Author Archives: eehines

Another Reason for School Choice

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Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools pushes its LGBTQ curriculum on its children down through pre-kindergarten—expose[ing] children as young as 3 to “Pride storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions, and elementary-age same-sex romance—the school district refuses to notify those children’s parents when this happens in particular classes, and the district refuses to allow those parents to opt their children out of such “lessons.” The 4th Circuit court upheld that atrocious and abusive behavior, so a coalition of parents across a range of religions is petitioning the Supreme Court to take the case and uphold the parents, reversing the 4th Circuit.

A plethora of friend-of-the-courts briefs are flowing in encouraging the Court to take up the case.

And

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe schools should hide a student’s gender change at school from parents, according to a recent poll of over 2,200 likely voters.
…
The poll shows that almost three-quarters, 71%, of likely voters said a teacher should notify parents if their students say they want to go by a different gender.

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision and subsequent ruling, if it takes the case, the way forward is clear. The 4th Circuit’s egregious error and MCPS’ enthusiastically aggressive child abuse and disregard of parents’ wishes illustrate the difficulty of getting public K-12 schools to do their job. Those schools no longer are worth the trouble or our tax money. Instead, this is just one more reason for parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of charter or voucher schools and homeschooling. And for pushing for more charter and voucher schools.

Has FEMA Gone Racist and Sexist?

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The Biden-Harris’ Federal Emergency Management Agency has gone from aiding Americans in regional emergencies to emphasizing Americans who happen to be black or female for such aid before it gets around to helping other Americans in the same emergency region.

[A] closer look at FEMA’s recent internal documents, spending, and public actions shows that FEMA has broadened its focus to handling the flow of migrants into the US and attempting to double down on DEI initiatives on gender, sexuality, and race.

FEMA’s strategic “plan” for the period 2022-2026—we have far too long yet to go under this piece of work—makes the agency’s bigotry clear:

In its first goal, the plan promised to “Instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.”
Its second named priority is to “lead whole of Community in climate resilience.”
FEMA’s “readiness” comes in as the third goal in the plan.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion cannot be optional; they must be core components of how the agency conducts itself internally and executes its mission[.]”

This is an agency that badly wants a complete revamp, with wholly new personnel in supervisory positions. The bigotry of those managers has gone entirely too far, and their redemption isn’t possible from within government positions.

A Subsidy

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It may be that the People’s Republic of China will start subsidizing mainland Chinese families who have more than one child, to the tune of 800 yuan per child for a family’s second and third children per month. Is that a little, or a lot?

The PRC’s 2024 per capita GDP in nominal terms is a bit over $13,000, which works out to 92,300 yuan, or 7,700 yuan per month. Those 800 yuan are roughly $113.

Using data from just before the Wuhan Virus Situation, per capita household electricity consumption was some 750 kilowatt-hours per month. That consumption cost $0.083 per kilowatt-hour; that works out to roughly 425 yuan per month.

Food consumption cost mainland Chinese roughly $270, or 1,915 yuan per month for a family of three, rising (in a naïve estimate) to $360 per month, or 2,555 yuan for a family upsized to four.

In those broad strokes, it seems that electricity and food consume that subsidy before getting to housing, which already is badly under water, for all that the housing industry may be—may be—turning around.

Given the decision of mainland Chinese families not to have more than one child, even after the murderously enforced one-child edict was lifted, this likely won’t increase family size in the PRC. And that’s separate from the editors’ note that child subsidies have never worked anywhere.

One More Reason

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For Israel to not trust the Biden-Harris administration.

The United States is investigating the unauthorized release of classified documents detailing Israel’s planned attack against Iran, The Associated Press reported.
The documents, attributed to the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on Oct. 1. ….
The documents, which are marked Top Secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app last week and first reported by CNN and Axios.

Supposedly, the Biden-Harris is investigating the leak, including how the data were obtained.

…whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the US intelligence community or by another method, like a hack….

Either way, this administration cannot be trusted with anyone’s secrets.

If the leak came from the administration’s intelligence community—I’m particularly suspicious, on the basis of no data whatsoever, of the NSA—that leaker should spend the rest of his life in prison, and this is would be yet another example of why the intelligence community needs a deep- and wide-reaching reform along with removal of managers from the mid-level on up to the political appointees, along with the cancelation of their security clearances once they’re no longer in government employ.

If the leak was the result of a hack job, it would be yet another demonstration of this administration’s disdain for matters relating to cyber security.

Hopefully, though, the Israelis already have learned the level of trustworthiness of this administration, and they shared false flag information in the expectation that Biden-Harris’ minions would leak them, or that they’d be hacked, and therewith mislead Iran regarding Israel’s actual plans.

Misleading Headline

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And a misleading article. The headline summarizes the miss:

Israel Said It Was Aiming at Hezbollah. Its Strike Also Killed Dozens of Civilians.

And the lede, which in keeping with newsroom policy across the journalism guild, misleadingly calls the terrorist entity “militants:”

For years, a helpful, middle-aged man lived in the basement apartment of a seven-story residential building on a hillside. Some neighbors in Ain el-Delb said they knew that he was connected to Hezbollah, the militant group. But they said they didn’t think he was important enough to be an Israeli target.

Misleading because what these newsroom writers carefully chose not to mention, at any point in the article other than a passing reference to Israel’s “describing” the building as a headquarters, is that Hezbollah had secreted its facilities and terrorists in apartment building among those civilians, using them as shields. It’s those terrorists who are responsible for the extent of the civilian deaths. It’s those terrorists who maximized the extent of the collateral damage centered on those civilian deaths.