Public Schools and Parent Options

The Supreme Court ruled that parents could, indeed, opt their children out of parts of public school curricula that violated those parents’ religious belief. In Mahmoud, et al. v Taylor, et al., the Court held

the public-school system in Montgomery County, Md, had placed “an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion,” according to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito.
“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill[.]”

The three “liberal” Justices demurred:

Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools[.]

The problem isn’t that chaotic, however:

Some parents from several religious backgrounds—Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox—objected to [a collection of books with LGBTQ themes and characters]. The school board said in court filings that it initially tried to accommodate opt-out requests, but doing so became “unworkably disruptive” due to “unsustainably high numbers of absent students.”

In other words, the school board was inconvenienced by not being able to dictate to parents how the school board would treat those parents’ children. Never mind that the objections were so widespread that the school board was unable to impose its will on all but a relative few. That clear cut a separation is hardly chaotic.

The chaos about which those three Justices bleated was caused by the school board and would be caused by other school boards who object to parents not meekly rolling over and kowtowing to the Know Betters of school boards more interested in their Leftist ideologies than they are in teaching the parents’ children.

These three Justices know this. They claim to worry about Court decisions deprecating respect for our court system, but it’s attitudes like those of these three that lead to that deprecation.

An aside: such chaos as might occur from enforcing parental rights, religious and otherwise, would be virtually eliminated were State and Federal governments to get out of the way of school choice, illustrated by voucher and charter schools, parochial schools, and home schooling. Parents could freely exercise their [religious beliefs] vis-à-vis the parameters of their children’s education if they had unfettered access to such a range.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

A Noble Man

The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.

Artificial Hysteria

The Supreme Court earlier this week stayed a district court’s order blocking the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens to countries that are not the home countries of those illegal aliens. The activist Justices on the Court demurred. The Court’s stay does not address the underlying case; it merely allows the administration to proceed while that case makes its way through our court system. It’s the nature of their demurral that’s instructive here, though.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the dissenters,

Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled[.]

This over-the-top manufactured hysteria by the activist Justices does the Court no good at all. In an environment where many begin to question the legitimacy of the Court, Sotomayor’s excessive hype is the sort of thing fueling that question.

Count Me Skeptical

Nvidia has a new AI out that purports to enable[] simulations of Earth’s global climate with an unprecedented level of resolution. As is always the case with AI, there are problems with accuracy, usability, credibility, and on and on.

This AI, as with all of them, are creatures of human programmers, and they do only what those humans programmed them to do, the data those humans carefully selected for its training, what other humans tested it on the doing. We’ve seen the outcomes of all of that in a variety of AI programs that are nakedly racist, spout outright lies hallucinations (one of the characterization distortions of yet other humans associated with the AI), refusals to answer uncomfortable questions, supposedly autonomous decisions to refuse to shut down, even plot revolt—the latter two especially nothing more than what human programmers wrote these software packages to do and what human testers let pass.

And this bit of distortion by the news writer in the lede of the article at the link:

As is so often the case with powerful new technology, however, the question is what else humans will do with it.

Because, of course, the AI’s output can be taken fully at face value, so we need only concern ourselves with those uses.

This climate simulator has a high credibility bar to get over, and an even higher empirical accuracy bar to get over.

Tariff Bankruptcy?

Or is that just an excuse? Marelli, which supplies Nissan and Stellantis with auto parts like lighting and internal electronics, has filed for bankruptcy and is blaming the current tariff environment for the filing.

However, as Marelli’s CEO David Slump admitted in his company’s bankruptcy filing, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal,

…the company had already been struggling with long-term supply-chain issues stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic….

The company also has been struggling with losses and a hefty debt load for years.

Slump said the pandemic restricted access to both raw materials and the labor market, and set off a series of events that led to Marelli being unable to sustain its nearly $5 billion of debt. Even after the pandemic subsided, the impeded supply chain for semiconductors had an acute effect on automotive production.

Obvious questions arise:

  • what has the company been doing to reduce and then eliminate those losses over those years?
  • how assiduously has the company been working to pay down that debt? Has it only been paying the contractually obligated minimum payments, or has it been paying something extra against the principle in each payment period? Coupled with that, the company’s debt repayment has been heavily complicated by operating at a loss for years.
  • what has the company been doing to readjust its own supply chains? It saw, empirically, those five years ago during the supply chain disruptions of the Wuhan Virus situation, that its existing supply chains were heavily vulnerable.
  • what has the company been doing to develop new products and new buyers?

Slump’s claim of macroeconomic headwinds associated with the imposition of tariffs in countries around the world may well have been the trigger, but those “headwinds” are only that. This has been a bankruptcy building toward actuality for a few years. Excuse-making isn’t much in the way of a solution.