[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

In related news, Milkshake Boy's no longer the editor at Quillette, a hub for the so-called Intellectual Dark Web.

Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann insisits that Ngo's removal had nothing to do with the Portland Mercury's article or the new video showing him planning criminal activities with Patriot Prayer, that Ngo's departure happened weeks earlier, and they just got around to announcing it. Also, that f*cking grifter got $195,000 from GoFundMe for getting hit with that milkshake.

Charter Schools’ Success Is an Illusion (gated behind paywall)

Interesting mostly because this was published by WSJ.

Full text:

Spoiler:

I teach at James Monroe High, a public school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. More than 80% of my students passed the 2019 Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics exam. This far exceeds the national (55%) and California average (52%). All my students are minorities, most are low-income, and few of their parents are educated. Almost all come from immigrant families, some here illegally.

I’m proud of them. Their success is my success. But my success is an illusion.

The reason my scores are higher this year is because I moved from Monroe’s residential school—a traditional public school—to its magnet school. I didn’t get better; the academic ability of my cohort of students got better. Research shows that throughout the district magnet students’ performance was better than those at other types of schools, and better than the state average.

Our magnet accepts everybody, as any public school does, but its students outperform residential students in practically all areas, including standardized tests, participation in extracurricular activities, and college admissions and scholarships. What separates them from the residential school’s students is self-selection—they applied to a magnet.

Yet that’s a big difference. The pursuit of a school of choice is evidence of a student’s and a family’s commitment to education. Parents understand how important this is. A recent study of New York City’s public high-school system found parents were more concerned about the quality of a school’s students than the quality of the school itself.

The selection effect that makes me appear more successful than I am also makes charter schools appear more successful than they are. Charter proponents’ claims that they “outperform” traditional public schools are based almost entirely on their test scores and college admissions rates.

Each spring, pro-charter websites are filled with standardized-test-score and college-acceptance hype, contrasting charters’ “success” with traditional public schools’ scores and rates, as if they were competing on a level playing field. KIPP, the largest nonprofit charter network in the country, boasts: “Our alumni enroll in college at rates above the national average. They graduate from college . . . at three times the rate of their peers from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Some charter advocates acknowledge the selection effect. “There’s a level of institutional hypocrisy here,” Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute said in 2013. “Charter advocates say, ‘No, no, no, we don’t believe in [selective admissions],’ but when you see a successful charter school, it’s filled with families who are a good fit and who want to be there, and that’s not possible when you have a random assortment of kids.”

Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon, who conducted an extensive study of charter schools, found that charters also benefit because they “exercise recruitment, admission, and expulsion policies that often screen out the students who would be the neediest and most expensive to serve—who then turn to district schools.” An American Civil Liberties Union study of California charters and a nationwide Reuters investigation found widespread admission policies helping charters to exclude low-performing students.

Charter skimming is apparent in the public school classroom. Each year in the residential school, I lost a few students because they had been accepted to charters. Almost all of them were top-tier students.

At the same time, we received students midyear who struggled in charters and were bounced back to public schools. Yet students who flunk out of a public school midyear rarely can go to a charter school. If a charter decides to replace a student at all, it will be with someone from its waiting list.

I don’t blame charter parents for wanting to do what they feel is best for their children. And I’m sure many charter advocates mean well. Every teacher has daydreamed about having classes filled with motivated, high-performing students. Charters are that daydream come to life.

If charters aren’t the solution, what is? Our schools are understaffed and underfunded, and teachers are stretched very thin. We could do much more for our students if we had sufficient support staff and smaller classes.

Moreover, funding issues have cost schools many programs that were successful in connecting with students who were otherwise disinterested and disengaged. My principal wistfully recounts them, including an airline-mechanics program we had with the local airport, where our students repaired actual aircraft and trained to become airline mechanics. Teachers who run surviving programs are always in a struggle for funding.

The real solution to America’s educational problems lies not in expanding charters or other educational fads, but in properly supporting the schools we already have.

Mr. Sacks is a teacher and co-chairman of United Teachers of Los Angeles at James Monroe High School.

Archangel wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Not a story but a web site

Reasons to be Cheerful

farley3k, that's awesome, thanks! Though would you edit the URL to remove the Facebook tracking ID? I think we would all be a bit more cheerful with less of that. =)

Done! Sorry it took me awhile to get it removed.

Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.

This is what we are burning at Earth’s surface today. We’re not just burning down the Amazon. We’re burning down all the forests in Earth history that we can get our hands on. For every worrying part per million that CO2 goes up from burning fossil fuels, atmospheric oxygen goes down an equivalent amount, and then some. As a result, oxygen is dropping far faster from burning fossil fuels, and their untold forests, than it is from burning just the trees available on the planet’s surface. We’re reversing tens of millions of years of photosynthesis all at once.
Luckily, unlike CO2, we measure oxygen not in parts per million, but parts per hundred. In other words, we have been gifted such an absurd surplus of oxygen by deep geological time, and by strange ancient life we’ll never know, that it won’t soon run out by our own hand, whether by deforestation or industry. Thankfully, most of the organic carbon in the Earth can be found not in easily recoverable reservoirs of fossil fuels, available to feed our industrial appetites, but in rather more rarefied deposits—small whispers of this life diffused in mudstones throughout Earth’s crust. There’s plenty of oxygen. For now.
Nevertheless, our geological bonfire illustrates just how unusual the project of humanity is. We are trying to retrieve, burn down, and metabolize all the forests and sea life ever buried, from alien worlds long past. We’re not merely lighting a match to the Amazon and imperiling everything that lives in it with extinction, but also summoning creatures long-dead to return to Earth’s surface and give up the ancient energy they took to the grave. This global industrial metabolism, this heedless combustion of the life at the planet’s surface and throughout its history, is a new phenomenon on the face of the Earth. It is a forest fire of the eons.
DSGamer wrote:

Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.

This is what we are burning at Earth’s surface today. We’re not just burning down the Amazon. We’re burning down all the forests in Earth history that we can get our hands on. For every worrying part per million that CO2 goes up from burning fossil fuels, atmospheric oxygen goes down an equivalent amount, and then some. As a result, oxygen is dropping far faster from burning fossil fuels, and their untold forests, than it is from burning just the trees available on the planet’s surface. We’re reversing tens of millions of years of photosynthesis all at once.
Luckily, unlike CO2, we measure oxygen not in parts per million, but parts per hundred. In other words, we have been gifted such an absurd surplus of oxygen by deep geological time, and by strange ancient life we’ll never know, that it won’t soon run out by our own hand, whether by deforestation or industry. Thankfully, most of the organic carbon in the Earth can be found not in easily recoverable reservoirs of fossil fuels, available to feed our industrial appetites, but in rather more rarefied deposits—small whispers of this life diffused in mudstones throughout Earth’s crust. There’s plenty of oxygen. For now.
Nevertheless, our geological bonfire illustrates just how unusual the project of humanity is. We are trying to retrieve, burn down, and metabolize all the forests and sea life ever buried, from alien worlds long past. We’re not merely lighting a match to the Amazon and imperiling everything that lives in it with extinction, but also summoning creatures long-dead to return to Earth’s surface and give up the ancient energy they took to the grave. This global industrial metabolism, this heedless combustion of the life at the planet’s surface and throughout its history, is a new phenomenon on the face of the Earth. It is a forest fire of the eons.

While that article may be informative, I don't like how dismissive it is of the problem at hand until the last paragraph. It's basically saying, go ahead, destroy your environment, it should be fine, maybe.

We're back to wall building now...

WaPo wrote:

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

Pretty standard stuff, but here's the kicker, offering pre-emptive pardons should any of his flunkies happen to break any pesky "laws" executing his will:

WaPo wrote:

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

JC wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.

This is what we are burning at Earth’s surface today. We’re not just burning down the Amazon. We’re burning down all the forests in Earth history that we can get our hands on. For every worrying part per million that CO2 goes up from burning fossil fuels, atmospheric oxygen goes down an equivalent amount, and then some. As a result, oxygen is dropping far faster from burning fossil fuels, and their untold forests, than it is from burning just the trees available on the planet’s surface. We’re reversing tens of millions of years of photosynthesis all at once.
Luckily, unlike CO2, we measure oxygen not in parts per million, but parts per hundred. In other words, we have been gifted such an absurd surplus of oxygen by deep geological time, and by strange ancient life we’ll never know, that it won’t soon run out by our own hand, whether by deforestation or industry. Thankfully, most of the organic carbon in the Earth can be found not in easily recoverable reservoirs of fossil fuels, available to feed our industrial appetites, but in rather more rarefied deposits—small whispers of this life diffused in mudstones throughout Earth’s crust. There’s plenty of oxygen. For now.
Nevertheless, our geological bonfire illustrates just how unusual the project of humanity is. We are trying to retrieve, burn down, and metabolize all the forests and sea life ever buried, from alien worlds long past. We’re not merely lighting a match to the Amazon and imperiling everything that lives in it with extinction, but also summoning creatures long-dead to return to Earth’s surface and give up the ancient energy they took to the grave. This global industrial metabolism, this heedless combustion of the life at the planet’s surface and throughout its history, is a new phenomenon on the face of the Earth. It is a forest fire of the eons.

While that article may be informative, I don't like how dismissive it is of the problem at hand until the last paragraph. It's basically saying, go ahead, destroy your environment, it should be fine, maybe.

That wasn’t my takeaway at all. My takeaway was that we shouldn’t fixate on the trees burning, because humanity is engaged in an unprecedented project to put more carbon in the atmosphere than was physically possible at any time in history. And that’s what we need to stop, immediately.

basically: Fixing the carbon release problem without fixing the tree problem will still be ok probably; fixing the tree problem without fixing the carbon release problem absolutely will not be ok. So either do both or do carbon, don't let trees distract from carbon.

thrawn82 wrote:

basically: Fixing the carbon release problem without fixing the tree problem will still be ok probably; fixing the tree problem without fixing the carbon release problem absolutely will not be ok. So either do both or do carbon, don't let trees distract from carbon.

Yes.

qaraq wrote:

We're back to wall building now...

WaPo wrote:

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

Pretty standard stuff, but here's the kicker, offering pre-emptive pardons should any of his flunkies happen to break any pesky "laws" executing his will:

WaPo wrote:

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

It's nice to see a President that gets so involved in the details of a project that he makes it more expensive and less effective (and miles shorter).

WaPo wrote:

Trump’s determination to build the barriers as quickly as possible has not diminished his interest in the aesthetic aspects of the project, particularly the requirement that the looming steel barriers be painted black and topped with sharpened tips.

In a meeting at the White House on May 23, Trump ordered the Army Corps and the Department of Homeland Security to paint the structure black, according to internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post.

Administration officials have stopped trying to talk him out of the demands, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to instruct contractors to apply black paint or coating to all new barrier fencing, the communications show.

...

While Trump has insisted that the barriers be painted, the cost of painting them will reduce the length of the fence the government will be able to build. According to the internal analysis, painting or coating 175 miles of barriers “will add between $70 million and $133 million in cost,” trimming the amount of fencing the Army Corps will be able to install by four to seven miles.

...

At Trump’s behest, the Army Corps also is preparing to instruct contractors to remove from the upper part of the fence the smooth metal plates that are used to thwart climbers. The president considered that design feature unsightly, according to officials familiar with his directives.

Instead, contractors have been asked to cut the tips of the steel bollards to a sharpened point. Trump had told aides this spring he thought the barrier should be spiked to instill a fear of injury.

The change in the bollard design is likely to reduce the overall length of the barrier by two to three miles, according to the administration’s cost assessments.

Just like the hero of the Lord of the Rings, Sauron, who appropriately protected his lovely home Mordor from jealous theives and haters.

DSGamer wrote:

That wasn’t my takeaway at all. My takeaway was that we shouldn’t fixate on the trees burning, because humanity is engaged in an unprecedented project to put more carbon in the atmosphere than was physically possible at any time in history. And that’s what we need to stop, immediately.

Are you sure of this? This seems overly exaggerated.

slazev wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

That wasn’t my takeaway at all. My takeaway was that we shouldn’t fixate on the trees burning, because humanity is engaged in an unprecedented project to put more carbon in the atmosphere than was physically possible at any time in history. And that’s what we need to stop, immediately.

Are you sure of this? This seems overly exaggerated.

This is exactly why the problem isn't getting enough attention.

IMAGE(https://www.darrinqualman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-CO2-levels-long-term-historic-800000-years.png)

Limiting it to just the human timescale:
IMAGE(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/earth_temperature_timeline.png)

slazev wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

That wasn’t my takeaway at all. My takeaway was that we shouldn’t fixate on the trees burning, because humanity is engaged in an unprecedented project to put more carbon in the atmosphere than was physically possible at any time in history. And that’s what we need to stop, immediately.

Are you sure of this? This seems overly exaggerated.

We have ice core records that give us a picture of global CO2 levels going back 800,000 years, several hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens even existed. Those CO2 levels averaged between 170 and 280 ppm.

This summer the average monthly CO2 levels exceeded 410 ppm. The last time the Earth had that much CO2 in the atmosphere was the middle of the Pliocene epoch, about three million years ago, when sea levels were about 25 meters higher, and there weren't really any polar ice caps.

Global average CO2 levels didn't exceed 300 ppm until the Industrial Revolution and have dramatically accelerated since then. According to those ice core records it took about 1,000 years for CO2 levels to increase by 35 ppm. Right now those CO2 levels are increasing by about 2 ppm per year thanks to human activity.

Chance, not ideology, drives political polarization

The results showed how a handful of early movers can trigger a cascade in which later partisans pile on to their party's newly emerging position, leading eventually to large political differences. The big surprise was that the party that supported the issue in one world was just as likely to oppose the issue in another world.

"In one world, it was Democrats who favored using AI to spot online criminals, and in another world it was Republicans," he said. "In one world, Democrats favored classic books, and in another world, Republicans favored the classics. In one world, Democrats were more optimistic about the future and in another world, it was Republicans."

Interesting article! I had questions on methods and controls so I pulled up the whole thing.

Here's a link to entire study

It's almost like it's all about gaining power, and the issues and positions don't matter.

Aetius wrote:

It's almost like it's all about gaining power, and the issues and positions don't matter.

Or, more likely, most people just don’t have enough time or motivation to stay informed on every single topic so they tend to place disproportionate trust in ideological ingroups and that allows them to be swayed towards certain positions, whether by bad-faith actors or just unintentional groupthink.

Wonkette: In The Matter Of Diamond And Silk's Very Real Lawyer v. Wonkette: Bring It, Sh*thead

The letter is honestly so fantastic that at first I thought it was a truly great troll written by one of our dear readers. But then I remembered that this is Diamond and Silk's legal team* we're talking about, which means it was probably written by their own personal in-basement counsel, as he feasted on leftover pizza crusts.

The letter, which is totally legally binding and was definitely written by a real lawyer, included a threat not to make it public. So naturally, we're going to tell you ALL about it.

IMAGE(https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMTA2ODA2Ni85ODB4LnBuZyIsImV4cGlyZXNfYXQiOjE1Njc3MzYyODR9.AchG-ePR-wm2YGbxG6YIJLYt6KQZQPd8saqi_19Fgwc/img.png)

That's right. THE Diamond and Silk sent us a cease and desist. And it's just as beautiful as we imagined.

People who don't understand how the law works love to try to threaten people into not being mean to them, and we have apparently been pushing all the right buttons lately. Between this incredible letter and being sued, along with Donald Trump Jr., in Don Blankenship v. The World, Wonkette is on a roll!

Everything about this letter is incredible and SUPER LEGALLY BINDING. The fact that it was sent to us via email by "robert," with a lowercase "r" and no last name. The subject line, "Cease and Desist Letter for Defamation of Character and Libeling," is just the tip of the iceberg.

After maps struck down in NC gerrymandering lawsuit, top Republican leader won’t appeal

The News & Observer wrote:

North Carolina’s political maps for the state legislature are unconstitutional and must be redrawn before the 2020 elections, a court has decided.

A panel of judges struck down the maps Tuesday, in a 357-page ruling that focused on the level of political partisanship used to draw them. The maps were drawn in 2017 to replace previous maps, drawn in 2011, that had also been ruled unconstitutional. Both sets of maps were drawn by North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature.

The judges found that “The North Carolina Supreme Court has long and consistently held that ‘our government is founded on the will of the people,’ that ‘their will is expressed by the ballot.’”

And that fact helped the judges conclude that the maps violated the state constitution because “it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly.”

Tuesday’s decision may be the final word in this legal battle, since at least one top Republican lawmaker said he doesn’t plan to appeal the ruling.

Only a decade of abuse. Good grief

Stele wrote:

Only a decade of abuse. Good grief

North Carolina has suffered from far more than a decade of blatant gerrymandering. In a sense, the current Republican shenanigans are revenge for over a century of Democratic shenanigans to lock out as much Republican representation as possible. 2010 was, in fact, the first time a Republican majority had been elected in the Legislature since 1898, despite the state voting in Republican Presidents by significant margins in almost every election from 1968 to 2004.

Yeah, but aren't the old Democrats the current Republicans? So it's really just the same group, just a different name.

Aetius wrote:
Stele wrote:

Only a decade of abuse. Good grief

North Carolina has suffered from far more than a decade of blatant gerrymandering. In a sense, the current Republican shenanigans are revenge for over a century of Democratic shenanigans to lock out as much Republican representation as possible. 2010 was, in fact, the first time a Republican majority had been elected in the Legislature since 1898, despite the state voting in Republican Presidents by significant margins in almost every election from 1968 to 2004.

we're just going to completely ignore the platform swap and southern strategy then are we?

here is what 1898 actually refers to: WIlmington Coup of 1898 when the the Southern Democrats who would be Republican today literally masacred an generation of rightfully elected POC government officials.

thrawn82 wrote:
Aetius wrote:
Stele wrote:

Only a decade of abuse. Good grief

North Carolina has suffered from far more than a decade of blatant gerrymandering. In a sense, the current Republican shenanigans are revenge for over a century of Democratic shenanigans to lock out as much Republican representation as possible. 2010 was, in fact, the first time a Republican majority had been elected in the Legislature since 1898, despite the state voting in Republican Presidents by significant margins in almost every election from 1968 to 2004.

we're just going to completely ignore the platform swap and southern strategy then are we?

here is what 1898 actually refers to: WIlmington Coup of 1898 when the the Southern Democrats who would be Republican today literally masacred an generation of rightfully elected POC government officials.

Anything and everything for the Libertarians to proudly proclaim "both sides" smugly.

Government bad!
Leave me alone and everything will magically be okay!

fangblackbone wrote:

Government bad!
Leave me alone and everything will magically be okay!

They don't care if things are okay. They smugly believe they will be better off than the hordes of idiots they believe should suffer more. And when I say idiots, I mean normal people going about their lives, making mistakes and helping others.

But as societies grew, it became clear that letting people suffer too harshly for their mistakes led to bigger problems than the taxes it cost to improve the situation. We educate everyone, not because they "deserve it," but because society functions better for everyone if people are educated. We have police and fire departments that protect everyone in a community, not just those that can afford the protection, because that makes everyone in the community safer.

Over and over and over again, we have identified problems, solved them by pooling our resources and regulating what can be done. Now, as life is good, some have decided it would be even better if they could keep their money and get rid of regulations because obviously they are unnecessary. Then we wait for the problems to grow, then correct them again.

We seriously need to have a class in high school that explains why both libertarianism and fascism are bad, because modern society has made these forms of government seem palatable, yet both destroy the fabric of societies.