Public Schools Trump First Amendment?

A Federal judge ruled that a school can exercise prior restraint on adults who are not students but are attending school functions. 

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, a President George H. W. Bush appointee, ruled that the district acted reasonably in its decision to prevent parents from protesting.

McAuliffe said the parents’ "narrow, plausibly inoffensive" intentions were not as important as the wider context, and that adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment-protected right to convey messages that demean, harass or harm students.

"While plaintiffs may very well have never intended to communicate a demeaning or harassing message directed at Parker Tirrell or any other transgender students, the symbols and posters they displayed were fully capable of conveying such a message," he wrote. "And, that broader messaging is what the school authorities reasonably understood and appropriately tried to prevent."

Public schools are frankly on the same order as prisons in their deleterious effects on America's culture of liberty. They train the young to submit their freedoms to the dictates of authority, and here extend the command of this intelligentsia to control of their parents as well. Even if you didn't mean to engage in wrongthink, comrade, someone might have understood you to be -- so your speech must be prevented before it can occur. 

UPDATE: Over in the UK, a ruling that transwomen are not, legally speaking, women. 

Prisons are Not the Way

Readers know that I am a longtime advocate of abolishing prisons in favor of some other approach to dealing with crime. We discussed this as recently as January, and the more recent police-state tactics we are seeing here in March. 

I don't like what prisons do to people's minds. I think that all the evidence clearly demonstrates that they are complete failures at rehabilitation and indeed make things worse. It does this by taking someone out of the market for a long period of time, so they have both a felony record and no recent employment history when they do go to look for work. It does this by placing them in constant contact with criminals as their nearly-sole company for years or decades. 

They are hugely expensive things given that they don't work, and not just expensive in terms of money. Think of all the American men (and some women) whose lives are being wasted guarding prisoners. Whatever you think of the prisoners, people who are fit to be prison guards could be better employed in some gainful occupation. 

I thought of this today while reading up on CECOT, the prison in El Salvador that is much under discussion. It is an immoral entity, as close to Hell as men know how to create on earth; America ought to have no part of it. It at least does not pretend to be reforming anyone; its conceit is that no one will ever leave it again, and thus the harm caused by their transformation through suffering will be contained within its walls. If that is what is wanted, executions would be a kinder and far more efficient way of achieving the same result.

The 8th Amendment should bar our government from making use of it, since neither a sense of honor nor morals seems to bind the government to much. Yet I reflect that it is no worse than, and indeed quite similar to, the detention centers we helped set up in Iraq to which we contributed many detainees. Like at CECOT, the Iraqis ran the prisoners together, perhaps in the hope that the rival gangs or rival Baathists/Islamists would punish each other. 

Instead, as you will recall, that is how ISIS came to be forged. They learned to work together and became something worse and more effective than either had been alone. The transformative harms done to them were not, after all, contained forever behind the terrible walls. 

Why Is This Funny?

I don't know why this is funny, but it is. I must have reached the delirious stage of Lent.

The Kamala Harris one ...

Holy Monday

I saw a lot of 'driving the moneychangers out of the Temple' posts yesterday, but that event actually occurred on Holy Monday. 

Surf & Turf

My neighbor’s wife left shrimp in her car. Guess who?

A Joke for Palm Sunday

An elderly woman lives by herself. She is very religious, and knows the Bible very well. One night, she is awakened by a noise. She looks out the window and sees a man trying to force his way into the house with a crowbar. 

She creeps to the phone and quietly calls the police, but is worried that they might not get there in time. So she decides to appeal to the guy's conscience with a Bible verse. She yells out, "Acts 2:38!" On hearing this, the man puts down his tools, and puts his hands over his head. 

Just then, the police get there and arrest him. As he's being booked, the arresting officer says, "I've got to ask you something. You were almost in the house. Why did you stop and give up just because that lady yelled some scripture?" 

"Scripture?!" he answered. "I thought she was saying she had an ax and two .38's!"

Fairness and Heritability

This was linked at Instapundit, but it's up AVI's alley and a subject we sometimes discuss.

The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life.  The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids.  (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation.  The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....

Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair.  The children of the rich do better.  But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.”  Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair.  The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.” 

I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.

What, if anything, should be done about that? 

Palm Sunday

Today begins Holy Week, and occasions one of my favorite Bible stories. 

Our solar,/lunar/hebdomadalian holiday

I thought I'd figured out the schedule for Easter a while back: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This complicated formula draws together the solar cycle (equiox), the lunar cycle (full moon), and the weekly cycle (Sunday). But imagine my surprise when this month's full moon turned out to be today (April 12). Why isn't Easter tomorrow? Instead, tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Easter is not until April 20.

The mystery turns on the Western Christian Church's ancient practice of calculating the vernal equinox according to a formula that doesn't quite line up with the astronomically observed full moon or equinox. This year the archaic formula, which requires us to divide the year by 19 and look up the remainder in a chart, yields a liturgical Paschal Full Moon on April 13, which is Sunday (tomorrow). When the post-equinox full moon lands on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday.

The accepted view seems to be that the seven-day week, which depends on neither the solar nor the lunar cycle, has its roots in Genesis: the seven days of creation. Romans used an 8-day week for many centuries B.C. and A.D., but switched to the Jewish 7-day week with Constantine's converstion to Christianity. Later Europeans continued the Roman custom of naming the days of the week after the five classically visible planets plus the sun and the moon (though the Romans had added an eighth day with a name that had something to do with markets). In English, the modern names of the seven days of the week are rooted in the Norse gods for Tuesday through Friday, to the Roman god Saturn for Saturday, and to the Teutonic words for sun and moon for Sunday and Monday. In Romance languages, the days of the week are rooted in the Latin names for "Lord" for Sunday, moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and sabbath for Saturday.

Look, Sergeant Pepper…

Hank Jr. Getting It

I admire a man who has kept up his relationship with the ground this way.

Lazarus Saturday

One more week until Pascha, Holy Week.

I'll include the whole passage from John below the fold, but Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a prelude to the Passover, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and it is this miracle that prompts some Jews to decide to kill Jesus. An odd juxtaposition: A resurrection causes some to decide to kill Jesus, which leads to both His resurrection and ours. God indeed causes all things to work together for good.

It is in this passage that we get the shortest verse, "Jesus wept," as he mourns for his friend, and also the passage where Jesus declares "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." And then he asks, "Do you believe this?" 

Isn't it strange that Jesus should weep for the death of a friend when he knows he will raise that friend from the dead? I think human death is always a tragedy; it is the result of the disease of sin and it is something to mourn. We are so allergic to any negative emotions in America that we now have "celebrations of life" at funerals. There is nothing wrong with that; I have friends and family who have had those and I always participate appropriately. That is what they wanted. But, sometimes it is good to weep and to weep openly in public as Jesus did. It is good to acknowledge the tragedy. It is no denial of the resurrection to grieve the death of the beloved.

Passover

I’m not aware of there being any Jews in the audience of this blog, but if there are, happy Passover. 

Easter is still quite a ways off this year, depending upon whether your church follows the Gregorian or the Julian calendar. 

Unintended Consequences

I hadn't heard of this series until this morning, although it's 18 episodes long already. It's from Reason magazine, and is very instructive.

...but we learned our lesson and it never happ... oh.

Alas Colorado

One of the more beautiful states, Colorado, but so was California. 

The [manufacture and sale] restrictions are real enough but as Complete Colorado reported last month, the law's definition effectively covers "almost every centerfire semiautomatic handgun" bigger than a .22. In fact, "There is only one centerfire semiautomatic handgun model that does not fall within the bill’s definitions. That unique item is the Benelli B-80, a collector’s item last manufactured in 1990."...

Up next: House Bill 1312 and its obliteration of 1st Amendment protections and parental rights. HB 1312 says, "It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful to, with specific intent to discriminate, publish materials that deadname or misgender an individual.” The law applies to everything from flyers to blogs to newspapers, and if it becomes law, I could find myself in hot water for referring to a dude in a dress as "he."

Going even further, according to Ari Armstrong:

Part of the bill pertains to child custody. Existing statutes define “coercive control” as “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse, that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual.” The bill adds deadnaming and misgendering someone as types of “coercive control,” and it directs courts to consider deadnaming and misgendering when deciding matters of child custody.

So, as to the latter, a mother could lose custody of her child for the offense of calling her child by the name that she, the mother, bestowed upon her child at birth. 

The state should be forbidden from interfering inside families. I realize that some families are awful. It's still a good rule because governments are reliably awful. 

The firearm regulation is quite terrible, although as I understand it the law does not actually ban any guns, it just complicates the process for buying them (and imposes fees). That's still an unconstitutional set of infringements that I hope will be struck down by the courts, as they ought to be. It's still not as bad as, say, Maryland's law.

As I've written before, we've reached the point that literally the only real right the left believes in is the right to abortion. Everything else is subject to restrictions, and as severe a set of restrictions as they want that day.

Foreign Responses to the Tariffs

From Canada

From Ireland

From the Heard and McDonald Islands

Harley-Davidson CEO Out

Great job. Now bring back the Dyna. 

UPDATE: A friend from the Iraq days sends:

If you do, bring back the Dyna. 

Why Not Make It Worse?

The heavy rains we've had over the last week have finally allowed fire crews to finish containing the big wildfires that were near to me. Even the massive Table Rock fire is now fully contained. 

However, we still have millions upon millions of downed trees from Helene; and while the rains have wet the earth, the wood will continue to dry for years. It would be helpful if we could remove some of that fuel before the next round of fires.

The Trump administration decided to help with that -- it's been surprising how much more the Federal government has been wanting to help since the new administration came in. Enter the usual suspects:

C'mon guys. I love the forest as much as anyone, but these trees are already dead. Let's get as many as we can before they burn up the world. There's no way we'd get them all up anyway, but potentially we could reduce the fire hazard at least a little bit.

Why didn't we think of that?

Failing Houston schools are trying something new, or rather, something old-fashioned. The teacher stands in front of the class and teaches lessons. After an hour or so there's a short quiz, which lets the teacher split the class roughly in half. The half who are struggling the hardest get more hands-on teaching, while the half who are picking it up faster have a chance to work more on their own. Kids who disrupt class get a time out in a separate room, where they continue to be taught by a ZOOM link under adult supervision.

Sylva’s Confederate Monument Restored

Sylva’s town council is not happy about it, either. The county owns the thing, though, not the town. 

I imagine it will be defaced a half dozen times during the upcoming Pride Month celebrations, which Sylva does take seriously. Or once, really well.