Another Army Football Player Goes To The Pros

I am against this policy that lets academy athletes play professional sports instead of serving as lieutenants, but then again, no one asked for my opinion when crafting that policy.  Looks like at least one Army football player from this year's class will be in the NFL, perhaps more:

Army linebacker Andre Carter II went undrafted but ended up signing a free agent deal with the Minnesota Vikings on Saturday night.

The edge rusher did not have his name called through seven rounds and 259 selections in the three-day NFL Draft, hosted in Kansas City. Touted by some as a late first-round or second-round choice, Carter signed a free agent deal with the Vikings within an hour of the draft's conclusion...

Army has five other NFL-eligible players, some of whom may get signed as free agents in the coming days: defensive back Marquel Broughton; defensive lineman Kwabena Bonsu; defensive wide receiver Braheam Murphy; cornerback Isaiah Morris; and, running back Maurice Bellan. Carter and his teammates participated in a Pro Day at West Point on March 16, when 32 NFL scouts from 27 teams were on hand.

Army has four active NFL players, all of whom were undrafted free agents: Seahawks linebacker Jon Rhattigan; Chiefs linebacker Cole Christiansen; Steelers defensive back Elijah Riley; and, Eagles offensive lineman Brett Roth.

All Your Children Are Belong To Us

Seems like schools only want parental involvement when it involves fundraising, volunteering, or being a teacher's "secret pal" for gifts.  Certainly don't want those parents to know what's going on with their kids!

The teachers claim they were mandated under the K-8 school district's policies to accept a child's transgender or gender diverse identity without hesitation and to hide it from families. They said they were instructed to use students' preferred names and pronouns in school, but to revert to their biological pronouns and given names when speaking with their parents.

When encountering "a suspicious parent," teachers were instructed to reply that they were allowed only to discuss "information regarding the student’s behavior as it relates to school, class rules, assignments, etc.," according to the suit.

I hope these teachers win their case, but I'm not holding out much hope here in the Democratik Peoples Republik of Kalifornia.

Equitable Grading

If "equitable grading" meant only not counting non-academic issues (behavior, attendance, bringing in a box of Kleenex for everyone to use) as part of a grade, I'd be all for it:

The Wall Street Journal reports on a growing trend in high schools to ditch homework and move to an “equitable grading” system, which is supposed to measure whether a student knows the classroom material by the end of a term without penalties for behavior like skipping class...

But some students and teachers in Las Vegas claim that some kids are gaming the system and that equitable grading ignores accountability.

This goes back to my perennial question, what does a grade signify?  I won't repeat here what I wrote 4 years ago, but my view on the topic hasn't changed.

My issues with so-called equitable grading start with treating grades like rewards or motivational tools rather than as measures of performance; for example, making the minimum grade that can be given (as opposed to earned) on a test a 50%, even if a student never takes the test, so that it's almost mathematically impossible to fail a course.  This is good if your sole reason for living is to get more students a passing grade than to ensure they learn something, but I'm not one of those people.

If you have to use "equitable" as a modifier, you know the result won't be a good one.

Innumeracy

It's bad enough to be so wrong about the relative sizes of different minority groups in the population; the problem is that too many people, both in and out of government, make decisions based on these exceedingly wrong estimates:

Any Bets On Who's Going To Win This Case?

My dime is on FIRE:

Today, two students represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued their Michigan school district for viewpoint discrimination after they were forbidden from wearing apparel critical of President Joe Biden. 

“Criticism of the president is core political speech protected by the First Amendment,” said FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick. “Whether it’s a Biden sticker, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirt, or gay pride T-shirt, schools can’t pick and choose which political beliefs students can express.” 

In Feb. 2022, two Tri County Middle School students wore sweatshirts to school with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” a political slogan critical of President Biden with origins in a more profane chant. Even though the political slogan is widely used — multiple members of Congress used it during floor speeches — an assistant principal and a teacher ordered the boys to remove the sweatshirts. However, administrators allowed students to wear apparel with other political messages, including gay-pride-themed hoodies. 

The incident is part of a pattern of political favoritism by the school district. When the school district relaxed the dress code for field day, a school administrator ordered a student to stop wearing a Trump flag as a cape, but permitted other students to wear gay pride flags in the same manner. 

The school district is wrongly relying on a policy that prohibits “profane” clothing to censor this particular message, but FIRE’s lawsuit argues that ordering the students to remove the “Let's Go Brandon” sweatshirts violates the First Amendment.

My prediction:  the leftie school administrators will lose, but they won't learn their lesson.

'Rona-related Isolation Did No Good

This from no less than the BBC, mouthpiece organ of a government that loved its lockdowns:

There is no evidence that shielding benefited vulnerable people during the Covid pandemic, according to a study.

Swansea University compared 117,000 people shielding in Wales with the rest of the population of three million.

The study found deaths and healthcare usage were higher among shielding people than the general population.

The Welsh government said shielding was introduced on medical and scientific advice and it will continue to review evidence from the pandemic.

The study also found the Covid rate was higher among those shielding - 5.9% compared to 5.7%.

The researchers said the data raised questions about whether the policy worked.

They concluded that a "lack of clear impact on infection rates raises questions about the success of shielding, and indicates that further research is required to fully evaluate this national policy intervention"...

Speaking to BBC Radio Wales, Prof Helen Snooks, who led the research, said: "If shielding was going to be effective in reducing deaths and serious illness from Covid, then it really needed to reduce the infection rate, but unfortunately we didn't find evidence of that in the study."

Here comes the biggie:

Prof Snooks also emphasised that the shielding group was "a lot sicker than the non-shielding group".

"There were more deaths and there were more hospital admissions. We are, at this point, thinking that perhaps it was impossible to shield people effectively when there was such a high level of healthcare transmission at that time," she said.

"For a particular person, it may have been the best thing to do. What we evaluated was the policy of writing to people and recommending very strongly that they stay at home. It wasn't underpinned at that time by any evidence."

"It wasn't underpinned at that time by any evidence."  Those of us who said that a few years ago were blood-libeled.

"It was sort of made up at the time and implemented."

Given that no one could provide any evidence, of course it was made up.  

It wasn't anti-mask people like me who were anti-science, who made this a totalitarian "with us or against us" issue, who damaged the credibility of public health officials.  It was the the people who "made it up at the time" who did these things.

#### them, including this one.

Update:  Even Nate Silver, now formerly of FiveThirtyEight, says this:

Nate Silver blasted COVID-era closures of churches while other public spaces, such as museums, were permitted to operate with fewer restrictions.

“It’s kind of crazy (and tells you a lot about who was writing the restrictions) that churches in some jurisdictions were subject to more restrictions than museums!” Silver, the data journalist and founder of the FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis news site, tweeted.

“Not even attempting to follow any sort of epidemiological principles.”

Yeah, pretty much.  And Nate Silver is no rightie.

School Discipline

I don't care about your skin color; if you act up in school, especially if you're interrupting the learning environment of others, there should be a penalty for that:

Legislation that supporters say will improve school discipline but critics say will kick more Black students out of school was adopted Wednesday by the state House. 

The N.C. House passed a bill that removes wording from state law that now lists inappropriate language, disrespecting teachers, dress code violations and minor fights as examples not to be deemed serious violations meriting a long-term suspension. 

Rep. John Torbett, a Gaston County Republican and primary sponsor of House Bill 188, said the change is needed because of how lax discipline has gotten in schools. 

“All it does is simply give teachers some, I guess, power back to control their classrooms,” Torbett said.

Meanwhile, California is going in exactly the opposite direction (with easily predictable results):

Instead of sending a student out of class for a minor infraction, teachers were encouraged to de-escalate by talking to the child quietly or writing them a note in class.

“We’re not just going to move the problem and kick the can down the road to somebody else,” Karigaca said.

The discipline models could be replicated throughout California public schools under legislation sponsored by State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley). Senate Bill 274 would permanently extend the ban on willful defiance suspensions in middle and high schools after 2025. Current law bans these suspensions permanently for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.

When the earlier ban was put in place, some teachers said their classrooms became chaotic because students didn’t see consequences for misbehavior. Now, even some educators who support the policy say they understand why teachers may worry that they do not have the resources to safely implement it at higher grade levels with older, and sometimes physically larger, students.

“If you’re not taught basic tools to support and manage a classroom, then you are going to see behaviors escalate to a point where you might feel a little loss of control or safety in the environment that you’re supposed to support,” said Justine Bernacet, the lead seventh-grade teacher at KIPP Sol Academy, a charter middle school in East LA...

Oakland is among a handful of school districts — including Los Angeles, Pasadena and San Francisco — that have already ended willful defiance suspensions, which punish students for nonviolent acts such as ignoring the teacher, wearing a hoodie in class, talking back to a teacher or disrupting the class by tapping their feet. These disciplinary actions disproportionately affect Black, Latino and indigenous students, leading to higher dropout rates in these communities, according to a state report.  

Statements like that last one drive me nuts.  Are we to believe that California's teachers are racist and are targeting "Black, Latino and indigenous students", or might these students commit a disproportionate number of offenses?  And if the latter, why is that?

Sorry, "racist teachers" isn't the first answer I'd jump to.

Airplane Etiquette

As a moderate air traveler, I subscribe to the following in airplane etiquette:  the person in the middle seat gets primary access to both armrests; even though you can, you shouldn't recline your seat if there's someone directly behind you; and as soon as the seat belt light goes off at the gate, the aisle people should get up and get their gear out of the overhead bins.  I didn't even know that last one was a debate until I read this piece:

But there’s one bit of travel etiquette that has been spreading steadily online for five years that has become something of a mantra in recent months — and it's stupid.

It's the notion that it's bad to stand up once the plane lands. Buzzfeed even had an article headlined, "If You Stand In The Airplane Aisle As Soon As The Plane Lands, You Are Wrong."

The objectors here think they’re preaching good behavior, but really, they are being inconsiderate. 

Maybe this kind of writing is why Buzzfeed is shutting down, but I digress:

A considerate person has her ATM card in her hand by the time she gets to the front of the ATM line, and when she’s using the machine, she concentrates on the screen rather than staring at the birds or the clouds. She might get her cash only 10 seconds sooner by being quick and prepared, but the person seventh in line might get his cash a minute earlier if everyone in front of him is prepared and quick. That might make the difference between catching the next bus or missing it.

This is why the standard objection to the immediate-standers is not only dumb, but self-damning. 

The people making this objection literally only think, “What is in it for you if you stand?” They don’t think, “What behavior might help other people?”

So here's why, when I have the aisle seat, I stand up right away and start gathering my stuff: Yes, it's true that if you stand up once the "fasten seatbelt" sign turns off, you can’t go anywhere. BuzzFeed argues that this is why everyone should “wait until the doors have opened and it's your turn to get up and gather your s***.”

But gathering your things ahead of time is actually the courteous thing to do.

You have downtime while the doors are closed, and if you’re standing, you can use that downtime to get your bag down from the overhead bin. Maybe this saves you only 10 seconds, but if every aisle-sitter did it (both sides of the aisle for 30 rows), then the last person on the plane will get off 10 minutes sooner.

And there’s more. When I stand up once the seatbelt sign goes off, I am often able to pass a backpack or jacket to my rowmate or even get the roller bag from above my seat down for the lady two rows ahead, who otherwise would be clogging up more of the lane when it was “her turn” to get up.

Another benefit to others is this: When I’m standing in the aisle, the middle-seat person, who just spent two hours with no elbow room, now has a little bit more space. If the sitters had their way, we’d all be crammed into the same square footage we were crammed in during takeoff and landing.

Courtesy and consideration are about thinking about how you can help others or at least avoid inconveniencing them. Too many of the social media scolds think only of themselves. 

The one and only time I flew on a foreign discount airline, they enforced the opposite.  A flight attendant would stand in the aisle; anyone in front of that flight attendant could stand up and get their belongings, everyone else had to stay seated.  When those people had mostly cleared out, the flight attendant would back up a few rows and those new rows of passengers would stand and get their gear.  It was so inefficient.  Yes, it looked orderly, but it was inefficient.

I'm flying to Mexico in mid-June.  While I booked the flight through Mexico's flag carrier, the flight will be on an American airline.  I don't see Americans staying seated because some softhead without good reasons says they should.

Personal Responsibiliity

How is it that lefties think that a 12-year-old can decide his/her own gender, independent of anatomy, but an adult doesn’t understand enough to enter into a legally-binding loan agreement?

The Supreme Court decision on whether or not it allows the Biden administration to move forward with the plan to cancel $400 billion in student debt will have life-changing financial consequences for tens of millions of Americans.

Unfortunately for borrowers, legal experts remain skeptical that the justices will greenlight the relief.

“I expect the court will rule against the Biden administration,” said Paul Collins, Jr., professor of legal studies and political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Collins predicts the six conservative justices will vote down President Joe Biden’s program, and that the three liberal justices will be in favor of it. “The Supreme Court is an incredibly ideological and partisan institution in 2023 — perhaps more so than at any other point in American history,” he said.

Do you think a professor of political science in Massachusetts might be just a teeny bit biased in his opinions?  I do. 

Anyway, I can find no legal or moral justification for having taxpayers pick up the bill for people who, having graduated high school and being on their way to college, were supposed to have been smart enough to know what they were doing.

If The Lefties Who Voted For Prop 47 Had Used Their Brains Instead Of Their Tribe Mentality, They'd Have Known This Would Be The Result.

When you advocate for a course of action that has easily predictable results, you share some of the responsibility for those results.  Thus, this result is the fault of leftie softheads:

A California sheriff said legislation touted as creating safer neighborhoods and schools is to blame for the state's soaring addiction and homeless rates.

"When we stopped enforcing drug rules and laws," Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told Fox News, "we started seeing a major, major, major increase in what we see now as the severe mental health problems of people that are living on the street"...

The problem stems from Proposition 47, approved by voters nearly a decade ago, Bianco argued.

Also referred to as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, Prop 47 changed crimes like theft of goods under $950 and drug possession from felonies to misdemeanors and ultimately reduced California’s prison population by more than 13,000 inmates. More than half the money saved on prison costs is earmarked for mental health services, substance use disorder treatment and other programs.

"It was astonishing that people did not do the research of what they were voting for, and they trusted the government to be honest to them when they said it was safe schools and safe streets, because everybody's for that," Bianco said. "But we were lied to."

California's fatal overdose rate rose more than 35% between 2014 and 2019, then skyrocketed the following year amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

I don't care if you were lied to.  If you bought into the stupid lie, especially because it buttressed your liberal bona fides, you're responsible. 

Bianco said a false narrative of mass incarceration for simple drug possession fueled Prop 47's popularity...

 

The inability to force people into substance abuse treatment has led to a "drastic increase" in mental health issues and drug-related crime, Bianco said.

"We cannot force them into drug rehab," he said. "Now they get a ticket. If they fail to go to court on that ticket, they just get another ticket."

How anyone could have believed anything different would happen is, well, unbelievable.  They were vaping the unicorn farts. 

There's a difference between being wrong and saying you believe something that is obviously not the case.  I can accept wrong, I can't and won't accept willful stupidity.

Roddenberry Nailed It So Many Years Ago

Months before I was born, Star Trek's original pilot episode, The Cage, was completed.  NBC found it too intellectual, with not enough action, and ordered a do-over.  Footage from The Cage was later repurposed for use in an episode called The Menagerie.

In The Cage, the inhabitants of Talos IV are physically frail, with huge heads and brains.  They communicate via telepathy, and eventually found a way to make illusions that seem real.  In this episode, the Talosians have kidnapped Captain Pike and are using illusions to convince him to fall in love with Vina, a beautiful woman.  Their plan is to breed humans to help them rebuild and repopulate the planet.  Here's a little of the dialog from the episode:

Captain Christopher Pike: Why did they go underground?

Vina: War, thousands of centuries ago.

Captain Christopher Pike: That's why it's so barren up there?

Vina: The planet's only now becoming able to support life again.

Captain Christopher Pike: So the Talosians who came underground found life limited here and they concentrated on developing their mental power.

Vina: But they found it's a trap, like a narcotic...

Vina: When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.  

Does this not sound at all like what too many people experience today with their phones and gaming and VR?

Earth Day

I don't understand those who revel in apocalypse porn, and I wouldn't care if their crazy beliefs didn't impact me.  Apparently, though, even Earth Day isn't enough for some of those kooks:

Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.

Their predictions have been almost 100% wrong for 50 years now, and that doesn't seem to deter them.

I'm a conservationist.

Tower Records

As a youth I spent significant amounts of time at Tower Records and Tower Books on Watt Avenue.  At the time I didn't realize it was a hometown business that had gone worldwide (well, at least to New York and Tokyo):

From these humble roots grew the international empire of Tower Records. In 1961, the younger Solomon opened the first official Tower Records, complete with its famous red-on-yellow signage, on Sacramento’s Watt Avenue. In 1968 and 1970, Tower opened larger locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. The first of a string of immensely profitable stores in Japan followed in 1979, and then, in 1983, the company opened a four-story temple to music in one of the most run-down sections of New York City. As with the locations in San Francisco, L.A., and throughout Japan, the New York City Tower was an enormous success.

I also didn't know that an employee's experience working at Tower was the backdrop for (the awesome 90s movie) Empire Records.

Summer Plans

I don't think I've taken my trailer out camping since October, and now I probably won't until school gets out.  It will have been over half a year.

I was supposed to go over Spring Break, but a rock slide made access to my planned campground much more difficult than it needed to be, so that trip will get postponed until June.  Maybe I can go there right after school gets out...

About a week after school gets out, I'm headed for Puerto Vallarta.  I like to go places I haven't been or do things I haven't done before when I travel, and I'll get a smidge of both in PV.  I overnighted there on a cruise 7 years ago, so here are my planned new events:

• take a bus to Sayulita
• take surfing lessons in Sayulita
• rent a waverunner

How fun do those sound?

A few weeks after my return I'm going on an Alaska cruise with my mother.  When we booked it I had previously been to all the ports of call, but in the interim, Victoria BC has been replaced with the thriving metropolis of Prince Rupert BC.  From what I've seen on YouTube it doesn't seem like a fair trade at all, but at least it's somewhere I haven't been before.

The last weekend of July, some of my high school friends have planned a "reunion" of sorts.  I don't have a lot of details yet, but since Styx and Starship were popular when we graduated high school, we're going to a concert of theirs at the local casino!  Our 40th high school reunion should be this year but I think it's only in the initial planning stages.

I'm already doing preliminary planning for Summer '24, when my sister and I are scheduled to spend 2 1/2 weeks in Italy.  She's given me carte blanche to do the planning, saying "I just want to pay my share and show up and have it all done for me."  I am so the right person for that job!

I wish I knew enough about how to arrange it so I could deduct at least part of the cost of that Italy trip from my taxes....

They Came So Close

Interesting article on CNN about why the Vikings might have abandoned their Greenland settlements:

The Vikings disappeared abruptly from Greenland in the mid-15th century, some 400 years after arriving there. Why they abandoned a successful settlement is a mystery that historians never have been able to fully explain.

Theories include drought, changing temperatures, social unrest, and the overhunting of walrus tusks (a cherished luxury good in medieval Europe) — conditions that would have made Norse colonies in Greenland economically nonviable.

Now, a team of researchers from Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University say they have uncovered another key factor that could explain why the Vikings fled: a rise in sea levels.

Using a computer model based on geological and climate records, the team found that sea levels would have risen by up to 3 meters (9.8 feet) during the the four centuries of Norse occupation of the eastern settlement Vikings established in Greenland in 985 AD. 

The researchers calculated that 204 square kilometers (79 square miles) of land would have been been flooded during the period the settlement was occupied, making Norse communities more vulnerable to storms and coastal erosion as they also lost fertile lowland.

The loss of habitable land would have been compounded by a trend from warmer temperatures toward cooler, drier temperatures in Europe that ultimately led to what is known as the Little Ice Age, which began around 1250 AD. A study detailing the findings published Monday in the scientific journal PNAS. 

So in this article they acknowledge the Little Ice Age and changing sea level changes well before the advent of SUVs but they just can't or won't pull it all together.  Swing and a miss.

Female Share of BA Degrees by College Major, 1971-2021

Source

The Capital Region Covers Itself In Math Glory (not)

If these numbers are correct, they're a damning indictment:

“87% of Sacramento County parents think their kids do math at grade level,” reads one billboard. “28% of kids actually do." The goal of the #GoBeyondGrades campaign is to persuade parents to talk to teachers about their child's achievement and take advantage of summer programs, writes Sawsan Morrar in the Sacramento Bee.

In addition to Sacramento County, the foundation-funded billboard campaign is targeting Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City and Washington, D.C.

In all six regions, 80 percent of parents said their children earn As or Bs on their report cards," according to a recent Learning Heroes survey, and 89 percent believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math. Parents are very confident that their children will be prepared for success in college and the workforce.

It ain't necessarily so....

Coincidentally, a parent recently told me that he thinks that 80% of the students in a high school math class should receive an A or a B.

Hey Nineteen

Are fundraising commercial writers all Steely Dan fans?

One of the many apps on my TV is PlutoTV; click on PlutoTV and you have well over 250 channels available, and that's just on that one app.  Recently on the More Star Trek channel (yes, there's a regular Star Trek channel) I've been watching Voyager.  I'd forgotten how good a show that series eventually became.

PlutoTV has commercials, and one came on for St. Jude Children's Hospital.  The request was for "just 63 cents a day", or $19/month.  Strange number, but whatever.

Several minutes later, during the next commercial break, there was a commercial for the ASPCA.  The request was for "just 63 cents a day, $19 a month."

Any thoughts on why they'd ask for such an odd amount?  Why not 67 cents a day for an even $20?

On What Planet Does This Make Sense?

Why is it the electric company's business how much money I make?

If you live in California, your electricity bill could be affected by how much money you earn. 

California's three largest power companies - Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric - have submitted a joint proposal to the Public Utilities Commission outlining a fixed rate restructuring that would be based on one's income. 

The plan would break down monthly bills into the fixed rate plus a reduced usage charge based on consumption. According to officials this fixed-rate plan would reduce monthly bills for low-income customers and if electricity usage is controlled, bills would also be lowered.

I'm sure there's some so-called social justice aspect to this.  I should pay more than a 20-something because I make more than a 20-something?  I've already been a 20-something and worked to earn more, and now I do.  Are we going to do the same for gas, groceries, insurance?  Will I have to submit 1040s to corporations now?

Just another example of how the left doesn't want to bring anyone up, it wants to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

Oh, Heck No

Here in California we have a few bears up in the mountains, but rangers chase them through (and away from) campgrounds with pop guns.  They don't sound too dangerous.

Rattlesnakes?  If you get close enough to one to make it rattle, back the truck up.  Don't mess with it.

Yes, there are sharks off the coast, but shark attack stories don't usually come from California.  And in the greenbelt along the American River there are some mountain lions, but they've apparently learned to give the humans wide berth.

Bottom line, we don't have too many big bad animals here in California.

So where did this alligator come from???

A seven-foot alligator was found in a California river and wildlife authorities aren’t sure how the animal got there...

Before the alligator’s death, the animal was captured and brought into the Wildlife Care Association of Sacramento, a wildlife rescue in McClellan, California, by a man who claimed to have found the alligator swimming in the American River near Sailor Bar Regional Park.