Loose Ends (170)

I think we can inaugurate a new catchphrase today for corruption and stupidity: “All the rectitude of a DC jury.”

Or: “The OJ jury: ‘We are impressed!‘”

Or, move over “faster-than-a-speeding-bullet” Superman: “Faster than a DC jury acquitting a Clinton crony.”

News item: Gee—who could have seen this coming?

San Francisco’s Lowell High School is seeing a record number of failing grades in its fall 2021 class – the first admitted through a new lottery system over its merit-based admissions process.

Of the 620 students in Lowell’s freshman class, 24.4% received at least D or F in their first semester, according to internal records obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle. This is almost triple the number of the first-year students in the two years before – 7.9% in fall 2020 and 7.7% in fall 2019.

And who could have seen the proposed remedy for this? (Actually anyone paying attention to “progressive” racists):

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. . .

In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.

“Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap,” reads a slide in the PowerPoint deck outlining its rationale and goals.

This is sure to end well for the very people the left say they want to help. (Of course, much of leftism is merely a screen for guilty white liberals to feel better about themselves. . .)

Maybe The Atlantic is hoping to reduce the increasing number of people who throw the magazine in the recycling bin without reading it?

[A]lthough some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t. . .

Yet another problem is that plastic recycling is simply not economical.Recycled plastic costs more than new plastic because collecting, sorting, transporting, and reprocessing plastic waste is exorbitantly expensive. The petrochemical industry is rapidly expanding, which will further lower the cost of new plastic.

I remember when NY Times columnist John Tierney published a detailed article exposing the folly of recycling in the New York Times Magazine in the mid-1990s. It generated more hate mail than anything he’d ever written, because recycling is the key sacrament of the environmental religion.

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