Property taxes are how we fund public schools. Unless we want illiterate children, we need property taxes.
Of course, we’re headed in the direction of mass ignorance anyway. The popular conception among the MAGA right is that education cranks out woke liberals, and thus our kids are better off without it. If you doubt this, tune into Fox News for a few minutes here and there.
Further, it looks like the Department of Education will soon be a thing of the past.
At left we have a handful of irrelevant facts. Knowing all this, Trump appointed Gaetz to be the U.S. attorney general, to the sheer delight of the MAGA right.
The only relevant fact here is that Gaetz comes from an extremely rich family.
From the Daily Montanan:
The Montana Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a district court ruling in the nation’s first constitutional climate change trial, affirming that the youth plaintiffs have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment” while revoking two Montana statutes.
The 70-page decision, authored by Chief Justice Mike McGrath, comes 16 months after Lewis and Clark District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in the landmark Held v. Montana lawsuit, explicitly stating that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions are “proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment, and harm and injury to the youth plaintiffs.” Seeley’s decision also rolled back two laws enacted by the 2023 legislature that changed the Montana Environmental Policy Act.
The state immediately appealed the decision to the Montana Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the appeal in July. The court found in a 6-to-1 decision that Montana’s constitutional guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment” includes a stable climate system, “which is clearly within the object and true principles of the Framers inclusion of the right.”
“Plaintiffs showed at trial—without dispute—that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” the order states. “Plaintiffs showed that climate change does impact the clear, unpolluted air of the Bob Marshall wilderness; it does impact the availability of clear water and clear air in the Bull Mountains; and it does exacerbate the wildfire stench in Missoula, along with the rest of the State.”
The six-justice majority found the law which limited analysis of greenhouse gas emissions during environmental reviews violates the Montana Constitution’s “right to a clean and healthful environment,” and enjoined the state from acting on it.
All this sounds great, but what does it mean in practice? OK, analyses of greenhouse gas emissions are admissible in environmental reviews. But what actions can be taken to force the reductions of these pollutants?
In my own less-than-sophisticated words I would say that program music is music that is about something.
From Wikipedia:
Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece’s title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. (more…)
Well, this really is what progressives are all about: more inclusion and better education.
But are smarter and kinder people really destroying our country?
I just came back from the gym where, unfortunately, they have one of their televisions locked on Fox News. I noticed a segment called Voters Eagerly Await Trump’s Return to White House.
This is a good example of a key aspect of Fox programming: It’s dishonest. Trump won with just under 50% of the vote. Given that the (slim) majority of ballots were cast for someone else, it would be far more candid to say Trump Voters Eagerly Await his Return to White House.
For better or worse, there will never be another revolution here in the U.S., given our nation’s annual military budget that’s just shy of $1 trillion.
That said, what Che Guevara said here about revolutionaries and education is quite interesting.
Here’s something from 20th Century playright Thornton Wilder.
The problem is that “nonsense” comes in a variety of different flavors, and some of them are more harmful than others.
Just turn on the news, and you’ll see what I mean. Gaza, Trump’s cabinet choices, and our ignoring environmental collapse are just a few examples.
It’s hard to know exactly what Kurt Vonnegut was referring to when he used the word “indecent” here. Maybe it’s just an amorphous combination of war, poverty, denial of healthcare, lack of clean water, and injustice.
He was also a huge advocate of abolishing the death penalty; he mentioned Sacco and Vanzetti in several of his books.
When my kids were in elementary school, I loved to volunteer as a chaperone on their field trips, and I remember with great fondness one of my daughter’s favorite teachers, Englishman Martin Cook, whom she had for 5th Grade.
Mr. Cook took the class out for a nature hike in a nearby forest, and began by explaining when we arrived, “This experience is best had with our ears and eyes, and not with our mouths. Please try to stay as quiet as you can.”
