Tag Archives: culture

Government Intrusion

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A particularly bad effort by the Progressive-Democratic Biden administration, this one attempts to insert Government between parents and their children, have the children engage directly with Government persons, and block the parents from participating or any sort of oversight at all.

The proximate subject is a CDC-generated

private chat platform that enables teens to discuss—without parental oversight—a range of highly fraught issues, including LGBT challenges, occult topics, dealing with difficult relatives or even finding an alternative “family” through communities that are more accepting.

This Q Chat Space

includes features that enable its teen users to evade parental scrutiny and oversight.
For example, the platform offers two options for text reminders of upcoming chats—discreet or detailed. Detailed reminders include a “Q Chat Space” tag and other identifying information. Discreet reminders, however “are private, they do not include ‘Q Chat Space’ or the name of the chat,” the platform explains. “They only say ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 1 hour.’ or ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 24 hours.'”
At the bottom of the Q Chat Space website, there is a bar with a button reading “Click/tap here for a quick escape…” accompanied by a picture of a person running towards an exit door. Clicking on the button changes the screen to Google’s website.

Jaco Booyens has the right of it:

It is not the role of the CDC or any school environment to educate Americans’ children on gender, sex, sexual conduct, or sexual preference. In fact, this particular site is highly deceiving, encouraging children to hide their activity on the site from their parents by giving them an easy exit button.

There are two major Government crimes in Booyens’ objection: one is that intrusion of Government into parental responsibilities. The other is Government teaching children to not trust their parents, to hide important family matters from them, functionally to lie to their parents, if only by omission.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is trying to do to traditional family structure. We must start the removal process this fall.

They’re Both Wong

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A Washington Post columnist wrote Thursday, regarding the Wuhan Virus (my term, not hers) lockdowns and the impact they had on our children,

I am basically totally uninterested in who was right and who was wrong in the summer of 2020. Kids don’t need adults’ self-justifications. They need us to get moving and looking forward.

The thrust of her justification centered on

It’s time to start thinking about how to pay them back[.]

That’s mistaken. Blowing off who made the mistake goes too far.

There was a fair amount of demurral regarding her position. A Deseret News contributor offers what I think is the canonical objection.

I am very interested in who was right and who was wrong because we need to make sure that the people who made bad policy will never make policy affecting children again[.]

She’s wrong also, but from the opposite side. Emphasizing fixing blame goes too far in the opposite direction.

Finding out who made the error matters to the extent that it’s important to track trends of good and bad performance so we can emphasize the successful and lessen the impact of the unsuccessful. Mistakes occur, including serious ones, but if those are not part of a pattern, the corrections still need to be made and the lessons learned, but the individuals, in the main, should be continued.

The most important aspect of a mistake, though, especially the large ones like these lockdowns, is the fact of that mistake. Investigations into the mistake need to focus on how the mistake occurred—its mechanics—so efficient, focused corrective action can be taken and the likelihood of that mistake recurring greatly reduced, if not prevented altogether.

If that investigation into the mechanics of the mistake leads the investigators to a who as the what that led to the mistake, that’s when who did it becomes important. That’s when responsibility (not blame) can be attached and personnel-related corrective action, as efficient, focused corrective action, can be taken. And not before.

Is the Iron Curtain Come to California?

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It seems that the University of California Los Angeles has decided to move from college’s PAC-12 Conference to the Big 10 Conference, effective with the 2024 academic/athletic year.

It seems also that California’s Governor Gavin Newsom (D) is unhappy about the alma mater of Lew Alcindor, later becoming the NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, joining the exodus from the State, if only functionally and not physically.

Nobody said, “Mother may I?” to Newsom, and that angrifies him as much as UCLA’s decision to go out from a West Coast conference to a more economically sound area of our nation.

I read about it (is how I found out). No big deal. I’m the governor of the state of California. But maybe a bigger deal is that I’m the chair of the UC Board of Regents. I read about it. Is it a good idea? Did we have a chance to discuss the merits (of the decision)? I’m not aware anyone did. So it was done in isolation. It was done without regental oversight or support. It was done without any consideration to my knowledge.

Now, it may be that there is/was a contractual obligation for UCLA to advise the Board of Regents of the school’s discussions and intentions. However, Newsom didn’t mention any of that in his plaint—only that His Nibs wasn’t consulted.

Regarding those more economically sound areas of our nation—in the new era of Name, Image, and Likeness requirements that allow college athletes to personally profit form the use of their NIL material—here is, UCLA’s Athletic Director Martin Jarmond:

…the move was mostly about increasing “exposure” in the NIL era. By opening the school up to potentially more nationally televised games and East Coast markets, Jarmond says they can now provide an enhanced opportunity for student-athletes to find “their voice and their brand and what’s important to them.”

But not so fast: His Nibs is looking for ways to block the move.

Trust me when I say this: We are not going to be looking into. We are already looking into it within (and have been) minutes after reading about this in the newspaper.

No veiled threat there….

The Opposite of Courage

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In a Just the News article centered on George Washington University Law Professor, and holder of the university’s Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, Jonathan Turley’s view that four Border Patrol agents have defamation and denial of due process cases (the four agents face administrative punishments even though the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found they’d done nothing wrong), JtN quoted National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd as saying,

…the president of the United States said that these individuals would pay, and the moment he said that, those investigators had no choice but to find some sort of fault—whether it was criminal or administrative.

On that I must disagree. There’s no doubt the “investigators” might have felt pressure to find a fault, but they also without doubt were not forced to do so. The most pressure that could have been applied would have been to cancel their jobs.

It would have taken a measure of courage to resist the pressure. Choosing their jobs, assuming such a threat was made or implied, over doing the right thing, however, took no courage.

In choosing between doing a right thing and doing a wrong thing, the opposite of courage is cowardice.

A Thought on Money-Follow-the-Child Programs

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters had one.

Quoting Toni Jennings, retired teacher and former Florida Lieutenant Governor, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute CEO, wrote

The more competition we had in education, the better off we became. So, I for one believe that competition is good. But you will hear those who say, “Oh no, you’re making the public schools compete with others.” Well, those children are going to have to go out and compete with others in the workaday world.

Absolutely, and those public schools are not only failing those children, they’re defrauding those children’s parents, whose tax money is paying for those schools.

Here’s another thought, this one from me, flowing from this bit in Trabert’s letter:

The 2021 ACT results show that 31% of white students are college-ready in English, reading, math, and science, while only 14% of Hispanic students and 6% of black students met that standard. Achievement gaps are getting worse….

Even if that achievement gap didn’t exist, and those minority children also were at that 31% rate, the rate is unacceptably bad and illustrates the magnitude of the failure of our public schools.

We need vastly more competition in our K-12 system, not less, in order to both eliminate that achievement gap and to bring the college-ready rate up to acceptable levels. That means the Federal government must butt out of the business [sic] or be butted out by the States rejecting Federal funds; it means that State and local education funding must follow the child not the institution; and it means that State and local jurisdictions must stop, or be stopped from, using their regulatory powers to obstruct the opening of charter and voucher schools or of the nascent homeschooling pod alternative.