Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. Since Stephen Breyer's retirement in 2022, he is also the Court's oldest member. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Ariz. lawmakers to help reverse Donald Trump’s loss, emails show. Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona lawmakers after the 2020 election to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory and choose “a clean slate of Electors,” according to emails obtained by The Washington Post. (more)

Anthony McLeod Kennedy (born July 23, 1936) is an American attorney and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He was nominated to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, and sworn in on February 18, 1988. After the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he was considered the swing vote on many of the Roberts Court's 5–4 decisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Kennedy

Antonin Gregory Scalia (/ˌæntənɪn skəˈliːə/ ⓘ; March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016)[1][n 1] was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century,[8] and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court.[9] Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor... nominated by Ronald Reagan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Scalia

John Glover Roberts Jr. (born January 27, 1955) is an American jurist who has served as the 17th chief justice of the United States since 2005.[3] He has been described as having a moderate conservative judicial philosophy, though he is primarily an institutionalist.[4][5] For his willingness to work with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc, Roberts has been regarded as a swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court... appointed by George W Bush. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts

document posting/hosting service (more)

Revanchism (French: revanchisme, from revanche, "revenge") is the political manifestation of the will to reverse the territorial losses which are incurred by a country, frequently after a war or after a social movement. As a term, revanchism originated in 1870s France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War among nationalists who wanted to avenge the French defeat and reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Revanchist politics often rely on the identification of a nation with a nation state, mobilizing sentiments of ethnic nationalism to claim territories outside of where members of the ethnic group currently live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revanchism

In politics, particularly the politics of the United States, dark money refers to spending to influence elections, public policy, and political discourse, where the source of the money is not disclosed to the public. In the United States, some types of nonprofit organizations may spend money on campaigns without disclosing who their donors are. The most common type of dark money group is the 501(c)(4) (often called social welfare organizations).[3][4] Such organizations can receive unlimited donations from corporations, individuals and unions. Proponents of dark money maintain it is protected under the First Amendment, while critics complain recipients of dark money (as with any contribution) are beholden to their funders, while voters are kept in the dark about connections between donor and politician when favors are paid back.[5] Dark money entered the politics of the United States with Buckley v. Valeo (1976), when the United States Supreme Court laid out "Eight Magic Words" that define the difference between electioneering and issue advocacy – exempting the latter from campaign finance laws. Dark campaign spending increased from less than $5.2 million in 2006 to well over $300 million in the 2012 presidential cycle, more than $174 million in the 2014 midterms,[3] $216 million in the 2014 midterm elections,[5] and more than $1 billion in all 2020 federal elections.[6] The 2010 landmark case, Citizens United v. FEC, marked the turning point when dark money contributions surged, and some political groups began contending that they were not required to register with the FEC as any sort of PAC because their primary purpose was something other than electoral politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_money (more)

Elisabeth Dee DeVos (/dəˈvɒs/ də-VOSS; née Prince; born January 8, 1958) is an American politician, philanthropist, and former government official who served as the 11th United States secretary of education from 2017 to 2021. DeVos is known for her conservative political activism,[1] and particularly her support for school choice, school voucher programs, and charter schools.[2][3][4][5] She was Republican national committeewoman for Michigan from 1992 to 1997 and served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000, and again from 2003 to 2005. She has advocated for the Detroit charter school system[6][7] and she is a former member of the board of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. She has served as chair of the board of the Alliance for School Choice and the Acton Institute and headed the All Children Matter PAC.[8] DeVos is married to former Amway CEO Dick DeVos.[9][10] Her brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA.[11][12][13] Their father is billionaire industrialist Edgar Prince, founder of the Prince Corporation.[12][13][14][15] In 2016, the family was listed by Forbes as the 88th-richest in America, with an estimated net worth of $5.4 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_DeVos

Kieran Egan (22 May 1942 – 12 May 2022) was an Irish educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural history.[1] He has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the stages (Egan called them "understandings") that occur during a person's intellectual development. He has questioned the work of Jean Piaget and progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey. He taught at Simon Fraser University.[2] His major work is the 1997 book The Educated Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieran_Egan_(philosopher)

Because machine learning algorithms process numbers rather than text, the text must be converted to numbers. In the first step, a vocabulary is decided upon, then integer indexes are arbitrarily but uniquely assigned to each vocabulary entry, and finally, an embedding is associated to the integer index. Algorithms include byte-pair encoding and WordPiece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model#Probabilistic_tokenization (LLM) (more)

founder, Science is Weird https://www.scienceisweird.com/origin, School for Humans http://www.schoolsforhumans.org/ (more)

Harold Jarche: Kieran Egan - 1942-2022. I found out the other day that another person who has inspired my work has passed away. Kieran Egan’s book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding greatly influenced my thinking on public education (more)

Myth is a genre of folklore or theology consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. For folklorists, historians, philosophers or theologians this is very different from the use of "myth" which simply meaning something that is not true. Instead, the truth value of a myth is not a defining criterion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth

The classical education movement or renewal advocates for a return to a traditional education based on the liberal arts (including the natural sciences), the canons of classical literature, the fine arts, and the history of civilization.[1] It focuses on human formation and paideia with an early emphasis on music, gymnastics, recitation, imitation, and grammar.[2] Multiple organizations support classical education in charter schools, in independent faith-based schools, and in home schooling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_education_movement

Back in 2010 SalonCom had an article about Hipsters using Food Stamps (to buy hipster-ish fancy groceries). Faced with lingering UnEmployment, 20- and 30-somethings with College Degrees and foodie standards are shaking off old taboos about who should get government assistance and discovering that government benefits can indeed be used for just about anything edible, including wild-caught fish, organic asparagus and triple-crème cheese. (more)

part of Educating Kids (more)

Bill Hicks Rising. On October 1st, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored (more)

Brandon Hendrickson: Towers, and kids' brains, and bears, oh my! I’m guessing that you know who Barbara Oakley is because (1) she’s a rock star of education,1 and (2) she just gave us a major shout-out on her newsletter, which reaches something like three orders of magnitude more people than our homely substack! (more)

Brandon Hendrickson: on Spiral history. 1. A problem. Because stories are the One Tool to Rule Them All, the story of the whole world is the backbone of an Egan education. It connects everything, and helps give everything its flavor. The other backbone of an Egan education, of course, is the different ways of understanding that we gradually build (more)