A Thought on Kipp

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Since I’m thinking about things today.

KIPP Public Schools is a nation-wide charter school organization that has had outsized success in teaching its students, as has virtually all charter and voucher schools and school organizations in the US.  It had a motto, Work Hard. Be Nice., which it scrapped in an attempt to pander to the woke gangs.

In defense of that move, Kipp Co-Founder Dave Levin wrote a Letter to The Wall Street Journal. Toward the end of that letter, Levin made the remarkable claim that

Hard work is essential. Character matters.

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Some Thoughts on TikTok

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TikTok is a video messaging app that was developed in the People’s Republic of China and is owned by ByteDance, another PRC company. The Wall Street Journal published a Q&A on the app last Tuesday.

I have some thoughts, too.

For background, here are some of the data that TikTok collects just because you’re using it.

…location data and your internet address, according to its privacy policy, and it tracks the type of device you are using to access its platform. It stores your browsing and search history as well as the content of messages you exchange with others on the app.

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Free Speech, Free Assembly

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Here is how two clauses of our Constitution’s First Amendment will be enforced under a Progressive-Democrat administration.

Officials in the city of Houston, Texas have cancelled the state’s Republican convention. On Wednesday, Democrat Mayor Sylvester Turner announced he has instructed the city’s convention center to cancel the event.

Today I instructed the Houston First Corporation to exercise its right contractually in cancelling the State’s Republican Convention that was set to take place next week at GRB. #COVID19
— Sylvester Turner (@SylvesterTurner) July 8, 2020

It was supposed to be held there next week, but Turner claimed it would’ve posed a “clear and present” danger.

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Identity Politics

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Candace Owens had a thought on the Left’s (because I’m going to generalize her thought) contemptuous dismissal of black conservatives.

White liberals hate black conservatives because we don’t see ourselves as oppressed.
Fundamentally, because we view ourselves as their equals.
That’s the issue.

That’s the point, though, of the Left’s identity politics—to segregate people into artificially defined groups in order to keep those grouped people apart, the better to emphasize their need for the Left’s…guidance.

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More Disingenuosity

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The Supreme Court has ruled—7-2—in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other organizations. The Court upheld the Trump administration’s rule exempting these employers from an Obamacare requirement to provide insurance coverage that includes contraception.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court:

We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

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Markets

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Zimbabwe, in attempt to protect its currency—already a close neighbor of worthless—has decided to close its stock exchange.

If there is no market for the currency, then it has little value in terms of purchasing power. If there is no convertibility of the currency into other currencies, then there is both high risk in holding the currency and reduced interest in holding it.  And so reduced purchasing power.

If the currency has little value and limited convertibility—or either alone—there is little interest in investing in the country or in simply buying its goods or selling foreign goods in—especially if the investments must be done in the domestic currency.

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Changes

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Here’s a brief throwback video of 2007 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Don’t worry about what he’s saying. Just compare the quality of his voice and diction and energy then with now, 13 years later.

Is that really what we need in the White House?

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Distractions

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Much is being made of the cybersecurity threat, the national security threat, that the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei represents. For instance, Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE) has said it’s good for the British government to be removing Huawei from the core of the British Internet.

Senator Mark Warner (D, VA):

Huawei has been and will continue to be a national security threat….

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) on the Brits’ initial decision to allow Huawei into their Internet infrastructure:

[t]he Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will now have a foothold to conduct pervasive espionage on British society.

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It’s Been Going On for a Year

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This is what Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, in a series of tweets, said so weakly about antifa on 2 July 2019 after that gang assaulted journalist Andy Ngo and others, putting them in the hospital:

Portland has always been a beacon of free speech. We are proud of that history.
— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) July 1, 2019

But in the last couple of years, some have increasingly used their opportunity to exercise their 1st amendment rights, as an opportunity to incite violence.
— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) July 1, 2019

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Support for the 10th Amendment

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From an unexpected quarter. The Supreme Court has ruled against Washington State in its suit regarding faithless electors. The decision was unanimous, and the opinion held in part

Nothing in the Constitution expressly prohibits States from taking away presidential electors’ voting discretion as Washington does[.]

And

The Constitution’s text and the nation’s history both support allowing a state to enforce an elector’s pledge to support his party’s nominee—and the state voters’ choice—for president[.]

That’s a reflection of our Constitution’s 10th Amendment and an affirmation of textualism, and that’s what makes it surprising, coming as it does from the ruling’s author, Justice Elena Kagan.

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