Bunny Trails: Politics

[temporal1]

Vivek Ramaswamy would be ideal to revamp gov education.
It’s been broken for far too long.

Possibly the greatest need in the U.S., more than international affairs, national borders, human rights, et al.
Children, teens, young adults deserve balanced education. The chronic imbalance has been ignored for too long.

U.S. children, their families, taxpayers, have been sold an empty bill of goods. Passing mediocrity.

There is little hope graduates can be adequately prepared for real life, hopefully, for excellence and honor, without balance in their formal education. Harvard well-reflects the problems, of notice even before Ms Gay.

i have no idea what would be required, but the starting place should be to hire admin, teachers, staff in balanced ways, hopefully without added rule of law, to assure gov ed is not the sole playground for lib ideologues. Pre-K through college.

Betsy DeVos was never up to the challenge.

Vivek has the wherewithal to be able to say, “The party’s over.”

[Ken]

Vivek Ramaswamy would be ideal to revamp gov education.
It’s been broken for far too long.

Possibly the greatest need in the U.S., more than international affairs, national borders, human rights, et al.
Children, teens, young adults deserve balanced education. The chronic imbalance has been ignored for too long.

U.S. children, their families, taxpayers, have been sold an empty bill of goods. Passing mediocrity.

There is little hope graduates can be adequately prepared for real life, hopefully, for excellence and honor, without balance in their formal education. Harvard well-reflects the problems, of notice even before Ms Gay.

i have no idea what would be required, but the starting place should be to hire admin, teachers, staff in balanced ways, hopefully without added rule of law, to assure gov ed is not the sole playground for lib ideologues. Pre-K through college.

Betsy DeVos was never up to the challenge.

Vivek has the wherewithal to be able to say, “The party’s over.”

I'm not sure what this has to do with Texas. But none of those things you just listed are part of the federal Department of Education. Those are all issues that are under the jurisdiction of the various states.

[temporal1]

McConnell is not a very big Trump fan. I see him as a very corrupt leader. I hope he retires soon.

Incidentally, I’m currently teaching my sophomore students informal logical fallacies. This is an example of ad hominem.

^^The bunny trail started here.

To repeat, i don’t have direction, but after listening to Vivek a bit, i expect he does .. that is, he would see+assess needs clearly and find direct paths to have impact. To FIX problems, to avoid chronic+worsening disease, the love child of lib gov.

One sore spot would be teachers’ unions - for teachers, not students. And it shows.
Private ed and homeschools don’t settle for union teachers. That’s a clue.

[Ken]

McConnell is not a very big Trump fan. I see him as a very corrupt leader. I hope he retires soon.

Incidentally, I’m currently teaching my sophomore students informal logical fallacies. This is an example of ad hominem.

^^The bunny trail started here.

To repeat, i don’t have direction, but after listening to Vivek a bit, i expect he does .. that is, he would see+assess needs clearly and find direct paths to have impact. To FIX problems, to avoid chronic+worsening disease, the love child of lib gov.

One sore spot would be teachers’ unions - for teachers, not students. And it shows.
Private ed and homeschools don’t settle for union teachers. That’s a clue.

Teachers have a constitutional right to join any organization that they want. The Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment's protection of free speech, assembly, and petition logically extends to include a “freedom of association." Just like you have a constitutional right to join any organization you want from the Republican Party or NRA to your local Mennonite Church, so do teachers.

What you are really talking about is whether states or school districts should engage in collective bargaining with teacher unions. There are 33 states that allow some form of collective bargaining in education, and 17 states that do not. Since this is a Texas thread, I would point out that Texas is one that does not. So we already have a ready-made experiment available to determine the effects of collective bargaining on educational outcomes. Go ahead and compare educational outcomes in states that allow collective bargaining with those that do not. I suspect you will not find the results that you want.

[temporal1]

The starting point i’m interested in would be reports (of years) that consistently reflect the vast majority of educators and admin that are registered to vote, vote for the DNC. That should be a glaring red flag for anyone.

It’s so routinely imbalanced, over decades, it could be compared with a monopoly.

No evidence the problem will resolve itself.

[Grace]

Last week Biden announced that he will block new liquid natural gas (LNG) installations. Not only will this cost vital jobs, and increased energy prices, it means Europe may need to buy their LNG from Putin. U.S. gas exports rose sharply after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. So in the name of reducing carbon emissions, his decision will enrich Russia and indirectly fund the war between Russia and Ukraine. Biden is funding the war between Russia and Ukraine from both ends. He wants to send 60 billion of our tax money to strengthen Ukraine’s military; he also wants to indirectly fund Russia at the expense of our economy and fuel prices. Add to that it will lengthen the war with all its death and destruction.

We knew he was a horrible warmongering politician, but his emboldening Putin on so many fronts, and empowering Iran (who funds Hamas) comes at such a high price of death and destruction. His agenda seems to be one of horror, death and a hatred for the country and its citizens. His administration is an administration of death, from promoting the killing of the unborn, the deaths at the southern border, and the deaths in the wars he has emboldened and empowered.

Add to that, by reducing the exports of LNG in the name of reducing carbon emissions, some of the countries will just resort to building more coal plants, increasing those emissions.

[Grace]

Four of the illegal migrants who brutally beat and pummeled NYPD police in Times Square were released without bail by none other than Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. The illegal criminal migrants then acquired phony names and got tickets and left the city for a sanctuary state, California, and free to commit more crimes.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... y-have-fl/

https://www.foxnews.com/us/illegal-migr ... mes-square

Meanwhile, peaceful hymn singing, praying, pro life people, who demonstrated at an abortion clinic, could face up to 10 years in prison and fines over $200,000.

https://www.ncregister.com/cna/six-pro- ... -in-prison

https://www.foxnews.com/media/pro-life- ... bidens-doj

[Ken]

Are any of those important to you? And worthy of consideration?

Dan Z cited concern about nuclear weapons; the simple fact is that America gets an F there, since they used them unnecessarily in a war simply to cause mass terror and win. No one else has ever used one.

Hypotheticals don’t count. We can look at what actually happens in the real world.

The US was faced with 3 plausible strategies for bringing the war with Japan to an end. A war that the US did not start.

Strategy 1: Nuclear weapons. The war ends in August 1945. Total killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 129,000–226,000

Strategy 2: Invasion of Japan. The war ends sometime in late 1946. Total killed? No one knows. But in late July 1945, the War Department provided an estimate that the entire Downfall operations would cause between 1.7 to 4 million U.S. casualties, including 400-800,000 U.S. dead, and 5 to 10 million Japanese dead. Projections were based on the experience in the Battle of Okinawa in May 1945. Were those numbers overstated? Probably it was a worst-case scenario. But even the best case scenarios has more than 20x the number of deaths as Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Strategy 3: Total military blockade of Japan with continued conventional bombing. The war continues until 1947 or longer. Minimal American casualties but millions are killed in Japan from starvation and bombing. Widespread famine in Japan could have killed tens of millions.

Also remember that Japan was not the only theater of war in the Pacific. The biggest theater of the Pacific war was China. The Chinese lost 20 million people at the hands of the Japanese and Japanese occupation of China was continuing in the summer of 1945. In late 1944 in the battle of Ichi-Go, the Japanese killed an estimated 700,000 Chinese soldiers and uncounted millions of Chinese civilians. Japan was still engaged in offensive actions in China in the summer of 1945. A decision to delay delay decisive surrender in August 1945 could have cost hundreds of thousands of more lives, potentially millions in China due to famine and starvation had the war dragged on for another year.

War is nasty business and decisions to prolong it have enormous consequences. Every additional day the war lasts, more people die. What was the correct strategy for American war planners in August 1945? Based on what they knew at that time, which strategy brought the war to an end in the quickest fashion and with the least loss of life?

[Josh]

I think that dropping atomic bombs and burning hundreds of thousands of innocent people to death is wrong.

[GaryK]

I think that dropping atomic bombs and burning hundreds of thousands of innocent people to death is wrong.

Then why not get involved in politics in order to right that wrong?