Education:

Image by littlemoresunshine
[Ed2] It’s not just Missouri. The good news back home Southern Tech’s applications are up 80% since 2009.
[Ed3] Frances Coleman says save our summers! I think we should do away with summer vacation, but there is a definite tension there.
[Ed4] This says more about the state of our education system than it does about HBO’s plans.
[Ed5] Relatedly, college graduates aren’t learning how to write.
[Ed6] Jesse Singal writes about Mindset Theory, and how it may be falling apart. Well, maybe overhyped, anyway.
Football:

Image by dbking
[Fb2] I go back and forth on whether Charlotte or Georgia State is embarking on the most quixotic quest for a relevant football program. Georgia State has a new (well, repurposing an existing) stadium and is the #3 school in its state, but Charlotte has the better conference affiliation.
[Fb3] Why are there so few black head coaches in college football? Well, it’s a story that starts early…
[Fb4] Aaaaaand now Millennials are killing the Big 12.
[Fb5] Ooooh, the Weekly Standard has picked up Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Previously featured on Slate and ESPN website, it’s the only NFL feature I’ve read regularly.
Violence:

Image by Michelle – Key Set
[V2] The Jewish history of the Nazi’s favorite shirt, the polo shirt.
[V3] Meanwhile, in San Fransisco Nancy Pelosi is leading the charge to pull the permit for the Patriot Prayer group, whose leader actually had some pretty harsh words for the folks in Charlottesville.
[V4] I think I’ve mentioned this before, but my wife’s personal safety has been threatened a handful of times, and all but one of them involved prescriptions she didn’t write.
[V5] {Ominous music}… the perfect murder? (Despite being convicted?)
[V6] How to make excuses for prisoner torture, in Russia.
[V7] How our military is exporting coups.
Law:

Image by Bailiwick Studios
[L2] This seems both natural and disturbing.
[L3] In the age of three felonies a day and the potential to upcharge, defendants may never stand a chance.
[L4] It’s… interesting… that among groups that take care of strays, PETA is unusually aggressive about putting them down.
[L5] For-profit Charlotte Law School may be shutting down.
[L6] At a certain level of scrutiny, there may be enough for a lot of us to be institutionalized. My wife has worked in systems too far in each direction and one too far in both. It’s a tough issue.
Health:

Image by HRYMX
[H2] A hard won victory has been won in allowing bone marrow donors to be compensated. Well, in this case, it was more of an avoided loss, but still.
[H3] Jacob Sullum takes a stand against the planned low-nicotine initiative by the FDA. It’s worthy of investigation (which is all that’s been committed to), but there are definitely some concerns. {More}
[H4] Louisiana is betting economically on (questionable) healthcare innovation.
[H5] We need more people to get cancer. Wait, that came out wrong…
[H6] As the US pivots towards ecigarettes, the UK is going all in. Meanwhile, the EU has decided to re-evaluate its draconian (though less draconian than Obama’s) ecigarette policy only after its most pro-vaping member leaves. Relatedly, this seems like a good place to mention back on August 21st I passed four years of smoking cessation.
Ed3: We had a mini-debate about this on LGM a few months ago. The pro-Summer Vacation side argued that kids need to be given time to be kids and people spend too much time devoting life to work anyway. The pro-Year Long School side believed that only year long schooling can help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds compete or as one honestly put it, using coercive government action to make up for subpar parenting.
Summer vacation is a weird thing. Even in affluent families, its something of a hassle because both parents are going to be working full time and globalization made summer slack time at work an anachronism. When I was kid, the New York and I think New Jersey courts didn’t do any civil cases from Memorial Day to after Labor Day. Even though my dad, a lawyer, still went to work it was much more relaxed. The courts hears cases year round. Summer vacation is even more of hassle for single parent households or families that can’t afford summer programs easily. Yet, the idea of summer has a fun time and family get together time remains.
V2: We are unescapable.
V5: I guess by some definitions, committing murder with malice aforethought but getting the prosecutors to give you ten years for manslaughter rather than life or the death penalty is the perfect murder. His punishment could be a lot worse. I’m wondering if he called 911 whether he would have gotten away with it.
L2: Pharmaceutical companies are the real drug pushers that the government should go after.
L3: We really need to reform the entire criminal justice system. This means decriminalizing or even legalizing a lot of illegal activity, reducing the power of the prosecutors to play hardball, and increasing defendant rights.
L4: This seems like douche move even for PETA.
L5: Yes.
HI: Scott Lemieux of LGM would agree with you and the Nation on this.
H6: People who smoke e-cigerettes always look like they are sucking their thumb to me.
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Because that’s what’s getting us all these “80 mg oxycontin” tablets that are actually fentanyl, of predictably lethally unpredictable strength, because the cement mixers in which they’re compounded have very different design parameters from pharmaceutical powder mixers.
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Lawyers should not pretend they know a doctors business, I don’t care how many malpractice suits they’ve worked.
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We had to drop the bomb on Japan because they wouldn’t surrender.
The civil war was about ending slavery
Columbus “discovered” america.
[Ed5] I read a lot…a LOT when I was a kid and I think it helped me write better. I write “ok”. The ex, a lit major, always said my transitions sucked, but otherwise ok. Never very flowery, just the facts. Have you seen for what passes for dating profile writing nowadays? Dear lord.
[V1] Yeah, fully auto m-16s, a urban assault pacification vehicle capable of withstanding .30 cal AP rounds, and a mount ” suitable for the M60, 240B and Mark 19 weapons system.” and they were “outgunned”? Hell, a .223 round won’t even penetrate the bearcat’s armour. Methinks the gov is “a lying bastard”…or ignorant as hell.
[V3] Nancy Pelosi? There’s a paragon of free speech support there.
[V7] Duh. They teach that shit at Fort Huchucha in Az, among others.
[L3] Further reason to end the “war on drugs”.
[L4] I can only say that if someone stole my cat and put her down I’d be out for vengeance “law abiding citizen” style.
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But, y’know, bitch gets mouthy, bitch gets popped, right?
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https://lawnewz.com/uncategorized/bar-association-wants-trump-to-let-undocumented-immigrants-practice-law/
The last thing this country needs is illegal lawyers.
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(ducks head before 1000 footballs hit it.)
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Ed3: Lee has the argument right. The anti-Summer vacation side point to lots of studies that show year round schooling helps disadvantaged kids catch up academically and can also help with things like food insecurity because of free meals at school. The pro-Summer vacation crowd tends to be middle class or above people whose kids are going to turn out okay and have romantic memories of summer. Lee also brings up a good point of how summer isn’t a slack period anymore.
V2: Jews also invented Jeans and Superman and Captain America but plenty of White Nationalists still wear jeans, Captain America, and Superman t-shirts. They probably don’t know. I wonder how they would react if they found out.
L5: I think they closed down. This is the 5th law school to do so. But of the schools that did, I only see Whittier and the Hamline “merger” as being the real ones. Lots of law schools still seem able to find students who have no hope of passing the bar and taking them as students.
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I loved it. The sad truth is that traditional summer vacation is too damned long. By the last few weeks boredom has set in and the beginning of school is sweet relief, until it too becomes a drag. The 9/3 week schedule was great. Three weeks off is long enough to feel like a real vacation without getting bored. Nine weeks on is long enough to build continuity without becoming a drag. The those three weeks off aren’t so long that you have forgotten what an adjective is and how to do long division.
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Our kids get about 2 & 1/2 months of summer break. There are elementary schools in the district that switched to a 9/3 schedule, because they thought it would improve academic performance, but from what I’ve heard, they aren’t seeing any results. The complaint that I’ve heard from on parent is that its difficult for a lot of planning reasons when everybody else is on a traditional calendar. Still the problem of parents not having 12 weeks of vacation with fewer kids around and no college kids.
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On: September, October, November
Off: December
On: January, February, March
Off: April
On: May, June, July
Off: August
Works well enough I suppose.
Another weird thing that U.S. Schools do is have their school calendars still be on agricultural time.
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There are economies of scale and other benefits from a long summer break, such as job opportunities and youth programs. Its not as if the parents get more time-off work if its taken four times a year.
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I think the only schools on this system are elementary, so I don’t think having equal instructional quarters is that paramount. It appears Spring break is moved back a week to better coincide with the Easter break of the traditional schools in the district.
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And, it’s clear from meta studies that there’s something to it. This matches my intuition, which says, “If you don’t think you can change or learn, you won’t try to” And you don’t learn things unless you are trying to learn. Repetition, in and of itself, does not promote much learning at all. It just makes whatever your status quo is more entrenched and harder to change.
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The other issue is how much of Trump’s back and forth response to Charlottesville was planned by Bannon/Miller and how much was not. It would be darkly ironic and said if Trump got more white supremacist afterwards.
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If that’s not it, I have zero idea what he thinks he’s doing. If there’s one thing he’s not clueless about, it’s the intersection between politics, media, the Internet, and angry mobs. There’s no way he’s surprised that his words got out. So there’s a plan. Maybe not a good one, but there’s definitely a plan.
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Frankly, I hope it works. I’m more in being able to separate the two than I am in Trump, by a lot.
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The other theory is that Bannon believes in Trumpism and Trump does not. Trump doesn’t mind outsourcing all the work as long as he gets praise and gets to comment.
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An interesting look on how the KKK used absurdity and comedy (re trolling) to inspire fear in their victims, perplex would-be opponents, and spread their ideas.
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Except for Football Outsiders, who have something of the same vibe as early Baseball Prospectus, the rest of the gridiron blogosphere is basically a choice between intelligent analysis written in coachspeak vs. well written, funny writing at the intellectual level of Deadspin (a lot of it actually ON Deadspin).
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The War on the Rocks people read the chart wrong – the baseline date is 2001 not 2011. The budget under management by DoD, DoS, a a third entity *all* increased, but the reason the DoD now has the lion’s share is because Afghanistan and Iraq went from zero in 2001 to several gazillion in recent years.
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I’d really want to know what the show would be like before passing judgment on whether it should be done or not. Maybe it’s obvious from who the producers/directors would be (I don’t know anything about the people the article mentions, and I tend not to know such things anyway), but I’d need it spelled out.
My big problem with alternate histories is that they usually assume something that in my opinion is incredible and hard for me to suspend my disbelief over. Phillip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (I haven’t seen the TV series), for example, is hard for me to swallow because I don’t think Japan or Germany would have taken over the US. Or the mockumentary the Ed4 article refers to (if it’s the same one I saw a while back) claims that the CSA took over the entire United States, which also was never going to happen. In either case, I see the creator’s point: PKD was (I think) trying to imagine what life would be like under a fascist regime, and the mockumentary was making the argument that “the South lost the war but won the peace.” It’s just hard for me to swallow the premise the creators make to get us there.
That said….I could imagine a alternate history could be done well. I don’t think it’s ultimately a problem of an “uneducated populace.” A good enough (for me) version that demonstrates how horrible slavery was and how bad a CSA victory would have been for blacks (and for the country) would overcome the supposed lack of education. Whether that’s what these particular producers have in mind, I don’t know.
ETA: I realize much of the above is a matter of taste. If others like alternate histories based on what in my opinion are implausible premises, that’s not necessarily much different from the fact that I like certain movies or books over others.
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That said, some of the choices the GoT people have made are questionable after they have been unmoored from Martin’s completed work. They seems to beed context and texture in the background to make sure plots and themes stay coherent and fully realized.
So I have been skeptical of them trying to handle something that requires subtlety and nuance (the failure of the scene with Jamie and Cersei and Joeffry in the Sept looms large – and thats *from* source material)
However, I think there is another team (who I know nothing about) joining them on this potential project, so it may be fine if B&W just stick to what they’re good at.
(I also have a feeling this series is going to be in development limbo forever, and then die, but may be resurrected later when the same people bring the idea with a different spin to a different production team)
*To be clear my opinion is that they’ve done a great job of cutting through the chaff to get to the wheat of the story that *has* been written, but have been uneven in trying to tell the story that has not.
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