Muda69

As the Indianapolis area urban sprawl moves northward along I-65 Lebanon stands poised to become the next Zionsville.

Crackpot School Board Californicates History: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/crackpot-school-board-californicates-history-san-francisco/ Education as social therapy. Who cares about facts? We need to uplift! Chotiner presses the point with Lopez, trying to figure out whether she believes that historical truth matters here. He points out that some of the figures whose memory was damned by the board, and whose names will now come off of schools, were actually not guilty of the offenses for which the Board damned them. The exchange goes on with Chotiner trying to pin Lopez down on whether or not truth matters: Word salad! Poor Chotiner labors on, trying to get a straight answer from Lopez: Ah! Now the interviewer is a villain because he keeps asking Lopez basic questions that she can’t answer. Read it all.There’s so much more. In an earlier interview, Lopez said that it’s not such a bad thing that San Francisco public school kids haven’t been in school forever, because of Covid: Can you imagine being a parent of a San Francisco public school student, and hearing the president of the school board say such a thing? Chotiner asks Lopez about that too. You’ve really got to read it all. This is a perfect example of the real and lasting damage that the Woke do when they gain control of institutions. This is anti-intellectual mindlessness, but nobody is stopping them. The San Francisco Chronicle published this column by a San Francisco public school teacher who insists that Bernie Sanders’s mittens are an example of “white privilege.” I kid you not. Excerpt: This person, Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, actually teaches high school students in San Francisco. Can you imagine the poison she puts into their minds, teaching them to be offended by elderly socialist Bernie Sanders’s racist mittens? Seriously, this is deranged cultishness. The White Man’s Mittens Menace. Here’s the thing, though: this is not funny when you consider what it means for the future when the woke cult seizes institutions. Joe Biden has named Cindy Marten, superintendent of San Diego’s public school system, as his choice for Deputy Secretary of Education. Last year, Marten welcomed with gushing compliments to a training meeting Bettina Love, a critical race theorist whose program included the claim that public schools “spirit murder” black and brown children. Christopher Rufo reported further on things that Cindy Marten has overseen in San Diego schools. Excerpts: Under Cindy Marten’s exquisitely woke leadership, San Diego schools have abolished requirements to turn in homework on time, because that’s racist: Now the woke wisdom of San Diego public schools will inform federal education policy at the senior level. This is what it means to have a Democratic president. When creating “antiracist” school systems, and renaming all the schools in California after woke heroes, fails to produce better grades for minorities, there will be even more radical measures tried. Wokeness cannot fail; it can only be failed. The woke live by ideological lies, and demand that the rest of us do too — or else. The Board responsible for overseeing San Francisco public schools has shown that truth does not matter to them, only woke uplift. We must all live by lies, or be denounced as racists. We can point at the San Francisco school board and laugh at its crackpot antics while pitying what the students and families there are having to endure, but never forget: what happens in California rarely stays in California. A scary future has been foretold for government primary education across America. Yet another reason to abolish the entire edifice.

https://reason.com/2021/02/05/this-draconian-bill-would-turn-millions-of-peaceful-gun-owners-into-felons/ Yet Lee now wants to transform millions of Americans into felons, threatening them with long prison terms for peaceful conduct that violates no one's rights. A clearer example of how readily partisans forsake their supposed principles when they prove inconvenient is hard to imagine. Lee's bill is named after Sabika Sheikh, a foreign exchange student from Pakistan who was murdered in the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas. The perpetrator of that attack was 17, meaning it was already illegal for him to possess the .38-caliber revolver he used (except for temporary possession in specified circumstances, such as hunting or target shooting). In addition to the revolver, he had a 12-gauge shotgun. Neither would qualify as a "military-style weapon" under Lee's bill. In other words, her legislation has nothing to do with the crime she invokes to justify it, which is par for the course with anti-gun politicians. The system Lee imagines is completely impractical, since gun owners would be understandably reluctant to identify themselves and their firearms so they could be entered in a federal database and required to apply for licenses. Politicians pursuing far less ambitious gun registration schemes have found that voluntary compliance is the exception rather than the rule. Since the Justice Department would not have the resources to go after millions of recalcitrant gun owners even if it knew who they were, the result would be random application of Lee's draconian penalties to the few who happened to attract the government's attention. Who would those people tend to be? As a legislator who decries racial bias in policing, Lee ought to know. Current restrictions on gun ownership already disproportionately hurt African Americans, who are more likely than whites to have felony records that permanently bar them from possessing firearms for self-defense, no matter the nature of the offense or how long ago it happened. Lee's bill would only compound that problem. Call that what you want, but it is manifestly not an attempt to fix a "deeply flawed" criminal justice system that is "often more effective at creating criminals and collateral damage than actual justice." It should go without saying that violent criminals will be even less motivated to comply with Lee's requirements than the average gun owner. They already obtain, possess, and use guns illegally. They will not be fazed by another layer of criminality. Lee's bill so far has no cosponsors, and it is unlikely to make much progress. But it reflects a broader mindset in the Democratic Party, which used to at least pay lip service to the Second Amendment but lately talks and acts as if it does not exist. After promising to respect the Second Amendment in 2004, 2008, and 2012, the Democrats erased the constitutional provision from their 2016 platform, although they did mention "the rights of responsible gun owners." The 2020 platform omitted even that phrase. President Joe Biden does occasionally mention the Second Amendment, which he says he respects. "It's within our grasp to end our gun violence epidemic and respect the Second Amendment, which is limited," his campaign website said. How limited? We know that Biden's Second Amendment does not cover guns he does not like. He concedes that the federal ban on "assault weapons," which was part of what he has proudly called "the 1994 Biden Crime Bill" but expired in 2004, had no impact on the lethality of legal firearms. Yet he supports a new and supposedly improved version, including a magazine ban similar to Lee's and a requirement that current owners of the targeted firearms either surrender them to the government or follow the same tax and registration requirements that apply to machine guns. During an argument with a Detroit autoworker last year, Biden suggested that the Second Amendment no more protects the right to own "assault weapons" than the First Amendment protects the right to falsely cry "Fire!" in a crowded theater. And although the Supreme Court has described handguns as "the quintessential self-defense weapon," possession of which for home protection is indisputably protected by the Constitution, Biden thinks shotguns are better for that purpose. While Biden has not said his preference should be enforced by law, his policy prescriptions might be different if the Court had not ruled so clearly on the issue. His explanation of why he is willing to let people own guns, which focuses on hunting rather than self-defense, does not inspire much confidence that his avowed respect for the Second Amendment is based on a clear understanding of its function. Proposals like Lee's help make Biden's gun control agenda look moderate and reasonable by comparison. But his attitude, like hers, shows that Democrats would be perfectly happy to expurgate the Bill of Rights if only the courts would let them. Good luck with passing this bill, or even enforcing it. The lefties time would be better spent in trying to gut the 2nd Amendment first via the amendment process, then pass this kind of draconian bill.

I feel you'll have a hard time convincing Western and West Lafayette that a newly re-jiggered NCC is better for them than the Hoosier Conference is now. Especially the River Rats................

Then maybe those individuals should move from Bedford to somewhere else where there are choices.

Probably get a pizza.

And your point? So you are saying these expelled children don't deserve another change at an education? Apparently their parents believe so or they wouldn't pay the tuition.

I contend that was more a matter of the timing of the initial pandemic outbreak, and the fear and uncertainty concerning the transmission of the virus that drove the decisions being made at the time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-great-american-gun-buying-binge-continues/ Some gun owning friends of mine are also bemoaning the general lack of ammunition for sale, mostly likely caused by this buying spree.

R.I.P. prolific actor Christopher Plummer: https://news.avclub.com/r-i-p-prolific-actor-christopher-plummer-1846207003 Truly an American/Canadian icon. He will be missed.

No. High School basketball is King in Indiana and always will be.

The Public School Monopoly Is Immoral: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-public-school-monopoly-is-immoral/

My wife left me because of my obsession with horoscopes It Taurus apart

Mandated Pandemic Hazard Pay for Grocery Store Workers Prompts Store Closures, Lawsuits: https://reason.com/2021/02/04/mandated-pandemic-hazard-pay-for-grocery-store-workers-prompts-store-closures-lawsuits/ "Hero pay" reminds me of this quote from "Hoosiers", the best sports movie ever made: "Heroes come pretty cheap around here … if you can put a ball through an iron hoop, people treat you like a god." We can now add "sling bologna from behind a deli counter" to the list of hero qualities......................

https://mises.org/wire/title-ix-will-become-vehicle-more-injustice In short, the woke campus hearings would discourage direct cross-examination, allow hearsay, loosen rules of evidence, be conducted quickly, and bypass the need for a formal complaint…the denial of due process would be policy. This despite the fact that, as Sokolow stated in a phone interview, “Probably 40 or 50% of allegations of sexual assault are baseless. There are a lot of cases where someone says they were incapacitated, but the evidence doesn’t support that they weren’t able to make a decision.” A “model” Title IX bill is currently being drafted by ATIXA and will be circulated the “to Congress and Biden Administration.” An earlier draft entitled “ATIXA Submission to the ED ART on Title IX 12.18.2020” that was submitted to Biden’s education transition team hints at the content. The hints are confusing, however. The bill endorses Biden’s progressive approach while stating, “a return to...the 2011 DCL (Dear Colleague Letter) or maintaining the status quo of the 2020 regulations would not be supported by ATIXA’s 6,000 practitioner members.” In short, there is pushback from the membership. Also, a mountain of complaints and lawsuits have proven expensive in time and money. Therefore “ATIXA seeks a balanced approach that honors the rights of all parties in the Title IX resolution process.” So far, so good. The same hearing standards would seem to apply to all participants regardless of gender or race. Yet, elsewhere, the submission commits to “focusing broadly on the impacts that Title IX work can and should have on the LGBTQIA+ community [and] on people of color.” There is a tension between the two statements. Moreover, an accused’s due process rights are directly attacked. The right of cross-examination, for example, would be restricted to spare an accuser distress; “if cross-examination is required in a jurisdiction [where the campus is located], it is sufficient to have party-proposed questions submitted to and then posed by the neutral, impartial decision-maker,” presumably appointed by the university. The right of direct examination by the accused or his advocate would be denied. (Nothing is said about jurisdictions in which courts do not require the cross-examination.) Currently, if a witness refuses to submit to cross-examination, his or her statements during the investigation are not considered at the hearing. ATIXA wants this rule to be “revisited,” because “it’s too drastic, is too complicated for laypersons to apply, has no litigation equivalent, and takes away the discretion of the recipient to appropriately assess relevance and credibility.” Why “laypersons” are holding court-like hearings when the basics of due process and court procedure are too complicated for them to understand is not addressed. Elsewhere, the clarity of ATIXA’s recommendations is chilling. For example, “ATIXA supports universal application of the preponderance of the evidence standard….Existing regulations permit a choice of standards.” Preponderance of the evidence means that if a hearing believes a rape complaint to be supported by 50.01 percent of the evidence, the accused is “guilty” and open to expulsion or other common punishments. All in all, a prediction in the JD Supra article seems half correct. “If we had to prognosticate, we’d guess that fairly early on, the Biden administration will rescind the 2020 regulations, and implement another new Dear Colleague Letter/Q&A style approach.” BUT the new Title IX is likely to be a new Obama-style DCL approach that is tweaked to avoid the legal pitfalls visited on the 2011 one. I disagree; withdrawing the 2020 regulations will not be a quick process. The DeVos administration did not use a DCL or other guidelines to impose its regulations. It went through the arduous Administrative Procedure Act notice-and-comment process, which is why it was not enacted until 2020; the process and obstructionist tactics made it take that long. To rescind DeVos’s regulations requires the same long slog through bureaucracy and Congress. This alone makes new regulations unlikely before 2022 at the earliest. ATIXA and Title IX may seem arcane to those not on campus or without a loved one who is. But the incredible bias and injustice embedded in earlier sexual misconduct hearings was integral in promoting a social division that borders on hatred. Close attention must be paid to the social justice measures on campuses, because they are part of the ideology promoting street riots, increased violence and hostility between groups. College administrators and professors have actively stoked hatred between the genders and the races for decades. And now society reaps a whirlwind. The Title IX "due process" system is pretty much the Guilty-Until-Proven-Innocent variety, and the leftists want it that way.

No, Biden Can't Save Us With a 'Reality Czar.' Also, WTF? https://reason.com/2021/02/03/no-biden-cant-save-us-with-a-reality-czar-also-wtf/ Cue scores of snorting noises on Twitter about our new "Ministry of Truth." "It sounds a little dystopian, I'll grant," Roose concedes. "But let's hear them out." OK, let's. Harvard's Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, joins the recent political-class chorus calling for a "truth commission," and pushes for the feds to have access to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube algorithms: "We must open the hood on social media so that civil rights lawyers and real watchdog organizations can investigate human rights abuses enabled or amplified by technology." Stanford Internet Observatory disinformation researcher Renée DiResta advocates a centralized counter-conspiracy task force, because if federal agencies are doing that work separately, "you run the risk of missing connections, both in terms of the content and in terms of the tactics that are used to execute on the campaigns." Various pols and pundits propose rewriting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act while using anti-trust threats to tame Big Tech; counter-extremism specialist Micah Clark plumps for a "social stimulus," and hate-group deprogrammer Christian Picciolini opts for the kitchen-sink approach: "We have to destroy the institutional systemic racism that creates this environment. We have to provide jobs. We have to have access to mental health care and education." These thought bubbles may sound like unintentional self-parody to libertarian ears, but they are common both among the people who just re-took power in Washington and the knowledge workers who are glad they did. "We're going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) warned on Jan. 13. A day earlier, Politifact founder Bill Adair and Duke professor Philip Napoli argued that Biden "should announce a bipartisan commission to investigate the problem of misinformation and make recommendations about how to address it. The commission should take a broad approach and consider all possible solutions: incentives, voluntary industry reforms, education, regulations, and new laws." So merely as a matter of prevent defense, it's worth taking these ideas both seriously and literally. Starting with a point so obvious that only journalists and academics could miss it: Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation. Imagine as the annointer of a Reality Czar not Joe Biden, but President Ted Cruz, or President Tucker Carlson. You people do remember that the White House was the scene of insane meetings like this all of two weeks ago, right? There are also several structural problems with tasking government to encourage and adjudicate society's net store of capital-T Truth. Politicians (such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) are incentivized to embellish their credentials, fictionalize their biographies, and misrepresent their records. Government agencies, given their druthers, would rather operate like the CIA—funding essentially guaranteed, details not available on request. As our resident Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filer C.J. Ciaramella frequently reminds us, it's the norm for bureaucrats to "flout the spirit and, quite often, the letter of federal record law." And the last time Joe Biden was in the White House, his boss left "a blueprint on how to suppress information and get away with it." Truth is but one of many interests grasping for the steering wheel on the ship of state, and its lobbyists are comparatively underpaid. Realpolitik, interest-group payouts, and paternalistic efforts to shape citizen behavior all warp the common use of language and fact. There's a reason why U.S. officials can't gin up the courage to call the century-old Turkish genocide of more than 1 million Armenians a "genocide," yet are currently characterizing China's brutal, though non-mass-murderous, suppression of its Uighur minority with a G-word even while several human rights groups do not (see also: "states that sponsor terrorism"). The Food Pyramid and its antecedents have been many things, but revealed truth is not one of them. The Centers for Disease Control, name-checked in Roose's article, changed its recommendations on masks based more on behavioral effects than science. War is a perpetual lie-making machine, and that includes the War on Drugs. The messy reality of overlapping bureaucracies and their conflicting interests may be one reason why pundit imagineers are tempted by "centralization" and the notion of a "czar." It's the eternal lure of a single magic wand. And about as childish. "The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use," F.A. Hayek famously observed, "never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess." The more you centralize the processing and dissemination of knowledge, the greater the range and effect of potential error. The centralization of U.S. intelligence under a single Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 was supposed to make us smarter and faster, and yet its single most visible impact on our lives is invasive and ineffective security screening at airports. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has throughout the COVID-19 pandemic kept "key virus data out of public sight," the Associated Press reported Jan. 22, lest the little people get confused. In related news, Newsom kept outdoor playgrounds in sunny California closed for several months after a preponderance of studies had demonstrated that kids were not spreading it to one another outdoors. Science is a dispersed, contested, and constantly evolving process, not an on-off switch best entrusted to a single enlightened source. I will let my colleagues Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Andrea O'Sullivan (twice), respectively, argue against gutting Section 230, using anti-trust against Big Tech, and giving the government access to social media algorithms, though props to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for demonstrating the dangers this week. But a final word about some kind of "truth commission." Here's yet another political-class endorsement of that idea, from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch last month: Hyperbole aside, can you spot the flaw in this oft-used historical analogy? South Africa was a brutal racist police state. Most countries that have staged variants on truth commissions or qualified amnesties for past collaborators did so in large part because they were transitioning from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, and doing so requires immediate creative thinking about how to deal with past crimes and operate a current government without re-filling the prisons. It's a damnably hard problem, not least because laws change dramatically in such transitions, prompting difficult questions about how to assign culpability to actions and collaborations that were perfectly legal in the Before Times. Regardless of how darkly you characterize the Trump administration, that analogy just does not apply to the United States. Our laws, with almost no exception, are the same, and are in fact being used to prosecute hundreds of people connected with the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill ransacking. There are no pressing questions of lustration, of property-denationalizing, of teaching old civil service new codes of behavior. Shorn of such urgencies, any proposed Truth Commission process looks more like a one-sided lecture, potentially backstopped by some government coercion aimed at those who are producing and consuming media in ways that the commissioners find distasteful. Not a very promising scenario for "reconciliation." Readers who've made it this far may be under the impression that I am blasé about the mainstream hold that conspiratorial twaddle has placed on ostensibly governing Republicans. In fact, I am not—there's a mutually reinforcing rot in conservative politics and media, one whose main culprits are the politicians, journalists, and consumers who are either doing media literacy wrong, or making the cynical decision to pander to fantasies they themselves don't believe in. It's not a pretty picture, and blaming the left-leaning media is no excuse for any of it. But what should said media do? Here is where my view diverges sharply. Journalists and media-theoreticians right now think the solution to Trumpy delusion is to deplatform even sitting U.S. senators, sic the feds on Fox News, break up Big Tech, reject "bothsidesism," use the most maximally negative adjectives to describe Republicans, and reposition journalism as a tool for producing better democratic outcomes through applied moral clarity. I think those approaches will backfire. Deliberately shrinking the public square is no way to persuade consumers on the edges of the debate. Injecting more moralizing into fact-gathering is unlikely to make the end product more factual. Giving the government more power over the rules and practice of free speech is, well, dystopian. My recommendation to journalists and their cousins in government and academia will be neither popular nor satisfying, but here it is: Do your own jobs better. That's it, that's the memo. If government was efficient and helpful, if journalism was compelling and truthful, if the academe was relevant and unpredictable, their lectures would have far more resonance, and audience.

https://reason.com/2021/02/03/the-ugly-reality-of-socialism/ How true. History have proven it. Yet will still have those who truly believe it will still work.

San Francisco Schools Renamed the Arts Department Because Acronyms Are a Symptom of White Supremacy https://reason.com/2021/02/02/san-francisco-schools-acronyms-white-supremacy/

Biden Tells Federal Bureaucrats To Approve Regulations With Benefits That Are 'Impossible To Quantify' https://reason.com/2021/02/01/biden-tells-federal-bureaucrats-to-approve-regulations-with-benefits-that-are-impossible-to-quantify/ Gee, I can't wait.

Disney Revamps Jungle Cruise Ride To Remove Racist Depictions Of Indigenous People: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/01/962772012/disney-revamps-jungle-cruise-ride-to-remove-racist-depictions-of-indigenous-peop

'Saturday Night Live' critics say show avoided Joe Biden, Kamala Harris in first show of 2021: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/saturday-night-live-critics-accuse-show-avoiding-joe-biden-kamala-harris

Kokomo Haworth was a doomed experiment from it's inception. At least the newer Haworth building on the west side of town is now the Kokomo high school building.

Biden's Orders Continue the Presidency's Slide Toward Elective Monarchy https://reason.com/2021/02/01/bidens-executive-orders-continue-the-presidencys-slide-toward-elective-monarchy/

Now all you have left is name calling and personal attacks. Now I know I have won. Have a nice day.