In which the pond offers distractions, but can't forsake Lord Downer, the Caterist, or even a teaser sample of the Major ...

 

Some might wonder why the pond often starts off with a list of links and connections ...

You know, talk in The Atlantic ... A Massive Vaccine Experiment, In just seven months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has undone decades of vaccine synchrony.

Isn't this self-defeating? An immediate invitation to go elsewhere?

Talk in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik's Donald Trump, Architecture Critic, With a new executive order, the President has turned his attention to remaking our federal buildings—and it’s not a good look for a democratic state.

It's tempting stuff, who could resist a link between King Donald and the ways of Adolf with Speer and Stalin with Boris Iofan.?

News of Donald Trump’s recent executive order concerning architecture, and particularly about preserving and protecting hallowed traditional styles, will have come as a surprise to anyone who recalls that one of his first appearances in the architectural realm occurred while tearing down an Art Deco treasure, the old Bonwit Teller building, and replacing it with a shiny glass tower meant for the residence of the very rich in a midtown New York non-neighborhood—an early instance of the now popular (and trendy) building type, the Oligarch’s Erection. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration, having now remade American medicine and remedied our higher education, is hard at work reforming our buildings, with memos on movie editing and how to write short stories doubtless on the way. When you have a totalizing program, you totalize.
The executive order states that “Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces,” and that “Architecture—particularly traditional and classical architecture—that meets the criteria set forth in this subsection is the preferred architecture for applicable Federal public buildings. In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.” The weird mix of bureaucratese (“set forth in this subsection”) and authoritarian diktat is part of the new normal, perhaps, as is the nature of the codicil stating the necessity of “notification to the President through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy when a building design deviates from the preferred style, including where a design embraces Brutalist, Deconstructivist, or other modernist architecture.” Public struggle sessions will presumably be held to denounce deconstructivist deviationists—although, given the complicated ironic reuse of familiar motifs that is so essential to American postmodern architecture, one can imagine worried memos being sent to the Oval Office: “Oh, Beloved Leader: Many are concerned that the Roman imperial column with the Emperor standing resolute, attached to the front of the Boston federal courthouse, might be meant ironically? A ruling from above is necessary!” (And, lest one think this too fanciful, recall that this is more or less how buildings got built in Stalinist Moscow.)

By golly, King Donald only needs to go vegetarian and develop a devotion to a German Shepherd and the comparison will be compleat.

What of the talk in Wired, Defense Department Scrambles to Pretend It’s Called the War Department, President Donald Trump said the so-called Department of War branding is to counter the “woke” Department of Defense name.

All of Uncle Leon's cost savings splurged on a name change!

Any number of scribes can distract and demand attention, as in The Atlantic's Why This Administration Can’t Fill Its Jobs, Making many officials work multiple roles is bad for governance. 

Or The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously, At parades and in the halls of global power, America has been sidelined.

Or Anne Applebaum scribbling America Surrenders in the Global Information Wars, The U.S. is reorienting its foreign policy to protect governments that manipulate and suppress information.

Or Timothy Synder substacking away in Ukraine ...

Uncle Elon is a regular source of amusement, Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business, Elon Musk’s grand vision is coming into focus.

Climate change is a regular distraction, such as the recent response to King Donald's attempt to destroy the planet ... (the report, the LA Times, the Graudian, The New Yorker, *archive).

But none of these links are for hardened pond herpetologists, devotees of the lizard Oz.

They're intended as a lifeline for innocent vulgar youffs, ingenues, and innocents.

It's unlikely, but what if by a rare chance, they stumble on the pond, and so get caught up in the sticky mess known as the hive mind?

Best give them a chance to click on something else, offer them a chance to be distracted, a chance to move on to something else. Once they're gone, they're not likely to remember to come back.

The pond realises that nothing will stop the hardened pond cultists, addicted to reptile crack. 

Like Robert Kennedy, they just want to mainline the hive mind into the eyeball, they'll risk a brain worm for the feast. 

They realise the pond will at some point or another run out of distracting link steam, and then the good oil will flow ...

... as it does this Monday. The odd stray waif, the weird pathetic youff might be steered out of the abyss, but the pond is in so deep that to retreat were even more tedious than to go o'er ...

So o'er the pond goes ...

Now it has to be said that sometimes the pond skips over vital questions asked by the reptiles, and perhaps of deep concern to correspondents ...

Media Diary: ARN secretly investigates replacing human hosts with fake presenters

The media giant is asking listeners if they would ‘miss’ or even ‘care’ if presenters such as Kyle Sandilands andJackie ‘O’ were eventually dumped and ‘replaced by an artificial voice’.

Who? Never heard of 'em. 

Say what, the only requirement is for the bot to have a filthy mind, and be able to tell feeble 69 jokes? Bring on the bot ...

The pond is willing to respond to requests when an EXCLUSIVE catches the eye of pond correspondents ...like the big splash this day, with fancy bot (aka Frank) graphics ...

‘Bad policy’: How sky-high tobacco taxes sparked a $5bn black market inferno
They’re calling it the ‘worst example of bad policy in the world’. A deadly tax stalemate has sparked a health and crime crisis, featuring cheap cigarettes, violent turf wars, firebombings and a burgeoning black market.

Heck, have at it, and have Mohammad Alfares' thoughts on the matter, also blessed by a bot graphic,

Clean on paper, dirty in reality: Inside Australia’s cigarette cash pipeline
Behind the lucrative dirty tobacco trade is a sophisticated laundering system. Puffed-up gangsters exploit banks and payment systems to launder millions and bankroll crime empires.

But if the pond carried on as link central, the pond would have absolutely nothing to relish. 

Why even bother with the extreme far right?

There's simpleton Simon, briefly top of the world ma ...

Looming carbon tariff an existential test for listless Coalition
You’d expect the loudest voice of opposition to a carbon tariff would be, well, the Opposition. Yet barely a whimper can be heard from the Coalition on this feature of the net zero debate.

Please, pretty please, enough already with the links, please allow the pond to enjoy a little quality time with Lord Downer ...

The header: ‘Life must be quiet in DFAT when foreign policy has all the impact of a paper umbrella in a hurricane’, Climate policy is the best example of an incoherence that is stifling our ambition as a country.

The caption for the existentially bleak shot of whale killing machines, busy killing whales all over the countryside, Windmills cover the countryside in Britain.

Lord Downer was in fine denialist form this day ...

Australia has joined some of the major European economies – Britain, France, Germany – in what can only be described as a doom loop. The government spends recklessly on windmills and welfare, unconcerned about ballooning national debt and the mounting burden of interest payments. At the same time, it is consumed by a fixation on net zero by 2050, pushing up energy prices, hollowing out our industrial base and driving private sector investment offshore. Yet to afford windmills and welfare we need the economy to grow and growth comes from profitable private sector investment.
The state is growing larger while private enterprise is shrinking as a proportion of the economy. Foreign investment flows elsewhere – chiefly to the United States and emerging economies. Even our foreign policy is performative, not purposeful. The malaise is palpable. Australia, once dynamic and exciting has lost its mojo. We’ve embraced the European model and with the same results.
This is very noticeable when travelling overseas. Once people would ask me about Australia’s economy. How did we achieve high rates of economic growth, low unemployment, a budget surplus, and pay off all our government debt? I got a standing ovation in New York making a speech about it once. It wasn’t the quality of the speech that generated the ovation, it was the facts.

See how his lordship nimbly deploys his forces, Australian soldiers with the peacekeeping force in East Timor in 1999.

Why there's nothing the old dog can't do with a kick of his heels and a sly flourish ...

Ah, we were so active once upon a time ...

And we used to be so active on the international stage helping to establish the Chemical Weapons Convention, bringing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into life, helping to draft the International Criminal Court Statute (maybe we shouldn’t have done that). We helped build new countries like East Timor, saved older ones like Solomon Islands, and contributed quite aggressively and meaningfully to the war against Islamic terrorism.
But now, where is Australia? Life must be quiet in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and not just because many of them are working from home! Our foreign policy has all the impact of a paper umbrella in a hurricane. It’s driven by domestic politics. We take positions such as recognising a non-existent state of Palestine not because it’s going to make any difference other than giving encouragement to the world’s most egregious terrorist organisation, but because it plays well in certain far-left constituencies in Australia.

Forget the genocide, there's that parade to vex his lordship ... Former DFAT Australia-China Council scholar Andrew Phelan discusses China’s massive parade to mark 80 years since the end of World War II. “The message there is that we’re getting on par with the United States, we’re doing it very quickly,” Mr Phelan said. “The message there is … if you’re thinking about intervening in a Taiwan contingency, it’s going to cost you, and it’s going to cost you big time.”

But here's the main game. 

You want climate change solved? Call on his lordship, but whatever you do, don't even begin to think batteries and solar and wind and all that nonsense ...

Yet, as we saw last week from the military pageant in Beijing, this is an increasingly dangerous world and, as a significant country, we should be playing our part in investing our diplomacy and our resources in helping to stabilise it. But the best we could do is have the unedifying experience of former Labor Party premiers enjoying the dictator-fest in Beijing. They reminded me of Unity Mitford going to Nuremberg in the 1930s.
The question is: Can we recapture our ambition as a country? Well, we won’t if we maintain the same incoherent approach to public policy. Climate policy is the best example of this incoherence. We barely debate whether to commit to net zero by 2050. Yet to even question the policy is seen as heresy. There’s so little debate about it that most Australians misunderstand what “net zero” even means. It is not gross zero. Presumably, it still allows for emissions, provided they are offset through technologies such as carbon capture and storage and tree planting.
But how much do the net zero policies cost? The government never says and no one seems to mind. It is the height of policy irresponsibility to pursue a policy so consequential without assessing the costs.
Even so, the path to net zero must not come at the expense of two absolute imperatives: affordable electricity and reliable electricity. No economy can grow without both. Yet in pursuit of net zero, governments are implementing policies that push up costs and undermine grid reliability.
Yes, battery technology may improve. Perhaps costs will fall. But we cannot simply assume breakthroughs. Governments are mandating ever greater reliance on wind and solar, both intermittent sources, which require massive investment in transmission lines and backup generation.

Think glorious, dinkum, clean, virginal Oz coal, in all its loveable purity, Delays to Australia’s renewable energy rollout may leave coal-fired stations open for longer. Picture: Jason Edwards

And whenever you get tired of coaling the country, why you can gas it ...

This is expensive and disruptive. For all the rhetoric about the energy transition, consider this: fossil fuels still account for 91 per cent of Australia’s total energy consumption. Twenty years ago, it was 94 per cent. After hundreds of billions of dollars invested in renewables, that is the result. A three-percentage-point change.
Meanwhile, energy costs rise in one of the most energy rich countries in the world. Companies close. Some relocate offshore, others survive only through government subsidies. The Whyalla Steelworks and Port Pirie smelter both rely on coal. Without subsidies, they would collapse. So the government undermines cheap energy on the one hand, and subsidises businesses damaged by that policy on the other. It’s nuts.
Then there is gas. Australia has vast reserves and was once the world’s largest LNG exporter. Yet Victoria, perversely, bans its extraction – forcing the state to spend around a billion dollars on an LNG terminal. That too is nuts.
The same confusion extends to electric vehicles. Governments subsidise their purchase, then turn around and discuss taxing them. Subsidise with one hand, tax with the other. This is not policy; it is muddle. Yes, it’s nuts.
Without rapid and extraordinary technological change, Australia will not achieve net zero by 2050. That does not mean the aspiration is worthless. Aspirations matter. We aspire to eliminate road deaths. We aspire to end landfill. Yet we compromise, because absolutism would be catastrophic.

Best of all, you can relish CCS, talked up by that impeccable solver of climate change, Santos, Santos Chief Executive Kevin Gallagher discusses the company’s plans for carbon capture and storage (CCS). Santos’ Moomba CCS project is designed to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from the gas plant and inject it into the depleted reservoirs of the Cooper Basin. “The technology of capturing carbon works … its really about working on the technology curve to get the expense of that down,” Mr Gallagher. “The exciting thing about that though, is once you do that, you don’t need to build pipelines, you don’t need to ship it.”

What an astonishing, revelatory, deeply satisfying snap of pipes, though apparently you don't need to build pipelines, you just need to build immensely cost-efficient pipe dreams ...

And so to the final solution with his lordship...

The same principle applies to net zero. It is a noble aspiration, but the costs of absolutism will destroy the economy. Leaders must be honest about that. They must explain that while Australians support emissions reduction, they do not support endless increases in electricity bills or the deindustrialisation of the nation. You cannot have one without the other.
Nor should Australians be misled into believing that if Australia achieves net zero that will stop bushfires or floods. The science does not say that. But activists and politicians alike encourage this false impression, because it is politically “clever”.
Climate change is a global phenomenon. Australia’s contribution, whatever we do, will make no measurable difference to the global climate. That is not an argument for doing nothing. We should contribute proportionately, as a responsible international citizen. But we should not tank our economy in the process.
The first duty of leadership is to tell the truth, however unpalatable. That means acknowledging the limits of what Australia can achieve and the costs of chasing what in many cases are illusions. If we are serious about escaping the doom loop, we must rediscover ambition, embrace coherence in policy, and above all, stop misleading ourselves.

There's something to be said for the pond's old ways, just as there's something to be said for spending quality time with an imported Pom, berating the importation of Kryptonian aliens ...

The header: Immigration debate won’t budge without focus on temporary visa, The irreversible damage caused by this rudderless government – more responsive to lobbyists and focus groups than its own people – will be monumental.

The caption for that image of that man carrying on rather like a Caterist: Protesters and counter-protesters confront each other during an anti-immigration rally in Melbourne. Picture: William West / AFP

Just like the best gamekeeper is a poacher at heart, so you must set a reformed furriner to the task of hounding furriners ...

The term “temporary visa” no longer fits the reality of modern Australia. From 2013 to 2024, roughly 3.2 million temporary visa holders entered the country, but only 1.3 million departed.
Perhaps we should take it as a compliment that a couple of million or so liked the joint so much they decided to stay. It makes nonsense, however, of the suggestion that the government controls migration and sets quotas with due regard to the numbers we can house, educate or care for.
The notion of an immigration quota locked into the commonwealth budget is a throwback to last century, when migrants would dutifully file their papers at distant diplomatic outputs and cross their fingers. The Immigration Minister knows that in the age of cheap air travel and the internet, the net balance between arrivals and departures (excluding tourist visas) could well be double the “quota” of 185,000 migrants he announced last week.
A two-step migration process, giving temporary migrants a foot in the door to permanent residency, has become the norm rather than the exception. It arguably has benefits, as it weeds out migrants whose applications look good on paper but struggle to perform.
Yet the unintended consequences are little debated, nor is its tendency to inflate immigration numbers and lower the skills base. The size and composition of the program is increasingly determined by sectional interests, notably universities, rather than a responsible government acting in the country’s best interest.

Always allow a little time for an AV distraction, remembering to always blame those bloody alien Krytonians for whatever ails ya, Courier Mail columnist Des Houghton says the Albanese government’s immigration policies are “unsustainable” for Australia. Mr Houghton told Sky News Australia that it’s “impossible” to create housing for all the people entering the country. “This is what people are coming to understand, Australians can’t afford their own houses.”

On with the blame game, and never mind that in some distant past, the Caterist himself arrived to snatch a plum north shore place from some nativist already busy snatching the land from the original residents...so it goes ...

Without rigorous, root-and-branch reform, the intake of migrants will not return to the long-term average of around 90,000 a year that held from the end of World War II until the early years of this century. We are destined to receive up to four times that number every year.
The strain is beginning to show. When was the last time we witnessed middle-class Australians take to the streets in such large numbers as we saw at the March for Australia rallies last week? The driving sentiment was not anti-immigration. They merely want to be reassured their government is in control.
The overseas student mills are the most significant contributors to the rise in temporary migration. The benefits to the bottom line of our corporatised universities are undeniable; education has become the fourth-largest export after coal, iron ore and natural gas. It earns around $50bn a year. The benefit for the wider public is harder to identify. Roughly 40 per cent of the student visas last year were attached to the cluster of universities around Sydney’s southern CBD and the centre of Melbourne, drastically changing the character and economy of our major cities.
The sheer numbers encourage the growth of micro-communities of students who share a common language and lack motivation to integrate with the broader community. Nor are they necessarily enhancing the national skills base, despite their attendance at some of our most prestigious universities.
The most conferred degree last year was in management and commerce (28 per cent), an intellectually thin discipline that has little in common with the study of economics. Second is what we used to think of as the humanities, but is now bracketed under the dismal heading “society and culture” (24 per cent). Information technology (9 per cent) comes next. Food, hospitality and personal services tie with engineering in fifth place (7 per cent).

Splendid insights from a man who boasts of a sociology degree, as the reptiles introduced a villain, Immigration Minister Tony Burke ‘knows … the net balance between arrivals and departures (excluding tourist visas) could well be double the “quota” of 185,000 migrants’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

At this point the quarry whispering Caterist - such a provider of employment in the lawyer game - almost went the full Jacinta ...

Yet despite the evident dumbing down, a growing number of these students are rewarded not just with a degree certificate but also with a graduate visa, the first step towards applying for permanent residency. In 10 years after the visa’s introduction in 2008, an average of around 30,000 graduate visas were issued. In the three years under Labor the average is 118,000. Appeasing the universities has been an imperative for both sides of politics. The Coalition made noises before the election about reducing the student visa quota by 60,000, but chose not to make it an election issue. Immigration Minister Tony Burke recently announced the government would increase the quota from 570,000 to 595,000.
Marginal-seat politics means Labor is reluctant to antagonise ethnic communities that are particularly sensitive to changes in family migration. 

There, did you spot it? 

At least a half Jacinta ...

What an unerring ability to command attention and offer distractions, as the Caterist carried on ...

Labor’s fiscal challenges make it easy prey for the vested interests at Treasury who habitually warn of the dire economic consequences of reducing quotas. The National Accounts figures suggest the economic benefits are largely illusory. The national GDP has increased by an average of 1.7 per cent per year under Labor, while GDP per capita has shrunk by an average of 0.3 per cent. The addition of approximately a million new migrants to the workforce may have increased the number of pay packets, but it has not made them fatter.
Anthony Albanese is particularly susceptible to the increasingly surreal ideology of the progressive left, which has a less benign approach to multiculturalism than earlier advocates in the 1970s whose main goal was to eliminate prejudice.

Cue a snap of a woman with a strange-sounding name, Multiculturalism Minister Anne Aly, pictured with Chris Bowen, provided ‘condescending analysis’ about the anti-immigration protests. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Now for a little explicit racism, as befits a man besotted by Kipling ...

Today, that noble goal has been polluted by post-colonial studies and critical race theory, which declares Western culture to be illegitimate. The object of multiculturalism, according to this view, is not the elimination of racial discrimination but its reinstatement. Under this view, diversity is not merely a social by-product of a racially blind immigration policy, which creates both challenges and rewards. Diversity is an end in itself, a means of diluting the influence of disreputable white people and increasing the population of more virtuous races.
In his book, The War on the West, Douglas Murray exposes the tactic: “To delegitimise the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonise the people who still make up the racial majority in the West.”

Did you spot it? It wasn't much hidden ...

That talk of "...the people who still make up the racial majority in the West.”

And yet the Caterist is so tone deaf, such a doofus, he apparently didn't understand the meaning of what he copied from his white nationalist cheat sheet ...

Journalists and politicians have grievously misrepresented Australians who exercised their democratic rights last weekend. “Let’s not be coy about this,” Multiculturalism Minister Anne Aly told ABC Radio National on Monday. “They weren’t protesting immigration from white Western countries. They were very clearly protesting immigration from countries that have brown people.”
“In times of economic insecurity people do defer to racist tropes about immigrants,” she said.
Her catch-all, meta-theory is the kind of condescending analysis we might expect from a former academic whose PhD thesis was entitled “A study of audience responses to the media discourse about the ‘Other’ ”.
It’s redolent of a political class ensconced in an ivory tower, contemptuous of those unable to articulate their views as elegantly as they can, hardened to the crisis of confidence in an over-complicated migration system ripe for exploitation by special interests, rich with gaming opportunities and unforeseen consequences.

The irreversible damage caused by this rudderless government that’s more responsive to lobbyists and focus groups than its own people will be monumental.

Well said quarry whisperer, stand up for your own kind, "...the people who still make up the racial majority in the West”, while mocking those who talk of brown people...

And there you have it, and the pond thinks that with Lord Downer on climate and the Caterist on Kryptonian aliens, that's more than enough.

But what of Major Mitchell, squawking away in his usual cockie manner?

Labor should go back to school to kickstart reform agenda
Too few Australian politicians advocate for a focus on reading, writing and arithmetic, even though such an emphasis defines curriculums of best performing countries in international testing.

You see the pond's cunning?

By reducing the Major to a link, the pond can find space for a serious discussion of reeling, writhing and derision ...

Not convinced, want some Major reason for clicking on that Major link?

Well any reptile source that references dashing Donner must be taken seriously ...

...Centre for Independent Studies education researcher Trisha Jha got it right in The Australian Financial Review on July 18: “With apologies to Paul Krugman, education outcomes aren’t everything – but in the long run they are almost everything.”
Despite a mammoth ratcheting-up of federal and state spending on school education under two rounds of Gonski reforms, Australia’s results in international educational comparison testing and in our own NAPLAN tests are either falling or flatlining.
Jha continued: “Award-winning education economist Eric Hanushek argued in 2023 that the downward trend in Australia’s performance in international testing and high proportions of students unable to meet basic skills would have an impact equivalent to a 6 per cent decline in lifetime earnings, compared with Australians two decades ago.”
Daily Telegraph education commentator Kevin Donnelly, discussing the roundtable, last Tuesday wrote: “Changing the tax system, addressing intergenerational inequality, reforming the national construction code and reducing red tape and bureaucratic regulation achieves little in comparison with ensuring citizens are literate, numerate, highly educated and intelligent.”
Donnelly quoted Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann from The Knowledge Capital of Nations: “Knowledge is the foundation of economic prosperity. Nations that ignore the fact suffer, while those that recognise it prosper.”
Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan thrive, the book says, because they recognise “the cognitive skills of the population are essential to long-term prosperity”.

You see? If you want to improve your literacy, study the Daily Terror ...

Say what, et tu Joe?

By golly that collage looks like it's been imported from the lizard Oz fever dream.

Never mind, here's a Major reason for clicking on that Major link, as the Major celebrates US education standards ...

Hanushek has for more than three decades argued in the US context that increased spending on schools and reducing class sizes has done zero to improve education outcomes. He argues the US must focus on teacher and curriculum quality and a national commitment to education.

Here we have fallen for the same trap of thinking higher spending and smaller class sizes will lift standards. We have let people with low tertiary entrance scores enter teaching degrees.
Our schools are also burdened with a national curriculum that includes three cross-curriculum priorities first flagged in the Melbourne Declaration in 2008 when Julia Gillard was Labor education minister under Kevin Rudd, and finally adopted in 2012 under Gillard as PM.
These are “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture”, “Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia”, and “Sustainability”.
To be fair, Gillard also introduced NAPLAN, the first serious attempt to measure education outcomes. Nor was Gillard the only PM to have strong opinions on the curriculum.
Short-lived Coalition PM Malcolm Turnbull argued all Australian school students should learn computer coding – something that soon will be done by AI.
Too few politicians have publicly advocated for a strong focus on reading, writing and arithmetic, even though such a focus defines the curriculums of countries performing best in international testing.
Things are worse in Democrat states in the US where students are being deliberately held back in an effort to make sure children from disadvantaged backgrounds do not fall behind.
The Free Press on August 31 published The War on Knowledge, by Dan Lerman, who describes expensive private schools where teachers do not care about spelling because it could get in the way of creativity.
As usual, it’s worst on the west coast.
“The Seattle Public School System embraced a ‘Math Ethnic Studies Framework’ starting in 2019,” Lerman writes.
Teachers were asked to reflect on how to “change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking’’.
Tracy Castro-Gill, creator of this maths framework, wrote that “decolonial teacher education must actively confront coloniality and create alternative frameworks”. Lerner says Castro-Gill “casts education itself as a colonial project to be dismantled – a fundamental departure from what the word (education) means”.
California in 2021 unveiled a draft new maths approach, “calling for districts to abandon tracking practices and delaying Algebra 1 until 9th grade in the name of equity”.
Several Democrat districts have explored new grading methods, called “grading for equity”, that eliminate penalties for missing work and cheating, and remove assessment of homework, attendance and class behaviour.

Indeed, indeed, what we need is a WWE type to run education ...

Inspirational, and so to a final teaser to get correspondents clicking on that Major link ...

Any further downgrading of school rigour in Australia would be particularly worrying given the debasement of much of our higher education sector.
Many university students today experience little face-to-face education and do most of their lessons online. Add perverse incentives for universities to earn income by attracting foreign full-fee paying students who are seldom failed and tertiary education looks like a recipe for destroying productivity and prosperity.
This column, in a July 27 preview to the productivity roundtable, pointed out the economic home truths: productivity that used to rise at an average annual 2 per cent in the Hawke, Keating and Howard years has been rising at 1 per cent since Rudd’s 2007 election win and only 0.7 per cent this year.
Living standards here rose only 1.5 per cent over the past decade compared with 22 per cent in comparable trading partners.
We are surviving only because of the mining exports many on the left want to stop.
If Chalmers really wants to lift productivity he should read a short 2019 paper by Hanushek, “The Economic Value of Improved Schools”. He calculates that had the US in 2015 lifted education results to the level of Germany by the end of this century it would have added $US48 trillion ($72.9 trillion) to cumulative US GDP – about three times average annual GDP in 2015.
To get there, Labor would have to ignore the bleating of education unions that believe the system is about them rather than their students.

It's all up, up and away in Major land, nd so to welcome all that's good about the fever dream swamp known as Faux Noise's America ...

What a Master Troll he is, and if only he'd go back to his home under the bridge, there to threaten all who try to pass ...