URLs du Jour

2020-08-24

Our Eye Candy du Jour: The worst attraction in every state.

Well, OK. But the Old Man used to be much better than he is today.

  • In the Pun Salad "Of Course They Did" department, Michael Graham at NH Journal says: Dems Choose Union Dollars Over Charter School Families. Despite past openness to charters,…

    Now, the Democratic Party has turned on charter schools, teaming up with teachers unions targeting them for destruction. Unlike his old boss, former Vice President Joe Biden said in May that if he’s elected president, charter schools “are gone.”

    That would close more than 7,500 public charter schools serving more than 3 million American children. While rich kids will always have education choices, defunding charter schools would close the schoolhouse doors on low-income families with few options.

    After the Trump campaign called out Biden’s threat to charter schools, his campaign released a statement to factcheck.org that appeared to reverse course. It said the campaign “does not oppose districts letting parents choose to send their children to… high-performing public charters.”

    The famed Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force is full of mealy-mouthisms about charters. They do call for a ban on for-profits receiving "federal funding". As for the non-profits, it's clear they either mean to regulate them to death, or ensure they'll become as bad as their government counterparts.


  • Possibly the most literate headline we've ever blogged, is from Anthony Daniels in the New Criterion: Hypocrite Hector. A review of a couple of our bete noirs: the books White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.

    You feel in reading them that you have been cornered at a party by a monomaniac who will not let you escape until he has preached you into total silence, if not acquiescence. I can only conclude from their sales that people like being hectored.

    His bottom line:

    Perhaps the most interesting question raised by these books is why, when they are so badly written, self-indulgent, and intellectually nugatory, when they are so plainly written in the spirit of what Karl Popper called reinforced dogmatism, they should be so popular among the Western intelligentsia. Let us hope that this is not a question for an Edward Gibbon of the next millennium to answer.

    Pointing out one more time: both dreadful books are high on the list of recommended "Racial Justice Resources" at the University Near Here. And I don't see any dissenting voices from the suffocating wokeism, do you?


  • At AIER, Jeffery A. Tucker describes Older Americans Should Be Anti-Lockdown Activists. (And, hey, that's me! I am an Older American!)

    As demographic data has poured in, and it has finally become common knowledge that the average age of death with/from COVID-19 is 80 years with comorbidities. Indeed,  in only 6% of COVID deaths is COVID listed as the only cause; the typical death from COVID-19 lists 2.6 additional health factors. 

    Once this became obvious, so too has come the accusation that those who oppose lockdowns care nothing for the lives of the aged and infirmed. We are trying to kill grandmother, as the popular lockdowner saying goes. It’s a purely emotional argument that basically accuses anti-lockdowners of bad faith, which is a particularly nasty way to go about disagreeing with anyone. 

    And his bottom line:

    Lockdowns have done nothing to protect anyone while creating astonishing chaos and confusion all around, with no evidence that they have minimized mortality for any groups.

    I buy that. I'm doing a certain amount of "public health theater" myself, so I don't get people hectoring me. But I'm way past thinking that it's anything more than a sham.


  • And finally, a Quote du Jour from Scott Meyer, who has an excellent brief review of a classic;

    The message of Pride and Prejudice seems to be that even a socially awkward, emotionally remote man can find love, as long as he’s very good looking and fabulously wealthy.

    Unfortunately, Scott's classic Ask Capt. Pike page requires Adobe Flash Player. If you (still) have that going, check it out.