Progressive-Democrats, Education, and Assimilation

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California’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, is illustrating how thoroughly the Progressive-Democratic Party and the education of American children are an oxymoron, and this doesn’t even involve teachers unions.

Nearly 1 million California students designated as English learners will no longer have to pass a set of tests and benchmarks to exit the program, under a new law signed Sunday by [Progressive-]Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom’s—Party’s—move also illustrates the disdain that they have for American culture. Language is at the heart of any nation’s culture. It informs and strongly influences how a nation’s citizens think about themselves and how they understand their nation’s culture. By dumbing down English learning in California’s schools, Newsom and Party are deprecating the very thing that makes our nation American—our culture. Party doesn’t care that it’s very hard for immigrants to assimilate into our culture when they’re not required to become even reasonably conversant, much less proficient, in our language. But Party doesn’t care about American culture, either, so there’s that.

A Misreading

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Matthew Hennessey has misread what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants when it gains majorities in the House and the Senate.

There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

That’s not entirely accurate. There are those fears, which Party is fomenting in lieu of specifics regarding economic and foreign policy goals: fear of artificial intelligence, fear of data centers, fear of Donald Trump, and fear of MAGA.

Those, though, are just tools Party is using in pursuit of its major proposals. Hennessey is right, though, to the extent its major proposals are not up for debate.

The Progressive-Democrats have promised to eliminate the filibuster, reducing our republican democracy to a popular democracy and reducing our Senate to just another House, this time whose members have State-wide districts. They’ve also promised to stack the Supreme Court, reducing it from a Court upholding and applying our Constitution as it’s written to an activist court for whom our Constitution is just a collection of suggestions, if not entirely irrelevant, and which is malleable to Party demands.

Land Acknowledgments

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We stole your land. Sucks to be you. That’s what the Left’s precious land acknowledgments said at their core. As Kyle Smith put it in his WSJ Free Expression piece,

It’s as if a robber announced, “I took your jewelry and feel bad about it, but no way am I giving it back.”

Or, sucks to be you. Either way.

At any rate, it seems this particular bit of Leftist guilty bodice grasping (it’s not like they’re prepared to actually rend their YSL blouses) is beginning to fade to black. Some universities are quietly dropping them, and plays are making jokes of them in their preludes to their Acts 1.

Land acknowledgments, used so studiously by progressive do-gooder wannabes, were never more than expressions of contempt for the indigenes supposedly the addressees of the acknowledgments and insults to the intelligence of the rest of us, who also knew how we came into possession of lands that were variously bartered to us, taken by us, occupied by us where it was owned by no one. And especially those of us who recognized the arbitrary line in the dirt that the acknowledgments so carefully drew so as to ignore inconvenient history: that the indigenes whose land we’d allegedly taken had themselves bartered, taken, or occupied those same lands from their predecessor occupants all the way back to the original migrants coming across the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska those 10s of thousands of years ago.

Busy?

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Boeing’s 737 MAX has a software glitch that can cause an automated navigation feature to fail at difficult moments during an approach.

It emerged from a cockpit software update and can occur when flight crews alter their planned flight path following a missed approach. In a certain scenario, pilots may have to fly manually without some autopilot functions. That, some industry officials said, could overwork pilots while they are already busy, at low altitude and possibly dealing with situations like bad weather.

I have two comments about that. One is my usual: who tested that software update, in what scenarios, and with what test procedure?

The other concerns what constitutes “busy” in the cockpit. A single seat fighter pilot crossing the IP inbound to his ground target in a hostile environment is busy. Even a two-seat fighter crew approaching his airborne target(s) in a target rich environment is busy. In both cases, the busy-ness increases exponentially as the pilots begin actually engage their respect targets, a much more fluid situation than a go-around on a missed approach.

Airline pilots during a go-around, especially in low-altitude bad weather, do see their workloads increase, but they aren’t busy enough to be threatened with overwork.

It’s certainly true that “busy” is relative to what a fighter pilot or civilian aircrew are used to. That, though, is what time in the simulator—and there are very good ones extant for both military and airline pilots—is for. That includes failing the nav feature in the simulator to drill the aircrew on proper and timely responses until a fix to the software update—properly tested this time, hopefully—can be installed. Perhaps, also, this particular failure should be added to the unexpected and emergency drills in the simulator.

Talk about Conspiracy Theories

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Canada’s Liberal Party Prime Minister Mark Carney is no piker when pushing them.

…he suggested he has prepared for a possible military invasion by American forces. “I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney said recently. “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare.

Given that level of irrationality, how would it be possible to reach any sort of trade deal with Canada?