Stop gerrymandering, idiots. It's hard to underestimate how unpopular this is, unless you're in the political party that benefits (I guess, but even then.... if you feel so strongly that your political party should benefit from gerrymandering then you're an awful human). Which makes this a fundamentally political battle. The courts are so confused, perhaps because they were nominated for lifetime positions without having proper qualifications....

The third full term in thrall to the 6–3 supermajority is now upon us, and it brings yet another crisis of the court’s own making: In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second [Black majority] district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions.... Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”.... So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.

Err. Are we serious people here? The dog has caught the car. There's no excuse for reversing legal opinion in less than a year's time based on exactly the same rationale. Conservatives need to figure out what they're for, not just what they're against. Why are they agreeing to hear arguments on the exact same case, argued in a slightly different manner based on court directives, 6 months later? This seems patently absurd. A waste of time and resources.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-whoopsie-groundhog-day.html

@Metal-Brain
Explain to us mortals what is it that does not exist.

@averagejoe1 said
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/09/14/views-of-divorce-and-open-marriages/
51% of our young people favor open marriages. Lay with your neighbor's spouse.
Every day is new news about what you libs are doing. Now you have created an approval of open marriages. Every day is something. Sickening. Soon you will renounce the bible. To hell with Judeo Christ ...[text shortened]... rriage? I say not. An open marriage is a not-marriage. Let us have their kids define it.
Jesus.

I saw this study. The causes are not a lib thing. Our culture just went through a generation of divorce. More than half of marriages ended, sometimes when their kids were extremely impressionable teenagers. Now those kids are grown up and they don't want marriage. Not a lib thing. Among the important findings, more divorces happened in red states. More divorces happened in conservative households. Get over yourself with the lib thing.

The past 50 years showed our current youngsters that society views divorce as a legal tax relationship, not a life long partnership. Not a lib thing.

@averagejoe1 said
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/09/14/views-of-divorce-and-open-marriages/
51% of our young people favor open marriages. Lay with your neighbor's spouse.
Every day is new news about what you libs are doing. Now you have created an approval of open marriages. Every day is something. Sickening. Soon you will renounce the bible. To hell with Judeo Christ ...[text shortened]... rriage? I say not. An open marriage is a not-marriage. Let us have their kids define it.
Jesus.

How about you take the truly conservative stance and get government out of personal lives. Government should never poke its nose into our sex lives. Government should not be involved in deciding our health care choices unless that choice damages others ie smoking in public places, not wearing a mask and social distancing in public places during a pandemic. You all seem to want the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy.

@averagejoe1 said
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nj-sen-bob-menendez-and-wife-indicted-on-bribery-charges-prosecutors/4702810/

And if they don't throw him in jail, (this is slam-dunk), they cannot possibly throw Trump, who is not slam dunk. (He is not, since there is no charge of insurrection....but I digress!)

Dear Joe - Why don't you stop trying to "handicap" the legal system as if were a day at the racetrack. Both Menendez and Trump will take their respective journeys through the judicial system - a system that has worked reasonably well for the better part of 250 years.

It doesn't matter if a lib will post about Menendez crime. We don't have access to the evidence the prosecutors have, we don't know what witnesses have decided to cooperate with prosecutors, what information they've given up, nor do we know if either defendant might decide to plead guilty to lesser charges in return for a reduced sentence. To put it bluntly Joe, you're trying to put a 1000-piece puzzle together with 25 pieces.

Let the professionals handle this.

@jj-adams said
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/at-13-baltimore-city-high-schools-zero-students-tested-proficient-on-2023-state-math-exam

So you right-whingers (not a typo) just seem to have nothing better to do but sit on your ass bingeing on whatever is going wrong in a US city.

Those inner city schools are not blessed with quite the resources of the suburbs. Is that your point? Yeah, I doubt it.

The schools that failed 100% are listed in the article. As I'm currently procrastinating on starting work on a graph theory problem on my desk, I looked at some of these schools. Here's the list:

Achievement Academy at Harbor City High
ConneXions: A Community Based Arts School
Coppin Academy
Edmondson-Westside High
Excel Academy at Francis M. Wood High
Frederick Douglass High
Joseph C. Briscoe Academy
New Era Academy
Patterson High
Reginald F. Lewis High
Renaissance Academy
The Reach! Partnership School
Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy

Most of these school names are strange to me. The word "academy" has apparently been discounted by 90% in the last few decades...

Achievement Academy at Harbor City High: A very small school, and not a normal one. It "serve[s] students with severe academic and/or behavior issues." Okay. So maybe not surprising that it's a problem child.

ConneXions: A Community Based Arts School: A charter school. I thought charter schools were the right-wing darling. Oh well. Anyway, it's an "art focused school." Uh huh. In my experience art people are extremely allergic to mathematics, so this school is disadvantaged right there. But it needs sorting out, clearly.

Coppin Academy: Not operated by Baltimore, but rather by Coppin State University. Another dodgy charter school that ought to be looked into.

Excel Academy at Francis M. Wood High: "Excel Academy is a public alternative placement high school servicing students needing credit recovery for students in grades 9-12." This is another school that takes in the worst students, including adults that didn't graduate from high school the first time 'round.

And so on.

My point is this: these are not random samplings. The schools in question are by and large not representative of Baltimore's 37 high schools.

There is no question, however, that more needs to be done to improve mathematics education in the US, though privatizing the school system is certainly not one of them. All the nations that are kicking the US's ass in mathematics have fully public, "socialized" education systems.

Oh dear

@wildgrass

American "conservatives" don't have ideas of their own aside from some vague notions of turning back the clock to the 1950s, but sans the 91% tax rate for those in the top 1% income bracket. It's all about the temper tantrums, and doing whatever it takes to hurt people they believe shouldn't exist, and dismissing inconvenient science as a hoax, and worshiping a bloated orange clown whose qualities match those of a tin-plated banana republic dictator to a degree that defies parody.

That looks like quite a problem they have in San Fransisco.

So, being the educator of the masses I think I am (I’m not and I don’t; I’m just being cute, which I do and I am), I took a wee peek into the numbers…

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm

The States with the highest death rates by overdosing are:
1. West Virginia
2. Tennessee
3. Louisiana
4. Kentucky

It is a very interesting site.
You can also find out which states have the highest teen pregnancy rates (red States), highest gun related deaths (red states) and lowest life expectancy rates (red states).

Quite telling really.

@averagejoe1 said
Divorces? Sorry to disagree, it is an offshoot of the Sexual Revolution. Who started the Sexual Revolution?

The crisis of divorce was not caused by the sexual revolution. I won't lecture you. You can look this up.

But extremely high divorce rates does require a reevaluation of what marriage means. Whatever works to reverse the divorce trend.

Instead of laying scurrilous blame on the libs for everything, how about identifying a solution?

@mott-the-hoople said
https://www.facebook.com/reel/359902093131729?fs=e&s=TIeQ9V&mibextid=0NULKw

Gfy and take your BS Nazi Facebook page with you, the world stopped wetting their pants laughing at you as soon as the orange moron finally slithered out of the White House.

@mott-the-hoople said
https://www.facebook.com/reel/359902093131729?fs=e&s=TIeQ9V&mibextid=0NULKw

The world’s been laughing at you since Raygun.
Since Bush Jr. we’ve split our seams.

But the orange blob had us rolling on the floor.

At this moment in time we’re back to pointing and giggling.

@mott-the-hoople said
when will you idiots ever learn the US is not a democracy. Democracies have many faults as our founders rightly wanted to avoid. Mob rule being one.

Uh… yeah… the US is a democracy dude.

I don’t know what sort of cave you’re tied up in, but a republic democracy is… uh… a democracy.

@kmax87 said
It will invariably turn out to be a turd burger. Could we expect anything more from Poop the Scoopler?

I rue the day the little poppet happened across his dark corner of Facebook
No explanation of the link nothing to say which Nazi is hosting the page, you’d need gonads of titanium and a wooden cerebellum to follow them.

The d4 Bishop should be unleashed, but how?