“When the Texas state House education committee held a hearing on a proposed voucher bill this Tuesday, parent Hollie Plemons was among the first people to arrive in the committee room. She’d spend much of the next 12 hours in the cramped, crowded space, waiting for her chance at the mic. And when her name was finally called, she didn’t hold back. ‘I told them exactly how bad this bill is and that we’re being bamboozled by our own party,’ recalls Plemons, a Republican Party activist and precinct chair in Tarrant County. ‘Vouchers aren’t conservative. They’re just not.’ In recent years, ‘school choice’ programs that allow families to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public schools for their kids have been proliferating wildly. This January, Tennessee became the latest of a dozen states to adopt so-called universal vouchers.” (03/12/25)
“Education is about giving children the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life — especially economically — and public education was created to ensure that all children can acquire such learning to the best of their ability, regardless of their parents’ desires or financial resources. That, at least, is likely the assumption of most Americans: public education is a ladder of upward mobility. Perhaps the assumption is wrong. Governments could have embraced mass elementary education for another primary reason, which might explain why public education has often been ineffective at providing skills and knowledge crucial for upward mobility. Indeed, rather than creating a ladder of opportunity, the aim of mass education has been to keep people passively in their place.” (03/12/25)
“By a recent dereliction of duty, the Supreme Court has demonstrated that sometimes the proper regret about judicial activism is that there is too little of it. The court refused to hear a case that would have allowed it to clarify a doctrine that has become an impediment to remedies for even gross government violations of individuals’ constitutionally guaranteed rights. In 2016, Kodi Gaines, then 5, was seriously wounded by a Baltimore County police corporal who was, he later explained, ‘hot’ and ‘frustrated’ during a six-hour standoff on a sweltering August day in a Baltimore suburb. The corporal was, however, protected by court-granted ‘qualified immunity’ from liability for his appalling misjudgment. Qualified immunity, which is frequently misapplied because the Supreme Court has declined to dispel confusion that has proliferated in the absence of clarity that the court could have provided by taking up Kodi’s case.” (03/12/25)
“The US debt has doubled in a generation, and the Tea Party’s warnings went unheeded. We’re locked into a deficit spiral with no political will to change it.” (03/12/25)
“SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket (or flying machine) ever built, lost control and exploded soon after launch last week. Rocket nerds jokingly call this a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ — a RUD. When inventing something as unprecedented as Starship, it’s to be expected and shows limits are being pushed. People who don’t understand what’s going on called this a ‘test failure.’ If there were no explosions, it wouldn’t be a rocket test. No test is a failure when it teaches something.” (03/12/25)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“President Trump and his base have accurately assessed that the US economic situation is in decline. But they have come to the wrong conclusion about that decline. Our decline is not due to competition but to a lack of competition. Much of that lack of competition comes from laws and regulations that create barriers to entry, coupled with an enormous growth of government that deprives the free market of the resources to grow around those barriers to entry. Tariffs will make the problem worse, not better.” (03/12/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Muslims are not a threat to you. Russia is not a threat to you. China is not a threat to you. Trans people are not a threat to you. Immigrants are not a threat to you. If you find yourself resisting anything I just said, that’s where they hooked you. That’s where your rulers duped you into blaming your problems on something other than them. You will notice that I am not saying there are no enemies and nobody poses a threat to us; there absolutely are, and they absolutely do. It’s just that people are tricked and manipulated away from seeing the real enemies and the real threats where they are. What poses a threat to you is the political status quo which robs your country of riches and resources to inflict military violence on innocent people overseas while strangling your civil rights and poisoning your planet.” (03/12/25)
“When I started writing The Case Against Education, I expected to confront a massive research literature claiming that education definitely has a massive effect on economic growth: ‘If you want progress, generously fund education.’ In response, I thought I was going to have to repeatedly shout, ‘Reverse causation! Reverse causation!’ Lavishly funding education doesn’t cause countries to become rich; being rich causes countries to lavishly fund education. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that — despite overwhelming pro-education bias — the massive research literature on education and growth hadn’t found much of anything. Contrary to conventional stories about the positive externalities of education, mainstream estimates of education’s national rate of return were consistently below estimates of education’s individual rate of return. Just as the signaling model predicts.” (03/12/25)
