WELL, TWITTER: Twitter defends not blocking Iran leader’s tweets after blocking Trump’s “Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s tweets call for ‘elimination’ of Israel.”
A little genocide talk among friends isn’t threatening or hateful, unlike discussing the potential benefits of HCQ, which is practically Hitler.
NOTHING SUSPICIOUS HERE, MOVE ALONG: Obama Tells Packed Crowds At Lewis’ Funeral That Mail-In Ballots Needed ‘So People Don’t Get Sick.’
CUTTING THE CORD: Comcast lost 477,000 cable-TV customers in Q2 amid 12% drop in revenue.
I figured I’d miss pro sports when we cut the cord unless I paid extra for streaming season passes, but then I never missed them enough to pay up.
THEY WERE CALLED ‘POLITICAL OFFICERS’ IN THE SOVIET UNION: At the Washington Post, the title is “Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion.” I wonder if she will have rewrite authority to ensure strict compliance with the party line in every story? Remember Ivan Putin in “Hunt for Red October”?
FOUR MAIN TAKEAWAYS FROM THE HOUSE’S BIG TECH ANTITRUST SIDESHOW:
As Twitter’s Jack Dorsey buckles to finger-wagging commentators, Mark Zuckerberg has provided a platform largely dominated by conservative news and viewpoints. The thanks Zuckerberg receives? Being quizzed about taking down Donald Trump Jr’s Twitter account. Zuckerberg is by no means perfect, or let’s face it, even human, but right now he’s the only thing standing between free expression and a media and Congress eager to regulate his platform out of existence.
Read the whole thing.
IS THIS THE SANEST MAN IN OREGON? Billy J. Williams is the U.S. Attorney for Oregon. How he responds to narrative-pushing journalists in a recent interview about the continuing violence in Portland is a model of straight talking, fact-based toughness.
BAN ALL THE HISTORY! Name Change Underway At Sir Francis Drake High School.
WHAT DOES GOD SAY ABOUT RACE? There is a long-standing liberal stereotype about Southern Baptist preachers that became stale quite a while ago. So this Maryland pastor’s recent two-part sermon on God and race may shock some folks, but at least they’ll gain a more accurate understanding. I suspect that most Americans, regardless of their faith or lack thereof, hold similar views, that skin color is irrelevant. Just ignore the lame jokes.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Chinese Immigrant Sues University for Sanctioning Tiananmen Post. “Fordham threatened student for posing with legal rifle.”
DAVID HENDERSON: The Virus May Strike Teachers Unions: What happens when they refuse to do their jobs and it turns out home-schoolers are better at it anyway?
If you have school-age children, you may be wondering if they’ll ever get an education. On Tuesday the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest education union, threatened “safety strikes” if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. Some state and local governments are insisting that public K-12 schooling this fall be conducted online three to five days a week and imposing stringent conditions on those students who actually make it to the classroom.
Yet there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. First, many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.
Second, once the pandemic ends, many parents, perhaps millions, will have a new appreciation of how mediocre a job the public schools were doing. They will continue home-schooling, switch to a private school, or push hard to end restrictions on the growth of charter schools. Third, as schools sit empty and homebound teachers draw their regular salaries for less effective work, there will be more opposition to more funding for public schools, which, in turn, will make local school boards amenable to lower-cost options such as charter schools. . . .
Public schools are dominant because they don’t need to compete for funds. Taxpayers are forced to finance them. If a family decides to take a child out of the local public school, thereby saving the school board the cost of educating that child, the family gets no tax break, no rebate. If a family finds a cheap private school that charges $8,000 in annual tuition, sending the child there makes economic sense only if the family values the private education by at least $8,000 more than they value the public education. That’s a high hurdle for most parents.
But with public schools’ shift to online instruction, the equation changes dramatically for two reasons. First, the public schools have done a poor job of adjusting to the new reality. Second, and possibly more important, online instruction eliminates arguably the most valuable service provided by public schools: child care. On net, therefore, the value of the online public school is much lower, especially for young children, than the value of in-person public school.
Many will opt instead to home-school. This summer, parents have had time to plan for the fall. Many of them are forming “learning pods,” which are small groups of families getting together to hire a teacher or a tutor to teach their kids.
What if, as I predict, home-schooling works, on average, better than the public schools before the pandemic? Once the pandemic ends, many parents will want to continue with home-schooling. A poll taken in May of 626 parents found 40.8% of them saying they were more likely than before the pandemic to enroll their child in “a home school, a neighborhood home-school co-op, or a virtual school” once the lockdowns ended. There are now about 56 million children in K-12 schools. Before the pandemic, an estimated two million children were home-schooled. If even a third of the 40.8% of parents who said they might take it up followed through, the number of home-schooled children would almost quadruple.
Even many who don’t home-school will push for an expansion of charter schools, which tend to be responsive to parents and can more easily fire poor teachers.
That’s the dream.
THE ‘MOMS’ WERE MOSTLY JUST ANTIFA IN YELLOW SHIRTS, ANYWAY: The Left Eats Their Own, Portland Edition: Wall of Moms Collapses, Accused of Anti-Blackness.
THAT’S ENTIRELY RATIONAL: CBS News Poll Says 70% Of Americans Would Wait To Get COVID-19 Vaccine, Or Wouldn’t Get One At All. It’s a rushed vaccine for a disease that isn’t all that dangerous in most people. It’s not like an Ebola vaccine. And did I mention it’s being rushed? Unless you’re at high risk, the vaccine won’t change the odds much for you even if it works perfectly. And when you factor in the risk that it will be dangerous — did I mention it’s being rushed? — people aren’t crazy to forego it. And I say that as a guy who gets vaccinated for everything. It’s just risk analysis math.
FROM JEAN RABE: The Dead of Winter: A Piper Blackwell Mystery.
In a deceptively peaceful county, a murderer hides in plain sight…
Fifty-eight minutes into her first day on the job, twenty-three-year-old Sheriff Piper Blackwell is faced with a grisly murder—the victim artfully posed amid decorations on his lawn. Drawing on former military training, Piper must prove herself worthy of the sheriff’s badge, and that won’t be easy.
Chief Deputy Oren Rosenberg, Piper’s opponent in the recent election, doesn’t like her and wants her to fail. She doesn’t like him either, but she needs Oren to help catch the killer before another victim is discovered. Too late!
As Piper leads the manhunt, another crisis hits close to home. Her father, the previous sheriff, is fighting for his life, and she is torn between family and duty. Facing personal and professional threats, Piper has to weather a raging storm, keep the sheriff’s department from crumbling around her, and reel in a killer during the most brutal winter sleepy Spencer County, Indiana, has experienced.
*I enjoyed it!*
AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: Teachers Refusing To Go Back In The Fall Launch ‘Every Child Left Behind’ Movement.
JUST READ IT: Clouds of Summer Obscure the Coming Thunder of November.
HOW’S ABOUT NO? The Misery Compact.
PEOPLE ARE HOPING THE THIRD BOX WILL FIX IT: Biden’s Civil War.
WELL. WE WILL NEVER AGAIN BE INNOCENT ABOUT OUR CORRUPT POLITICIANS. NOT BEING INNOCENT ABOUT VOTE BY FRAUD MAIL WOULD ALSO HELP: Coronavirus and the Ceremony of Innocence.
MORT THE WART, CLASSLESS AND EVIL AS USUAL: Obama Uses Eulogy for John Lewis to Attack Trump Admin.
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