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Watching the videos coming out of Afghanistan evokes both outrage and despair. After 20 years making sure that Afghanistan would not become a safe haven for terrorists who would plot another 9/11, President Joe Biden turned an ill-advised withdrawal into a debacle. He betrayed the American people who spent blood and treasure there. He betrayed […]

At the end of the 2020-21 school year, Paso Robles High School's last day of classes consisted of two separate cohorts of students coming to classes for 15 minutes. It's unclear what exactly was supposed to be accomplished in these super-short classes, it was anticipated that attendance would be low, and the teachers I was […]

It's been several weeks since the 20-21 school year ended here in Paso Robles, Calif. My wife and I are moving to the Central Valley so she can return to teaching at her alma mater—a public school that pays better than any public school district on California's Central Coast, and in an area with a […]

I've been working on a rather long post for several weeks, as I've had time, on my experience as a semi-regular classroom teacher during the final months of the 2020-21 school year. The completion of that post has been hampered by the sale of our home and preparations to move. But this bit of news […]

Corrections policies, especially at newspapers, used to be pretty straightforward. In most cases, they'd run in the same, dedicated spot in the section of the newspaper in which the story they were correcting first appeared. So, corrections on AP wire stories often ran on A2. If it was a correction to a feature piece in […]

For more than a year, suggesting that the COVID-19 virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a crazy, right-wing conspiracy theory that was the equivalent of believing the moon landings were faked. Let's start with this: You shouldn't trust anything the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) says. […]

Former President Donald Trump rightly received a lot of flak over his continual failure to stay on message as the spread of COVID-19 eventually led to lockdowns, skyrocketing unemployment, and hundreds of thousands of Americans dead. However, if the public pronouncements of our public health officials under the Joe Biden presidency are any indication of […]

There were a couple of items that came across the transom yesterday while I was locked out from my main computer (my wife was doing grades for the final progress report of the year) and so I responded on Twitter, rather than here. The first example, an article by Ian Miles Cheong at The Post-Millennial, is […]

USA Today, the newspaper that decades ago pioneered the practice of short front page stories that weren't continued inside has recently pioneered a new type of opinion piece: The ever-evolving commentary. Our Horrible Media: Stealth Editing In a first of its kind, USA Today had former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams rewrite her piece on Georgia's […]

Earlier today the Centers for Disease Control released new guidelines on where masks should be used. As has been the norm since the beginning of this pandemic, the United States government, first under Donald Trump and now under Joe Biden, has done a less than stellar job of communicating with the public. The mask flyer […]