We won’t take sides in the presidential sweepstakes starting in the months ahead (may the best man or woman win), but you’ve got to be continually impressed with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ courage and leadership on major issues of the day.
This WSJ story of how DeSantis and his associates in Florida are taking on the radical ESG pension managers just made our day:
We are pro-choice when it comes to smoking cigarettes and adamantly oppose measures in states and in Washington to ban smoking.
The good news is that smoking rates for all age groups have fallen over the past decade and continue a sharp five-decade-long decline in lighting up. This trend will be highly associated with longer life expectancies and reduced rates of cancer and heart disease.
And for those who do smoke: in all things, moderation.
The pandemic revealed just how “woke” public schools are in many states not just to parents, but to teachers as well.
A big complaint of union members is that the National Education Association and its state affiliates report spending more than twice as much money on political expenditures than they do representing its members.
According to a Freedom Foundation investigation, the Oregon Education Association (OEA) has lost just shy of one in five of its members. They have taken advantage of the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that mandatory union dues violate public employees’ First Amendment rights.
The breaking point for many Oregon teachers came during the pandemic. As Freedom Foundation reports: “While demanding public schools remain closed to in-person learning despite credible evidence showing youngsters seldom contract the virus and almost seldom die of it, OEA and its labor allies successfully blocked hundreds of children from continuing their education at virtual public charter schools in 2020.”
Student test scores plummeted to an all-time low. The legislature’s response wasn’t to pass reforms, but instead to pass a bill suspending the state requirements that students demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math to graduate from high school.
The teacher unions are engaged in unforgivable abuse of our children.
No one played a bigger and earlier role in attacking lockdowns than we at CTUP. We exposed these assaults on freedom and common sense as wholly ineffective and ruinous to the economy. Now nearly everyone with a brain admits we were right.
But apparently not Mark Cuban – the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a regular panelist on CNBC’s “Shark Tank.” Cuban decided to tweet some unsolicited advice on how to deal with “medical info and misinformation” to new Twitter owner Elon Musk.
One of our allies, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and one of the original co-signers of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, weighed in:
Cuban didn’t challenge the deplorable record of lockdowns. Instead, he attacked those of us who were right about lockdowns for being right; “While you were shouting to try to be proven right, all you did was add to the uncertainty as everyone made decisions using ever-evolving data. And now, again, your big accomplishment appears to be you think you were proven right.”
So Cuban still defends the false scare campaign about Covid. Cuban and other lockdown supporters have demonstrated that they don’t want to have a real debate on the evidence or the merits of their position. Because they were dead wrong.
We’re sick and tired of every two months' new “COVID emergency.” This so just a cynical ploy to keep people in a perpetual state of fear of flu-like symptoms and an excuse for perpetual government controls on the economy and individual behavior.
Here's one way to end zero-COVID madness without admitting you ended zero-COVID — announce the virus has mutated so much that it isn't COVID anymore. The Chinese have done just that:
A rename makes sense. The latest study out of South Africa shows the current Omicron strains carry about 90% lower hospitalization risk than Delta:
Is that really still COVID-19, which is an abbreviation for Coronavirus Disease 2019?
