90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, August 1, 2022

Visage à trois #382

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #564

Senior Economist ‘Fact Checked’ By Facebook For Saying U.S. Is In Recession

“We live in an Orwellian hell-scape.”

An experienced economist has been ‘fact checked’ and corrected by Facebook after he stated that the U.S. is now in a recession.

Phil Magness, a researcher and educator with the American Institute for Economic Research, reacted to the incident by commenting “We live in an Orwellian hell-scape.”

Facebook uses ‘independent’ fact checkers at Politifact, a brazenly partisan operation, which ‘corrected’ Magness’ post about the Biden administration attempting to change the definition of a recession.

Magness provided examples of previous statements by Biden himself about being in a recession that were never fact checked:

The economist also noted that practically every other country defines a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth:

Biden and his underlings have engaged in gaslighting on the definition of recession throughout the past week, and it has continued into...

Democrats in Congress have proposed a new spending bill that would allocate $80 billion for the sole purpose of expanding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), ostensibly to fight inflation by raising government revenues.

As reported by The Daily Caller, the bill is called the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” The bill would see the size of the IRS increase as part of a broader effort to increase “taxpayer compliance.” Under the new bill, the IRS would spend an additional $80 billion over the course of the next 10 years, up significantly from its current budget of $13.7 billion, with a primary focus on hiring thousands of new agents, and expanding operations, facilities, and services.

The bill allocates $45 billion for the purpose of hiring even more lawyers and auditors for the collection of taxes and cracking down further on those who fail to pay, with another $25 billion dedicated to increasing operations expenses, such as transportation and office rent. The remainder of the funding will see $5 billion and $3 billion, respectively, dedicated to “Business Systems Modernization” and “Taxpayer Services.”

Proponents of the bill say that the increased spending for resources and hiring will ultimately generate as much as $124 billion in government revenue through improved “tax enforcement,” which, they claim, will subsequently fight inflation. The increase in government revenue will partially go towards funding a massive spending package that Democrats are proposing to combat the broader economic crisis, to the tune of $430 billion.

However, the additional spending on such resources as office space and transportation may prove redundant and a waste of taxpayers’ money. In April, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said during his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee that over half of the IRS’ employees are working full-time from home rather than in their offices. In addition, an inspector general report in 2021 found that the agency’s fleet of government-issued vehicles is...

Visage à trois #381

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #559

Public Schools Are Cesspools Of Wokeness And There’s No Bringing Them Back

The DNA within the school systems has been radically altered along with administrators, teachers, and many students.

Teachers’ unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America.

Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students.

In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 “marks the second consecutive year the state’s public school system has lost thousands of students,” the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents in Minnesota or any other state keep their children in public schools?

In 2021, the Minnesota Department of Education’s statewide test results showed another drop in the number of students meeting or exceeding grade-level criteria. Overall, reading scores fell 7 percent, math scores dropped 11 percent, and science scores shrank 8 percent.

In another example, New York City public schools — which compose the nation’s largest school district — have already lost about 50,000 students over the past two years and are expected to lose nearly 30,000 more by the time school begins this fall.
Increasing Spending Without Results

Minnesota Education Commissioner Dr. Heather Mueller explained the poor student achievement outcomes thus: “The statewide assessment results confirm what we already knew — that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our students’ learning and they need our help to recover.”

The problem with blaming poor student outcomes in Minnesota on Covid is that the state’s public schools actually had “little to show for decades of increased spending,” wrote Catrin Wigfall of the Center of the American Experiment in a July 2020 report titled “Allergic to Accountability.”

“The consistently increased flow of dollars into Minnesota’s public schools has not translated into improved student achievement outcomes or more learning,” Wigfall wrote.
Goal of Even More Woke Teachers

For insight, look to what the Minnesota Department of Education now values in professional teacher training when it comes to hiring licensed teachers.

In 2021, Minnesota’s professional educator licensing and standards board proposed an addition to what proficiency standards for teachers to be licensed. Proposed requirements include:

Helping students develop social identities based upon their social grouping.
Understanding “systemic trauma,” including racism and micro and macro aggression.
Fully affirming and incorporating identity politics into the school including race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, economic status, and ethnicity.
Connecting students with local and global political activists.
Understanding that Minnesota’s laws were created to oppress by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

After shutdowns and the abysmal remote learning results, mask mandates, and a further decline in students’ academic performance, the response of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) was to go out on strike for more than two weeks in March, cancelling classes once again for 28,000 students.

In addition to demanding increased wages, the MFT stated they are at war against capitalism. At a rally with her union members, Greta Callahan, president of...