California Leavin'

A bit from a Wall Street Journal article raises a couple of rude questions in my pea brain, and a rude notice.  California is beginning a more-or-less serious effort to secede from the union. The bit is this: the US would have to approve a constitutional amendment to allow a secession.

The questions are these: what would Californians think if the required amendment passed unanimously--or perhaps only with New York, Illinois, Washington demurring?  What would Californians think if those States approving the amendment did so with enormous majorities?

The rude notice is this: California secession dreamers can begin collecting signatures to place a  nationhood proposal on the November 2018 ballot, after language for the measure was approved this week by the state’s attorney general.  Notice that: in California, the citizens are allowed to have only those referendum ballots whose political speech is approved by the California government; they don't get to vote on the things they think are important without Government oversight.  What must California citizens think of that?  Oh, wait....

Eric Hines

Hotcoldwetdry

If I'm reading this New Yorker article correctly, the same shadowy forces that once undermined a scientific consensus for nuclear winter then turned their attention to undermining a scientific consensus for global warming.  They were equally nefarious both times, either because they're very bad people or because their money comes from very bad people, or both.  The conclusion seems to acknowledge grudgingly that science is corrupted when it's in service of the nation-state's political objectives, but the lesson we're to draw is that we're not entitled to be skeptical of global warming unless we're also skeptical of claims that nuclear war would be just peachy keen for the  environment.  Well, okay then.

Honestly, I remember when The New Yorker had smarter authors and lots better editors.

DB: Grief-stricken Navy mourns the departure of beloved Secretary Ray Mabus

"In news that has every sailor and Marine in the Department of the Navy literally wailing with inconsolable grief..."

SNL ... Enters the Twilight Zone?

I don't know if I can handle SNL being funny again, and making non-progressive points. That shakes my worldview.

Anyway, the skit I'm referring to now is on Hulu, which I'm not sure how to embed here, so here's the link to SNL's Susan B. Anthony skit.

And after that, if you want more, Acculturated has an article about SNL doing a skit pointing out that our feminist foremothers did not support abortion.

Should Have Opened Fire Earlier

NSFRPOW (Not Safe for Rational People ... or Work)

Country Heroes, More or Less ...

I swear, if I ever make it to a Corb Lund concert, I'm going to wear a "Free Lester Cousins" t-shirt.

Sounds Like a Good BASIS for Education

From Naomi Schaefer Riley at the New York Post:

...

While America is falling behind globally — we were ranked 24th in the world on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment scores — BASIS is soaring. In math, reading and science three BASIS schools ranked above Shanghai, Korea, Finland and Singapore. If BASIS schools formed a country it would be ranked top in the world. Even compared to students whose families are in the same income brackets, BASIS is still performing 18 percent better on average.

But there’s a catch. If you’re looking for a place that will coddle your kids, you’ve come to the wrong school. As headmaster Hadley Ruggles tells me, “Brooklyn is a progressive place, and it looks like we have rolled back the clock.”

The students are taught grammar. Math in the early grades involves drilling. Students are required to take three years of Latin. Writing is focused on analytical work, not “journaling.”

... Students as young as eighth grade are taking APs and scoring well. Plus, middle-schoolers take biology, chemistry and physics classes three days a week each.

The teachers have come from top college and graduate programs, and many have left their own fields to teach.

...

The fearless regulation killer

I had vaguely heard of the Congressional Review Act, which permits Congress to nix a regulation within 60 legislative days.  A bright young feller showed up at this week's Republican retreat and pointed out that the deadline isn't 60 days after the regulation is issued, it's 60 days after the later of the date it's issued or the date the agency issues a report on it.  In most cases during the recently concluded administration, the agencies didn't bother.  That means Congress can vote down a whole slew of regulations with a majority vote--no filibuster.

“If they haven’t reported it to Congress, it can now be challenged,” says Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Larkin, also at Wednesday’s meeting, told me challenges could be leveled against any rule or guidance back to 1996, when the CRA was passed.

The best part? Once Congress overrides a rule, agencies cannot reissue it in “substantially the same form” unless specifically authorized by future legislation. The CRA can keep bad regs and guidance off the books even in future Democratic administrations—a far safer approach than if the Mr. Trump simply rescinded them.

Republicans in both chambers—particularly in the Senate—worry that a great use of the CRA could eat up valuable floor time, as Democrats drag out the review process. But Mr. Gaziano points out another hidden gem: The law allows a simple majority to limit debate time. Republicans could easily whip through a regulation an hour.

March for Life

Here is a healthier take on a recent political slogan.

A Renaissance for Truth

In all sorts of information operations or psychological warfare, credibility is the currency and truth is a force multiplier. The common theory is that powerful regimes want to disrupt our ability to know the truth so they can create their own reality. In fact, this is what weak regimes do. Powerful regimes tell the truth, and then make the things they want to be true happen.

At some point, the parties that be are going to remember that. Somebody is going to decide to stop the hyperventilating, stop the shutting-off of debate, stop with the name-calling and social bullying, and just tell the truth. Whoever does it first, and builds the reputation for speaking the truth no matter what, is going to win this political exercise. Then they'll have the power to make true many of the things that they wish were true.

UPDATE: Via Anarchyball.

Ceaușescu's America

I'm reading this collection of interviews with women who voted for Trump. At least one of them has something quite interesting to say.

I defected from Ceaușescu's Romania. You don’t grow up in a regime like that and not think about state control over human lives. Today I’m a libertarian. I believe in small government. I’m pro-choice. What I find most threatening in a democracy is extremism. She’s an ideologist and would’ve appointed Supreme Court justices with extreme positions. My vote was more an anti-Hillary vote.

I’ve lived here since 1993 but I’m still a European at heart and read the European papers. Let me tell you, Benghazi was covered with graphic detail. Reading the news in Europe I understood how censored the news in the U.S. has become, giving me flashbacks of a Commie regime. I also resented that when I opened the October issues of my fashion magazines, the editors all endorsed Clinton for president.

I've read lots of people talking about Trump in totalitarian terms, but here's the voice of a woman who really lived under a totalitarian system. Hillary Clinton was the one she recognized as reflective of it. Of course, the uniformity of expressed opinion -- and the media censorship -- is consensual here, where it was enforced by secret police there. How much does that matter? At least some, and perhaps a lot.

Billions down the drain

There was some freaking out dressed up as fact-checking over President Trump's inaugural reference to billions of dollars dumped into failing schools for no benefit to students.  No need to take his word for it; here's the outgoing administration's analysis of the very expensive "School Improvement Grant" program.  A direct quote from the Executive Summary:

Overall, across all grades, we found that implementing any SIG-funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.

* * *

The SIG program aimed to support the implementation of school intervention models in low-performing schools. Although SIG was first authorized in 2001, this evaluation focused on SIG awards granted in 2010, when roughly $3.5 billion in SIG awards were made to 50 states and the District of Columbia, $3 billion of which came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. States identified the low-performing schools eligible for SIG based on criteria specified by ED and then held competitions for local education agencies seeking funding to help turn around eligible schools.

No doubt the Keynesian spending stimulus was crackerjack, but funneling resources to the schools that are failing the most egregiously, while merciful to the struggling schools, doesn't seem to be very merciful to the kids trapped there. Maybe rewarding failure gets you more failure.  It's interesting that the money ostensibly was spent on a variety of techniques associated with change and reform.  Something tells me they were reforming the wrong things.

There's a lot of gobbledegook about "comprehensive instructional reform strategies, teacher and principal effectiveness, and operational flexibility and support," but it's not obvious to me what really changed in the schools that got the money.

One goal of SIG is to promote the use of instructional practices that have the potential to increase academic rigor and student achievement. The SIG application criteria focused on practices to reform instruction in seven subtopics: (1) Using Data to Identify and Implement an Instructional Program; (2) Promoting the Continuous Use of Data to Identify and Address the Needs of Individual Students; (3) Conducting Periodic Reviews of the Curriculum; (4) Implementing a New School Model; (5) Providing Supports and Professional Development (PD) to Staff to Assist Both English language learners (ELLs) and Students with Disabilities; (6) Using and Integrating Technology-Based Supports; and (7) Tailoring Strategies for Secondary Schools. We collected data on five of these subtopics through school survey questions that asked about eight practices aligned with SIG objectives in these areas (Table IV.1). Because none of the questions from the school surveys aligned with the third or fourth subtopic, we excluded these subtopics from the analysis.

What I'd love to see is a study of contrasting schools with differing percentages of graduates of teaching colleges versus practically any other background, and taking into account the school's freedom to remove incurably disruptive students from the classroom or even from the school. I'm afraid many of these radical "turnaround" and "transformation" models were only pushing the food around on the plate.

Let's Halt the Eclipse

A proposal from our Brexit friends. It's not the worst idea ever, if it can be done.

Ace of Spades

Actually it's a shovel, not a spade.

Batting Near a Thousand

Trump's made some friends, anyway.

UPDATE: How's 11 million sound to you?

The guts of an insurrection

The AEI article in my immigration post below contained a link to a fascinating piece by Dominic Cummings describing the nuts and bolts of the Brexit campaign, including his deep frustration over the inability of the ostensibly friendly Brit leaders to comprehend what was motivating the voters:

[The 2008 financial crisis] undermined confidence in Government, politicians, big business, banks, and almost any entity thought to be speaking for those with power and money. Contra many pundits, Miliband was right that the centre of gravity has swung against free markets. Even among the world of Thatcherite small businesses and entrepreneurs opinion is deeply hostile to the way in which banks and public company executive pay work. Over and over again outside London people would rant about how they had not/barely recovered from this recession ‘while the politicians and bankers and businessmen in London all keep raking in the money and us mugs on PAYE are paying for the bailouts, now they’re saying we’ve just got to put up with the EU being crap or else we’ll be unemployed, I don’t buy it, they’ve been wrong about everything else…’ All those amazed at why so little attention was paid to ‘the experts’ did not, and still do not, appreciate that these ‘experts’ are seen by most people of all political views as having botched financial regulation, made a load of rubbish predictions, then forced everybody else outside London to pay for the mess while they got richer and dodged responsibility. They are right. This is exactly what happened.

Who needs data?

It's been frustrating trying to discuss either voter fraud or sane voter i.d. laws for the last 5-10 years.  I'll never understand the impulse to lump them in with racist poll taxes.  Jazz Shaw makes a reasonable suggestion that, just possibly, it might help to have some data, so we ouldn't quit screaming "There's fraud."  "No there isn't."

Ray Mabus Out

One of the best pieces of news I've heard in a long time is the end of the longest-serving Secretary of the Navy since World War I.

His replacement comes well recommended.

"All three of these nominees have my utmost confidence," Defense Secretary James Mattis said in a statement following the announcement. "They will provide strong civilian leadership to strengthen military readiness, gain full value from every taxpayer dollar spent on defense, and support our service members, civilians, and their families. I appreciate the willingness of these three proven leaders to serve our country. They had my full support during the selection process, and they will have my full support during the Senate confirmation process."

Bilden is a business leader, former military intelligence officer and Naval War College cybersecurity leader who served on the board of directors for the United States Naval Academy Foundation and the board of trustees of the Naval War College Foundation.

Cleaning House

The new Secretary of State will have a very free hand, as the entire senior leadership team of the State Department just resigned -- or, possibly, were required to resign.

Of course, after the Obama era -- and the Kerry State Department following on the Clinton State Department -- that is exactly what is needed. The Post describes this as the new Secretary's job getting harder, but I frankly think his job would have been impossible without replacing at least the entire top level of personnel.

Weird Times

As Trump's moves are matched by rising approval ratings, I notice that strange things are going on in San Francisco.

Frisco is always at least a little weird, though.