“Schools”

It's cheap and easy to put up a sign saying "School" on the front of a building. It's entirely another thing to run a functioning school. Many of our schools are among our institutions that are being rotted out on the inside. This is permanently hurting millions of people and threatening America's future. From City Journal:

No issue is more pressing in California than education. In late October, the state released scores for the first post-Covid-shutdown state standardized test, conducted earlier last year. The results were horrendous. Less than half of all students who took the Smarter Balanced test—47.1 percent—met the state standard in English language arts, down 4 percentage points from 2018–19. One-third of students met the standard in math, down 6.5 percentage points. Only 16 percent of black students and 9.7 percent of English learners met standards in math.

Not only did test scores plummet; the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has also skyrocketed. The no-show rate leapt from 14.3 percent in 2020–21 to 30 percent in 2021–22. (California defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10 percent of the days they were enrolled for any reason.) But amazingly, during the 2021–22 school year, data showed that the state’s four-year high school graduation rate climbed to 87 percent, up from 83.6 percent in 2020–21.

How is this possible?

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Argument Pyramid: Deploy in Case of Ad Hominem Attacks

This pyramid is an elegant response to shitstorms of ad hominem attacks.

If your response is "this pyramid sucks," it's especially for you.

Credit for this meme goes to Paul Graham, a computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author.

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Marty Makary Counts the Many Ways the Federal Government Failed Us During COVID

Marty Makary, MD, testifying before Congress:

More tragically, the NIH has $42 billion. BARDA, which is part of the PAHPA Act, has another billion dollars and they couldn't do the most basic clinical research we needed done quickly to answer the basic questions to end the controversies and the conspiracy theories to finally get up the questions Americans were asking us: How does it spread? Is it from touching surfaces? Do I need to pour 20 gallons of alcohol on my groceries? Fauci was telling teachers in July to wear gloves and goggles. Or was it spread airborne? That could have been answered in 24 hours in one of our BSL4 labs? Or in one week of clinical research to answer the question: When are you most contagious? What's the peak day of viral shedding? How long do you have you have to quarantine for? Do masks work? We could have answered these with definitive basic clinical research early. They didn't.

And so I think it's fair to ask how did they do in preparing us? For the pandemic? We've spent over $20 billion on PAHPA over the last 20 years. What has that done for us? How many lives were saved during the COVID pandemic because of investments by PAHPA or BARDA? Now, they've done some good work. I've seen it. But regardless of one's political affiliation, they've got to acknowledge that we doctors in the public were flying blind. We had opinion ruling the day on what we should do or not do when we could have been governed by evidence. Policy driven by good basic clinical research. We didn't have that. And so we had a void of clinical research. And guess what filled that void over half a year? A year? Two years? What filled that void were political opinions. Those controversies could have been ended early. We had the money.

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It’s Friday. It’s Time for Nellie Bowles to Discuss Gas Stoves at TGIF

It's Friday, which means Nellie Bowles is writing things like this at TGIF, at Free Press:

I thought banning gas stoves was a conspiracy theory? Now, hold on. I was told just in January of this year that the gas stove ban was a fake right-wing culture war thing.

NYT: “No One Is Coming for Your Gas Stove Anytime Soon”

Time: “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars”

Salon: “Rumors of a gas stove ban ignite a right-wing culture war”

MSNBC: “No, the woke mob is not coming for your gas stove.”

AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves”

The Washington Post: ​​“GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars”

Which is why it’s so weird because just this week, New York state lawmakers banned gas stoves from all new construction. So it definitely does seem like Dems are coming for gas stoves, in that they just banned them in one of America’s most populous states.

There’s usually a slightly longer lag between when the mainstream press tells us something is a crazy lie and when the press says okay, fine, it’s not a lie, it’s actually true, and also it’s a good thing—so this is surprising. I’ll be over here huffing carbon oxides and vapors.

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The Annual Love-In with the White House and “Journalists”

Have you recently visited any of the left-leaning corporate media outlets to try to find one thing, anything, that they write that is critical of Joe Biden and Democrats? What are the odds that even your favorite politician can do no wrong for 2 1/2 years? But it happens over and over. With only a few notable exceptions (e.g., Tucker Carlson), it also happens on the right.

Well, it's time for those journalists to celebrate with the country's centers of power and you will never hear Glenn Greendald heap such scorn upon other human beings. It's because they are proudly abandoning their mission to be adversaries of the White House, not buddies seeking to get even more friendly. The net result is what you don't see: News accounts that **** badly on the White House. Here's an transcript from Glenn's Rumble show, System Update:

s repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy, it actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are. It's become kind of like the Oscars, in the sense that – in many senses, actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night, but many days leading up to it, where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend. But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is that these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars, in gowns and tuxedos, and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest and sleaziest event you can possibly imagine held at the White House hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering.

And so, in the days leading up to the event, they spend a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing and within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think. As I said, it's a mask-dropping event. They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides. It's really why they do their job – to be around power or to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the Royal Court – and so, it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know that it's one of the most revealing lights that ever get shined on them.

You can view the entire episode here, at Rumble.com

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