July 30, 2026

TONY WOODLIEF: ‘Restorative Justice’ Brings Violent Schools.

The Education Department will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination, it announced on July 23. This is a welcome change, but it won’t automatically restore order in the thousands of schools pressured by the Obama and Biden administrations into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective is race equity. Many such programs have come at the cost of student safety and education.

These methods go by many names, like “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and, most telling, “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them, say, to hit another student or disobey a teacher. Students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students, where they can share their feelings, and others in the circle can talk with them about how peace in the community might be restored.

Reality often falls short of this vision. Concerns about restorative justice emerged soon after the Obama administration began pushing it. Public schools in Philadelphia that implemented it experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement,” Manhattan Institute researchers observed in 2017. Other cities experienced similar results.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

CATCHING UP WITH 1998: CENTCOM Just Noticing Troop Cell Phones Are a Problem. “This full-blown drooling idiot soldier has a video of the entire inside of his command hut, makes sure he gets shots of all the desks and monitors as he’s swinging on his protective gear at a run. With sirens blaring, he throws open the door to charge outside into the darkness and proceeds to show anyone watching how to get to the bunker and how it, too, is protected from incoming. And this soldier, of the tiny, TINY brain, thought this was a good thing to load to social media for the world to see.”

Posted at 2:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT USED TO BE MY FAVORITE, MUST-READ MAGAZINE…:

…but that was 20 years ago or longer.

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: California’s Impending Energy Disaster Nobody Talks About. “When and if the world’s fourth-largest economy implodes, you’ll be able to say, ‘I told you so,’ thanks to a chilling report today from two experts in oil refining and energy production.”

Posted at 2:18 pm by Stephen Green

FLASHBACK:

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Gets $1.6 Billion US Space Force Order for 18 Falcon 9 Launches.

The 18 missions were assigned to SpaceX ‌across two task orders under ‌the U.S. Space Force’s flagship launch procurement program, in which SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue ⁠Origin and ⁠other U.S. launch firms inducted into the program jockey for lucrative mission ​assignments.

SpaceX has bagged at least $7 billion worth of Pentagon contracts this year as the Trump administration has laid groundwork for its Golden Dome missile defense shield, a roughly $185 billion multi-year endeavor heavily featuring Elon ​Musk’s launch and satellite company.

SpaceX in May won $6.5 billion worth of satellite contracts from the ⁠U.S. ⁠Space Force. That included $4.16 billion ⁠for a ​network of airborne moving target indicator satellites and $2.29 billion three days later for communications satellites ​that can pass data between ⁠missile warning and tracking sensors to interceptors in near real time.

The SpaceX award announced on Wednesday was part of an “unprecedented two-month acquisition timeline,” Space Force acquisition official Eric Zarybnisky said in a news release. For years, the service has sought to ramp up the pace with which ⁠it buys spacecraft and rocket launches from the private sector.

For perspective, that’s a little under $90 million per launch — which sits at the low end for military launches, and well below typical ULA or Blue Origin prices.

And 18 launches is only six or seven weeks worth of Falcon 9 launches at the current cadence.

Incredible.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN FAVOR OF LOCKDOWNS:

In case you don’t, here’s how fast the narrative flipped: Kern County doctors use disputed data to suggest Stay Home orders be lifted.

But at the same time, some doctors say the death rate of COVID-19 isn’t nearly as high as officials are leading the public to believe, and are now calling for the stay home orders to end, and the economy to be reopened.

“There are widespread cases, and a small amount of death,” said Dr. Dan Erickson of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County. “It’s similar to the flu, as a matter of fact.”

Dr. Erickson, along with colleague Dr. Artin Massihi, held a news conference earlier this week that is now going viral. They even take shots at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“We’re actually seeing the patients,” said Dr. Massihi. “Dr. Fauci hasn’t seen a patient in 20 years.”

YouTube has since removed the video, saying in a statement that they “quickly remove flagged content that violate our community guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.”

—L.A.’s ABC7, April 29th, 2020.

Fast-forward to the beginning of June 2020: The Apex of the Pivot.


UPDATE: Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance. For months, health experts told Americans to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests.

—Politico, June 4th, 2020.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SCENES FROM THE COUNTER-RECONQUISTA:

Portugal is doing much better, but it also isn’t governed by socialists.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green

THE ONLY PROBLEM IS, THE REPUBLICANS ARE THE DEMOCRATS’: Kurt Schlichter: The Democrats Are the Republicans’ Secret Weapon.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a lot of media hits and found that I keep facing the same question, even from otherwise friendly interviewers. And it’s a good question.

“Kurt, what are the Republicans offering the voters as a solution to huge problems like affordability, war, and election integrity?”

And my answer is… I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. I know that we’ve got a bunch of poncy dorks running out the clock in the Senate after their constituencies have rejected them for their track record of failure, posturing and posing, and making sure that we absolutely don’t get anything done like the SAVE Act because if true conservatism means anything, it means not doing what conservatives actually want done. Or something.

We’ve got the House. We’ve got the Senate. Lord knows we’ve got the presidency. We even seem to have the Supreme Court. And what do we have to show for it? Actually, a hell of a lot. Donald Trump’s track record is incredible. He’s done more and achieved more and rolled back more of the communist march through our institutions than any president, including the glorious Ronald Reagan, ever dreamed of. But you know what? That was last week. Dudes, what have you done for us lately? That’s the question you’ve always got to answer as a political party, and the answer right now is “Diddly squat.”

Thune, Cornyn, et al. are traitors to their party, and possibly to America. But:

It’s awful to have to run on a platform of “Yeah, we suck but look at those guys—that’s some serious sucking.” But here’s the thing. While we suck, they seriously suck. They supersuck. They are a festival of socialist sucking of such insane intensity that it redefines the concept of sucking such that Stephen Hawking would need to do mathematical calculations otherwise applicable to a black hole to fully express the totality of their sucking.

Let’s look at what the new pinkos on the block had to say on last weekend’s Sunday morning shows. The Democratic Socialists of America is trying to engineer a hostile takeover as they somehow believe that the current crop of Democrats isn’t socialist enough. What’s on their agenda? It’s kind of astonishing that they say it out loud. Their chair, a behemoth called Megan Romer who looks exactly like you would expect the leader of the DSA to look like, came out against having a Senate, having a president, having a Pentagon, having borders, and having prisons. She didn’t hide it—obviously, hiding is not her strong suit—but instead proudly admitted it. This is the cutting edge of the Democrat Party. Congrats, guys. Even John Fetterman, who I used to consider a leftist and now he’s pretty much Genghis Khan in comparison to the rest of his party, called it “anarchy” and asked why the Democrats can’t call out the DSA.

True enough. Read the whole things.

Posted at 1:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds