A recent word salad from the VSG. It's a dandy:
Trump: "You know President Putin is KGB... Putin is fine. He's fine. We are all fine, we're all people
At the rally where he let loose with this, he also said that North Korea hasn't fire any missiles in eight months. That bit of information hasn't aged well:
North Korea fired two presumed short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern sea on Monday, South Korean officials said, resuming weapons demonstrations after a months-long hiatus that may have been forced by the coronavirus crisis in Asia.And immediately on the heels of that really bad deal between our State Department and the Taliban comes this:
A deadly blast shattered a period of relative calm in Afghanistan on Monday and the Taliban ordered fighters to resume operations against Afghan forces just two days after signing a deal with Washington aimed at ushering in peace.No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack at a football ground in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, where three brothers were killed, officials told AFP.The blast occurred around the same time the Taliban ordered fighters to recommence attacks against Afghan army and police forces, apparently ending an official "reduction in violence" that had seen a dramatic drop in bloodshed and given Afghans a welcome taste of peace.The partial truce between the US, the insurgents and Afghan forces lasted for the week running up to the signing of the US-Taliban accord in Doha on Saturday, and was extended over the weekend."The reduction in violence... has ended now and our operations will continue as normal," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP."As per the (US-Taliban) agreement, our mujahideen will not attack foreign forces but our operations will continue against the Kabul administration forces."The Taliban's military commission circulated instructions for fighters to resume operations, according to a document that an insurgent provided to AFP.
Kyle Sammin at National Review reviews Ross Douthat's new book, and it's prompted me to make yet another addition to my wanna-read-this-year list. I've long held that his premise was the case. This blog is called Late in the Day, after all:
Pollsters often ask the American public their opinion on which way the country is going. In his latest book, Ross Douthat takes a step back from that inquiry and ponders whether America — and the West as a whole — is going anywhere at all. Have we instead entered an age of decadence and stagnation, resting on the successes of the past, and lulling ourselves to sleep as civilization slides lazily into decline? In The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, Douthat makes a fairly convincing argument that this may be the case.He examines several areas, including technology (he points to the 1972 end of the Apollo space program as the inflection point on this score), politics and the arts. He cites Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, which I have read. Douthat says we could go go on in our present state for quite some time.
An example of the cultural exhaustion he discusses is this Billie Eilish phenomenon:
Strange and often terrible things happen when the music industry anoints new royalty. Backlash is quick and intense. Stars sweat under the spotlight and start to say and do the wrong things. (Remember when *Justin Bieber peed in a restaurant mop bucket and cursed out Bill Clinton?) Everyone is desperate to figure Gen Z out, and rallying behind Billie Eilish seems to be a lot of people’s idea of getting it done, which is an understandable thought process, considering the size and median age of her following. But when you shoot a young performer to the top of the prestige circuit on the first album, where do they go next? For Eilish’s sake, let’s hope she can mitigate the backlash and show people what she’s really about and what she’s capable of.
The ever-ballooning amount of money that federal, state and local levels of government spend on education is a rich subject for exploration. We devoted a segment of the last episode of the Barney & Clyde podcast to the matter, launching into it via something happening in the city where we live. The school system, with the backing of the school board, is pushing a referendum that will be on the May 5 primary ballot. People will vote on a local property tax increase to fund teacher salary increases - a response to last fall's Red for Ed push. But it seems some of the newfound funds will go for stuff like "social and emotional learning" initiatives, mental health professionals in each school, as well as school resource officers. How did we come to have these needs? If I may venture an answer, it's that we have become a markedly more nutty society in the last 50 years.
I'm seriously tempted to send to the system superintendent and all the board members this Real Clear Politics piece by high school teacher and Young Voices Education fellow Tyler Bonin entitled "Throwing Money At Education Won't Improve Outcomes":
SCOTUS will consider a challenge to the "Affordable" Care Act's individual mandate.in the U.S. a great deal more was spent on support staff (administration, operations, etc.) than teaching staff. Support services spending has increased by 50% between the 1999-2000 and 2014-2015 school years in North Carolina. Such has been the broader trend in the United States overall, where school staffing growth, reduced only briefly during the recession, climbedconsistently since 1950 at a rate greater than student growth. So, while teaching staff in U.S. public schools grew by 243% between 1950 and 2015, administrative and support personnel increased a whopping 709% during the same period.Spending money on perpetual bureaucratic bloat and top-down pedagogical approaches that assume one-size-fits-all doesn’t mean educational equity will follow. Indeed, this growth of support services at greater rates than teaching faculty demonstrates just how large the educational-industrial complex has become. And the more distance put between bureaucrats making these funding decisions and the schools they work for, the less likely it is they’ll spend wisely (and the more likely they’ll never be satisfied with the amount received).The rising number and popularity of charter schools in states like North Carolina and Texas, then, illustrate the effectiveness of local educational governance and decision-making, especially concerning finances and student achievement. In 2011, the North Carolina General Assembly lifted the charter school cap from its maximum of 100. As a result, charters have grown while traditional public school districts have contracted. The Opportunity Scholarship, NC’s voucher program, has nine times the number of students it did in its inception year of 2013.More constituents have voted with their feet, choosing alternatives to traditional public schools, like charters or private schools using the Opportunity Scholarship. Their record of student success and prudent spending speaks for itself. Hopefully, legislators will learn from the charter example that money well spent is far more valuable to students than a poorly managed influx of cash.
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