Source: The Hill
by Mark R Whittington
“While NASA’s policy of contracting out many of its services to the commercial sector with fixed-price contracts dates back to the George W. Bush administration, it achieved its full flowering with the first flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon to the International Space Station in 2020. Besides Crew Dragon, NASA has contracted out everything from lunar landers to space suits in a similar manner, reserving the traditional cost-plus approach to a few legacy programs such as the Space Launch System. However, as Ars Technica recently reported, some backsliding is taking place at the space agency that is hobbling the commercial approach and threatening it with failure.” (12/01/24)
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5014926-nasa-commercial-approach-failing/
Source: New York Post
by Jeremy Adams
“Recently, writing in the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty Online, a Texas high-school teacher, Auguste Meyrat, brilliantly formulated the most precise description of education in post-COVID America: vegetative education. As he writes, ‘Teachers in past decades have been faced with two choices: educating students with challenging material and frequent grading or engaging them with fun projects and participation grades.’ What is he talking about? What does modern classroom instruction look like these days? To put it mildly: A lot of it is not very good. We can abolish the federal Department of Education, offer lip service about bolstering parental rights and abolishing DEI policies. But unless we acknowledge the hollowness of conventional classroom instruction, it won’t make a bit of difference. Here’s the dead giveaway: Our students suffer from a pathology of low expectations for themselves and especially for their teachers.” (11/29/24)
https://nypost.com/2024/11/29/opinion/as-a-teacher-i-know-how-we-dumbed-down-education-and-how-kids-suffer/
Source: US News & World Report
“Voters in Iceland joined a global trend of punishing incumbents in a parliamentary election, with a center-left party winning the largest share of votes in the North Atlantic island nation. With all the votes tallied on Sunday, the Social Democratic Alliance had won 15 seats in the 63-seat parliament, the Althingi — more than doubling its total — and secured almost 21% of votes, according to national broadcaster RUV. The conservative Independence Party, which led the outgoing government, had 14 seats and a 19.4% vote share, and the centrist Liberal Reform Party 11 seats and about 16% of votes. Three other parties also won seats. Social Democrat leader Kristrun Mjoll Frostadóttir, 36, will likely try to seek coalition partners to command a parliamentary majority.” (12/01/24)
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-12-01/social-democrats-gain-and-incumbents-are-punished-in-icelands-election
Source: The Anarchist Experience
“Rich & KS discuss KS’s participation in the World Anti Extremism Network’s Toronto Democracy Forum, and the economics of international trade.” (11/30/24)
https://theanarchistexperience.wordpress.com/2024/11/30/the-anarchist-experience-504/
Source: Yascha Mounk
by Yascha Mounk
“Many progressives continue to deny that the left’s embrace of identitarianism helped Donald Trump win the election. That is a key reason why, as I argued last week, it is unlikely that Democrats will let go of wokeness anytime soon. But even among those who do accept the damage that identitarian rhetoric and policies have done to the Democratic brand, a fierce debate has broken out. Moderates and radicals are pointing fingers, with each claiming that the other is the real reason why the party has proven so susceptible to these ideas.” (12/01/24)
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/help-me-understand-whether-wokeness
Source: Town Hall
by Mark Lewis
“Headline from a recent ‘World Net Daily’ article: ”Think outside the box’: Lawmaker floats idea of state seceding to resist President-elect Trump.’ This lawmaker was in New York and suggested persuading ‘several nearby states’ to join in. Frankly, to be perfectly honest, if they want to do that, I would not object. I just hope they’d take California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota with them. The conversation about a ‘national divorce’ occasionally crops up, though it hasn’t reached tsunami-like proportions since 1860. … Any mention of ‘secession’ (and let’s be honest, ‘national divorce’ means somebody initiates a split) often brings calls of ‘treason,’ ‘traitor,’ ‘un-patriotic,’ and ‘Southern hick’ among a certain class of people, depending on who is suggesting it and who is listening.” (11/30/24)
https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2024/11/30/the-s-word-appears-again-n2648439
Source: Politico
“Passing smoking legislation will be no easy feat for the new European Commission, if Thursday is anything to go by. Members of the European Parliament failed to agree a position on even a nonbinding decision on smoking and vaping restrictions in a surprise move in the Parliament’s plenary. The Commission recommended earlier this year that European countries extend smoking bans to cover outdoor areas like restaurants, bars, cafés and transport hubs, and this included vapes and nicotine-free products. … A watered-down version of the Commission’s vision had been negotiated among some political groups, but failed to win enough support from lawmakers with 378 votes against, 152 in favour and 26 abstentions.” (12/01/24)
https://www.politico.eu/article/meps-reject-smoking-ban-plan
Source: New York Post
“Sen. Bernie Sanders turned heads Sunday with his support for President-elect Donald Trump’s planned new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — providing it takes aim at the Pentagon’s cushy budget. ‘Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,’ the 83-year-old Vermont senator posted on X. ‘Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change,’ the Independent pol added. Trump had announced shortly after winning last month’s election that tech mogul Elon Musk, 53, and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, 39, would serve as the co-heads of DOGE until it concludes its work by July 4, 2026.” (12/01/24)
https://nypost.com/2024/12/01/us-news/bernie-sanders-commends-doge-and-elon-musk/
Source: The Atlantic
by Noah Hawley
“As a novelist and filmmaker, I spend a lot of time thinking about the value of fiction. I tell stories to help me understand my world and the people in it. My job is to create feelings in the audience — fear and longing, joy and anger. When I consider the author’s role in our culture, I picture the following sequence: first comes news, then comes history, then comes fiction. Novelists and filmmakers are the cleanup crew, parsing meaning from the historical realities we have shared. But over the past 10 years, I’ve noticed something at first puzzling, then alarming. Fact and fiction are trading places in the sequence. … My feelings, your feelings, everybody’s feelings are facts — and facts of equal value to actual reality. Crime is up because I feel like crime is up. And you will never convince me otherwise, because my feeling is a fact.” (11/30/24)
https://archive.is/Vpimc
Source: Common Dreams
by Ralph Nader
“Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that ‘the Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.’ This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party started long ago. In 1970, writing in Harper’s Magazine, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote an article ‘Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to be Needed?’ He argued that if the Democratic Party does not take on the corporate and political establishment, it has no purpose at all. ” (11/29/24)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/democrats-losing-republicans
