I just don’t see the point in calling ourselves a united nation if we aren’t going to produce a minimum standard of educated workers across the board. Why not just Balkanize at that point?

And the US government banned words related to climate change from any future studies. If your grant proposal includes those keywords, it’ll get denied automatically without a human even looking at it.

Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.

You know who believes in climate change? Fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, the military industrial complex, and every single politician talking about buying or taking Greenland by force. All the very same people who have spent the past half century publicly denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do they believe in it, but they are designing their profit models around it at our expense.

I’m not saying some states are “too dumb”. I’m saying some states are too poor, and the poor shouldn’t be left to suffer compounding negative results because their citizens can’t shoulder the burden of higher state taxes. Because I promise you that federal taxes will not go down. Once the government has gotten used to milking you for X amount, they aren’t going to give up that cash flow. All that will happen is that poor states will just get worse and worse as education falls and they fail to produce a workforce qualified for anything other than menial labor.

We are too dumb to set our own standards!

It’s not about being “too dumb”. It’s about having skills that transfer across state lines. There’s a reason we don’t let doctors and lawyers from other countries just set up a shop and start practicing in the US without meeting American standards first. Now imagine that happening from one state to the next. In your naive attempt to reduce the size of government, you’ve actually increased government bureaucracy and red tape by orders of magnitude.

And again, where are states going to make up that 15% of funding provided by the federal government?

The problem with this is that there ends up being no national education standard. You take a state like Alabama, which ranks dead last in so many education metrics, and remove those federal standards. Now Alabama can just change their state standards, and suddenly they have a 100% graduation rate with all straight A students. Guess what happens when Cletus the Alabama valedictorian tries to get a job in the medical field or the tech sector.

And that’s before we ever even talk about funding. States get about 15% of their K-12 funding from the federal government. Where are the states going to make up that difference? Higher state taxes? Higher property taxes? Or are they just going to let already struggling schools go to shit? Guess who that affects the most?

You really haven’t put a lot of thought into this beyond “federal gubmint bad”.

The 99% Party. It’s a slick way of calling it a worker’s party without sounding like a communist party.

Is it though?

ZACHARY, La. (BRPROUD) – The Zachary Police Department says they arrested a former student after Zachary High School was tagged with graffiti.

Police say that Shyron White was arrested at his home in Livingston Parish for drawing a triangle with a symbol in it on the exterior doors. Graffiti was found in several locations around the building, and police were alerted on Tuesday.

“It’s always important to not damage someone else’s property. It costs money and time to, you know, to actually fix,” Zachary Police Department Chief Daryl Lawrence said. “And then you’ll have people like us out looking for you.”

Lawrence said an incident like this is not common for the Zachary community. White is booked in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, charged with terrorism, criminal damage to property, aggravated assault and criminal trespassing.

This is the Orwellian shit you’re advocating when you start classifying vandalism as terrorism.

It’s property damage that was done specifically to avoid hurting people. By that interpretation, Banksy could also be classified as a terrorist.

If you read the Bible with a purely objective mind and come away thinking God is the good guy in the story, I have some serious questions about your morality and ethics.

Many years ago I was doing carpentry in a mansion on Kiawah Island, and the owner had brought back these huge clam shells from Greece that he turned into bathroom sinks.

Probably both.

The question mark won’t matter. It detected the word “fight” and that’s all the removal was based on.

Is this the same House GOP pressuring universities to expel students for protesting and pushing police to arrest and imprison protesters? That House GOP?

Sometimes it takes me forever to get these, if I ever get them at all. This one though… It immediately clicked.

If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.

They actually deserve it

You understand that Russians are just people too, right? They aren’t all a bunch of drooling savages who want to murder Ukrainians or anyone else. Not sure how you can say the Russian civilian population deserves to be punished for what their shitty government does. Have you applied that same logic to your own country and its people? Or is that just something you say about faraway places from the comfort of your own home?

Having been to both countries, and made friends in both countries, this whole war really hurts to see. I hate the Russian government, but the Russian people don’t deserve this any more than the Ukrainian people deserve being invaded. I can’t give an opinion on how strategically “necessary” this was in the eyes of Ukrainian military leadership, but it’s sad all the same.

Slightly off topic, but I wish I had the patience to learn how to make these videos. I’ve got some songs I’d love to make videos for, but I get so frustrated with the tedium of using AI tools. Granted, I’ve only ever used SD-Forge, ComfyUI, and the like. I’m not stupid, I just have a hard time staying focused.

Maybe a long shot, but anyone know where I can collaborate with someone to do this?

You can openly call for the death penalty for people seeking an abortion, or for the extrajudicial execution of immigrants, but Satan forbid you up vote a cartoon of your favorite green hat wearing Nintendo plumber.