President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a “Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch.” The order requires his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to complete a plan recommending specific spending cuts based on input from federal agencies and outside scholars. This is a promising initiative. It will be up to Congress to enact the administration’s
READ MORELast year, following a rash of student violence in a Minnesota public school district, one teacher made a startling statement: “[T]eachers feel powerless to discipline. I am not exaggerating. We are told to never under any circumstances touch a student as a behavioral intervention. We have no way to discipline. If a child is running
READ MOREThe Democratic leadership, and its leftwing intellectual base, are feeling implausibly smug these days. They figure it this way: the Trump era is going to inspire a blowback. Trump will make a terrible mess, destabilize income security and health care access, and skew social power in favor of fat cats, and all of this will
READ MOREWith the increased emphasis on transparency in recent years, it has become easier for parents to get some idea of the quality of education their child is receiving. But while such transparency is good for parents and children, it’s not so great for our country’s education system. Much to the chagrin of Americans across the
READ MOREIn the Netherlands an elderly woman suffering from dementia was held down against her protests as a lethal injection was administered by a doctor. In the days before her “euthanasia” she repeatedly said, “I don’t want to die.” The doctor was cleared of wrongdoing. Another elderly woman in the Netherlands was euthanized due to her
READ MOREIn the last year or so, a handful of college faculty have been going public about the problems they see in the latest generation of students. First it was the college president who described his students as “day care” kids victimized over every little offense. This viewpoint was seconded by Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who suggested
READ MOREDriving down a country highway in the Midwest can seem an endless ribbon flanked by green walls of corn, neatly planted in stately rows. But who would guess that a plant that feeds a planet might hold clues that could help us better understand, or perhaps cure, insidious human diseases? Recent research from Dr. Mark
READ MOREUrapmin, a remote community in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, has no electricity in any of its seven villages. The people there, also called Urapmin, have no regular way of earning cash. They build their houses out of materials they gather from the rainforest that surrounds them, and they garden and hunt for their
READ MOREIn the last several years, comedienne Amy Schumer has burst on the national scene and enjoyed a decent amount of success. Like many of today’s comedians, Schumer’s humor capitalizes upon crass and crude subjects, which the Los Angeles Times recently described in the following way: “Schumer’s renown for obliterating narrow ideas about female sexuality, double
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