Once again, 500,000 students couldn't go to school due to a teacher's strike. Teachers are government employees, at least 40 percent and over 50 percent (if you count colleges) of the state budget goes toward education, but a lot of that has nothing to do with teachers. Much of the $129 billion is everything except education, it is nebulous state programs like $250,000,000 to "improve the quality of reading for students" which, like a 2014 voter mandate to add water storage, means years and years of proposals with little being done. 

A year after Governor Newsom bragged during his re-election campaign that his progressive policies were Making California Great Again, he says there is no money for teachers, but there is money for new government agencies.

A new survey of 515 trans individuals found that 78 percent are happier since they transitioned from their biological sex. Transitioning means different things, though - only 16 percent report surgery, most changed their personal style or name while 38 percent had therapy. 

It's not all good news. Though they are happier now, in the past 41 percent have felt unsafe in a locker room, 64 percent have been verbally attacked, and 25 percent have been physically attacked.  43 percent reported suicidal thoughts.

Expanded federal involvement in agriculture using expanded definitions of "waters of the United States" to cover tiny streams and even small ponds has led to a majority of US states fighting in court against Washington, DC.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown has granted an injunction against the Biden administration for Idaho and Texas.

It makes little sense to consider any of them WOTUS, since no American ship is traveling on them, nor could they. The White House is instead arguing because small streams can feed into larger rivers they all fall under the new definition. 

After the East Palestine derailment, government officials in states have been worried that eco-terrorists will also ramp up their efforts to sabotage energy infrastructure while media attention is high.

Utah just became the 19th state to pass the infrastructure equivalent of a hate crimes law; HB 370 provides greater penalties for environmentalists who damage railroads, energy plants, pipelines, or infrastructure leading to those. Utah had already been concerned after attacks during the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 so a judge can now sentence those caught attempting to go beyond peaceful protests to five years in prison.

If you own an electric car in America, you paid a premium to do a good work; save the planet from CO² emissions.

Except perhaps not. Unless you are a wealthy elite who can spend $60,000 on a car and $25,000 on solar panels (government subsidies funded by poor people aside) 80 percent of your electricity probably came from conventional energy, like natural gas, anyway.

Harvard biologist David Sinclair is so convinced he has the secret to staying 'biologically young' that he *ta da* sells it. And it is all things you can buy. Or do.

He is mostly vegetarian and mostly doesn't drink. Okay, a moderate diet and exercise, you don't need a degree for that, you just need to have read "Readers Digest" any time since 1963. He looks young and perhaps always will, but just like someone may buy some brand Kim Kardashian sells, it doesn't mean they will look like her, it is an aspirational purchase. He knows that but wants to sell you stuff anyway.

A recent op-ed argues that the way to curb climate change is to invoke Malthus, or at least 20th century progressives like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and economist John Maynard Keynes and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who all believed that retreating to the past was the only way to protect the future - well, the future for white elites, anyway.

The ultimate state control of culture in the name of progress was not the National Socialists in Germany or the Fascists of Italy, it was the Soviet Union under communism. Communists fought to gain ground everywhere, Mussolini fought them in Italy and won, Hitler fought them in Spain and won(1) but they succeeded in a lot of other countries, which ultimately meant failure.

Do you want protection from changes that would increase competition and threaten your profits? Who wouldn't? 

That does not make it better for everyone else. 

France made wine famous - the prominent chemist Louis Pasteur set out to solve the spoilage problem the domestic wine industry faced and his success set off an international craze- but they didn't make it first.