasn’t possible.

Mr McNeil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being “dropped” for a year.

However, the experts initially thought the lab leak theory was plausible but didn’t want to disclose so for political reasons, according to a raft of messages between them accidentally released by a US congressional committee last year.

In his book The Wisdom of Plagues, which looks back at 25 years covering pandemics, Mr McNeil Jr said the scientists “clearly misled me early on” and he was a “victim of deception”.

He said he was “disappointed, both in them and in myself, that I was so easily taken in”.

“Don… pretty much nailed it,” Prof Andersen added. “Let’s not tell him.” They told him the rumours were “demonstrably false” and 10 days later published Proximal Origins.

Discussing his response to another email from Mr McNeil Jr nine days later, Prof Andersen told his colleagues he had used “humour to deflect the fact I’m dismissing him” and added a “very deliberate” smiley face.

More.

On Feb 6, 2020, NY Times reporter Don McNeil asked both Kristian Andersen & Richard Ebright about the possibility COVID-19 had a lab origin. In response, Andersen lied (see Slack chat) & Ebright told the truth (see below).

And.

Correct. Andersen and I received the same question on the same day from the same journalist. Andersen responded with pre-meditated disinformation. I responded with truthful, balanced, and detailed information.

By John Kass

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—the perpetually frightened rich kid born on third base thinking he hit a triple—has a big fat political problem.

He’s hosting the Democratic National Convention, his big fat coming out party in Chicago, in August. His fantasy? Becoming president of the United States of America.

As he’s planning his party, America is starting to focus on the absolute political wasteland that Illinois has become. And if they but open their eyes they’ll see exactly how the Democrats treat the sanctity of the vote.

The leftists preen like perfumed apes dressed in velvet suits when speechifying about how much they revere the institutions of democracy. Democracy Dies in Darkness is the slogan of The Washington Post, the leftist paper that promoted the Russia Collusion Hoax designed to destabilize the Trump administration. But they received the highest prize of corporate media. They’re all about democracy and darkness.

But in Chicago, where the DNC is to be held, there is another way, the Chicago Way, the Johnny Rocco Way.