On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety.
When I was a little kid, the State of Virginia was busy passing those private voucher laws as part of its resistance to the 1954 Brown decision. It gave families grants for withdrawing their kids from public schools to help them financially attend segregated, private schools instead.
My snarky, brave, liberal parents used that grant to send me to Virginia's first integrated private school, founded in 1949 in Alexandria. My first-grade teacher was Miss Camay Brooks, Cab Calloway's youngest daughter, whom we simply called "Camay." Back in 1962, our class was about one-third black. We memorized the names of all the Gemini astronauts, went down to the barns to watch baby animals being born in the spring, and helped the 8th graders stage "The Mikado." And took naps in the afternoon on little rugs after milk and cookies.
I don't remember being emotionally damaged for life as a result of it all.
“…let the punishment fit the crime!” - the Mikado by G & S.
Just too bad that America cannot even reach the level of Justice that existed in 🎶Tittipoo, Japan!🎶
Yes…education is a powerful thing, and the paranoid, selfish slave owners were well aware that educated slaves could advance themselves, having - despite Trumpian theory - as fine minds as anyone! (See the documentary re the Black WOMEN engineers who worked on the Apollo Missions). 🤯
The only hope to REPAIR the fiscal, geographic, societal, and humanitarian damages done by the present REGIME will be a properly designed Education System, that will BEGIN by restoring accurate HISTORY to the curriculum, to thwart the racist, bigoted and salacious falsehoods Trump is forcing into the school programs.
The Evil Weeds are sown now…and must be rooted out.
BTW one of Donald Trump’s early teachers testified that he was the ‘worst student she ever had’! Yet, each grade’s teachers passed him under threat from his parents. That ‘crime’ is ravaging America today and deserves a fitting punishment.
Hidden Figures, the book, by Margot Lee Shetterly: The biographical text follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. who worked at NASA.
Pete Hegseth would choke on his beer if he read about those women. No self-respecting female should vote for ANY of Trump’s Regime. Time for another ‘Pussy March’. 😼😾😼
Let’s go all the way and make it a ‘riotous PARADE’, with someone representing ‘LYSISTRATA’ as the Parade Grand Marshall.
Time to remind American women of the savvy Greek who ‘stopped a war’ by convincing her ‘sisters’ to withhold ‘sexual favours’…and the men ‘caved’ and stayed home…(led by WHAT! You say?)😁
Trump would have a ‘royal fitt’, but WHO CARES…that WAR is as ‘ILLEGAL’ as the ‘games’ on Epstein’s Island were…you know…the ones Donald and Melania didn’t engage in because they were ‘never there’ 🤔…
Hmmm…no nookie as a ‘super power’…I think we’ve discovered Trump’s Achille’s bone spur!!
Well Jean, I'm guessing (and you are hoping) your reference to Aristophanes' play will somehow convince the men who'll be getting the cold shoulder in bed (does the bedside aspirin bottle still work?) to somehow do what? Stop a war (it didn't work for the Greeks in real time); get their knuckle-dragging spouses to vote out the Rs in the House and Senate; get billionaires to stop buying elections; start treating women and Black Americans with civility and respect.
If only this could work outside the theater!
We all know what the host unenlightened males would say anytime about a woman stood up for herself or disagreed with some nonsensical drool coming at her from a spouse, or a co-worker..."she must be on the.. "
What is Hegseth's excuse or trump's or the other brain and soul-dead members of this administration?
Not getting any? I doubt that would get them to change. A frontal lobotomies are the only solution--and keep the cuckoos on exhibit at the National Zoo as a warning to the overly testosteroned boors.
You are correct, of course, but ‘impeachment’ has not succeeded - TWICE BEFORE - and Trump has an even firmer grip on SCOTUS and his ‘Gumby’ A.G., so the annals of Parliamentary History must be searched to find a codasill, or tenet, or ironclad rule that will deny Trump the ‘carte BLANCHE’ he is claiming (NPI).
As it is, he defied the Constitution to even run in the 2024 election > as a ‘convicted felon’ < and Congress was over-confident about Harris plus pretty näive about the ‘support’ American men would give a WOMAN.
You are also correct about “NOW”, because his treachery grows with each crime he gets away with, and each coercion of SCOTUS and manipulation of the DOJ.
BOLD…BONKERS…BARBAROUS…with nothing to lose at this point in time.
Somewhere there is a ‘law’ that can rein him in, but now he has the Attorney General in one pocket and 6 Justices in the other. 😖
BTW MAGAs have their red hats, that M.ake A. G.irl A.ngry…so if Barb wants to ‘wear HER colours’…👍
However, this time around perhaps it should be HARDHATS in case of ICE. 🥶
Better World Books. $6.11 + shipping. My shelves are overflowing with affordable reading material. I love it. As much as I love Barnes & Noble it is a budget buster.
The movie Hidden Figures is great! It made me curious to learn more about those women. So I read the book, Hidden Figures too.
Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson are enlightening and some times heartbreakingly, difficult books to read. But both are really important works. I highly recommend both.
I'm waiting for his classmates from the NY Military Academy and then Fordham U to spill the beans on what he was like and whom he paid to do write his papers and take his exams. I don't think the Wharton alums are up to spilling beans.
Wow, I hadn't heard that but am not at all surprised--only maybe that Judge Trump admitted it! I'm sure he began his habits of paying off, extorting and trading in quid pro quos long before he ran for president.
Jean, i saw a great program online (don't ask for details as at my agez memory is gone) that showed black people teaching their children "black language" to be used when speaking to white folks but speaking normally when speaki ng to each other. I, a liberal enlightened "white folk" had never thought of this.
It’s called ‘hiding in plain sight’, and ironically this was a protective technique that lessened over generations but now seems a smart survival skill. POTUS #47 made sure to surround himself with people he feels more intelligent than.
It wouldn’t be hard…observing R. Kennedy and Hegseth!
I think ‘total women’ also ‘play dumb’ around men, so, the precedent is established. Trump likes his ‘Blonde Bimbo Brigade’ and Ms. Harp is just the latest one! DJT doesn’t want a REAL puppy because he is the only POTUS to not have a dog at the White House.
Albert Einstein warned that people who didn’t like animals - (DJT) - are ‘suspicious’ and to be avoided, and he was kinda’ smart…
It's funny. I'm an animal advocate and I wouldn't want to impose Trump on any dog...or cat...or even species with whom he may share certain traits -- skunks, rats, snakes and so on...they all deserve better, but I have thought that in the absence of a functioning wife, adoring kids, or at least a golden (what else) retriever who provides the loyalty demanded, he at least has Hart, and she comes complete with leash, collar, be they invisibly self-imposed, and a set of commands. I wondered if others felt the same way, and yeah, I do think Albert had the right idea; he was a bright guy.
I raised a ‘Golden’ with my brother (Zan), but his previous dog (also a Golden) was named TAFI (after the Theatre Arts Festival International) 🇨🇦, and she was “bilingual” - would respond to commands in both french and english. I am SURE that dog was SMARTER than Trump!! 😄
BTW I am also certain not too many dogs would jump into the trunk of a car if there wasn’t room for them to sit in it 🤪.
My ‘concern’ is that Trump’s pet is carrying around the nuclear code satchel inside that huge bag she totes for DJT. He probably thinks she is his ‘caddy’. 🤨
As an animal advocate, hope you saw the story yesterday about the wild mustangs that are supposed to be under government protection. Using a loophole to sell some to "caring homes", they are being sold for less than $25 then resold by these " caring homes" to slaughter houses. Reported by the NY Times.
Paula, this is evidence that the Republican depravity embedded in the U.S. Government, fueled by unbridled avarice, has expanded into every possible corner of our empire.
(I started to use the word, "society," but that word suggests that we are civilized or considerate. We are neither. Some of us are trying, but we have been overwhelmed by Florsheim-shod, money-grubbing savages.)
Yesterday we hiked (walked is more accurate) to look at the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. Our personable, knowledgeable 19 y/o guide told us about a recent move (beat back once) to tear up the area we were standing on to drill for oil. He said it would destroy the area forever, and I did not doubt him. The comment period is still open, and he urged us to comment. I will. Occasionally public pushback stops the trump destruction juggernaut.
Marguerite Henry and her animal books and the one film . The history of horses and how they arrived on our continent also worth researching.
And for everyone commenting I had never heard of Einstein ‘s comment but when assessing an alleged sex offender a history of animal contact is vital. Many times offenders use animals as a tool to create fear or scare a possible victim. The old tv ABC film The Muffin Man showed this. EB White’s Charlotte ‘s Web also comes to mind.
Read about Wild Horse Annie. She followed a truck leaking blood and discovered the slaughter of the wild mustangs. Helicopters were used to terrify the herds forcing them onto canyons for easy capture/kill.
Paula, I saw this and it is disgusting. Years ago we had a local chef who was French who wanted to serve horse meat. We told him that here that is not a good idea. Years ago during WWII my great aunt and uncle who had a grocery store in Indy sold horse meat claiming it was beef. They were the black sheep of the family.
Paula, yes Trump tried to have the Wild Horses that the BLM is warehousing back in his first term.
This story is nothing new - for decades, the BLM (bureau of land management) and the FS (forest service) have been rounding up Wild Horses and Burros from HMAs(herd management Areas) and warehousing them in "pastures" and feedlots. After three offers of
adoption with no takers, they go to Sale Authority where anyone can buy them cheaply & do whatever with them. Many go to the slaughter buyers.
Ten or twenty years ago, there was some publicity when some rancher bought a large number & disappeared them - I guess Dave Phillips is back again with this story. He wrote it up back then I believe in the Times.
Obviously, there was a turmoil briefly, but as you can see - nothing changed. And now we have the WH felon eager to "save the government money by getting rid of the ones warehoused.
I did see something about the Sale Authority issue being "investigated" recently.
“They Shoot Horses Don’t They!” The movie (starring Red Buttons among other actors) reminds us of how ‘money hungry’ people can be…but, also desperate!
As a volunteer at two humane societies, I agree with your comment. I do feel a sense of non-understanding as to the reasons behind Ms. Hart's attraction to him. It goes to my deeper mis-understanding & disbelief how anyone can follow that person. He has no honor.
Jean, now he is letting lots of beef in from other places like Argentina, before the election so hamburger can be cheaper. I was reading yesterday that ranchers here are not happy with this. About playing dumb around men...this is the advice I received when growing up. I have never been able to do this.
Barry, I appreciate that and I don't mean to paint all with the same brush. I just have been treated to mansplaining once too often and treating me like I am some add on to my husband.
You do realize that Let The Punishment Fit the Crime was a satirical commentary on justice in Great Britain at the time in the late 1800s LOL! The Japanese thing was just a cover!
Tonight's LFAA triggered a number of vivid personal memories to this Professor Richardson student. Today's Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026 UCLA school newspaper, the Daily Bruin, surveyed my University's long history of successful student activism going back to the 1934 when the Provost attempted to remove 4 enrolled students permanently.
The ousted students were reinstated.
When I entered UCLA as an underground in 1966 tuition was only $69 a quarter which I paid from my income from working at the UCLA research library where I became aware & read Nat Turner's then widely biography. Reagan & the other Regents steadily raised tuition $271 tuition/quarter.The complexion of my fellow students was changing.
I graduated in 1971 during the Vietnam War & 3 days later I left UCLA for Northern California with my young partner to live in a cabin near the beach south of Santa Cruz in La Selva (the jungle).
When I found my mailbox on the roadside on the street above, Freedom Blvd, there was an induction notice to report for induction 2 states to the East in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I was NOT pre-law but I did get a life saving lecture by my Political Science Professor at UCLA on Marbury vs Madison. I was a able to get the induction notice quashed retroactively on basic due process grounds, That was among a few other successful in pro per actions before I left West LA. More such actions were to come shortly.
I did not enter law school until the the early 1980's.
The attack on public education was exacerbated when bible reading was removed from public schools. Catholics protested the King James version of the daily prayers. In my school district religious nuts protested Jewish board members and Jewish school teachers. My home room teacher read the "Jews killed Jesus" gospel regularly on my behalf....
Before and after I went to Vietnam, 1966-7, I was in the Army of the Occupation of the South, SC branch, Ft. Jackson, SC. "Massive resistance" was in full force and effect in South Carolina off post. School districts in Virginia had closed to avoid Brown v Board. Tens of thousands of Black SC residents were shipped north to places like my old hometown in Pennsylvania in retaliation for "Yankee intervention". Local TV stations would not play national news, like CBS and especially Walter Cronkite. Blacks could not use sidewalks if a white person was on them.
By 1968, I was discharged but recalled when riots closed most major cities.
I've lived through forced conscription, participation a foreign war, school strikes, riots, busing, etc.
Today in NYT, Dealbook documents that AI is teaching a class at Harvard business school....
" ...Dealbook documents that AI is teaching a class at Harvard business school ...." Yikes, the "thinking machine" aka Alan Turings "Christopher" went off road from the Age of Reason.
********************************
8/22/26 Update:
Per "Harvard Business School (HBS) [which] has integrated artificial intelligence deeply into its curriculum, utilizing interactive AI video of faculty members, live AI case simulations, and specialized tech tools across marketing, entrepreneurship, and leadership courses. There has been key AI Integration in HBS Classes."
[HBS] "AI Faculty Avatars [pitch] Programs like the H.B.S. Foundry boot camp using interactive AI-generated video clones of real professors (such as venture capitalist Jeff Bussgang) to let students practice live pitch feedback."
[HBS] "LIVE AI Cases: Courses feature real-time AI simulations, building exercises, and specialized platforms like the Harvard AI Sandbox alongside tools like ChatGPT and Claude.Core Curriculum: Building on required first-year data science and AI foundations, marketing and organizational behavior classes heavily simulate data-driven tech disruptions."
[HBS Promo Ad] "Would you like to know more about HBS Online AI courses or the specifics of how the AI pitch [promo] avatars [sic] work?"
"The Harvard Crimson reports Harvard Business School Expanded AI Integration Across MBA [curriculum circa] Apr 11, 2026 — The efforts build on HBS's introduction last year of Data Science and AI for Leaders, a required first-year course."
"AI integration [per] The New York Times, Harvard's A.I. Clones Will Hear Your Start-Up Pitch Now To create a new $699 bootcamp for entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School made A.I. versions of its faculty. The Foundry Bootcamp .... "
Based on the public school education I got, the history courses all taught the propaganda about how wonderful our start was, but they never even got to the Civil War. IMO our education needs to START teaching our real history. I've been reading about our real history, and it isn't any prettier than what we are currently living.
The ones I've read are The 1619 Project, Caste, The Warmth of Other Suns, and Native Nations (almost done with this one). If you don't mind reading a book that is biology based, Braiding Sweetgrass is excellent. Just got two new ones in the mail today: An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States. and The Knowing (by Tanya Talaga). The first three are from the point of view of Blacks, and the remaining ones are Indigenous books (which I'm heavily into right now). I hope this helps. The reading is not easy, but well worth the effort. The subject matter is what is difficult, not the writing.
'Caste' is my top history book centuries of comparative race stratification going back to Drake & Queen Elizabeth's plunder of "New Avalon" aka California.
I am grateful to Lawrence O'Donnell for having Isabel Wilkerson on his show, because listening to her is what got me to read that book. I find it difficult to choose a top history book, because the ones I've been reading cover different aspects of our history, and I find all of them to be important.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply and suggestions. They all sound like books I'd like to read and will begin with 1619 Project. I don't expect it to be easy reading, thanks for the heads up.
Diploma? Um…the 🙄 ’Astronaut’, ‘Soccer Champion’, ‘Basketball Star’, ‘Jet Fighter Pilot’ doesn’t need a piece of paper! He just LIES like the road and thinks he is believed…
Please…someone…give him a gilt edged diploma with the words - in Latin - for:
‘Leader of those who defecate where they eat’…without provided translation.
Somewhere during his first term, I read that he has a diploma from Penn but not the Wharton School of Finance there, but other sources said his bachelor's was from Fordham, where he went before his brother talked Penn into admitting him. Funny how you never hear Penn bragging about his attendance.
He went to Fordham for the first two years. His brother's friend, in the Admissions Dept. at Penn, got him admitted as a Junior. His older sister admitted she wrote his papers during his college years.
Redistributing tax funds from public education to private schools that rob public schools and taxpayers of an unbiased education is evil.
How many religious schools will have a complete science curriculum?
And a robust curriculum for history, when their whole reason to exist is to preserve belief in their faith or private schools that cater to the wealthy elite?
School vouchers reduce the ability of public schools to provide a quality education for the majority of American students in order to benefit the elite and further the class system and reduce the possibility of a majority of students learning to think critically and maybe holding different political and religious beliefs than their parents.
And private schools can pick and choose their students. Public schools are open to all students. So inadequately funded public schools have the students who need the most help, while private schools brag about their students having better standardized test scores.
The current anti-public school movement did develop in reaction to one specific education model proposed by the left that now even AOC and other progressives begin to publicly denounce: wokism.
And wokism has its roots in what started decades ago, namely the rejection, by progressive academics, of the history of literature and philosophy altogether. Everything became "politicized" and judged based on the false assumption that people living today are morally superior to those in the past.
It's the LEFT that dropped many of the Enlightenment values, especially those that had to do with "culture".
If we don't change that and go back to a much more serious version of the "Humanities", the problem will remain intact for decades to come.
EUWDTB, when the US found itself in WWII without a real spy agency, the government recruited librarians, archivists, professors, artists, etc. from the humanities to act in various roles including actual spies. Book and Dagger is a fascinating history of this.
Yes Michele but the book is new to me. Julia Child and her husband part of this effort. However those were the folks who became involved in McCarthyism and his speech in West Virginia all made up. And not only the Red Scare the Lavender Scare as well. The Hollywood Blacklist and the closing of the Federal Theater Project and what they did to Hallie Flanagan. The Monument Men another film as well. So many served and supported our country and then in the fifties and sixties they were harassed . Howard Zinn and Dalton Trump no matter their imperfections both served in the war efforts. That always blowflies my mind. Also for any Chjcago folks or in the internet WTTF is going to honor Malvina Reynolds the composer of the song Little Boxes.
Thanks for the posts with all this information -- books, films, songs, history... My grandfather, who was in the OSS, later became a music professor. My mother often says that the OSS was the place for a music major.
The opening claim is particularly strange historically. The American anti-public-school movement—or, more precisely, the political movement seeking vouchers, privatization, weakening teachers’ unions, and shifting public money toward private and religious schools—long predates whatever he means by “wokism.” There certainly was a major acceleration of conservative hostility toward public schools over race, gender, DEI, curricula, and COVID-era school controversies. But saying the movement developed in reaction to “one specific education model proposed by the left” collapses several decades of history into a contemporary culture-war explanation.
Then there’s this:
“the rejection, by progressive academics, of the history of literature and philosophy altogether.”
What does that actually mean? Which academics? Which departments? Which curriculum? Rejected the history of literature and philosophy—or challenged a traditional canon? Those are radically different propositions. You can make a perfectly serious argument that some humanities departments became too enamored of political interpretation, identity, theory, presentism, etc. But “rejected the history of literature and philosophy altogether” is so sweeping that it’s almost impossible to evaluate.
And this is another unsupported leap:
“Everything became ‘politicized’ and judged based on the false assumption that people living today are morally superior to those in the past.”
“Everything” is doing heroic work there. There is a recognizable criticism underneath it—presentism, judging historical actors without adequately understanding the moral universe in which they lived. Historians themselves argue about that problem. But that’s a long way from establishing that progressive academia collectively believes we’re morally superior to everyone who preceded us.
The oddest part may be the Enlightenment claim. The Enlightenment wasn’t a set of propositions about “culture.” It encompassed reason, empiricism, skepticism toward inherited authority, individual liberty, toleration, natural rights, scientific inquiry, and competing ideas about political legitimacy. If you’re going to announce that “the LEFT dropped” Enlightenment values, you’d need to specify which values, who dropped them, and what evidence demonstrates it.
There is an interesting argument buried inside the comment: the humanities ought to expose students seriously to the intellectual inheritance of the past rather than treating old works primarily as objects upon which contemporary political judgments are imposed. I’d happily have that argument. It’s a real argument.
But he hasn’t made it. He’s started with “wokism,” traveled backward several decades through academia, declared an entire political tendency responsible, invoked the Enlightenment, and ended by prescribing a restored Humanities curriculum as the solution to America’s public-school politics.
I only have one contribution today - "Some men improve the world only by leaving it." Oscar Wilde (I send that out to all the men inside and outside the present administration.)
Wow, what a great xchool. That's the kind of stuff that needs to be taught. I was relegated to learning American history from books that hadn't been rewritten to project the truth in over a hundred years. My advantage was progressive parents who urged me to read as many things as possible which i did. That led me to free thinking and making snarky but enlightened comments such as this one.
I came to free thinking as a rebellion against the nuns who insisted that I was bound for hell since I was a Protestant. That and the dimes they extorted from me for “ holy cards” that were supposed to keep me out of purgatory. By second grade, I had pretty much figured out their scam.
Arizona Republicans spent years warning that public schools waste taxpayer money on ridiculous extravagances like teachers, counselors, libraries, and buildings where the roof doesn't leak.
Their solution? A voucher program that helped pay for trampoline parks, ninja warrior training, ski passes, martial arts, golf purchases, pianos, sewing equipment, and driving lessons from a company advertising BMWs and Teslas.
Fiscal conservatism has apparently discovered the climbing wall.
A public school asking for another teacher is government waste. A nearly $4,000 piano for one family? Educational freedom. Road repairs can wait. Somebody’s kid has karate at three.
Texas is getting in on the fun with a $1 billion voucher program, where about 70 percent of participating or invited families were already using private schools or homeschooling.
In other words, many taxpayers aren't helping kids escape failing schools. They're helping pay bills families were already paying.
Call it school choice if you like.
It looks a lot more like public money financing private purchases while politicians congratulate themselves for shrinking government.
And here in Arizona, we tried to do something about exactly this. Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans signed petitions to put greater accountability for the voucher program before voters. Now we won’t even get to vote on it.
I wrote about the larger democratic problem this creates here: who controls what the people are actually allowed to vote on?
So do like we’re trying to do here in Ohio- rather than vote against the bills, campaign to vote against the bill writers! More work, but more justice!
It’s paying for pianos objections that I object to. If that’s the only way a child can have a piano and, I assume a teacher, it’s the one expenditure this piano student could approve. Music is never an extravagance and belongs to everyone. We can never have enough.
Agreed, S Brasseux. But then public schools MUST be funded, pay teachers, have wide requirements (did you see the list I wrote? it’s long). I forgot that my first piano lessons were in my public school on one of the two pianos it had. Our public school system is so screwed up from what we had before WWII that establishing a good system will take strong leadership and a lot of planning. Why shouldn’t we have an excellent system with well paid teachers? It should be part of recivilizing ourselves.
Paying for a piano for one child while not paying for a piano in a public school is deplorable. The purpose of the voucher system is to help the wealthy keep their children in elite schools at the expense of public schools. I think if a state has a voucher system that is not needs tested, It is complicit in segregation of education for the well to do and no education or under supported education for the working poor. I also think those states school districts ought to tell the radical right that wants to remove the classics from public library and schools to tale a hike.
If a state really wants to produce the smartest and the brightest, they need to ensure all schools are on par with the privates schools otherwise they may miss the one mind that could cure cancer or develop the propulsion to get us to the next planets in a blink of an eye.
We all know that not all privileged white students have the mental capacity to be a brilliant leader or scientist or lawyer as demonstrated by our current administration.
The vouchers in Texas don't cover the full tuition of most private schools. So the people who can use them are the people who can make up the difference. And who have kids the private schools will accept for admission.
As we all know…vouchers and “private schools” are just another way to push a “separate and never equal “ education on children. No allowance for people not in the cities. Sure, there are a few “private schools” that do a good job, but I will bet you will find most of them push their dogma more than they educate.
School should be about learning and LISTENING to differing ideas, being able to discus new things with people of different backgrounds, not to reinforce the prejudices that you are surrounded by.
You would surely have to agree that yours is hardly a typical example of the way voucher systems have been used. You live in what is already the most unequal society in the developed world (and possibly the entire world) and a voucher system for education is just going to make it worse.
He’s talking about other countries. For example in Canada, private schools aren’t that common. Most people use public schools, which are perfectly good.
My junior high school chorus class also did “The Mikado,” a wonderful experience, which is something that relatively few public school students still have the option to participate in.
I wish we could support strong public schools, along with alternative schools, home schooling, parochial, and other private schools, however, we cannot, at least at this time. We simply MUST have high quality, public schools!
Janice, I could not scroll past your comment without comment, because your second sentence made my blood boil for an instant.
As civilly as I can, I will insist that we absolutely do not need "alternative schools, home schooling, parochial, and other private schools."
Every one of those schooling modes denies students the ONE THING that would save our society from being torn to shreds: INTERACTING WITH OTHER STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT LIKE THEMSELVES.
Only public schools provide that benefit, and it means everything to a healthy society.
That is really quite simple. NO public tax money for private schools. Private schools are fine but they should never receive public funds. The lack of accountability of private schools does not build a nation.
There’s something wonderfully subversive about your parents taking a program created as part of resistance to integration and using it to send you to an integrated school. That history matters when we talk about what vouchers have become today.
It’s clearly NOT good for a wide swath of the country and therefore, not good for the WHOLE country.
I continue to be amazed out how sheepish some American white men are at the thought of having to compete on level ground with other Americans of color for their place in commerce and society.
You describe a beautiful childhood, well-loved, as each child should be.
Each child deserves nurture and love, and your integrated school sounds beautiful.
And the link to Cab Callaway. A touch of heaven.
Speaking of heaven, the 1943 film, Cabin in the Sky, with Jazz Greats, ah, that is a musical I listen to many times, with my screen-crush on Lena Horne!
I am so thankful for each and every person God has made and for the opportunity to share in their life and culture, creativity and personhood as each of us may choose...(whether they have a "belief or not...better to be honest than lie).
We are not a perfect people. Unfortunately we need police to guard and protect us and keep us personally on the "straight and narrow". Many of us would like to argue that rules are NOT made for us but for "others" forgetting that we are vulnerable to "stretching the truth" or driving too fast or judging.
"It's Come To This", I too had friends of color whom I loved and greatly respected as well as friends of various religions or no religion throughout my life and so it continues. I am so grateful for each one. Those friends gave me a deeper understanding of life and the world and possibilities I could not have understood without enjoying the experience of their friendship.
One aspect of this history that has always fascinated me is just how long much of the South was able to delay actually carrying out Brown v. Board of Education.
I grew up in Huntsville because my father worked for NASA, and I went through grades 1–12 there. I was in Catholic school, which complicates my own memory: we had Black children in school from first grade. But I remember public-school friends talking about schools that were still segregated, or only beginning the most token sort of integration, years after Brown. Huntsville did admit four Black students to previously white public schools in 1963—the first public-school desegregation in Alabama—and 31 Black children were attending white or predominantly white Huntsville schools the following year. So my childhood memory of the precise dates was imperfect. But the larger memory of how little Brown had initially changed ordinary public schooling was not. (City of Huntsville)
What astonishes me in retrospect is the length of the delay. Brown was decided in 1954. Yet the Supreme Court itself later recounted that the DeKalb County, Georgia, school system took no positive action toward desegregation until the 1966–67 school year, when it finally adopted a “freedom of choice” transfer plan that had little practical effect on the formerly Black schools. Twelve years after the Supreme Court had declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, a major school system essentially had not implemented the decision. The Court called DeKalb’s response “an all too familiar one.” (Legal Information Institute)
Part of the problem, of course, was the remedy the Court itself chose. Brown II in 1955 ordered desegregation not immediately, but “with all deliberate speed.” The Court was trying to accommodate the enormous practical difficulties of dismantling a dual school system. But Southern officials discovered that “deliberate” could be made to do considerably more work than “speed.” The result was years of freedom-of-choice plans, pupil-assignment schemes, litigation and other devices that produced nominal compliance while preserving segregation in practice.
Eventually the Court recognized what had happened. By 1968, in Green, it was no longer enough for a school district merely to remove the formal rule assigning children by race. Districts had an affirmative obligation to produce a genuinely nonsegregated school system. And by 1969, fifteen years after Brown, Justice Black was still writing about Mississippi schools that remained all-white or all-Black and explicitly attributed much of the delay to the “all deliberate speed” formula. (Legal Information Institute)
I find all this particularly striking now because most of my adult life has been lived with the assumption that when the Supreme Court finally decides a constitutional question, governments obey it. They may denounce the decision, try to distinguish it, pass a new law testing its limits, or seek to have it overturned. But simply delaying its practical implementation for ten or fifteen years seems almost unimaginable.
Yet it happened within living memory.
And Brown is a useful reminder that a Supreme Court opinion and the execution of that opinion are two different things. The Court could declare segregation unconstitutional in 1954. It took federal judges, additional Supreme Court decisions, the Civil Rights Act, federal funding leverage and, ultimately, the willingness of the executive branch to enforce federal law to turn that declaration into reality.
Perhaps the most unsettling lesson is that the authority of the Supreme Court depends on more than nine justices issuing an opinion. It also depends on a political and institutional culture in which presidents, governors, legislatures and government officials accept that a final judicial decision must actually be carried out—even when they profoundly dislike it.
For most of the intervening decades, that norm has seemed so ordinary that it was easy to mistake it for something automatic. The history after Brown suggests it wasn’t automatic at all.
All well and good.. you got. In our country, nation, a supposed liberal democracy, inclusive, education is key..above all else that follows including voting rights. Maybe you were not damaged but the repercussions of taking funds away from the public schools were ( as HCR says) felt on others and the public school system. This is another way to foment white supremacy because education IS key- ACCESS to education when children were poor ( having to, or sent to labor), even without parenting, or proper parenting is felt even today. This method amongst others of making and treating some people better than others helps to get us in this situation where we want people to vote- to know what they are voting for, what the law is. My first grade class was not anything like yours. I do remember the pledge of allegiance and learning how to write and read. I continued through to college- free of tuition in NYC in the 60's. My public education was high quality too and not segregated at all though it was still very tough for blacks to come out from under their poverty. They needed help and encouragement.
On a cruise right now & sat with two folks from AZ at dinner last night. Discussed vouchers. They said their grandchild was deemed ineligible (grade wise) for a Catholic high school bc of grades. In public school had been getting A’s. (And several family members were alums of the school.) So other grandchildren were moved to Catholic grade schools to prepare them for high school.
They said public schools were paying the price for years of vouchers. No surprise.
Public education has never been only about schools. It is about who gets access to knowledge, who gets the opportunity to participate fully in society, and whether that opportunity belongs to everyone.
Here in Arizona, the voucher debate has become something even larger. Voters tried to put accountability for a billion-dollar program on the ballot, and now they won’t even get to decide.
A democracy depends on an educated public. It also depends on the public having a voice. Arizona should be paying attention to the loss of both.
If we ever get control back, one of the reforms I would love to see is the elimination across the board (the entire country) of the use of public funds to fund ANY private schools, whether secular or religious, rich or poor. If you want to set up a private educational system, fine, no problem, but don't expect ANY tax dollars to support it in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM. Public funds should be used to support public enterprises, not private ones.
I agree, Jon. Public funds should support public education. But if there’s no way around that, and we’re going to use public money for private education, then public accountability has to follow every single dollar. Transparency and oversight shouldn’t disappear simply because the money crosses the threshold of a private school.
I'd rather not get into that bucket of worms. For me, the answer is to simply stop permitting public money to be used to fund private businesses, including schools and munitions manufacturers and car companies.
I’m actually completely with you, Jon. No public money should go to private schools. Period. My point about accountability was the fallback because that’s the fight we’re stuck in here in Arizona right now. We can’t get rid of the voucher program, and now voters won’t even get to decide what accountability should follow the public money being spent. That’s what infuriates me. But on the larger principle, yes — public funds belong in public education.
I essentially agree with both of you. And I agree, Kelli, that accountability has to follow every public dollar, because grifters gonna grift, every chance they get.
This should be automatic, just like every right comes with responsibilities.
Recently, I noticed that Success Academy, a charter school system in NYC was advertising for minority students on a city bus as a public school. Yes, it gets vouchers of public money, but it is independent and not bound by many requirements of public schools. Margaret Hoover, William F. Buckley's successor, just interviewed Success's head Eva Moskowitz, on her program. No pushback there. Meanwhile, one of the city's most competitive special public high schools, admitted only four Black students based on tests for which many spend big bucks in test prep. If this happens in one of the nation's most liberal cities, I think we might agree that racial integration is a persistent challenge all these years later.
I guess I could imagine a scenario where money went to some private institutions but ONLY under rules that said they had to report and act just like public schools. Otherwise, they can do all sorts of harm that should be prevented.
What school or district doesn't pay their teachers the minimum wage? I sincerely doubt that actually happens in the United States, first because it is highly illegal and relatively easy to uncover, second because the minimum wage in most states is so low anyway, that its hard to imagine anyone with a teaching degree who would want to or need to work for a sub-minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage is still $7.75/hour (which is ridiculous even in Mississippi!) but even in states like California where in some locations the minimum can be $20/hour, you'd be hard pressed to find any school that doesn't pay their teachers at least $40,000 a year which is essentially the minimum.
If private schools didn't get some public funds, Jon, (for limited purposes), then they would be funded by families wealthy enough to pay for them. Children of poorer families would be excluded. Unless those wealthy parents and donors established scholarships, but then they could put all sorts of conditions on these.
I could not care less. If private schools feel children of poorer families are important to their schools, they will do what they want/need to do. What I want is the society to ONLY fund people who believe in the values of the society which should NOT include segregation and isolation and red-lining and other such crap. The public system is failing because we are taking money out of the public system and using it to fund private schools. Its not the only problem, but it is big part of it.
If we simply stopped permitting the funding of ANY private schools (and universities and colleges too) our public money would go a lot farther. Here's an intersting one...
Harvard has an endowment of $56 BILLION dollars. Not Million, BILLION. And yet they get almost $750 MILLION dollars each year in government grants. That money should be going to the public colleges and universities, not to Harvard which could fund that by just using their own endowment. Its a crime that we shouldn't tolerate anymore, stealing money from the public poor to give to the rich and wealthy.
Lincoln already said it, as Heather wrote: “An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” “ So what was (and is) the solution of the new billionaire kings? Destroy education and dumb the people down. And social media is a blessing for that project. What I don’t understand is why Heather doesn’t mention the Powell Memorandum; that says it all, being the precursor to Project 2025…
The Powell Memorandum is absolutely part of that history. What followed is just as important: the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership in 1981, the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982, and decades spent building the think tanks, legal networks, donor networks and media infrastructure capable of turning ideology into governing power. Project 2025 didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew from an institutional project built over generations.
since Roe v Wade in '74 the rw evangelicals have been methodically, patiently plotting their take over. They have infiltrated many institutions and were part of the J6 insurrection. They are actively promoting no separation of church and state. This is your big fight America.
I wrote about this here in Arizona a couple days ago. The voucher fight led me to a larger question: who controls what the people are actually allowed to vote on? Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans asked for this question to be put before the voters. Now we won’t get to decide.
The value of public education that is too often overlooked is the social education gained by living and working beside students from all sectors of society. The privileged kids who come out of private , particularly religious, schools are rubber stamps ( if that school has been successful in its mission) who are unequipped to live and work in the real world where they are required to accommodate other points of view. This movement has been the cause of the division that we are troubled with currently.
Yes, at or near Blackberry Farm, that resort hotel in Walland. My son-in-law is in a band. They were hired to play at an event at the resort during trump#1. He saw her there with her husband at some R retreat.
As a former teacher, I remember the visceral attacks on public schools after the release of A NATION AT RISK. That published report became a widely distributed book; I still have a copy. However, in the introduction, the authors never revealed this:
But what I [reporter] learned in talking to two of the original authors of "A Nation At Risk" was that they never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation's schools. They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.
On the other hand, though I was still teaching, I NEVER EVER heard of the subsequent report from 1991. A year later, the Bush Sr. administration was still suppressing its release. Why? Because it contradicted the myth that public schools were failing.
I'm a bit different today -- very angry, beyond history.
I'm angry that John Roberts cannot read the Constitution.
It expressly reserves to Congress the approval and funding of public projects.
But we know John Roberts’ contempt for the Constitution when he and his fellow monarchists disdained its Article 14, Section Three, which expressly forbids any public office to anyone involved in any insurrection such as criminal Donald’s having organized for his private army of thugs January 6, 2021.
But let’s ask why anyone would become monarchist as have the six on the high court who so love the rich – the fellow corrupt who abet criminal Donald.
It’s language. Anyone who has sought English fit to others – fit to life – will eagerly use active verbs, those truest to the details, nuances, living complications, and subtleties of others, including sensitivity to their hurts.
They’ll thrill to and quote those who model these arts, in the novel, memoir, histories, biographies, and essays. Those indifferent to others will contrarily show that regarding all whom the John Roberts court has disdained, from the devastation U.S. elites have wrecked on our millions of job-offshored working classes to the tens of millions of women who lost medical choices on their own bodies, from blacks who lost voting rights act protections to immigrants voided their Temporary Protective Status legality.
The rest of us will show lack of human vitality by language empty of human specificity, anesthetized by the labeling, adjectives, groupings, and abstractions in all do-nothing conjugative verbs: “This is this”; “That is that.”
Of course the rich and their enablers recoil from arts for seeing others – show instead the madness of the Long Dong Clarence six who immunize criminal Donald and all his murders, rapes, extortions, thefts, and vanities.
'Disabling nine substations simultaneously might be beyond the reach of a domestic terror group, but it is well within the capabilities of a state actor. For years, intelligence analysts have warned that the grid represents an inviting “attack surface” for adversaries including China, North Korea, Russia and Iran. Already, China has been caught installing a software backdoor in a large power transformer being shipped to a federal utility in Colorado. The Pentagon has warned that the Chinese could target critical infrastructure specifically to “undermine the will of the U.S. public.”'
'Durkovich worries that our enemies will feel newly emboldened to consider substations a valid target. “The United States is actually normalizing attacking critical infrastructure within Venezuela and Iran,” she said. Just this month, Iran was linked to recent sabotage of water systems in several states. The grid could be an even bigger prize for the right adversary: Without an army or a fleet of bombers or a nuke, you could cripple the United States for years.'
And yet the biggest news stories focus on the weird details of Natalie Harp's letters rather than the myriad threats facing the nation.
Our allies are turning away from us not just because of Trump, but because of our seeming inability to quit the clickbait habit and engage in serious discussions about our country's priorities.
Exactly. The problem goes way beyond Trump. And it even goes beyond the fact that the GOP has become an ideologically neofascist party (which is bad enough already).
The problem is also that the left has undermined itself, and for decades already. Center-left media no longer do their homework. Yes, they're still good at doing in-depth investigations (most of the time), but the daily reporting and major headlines are no longer based on ethical values (what citizens should think about first, in a democracy) but on clickbait.
This allowed Trump to achieve name recognition much faster than Kamala Harris. It had nothing to do with the DNC or Harris herself, and everything with the demise of the legacy media.
Even 60 Minutes is part of the problem. The interview it did with Harris was ridiculous. It was extremely superficial, with questions no longer fabricated by the journalist himself, after a thorough study of the facts, but just taken from the internet and... tweets by Trump.
In this way, a presidential candidate cannot possibly have a serious conversation with the nation.
I have to agree with this assessment. As you examine the assault on the VRA, what was being done to counter the systemic chipping away? So much damage had already been done by the time the Democrats proposed the John Lewis bill, it was never going to pass as the repubs had managed to screw over the voting just enough to be able to filibuster the bill with the help of 2 democrats (Manchin and Sinemina). The systemic attack on all fronts of the administrative state has been carefully orchestrated through the Koch organization. They built a data collection machine that has now been reproduced and expanded by the likes Palantir.
The billionaire class are not working peoples friends.
I once wrote a letter to President Biden advising him to begin having Fireside like chats with the nation on TV and/or online. For some strange unknown reason, he didn’t take my advice.
The reason is obvious: he has a speech impairment. His most impressive skill is that of a lawmaker and dealmaker. That's what made him achieve so much, compared to other US presidents.
But if the media refuse to report on it and "we the people" spend our time on social media instead, we WILL get the "government we deserve", as is always the case in a democracy (namely: neofascism).
We need differentiate here between the pseudo-left and the Real Left. The former destroyed itself by trying to hide within the post-JFK "Democratic" [sic] Party, which is a very different organization from its New Deal, FDR/JFK predecessor. The latter -- the Real Left -- was already fatally crippled by the Moronic Majority's methodically conditioned, reflexive hatred of socialists and socialism – which is, in effect, support for unrestricted capitalism -- and ultimately therefore endorsement of the capitalists' often secret or maliciously disguised but nevertheless omnipresent yearning for the Trumpstein-caliber omnipotence granted them by Nazism.
The entire GOP elite AGREES with Putin, ideologically. They've visited Alexander Dugin, Putin's palace ideology. They've concocted Project 2025 together with Hungarian neofascist leader Orban's Danube Institute, designed to help democracies transition to neofascism.
Putin doesn't need Natalie. He has Thiel, Vance, the Heritage Foundation, Musk, Johnson, Andreessen, and so many others actively siding with him.
Many actors, Loren, state and non-state, have legitimate grievances at U.S. criminality.
Add to this how criminal Donald and his sycophants in all key parts of the government have been stripping personnel -- often entire protective agencies -- making things easier for plots which Putin, Xi, the mullahs, Kim, and various sheiks may collude to carry out.
Meanwhile, the U.S.'s ostensible "adults" just prioritize more, more, more of their boy, criminal Donald's, vanity.
Loren, it's not the actors from other states we need to worry about. It's those of our own state. Apropos of that, see "Trump’s Plans to Steal the Elections Underway," Ralph Nader, August 21, 2026, info@nader.com.
Thanks for leaving to reference to Nader's webpage. I will check it out. For readers in red states, you may want to check out how Trump cheated there in 2024 on the VIGILANTES INC video at gregpalast.com .
That's nonsense, Bill; the murderers of Al Gore Jr.'s presidency were the then-closeted ChristoNazis who transformed SCOTUS to the Robbers' Court.
(Suggested acronym for the Robbers' Court: SCROTUS, Supreme Court Robbers of the United States, i.e., that which has all by our crotches and is dragging us to death.)
Mr. Katz: I suggest you read more carefully; I said nothing whatsoever of whom appointed Roberts. My statement -- intended to be humorous -- could surely have been phrased better, but it is in fact accurate: the Justices who appointed Bush II president, including Chief Justice Rehnquist, are indeed the justices who enabled and began the [lifetime] ChristoNazi conquest of SCOTUS and thus its eternal transformation to the infamy of SCROTUS.
Again you are wrong. Ralph Nader destroyed Mr Gore’s chances when he took I believe if memory serves me, 90,000 votes on the Green Party. And I just now had to address this with Mr. Nader since he is also a writer on Substack. Folks don’t like being reminded of their mistakes, do they.
See above. (Understand I don't spend all my time on Substack; I have other obligations -- a number of them, in fact. ) Nevertheless, , Mr. Katz, I thank you for revealing your antagonism; I will keep that foremost in my mind if it's ever necessary to interact with you again in the future.
And the Regime's response? Undoubtedly they would nuke Iran. (Remember the missile silos have their own independent electrical-generation systems, as do all USian military installations. Thus any civilian outage would not have an immediate impact on the Regime's military capabilities.
Indeed it does, Phil -- many times intensified by the longstanding USian policy of "better dead than red" -- that is, of doing what Hitler said he'd do had he the capability, destroying the world with nukes and other forms of CBR warfare rather than surrender.
I read that a couple days ago Loren and passed it around, it was one of the most sobering things I have read in years. I remember well the attack on the transformers near silicone valley. If the grid fails we go dark, and not just for an inconvenient few hours or a day or two, like we might get with an ice storm, but for potentially years and not just in this location or that one, but the whole nation. Our world is supported by electricity, without it everything stops, and we go back to a 1820’s economy with better roads but no way to really use them.
Dick...I saw the story when it broke and set it aside because I know the vulnerabilities of our electronic infrastructure and knew I'd be absolutely horrified when I read it. (During my years in deeply rural Western Washington, I experienced winter-storm-inflicted power-outages that lasted up to four weeks. But there I had wood heat, propane cooking, Coleman lanterns for light, two very large dogs for spiritual companionship and guidance, a trout stream literally in my back yard and all the tools and skills required to feed myself from the local woods and waters, so I was not unhoused and forced to live in school gymnasiums as the local all-electric town-dwellers were. Nor was I troubled by shortages. I'd spent most of my boyhood summers in a place that had neither telephones nor electricity nor indoor toilets, and I was thus considerably more adept at primitive living than the average 20th Century USian. Also I was a very successful subsistence vegetable gardener. But in the horror portrayed by NYT, we'd be back to horses and muzzle-loaders before the lights came back on...if indeed they ever did.)
Good question -- especially since [all] USian intelligence agencies have been irreparably ChristoNazified into Trumpstein falsehood mongers.
Thus, based on two assumptions -- (1), that British MI-6 is our potential Liberators' most skilled and reliable foreign intelligence service (though I'd love to hear from the Canadians, the Germans, the French, the South Koreans and the Japanese as well); and (2), that British journalists can still expand their perspectives with access to classified background briefings -- I offer the following. It doesn't really answer your question, Mr. Current, but it does thoroughly discuss most of the indications.
The one indication missing from that particular BBC analysis is the possibility the attacks were by the ChristoNazis or their MAGAT supporters. This is suggested (but most assuredly [not] proven) by two hypotheses: firstly, that the 2013 California transformer attacks were proto-ChristoNazi terrorism, as suspected by the pre-Trumpite [and therefore presumably credible] authorities; secondly, that Trump's obscene attempt to blame Minnesota -- see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgwe2qpgq1o -- utilizes the traditional USian methodology for affixing "plausible deniability" to the innumerable false-flag operations by which the USian ruling class relentlessly imposes its Evil will.
(Would deeply appreciate analysis from Georgia Fisnick on this question.)
And yesterday Roberts stayed the stay on the building of the stupid ballroom -- allowing it to proceed until the Court could give the matter greater review. This is bollocks. This case had already been before 2 courts -- the facts are the facts - and Roberts unilateral decision (which he apparently could make because he is the Justice for the circuit) allows this 24/7 construction to go forward. If it's all already built, will they make him tear it down? Do pigs fly?
The facts are the facts, but the ruling was wrong. That has happened often before. Both courts were wrong and I expect Roberts plans to make sure that comes out when the SCOTUS rules.
The National Historic Preservation board which was set up in PL 89-665 (look it up, its easy to find) in Section 107 CLEARLY STATES:
"SEC. 107. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to be applicable to the White House and its grounds, the Supreme Court building and its grounds, or the United States Capitol and its related buildings and grounds."
Pretty clear, isn't it? The law doesn't cover the three main branches of government buildings. I don't know why people can't simply read laws and understand them when they are ABSOLUTELY CLEAR AS THE PAGES THEY ARE WRITTEN ON!
I think the reasoning for this exclusion is probably pretty interesting but I have to speculate. It would be weird to let any part of the government have some kind of veto power over the main buildings of any other part of the government, at least the "big three". That could be construed as a violation of the separation of powers. So each branch of government has sole control over its own "headquarters" building.
I am pretty certain the Supreme Court will overturn the Appeals Court, and even if you dislike Trump (I certainly DO), you can't argue when he actually does something according to the law (since he violates it so often, everyone here seems to think he ALWAYS does). In this case, I don't think so.
My husband (historic preservation degree from Columbia Univ.) tells me that you are right, Jon, but that there is still a problem with the ballroom because of its imposing size. It overwhelms the White House and the neighborhood and for that reason needs to be scrutinized not simply allowed to go on being built. This is a fine point, I think, that has to do with the integrity of the aesthetics imbued in the design. The key thing, however, is that Congress hasn't appropriated any money for this big project.
Seriously, I looked at current appropriations and apparently there has always been the power of the President to move certain monies around, and they have moved around quite a bit of funding from various other budgets (Secret Service, White House Military office, etc) to cover the initial costs of the East Wing "renovation" which is a legal transfer of funding. Of course, that leaves other departments short this fiscal year, but Trump doesn't seem to care about that and it is apparently within his legal power to do that.
It has been done by other Presidents as well, just not to the level Trump is attempting. But if it is LEGAL to do it, then the question of HOW MUCH probably isn't something that would alter the legality. And in the upcoming budget proposals, he has requested an additional $400 million for White House expenses, presumably to complete the renovation. That money has not yet been allocated by Congress but must be by October 1, start of the 2027 fiscal year (or theoretically the government could shut down again).
Of course for FY 27, Congress could refuse to allocate that much, but remember, funding bills can't be filibustered and Congress is currently in the hands of the GOP, so I expect Trump will get the money he wants.
SO the "norms" have been violated, not the law? That would be the old republican typical response when the violate and ethical position "Nothing illegal about this".
I do NOT understand your comment. Is it a question? Where did I say that "norms" were violated (or not)? Please make your comment understandable. What I said is that the renovation or rebuilding of the East Wing is up to the president by the virtue of the LAW of PL 89-665. Did I even use the word "norms" (or imply it?).
Okay this morning after the fog of late last night cleared from my brain, I understood your comment Rickey! And yes, that is essentially the truth, the law is very specific that there is no power of Congress to override the President's right to do what he wants with the building other than the power of providing the money, but he also has the power to move allocated money around and he is doing that, "borrowing" money from the Secret Service and the White House Military office to pay for the "renovation". You can hate it (I certainly do and probably it should be changed) but that is the way the law reads today.
As all other POTUS cleared many of things done through a process. That is the norm I was referring which have been trampled over by this administration.
Agreed, but norms do NOT necessarily mean that they MUST be followed. If so, someone could point out that the "norms" of the 50s made segregated schools "the way it was". As a result, those norms were followed until new laws were passed to change things. That was idiocy, we shouldn't have needed to pass new laws to require states to integrate.
Let’s not ever forget that Long Dong had the red carpet unrolled by Joe Biden. Back to education. It’s beyond my pay grade to understand the nuances, but when I was in Catholic grade school, St Joseph’s Cathedral School, the nuns, Sisters of merciless Mercy, told us we were two grades ahead of the public school. But when they kicked me out in 7th grade for refusing to cut my hair as we approached in 1967, the Summer of Love, I registered in the fall at the local public school and found that public schools were not two grades behind, but maybe 3 or 4 grades behind. Since I still refused to cut my hair, ( I was in full revolt of everything and of course still am), they put me in a non English speaking class and held me back. I didn’t mind that much because the class was filled with prettier girls and that was more fricken important than getting an education.
I trust you are laughing because today I fancy myself a comic. A real dirty one at that. And my mommies speaka another language; MEOW. My forthcoming book titled, “Katz on Cats and Other Animal Tails.” (Billkatz@substack.com)
Bill...Though I am most assuredly neither Jew, Christian or Muslim, my parochial-school experience was notably similar to yours -- but c. 1950-1954, grades 5 though 8 at Knoxville's Holy Ghost School, the Sisters of Mercy, many from Ireland, were genuinely merciful. When my father's post-purge job-quest moved us to Tennessee in the summer of 1950, he took a hard look at the local public schools and -- himself boarding-school educated -- concluded they were so wretched that "under no circumstances" -- yes, in those exact and memorable words -- would I ever be enrolled therein. Hence my enrollment at Holy Ghost.
But once I reached high school, it was my decision whether to attend Knoxville Catholic High School or Knox County Central High School. Assuming the public school girls would be easier, I chose Knox Central -- and, like you, discovered the public school was maybe three or four grades behind.
(Though my education at Holy Ghost enabled me to graduate from high school with only occasional glances at textbooks, I nevertheless profoundly regret my decision to follow my phallus into an accursed southron-public-school realm of omnipotent, run-amok Ku Klux Konsciousness; violent hatred of "yankees"; and school-encouraged assaults -- often by members of the athletic teams -- against anyone who dared exhibit the slightest non-conformities. And the reason for my regret is not the suffering I inflicted on myself; it's the fact that in my adolescent lust I squandered an opportunity for a genuinely superior high-school education. Though the experience did give me useful lessons in brawling.)
Note: though I dunno about parochial schools today, now that USian Christianity has restored its function as the nation's primary source of hateful bigotry, but in my day it was a matter of policy that we "non-Catholics" were [never] harassed to convert. Indeed, the Catholics were infinitely more tolerant than the public-school Protestants, who routinely forced the entire Central High School student body to attend "student revivals" held illegally in the school auditorium.
Loren, reading about your school experience is intriguing and quite a confession. Truthfulness in hindsight is wisdom’s gift. You have obviously made up for what you’ve related as academically inferior in high school. I do recall a trip I made as a young adult to Georgia. It was the first time I experienced southern prejudice against myself as a white female northerner.
Gloria...The compensation for wretched Southron schools was my late father's library, which filled a 22-foot wall floor-to-10-foot-ceiling and spilled over into seven moveable four-shelf hardwood book-cases, three of them glass-fronted antiques. The son of British/Canadian parents, he had intended to major in history at Montreal's McGill University, probably to the teaching/PhD level, maybe with a commission in the British Army, but that ended with the Crash of '29, which utterly and irreparably destroyed my family's wealth. Nevertheless my father remained a scholar all his life, better read and more knowledgeable in history and economics than anyone else I've ever known, professors included, and his lifelong-student compulsions obviously rubbed off on me.
Apropos Canada, by act of parliament I am now technically a Canadian citizen, granted that enormous honor by my paternal grandparents, and were I not terminally ill, I'd be working overtime to raise the obscene sum -- as much as $10,000 -- that ever-greedy USian lawyers charge to do the required document search. I need the original birth certificates of my father (Massachusetts, 1910), my grandfather (New Brunswick, 1862) and my grandmother (Nova Scotia, 1888). If I thought it might be possible to raise the money, I'd attempt it, but this is, after all, the realm transformed by majority vote into the ChristoNazis' Unified Reich -- a realm wherein anyone with my politics is already on a government death list -- so I figure any fund-raising effort is doomed.
Glad you got out of the South alive. Too many didn't.
Thank goodness my mother who didn’t graduate from high school was an avid reader and passed that on to me. If I hadn’t purchase and then given away so many books in my lifetime I would have the cash to put towards that $10,000 sum 🤗!!
My books now come exclusively from the public libraries here in this dominantly liberal university corner of Red state Iowa. My daughter makes the trip to the library for me as mobility is limited. Normally she brings 4 nonfiction and 2 novels. Sometimes I think I’m not going to be interested in the nonfiction she brings but more often than not surprise myself. There’s so much left to read and learn and not much time left.
I made public high school in three years because I was so bored. I couldn’t graduate with the class because I flunked Typing, again, where any of the prettier girls were.
I was educated in catholic schools through HS, the last 3 years by Jesuits, who taught me how to think, not what to think. I resisted them with all of my strength but in the end they stood on the high ground. All 4 years of HS were in all boys schools and I hated that, I to this day think it was a mistake, in fact Jesuit HS outside Portland where I studied is now co-ed and appears to be a very nice place to get a good education. I benefited from a private school education that my parents paid for not the state, and that was as it should be, it was not cheap to educate 4 kids while still supporting the public school system through taxes, but that was a choice they made. My kids got their start in private schools and then shifted to public starting in HS, they learned to love learning in those early grades and have both benefited from that experience.
Well, it’s all you Idiots continue to live in ancient history… trump is the best president of your life in todays real world. Trying to enjoy it. It’s actually such a pleasurable ride.
This helps explain why Pissy Pants is so fond of saying how much he loves the uneducated.
Today, in response to a reporter's question about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's decision to intervene in international bond markets, our brilliant, humble president remarked that "yields have gone back up since then." The reporter followed up by asking: "have you talked to Bessent about another type of intervention? Is that something he will be doing?" The response?
"We have many types of intervention. That's one. The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will."
I had to double-check, because I simply didn't believe a President of the United States could actually say something that stupid. But it's true. As Robert Hubbell said, "if Biden had said the same thing, he would have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office before his plane touched down."
At least we know when he says “I want the nuclear option” he’s referring to global thermonuclear destruction, not some fancy senate standing rule. Wouldn’t want to get those mixed up.
The MSM unceasingly repeat Trump calling people "stupid". However, when writing letters to the editor of the papers here in ME or commenting on stories in WAPO, AOL and most other MSM, you cannot use many words that can be construed as "mean spirited." You know, words like hate, cruel, stupid, racists. But they don't hesitate to allow Trump or anyone from his administration to repeat them.
Yours contrasts so vividly, ICTT, with the stance Lincoln remains laureled for.
Heather quoted Lincoln on his views that "workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy."
Yours contrarily notes criminal Donald basically not just indifferent to American workers, but in contempt of their possibilities for a decent life, and in even greater contempt of a government, any government, that would aid in that decency.
Government serves his vanities, and his self-enrichment schemes. End of story. He has no other considerations of any American people other than his fellow U.S. cynical rich allied with the world's worst despots and underage girl and young women sex traffickers.
He's totally out of touch with most everything our best artists have loved and agonized over in America. Just ignore the key parts of the Constitution and rule out most of the great progress Congress and other institutions have made.
Restore monarchy is probably the most polite way to characterize his priorities. If criminals like Donald can further the autocrat project, then let him have his insanely vain ballroom. If Congress didn't fund it, of course Roberts underlines the power of a dictator to ignore Congress, ignore the Constitution, ignore everything except what the U.S.'s enslaving heritage has entailed.
A real journalist would have followed up by asking: so you agree that yields going up is a bad sign, and that Bessent's attempt to manipulate the bond market didn't work?
I knew about Nat Turner and most of these folks. I remember Reagan, Jerry Falwell and the “Faith and Family” and “Moral Majority” campaign movement, the 1980 Republican platform and the Republican “Southern Strategy”. I had a bumper sticker on my car that said “Hate is not a family value.” But I’ve never heard the details of the political aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion or a detailed summary of events post Brown vs Board of Education, the catalyst for the reduction and misappropriation of public school funds to support private schools, including religious schools, most with none of the credentials, standards or performance requirements that public schools have.
Looking at the long lens of interconnected history that you provided, I realized I could actually see how we got to this impossible position we are in today.
You might be interested to see the relationships/"coincidences" that occurred in the Civil Rights Movement. Vernon Johns was the pastor at Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. His niece, Barbara, led the student walkout at her segregated school in Virginia that became one of the plaintiffs in Brown v Board of Education (in fact, due to threats, she moved from Virginia and finished high school in Alabama.) Vernon Johns was succeeded by the young Martin Luther King, Jr. as Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the local bus to a white person, saying her history lesson made her feel like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were holding down her shoulders. After Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and his mother, Mamie held an open casket funeral "so the world could see what they did to my boy" was when Rosa Parks became the figurehead against discrimination and the community organized for over a year to put economic pain to businesses that practiced Jim Crow apartheid.
It's important to know our history, and the unsung individuals who took some action, no matter how small, against injustice. Many of these changes were achieved due to the efforts of Black women.
Candace, apropos of nothing, HCR's and your mention of Jerry Falwell 1.0 reminded me of one of the best days of my life.
In the late 1970s, I lived in Lynchburg, VA, home of Jerry Falwell, who was, aside from his church members, reviled by the rest of the community, mainly because he was constantly trying to get the city officials to declare him a Very Special Boy who didn't have to abide by the ordinances governing the rest of us. But I digress.
One sunny morning, I left my home, which was not far from Falwell's walled compound, for work. As I came to the intersection where I would make a left turn onto a side street, Jerry Falwell, in his big black Suburban, ignored the stop sign and swung wide to make his right turn, screeching to a halt only inches from my front left fender.
He motioned for me to back up so he could complete his overshot turn. I stared him directly in the eye, not moving. He stared back, his face growing visibly red.
After a minute more, he angrily threw his Suburban in reverse and backed up to where he should have stopped in the first place.
I made my left turn and cheerily gave him a middle-finger wave as I passed by.
Just as Neil Postman predicted in his classic 1985 book "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" and Lewis Mumford before him, spectacular and omnipresent entertainment has largely accomplished what the defunding of public education could not — an addicted and stunned populace. I see it wherever I go where virtually everyone is hunched over their phones, and they are not reading Postman or Mumford. AI will complete the job by freeing us of the need to think at all. That, as Gil Duran says, is what it is largely for.
I do wish more sociologists and researchers were documenting both what the design and use of mobile phones is costing us. Perhaps they are, and I'm not aware of it.
Those of us who read first, then were introduced to technology later on, didn't lose the ability to focus, the longer attention spans, the richness of interpersonal relationships the way subsequent generations have. Still, I can feel my own brain being 'googlized' with less patience for longer narratives that never used to bother me before. I look at young people today who literally cannot take their eyes off their little glowing friends, even as they cross busy intersections -- their addiction placing their own lives at risk -- and I wonder what will come of generations after this. I'm sure I can't be alone in wondering.
ICCT, your experience mirrors mine. My personal first attempt to address this is to (again) have a "throw down" book in the truck at all times. (I take several friends to medical appointments and wait for them, and now read instead of being on my phone.)
Gray, I'm a visual artist, but music is what moves me. Thousands of songs have taken up residence in my brain, such that most of my daily activities bring a song to mind. Your comment reminds me of Zager & Evans' "In the Year 2525." The only mistake in the lyrics was giving us thousands of years to become useless. I think we'll manage it in less than 50.
Thanks for your thoughts as well as the music video, Dale. I hadn't seen it. As you say, the song is way too optimistic, but so is your 50 years. How else do you explain a majority of voters so recently choosing a felonious rapist who tried to overthrow the government as president largely because they found him more entertaining than a seasoned but wonky opponent? They appreciated his sadism which entertainment fed them. As we are all finding, however, apocalyptic movies are not so entertaining when you are in the film.
Thank you Heather for connecting the history for us.
We are experiencing the voucher war here in Florida. The “Moms for Liberty” got elected to the school board here in Sarasota about a decade or more ago. Just this past week, we finally voted them OUT. It’s been a huge effort to push back on their book banning, anti-DEI,
voucher pushing, shaming, anti LGBTQ/trans pseudo-religious bigotry. They are all about power and money, privatizing schools and creating division. We’ve just elected a majority of school board members who believe in public education for all,equal opportunity, freedom of ideas. It is so refreshing.
MAGA and its’ very sick leader is going down, by its own shear depravity and cruelty.
The push for private schools is meant to not only insure the possibility to keep white students segregated but it is intended to create a new generation of the population that has been reeducated so to speak in a warped understanding of our nation’s history and founding principles. To to that effectively, the young must be targeted first. Texas has been instrumental in making significant changes to school textbooks as that state has the largest student population and has great influence on what textbooks say. We are seeing the results already with so many being undereducated in American history and how government was set up to function. European students know more about American history and government than American students. It’s the dumbing down of American society that is very scary to me.
I got a very good public school education from 1958 to 1970. However I saw the curriculum change a lot afterwards when my younger sister went through the same schools here in Louisiana. I saw her put her own children in private schools to segregate them from other races. Those kids did not get a decent education in those private schools. They can’t spell, know nothing about American history or government. Those kids are now in their 40s with kids of their own. Our nation’s population is far less educated in things that would allow them to be well informed citizens which is vital for a healthy democracy.
My parents moved us to a neighborhood in Omaha that was outside of the Omaha Public School system. The school district had about 10% of the number of students as OPS and was about 99% white. I never went to school with a person of color from K-12 except for one person from India and one Black girl (Bob Gibson's daughter). The school system was ranked in the top 50 in the US for several years, because "good students make good teachers." (That's a quote I picked up from the son of a math teacher in Maine.)
Oddly, my introduction to people of color was because my high school sociology teacher required us to meet with someone that wasn't a person of color and write a paper on the experience. I was able to arrange a meeting with a man from the Oglala Sioux tribe to "interview" him.
When I arrived at his house there were half a dozen or so adult Sioux men seated in a circle. They welcomed me, an absolute nobody, and we talked for about an hour an a half. A few of them had been part of the siege of the BIA building in Washington, DC. in November, 1972 and we talked about why they took over the building.
I learned more in that 90 minute conversation about how the Native Americans have been screwed over and over again, than in all of the classes.
HCR is the most knowledgeable historian on the plain's Native Americans as you know from reading her book-- Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre.
I began my teaching career in 1957 and Illinois was using Texas textbooks then and the remaining 30 years while I taught additionally in Iowa and Wisconsin.
Sadly Texas radical agenda of rewriting history and science in our schools textbooks has dumbed down the curriculum so that we have adults today and children being raised that are grossly undereducated.
Hey, there is Rhonda is here. Lol. Omg. and Rhonda looks like you haven’t been cured yet. In fact, it looks like the disease is now riddling your entire body. Soon you’ll be a corpse with nothing but hate when they open you up to do that autopsy
MAGA and for that matter regular Republicans generally oppose universal healthcare and free public education for all. They cost money rather than generating it and support people without making them work to earn the favor. Keeping people alive who may not be earning and encouraging people to learn more than they need to know in order to do necessary jobs is not how billionaires want to spend their taxes and how people who support billionaires earn their patronage. On the other hand most Democrats believe a healthy and educated population should be everyone’s goal and worth paying for with public money. RFK Jr believes healthy people don’t get sick so vaccines and food inspections just weaken the general health. Doing away with the Department of Education will let each State decide what their people need to learn. Decades of research and experience show the fallacies that two years of the Trump administration are revealing but they still have two more years to attack healthcare and knowledge. Keep yourself and your representatives informed and vote Blue.
"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty."
- James Madison
The problem is that the education system in this country is badly broken. Private school vouchers are not the answer but I'm not aware of compelling solutions coming from other directions.
There is no national education system. We have thousands of public school districts in the U.S., and most decisions about what’s taught and the educational materials that are used are made at the local and state levels. And funding for public education varies a lot - which is a big part of the problem.
At the risk of devolving into semantics, what you describe is our "national education system." IOW a non-system is still a system.
I am not suggesting greater federal control of education but the patchwork of state and local laws, taxes, school districts and cultures needs to do better. By almost every measure student performance is down and the severity of decline cascades on a kind of "dollar for dollar" basis down the economic ladder. At the moment, Mississippi schools are drawing national praise because more of their 6 and 7 year olds can now read. Better than not being able to read, but the standard is nauseatingly low.
The feds are part of the problem too, however indirectly. The number of malnourished kids attending school is *increasing* on our watch.
One by product of this system or non-system is that being in a "good" school district is ever more important for families, driving up the cost of housing and contributing to the housing crisis which affects young families as much as anybody.
Lots of problems, lots of impacts, lots of lives affected. Not a lot of effective solutions. And we're wasting time and money pouring money into voucher programs which is just one more way the rich get richer.
I agree with everything you said. It should not be the case that some school districts and states have far more resources for education than others. Here in NY, charter schools strip funding away from public schools, and there doesn’t seem to be limit on how many charter schools can be approved in a given district.
Democracy jeff I’ll translate that for you and one word. CHOICE. almost immediately as Trump took away the power of the Department of Education so states could instruct their students in whatever way they wished that would be absolutely more applicable to practical use for students living in that state not only the curriculum. but the means in which it’s taught. A quick example would be the state of Mississippi which ranked 50th in reading comprehension and math. And because it provided more applicable curriculum that the kids would be interested in that they learned so well that recently Mississippi surpass California this year in reading and math and move from 50th to 9th.
Education is a theoretical science pal. Too many educated derelicts here. You got an education and didn’t get the accolades or the financial rewards you thought they were gonna get.. and you are frantically reaching out for any defense mechanism to help you and all your friends get through the reality of their failures
By the way, you’re probably right I should’ve used. They got an education and they didn’t get the accolades and they weren’t gonna be happy with what they received and they are frantically reaching out. Does that sound better to you??
You made a comment which was number one ancient history and unfortunately for you you probably blocked me here anyway the education system in this country has been screwed by Democrats since 1979. There has been no education. There’s only been inculcation from Washington DC from the lakes of randy Wine Gardner and her teachers union which is 95% liberal 98% donates to the Democrat party and back in 1979 we were number one in the world in education 20 years later we were Number 18th and today were Number 40th. Nice job. Kids today no more about their genitalia from the left. Then they know about math and science and in fact, did you see the recent comment by a Berkeley professor he’s having to dumb down his classes to incoming freshman because they don’t even know how to read and solve simple math problems.
Second, it is remarkable how little facts matter to you. You know nothing about me but are happy to pontificate about my level of success or lack thereof. And not just me, you threw in my friends for free!
JEFF, my sincere apologies if I didn’t recognize you by name but I don’t and I don’t remember ever replying to a comment of yours to be honest.
And I don’t do any other social media whatsoever occasionally very occasionally I go over to Twitter when there’s a big event going on but other than that, this is it I don’t do Facebook. I don’t do Instagram. I don’t do Snapchat. I do nothing else.
Never did Facebook in my life
What I recognize, though is that nobody here judges Donald Trump on his presidency not one person here not one they all judge him on his past Which I hate to say it once you’re once your president, your past is irrelevant What’s what’s irrelevant is every policy and law that is passed by your administration that affects every American until it either expires or is overturned, but it still has an impact and effect for a long time in general look at FDR for example
Biden’s term while it only lasted two years, will impact this country for the next decade with the vermin that they let in here with the illegals that they let in here without verification without vetting without giving a shit all they wanted was vote voters and they almost got them In one Local election 800,000 Undocumented immigrants vote voted, and the only thing that stopped that was the Supreme Court of that state that said nope you can’t do that. Otherwise Biden would’ve got his wish and the Democrats will get their wish if they continue to allow anybody to vote.
You see JEFF above us a lady called Lynn Shockey, who comes on here with accusations and insults with not a fact anywhere in sight that’s all it are accusations and insults, unsupported and unnecessary and childlike and what makes it worse then she blocked you from responding because the hell with free speech because she doesn’t wanna hear the response. So she runs in the house and mommy, mommy mommy please wipe my ass
And JEFF, since you’re not familiar with me or my posting, I am the voice of awareness to people here that only have heard half the story only care about half the story and believe that it’s the whole story.
And the new method of communication by a number of would I call cowards here is I’ll just go on that Substack and respond to RICK with some inane meaningless accusation, insulting remarks and then run into the house and ask mommy to wipe my ass because they don’t wanna hear a response
Au contraire, I am very familiar with your posting. I'm crushed that you don't recognize me after all this time. I've been around here since it wasn't even here (facebook).
I’m here and I’m listening, but you have to understand. This has been my experience here for the last two years, listening to people using the word that you just said pontificate about the ancient past. There is more hate in this Substack service that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. Irrational, meaningless, purposeless hate
I’m not pontificating. I’m pointing out facts. The fact is you can’t have socialistic inculcation of our youth and call it education I’ve been here for a couple years now, so don’t take it personally there jeff. You may be a swell guy, but there’s too many people living in the past here if your best friend is Julius Caesar or Socrates, you might as well get a little skiff and go out to see all by yourself. Today’s reality from the educational perspective is gone. So much so that the graduates from college today don’t even wanna work. They would prefer socialism that way everybody can suffer equally. If you have an alternate opinion, feel free to voice it here that’s what this blog is for ostensibly but what it’s turned into is a bunch of liberal, leaning lemmings with their nose up to people’s ass in front of them with nobody disagreeing with anything that Heather says, and they bow and genuflect, even though she doesn’t tell them the the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She tells you what she wants you to know from her liberal activist perspective, using nothing but links from radical liberal sources. And the results speak for themselves.
I wonder if there's a typo here. You say that Texas vouchers are going to families with less than twice the poverty level income. That's a group of families with below median income. Is that correct?
Kathleen, there are two ways to measure "median income." The official U.S. median income is $119, 896, but that is skewed by the super-rich who don’t necessarily go to work every day. The median income for full-time workers is $64,220/year. The current federal poverty level for a family of four is an annual income of $33,000.00, so the median income of working families is, indeed, less that twice the poverty level.
Still, in light of that breakdown, I don't get the significance of the original statement. I suppose it could be argued that families with incomes of $66 thousand need a lot less financial help than families with incomes of half that. But it's still not a relevant datapoint, in my opinion.
I'm 76, and attended Public School in San Francisco in the early 1960s. It was fantastic for us "gifted" kids who were given every modest advantage available then, trips to the opera, special math and science clubs, in which girls like me were welcome, and first rate teachers. My junior high school was the same, and high school, even more so. All public! Classes often had 40 students or more. The only private schools then were Catholic schools. Ah, "radical left" San Francisco! It was great!
I grew up in a white and waspy suburb of Detroit - and also had an excellent education through high school (probably because school finding was based on property taxes). Lots of writing, research, reading the classics, music, languages, theatre, etc. The private schools were either Catholic or super exclusive and for the very rich. Things definitely changed -- years later when my husband would hire a new and young employee -- though smart -- he found the person could not even compose a basic business letter. Due to the complete lack of diversity in my schools it became clear to me that we were still a segregated area. We raised our son in Manhattan - and from the get-go he went to school with people of a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds - so that is what normal is to him.
My best friend also attended public School in San Francisco in the 50's and 60's. He had nothing but good things to say about the schools.
Apropos of nothing, him and his bicycle buddies used to throw rocks off the Golden Gate Bridge at the ships passing under the bridge. One of the Captains called the SFPD and they chased the boys halfway across the bridge. They escaped by going the opposite direction from the police cars. Plus they knew the roads really well.
That was the end of the rock throwing off the bridge.
In bitter truth, the United States government has always been a criminal organization. Just ask the First Nations people. Or the striking coal miners it attacked with field artillery and bombing planes. Or the ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist dead, who still haunt the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, where they died after leaping from windows to escape the fire and falling eight or 10 storeys to splatter on the pavement. Actually just ask the late Renee Good and the late Alex Pretti...
That said, I am now convinced that what we are seeing -- the conduct of the ChristoNazi Regime, the cunningly perfected, always plausibly deniable collaboration of the Democrats and the embrace of tyranny implicit in the refusal of the people to (effectively) resist -- is the true face of the (real) "America."
Thus the Unified Reich -- like the Third Reich that fathered it -- will not be overthrown save by invasion, and that only if the liberators first achieve the scientifically impossible miracle of doing what it is alleged some flights of UFOs have done, paralyzing the USian CBR arsenal so that the Regime cannot destroy the world to avoid defeat, surrender, the long-deserved, zero-tolerance vengeance of partisans and the retributive justice to be meted out by new judicial authorities.
My oldest half-brother, my father's first-born son and one of the founding directors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said before he died that he believed Trump's 2016 victory was literally the beginning of the end of the world. Until the ChristoNazis flexed their judicial omnipotence, I believed there was some hope our species might survive. Now I believe he spoke prophetic truth.
Indeed. By reputation and the esteem held by many of those I worked with.
I started at the very end of the Reagan administration.
I reflected on that as I read the discussion about "vouchers." I worked in Grants Administration, where we paid a lot of attention to oversight. These were, after all, funds appropriated for specified use.
Any recipient who mismanaged or misspent the funds were subject to enforcement action, including repayment of funds.
That's why I was puzzled as to how the recipient of voucher $$ could just use the money as they liked.
I've wondered that many times. How different American would be. Gore would never have invaded Iraq, for one thing and probably not invaded Afghanistan as well.
In September of 1842 a hot tempered Irish-born James Shields challenged a 33 yo Abe to a duel after his sharp-tongued girlfriend Mary amplified Abe's critiques of James' tax policies, and then continued to trash-talk James personally, in series of letters to a local Whig paper. Abe took the blame but was in a difficult position to retract Mary's words - had he so wished.
As their 'seconds' stood-by that fateful Sept 22nd on Sunflower Island, located in the middle of the Mississippi and beyond jurisdiction of local laws against duelling, James and Abe, our future national leadership, stood mano a mano with broadswords under a tree as they sought final satisfaction - or at least to somehow save their 'honor' from humiliation.
As they exchanged what might be their final words, Lincoln more politely than previously, one assumes, reached over and cut away some potentially obstructive branches - well above the reach of the much shorter Shields. The pursuit of satisfaction continued with formal written query and response, and in the end did not come to blows.
Excerpt from the Alton Telegraph, Oct 1, 1842:
"... We recur to this matter with pain and the deepest regret. Both [Shields and Lincoln] are, and have been, for a long time, our personal friends. Both we have ever John Bailhache, Editor of the Alton Telegraph esteemed in all the private relations of life, and consequently regret that what we consider an imperative sense of duty we owe to the public, compels us to recur to the disgraceful and unfortunate occurrence at all.
We, however, consider that these gentlemen have both violated the laws of the country, and insist that neither their influence, their respectability, nor their private worth should save them from being made a menable [sic] to those laws they have violated. Both of them are lawyers - both have been Legislators of this State, and aided in the construction of laws for the protection of society - both exercise on small influence in community - all of which, in our estimation, aggravates instead of mitigating their offense.
>>>Why, therefore, they should be permitted to escape punishment, while a friendless, penniless, and obscure person, for a much less offense, is hurried to the cells of our county jail, forced through a trial, with scarcely the forms of law, and finally immured within the dreary walls of a Penitentiary, we are at a loss to conjecture. It is a partial and disreputable administration of justice, which, though in accordance with the spirit of the age, we must solemnly protest against.
Wealth, influence, and rank can trample upon the laws with impunity; while poverty is scarcely permitted to utter a word in its defense if charged with crime in our miscalled temples of justice. <<<" [emphasis mine]
In 1861 Lincoln asked James Shields to be a Brigadier General in the Union Army.
My son is another James Shields, but there are things in his education that supersede any supposed romance of 'honor' or duel. History is about to rhyme and he's draft age.
If the "multiverse" is real, there are many worlds where (1) John Wiles Booth wasn't born, (2) where he failed, (3) the whole conspiracy succeeded, (4) Andrew Johnson was convicted after impeachment.
Butterfly Effect. Imagine how it would have rippled through all our (and world) subsequent history. I can't help thinking it would have improved things on the whole. I also imagine, if we were born at all, we'd be in a very different world.
Master's Thesis: 1986, "Education Vouchers: The issue of family choice in American Education." College of Urban and.Public Affairs, University of New Orleans. Sadly 😥 40 Years ago I predicted THIS! College's of Education at the time were not even considering vouchers and I studied voucher systems within a College of Public Affairs and "Urban Studies" that ALLOWED the academic freedom to do so! I examined several ECONOMIC Voucher Models with Religion, Racial Segregation and Civil Rights in contrast to urban public school bureaucracies under political attack, "A Nation at Risk" at the time. In "Searching for SocIal Justice" published 2014, I concluded that resistance to the "privatization" efforts by right wing politicians was typically "silenced." Now there are outright efforts to ERASE History.
When I was a little kid, the State of Virginia was busy passing those private voucher laws as part of its resistance to the 1954 Brown decision. It gave families grants for withdrawing their kids from public schools to help them financially attend segregated, private schools instead.
My snarky, brave, liberal parents used that grant to send me to Virginia's first integrated private school, founded in 1949 in Alexandria. My first-grade teacher was Miss Camay Brooks, Cab Calloway's youngest daughter, whom we simply called "Camay." Back in 1962, our class was about one-third black. We memorized the names of all the Gemini astronauts, went down to the barns to watch baby animals being born in the spring, and helped the 8th graders stage "The Mikado." And took naps in the afternoon on little rugs after milk and cookies.
I don't remember being emotionally damaged for life as a result of it all.
“…let the punishment fit the crime!” - the Mikado by G & S.
Just too bad that America cannot even reach the level of Justice that existed in 🎶Tittipoo, Japan!🎶
Yes…education is a powerful thing, and the paranoid, selfish slave owners were well aware that educated slaves could advance themselves, having - despite Trumpian theory - as fine minds as anyone! (See the documentary re the Black WOMEN engineers who worked on the Apollo Missions). 🤯
The only hope to REPAIR the fiscal, geographic, societal, and humanitarian damages done by the present REGIME will be a properly designed Education System, that will BEGIN by restoring accurate HISTORY to the curriculum, to thwart the racist, bigoted and salacious falsehoods Trump is forcing into the school programs.
The Evil Weeds are sown now…and must be rooted out.
BTW one of Donald Trump’s early teachers testified that he was the ‘worst student she ever had’! Yet, each grade’s teachers passed him under threat from his parents. That ‘crime’ is ravaging America today and deserves a fitting punishment.
VOTE!
Hidden Figures, the book, by Margot Lee Shetterly: The biographical text follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. who worked at NASA.
Pete Hegseth would choke on his beer if he read about those women. No self-respecting female should vote for ANY of Trump’s Regime. Time for another ‘Pussy March’. 😼😾😼
Oh honey, baby, snookums cakes...it is time for a righteous Pussy Riot!
Blushing!
Let’s go all the way and make it a ‘riotous PARADE’, with someone representing ‘LYSISTRATA’ as the Parade Grand Marshall.
Time to remind American women of the savvy Greek who ‘stopped a war’ by convincing her ‘sisters’ to withhold ‘sexual favours’…and the men ‘caved’ and stayed home…(led by WHAT! You say?)😁
Trump would have a ‘royal fitt’, but WHO CARES…that WAR is as ‘ILLEGAL’ as the ‘games’ on Epstein’s Island were…you know…the ones Donald and Melania didn’t engage in because they were ‘never there’ 🤔…
Hmmm…no nookie as a ‘super power’…I think we’ve discovered Trump’s Achille’s bone spur!!
😂
EVERY man's Achille's bone spur! Men KNOW who holds the power and that is exactly why they work so hard to subjugate us.
Well Jean, I'm guessing (and you are hoping) your reference to Aristophanes' play will somehow convince the men who'll be getting the cold shoulder in bed (does the bedside aspirin bottle still work?) to somehow do what? Stop a war (it didn't work for the Greeks in real time); get their knuckle-dragging spouses to vote out the Rs in the House and Senate; get billionaires to stop buying elections; start treating women and Black Americans with civility and respect.
If only this could work outside the theater!
We all know what the host unenlightened males would say anytime about a woman stood up for herself or disagreed with some nonsensical drool coming at her from a spouse, or a co-worker..."she must be on the.. "
What is Hegseth's excuse or trump's or the other brain and soul-dead members of this administration?
Not getting any? I doubt that would get them to change. A frontal lobotomies are the only solution--and keep the cuckoos on exhibit at the National Zoo as a warning to the overly testosteroned boors.
I really enjoy reading the Greek classics!
Jean, LOL.
I still have my pink hat.
Me too!
No more euphemisms. ('No Kings' or pussy hats) We must adamantly rally for impeachment and removal now.
You are correct, of course, but ‘impeachment’ has not succeeded - TWICE BEFORE - and Trump has an even firmer grip on SCOTUS and his ‘Gumby’ A.G., so the annals of Parliamentary History must be searched to find a codasill, or tenet, or ironclad rule that will deny Trump the ‘carte BLANCHE’ he is claiming (NPI).
As it is, he defied the Constitution to even run in the 2024 election > as a ‘convicted felon’ < and Congress was over-confident about Harris plus pretty näive about the ‘support’ American men would give a WOMAN.
You are also correct about “NOW”, because his treachery grows with each crime he gets away with, and each coercion of SCOTUS and manipulation of the DOJ.
BOLD…BONKERS…BARBAROUS…with nothing to lose at this point in time.
Somewhere there is a ‘law’ that can rein him in, but now he has the Attorney General in one pocket and 6 Justices in the other. 😖
BTW MAGAs have their red hats, that M.ake A. G.irl A.ngry…so if Barb wants to ‘wear HER colours’…👍
However, this time around perhaps it should be HARDHATS in case of ICE. 🥶
I never thought of that M.ake A G.irl A.angry! I love it!
Another one
They Could Not Fail - about NASA in the deep south.
Better World Books. $6.11 + shipping. My shelves are overflowing with affordable reading material. I love it. As much as I love Barnes & Noble it is a budget buster.
Thanks for the tip, Christine!
When I looked it up, Rickey, it says, "We Could Not Fail." Thanks for the recommendation!
One of the co-authors was a friend of mine (he has since died) and a teacher at Lubbock High.
Morning, Lynell! Hidden Figures is one of my top three movies of all time. I'll have to get ahold of the book.
Morning, Ally!
we're reading it now for our bookclub!
Nice, Doreen!
The movie Hidden Figures is great! It made me curious to learn more about those women. So I read the book, Hidden Figures too.
Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson are enlightening and some times heartbreakingly, difficult books to read. But both are really important works. I highly recommend both.
The movie was really good, too. Have to request book from library - dont think I ever read it. So much of the movie made me grate my teeth!!!
I stood up in the theater, as did others, and applauded at the end.
walking through the parking lot to the bathroom...
Yes - teeth grating!!!
I'm waiting for his classmates from the NY Military Academy and then Fordham U to spill the beans on what he was like and whom he paid to do write his papers and take his exams. I don't think the Wharton alums are up to spilling beans.
Doubt if you get any feedback from those people because by now they're new home is probably in the East River.
and most are as old and senile as T... or gone
Mary Ann Trump (his sister, the Federal judge) admitted that she wrote his papers for school. Am sure someone was paid to take his exams.
Wow, I hadn't heard that but am not at all surprised--only maybe that Judge Trump admitted it! I'm sure he began his habits of paying off, extorting and trading in quid pro quos long before he ran for president.
Jean, i saw a great program online (don't ask for details as at my agez memory is gone) that showed black people teaching their children "black language" to be used when speaking to white folks but speaking normally when speaki ng to each other. I, a liberal enlightened "white folk" had never thought of this.
It’s called ‘hiding in plain sight’, and ironically this was a protective technique that lessened over generations but now seems a smart survival skill. POTUS #47 made sure to surround himself with people he feels more intelligent than.
It wouldn’t be hard…observing R. Kennedy and Hegseth!
I think ‘total women’ also ‘play dumb’ around men, so, the precedent is established. Trump likes his ‘Blonde Bimbo Brigade’ and Ms. Harp is just the latest one! DJT doesn’t want a REAL puppy because he is the only POTUS to not have a dog at the White House.
Albert Einstein warned that people who didn’t like animals - (DJT) - are ‘suspicious’ and to be avoided, and he was kinda’ smart…
Trump likes steers 🍔 👀…😆
It's funny. I'm an animal advocate and I wouldn't want to impose Trump on any dog...or cat...or even species with whom he may share certain traits -- skunks, rats, snakes and so on...they all deserve better, but I have thought that in the absence of a functioning wife, adoring kids, or at least a golden (what else) retriever who provides the loyalty demanded, he at least has Hart, and she comes complete with leash, collar, be they invisibly self-imposed, and a set of commands. I wondered if others felt the same way, and yeah, I do think Albert had the right idea; he was a bright guy.
I raised a ‘Golden’ with my brother (Zan), but his previous dog (also a Golden) was named TAFI (after the Theatre Arts Festival International) 🇨🇦, and she was “bilingual” - would respond to commands in both french and english. I am SURE that dog was SMARTER than Trump!! 😄
BTW I am also certain not too many dogs would jump into the trunk of a car if there wasn’t room for them to sit in it 🤪.
My ‘concern’ is that Trump’s pet is carrying around the nuclear code satchel inside that huge bag she totes for DJT. He probably thinks she is his ‘caddy’. 🤨
SUVs don’t have trunks per se. They have an open cargo area. Still, that space is not for passengers. Natalie Harp is mentally unstable.
As an animal advocate, hope you saw the story yesterday about the wild mustangs that are supposed to be under government protection. Using a loophole to sell some to "caring homes", they are being sold for less than $25 then resold by these " caring homes" to slaughter houses. Reported by the NY Times.
Paula, this is evidence that the Republican depravity embedded in the U.S. Government, fueled by unbridled avarice, has expanded into every possible corner of our empire.
(I started to use the word, "society," but that word suggests that we are civilized or considerate. We are neither. Some of us are trying, but we have been overwhelmed by Florsheim-shod, money-grubbing savages.)
Yesterday we hiked (walked is more accurate) to look at the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. Our personable, knowledgeable 19 y/o guide told us about a recent move (beat back once) to tear up the area we were standing on to drill for oil. He said it would destroy the area forever, and I did not doubt him. The comment period is still open, and he urged us to comment. I will. Occasionally public pushback stops the trump destruction juggernaut.
Marguerite Henry and her animal books and the one film . The history of horses and how they arrived on our continent also worth researching.
And for everyone commenting I had never heard of Einstein ‘s comment but when assessing an alleged sex offender a history of animal contact is vital. Many times offenders use animals as a tool to create fear or scare a possible victim. The old tv ABC film The Muffin Man showed this. EB White’s Charlotte ‘s Web also comes to mind.
Read about Wild Horse Annie. She followed a truck leaking blood and discovered the slaughter of the wild mustangs. Helicopters were used to terrify the herds forcing them onto canyons for easy capture/kill.
Paula, I saw this and it is disgusting. Years ago we had a local chef who was French who wanted to serve horse meat. We told him that here that is not a good idea. Years ago during WWII my great aunt and uncle who had a grocery store in Indy sold horse meat claiming it was beef. They were the black sheep of the family.
Paula, yes Trump tried to have the Wild Horses that the BLM is warehousing back in his first term.
This story is nothing new - for decades, the BLM (bureau of land management) and the FS (forest service) have been rounding up Wild Horses and Burros from HMAs(herd management Areas) and warehousing them in "pastures" and feedlots. After three offers of
adoption with no takers, they go to Sale Authority where anyone can buy them cheaply & do whatever with them. Many go to the slaughter buyers.
Ten or twenty years ago, there was some publicity when some rancher bought a large number & disappeared them - I guess Dave Phillips is back again with this story. He wrote it up back then I believe in the Times.
Obviously, there was a turmoil briefly, but as you can see - nothing changed. And now we have the WH felon eager to "save the government money by getting rid of the ones warehoused.
I did see something about the Sale Authority issue being "investigated" recently.
“They Shoot Horses Don’t They!” The movie (starring Red Buttons among other actors) reminds us of how ‘money hungry’ people can be…but, also desperate!
What is Donald Trump & family’s EXCUSE!
As a volunteer at two humane societies, I agree with your comment. I do feel a sense of non-understanding as to the reasons behind Ms. Hart's attraction to him. It goes to my deeper mis-understanding & disbelief how anyone can follow that person. He has no honor.
She's going to be the next big todo!
Jean, now he is letting lots of beef in from other places like Argentina, before the election so hamburger can be cheaper. I was reading yesterday that ranchers here are not happy with this. About playing dumb around men...this is the advice I received when growing up. I have never been able to do this.
Speaking as one, not all men would want you to.
Barry, I appreciate that and I don't mean to paint all with the same brush. I just have been treated to mansplaining once too often and treating me like I am some add on to my husband.
Read the book "JAMES" That is exactly what happens in the book. A great read by the way.
by Percival Everett
Penny, I was thinking about the book JAMES in this regard.
An important survival technique. Two different realities. It shouldn't have to be this way. The past never went away.
"James" by Percival Everett
Fucking SCOTUS.
The book “James’ was about that.
You do realize that Let The Punishment Fit the Crime was a satirical commentary on justice in Great Britain at the time in the late 1800s LOL! The Japanese thing was just a cover!
Don’t worry…I was in a production of ‘The Mikado’ and won a contest to write new lyrics to the “List Song” from that G&S. (Sorry to brag!)
Someone should really do a ‘Randy Rainbow’ List Song parody about the Great Orange Hope of the GOP!
Get busy!!
Tonight's LFAA triggered a number of vivid personal memories to this Professor Richardson student. Today's Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026 UCLA school newspaper, the Daily Bruin, surveyed my University's long history of successful student activism going back to the 1934 when the Provost attempted to remove 4 enrolled students permanently.
The ousted students were reinstated.
When I entered UCLA as an underground in 1966 tuition was only $69 a quarter which I paid from my income from working at the UCLA research library where I became aware & read Nat Turner's then widely biography. Reagan & the other Regents steadily raised tuition $271 tuition/quarter.The complexion of my fellow students was changing.
I graduated in 1971 during the Vietnam War & 3 days later I left UCLA for Northern California with my young partner to live in a cabin near the beach south of Santa Cruz in La Selva (the jungle).
When I found my mailbox on the roadside on the street above, Freedom Blvd, there was an induction notice to report for induction 2 states to the East in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I was NOT pre-law but I did get a life saving lecture by my Political Science Professor at UCLA on Marbury vs Madison. I was a able to get the induction notice quashed retroactively on basic due process grounds, That was among a few other successful in pro per actions before I left West LA. More such actions were to come shortly.
I did not enter law school until the the early 1980's.
The attack on public education was exacerbated when bible reading was removed from public schools. Catholics protested the King James version of the daily prayers. In my school district religious nuts protested Jewish board members and Jewish school teachers. My home room teacher read the "Jews killed Jesus" gospel regularly on my behalf....
Before and after I went to Vietnam, 1966-7, I was in the Army of the Occupation of the South, SC branch, Ft. Jackson, SC. "Massive resistance" was in full force and effect in South Carolina off post. School districts in Virginia had closed to avoid Brown v Board. Tens of thousands of Black SC residents were shipped north to places like my old hometown in Pennsylvania in retaliation for "Yankee intervention". Local TV stations would not play national news, like CBS and especially Walter Cronkite. Blacks could not use sidewalks if a white person was on them.
By 1968, I was discharged but recalled when riots closed most major cities.
I've lived through forced conscription, participation a foreign war, school strikes, riots, busing, etc.
Today in NYT, Dealbook documents that AI is teaching a class at Harvard business school....
" ...Dealbook documents that AI is teaching a class at Harvard business school ...." Yikes, the "thinking machine" aka Alan Turings "Christopher" went off road from the Age of Reason.
********************************
8/22/26 Update:
Per "Harvard Business School (HBS) [which] has integrated artificial intelligence deeply into its curriculum, utilizing interactive AI video of faculty members, live AI case simulations, and specialized tech tools across marketing, entrepreneurship, and leadership courses. There has been key AI Integration in HBS Classes."
[HBS] "AI Faculty Avatars [pitch] Programs like the H.B.S. Foundry boot camp using interactive AI-generated video clones of real professors (such as venture capitalist Jeff Bussgang) to let students practice live pitch feedback."
[HBS] "LIVE AI Cases: Courses feature real-time AI simulations, building exercises, and specialized platforms like the Harvard AI Sandbox alongside tools like ChatGPT and Claude.Core Curriculum: Building on required first-year data science and AI foundations, marketing and organizational behavior classes heavily simulate data-driven tech disruptions."
[HBS Promo Ad] "Would you like to know more about HBS Online AI courses or the specifics of how the AI pitch [promo] avatars [sic] work?"
"The Harvard Crimson reports Harvard Business School Expanded AI Integration Across MBA [curriculum circa] Apr 11, 2026 — The efforts build on HBS's introduction last year of Data Science and AI for Leaders, a required first-year course."
"AI integration [per] The New York Times, Harvard's A.I. Clones Will Hear Your Start-Up Pitch Now To create a new $699 bootcamp for entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School made A.I. versions of its faculty. The Foundry Bootcamp .... "
Based on the public school education I got, the history courses all taught the propaganda about how wonderful our start was, but they never even got to the Civil War. IMO our education needs to START teaching our real history. I've been reading about our real history, and it isn't any prettier than what we are currently living.
Susan, a book list to get me started please .. thx.
The ones I've read are The 1619 Project, Caste, The Warmth of Other Suns, and Native Nations (almost done with this one). If you don't mind reading a book that is biology based, Braiding Sweetgrass is excellent. Just got two new ones in the mail today: An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States. and The Knowing (by Tanya Talaga). The first three are from the point of view of Blacks, and the remaining ones are Indigenous books (which I'm heavily into right now). I hope this helps. The reading is not easy, but well worth the effort. The subject matter is what is difficult, not the writing.
'Caste' is my top history book centuries of comparative race stratification going back to Drake & Queen Elizabeth's plunder of "New Avalon" aka California.
I am grateful to Lawrence O'Donnell for having Isabel Wilkerson on his show, because listening to her is what got me to read that book. I find it difficult to choose a top history book, because the ones I've been reading cover different aspects of our history, and I find all of them to be important.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply and suggestions. They all sound like books I'd like to read and will begin with 1619 Project. I don't expect it to be easy reading, thanks for the heads up.
You are welcome, Burke!
Two to get started: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn; We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore.
I do wonder if the orange menace actually graduated from the University of Pennsylvania or his daddy just bought his diploma.
Diploma? Um…the 🙄 ’Astronaut’, ‘Soccer Champion’, ‘Basketball Star’, ‘Jet Fighter Pilot’ doesn’t need a piece of paper! He just LIES like the road and thinks he is believed…
Please…someone…give him a gilt edged diploma with the words - in Latin - for:
‘Leader of those who defecate where they eat’…without provided translation.
He will be duly impressed. 😆
Somewhere during his first term, I read that he has a diploma from Penn but not the Wharton School of Finance there, but other sources said his bachelor's was from Fordham, where he went before his brother talked Penn into admitting him. Funny how you never hear Penn bragging about his attendance.
He went to Fordham for the first two years. His brother's friend, in the Admissions Dept. at Penn, got him admitted as a Junior. His older sister admitted she wrote his papers during his college years.
Thanks for setting me straight. I'm still wondering if he has a degree and, if so, from what institution?
Redistributing tax funds from public education to private schools that rob public schools and taxpayers of an unbiased education is evil.
How many religious schools will have a complete science curriculum?
And a robust curriculum for history, when their whole reason to exist is to preserve belief in their faith or private schools that cater to the wealthy elite?
School vouchers reduce the ability of public schools to provide a quality education for the majority of American students in order to benefit the elite and further the class system and reduce the possibility of a majority of students learning to think critically and maybe holding different political and religious beliefs than their parents.
And private schools can pick and choose their students. Public schools are open to all students. So inadequately funded public schools have the students who need the most help, while private schools brag about their students having better standardized test scores.
Private schools do not usually offer admittance to students in need of special education programs.
Yes!
-->8647<--
VOTE!!!
The current anti-public school movement did develop in reaction to one specific education model proposed by the left that now even AOC and other progressives begin to publicly denounce: wokism.
And wokism has its roots in what started decades ago, namely the rejection, by progressive academics, of the history of literature and philosophy altogether. Everything became "politicized" and judged based on the false assumption that people living today are morally superior to those in the past.
It's the LEFT that dropped many of the Enlightenment values, especially those that had to do with "culture".
If we don't change that and go back to a much more serious version of the "Humanities", the problem will remain intact for decades to come.
EUWDTB, when the US found itself in WWII without a real spy agency, the government recruited librarians, archivists, professors, artists, etc. from the humanities to act in various roles including actual spies. Book and Dagger is a fascinating history of this.
Wasn’t that an excellent book? I loved the innovative approach using people accustomed to extensive research.
ML, me too as I am a former librarian.
Me too. Funny comment, MLMinET.
Yes Michele but the book is new to me. Julia Child and her husband part of this effort. However those were the folks who became involved in McCarthyism and his speech in West Virginia all made up. And not only the Red Scare the Lavender Scare as well. The Hollywood Blacklist and the closing of the Federal Theater Project and what they did to Hallie Flanagan. The Monument Men another film as well. So many served and supported our country and then in the fifties and sixties they were harassed . Howard Zinn and Dalton Trump no matter their imperfections both served in the war efforts. That always blowflies my mind. Also for any Chjcago folks or in the internet WTTF is going to honor Malvina Reynolds the composer of the song Little Boxes.
Thanks for the posts with all this information -- books, films, songs, history... My grandfather, who was in the OSS, later became a music professor. My mother often says that the OSS was the place for a music major.
The opening claim is particularly strange historically. The American anti-public-school movement—or, more precisely, the political movement seeking vouchers, privatization, weakening teachers’ unions, and shifting public money toward private and religious schools—long predates whatever he means by “wokism.” There certainly was a major acceleration of conservative hostility toward public schools over race, gender, DEI, curricula, and COVID-era school controversies. But saying the movement developed in reaction to “one specific education model proposed by the left” collapses several decades of history into a contemporary culture-war explanation.
Then there’s this:
“the rejection, by progressive academics, of the history of literature and philosophy altogether.”
What does that actually mean? Which academics? Which departments? Which curriculum? Rejected the history of literature and philosophy—or challenged a traditional canon? Those are radically different propositions. You can make a perfectly serious argument that some humanities departments became too enamored of political interpretation, identity, theory, presentism, etc. But “rejected the history of literature and philosophy altogether” is so sweeping that it’s almost impossible to evaluate.
And this is another unsupported leap:
“Everything became ‘politicized’ and judged based on the false assumption that people living today are morally superior to those in the past.”
“Everything” is doing heroic work there. There is a recognizable criticism underneath it—presentism, judging historical actors without adequately understanding the moral universe in which they lived. Historians themselves argue about that problem. But that’s a long way from establishing that progressive academia collectively believes we’re morally superior to everyone who preceded us.
The oddest part may be the Enlightenment claim. The Enlightenment wasn’t a set of propositions about “culture.” It encompassed reason, empiricism, skepticism toward inherited authority, individual liberty, toleration, natural rights, scientific inquiry, and competing ideas about political legitimacy. If you’re going to announce that “the LEFT dropped” Enlightenment values, you’d need to specify which values, who dropped them, and what evidence demonstrates it.
There is an interesting argument buried inside the comment: the humanities ought to expose students seriously to the intellectual inheritance of the past rather than treating old works primarily as objects upon which contemporary political judgments are imposed. I’d happily have that argument. It’s a real argument.
But he hasn’t made it. He’s started with “wokism,” traveled backward several decades through academia, declared an entire political tendency responsible, invoked the Enlightenment, and ended by prescribing a restored Humanities curriculum as the solution to America’s public-school politics.
You seemed to have missed the word "current" in my "opening claim"... ? ;-)
Nope.
Fucking SCOTUS.
I only have one contribution today - "Some men improve the world only by leaving it." Oscar Wilde (I send that out to all the men inside and outside the present administration.)
And the women as well?
Yes! I think the men are the loudest and meanest.
Wow, what a great xchool. That's the kind of stuff that needs to be taught. I was relegated to learning American history from books that hadn't been rewritten to project the truth in over a hundred years. My advantage was progressive parents who urged me to read as many things as possible which i did. That led me to free thinking and making snarky but enlightened comments such as this one.
I came to free thinking as a rebellion against the nuns who insisted that I was bound for hell since I was a Protestant. That and the dimes they extorted from me for “ holy cards” that were supposed to keep me out of purgatory. By second grade, I had pretty much figured out their scam.
🤭😁🤣🤣 couldn’t resist. Good for you!
Arizona Republicans spent years warning that public schools waste taxpayer money on ridiculous extravagances like teachers, counselors, libraries, and buildings where the roof doesn't leak.
Their solution? A voucher program that helped pay for trampoline parks, ninja warrior training, ski passes, martial arts, golf purchases, pianos, sewing equipment, and driving lessons from a company advertising BMWs and Teslas.
Fiscal conservatism has apparently discovered the climbing wall.
A public school asking for another teacher is government waste. A nearly $4,000 piano for one family? Educational freedom. Road repairs can wait. Somebody’s kid has karate at three.
Texas is getting in on the fun with a $1 billion voucher program, where about 70 percent of participating or invited families were already using private schools or homeschooling.
In other words, many taxpayers aren't helping kids escape failing schools. They're helping pay bills families were already paying.
Call it school choice if you like.
It looks a lot more like public money financing private purchases while politicians congratulate themselves for shrinking government.
And taxpayers still get a choice.
Shut up and pay for the trampoline.
And here in Arizona, we tried to do something about exactly this. Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans signed petitions to put greater accountability for the voucher program before voters. Now we won’t even get to vote on it.
I wrote about the larger democratic problem this creates here: who controls what the people are actually allowed to vote on?
https://wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com/p/the-peoples-voice-has-to-reach-the
So do like we’re trying to do here in Ohio- rather than vote against the bills, campaign to vote against the bill writers! More work, but more justice!
It’s paying for pianos objections that I object to. If that’s the only way a child can have a piano and, I assume a teacher, it’s the one expenditure this piano student could approve. Music is never an extravagance and belongs to everyone. We can never have enough.
I agree but we need those pianos in the public schools more.
Agreed, S Brasseux. But then public schools MUST be funded, pay teachers, have wide requirements (did you see the list I wrote? it’s long). I forgot that my first piano lessons were in my public school on one of the two pianos it had. Our public school system is so screwed up from what we had before WWII that establishing a good system will take strong leadership and a lot of planning. Why shouldn’t we have an excellent system with well paid teachers? It should be part of recivilizing ourselves.
Paying for a piano for one child while not paying for a piano in a public school is deplorable. The purpose of the voucher system is to help the wealthy keep their children in elite schools at the expense of public schools. I think if a state has a voucher system that is not needs tested, It is complicit in segregation of education for the well to do and no education or under supported education for the working poor. I also think those states school districts ought to tell the radical right that wants to remove the classics from public library and schools to tale a hike.
If a state really wants to produce the smartest and the brightest, they need to ensure all schools are on par with the privates schools otherwise they may miss the one mind that could cure cancer or develop the propulsion to get us to the next planets in a blink of an eye.
We all know that not all privileged white students have the mental capacity to be a brilliant leader or scientist or lawyer as demonstrated by our current administration.
The vouchers in Texas don't cover the full tuition of most private schools. So the people who can use them are the people who can make up the difference. And who have kids the private schools will accept for admission.
As we all know…vouchers and “private schools” are just another way to push a “separate and never equal “ education on children. No allowance for people not in the cities. Sure, there are a few “private schools” that do a good job, but I will bet you will find most of them push their dogma more than they educate.
School should be about learning and LISTENING to differing ideas, being able to discus new things with people of different backgrounds, not to reinforce the prejudices that you are surrounded by.
You would surely have to agree that yours is hardly a typical example of the way voucher systems have been used. You live in what is already the most unequal society in the developed world (and possibly the entire world) and a voucher system for education is just going to make it worse.
Congratulations on missing the point entirely.
Maybe your intended point was missed or even taken into account as I did. But did you miss other points you inspired?
He’s talking about other countries. For example in Canada, private schools aren’t that common. Most people use public schools, which are perfectly good.
My junior high school chorus class also did “The Mikado,” a wonderful experience, which is something that relatively few public school students still have the option to participate in.
I wish we could support strong public schools, along with alternative schools, home schooling, parochial, and other private schools, however, we cannot, at least at this time. We simply MUST have high quality, public schools!
Janice, I could not scroll past your comment without comment, because your second sentence made my blood boil for an instant.
As civilly as I can, I will insist that we absolutely do not need "alternative schools, home schooling, parochial, and other private schools."
Every one of those schooling modes denies students the ONE THING that would save our society from being torn to shreds: INTERACTING WITH OTHER STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT LIKE THEMSELVES.
Only public schools provide that benefit, and it means everything to a healthy society.
THERE IT IS!!
That is really quite simple. NO public tax money for private schools. Private schools are fine but they should never receive public funds. The lack of accountability of private schools does not build a nation.
There’s something wonderfully subversive about your parents taking a program created as part of resistance to integration and using it to send you to an integrated school. That history matters when we talk about what vouchers have become today.
I've always admired how they took Virginia's stupidity and used it against the intent of the law and give me some great memories all at the same time.
This is not only about black education but education for the poor, the immigrants, needing a leg up. It’s about class too not only racism.
Well, that’s good for you and Alexandria. Truly.
It’s clearly NOT good for a wide swath of the country and therefore, not good for the WHOLE country.
I continue to be amazed out how sheepish some American white men are at the thought of having to compete on level ground with other Americans of color for their place in commerce and society.
Truly un-American.
From a white man in America.
You describe a beautiful childhood, well-loved, as each child should be.
Each child deserves nurture and love, and your integrated school sounds beautiful.
And the link to Cab Callaway. A touch of heaven.
Speaking of heaven, the 1943 film, Cabin in the Sky, with Jazz Greats, ah, that is a musical I listen to many times, with my screen-crush on Lena Horne!
Your note made my day, so, I heartily thank you!
Not many private schools gorging themselves at the voucher trough are integrated. You were very fortunate to attend an integrated private school.
It's Come To This,
I am so thankful for each and every person God has made and for the opportunity to share in their life and culture, creativity and personhood as each of us may choose...(whether they have a "belief or not...better to be honest than lie).
We are not a perfect people. Unfortunately we need police to guard and protect us and keep us personally on the "straight and narrow". Many of us would like to argue that rules are NOT made for us but for "others" forgetting that we are vulnerable to "stretching the truth" or driving too fast or judging.
"It's Come To This", I too had friends of color whom I loved and greatly respected as well as friends of various religions or no religion throughout my life and so it continues. I am so grateful for each one. Those friends gave me a deeper understanding of life and the world and possibilities I could not have understood without enjoying the experience of their friendship.
Documented in Democracy in Chains
One aspect of this history that has always fascinated me is just how long much of the South was able to delay actually carrying out Brown v. Board of Education.
I grew up in Huntsville because my father worked for NASA, and I went through grades 1–12 there. I was in Catholic school, which complicates my own memory: we had Black children in school from first grade. But I remember public-school friends talking about schools that were still segregated, or only beginning the most token sort of integration, years after Brown. Huntsville did admit four Black students to previously white public schools in 1963—the first public-school desegregation in Alabama—and 31 Black children were attending white or predominantly white Huntsville schools the following year. So my childhood memory of the precise dates was imperfect. But the larger memory of how little Brown had initially changed ordinary public schooling was not. (City of Huntsville)
What astonishes me in retrospect is the length of the delay. Brown was decided in 1954. Yet the Supreme Court itself later recounted that the DeKalb County, Georgia, school system took no positive action toward desegregation until the 1966–67 school year, when it finally adopted a “freedom of choice” transfer plan that had little practical effect on the formerly Black schools. Twelve years after the Supreme Court had declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, a major school system essentially had not implemented the decision. The Court called DeKalb’s response “an all too familiar one.” (Legal Information Institute)
Part of the problem, of course, was the remedy the Court itself chose. Brown II in 1955 ordered desegregation not immediately, but “with all deliberate speed.” The Court was trying to accommodate the enormous practical difficulties of dismantling a dual school system. But Southern officials discovered that “deliberate” could be made to do considerably more work than “speed.” The result was years of freedom-of-choice plans, pupil-assignment schemes, litigation and other devices that produced nominal compliance while preserving segregation in practice.
Eventually the Court recognized what had happened. By 1968, in Green, it was no longer enough for a school district merely to remove the formal rule assigning children by race. Districts had an affirmative obligation to produce a genuinely nonsegregated school system. And by 1969, fifteen years after Brown, Justice Black was still writing about Mississippi schools that remained all-white or all-Black and explicitly attributed much of the delay to the “all deliberate speed” formula. (Legal Information Institute)
I find all this particularly striking now because most of my adult life has been lived with the assumption that when the Supreme Court finally decides a constitutional question, governments obey it. They may denounce the decision, try to distinguish it, pass a new law testing its limits, or seek to have it overturned. But simply delaying its practical implementation for ten or fifteen years seems almost unimaginable.
Yet it happened within living memory.
And Brown is a useful reminder that a Supreme Court opinion and the execution of that opinion are two different things. The Court could declare segregation unconstitutional in 1954. It took federal judges, additional Supreme Court decisions, the Civil Rights Act, federal funding leverage and, ultimately, the willingness of the executive branch to enforce federal law to turn that declaration into reality.
Perhaps the most unsettling lesson is that the authority of the Supreme Court depends on more than nine justices issuing an opinion. It also depends on a political and institutional culture in which presidents, governors, legislatures and government officials accept that a final judicial decision must actually be carried out—even when they profoundly dislike it.
For most of the intervening decades, that norm has seemed so ordinary that it was easy to mistake it for something automatic. The history after Brown suggests it wasn’t automatic at all.
I think you are talking about Burgundy Farms School. It was the standout school
back in the day. I wonder if it is still alive and thriving in our Doom Days of Trump?
Bingo. 🎯 It is alive and thriving indeed, with a new nature center in West Virginia for summer camp. A great school still.
All well and good.. you got. In our country, nation, a supposed liberal democracy, inclusive, education is key..above all else that follows including voting rights. Maybe you were not damaged but the repercussions of taking funds away from the public schools were ( as HCR says) felt on others and the public school system. This is another way to foment white supremacy because education IS key- ACCESS to education when children were poor ( having to, or sent to labor), even without parenting, or proper parenting is felt even today. This method amongst others of making and treating some people better than others helps to get us in this situation where we want people to vote- to know what they are voting for, what the law is. My first grade class was not anything like yours. I do remember the pledge of allegiance and learning how to write and read. I continued through to college- free of tuition in NYC in the 60's. My public education was high quality too and not segregated at all though it was still very tough for blacks to come out from under their poverty. They needed help and encouragement.
On a cruise right now & sat with two folks from AZ at dinner last night. Discussed vouchers. They said their grandchild was deemed ineligible (grade wise) for a Catholic high school bc of grades. In public school had been getting A’s. (And several family members were alums of the school.) So other grandchildren were moved to Catholic grade schools to prepare them for high school.
They said public schools were paying the price for years of vouchers. No surprise.
Public education has never been only about schools. It is about who gets access to knowledge, who gets the opportunity to participate fully in society, and whether that opportunity belongs to everyone.
Here in Arizona, the voucher debate has become something even larger. Voters tried to put accountability for a billion-dollar program on the ballot, and now they won’t even get to decide.
A democracy depends on an educated public. It also depends on the public having a voice. Arizona should be paying attention to the loss of both.
If we ever get control back, one of the reforms I would love to see is the elimination across the board (the entire country) of the use of public funds to fund ANY private schools, whether secular or religious, rich or poor. If you want to set up a private educational system, fine, no problem, but don't expect ANY tax dollars to support it in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM. Public funds should be used to support public enterprises, not private ones.
I agree, Jon. Public funds should support public education. But if there’s no way around that, and we’re going to use public money for private education, then public accountability has to follow every single dollar. Transparency and oversight shouldn’t disappear simply because the money crosses the threshold of a private school.
I'd rather not get into that bucket of worms. For me, the answer is to simply stop permitting public money to be used to fund private businesses, including schools and munitions manufacturers and car companies.
I’m actually completely with you, Jon. No public money should go to private schools. Period. My point about accountability was the fallback because that’s the fight we’re stuck in here in Arizona right now. We can’t get rid of the voucher program, and now voters won’t even get to decide what accountability should follow the public money being spent. That’s what infuriates me. But on the larger principle, yes — public funds belong in public education.
I essentially agree with both of you. And I agree, Kelli, that accountability has to follow every public dollar, because grifters gonna grift, every chance they get.
This should be automatic, just like every right comes with responsibilities.
Recently, I noticed that Success Academy, a charter school system in NYC was advertising for minority students on a city bus as a public school. Yes, it gets vouchers of public money, but it is independent and not bound by many requirements of public schools. Margaret Hoover, William F. Buckley's successor, just interviewed Success's head Eva Moskowitz, on her program. No pushback there. Meanwhile, one of the city's most competitive special public high schools, admitted only four Black students based on tests for which many spend big bucks in test prep. If this happens in one of the nation's most liberal cities, I think we might agree that racial integration is a persistent challenge all these years later.
I guess I could imagine a scenario where money went to some private institutions but ONLY under rules that said they had to report and act just like public schools. Otherwise, they can do all sorts of harm that should be prevented.
Like not pay their teachers a minimum wage.
What school or district doesn't pay their teachers the minimum wage? I sincerely doubt that actually happens in the United States, first because it is highly illegal and relatively easy to uncover, second because the minimum wage in most states is so low anyway, that its hard to imagine anyone with a teaching degree who would want to or need to work for a sub-minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage is still $7.75/hour (which is ridiculous even in Mississippi!) but even in states like California where in some locations the minimum can be $20/hour, you'd be hard pressed to find any school that doesn't pay their teachers at least $40,000 a year which is essentially the minimum.
If private schools didn't get some public funds, Jon, (for limited purposes), then they would be funded by families wealthy enough to pay for them. Children of poorer families would be excluded. Unless those wealthy parents and donors established scholarships, but then they could put all sorts of conditions on these.
I could not care less. If private schools feel children of poorer families are important to their schools, they will do what they want/need to do. What I want is the society to ONLY fund people who believe in the values of the society which should NOT include segregation and isolation and red-lining and other such crap. The public system is failing because we are taking money out of the public system and using it to fund private schools. Its not the only problem, but it is big part of it.
If we simply stopped permitting the funding of ANY private schools (and universities and colleges too) our public money would go a lot farther. Here's an intersting one...
Harvard has an endowment of $56 BILLION dollars. Not Million, BILLION. And yet they get almost $750 MILLION dollars each year in government grants. That money should be going to the public colleges and universities, not to Harvard which could fund that by just using their own endowment. Its a crime that we shouldn't tolerate anymore, stealing money from the public poor to give to the rich and wealthy.
It's got to stop.
Yes Jon , it has chafed me for years Harvard has so much money and still collects welfare in tax exempt status and grants.
Unless they are great athletes, they are excluded anyway.
Frank, good point.
Lincoln already said it, as Heather wrote: “An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” “ So what was (and is) the solution of the new billionaire kings? Destroy education and dumb the people down. And social media is a blessing for that project. What I don’t understand is why Heather doesn’t mention the Powell Memorandum; that says it all, being the precursor to Project 2025…
The Powell Memorandum is absolutely part of that history. What followed is just as important: the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership in 1981, the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982, and decades spent building the think tanks, legal networks, donor networks and media infrastructure capable of turning ideology into governing power. Project 2025 didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew from an institutional project built over generations.
since Roe v Wade in '74 the rw evangelicals have been methodically, patiently plotting their take over. They have infiltrated many institutions and were part of the J6 insurrection. They are actively promoting no separation of church and state. This is your big fight America.
I wrote about this here in Arizona a couple days ago. The voucher fight led me to a larger question: who controls what the people are actually allowed to vote on? Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans asked for this question to be put before the voters. Now we won’t get to decide.
https://wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com/p/the-peoples-voice-has-to-reach-the
Time to vote out those legislators.
This Arizonan so agree with you Kelli.
Thanks to unregulated, unlimited private money at all levels of politics.
The value of public education that is too often overlooked is the social education gained by living and working beside students from all sectors of society. The privileged kids who come out of private , particularly religious, schools are rubber stamps ( if that school has been successful in its mission) who are unequipped to live and work in the real world where they are required to accommodate other points of view. This movement has been the cause of the division that we are troubled with currently.
✅️💯✅️💯✅️ Here in Tennessee, our R supermajority is pushing vouchers. 🥺
Did you know the DeVos family has a home in Loudon (or Sevier) County?
Yes, at or near Blackberry Farm, that resort hotel in Walland. My son-in-law is in a band. They were hired to play at an event at the resort during trump#1. He saw her there with her husband at some R retreat.
As a former teacher, I remember the visceral attacks on public schools after the release of A NATION AT RISK. That published report became a widely distributed book; I still have a copy. However, in the introduction, the authors never revealed this:
But what I [reporter] learned in talking to two of the original authors of "A Nation At Risk" was that they never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation's schools. They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/29/604986823/what-a-nation-at-risk-got-wrong-and-right-about-u-s-schools
On the other hand, though I was still teaching, I NEVER EVER heard of the subsequent report from 1991. A year later, the Bush Sr. administration was still suppressing its release. Why? Because it contradicted the myth that public schools were failing.
Energy Dept. Lab’s Education Report Still On Hold
https://www.edweek.org/education/energy-dept-labs-education-report-still-on-hold/1992/09
The Sandia Report On Education: A Perfect Lesson In Censorship
https://www.projectcensored.org/3-the-sandia-report-on-education-a-perfect-lesson-in-censorship/
I'm a bit different today -- very angry, beyond history.
I'm angry that John Roberts cannot read the Constitution.
It expressly reserves to Congress the approval and funding of public projects.
But we know John Roberts’ contempt for the Constitution when he and his fellow monarchists disdained its Article 14, Section Three, which expressly forbids any public office to anyone involved in any insurrection such as criminal Donald’s having organized for his private army of thugs January 6, 2021.
But let’s ask why anyone would become monarchist as have the six on the high court who so love the rich – the fellow corrupt who abet criminal Donald.
It’s language. Anyone who has sought English fit to others – fit to life – will eagerly use active verbs, those truest to the details, nuances, living complications, and subtleties of others, including sensitivity to their hurts.
They’ll thrill to and quote those who model these arts, in the novel, memoir, histories, biographies, and essays. Those indifferent to others will contrarily show that regarding all whom the John Roberts court has disdained, from the devastation U.S. elites have wrecked on our millions of job-offshored working classes to the tens of millions of women who lost medical choices on their own bodies, from blacks who lost voting rights act protections to immigrants voided their Temporary Protective Status legality.
The rest of us will show lack of human vitality by language empty of human specificity, anesthetized by the labeling, adjectives, groupings, and abstractions in all do-nothing conjugative verbs: “This is this”; “That is that.”
Of course the rich and their enablers recoil from arts for seeing others – show instead the madness of the Long Dong Clarence six who immunize criminal Donald and all his murders, rapes, extortions, thefts, and vanities.
Quoth The New York Times, [not] paywalled:
'Disabling nine substations simultaneously might be beyond the reach of a domestic terror group, but it is well within the capabilities of a state actor. For years, intelligence analysts have warned that the grid represents an inviting “attack surface” for adversaries including China, North Korea, Russia and Iran. Already, China has been caught installing a software backdoor in a large power transformer being shipped to a federal utility in Colorado. The Pentagon has warned that the Chinese could target critical infrastructure specifically to “undermine the will of the U.S. public.”'
'Durkovich worries that our enemies will feel newly emboldened to consider substations a valid target. “The United States is actually normalizing attacking critical infrastructure within Venezuela and Iran,” she said. Just this month, Iran was linked to recent sabotage of water systems in several states. The grid could be an even bigger prize for the right adversary: Without an army or a fleet of bombers or a nuke, you could cripple the United States for years.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7VA.g55o.uhIjp9bNz8M3&smid=url-share
And yet the biggest news stories focus on the weird details of Natalie Harp's letters rather than the myriad threats facing the nation.
Our allies are turning away from us not just because of Trump, but because of our seeming inability to quit the clickbait habit and engage in serious discussions about our country's priorities.
Exactly. The problem goes way beyond Trump. And it even goes beyond the fact that the GOP has become an ideologically neofascist party (which is bad enough already).
The problem is also that the left has undermined itself, and for decades already. Center-left media no longer do their homework. Yes, they're still good at doing in-depth investigations (most of the time), but the daily reporting and major headlines are no longer based on ethical values (what citizens should think about first, in a democracy) but on clickbait.
This allowed Trump to achieve name recognition much faster than Kamala Harris. It had nothing to do with the DNC or Harris herself, and everything with the demise of the legacy media.
Even 60 Minutes is part of the problem. The interview it did with Harris was ridiculous. It was extremely superficial, with questions no longer fabricated by the journalist himself, after a thorough study of the facts, but just taken from the internet and... tweets by Trump.
In this way, a presidential candidate cannot possibly have a serious conversation with the nation.
I have to agree with this assessment. As you examine the assault on the VRA, what was being done to counter the systemic chipping away? So much damage had already been done by the time the Democrats proposed the John Lewis bill, it was never going to pass as the repubs had managed to screw over the voting just enough to be able to filibuster the bill with the help of 2 democrats (Manchin and Sinemina). The systemic attack on all fronts of the administrative state has been carefully orchestrated through the Koch organization. They built a data collection machine that has now been reproduced and expanded by the likes Palantir.
The billionaire class are not working peoples friends.
I once wrote a letter to President Biden advising him to begin having Fireside like chats with the nation on TV and/or online. For some strange unknown reason, he didn’t take my advice.
The reason is obvious: he has a speech impairment. His most impressive skill is that of a lawmaker and dealmaker. That's what made him achieve so much, compared to other US presidents.
But if the media refuse to report on it and "we the people" spend our time on social media instead, we WILL get the "government we deserve", as is always the case in a democracy (namely: neofascism).
Even if he had - networks would not carry it. Look at how they ignored his prime time speech in Philadelphia.
Yes, EUWDTB: "the demise of the legacy media."
And yes, again: "the left has undermined itself, and for decades already."
All graduated from schools Powell-memo-foundations-orchestrated dehumanized. All in thrall to testing and its IQ neutered narrowness.
We need differentiate here between the pseudo-left and the Real Left. The former destroyed itself by trying to hide within the post-JFK "Democratic" [sic] Party, which is a very different organization from its New Deal, FDR/JFK predecessor. The latter -- the Real Left -- was already fatally crippled by the Moronic Majority's methodically conditioned, reflexive hatred of socialists and socialism – which is, in effect, support for unrestricted capitalism -- and ultimately therefore endorsement of the capitalists' often secret or maliciously disguised but nevertheless omnipresent yearning for the Trumpstein-caliber omnipotence granted them by Nazism.
And libertarianism. A false philosophy of personal liberty that leads to anarchy - might is right society that preys of the weak.
Harp is a symptom of the problem. An unbelievable person so close to Trump. It seems relevant to me.
But what revelations if Natalie was hired by Putin.
The entire GOP elite AGREES with Putin, ideologically. They've visited Alexander Dugin, Putin's palace ideology. They've concocted Project 2025 together with Hungarian neofascist leader Orban's Danube Institute, designed to help democracies transition to neofascism.
Putin doesn't need Natalie. He has Thiel, Vance, the Heritage Foundation, Musk, Johnson, Andreessen, and so many others actively siding with him.
Many actors, Loren, state and non-state, have legitimate grievances at U.S. criminality.
Add to this how criminal Donald and his sycophants in all key parts of the government have been stripping personnel -- often entire protective agencies -- making things easier for plots which Putin, Xi, the mullahs, Kim, and various sheiks may collude to carry out.
Meanwhile, the U.S.'s ostensible "adults" just prioritize more, more, more of their boy, criminal Donald's, vanity.
Loren, it's not the actors from other states we need to worry about. It's those of our own state. Apropos of that, see "Trump’s Plans to Steal the Elections Underway," Ralph Nader, August 21, 2026, info@nader.com.
Thanks for leaving to reference to Nader's webpage. I will check it out. For readers in red states, you may want to check out how Trump cheated there in 2024 on the VIGILANTES INC video at gregpalast.com .
Oh please, not Ralph Nader again, the destroyer of Al Gore’s chances to be president in 2001.
That's nonsense, Bill; the murderers of Al Gore Jr.'s presidency were the then-closeted ChristoNazis who transformed SCOTUS to the Robbers' Court.
(Suggested acronym for the Robbers' Court: SCROTUS, Supreme Court Robbers of the United States, i.e., that which has all by our crotches and is dragging us to death.)
Nope. It was W Bush that appointed John Robert. Your memory is lacking.
Mr. Katz: I suggest you read more carefully; I said nothing whatsoever of whom appointed Roberts. My statement -- intended to be humorous -- could surely have been phrased better, but it is in fact accurate: the Justices who appointed Bush II president, including Chief Justice Rehnquist, are indeed the justices who enabled and began the [lifetime] ChristoNazi conquest of SCOTUS and thus its eternal transformation to the infamy of SCROTUS.
Again you are wrong. Ralph Nader destroyed Mr Gore’s chances when he took I believe if memory serves me, 90,000 votes on the Green Party. And I just now had to address this with Mr. Nader since he is also a writer on Substack. Folks don’t like being reminded of their mistakes, do they.
Please don't say you're still repeating that old canard, BIll.
Hush now.
https://nader.org/2026/08/21/trumps-plans-to-steal-the-elections-underway/
wow, thanks Loren Bliss ⛔️
Thank you.
When will you respond? W. Bush appointed Robert’s.
See above. (Understand I don't spend all my time on Substack; I have other obligations -- a number of them, in fact. ) Nevertheless, , Mr. Katz, I thank you for revealing your antagonism; I will keep that foremost in my mind if it's ever necessary to interact with you again in the future.
Well you can always block me and never read of me again. No big deal. Sorry I disturbed you.
They WILL take their chances now that America, and especially its intelligence agencies and defense department, is led by a bunch of cultist idiots…
Please give us a reference to read on the link between Iran and sabotage of water systems. I would like to read more in that.
Done. See below.
I think we would find out just how bad that would be if we attack Iran's power and water infrastructure. That would be their likely response, IMO.
And the Regime's response? Undoubtedly they would nuke Iran. (Remember the missile silos have their own independent electrical-generation systems, as do all USian military installations. Thus any civilian outage would not have an immediate impact on the Regime's military capabilities.
That specter lingers, Loren.
Indeed it does, Phil -- many times intensified by the longstanding USian policy of "better dead than red" -- that is, of doing what Hitler said he'd do had he the capability, destroying the world with nukes and other forms of CBR warfare rather than surrender.
I read that a couple days ago Loren and passed it around, it was one of the most sobering things I have read in years. I remember well the attack on the transformers near silicone valley. If the grid fails we go dark, and not just for an inconvenient few hours or a day or two, like we might get with an ice storm, but for potentially years and not just in this location or that one, but the whole nation. Our world is supported by electricity, without it everything stops, and we go back to a 1820’s economy with better roads but no way to really use them.
Dick...I saw the story when it broke and set it aside because I know the vulnerabilities of our electronic infrastructure and knew I'd be absolutely horrified when I read it. (During my years in deeply rural Western Washington, I experienced winter-storm-inflicted power-outages that lasted up to four weeks. But there I had wood heat, propane cooking, Coleman lanterns for light, two very large dogs for spiritual companionship and guidance, a trout stream literally in my back yard and all the tools and skills required to feed myself from the local woods and waters, so I was not unhoused and forced to live in school gymnasiums as the local all-electric town-dwellers were. Nor was I troubled by shortages. I'd spent most of my boyhood summers in a place that had neither telephones nor electricity nor indoor toilets, and I was thus considerably more adept at primitive living than the average 20th Century USian. Also I was a very successful subsistence vegetable gardener. But in the horror portrayed by NYT, we'd be back to horses and muzzle-loaders before the lights came back on...if indeed they ever did.)
Any proof that Iran had anything to do with the attacks on the water systems?
Good question -- especially since [all] USian intelligence agencies have been irreparably ChristoNazified into Trumpstein falsehood mongers.
Thus, based on two assumptions -- (1), that British MI-6 is our potential Liberators' most skilled and reliable foreign intelligence service (though I'd love to hear from the Canadians, the Germans, the French, the South Koreans and the Japanese as well); and (2), that British journalists can still expand their perspectives with access to classified background briefings -- I offer the following. It doesn't really answer your question, Mr. Current, but it does thoroughly discuss most of the indications.
Hence the BBC -- "Look, if you want to bring a nation to its knees, you go after two things, you go after power and water" -- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c934dq95zpgo
The one indication missing from that particular BBC analysis is the possibility the attacks were by the ChristoNazis or their MAGAT supporters. This is suggested (but most assuredly [not] proven) by two hypotheses: firstly, that the 2013 California transformer attacks were proto-ChristoNazi terrorism, as suspected by the pre-Trumpite [and therefore presumably credible] authorities; secondly, that Trump's obscene attempt to blame Minnesota -- see https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgwe2qpgq1o -- utilizes the traditional USian methodology for affixing "plausible deniability" to the innumerable false-flag operations by which the USian ruling class relentlessly imposes its Evil will.
(Would deeply appreciate analysis from Georgia Fisnick on this question.)
And yesterday Roberts stayed the stay on the building of the stupid ballroom -- allowing it to proceed until the Court could give the matter greater review. This is bollocks. This case had already been before 2 courts -- the facts are the facts - and Roberts unilateral decision (which he apparently could make because he is the Justice for the circuit) allows this 24/7 construction to go forward. If it's all already built, will they make him tear it down? Do pigs fly?
The Powell memo and its foundations set in the rot, laurie.
Since then, it's been all up to the pigs to swarm in and eat us up.
So true, Phil.
The moneyed classes realized they needed more people to keep getting elected. So they appealed to the prejudices of the MAGA crowd.
The facts are the facts, but the ruling was wrong. That has happened often before. Both courts were wrong and I expect Roberts plans to make sure that comes out when the SCOTUS rules.
The National Historic Preservation board which was set up in PL 89-665 (look it up, its easy to find) in Section 107 CLEARLY STATES:
"SEC. 107. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to be applicable to the White House and its grounds, the Supreme Court building and its grounds, or the United States Capitol and its related buildings and grounds."
Pretty clear, isn't it? The law doesn't cover the three main branches of government buildings. I don't know why people can't simply read laws and understand them when they are ABSOLUTELY CLEAR AS THE PAGES THEY ARE WRITTEN ON!
I think the reasoning for this exclusion is probably pretty interesting but I have to speculate. It would be weird to let any part of the government have some kind of veto power over the main buildings of any other part of the government, at least the "big three". That could be construed as a violation of the separation of powers. So each branch of government has sole control over its own "headquarters" building.
I am pretty certain the Supreme Court will overturn the Appeals Court, and even if you dislike Trump (I certainly DO), you can't argue when he actually does something according to the law (since he violates it so often, everyone here seems to think he ALWAYS does). In this case, I don't think so.
My husband (historic preservation degree from Columbia Univ.) tells me that you are right, Jon, but that there is still a problem with the ballroom because of its imposing size. It overwhelms the White House and the neighborhood and for that reason needs to be scrutinized not simply allowed to go on being built. This is a fine point, I think, that has to do with the integrity of the aesthetics imbued in the design. The key thing, however, is that Congress hasn't appropriated any money for this big project.
I am glad SOMEONE agrees with me LOL!
Seriously, I looked at current appropriations and apparently there has always been the power of the President to move certain monies around, and they have moved around quite a bit of funding from various other budgets (Secret Service, White House Military office, etc) to cover the initial costs of the East Wing "renovation" which is a legal transfer of funding. Of course, that leaves other departments short this fiscal year, but Trump doesn't seem to care about that and it is apparently within his legal power to do that.
It has been done by other Presidents as well, just not to the level Trump is attempting. But if it is LEGAL to do it, then the question of HOW MUCH probably isn't something that would alter the legality. And in the upcoming budget proposals, he has requested an additional $400 million for White House expenses, presumably to complete the renovation. That money has not yet been allocated by Congress but must be by October 1, start of the 2027 fiscal year (or theoretically the government could shut down again).
Of course for FY 27, Congress could refuse to allocate that much, but remember, funding bills can't be filibustered and Congress is currently in the hands of the GOP, so I expect Trump will get the money he wants.
SO the "norms" have been violated, not the law? That would be the old republican typical response when the violate and ethical position "Nothing illegal about this".
I do NOT understand your comment. Is it a question? Where did I say that "norms" were violated (or not)? Please make your comment understandable. What I said is that the renovation or rebuilding of the East Wing is up to the president by the virtue of the LAW of PL 89-665. Did I even use the word "norms" (or imply it?).
Please educate me. Thank you.
Okay this morning after the fog of late last night cleared from my brain, I understood your comment Rickey! And yes, that is essentially the truth, the law is very specific that there is no power of Congress to override the President's right to do what he wants with the building other than the power of providing the money, but he also has the power to move allocated money around and he is doing that, "borrowing" money from the Secret Service and the White House Military office to pay for the "renovation". You can hate it (I certainly do and probably it should be changed) but that is the way the law reads today.
As all other POTUS cleared many of things done through a process. That is the norm I was referring which have been trampled over by this administration.
Agreed, but norms do NOT necessarily mean that they MUST be followed. If so, someone could point out that the "norms" of the 50s made segregated schools "the way it was". As a result, those norms were followed until new laws were passed to change things. That was idiocy, we shouldn't have needed to pass new laws to require states to integrate.
So freakin' transparent are these crooks!
Let’s not ever forget that Long Dong had the red carpet unrolled by Joe Biden. Back to education. It’s beyond my pay grade to understand the nuances, but when I was in Catholic grade school, St Joseph’s Cathedral School, the nuns, Sisters of merciless Mercy, told us we were two grades ahead of the public school. But when they kicked me out in 7th grade for refusing to cut my hair as we approached in 1967, the Summer of Love, I registered in the fall at the local public school and found that public schools were not two grades behind, but maybe 3 or 4 grades behind. Since I still refused to cut my hair, ( I was in full revolt of everything and of course still am), they put me in a non English speaking class and held me back. I didn’t mind that much because the class was filled with prettier girls and that was more fricken important than getting an education.
I trust you are laughing because today I fancy myself a comic. A real dirty one at that. And my mommies speaka another language; MEOW. My forthcoming book titled, “Katz on Cats and Other Animal Tails.” (Billkatz@substack.com)
Bill...Though I am most assuredly neither Jew, Christian or Muslim, my parochial-school experience was notably similar to yours -- but c. 1950-1954, grades 5 though 8 at Knoxville's Holy Ghost School, the Sisters of Mercy, many from Ireland, were genuinely merciful. When my father's post-purge job-quest moved us to Tennessee in the summer of 1950, he took a hard look at the local public schools and -- himself boarding-school educated -- concluded they were so wretched that "under no circumstances" -- yes, in those exact and memorable words -- would I ever be enrolled therein. Hence my enrollment at Holy Ghost.
But once I reached high school, it was my decision whether to attend Knoxville Catholic High School or Knox County Central High School. Assuming the public school girls would be easier, I chose Knox Central -- and, like you, discovered the public school was maybe three or four grades behind.
(Though my education at Holy Ghost enabled me to graduate from high school with only occasional glances at textbooks, I nevertheless profoundly regret my decision to follow my phallus into an accursed southron-public-school realm of omnipotent, run-amok Ku Klux Konsciousness; violent hatred of "yankees"; and school-encouraged assaults -- often by members of the athletic teams -- against anyone who dared exhibit the slightest non-conformities. And the reason for my regret is not the suffering I inflicted on myself; it's the fact that in my adolescent lust I squandered an opportunity for a genuinely superior high-school education. Though the experience did give me useful lessons in brawling.)
Note: though I dunno about parochial schools today, now that USian Christianity has restored its function as the nation's primary source of hateful bigotry, but in my day it was a matter of policy that we "non-Catholics" were [never] harassed to convert. Indeed, the Catholics were infinitely more tolerant than the public-school Protestants, who routinely forced the entire Central High School student body to attend "student revivals" held illegally in the school auditorium.
You are in great form today, Loren! Love your posts.
Thank you.
Loren, reading about your school experience is intriguing and quite a confession. Truthfulness in hindsight is wisdom’s gift. You have obviously made up for what you’ve related as academically inferior in high school. I do recall a trip I made as a young adult to Georgia. It was the first time I experienced southern prejudice against myself as a white female northerner.
Gloria...The compensation for wretched Southron schools was my late father's library, which filled a 22-foot wall floor-to-10-foot-ceiling and spilled over into seven moveable four-shelf hardwood book-cases, three of them glass-fronted antiques. The son of British/Canadian parents, he had intended to major in history at Montreal's McGill University, probably to the teaching/PhD level, maybe with a commission in the British Army, but that ended with the Crash of '29, which utterly and irreparably destroyed my family's wealth. Nevertheless my father remained a scholar all his life, better read and more knowledgeable in history and economics than anyone else I've ever known, professors included, and his lifelong-student compulsions obviously rubbed off on me.
Apropos Canada, by act of parliament I am now technically a Canadian citizen, granted that enormous honor by my paternal grandparents, and were I not terminally ill, I'd be working overtime to raise the obscene sum -- as much as $10,000 -- that ever-greedy USian lawyers charge to do the required document search. I need the original birth certificates of my father (Massachusetts, 1910), my grandfather (New Brunswick, 1862) and my grandmother (Nova Scotia, 1888). If I thought it might be possible to raise the money, I'd attempt it, but this is, after all, the realm transformed by majority vote into the ChristoNazis' Unified Reich -- a realm wherein anyone with my politics is already on a government death list -- so I figure any fund-raising effort is doomed.
Glad you got out of the South alive. Too many didn't.
Thank goodness my mother who didn’t graduate from high school was an avid reader and passed that on to me. If I hadn’t purchase and then given away so many books in my lifetime I would have the cash to put towards that $10,000 sum 🤗!!
My books now come exclusively from the public libraries here in this dominantly liberal university corner of Red state Iowa. My daughter makes the trip to the library for me as mobility is limited. Normally she brings 4 nonfiction and 2 novels. Sometimes I think I’m not going to be interested in the nonfiction she brings but more often than not surprise myself. There’s so much left to read and learn and not much time left.
I made public high school in three years because I was so bored. I couldn’t graduate with the class because I flunked Typing, again, where any of the prettier girls were.
I was educated in catholic schools through HS, the last 3 years by Jesuits, who taught me how to think, not what to think. I resisted them with all of my strength but in the end they stood on the high ground. All 4 years of HS were in all boys schools and I hated that, I to this day think it was a mistake, in fact Jesuit HS outside Portland where I studied is now co-ed and appears to be a very nice place to get a good education. I benefited from a private school education that my parents paid for not the state, and that was as it should be, it was not cheap to educate 4 kids while still supporting the public school system through taxes, but that was a choice they made. My kids got their start in private schools and then shifted to public starting in HS, they learned to love learning in those early grades and have both benefited from that experience.
I am too am seething about this verdict. The 'People' House'? Throw the bum out!
Again…so poetic! You deserve the Ghost of Shakespeare to appear to you and say: 👍
Well, it’s all you Idiots continue to live in ancient history… trump is the best president of your life in todays real world. Trying to enjoy it. It’s actually such a pleasurable ride.
You’re not angry, Phil you’re just mad and I don’t mean that in a mad in the head. I was in woo hoo. Gone
Gone phil. Check yourself and go get help.
I was surprised to learn John Roberts’ opposition to civil rights goes back to his days working in the (Bush?) WH.
This helps explain why Pissy Pants is so fond of saying how much he loves the uneducated.
Today, in response to a reporter's question about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's decision to intervene in international bond markets, our brilliant, humble president remarked that "yields have gone back up since then." The reporter followed up by asking: "have you talked to Bessent about another type of intervention? Is that something he will be doing?" The response?
"We have many types of intervention. That's one. The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will."
I had to double-check, because I simply didn't believe a President of the United States could actually say something that stupid. But it's true. As Robert Hubbell said, "if Biden had said the same thing, he would have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office before his plane touched down."
At least we know when he says “I want the nuclear option” he’s referring to global thermonuclear destruction, not some fancy senate standing rule. Wouldn’t want to get those mixed up.
Gives rich, new context for understanding why his first Secretary of State called him a "fucking moron."
The MSM unceasingly repeat Trump calling people "stupid". However, when writing letters to the editor of the papers here in ME or commenting on stories in WAPO, AOL and most other MSM, you cannot use many words that can be construed as "mean spirited." You know, words like hate, cruel, stupid, racists. But they don't hesitate to allow Trump or anyone from his administration to repeat them.
Yours contrasts so vividly, ICTT, with the stance Lincoln remains laureled for.
Heather quoted Lincoln on his views that "workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy."
Yours contrarily notes criminal Donald basically not just indifferent to American workers, but in contempt of their possibilities for a decent life, and in even greater contempt of a government, any government, that would aid in that decency.
Government serves his vanities, and his self-enrichment schemes. End of story. He has no other considerations of any American people other than his fellow U.S. cynical rich allied with the world's worst despots and underage girl and young women sex traffickers.
John Roberts cannot see that.
Hello Phil... Is John Roberts being Criminally 'Blind'?...
He's criminality abetting, Apache.
He's totally out of touch with most everything our best artists have loved and agonized over in America. Just ignore the key parts of the Constitution and rule out most of the great progress Congress and other institutions have made.
Restore monarchy is probably the most polite way to characterize his priorities. If criminals like Donald can further the autocrat project, then let him have his insanely vain ballroom. If Congress didn't fund it, of course Roberts underlines the power of a dictator to ignore Congress, ignore the Constitution, ignore everything except what the U.S.'s enslaving heritage has entailed.
Hello Phil... Based upon his Major Decisions, it seems that John Roberts believes that John Roberts is part of a Vaunted Aristocracy...
Use our military on the bond markets????? and still, crickets from Congress.
A real journalist would have followed up by asking: so you agree that yields going up is a bad sign, and that Bessent's attempt to manipulate the bond market didn't work?
I knew about Nat Turner and most of these folks. I remember Reagan, Jerry Falwell and the “Faith and Family” and “Moral Majority” campaign movement, the 1980 Republican platform and the Republican “Southern Strategy”. I had a bumper sticker on my car that said “Hate is not a family value.” But I’ve never heard the details of the political aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion or a detailed summary of events post Brown vs Board of Education, the catalyst for the reduction and misappropriation of public school funds to support private schools, including religious schools, most with none of the credentials, standards or performance requirements that public schools have.
Looking at the long lens of interconnected history that you provided, I realized I could actually see how we got to this impossible position we are in today.
Thank you, Professor.
You might be interested to see the relationships/"coincidences" that occurred in the Civil Rights Movement. Vernon Johns was the pastor at Dexter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. His niece, Barbara, led the student walkout at her segregated school in Virginia that became one of the plaintiffs in Brown v Board of Education (in fact, due to threats, she moved from Virginia and finished high school in Alabama.) Vernon Johns was succeeded by the young Martin Luther King, Jr. as Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the local bus to a white person, saying her history lesson made her feel like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were holding down her shoulders. After Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and his mother, Mamie held an open casket funeral "so the world could see what they did to my boy" was when Rosa Parks became the figurehead against discrimination and the community organized for over a year to put economic pain to businesses that practiced Jim Crow apartheid.
It's important to know our history, and the unsung individuals who took some action, no matter how small, against injustice. Many of these changes were achieved due to the efforts of Black women.
Candace, apropos of nothing, HCR's and your mention of Jerry Falwell 1.0 reminded me of one of the best days of my life.
In the late 1970s, I lived in Lynchburg, VA, home of Jerry Falwell, who was, aside from his church members, reviled by the rest of the community, mainly because he was constantly trying to get the city officials to declare him a Very Special Boy who didn't have to abide by the ordinances governing the rest of us. But I digress.
One sunny morning, I left my home, which was not far from Falwell's walled compound, for work. As I came to the intersection where I would make a left turn onto a side street, Jerry Falwell, in his big black Suburban, ignored the stop sign and swung wide to make his right turn, screeching to a halt only inches from my front left fender.
He motioned for me to back up so he could complete his overshot turn. I stared him directly in the eye, not moving. He stared back, his face growing visibly red.
After a minute more, he angrily threw his Suburban in reverse and backed up to where he should have stopped in the first place.
I made my left turn and cheerily gave him a middle-finger wave as I passed by.
And that was one of the best days of my life.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍🏻👍🏻🖕
There's also the fact USian criminality is tacitly approved and gleefully enabled by the majority of the citizens, as proven beyond refutation and eternally preserved for infamy by the 2024 vote. Thus the fatal truth of USian history: “We have built our society on a foundation of not seeing,” a profound observation by Stephen Stromberg, an editor at The New York Times, sourced here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/opinion/epstein-files-victims-prince-andrew.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NlA.DG-h.frWCwUihCtbn&smid=url-share )
For what ? Make your life miserable by telling fables?
Sweet!
It is Professor Richardson's superpower!
Yikes. And Ali‘s addiction is worse than ever and it doesn’t look like there’s any help coming on the horizon.
Just as Neil Postman predicted in his classic 1985 book "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" and Lewis Mumford before him, spectacular and omnipresent entertainment has largely accomplished what the defunding of public education could not — an addicted and stunned populace. I see it wherever I go where virtually everyone is hunched over their phones, and they are not reading Postman or Mumford. AI will complete the job by freeing us of the need to think at all. That, as Gil Duran says, is what it is largely for.
I do wish more sociologists and researchers were documenting both what the design and use of mobile phones is costing us. Perhaps they are, and I'm not aware of it.
Those of us who read first, then were introduced to technology later on, didn't lose the ability to focus, the longer attention spans, the richness of interpersonal relationships the way subsequent generations have. Still, I can feel my own brain being 'googlized' with less patience for longer narratives that never used to bother me before. I look at young people today who literally cannot take their eyes off their little glowing friends, even as they cross busy intersections -- their addiction placing their own lives at risk -- and I wonder what will come of generations after this. I'm sure I can't be alone in wondering.
ICCT, your experience mirrors mine. My personal first attempt to address this is to (again) have a "throw down" book in the truck at all times. (I take several friends to medical appointments and wait for them, and now read instead of being on my phone.)
My bod: Postman's book is "Amusing Ourselves to Death," but it's about entertaining replacing education which is what has so largely happened.
And you no doubt know Postman's "Teaching as a Subversive Activity." No wonder our reigning cabal want to end education as it once was.
Gray, I'm a visual artist, but music is what moves me. Thousands of songs have taken up residence in my brain, such that most of my daily activities bring a song to mind. Your comment reminds me of Zager & Evans' "In the Year 2525." The only mistake in the lyrics was giving us thousands of years to become useless. I think we'll manage it in less than 50.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQfxi8V5FA
Thanks for your thoughts as well as the music video, Dale. I hadn't seen it. As you say, the song is way too optimistic, but so is your 50 years. How else do you explain a majority of voters so recently choosing a felonious rapist who tried to overthrow the government as president largely because they found him more entertaining than a seasoned but wonky opponent? They appreciated his sadism which entertainment fed them. As we are all finding, however, apocalyptic movies are not so entertaining when you are in the film.
Actually, just like Alfred E Newman predicted in 1986 30 millions liberals infected with a disease where there’s no cure…
Thank you Heather for connecting the history for us.
We are experiencing the voucher war here in Florida. The “Moms for Liberty” got elected to the school board here in Sarasota about a decade or more ago. Just this past week, we finally voted them OUT. It’s been a huge effort to push back on their book banning, anti-DEI,
voucher pushing, shaming, anti LGBTQ/trans pseudo-religious bigotry. They are all about power and money, privatizing schools and creating division. We’ve just elected a majority of school board members who believe in public education for all,equal opportunity, freedom of ideas. It is so refreshing.
MAGA and its’ very sick leader is going down, by its own shear depravity and cruelty.
Yeah, I feel like somebody connecting history to insanity. lol
The push for private schools is meant to not only insure the possibility to keep white students segregated but it is intended to create a new generation of the population that has been reeducated so to speak in a warped understanding of our nation’s history and founding principles. To to that effectively, the young must be targeted first. Texas has been instrumental in making significant changes to school textbooks as that state has the largest student population and has great influence on what textbooks say. We are seeing the results already with so many being undereducated in American history and how government was set up to function. European students know more about American history and government than American students. It’s the dumbing down of American society that is very scary to me.
I got a very good public school education from 1958 to 1970. However I saw the curriculum change a lot afterwards when my younger sister went through the same schools here in Louisiana. I saw her put her own children in private schools to segregate them from other races. Those kids did not get a decent education in those private schools. They can’t spell, know nothing about American history or government. Those kids are now in their 40s with kids of their own. Our nation’s population is far less educated in things that would allow them to be well informed citizens which is vital for a healthy democracy.
My parents moved us to a neighborhood in Omaha that was outside of the Omaha Public School system. The school district had about 10% of the number of students as OPS and was about 99% white. I never went to school with a person of color from K-12 except for one person from India and one Black girl (Bob Gibson's daughter). The school system was ranked in the top 50 in the US for several years, because "good students make good teachers." (That's a quote I picked up from the son of a math teacher in Maine.)
Oddly, my introduction to people of color was because my high school sociology teacher required us to meet with someone that wasn't a person of color and write a paper on the experience. I was able to arrange a meeting with a man from the Oglala Sioux tribe to "interview" him.
When I arrived at his house there were half a dozen or so adult Sioux men seated in a circle. They welcomed me, an absolute nobody, and we talked for about an hour an a half. A few of them had been part of the siege of the BIA building in Washington, DC. in November, 1972 and we talked about why they took over the building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Indian_Affairs_building_takeover
I learned more in that 90 minute conversation about how the Native Americans have been screwed over and over again, than in all of the classes.
HCR is the most knowledgeable historian on the plain's Native Americans as you know from reading her book-- Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre.
I began my teaching career in 1957 and Illinois was using Texas textbooks then and the remaining 30 years while I taught additionally in Iowa and Wisconsin.
Sadly Texas radical agenda of rewriting history and science in our schools textbooks has dumbed down the curriculum so that we have adults today and children being raised that are grossly undereducated.
Hey, there is Rhonda is here. Lol. Omg. and Rhonda looks like you haven’t been cured yet. In fact, it looks like the disease is now riddling your entire body. Soon you’ll be a corpse with nothing but hate when they open you up to do that autopsy
MAGA and for that matter regular Republicans generally oppose universal healthcare and free public education for all. They cost money rather than generating it and support people without making them work to earn the favor. Keeping people alive who may not be earning and encouraging people to learn more than they need to know in order to do necessary jobs is not how billionaires want to spend their taxes and how people who support billionaires earn their patronage. On the other hand most Democrats believe a healthy and educated population should be everyone’s goal and worth paying for with public money. RFK Jr believes healthy people don’t get sick so vaccines and food inspections just weaken the general health. Doing away with the Department of Education will let each State decide what their people need to learn. Decades of research and experience show the fallacies that two years of the Trump administration are revealing but they still have two more years to attack healthcare and knowledge. Keep yourself and your representatives informed and vote Blue.
Go to Canada and stay there and enjoy yourself. Please sanity to us.
"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty."
- James Madison
The problem is that the education system in this country is badly broken. Private school vouchers are not the answer but I'm not aware of compelling solutions coming from other directions.
There is no national education system. We have thousands of public school districts in the U.S., and most decisions about what’s taught and the educational materials that are used are made at the local and state levels. And funding for public education varies a lot - which is a big part of the problem.
At the risk of devolving into semantics, what you describe is our "national education system." IOW a non-system is still a system.
I am not suggesting greater federal control of education but the patchwork of state and local laws, taxes, school districts and cultures needs to do better. By almost every measure student performance is down and the severity of decline cascades on a kind of "dollar for dollar" basis down the economic ladder. At the moment, Mississippi schools are drawing national praise because more of their 6 and 7 year olds can now read. Better than not being able to read, but the standard is nauseatingly low.
The feds are part of the problem too, however indirectly. The number of malnourished kids attending school is *increasing* on our watch.
One by product of this system or non-system is that being in a "good" school district is ever more important for families, driving up the cost of housing and contributing to the housing crisis which affects young families as much as anybody.
Lots of problems, lots of impacts, lots of lives affected. Not a lot of effective solutions. And we're wasting time and money pouring money into voucher programs which is just one more way the rich get richer.
I agree with everything you said. It should not be the case that some school districts and states have far more resources for education than others. Here in NY, charter schools strip funding away from public schools, and there doesn’t seem to be limit on how many charter schools can be approved in a given district.
Democracy jeff I’ll translate that for you and one word. CHOICE. almost immediately as Trump took away the power of the Department of Education so states could instruct their students in whatever way they wished that would be absolutely more applicable to practical use for students living in that state not only the curriculum. but the means in which it’s taught. A quick example would be the state of Mississippi which ranked 50th in reading comprehension and math. And because it provided more applicable curriculum that the kids would be interested in that they learned so well that recently Mississippi surpass California this year in reading and math and move from 50th to 9th.
Education is a theoretical science pal. Too many educated derelicts here. You got an education and didn’t get the accolades or the financial rewards you thought they were gonna get.. and you are frantically reaching out for any defense mechanism to help you and all your friends get through the reality of their failures
By the way, you’re probably right I should’ve used. They got an education and they didn’t get the accolades and they weren’t gonna be happy with what they received and they are frantically reaching out. Does that sound better to you??
You made a comment which was number one ancient history and unfortunately for you you probably blocked me here anyway the education system in this country has been screwed by Democrats since 1979. There has been no education. There’s only been inculcation from Washington DC from the lakes of randy Wine Gardner and her teachers union which is 95% liberal 98% donates to the Democrat party and back in 1979 we were number one in the world in education 20 years later we were Number 18th and today were Number 40th. Nice job. Kids today no more about their genitalia from the left. Then they know about math and science and in fact, did you see the recent comment by a Berkeley professor he’s having to dumb down his classes to incoming freshman because they don’t even know how to read and solve simple math problems.
First, I'm not your pal.
Second, it is remarkable how little facts matter to you. You know nothing about me but are happy to pontificate about my level of success or lack thereof. And not just me, you threw in my friends for free!
JEFF, my sincere apologies if I didn’t recognize you by name but I don’t and I don’t remember ever replying to a comment of yours to be honest.
And I don’t do any other social media whatsoever occasionally very occasionally I go over to Twitter when there’s a big event going on but other than that, this is it I don’t do Facebook. I don’t do Instagram. I don’t do Snapchat. I do nothing else.
Never did Facebook in my life
What I recognize, though is that nobody here judges Donald Trump on his presidency not one person here not one they all judge him on his past Which I hate to say it once you’re once your president, your past is irrelevant What’s what’s irrelevant is every policy and law that is passed by your administration that affects every American until it either expires or is overturned, but it still has an impact and effect for a long time in general look at FDR for example
Biden’s term while it only lasted two years, will impact this country for the next decade with the vermin that they let in here with the illegals that they let in here without verification without vetting without giving a shit all they wanted was vote voters and they almost got them In one Local election 800,000 Undocumented immigrants vote voted, and the only thing that stopped that was the Supreme Court of that state that said nope you can’t do that. Otherwise Biden would’ve got his wish and the Democrats will get their wish if they continue to allow anybody to vote.
You see JEFF above us a lady called Lynn Shockey, who comes on here with accusations and insults with not a fact anywhere in sight that’s all it are accusations and insults, unsupported and unnecessary and childlike and what makes it worse then she blocked you from responding because the hell with free speech because she doesn’t wanna hear the response. So she runs in the house and mommy, mommy mommy please wipe my ass
And JEFF, since you’re not familiar with me or my posting, I am the voice of awareness to people here that only have heard half the story only care about half the story and believe that it’s the whole story.
And the new method of communication by a number of would I call cowards here is I’ll just go on that Substack and respond to RICK with some inane meaningless accusation, insulting remarks and then run into the house and ask mommy to wipe my ass because they don’t wanna hear a response
The epitome of cowardice
Au contraire, I am very familiar with your posting. I'm crushed that you don't recognize me after all this time. I've been around here since it wasn't even here (facebook).
I don’t do Facebook as I’ve said, but you should be honored that I don’t remember you because I remember all the shitheads that are here
I’m here and I’m listening, but you have to understand. This has been my experience here for the last two years, listening to people using the word that you just said pontificate about the ancient past. There is more hate in this Substack service that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. Irrational, meaningless, purposeless hate
I’m not pontificating. I’m pointing out facts. The fact is you can’t have socialistic inculcation of our youth and call it education I’ve been here for a couple years now, so don’t take it personally there jeff. You may be a swell guy, but there’s too many people living in the past here if your best friend is Julius Caesar or Socrates, you might as well get a little skiff and go out to see all by yourself. Today’s reality from the educational perspective is gone. So much so that the graduates from college today don’t even wanna work. They would prefer socialism that way everybody can suffer equally. If you have an alternate opinion, feel free to voice it here that’s what this blog is for ostensibly but what it’s turned into is a bunch of liberal, leaning lemmings with their nose up to people’s ass in front of them with nobody disagreeing with anything that Heather says, and they bow and genuflect, even though she doesn’t tell them the the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She tells you what she wants you to know from her liberal activist perspective, using nothing but links from radical liberal sources. And the results speak for themselves.
I wonder if there's a typo here. You say that Texas vouchers are going to families with less than twice the poverty level income. That's a group of families with below median income. Is that correct?
I kept rereading that line thinking I missed something. Thanks - thinking it’s a typo.
Kathleen, there are two ways to measure "median income." The official U.S. median income is $119, 896, but that is skewed by the super-rich who don’t necessarily go to work every day. The median income for full-time workers is $64,220/year. The current federal poverty level for a family of four is an annual income of $33,000.00, so the median income of working families is, indeed, less that twice the poverty level.
Still, in light of that breakdown, I don't get the significance of the original statement. I suppose it could be argued that families with incomes of $66 thousand need a lot less financial help than families with incomes of half that. But it's still not a relevant datapoint, in my opinion.
I'm 76, and attended Public School in San Francisco in the early 1960s. It was fantastic for us "gifted" kids who were given every modest advantage available then, trips to the opera, special math and science clubs, in which girls like me were welcome, and first rate teachers. My junior high school was the same, and high school, even more so. All public! Classes often had 40 students or more. The only private schools then were Catholic schools. Ah, "radical left" San Francisco! It was great!
I grew up in a white and waspy suburb of Detroit - and also had an excellent education through high school (probably because school finding was based on property taxes). Lots of writing, research, reading the classics, music, languages, theatre, etc. The private schools were either Catholic or super exclusive and for the very rich. Things definitely changed -- years later when my husband would hire a new and young employee -- though smart -- he found the person could not even compose a basic business letter. Due to the complete lack of diversity in my schools it became clear to me that we were still a segregated area. We raised our son in Manhattan - and from the get-go he went to school with people of a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds - so that is what normal is to him.
My best friend also attended public School in San Francisco in the 50's and 60's. He had nothing but good things to say about the schools.
Apropos of nothing, him and his bicycle buddies used to throw rocks off the Golden Gate Bridge at the ships passing under the bridge. One of the Captains called the SFPD and they chased the boys halfway across the bridge. They escaped by going the opposite direction from the police cars. Plus they knew the roads really well.
That was the end of the rock throwing off the bridge.
The history of Turner fighting for equality and fast forward to the present, just goes to prove that we never have been a nice country.
In bitter truth, the United States government has always been a criminal organization. Just ask the First Nations people. Or the striking coal miners it attacked with field artillery and bombing planes. Or the ghosts of the Triangle Shirtwaist dead, who still haunt the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, where they died after leaping from windows to escape the fire and falling eight or 10 storeys to splatter on the pavement. Actually just ask the late Renee Good and the late Alex Pretti...
That said, I am now convinced that what we are seeing -- the conduct of the ChristoNazi Regime, the cunningly perfected, always plausibly deniable collaboration of the Democrats and the embrace of tyranny implicit in the refusal of the people to (effectively) resist -- is the true face of the (real) "America."
Thus the Unified Reich -- like the Third Reich that fathered it -- will not be overthrown save by invasion, and that only if the liberators first achieve the scientifically impossible miracle of doing what it is alleged some flights of UFOs have done, paralyzing the USian CBR arsenal so that the Regime cannot destroy the world to avoid defeat, surrender, the long-deserved, zero-tolerance vengeance of partisans and the retributive justice to be meted out by new judicial authorities.
My oldest half-brother, my father's first-born son and one of the founding directors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said before he died that he believed Trump's 2016 victory was literally the beginning of the end of the world. Until the ChristoNazis flexed their judicial omnipotence, I believed there was some hope our species might survive. Now I believe he spoke prophetic truth.
As a now-retired employee of the same agency I appreciate that.
You then would know of whom I speak. (He was of course purged by Reagan.)
Indeed. By reputation and the esteem held by many of those I worked with.
I started at the very end of the Reagan administration.
I reflected on that as I read the discussion about "vouchers." I worked in Grants Administration, where we paid a lot of attention to oversight. These were, after all, funds appropriated for specified use.
Any recipient who mismanaged or misspent the funds were subject to enforcement action, including repayment of funds.
That's why I was puzzled as to how the recipient of voucher $$ could just use the money as they liked.
One of the unwritten but very real rules of the Trumpenführer's New Order is that the ChristoNazis can literally do anything they damn well please.
Yes. A very different world from the one I worked in.
I was lucky to be able to retire before the Trump jackbooted blitzkrieg.
I can dig it. There is a song in there somewhere.
I often wonder what life would be like today if John Wilkes Booth had never been born.
And what it would be like if Al Gore had become president.
I've wondered that many times. How different American would be. Gore would never have invaded Iraq, for one thing and probably not invaded Afghanistan as well.
And how much healthier the planet would be!
Or what if so many voters hadn't stayed home in 2016?
We could certainly go on with this forever!
Booth was a relative of mine on my Mother's side. Not something I'm proud of.
In September of 1842 a hot tempered Irish-born James Shields challenged a 33 yo Abe to a duel after his sharp-tongued girlfriend Mary amplified Abe's critiques of James' tax policies, and then continued to trash-talk James personally, in series of letters to a local Whig paper. Abe took the blame but was in a difficult position to retract Mary's words - had he so wished.
As their 'seconds' stood-by that fateful Sept 22nd on Sunflower Island, located in the middle of the Mississippi and beyond jurisdiction of local laws against duelling, James and Abe, our future national leadership, stood mano a mano with broadswords under a tree as they sought final satisfaction - or at least to somehow save their 'honor' from humiliation.
As they exchanged what might be their final words, Lincoln more politely than previously, one assumes, reached over and cut away some potentially obstructive branches - well above the reach of the much shorter Shields. The pursuit of satisfaction continued with formal written query and response, and in the end did not come to blows.
Excerpt from the Alton Telegraph, Oct 1, 1842:
"... We recur to this matter with pain and the deepest regret. Both [Shields and Lincoln] are, and have been, for a long time, our personal friends. Both we have ever John Bailhache, Editor of the Alton Telegraph esteemed in all the private relations of life, and consequently regret that what we consider an imperative sense of duty we owe to the public, compels us to recur to the disgraceful and unfortunate occurrence at all.
We, however, consider that these gentlemen have both violated the laws of the country, and insist that neither their influence, their respectability, nor their private worth should save them from being made a menable [sic] to those laws they have violated. Both of them are lawyers - both have been Legislators of this State, and aided in the construction of laws for the protection of society - both exercise on small influence in community - all of which, in our estimation, aggravates instead of mitigating their offense.
>>>Why, therefore, they should be permitted to escape punishment, while a friendless, penniless, and obscure person, for a much less offense, is hurried to the cells of our county jail, forced through a trial, with scarcely the forms of law, and finally immured within the dreary walls of a Penitentiary, we are at a loss to conjecture. It is a partial and disreputable administration of justice, which, though in accordance with the spirit of the age, we must solemnly protest against.
Wealth, influence, and rank can trample upon the laws with impunity; while poverty is scarcely permitted to utter a word in its defense if charged with crime in our miscalled temples of justice. <<<" [emphasis mine]
-https://madison.illinoisgenweb.org/lincoln/lincoln_shields_duel.html
In 1861 Lincoln asked James Shields to be a Brigadier General in the Union Army.
My son is another James Shields, but there are things in his education that supersede any supposed romance of 'honor' or duel. History is about to rhyme and he's draft age.
You might not be here had he never been born. And that itself would have caused untold other "ripples".
If the "multiverse" is real, there are many worlds where (1) John Wiles Booth wasn't born, (2) where he failed, (3) the whole conspiracy succeeded, (4) Andrew Johnson was convicted after impeachment.
Butterfly Effect. Imagine how it would have rippled through all our (and world) subsequent history. I can't help thinking it would have improved things on the whole. I also imagine, if we were born at all, we'd be in a very different world.
Master's Thesis: 1986, "Education Vouchers: The issue of family choice in American Education." College of Urban and.Public Affairs, University of New Orleans. Sadly 😥 40 Years ago I predicted THIS! College's of Education at the time were not even considering vouchers and I studied voucher systems within a College of Public Affairs and "Urban Studies" that ALLOWED the academic freedom to do so! I examined several ECONOMIC Voucher Models with Religion, Racial Segregation and Civil Rights in contrast to urban public school bureaucracies under political attack, "A Nation at Risk" at the time. In "Searching for SocIal Justice" published 2014, I concluded that resistance to the "privatization" efforts by right wing politicians was typically "silenced." Now there are outright efforts to ERASE History.
#shorts - Environmental Activist, Erin Brockovich, is helping Americans to combat the corrosion of Data Centers cutting corners (8/21/26)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcT78OuEjXf/?igsi=MWxlaWRvdzJ0MDhsag==
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There’s an interview with her on The New Yorker web site about that that’s free to listen to without a subscription also.