This week on The Learning Curve, co-hosts Alisha Searcy and U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng interview Dr. Kymyona Burk, Senior Policy Fellow at ExcelinEd and former state literacy director for Mississippi. Dr. Burk shares insights from her remarkable career in K-12 education reform. She discusses her journey from classroom teacher to leading transformative literacy initiatives in Mississippi that resulted in groundbreaking improvements in early literacy and NAEP reading scores. She examines the strengths and weaknesses of teaching approaches like “whole language” and phonics and emphasizes the importance of early childhood education, leadership, and high-quality reading materials in fostering young readers. Reflecting on Mississippi’s successes and the broader national learning loss exacerbated by COVID-19, Dr. Burk offers actionable advice for state policymakers to help students recover and thrive with the science of reading.

Escort Biden out of the Building, Now!

 

Source: Dreamstime

Could security just escort Biden and his Administration out of the workplace buildings already?  Please, right now. Not a moment to waste. Ideally, it would’ve occurred some time ago. In the corporate world, when a person is fired (especially unceremoniously), it is not uncommon for the sacked to immediately be forced to clean out his desk under supervision, turn in his company badge and computer, have his passwords disabled, and then walked out the front door with an escort. This practice is rather unpleasant, but there is a reason for it.

Microschool Journeys with Curious Mike is an eight-episode podcast series airing in January and February 2025. Host Curious Mike explores the rise of microschools—small, innovative learning environments—with stories from his personal experiences, expert insights, and visits to models like KaiPod.  What happens day to day, in terms of socialization, achievement, and personalization?  How quickly do they enter and exit the market?  Who pays?  Perfect for educators, parents, and policymakers, this podcast offers a deep dive into this fascinating straddle between homeschools and traditional schools.

America’s national debt stands at over $36 trillion dollars as of early 2025. What does that mean? How did we get here? What should and can be done about it? What are the consequences of inaction? AIER.org policy analyst Dave Hebert joins Jeff this week to discuss this problem, hiding in plain sight, its background, and possibilities for the incoming Trump administration and the future.

#debt #nationaldebt #politics #congress #deficits #debtceiling

Ancient Sodom in Modern BritainSodom and Gomorrah in Britain: How incest and rape gangs are related

 

People reference Sodom and Gomorrah, and they reference Lot engaging in incest with his daughters, but they don’t focus on how the two are related. I figured out the connection between the two and how it explains Pakistani rape gangs in modern times. Here is a short refresher from the New King James Bible:

Now before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.”

Democrats are losing their minds

 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Atlantic has a remarkable article up:  “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 days – He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.”  I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, so I couldn’t read the entire article linked.  Thus, I’m unsure if they explain why they just happened to publish this article just as Trump is taking office.  Perhaps it’s just a coincidence.  Or perhaps they describe some perceived parallels that they see between Trump and Hitler.  I don’t think it matters.  Their intention is clear.  Regardless, here are the first two paragraphs, that I could see on this side of the paywall:

Quote of the Day: Travel Writability

 

The Zephyr’s timetable is engineered for thrills: it’s nearly midnight by the time you pass into Nebraska, so you sleep through the Great Plains, provided you can sleep at all. But to locate the sublime in a darkened tallgrass prairie bookended here and there by flour mills is what separates the real romantics from the wannabes. I watch it pass, forehead pressed against the window.

– Meaghan Garvey, “Passengers,” County Highway vol. 2, no. 4 (January-February 2025)

Case Study: The Awful Marshall Fire of Colorado

 

Marshall Fire, from Wikimedia Commons

The recent raging fires around LA that have captured so much attention (and for good reason) jogged my memory of another awful fire that has parallels. I’m referring to one of Colorado’s worst fires, which eventually got named the “Marshall Fire.”  This fire can serve as a case study that should be popularized. It can better inform public policy and be an educational warning for the general public. It also has less of the politically charged rhetoric that surrounds the current southern California situation. However, it is not devoid of a key political angle—that I will cover at the end. But let’s first review what the Marshall fire was and the circumstances around it.

Ann talks to California inside expert John Phillips of KABC radio in Los Angeles and also gives her take on the sentencing of Donald Trump in New York.

Show links:

Russia Might Be Going Broke Over Ukraine War

 

When commentators talk about whether the Russians or the Ukrainians are winning the war between their two countries, much attention is paid to the Russians gaining territory, even though Russia was only able to gain about 0.7 percent of Ukraine’s territory in the entire year of 2024, at an estimated cost of 420,000 Russian soldiers killed, wounded or captured.  But less attention has been paid to the engines of war, the economy.  At first, it seemed that economic sanctions placed on Russia by the United States, Europe and Japan were not having much impact on Russia’s economy.  In more recent times, however, Russia’s economy does seem to be having difficulties.

Here is the Financial Times with an article on this topic.

Movies in the Sky

 

When I was a movie projectionist, the highest-paid union brothers in Local 306 threaded up reels of film, like I did, but they never entered a movie theater. They worked on airplanes, but they never left the ground. Not on the job, anyway. They were technicians for Inflight Motion Pictures, entrepreneurial pioneers and, briefly, a factor in Hollywood. In an age when regulated air tickets were much costlier, a non-stop coast-to-coast or international jetliner ride was a symbol of elite status. In 1961, TWA was first to offer the added luxury of passing the flight time watching a movie.

Inflight Motion Pictures controlled the proprietary technology. IMP technicians were the only ones permitted to handle the films, which had to be taken out, rewound, and reset for each flight. IMP was also an intermediary between the airlines and the studios. The compromises they worked out shaped the tone of most airline movies for decades to come; above all, inoffensive. Not unreasonable. Though it’s easy to make fun of censor cuts and blandness, most travelers prefer soothing to edgy. Dramas and historical films can fit the formula, but romcoms have become airline movies par excellence.

The Worst Mayor in America

 

After Lori Lightfoot was voted out of the mayor’s seat in Chicago following her calamitous tenure, I dearly hoped that the residents of Chicago had come to their senses about progressive mayors and would vote for someone who had some understanding of fiscal responsibility and the role of a big city mayor.

It was not to be.

Which of those decisions turned out to be mistakes?

 

Palisades fire from PTZ Camera on roof of high rise in Downtown. Wikimedia Commons

As with most enormous disasters, there wasn’t just one simple mistake that led to the Los Angeles fires.  There appear to be many decisions, made over the course of many years, by many different people, that led to our present circumstance, in which something like this was possible.  Interestingly, all of them were decisions made by leftists, in the interest of advancing leftism.  For example:

California Democrats Will Need to Make Things Worse

 

It is probably time for the California legislature to increase taxes, impose more regulatory burdens, find new ways to punish mainstream views regarding sex and sexuality, and mandate even deeper adherence to the dogma of anthropogenic climate change.  If that seems counterintuitive, I invite you to think of that august body as part of a living parasite with finely honed survival skills rather than the expected product of democratic processes. Creating pain is a survival strategy. I will explain.

The entity has its solid voting core of welfare dependency and government-funded jobs, but it is still logistically and fiscally very difficult to make that into a clear majority. The core has to be supplemented by stoking fear about a massive, yet remarkably well-concealed, white racist movement so as to get productively employed people to vote their ethnic identity rather than their natural interest in competent, lean government. Similarly, young women and those with unconventional sexual preferences must be made to fear that a right-wing movement is poised to deny them a wide range of bad choices.

A Rock and County Music Giant

 

Carl Perkins wrote “Blue Suede Shoes,” a 1950s rock-and-roll anthem. One of Sun Studio’s original fabulous four, along with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, he inspired other musicians, including the Beatles. Yet he is largely forgotten today.

Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly, by Jeff Apter, is a new biography of Perkins. It puts Perkins and his contributions to rock and roll in context, explaining why Perkins is often overlooked.

The son of a sharecropper, a member of a poor white family in Tipton, Tennessee, Perkins born in the 1930s, grew up in a shack without electricity or running water. As a child he picked cotton alongside other field hands, white and black, having dropped out of school in eighth grade to support his family.

California An Ideological Dumpster Fire

 

Ain’t diversity grand!  Just ask California Governor Gavin Newsom.  Just ask L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (recently back from Africa).  Just ask L.A. LGBTQ fire chief Kristin Crowley.  Just ask virtually anyone in a position of power in that once great state, now literally burning and coming apart at the seams.  Diversity, Equity, Inclusion!  Shout it to the heavens!

And run for your lives.

In Defense of Ethnic Discrimination

 

We’ve got all the wrong people in charge in this country.  Thankfully, I don’t live in Los Angeles, but if I did, I would not want a lesbian named Kristin Crowley in charge of the fire department. The LA Fire Department website boasts, “Chief Crowley took the oath of office on March 25, 2022 – becoming the first female and LGBTQ Fire Chief in the LAFD. Chief Crowley leads a diverse department.” That’s not gonna save my house or life in an emergency.

The Irish have run American fire departments for a century or more. I want a tough Irishman named Murphy in charge of the fire department. Someone who looks like he could drink all night with the boys and still haul you out of a flaming building the next day. Someone who might have engaged in a few fisticuffs in his day. Someone who would run toward the fire and not toward a TV camera.

With this episode the Three Whisky Happy Hour emigrates into its very own identity on Ricochet and Steve’s new group Substack, “Political Questions,” but not to worry—the old Power Line Show will live on in its old format as an interview show. The 3WHH, meanwhile, is rebooting with some new formats. We’ll be doing some show with a single-subject format; on some we’ll do a round robin of hot topics and reflections on currtent news items, and we’ll even have some guests from time to time, as well as emergency shows when somethingbig happens—or we get a new single malt in whose virtues we just have to share.

And having completed our emigration to a new logo and format, it seemed only logical that we’d take up as our primary focus this week the issue of immigration, with an attempt at an orderly procession through the key aspects of the matter: How much is too much? Should we have an immigration pause? What’s up with the H1-B visa controversy anyway? How should skills-based immigration be done, and should we move to some kind of point- or auction system to regulate immigration.

Interesting Times in the 2025 Minnesota Legislature

 

On Tuesday, January 14, 2025, Minnesota’s 94th legislative session is due to be called into order by Steve Simon, Minnesota’s elected secretary of state.  What happens next in the MN House of Representatives is a constitutional crisis.  The basic facts:

  1.  MN voters elected 67 Republican House Representatives and 67 Democrat House Representatives in November 2024.  However!  One of the Democrat reps. was found by a court to NOT have residency in their district (House District 40B) and cannot be seated in the 2025 legislature.  THEREFORE: At the start of the House session, Republicans will have a 1-vote majority until the special election can be held (there is even more controversy here).
  2. With a 1-vote majority, the Republicans will elect Lisa Demuth as speaker.  She would take office for 2 years unless there was some unforeseen death or resignation during that time period.  She would be the first African-American speaker of the MN House.  The speaker has a lot of power to name committee assignments, etc.
  3. HOWEVER, Democrats are threatening not to show up on January 14, which causes all kinds of questions. If all Democrats are a no-show, Steve Simon, a Democratic partisan hack, may declare that the quorum requirement failed (lots of different opinions on what constitutes a quorum in the constitution/house rules).  This would cause a constitutional crisis as the House session would be done at that point, and couldn’t start again without a special session, which has its own complicated rules.
  4. Will a couple of Democrats from swing districts feel pressured to show up to save their seats?  There are reports that this may happen.
  5. The special election for House District 40B (a Plus 20 Democrat district) is “scheduled” for January 28, 2025.  The date is the subject of a lawsuit as Gov. Walz did not follow the clear constitutional rules for a special election, but Steve Simon went ahead anyway.
  6. In addition, House District 54A elected a Democrat by 14 votes.  However, 20 cast ballots were accidentally destroyed.  Whether a new election will be called is currently being litigated, and the judge promised to rule by…January 14, 2025.

The MN State Senate also has interesting times ahead.  In November, Minnesota voters elected 34 Democratic Senators and 33 Republican Senators.  However, one of the Democratic Senators died in December, and there is a special election in a few weeks. That district is solidly Democratic (probably Plus 40), and it is unlikely a Republican will win.  In addition to this situation, one of the Democratic senators is currently being tried for burglarizing her stepmother’s house (a fun story in itself).  The senator is begging the court to postpone the trial.  All Republican senators and several Democrat senators are on record recommending that Senator Burglar resign or not be seated.  We’ll see how that turns out.

Saturday Night Radio

 

On our last episode, our hero … Sorry.  On our last episode, we showcased a beautiful 1937 model Zenith radio, so we’ll keep the chronology going with a 1938 Philco Model 38-5x.  Another beauty!  Our last show also had a picture of Jack Benny in “The Big Broadcast of 1937.” We’ll keep that chronology going, too, with “The Big Broadcast of 1938.” A fun comedy with an all-star cast about a transatlantic boat race.  (What if the Pacific identified as the Atlantic?  Would it be trans-Atlantic?)  “The Big Broadcast of 1938” is notable, too, as the film in which Bob Hope debuted what would become his signature song, “Thanks for the Memory.”  The song would further go on to win the 1938 Oscar® for “Best Song” …

Your car can be sporty, it can be practical, it can be new or used, but whatever it is – if you’re driving it to The Diner – it has to have style.

Quote of the Day – Envy

 

The envious man seeks not his own gain, But the fall of another, And in his malice, loses his soul, For the gods despise such hearts. – Euripides

There are massive wildfires running out of control in the Los Angeles Basin. They have been burning all week and will likely continue until they burn themselves out.  The local and state governments have failed utterly at stopping them and will likely continue failing until the fires run out of fuel.

The Palestinians Will Never Accept Israel’s Existence

 

Week after week, we’ve watched Hamas “negotiating” with Israel for a ceasefire. Recently, participants and observers were celebrating that headway was being made, but as usual, Hamas broke off activities once again. The terrorists remain focused on their major goal: driving Israelis into the sea. Any agreement short of that will be a failure to them.

So why do these negotiations continue? What does either side hope to accomplish? Exploring the issues on both sides has been a passion of mine; I admit that I am a Jew and have visited Israel several times, but not lately. Still, like most Westerners, I want to live to see peace in the Middle East. A book I just read was probably intended to suggest there was a way to peace. After I finished reading it, however, the possibility of reaching a practical and workable agreement seems extremely unlikely.

It’s finally here: 2025! And your favorite podcast is finally back in order to maintain some continuity in these tempestuous times. James, Charles and Steve cover raging fires in Los Angeles and the jaw-dropping incompetence of the Golden State’s leadership. On a cheerier note, they enjoy the changes taking place in Canada and at Meta, Inc.

Plus, Dan MacLaughlin joins today to discuss Jimmy Carter’s legacy, and, given Dan’s title as the baseball crank, the gang has at a few questions on the great American game.