As Steven Singer explains:
Pro-Industry EPA Chief is Scarily Successful at Gutting His Agency
“Since February, Mr. Pruitt has filed a proposal of intent to undo or weaken Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, known as the Clean Power Plan. In late June, he filed a legal plan to repeal an Obama-era rule curbing pollution in the nation’s waterways. He delayed a rule that would require fossil fuel companies to rein in leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. He delayed the date by which companies must comply with a rule to prevent explosions and spills at chemical plants. And he reversed a ban on the use of a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s own scientists have said is linked to damage of children’s nervous systems.”
Entire NYT article is here.
What a record. The SOB.
Chriropractic really is BS
I’ve always been skeptical of the practice of chiropractic, even though I’ve used a few for actual back pain. Some seemed to me to be out-and-out money-grubbing frauds, some not. But I had no idea how completely bogus was the origin of the the field in the first place. (Spoiler alert: it involved séances. You know, darkened rooms, ouija boards, spirits of dead doctors giving advice….) For details, read this article:
Panama Canal History
Cheeto45 is so ignorant that he didn’t realize that:
(A) the original Panama Canal was built (by the US government) over 100 years ago;
(B) the new, larger, faster, and more-water-efficient Panama Canal locks were built by the Panamanian government and opened almost exactly one year ago (See link) doubling the size of Panamax — the capacity of the largest ship that can get thru the waterway.
Of course, neither Cheeto45 nor his Nazi-loving, racist KKK dad had anything to do with any of this construction.
PS: reportedly, the reason that the Drumpf organization was able to build a lot of buildings in NYC without the problems that faced other builders is that the Drumpsters had no problem with making large, hidden, payoffs to the Mafia for labor and legal peace.
Teachers quit both DC charters and regular public schools at very high rates…
Probably because:
– the work load is impossible;
– they are blamed for everything
– they are held responsible for things they cannot possibly control
– they are required to enact policies that harm their students
Etc, etc, etc. Here is a report from Valerie Jablow detailing the numbers:
The impossible complexities of teaching
Larry Cuban has a blog post on how difficult it is to actually teach in the US k-12 setting. Worth reading and showing to anybody who thinks it’s easy:
https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/managing-crowds-classdojo-part-1/
Teacher firings based on VAM are unconstitutional!
This is BIG: firing teachers based on scores derived by secret VAM algorithms is unconstitutional — so says a federal appeals court!!https://epic.org/2017/06/court-rules-secret-scoring-of-.html?t=1&cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjc18y&iid=5be1768b7aba4084851ad04c35839d8e&uid=2680605892&nid=244+293670920
Just who gets to make the choices in a supposedly random ‘school choice’ lottery (DC Version)
Valerie Jablow has dug into this issue in her typical yeo-womanly manner.
The short version of the reality of DC School Choice is that people who are more worthy than YOU (or me) get to decide who is admitted into the relative handful of highly-regarded publicly-funded schools in DC (both public and charter) — where most kids do not attend their in-boundary school. (Mine mostly didn’t either — Brookland and Stevens ES; Stuart-Hobson MS; and SWW and Banneker HSs.)
All this leaves us with a two-track educational system, where in some schools there is strict discipline and relatively high test scores, lots of college admissions, and where only wealthy or well-connected families or those kids with good academic records are allowed in. (Think Banneker, BASIS, some of the KIPPs, Walls…)
And then there are other schools where the majority of students are absent for 3 or more weeks (not days) every school year, and hardly ever show up on time. (Think Cardozo, Ballou and Chavez Charter, among others)
Also See the recent post article about large numbers of DCPS teachers quitting in the middle of the year, mostly because they find it impossible to, uh, teach, because they are not allowed by school administration to have any classroom control or discipline. And are required to do enormously burdensome data-gathering work that is (almost intentionally) designed to take away from teaching time but to make the teacher look bad when it comes time for annual evaluations… and pretty much no matter what disruptive things a student does, teachers’ requests for disciplinary help are either ignored by administration or are used as excuses to attack the teacher…
Teachers at BASIS, Walls, KIPP, and Banneker don’t have to put up with that sort of nonsense. Others do. Obviously much more academic learning happens in one of these tracks than the other, but the fact that we still have these tracks, 60+ years after Brown v Board, should be intolerable.
But it’s applauded instead.
