Public Schools Failing, Dems to Blame

There is relatively wide agreement the public schools are no longer doing a good job of educating our children. An article in the normally liberal Washington Monthly lists (and substantiates) five "hard truths" that it claims Democrats must face. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link. 

Here are those five bullet points.

1. Students stopped learning during COVID. We’ve failed them.
2. Democrats have too often responded to learning loss by lowering standards.
3. We’re losing our best teachers. Lawmakers aren’t doing enough about it.
4. Public schools are as segregated and unequal today as they were before Brown. The problem is worse in Northern and blue cities.
5. The parents of students of color and working-class kids who attend failing schools increasingly blame Democrats.

The article tends to downplay teachers unions as a factor contributing to these problems, I am inclined to assign the unions more blame. With that caveat, I find the article mostly on target and definitely worth your time. 

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Another relevant factor for which I can see no handy fixes is this. Equal employment rights for women (which I support) have opened many other opportunities to smart women who once became teachers when that was one of about three pink collar careers (teaching, nursing, clerical) open to them. 

Today bright, hard-working women who would once have become teachers are instead becoming attorneys, physicians, airline pilots, professors, and executives. Dumbing down those becoming teachers has had the expected deleterious effect. 

Full disclosure: The other DrC is a former excellent public school teacher who became a professor. Academia’s gain was, perforce, K-12’s loss.

Wisdom

Despite the high cost of living,

It remains popular.

Sunday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, 12/28/25

Democrats chose this ridiculous doofus to run for Vice President last year. He is worse than Biden. Such choices buttress the doubts we have about their collective mental health.

Two Robins …

I’ve been wondering when I’d see the first tendrils of a movement opposing Artificial Intelligence. Here in Politico is a no-paywall column entitled, 

“We have to reject that with every fiber of our being”: DeSantis emerges as a chief AI skeptic.

In the same Politico issue, a second no-paywall column reports Democratic politicians are getting grassroots feedback demanding their opposition to AI.

Frank Herbert predicted a revolt against "thinking machines," his novel Dune (1965) naming it the Butlerian Jihad. When the actual history of our period is written, perhaps these will be cited as harbingers, hints of what’s to come.

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Questions COTTonLINE believes raised by AI: If a machine intelligence commits a crime, can we imprison it? Can we sue it for damages? Is turning its power off the equivalent of capital punishment? At what point does someone’s claim to control it constitute either slavery or employment? We need answers.

I propose that, at a minimum, all AI-generated material be indelibly labeled as such. And that whatever human agency, firm, or individual owns the AI be held responsible for any crimes or torts it commits.

Saturday Snark

IYKYK

Rural folk will get this.

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Boxing Day

In the post below I label today "Boxing Day," which is what the Brits (and some Commonwealth folk) call the day after Christmas. The term is entirely unrelated to pugilism or fisticuffs. 

Dec. 26 is St. Stephen's Day, aka the 'feast of Stephen" upon which King Wenceslas looked down. The origin of the name Boxing Day is unclear, it may refer to the alms box where gifts for the poor could be left, or the box of gifts, food, and/or money given to one's servants and tradespeople.

A Castle Keep?

I’ve written before about the ugly Obama presidential library under construction in Chicago. So have others, and this column actually gives the design’s supposed rationale, about which nothing is obvious or sensible.

My thought concerning this design monstrosity on a Boxing Day morning is that it resembles a keep that lost its castle walls. Given Chicago’s reputation as an every-weekend gangland shooting gallery*, maybe a castle keep isn’t entirely illogical. It should prove mostly impervious to handgun fire.

Later … *Of which this shooting is merely the most recent example.

Year-End Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's 

The Nation's Cartoonists Look Back on the Year that Was.

Happy Anniversary & Merry Christmas.

＆Tuesday marked the 19th anniversary of COTTonLINE. We dropped our first substantive post on December 23, 2006. 

I meant to recognize the anniversary on Tuesday but, as you know, things get busy at this time of year. Still, better late than never.

In those nineteen years we’ve posted in excess of sixteen thousand items. Just for fun I’ve looked back at some old posts and they seem to hold up reasonably well. All are still there for us to see.

I suppose you could call what I’ve done here my second career, that of an essayist. I’ve enjoyed the work, making the process indistinguishable from play. I hope you’ve found a few things to enjoy as well, they are my gift to you.

And I wish you a very Merry Christmas. I hope the joyous season finds you in good health and spirits, enjoying the company of kinfolk and friends.

Understanding Russia

I just finished reading the most sensible appraisal of what drives those who command Russia that I have seen. Written for Real Clear Defense, it argues Russia is best understood as an empire with top down leadership using compulsion to make it work. Its enduring drive is expansion, with everything else subordinate to that urge.

The author harks back to the analysis of George Keenan who held that the only way to deal with Russia is containment via military force. I find the reasoning displayed in this column persuasive, see what you think of it.

Vance Realistic About Ukraine

When interviewed for UnHerd recently, Vice President Vance sounded far from optimistic about a peace deal for Ukraine. Politico has the story. Here is the key Vance quote. 

We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t say with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t.

The VP sounds realistic, and his skepticism echoes what we've written here. When the war finally ends one or both of the leaders involved - Putin and Zelensky - may not live to tell the tale, and I bet they fear this.

Enemies Old and New

The Soviet Union was in many ways a theocracy, belief in communism being required and other faiths suppressed. And like many faiths it had missionaries all over the world, preaching the Marx/Lenin gospel. 

The US considered the USSR dangerous. The successor state Russia is smaller, not evangelical, and we consider it troublesome but do not fear it.

Today's China is supposedly communist but doesn't work very hard at selling its ideology outside its own boundaries. I suspect they believe non-Chinese are too dumb to understand their system's merits. 

However, China has a huge population and a rapidly expanding military. We now consider it dangerous and potentially fearsome.

The evangelical faith endangering us today is militant Islam. It wins some converts, feels free to kill those who won't, and scatters its adherents all over the world. Not precisely an existential societal threat, more of an infestation like fire ants or poison ivy, something to keep out of our society.

Later ... it seems Glenn Beaton of Aspen Beat fame has been thinking about this same set of issues. His treatment is more eloquent but his conclusions don't differ markedly from mine. He perhaps admires China more than I do, but his view of Islam seems right. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

Welcome the Winter Solstice

Last night was the longest night of the year, in the northern hemisphere, 5 pm looked like midnight. The North Pole is leaning as far from the sun as it goes. In the Southern Hemisphere the foregoing is reversed. 

Here winter begins today; down south summer begins today. North of the equator we call today the Winter Solstice.

In our nation's great southwestern desert midday today was quite mild, comfortable in a long sleeved shirt. This is our normal winter weather.

Up home in WY there wasn't much snow on the ground when I looked earlier this afternoon. Western WY won't have a white Christmas this year, the high is predicted to be 42℉. That will be weirdly warm for our combination of altitude and latitude. 

VDH: Is Another Dark Age on Our Horizon?

Historian Victor Davis Hanson asks this question, for RealClearPolitics, “Can the dark ages return?”Spoiler alert, he concludes there is considerable evidence it could do just that. 

Hanson marshals the evidence that our Western civilization is exhibiting several of the same signs of decay the late Roman Empire had, before Europe sank into the 500 years of societal retrogression we call the Dark Ages.

I hope you join me in wishing that he is unduly alarmist in this view. Sadly, all our wishing won’t make it so.

Thinking of ArtificiaI Intelligence

Who knew Frank Herbert was a prophet? In his epic doorstop sci fi novel Dune, he relates history from the perspective of roughly 8 thousand years in mankind's future. In that time's far past (our near future), mankind rebelled against thinking machines, destroyed them and banned their manufacture more or less successfully. This war of extermination was called the Butlerian Jihad.

One online source has called what now comes the AI Apocalypse. The current movement to AI or artificial intelligence threatens to replace many current office workers, as well as most factory workers. Expecting no Luddite response is asking too much of people. 

And yet, needing acreage, huge hangar-like buildings and enough electricity to power a small city to replace what the human brain can do on 2500 calories a day, clean water, and a place to sleep isn't so very impressive. When you think about it, AI seems downright inefficient.

Just because we can build AI is not a necessary justification for why we should do so. However we may have no choice because our near-peer adversary China is doing so.

To the End of the Road

I have a fun article for you to read, it's from Motor Trend, link provided by Instapundit. The author took a 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser with roof rack tent on a roundtrip drive from the Los Angeles area to the end of the road at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. His wife joined him for roughly the last 60% of the drive. They tented much of the way with hotel rooms in a few places. It is a good read.

He drove really far each day and did the roundtrip in 18 days. He saw a lot of wildlife, fed more than a few large mosquitoes, and found the vehicle reliable and comfortable if something of a gas hog. 

In my heyday some decades ago I'd have taken 6 weeks to 2 months and driven fewer miles each day. I'd also choose ideally to do it in a one ton pickup with a camper, no tenting for me. 

When the other DrC and I drove the Alaskan Highway sometime in the early 1980s little was paved until you got to Alaska. the Dawson Highway wasn't open then and Fairbanks was as far north as we got. We did it in a small class C motorhome and it was an adventure for sure. To learn more about our RV adventures up north, search "Muncho Lake" on the website's Search feature.

Friday Snark 2.0

Images courtesy of Real Clear Politics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Friday Snark 1.0

Wisely, he doesn't drink.

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

The Common Denominator: Physics

Authorities are claiming 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente committed both the Brown University mass shooting and the murder of MIT physics prof Nuno Loureiro, 47.

Neves Valente was found dead by his own hand in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. He was a citizen of Portugal who got legal permanent residency in the US in 2017.

Neves Valente appears to have known Louriero in Portugal when both were students there. He was a physics grad student at Brown some 20 years ago, on a student visa. So he was apparently familiar with both the Brown campus and with the murdered MIT physics prof.

His motive is unknown. I will spin a scenario which, if true, would give him a motive for both.

Imagine Neves Valente and Loureiro were bright, math-savvy students close enough equals in age and specialty to have known each other back home in Portugal. Later Neves Valente dropped out of physics grad school at Brown without getting a degree.

Loureiro obviously earned a PhD in Physics, a research position at world-famous MIT, and was considered one of the science's stars. Resenting and envying a former study partner's success when one has not achieved a desired career creates resentment.

Not "making it" in grad school creates resentment toward the school. Pehaps Neves Valente had become despondent and was considering suicide anyway. Getting revenge on two major sources of his anger and self-loathing before ending his life could be a way to feel his death meant something, to cause two sources of his resentment to also suffer.

I don't claim this is what happened, but as a scenario it offers a possible explanation for two seemingly unconnected acts. And it can make one wary about simmering anger and resentment in those left behind decades ago.

European Defense Questioned

Can Europe defend itself against a Russian threat? Are there any significant number of young men there who are willing to fight and die for "Europe?" Writing for The European Conservative, Javier Villamor believes the answer to those questions is "no."

He argues post World War II history shows, when things get ugly, European nations have tended to go their own individual ways. The EU project has been a way to "paper over" the differences by ignoring the will of the various peoples of the continent. It has not created a European patriotism or identity, which lack he believes is intentional.

He likens EU promises to spend money on defense to a sort of modern Maginot Line, and believes it will be as ineffective, in the absence of a "will to fight." Villamor's view in one sentence:

Dying for one’s country is one thing; dying for Brussels is quite another.