Author Archive: Stephen Green
February 15, 2023
JOANNE JACOBS: ‘Challenging’ students with disabilities are sent home (but not suspended).
Schools aren’t supposed to suspend special-needs students if their misbehavior is related to their disability. But some schools use “informal removals” to send challenging students home early or limit their school hours, writes Erica L. Green in the New York Times.
Another tactic is “transfers to nowhere,” charged the National Disability Rights Network in a report last year. Students are sent to programs that don’t exist, have no seats or won’t accept them.
Read the whole thing.
PAULA BOLYARD: Important Takeaways from Ohio Gov’s Train Derailment Briefing, Including a Shocking Revelation. “One of the most astounding revelations from the press conference (watch below) was that the train was not classified as carrying hazardous chemicals.”
HMM: Taiwan’s Tech King to Nancy Pelosi: U.S. Is in Over Its Head.
Chang, the 91-year-old founder of the chipmaking goliath TSMC, used a luncheon at Taiwan’s presidential palace to deliver a biting soliloquy to Pelosi and other visiting American lawmakers about the new industrial policy emerging in the United States. In comments that have not previously been reported in detail, Chang took aim at the CHIPS and Science Act and its $52 billion package of subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing.
…
With Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, looking on, the billionaire entrepreneur pressed Pelosi with sobering questions about the CHIPS law — and whether the policy represented a genuine commitment to supporting advanced industry or an impulsive attempt by the United States to seize a piece of a lucrative global market.Chang said he was pleased that his company could benefit from the subsidies; TSMC already had a major development project underway in Arizona. But did the United States really think it could buy itself a powerhouse chipmaking industry, just like that?
To be fair, we used to have one. But Intel infamously took a pass on powering the original iPhone, and ended up ceding the entire silicon growth sector — low-power/high-efficiency mobile CPUs — to rivals like Taiwan Semi and Samsung.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Parents Should Be Able to Sue Public Schools for Malpractice. “The familiar refrain from the teachers’ unions is that everything can be fixed with more money, as if all districts were operating on shoestring budgets. As Athena notes in her post, Baltimore public schools aren’t exactly searching the couch cushions for loose change.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools.
Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.”
But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient.
Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago.
Elsewhere: Outrage on Twitter after Baltimore reveals zero students proficient in math across 23 schools.
ANOTHER LEFTY LIKE HER GRANDFATHER: Benito Mussolini’s Granddaughter Does LGBTQ+++™ Propaganda Now.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO JUSTIFY “DENAZIFYING” A NEIGHBORING COUNTRY WHEN YOU KEEP ACTING LIKE NAZIS: Russia deports thousands of Ukrainian children. Investigators say that’s a war crime.
The Russian government is operating a systematic network of at least 40 child custody centers for thousands of Ukrainian children, a potential war crime, according to a new report by Yale University researchers in a collaboration with the U.S. State Department in a program to hold Russia accountable.
The report, “Russia’s Systematic Program for the Re-Education and Adoption of Ukrainian Children,” describes a system of holding facilities that stretch from the Black Sea coast to Siberia.
“This is not one rogue camp, this is not one rogue mayor or governor,” says Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. “It is a massive logistical undertaking that does not happen by accident.”
Raymond’s team of researchers is tackling one of the most explosive issues of the war. Ukrainian officials say Russia has evacuated thousands of Ukrainian children without parental consent.
Russian officials do not deny Ukrainian children are now in Russia, but insist the camps are part of a vast humanitarian project for abandoned, war-traumatized orphans and have been surprisingly public with social media messaging aimed at a Russian audience. Russia does not, however, acknowledge how many children are in Russia or where they are housed.
Potemkin childcare.
Previously: Hitler’s Lebensborn Children: Kidnappings in German-Occupied Poland.
ELON MUSK: We’re Curbing Starlink’s Use in Ukraine to Prevent WWIII.
Elon Musk this weekend defended SpaceX’s decision to curtail Ukraine’s use of the Starlink satellite internet system to launch drone strikes against Russia, citing the threat of “escalation.”
“Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed,” Musk wrote(Opens in a new window). “But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.”
Days earlier, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell confirmed the company had taken steps to limit the Ukrainian military’s ability to use Starlink to pilot unmanned drones on the frontlines of the war. “It was never intended to be weaponized,” Shotwell said of Starlink’s battlefield uses. “On the other hand, they are trying to fight for their country.”
The best way to prevent escalation is to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. But Ukraine doesn’t have the weapons, Russia hasn’t been able to generate the combat power, and Biden doesn’t have the diplomatic chops.
So it looks like we’re stuck with Putin’s stupid war for a good while longer.
I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER BIDEN TAKING A VICTORY LAP OVER INFLATION IN HIS LATEST STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS: Inflation Barely Slowed in January, but the Underlying Numbers Are Still Worrisome.
BRANDON MORSE: Chelsea Handler Makes ‘Comedy’ Skit About the Life of a Childless Woman but It Reeks of Sadness. “The entire skit is supposed to be a knock on women who have kids. Handler, like many women who chose childlessness for selfish pursuits, is probably getting dosed with pictures of her friends and family having moments with their children. She’s consistently hearing about how having children makes life far more fulfilling and it’s not actually sitting well with her.”
THE NEW ANTI-RACISM LOOKS AN AWFUL LOT LIKE THE OLD RACISM: Pentagon’s Anti-White Diversity Chief Comes up With a Novel Way to Excuse Her Own Racism.
STATE-SPONSORED CHILD MUTILATION: Johns Hopkins backs Maryland bill to fund child sex changes, face and tracheal surgeries. “These treatments include puberty blockers for children, hormone therapy, voice alterations and therapy, mastectomies, breast augmentations, laser scar treatments, and genital surgeries, among others.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Barney the Dinosaur Is Getting Rebooted… With an Excruciating Twist. “Barney the Dinosaur is coming back but, like a zombie, worse than before and with a hunger for brains.”
Plus:
- Another dude in a dress explaining periods.
- There’s nothing worse than those evil SOBs who cure blindness.
- You’ll never believe what costs more than gas in some places.
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
CDR SALAMANDER: We Have a Lot of Things to Relearn.
Thinking of the American military’s readiness for the next large war, there is rightfully a lot of concern that after a couple of decades of imperial policing wars in Central and Southwest Asia, that not only are we ill-equipped for a major peer conflict ashore, but that we’ve forgotten much of what is considered fundamental aspects of significant force-on-force combat.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has offered some good reminders, from the utility of armor, artillery, and logistics that clever peace time theorists were wishing away, but on the land side of the equation, what are some other critical capabilities that we have had the luxury of generations to forget about?
Over at the Modern War Institute, they have a reminder of something I think most of us have not given much thought to recently; the operational level fighting retreat.
Read the whole thing.
THE ATLANTIC: The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles. “In an electrified America, charging access may become a status symbol. Because the first wave of new EVs have been so expensive, America’s affluent tax brackets made up the bulk of early adopters. The same people are also those most likely to be able to afford their own homes and install a charger that can power up their car overnight. As EV adoption reaches mainstream levels—which is happening at rates outpacing even rosy expert predictions—lots of new electric drivers will be the same urban dwellers that have been priced out of their local housing market, creating two classes of EV owners.”
Plus: “The experience of owning, charging, and driving an electric vehicle makes the rising inequality of America more visible in new and subtle ways.”
The mandated electrification of cars and trucks is a cause of rising inequality — by design.
SOFT TARGET: The New York Times Has an Embarrassing Epiphany About ‘Gun-free Zones.’
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): They should have followed the science.
UH-HUH: All those spy balloons have had only a ‘limited’ benefit for China, White House claims,
“We assess at this time these balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC’s other intelligence platforms used over the United States,” Kirby said Monday at a White House briefing.
The US has so far downed four flying objects in just over a week, starting with an alleged Chinese spy balloon whose journey across the country raised national security questions. China contends the balloon had no espionage purpose and was just collecting weather data.
Three more objects have since been brought down — one over Alaska on Friday, in northern Canada on Saturday and in Michigan on Sunday. Officials have stopped short of saying what the three much smaller objects are or whether they think there’s a link between them and the Chinese balloon.
Kirby said Monday that recovery efforts were still continuing and noted the objects shot down over Alaska and Canada were in remote areas and that the object downed over Lake Huron “now lies in what is probably very deep water.”
He said officials still “have not yet been able to definitively assess what these most recent objects are.”
If the benefit Beijing was looking for was to gauge the mettle of our commander-in-chief, those balloons have been immeasurably valuable.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Physician of the Future—Dumber, Woker, and More Likely to Kill You. “I’m just saying that an across-the-board lowering of entrance standards for medical school MIGHT be fraught with unpleasant consequences. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think it should be more difficult to become a physician, not easier.”
HMM: SpaceX rolls naked Starship prototype to test site.
Aside from a range of smaller design changes, Ship 26 has three main differences relative to most prior Starships. First, it has zero heat shield tiles. Since the 2020-2021 period of suborbital Starship flight testing, all finished ships (S20, S21, S22, S24, S25) have been fitted with ~10,000 black, ceramic heat shield tiles. Eventually, those tiles will (theoretically) protect Starships from the intense heat created by reentering Earth’s atmosphere at orbital velocity.
Ship 26 also has no flaps. Since SpaceX first fully assembled a Starship in October 2020, every ship the company has completed (SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, SN15, SN16, S20, S21, S22, S24, S25) has had four large flaps and form-fitting ‘aerocovers’ installed. Starships need flaps to steer and orient themselves during orbital reentries. They also need flaps to control themselves during exotic landing maneuvers, which require ships to free-fall belly-down (like a human skydiver) and aggressively flip into a vertical orientation for propulsive landings.
Finally, and most confusingly, Ship 26 has no payload bay of any kind. The end result is a smooth, featureless Starship that looks like a steel bullet, can’t return to Earth, and can’t deploy satellites. Combined, the fact it exists at all almost seems like an elaborate, multi-month mistake. But SpaceX clearly intended to build Ship 26 and is now preparing to qualify it for flight.
Nobody outside of SpaceX knows what Ship 26 is and they aren’t talking.