Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, and all the rest of you, too! Welcome to the Big Top. Yes, that’s right: the Impeachment Circus, with its dancing elephants and prancing donkeys, is coming to town.
Category: Blogs
The official Everything-Voluntary.com blog.
The Formula for Anxiety
The magnitude of anxiety seems to be equal to the delta between expectations and self-assessment. That means there are two variables to work on to reduce anxiety. Expectations and assessment.
The Down Side of Impeachment
Unless there’s some dramatic change in the political landscape over the next month or so, I believe that the US House of Representatives will impeach President Donald Trump. Unless there’s some dramatic change in the political landscape between now and Trump’s trial in the US Senate, I don’t believe the Senate will vote, by the necessary 2/3 majority, to convict him. Taken together, those two outcomes constitute a bad thing. Here’s why.
Build, Barbara, Build: Reflections on Nickel and Dimed
I can understand someone saying, “Deregulation isn’t enough.” But you could double the supply of public housing without making a noticeable dent in the housing shortage. Rent subsidies are much easier to scale up, but subsidizing demand without increasing supply is almost the definition of crazy policy. Furthermore, if you want to create high-paid job opportunities for non-college workers, a rapidly growing construction sector is a dream come true.
Statism is The Strongest Witness Against Itself
Statism is incompatible with ethics; statism is incompatible with life, liberty, and property; statism is incompatible with humanity. You can tell this just by looking at the claims statism makes and where it leads.
Teachers Who Quit to Create Schooling Alternatives
It’s not uncommon for public school teachers to experience burnout or feel demoralized by the weight of their work. Many leave the classroom and the education profession behind to pursue other careers. In fact, U.S. Labor Department data reveal that public school educators are quitting their jobs at record-breaking rates.
“The Grid” is the Problem, Not the Solution
Extreme weather often results in power loss to large numbers of people. I’ve experienced multi-day outages from thunderstorms, blizzards, and ice storms in the midwest and hurricanes in the southeast. Most Americans probably recall similar outages. That’s what happens when you string wires and transformers all over the place then pray nothing knocks them down or stresses them out.
Erratic Behavior
Isn’t it odd when someone known for erratic behavior erratically does something with which an observer agrees, suddenly that erratic behavior becomes the mark of “stable genius?” On the other hand, the action becomes betrayal. Check out Senator Lindsey Graham, for instance.
Bojangles vs. Bureaucracy
Unlike the Bojangles employee, the woman working for the bureaucracy has no agency. She has no ability to read the situation, adjust, and do the simple thing that gets the spirit of the law right despite errors in the letter.
When the Quest for Education Equity Stifles Innovation
In March, efforts to open an innovative public high school in a diverse, urban district just outside of Boston received a devastating blow. Powderhouse Studios was in the works for seven years, with grand hopes of changing public education from a top-down system defined by coercion to a learner-driven model focused on student autonomy and self-determination. The vision for this school was so compelling that it won a $10 million XQ Super School innovation grant and was positioned to lead efforts to inject freedom into a conventional schooling system characterized by force.