Ben Arcuri

Not the worst treatment of school choice, but beware simple origin stories: "Vouchers were popularized in the 1950s as a way for white families to self-segregate following the Brown v. Board of Education decision." The choice movement long precedes that: cato.org/school-choice-…

I’m so tired of this talking point. Tom Steyer is running for governor of California, which spent $20,000 *per student* in 2023. That’s double what the state spent just 10 years ago. And yet test scores are *declining.* The idea that we don’t “invest in schools” is a myth.

Maybe you wonder why I, a mere gun blog, makes a big deal about Flock and similar tech? OK here’s a real world situation that can easily happen and has likely happened. Unfortunately to drive on public roads without getting hassled by the cops, your car needs a license plate. That’s tied to you, the owner of the vehicle. Flock isn’t just a traffic camera, it’s an AI/ML enabled (wait for it) flock of cameras that transmit all their video and audio to the mothership. Not a government server somewhere but, to keep it simple, a big giant cloud computer instance owned and run by Flock, the company. Government users, as well as Flock employees here in the US and overseas, can log in and query the system based on license plate number or even vehicle description and get a full history of that vehicle’s movements throughout the Flock network over multiple jurisdictions. Someone in New York can track a car from Armonk all the way to Homestead FL if they feel like it from the comfort of their desk. On a daily level, someone can get a pretty accurate picture of someone’s life just by monitoring their movements via Flock. And I’m using this example to rattle the cage of the “back the blue unconditionally” crowd in 2A. OK - your car has license plate ABC 123 - and Flock knows this. Someone can enter your tag in Flock and see what you are doing on a daily basis. You leave your home where the neighborhood is under the Flock panopticon. Flock sees you drive to Dunkin’ on Main Street, then you drop your kid off at XYZ Daycare. Then you go to work at the local IT consulting firm in ZZZ industrial park. You go pick up a quick deli sandwich for lunch at Food Lion. You go back to work. On the way home you stop off at Bob’s Guns, and stay for 20 minutes while buying some ammo. Then you go home. Everywhere there’s a Flock camera. Now Flock knows the following about you: - You live at 123 Wisteria Lane - Your kid is in daycare (means he’s likely under 5) - You work at ZZZ - You go cheap on lunch - You own at least one gun Your license plate is tied to you so they now have your name and assumed-to-be-private details of your life, like that you are armed. On the reverse of that, the Flock camera outside of Bob’s Guns has been recording the plates of everyone going into the parking lot. No need for a firearms registry when Flock is doing the work. All of this is done without a warrant and the data is available to anyone with a certain level of access to the system, whether it’s a cop, or a Flock technician in the Philippines. FYI Flock uses overseas contractors for support and AI annotation. The 2018 Carpenter decision at SCOTUS ruled that pervasive surveillance where one can divine private details of someone’s life is a 4th Amendment violation in absence of a specific warrant. Flock is illegal, unconstitutional and immoral. And a danger to everyone, not just gun owners.

Public sector unions are bad. These unions are not negotiating against billionaires or some convenient cartoon villain. They're rent seeking and negotiating against taxpayers, and they'll shut down vital infrastructure if we don't humor their tantrum.

In the Argument today, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon argue that Democrats have a public sector unions problem: if you want good results, you have to be able to hire the best people and fire the worst ones.

Currently, state and local government agencies are run primarily as jobs programs for their employees rather than ways to deliver actual government services to citizens and taxpayers. If you're not willing to change that, you're not serious about reform.

Every attempt to shut down campus speech should trigger an independent investigation asking two questions: 1) Did administrators do anything to stop the censorship? 2) Did administrators do anything to encourage, excuse, or facilitate it? Students are responsible for their own actions. But the deeper scandal is administrative complicity. In a healthy university, the answer to right-wing demands to fire a professor would be: “No way.” And the answer to left-wing attempts to shut down a speaker would be: “Not on my watch.” Does that sound fanciful? At this point, probably. Because it has become hard to imagine administrators actually acting this way. The dirty little secret is that too many of them have enabled this for years. Some are hired into ideological jobs built around policing speech, running BRTs, and managing “harm” rather than protecting open inquiry. Sometimes the damage comes through omission: refusing to punish obvious censorship. Sometimes it comes through commission, as at Stanford Law School several years ago, when administrators actively helped the shutdown along. Here, it looks like a combination of both. So yes, blame the students. They are adults, not infants or automatons. But look squarely at the administrators who are supposed to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech—and who too often undermine those values instead. We have long since passed the stage where tolerated—and often facilitated—shutdowns and shoutdowns can be treated as somehow distinct from university policy. If campuses allow, and especially if they facilitate, the systematic silencing of locally unpopular points of view, that should not be treated as some weird tragic coincidence. They have the power to stop it. They don’t. Worse, they often train students to think like censors and then protect them when they act that way. Until universities prove otherwise, the systematic shutting down of unpopular voices on campus should be understood as formal—or at least semi-formal—university policy.

Have you looked into how that charter school, which parents are picking instead of Sachem, can operate at such significantly lower expense (Sachem spends over $32K per kid) to figure out what you're doing wrong in Albany?

Families will now have real pathways to education options outside of a system that’s struggled with outcomes despite spending more per pupil than any other state in the country.

BREAKING: New York Governor Hochul says she will opt in to the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit! She will be the 2nd Democratic governor to do so, after Colorado Governor Polis. School choice is coming to New York!

@billyez2 All time great film

Drinking martinis and watching the Birdcage for the first time 🍸

McDouble back under $3. Literally No reason to ever buy a $4 protein bar ever again

Criminal policy guy: unions are good, police unions just happen to be bad Transit policy guy: unions are good, the teamsters just happen to be bad School policy guy: unions are good, teachers unions just happen to be bad Maybe these guys should meet!

@iamstillpunch Nope

Maybe I was a bit over zealous earlier lol. But does Mike Jackson have the best 3 album run in music??

"[Merit-based education] is about ensuring that every student is challenged, evaluated honestly, and allowed to reach their full potential." @DefendingEd's @PaulRunko testifies before @EdWorkforceCmte on why maintaining high standards in education matters for every student.

OP-ED: Don’t believe the NEA’s ‘average teacher pay’ claims trib.al/sUPwLT2

@JExplorah @25YearsAgoLive

@25YearsAgoLive @ArcuriBen

Lego introduces a new brand, called “Bionicle.”

@DeTahmineh @HBO Don't worry everyone, the original article is clickbait! They're just moving production because their sets got flooded. This is the next paragraph:

A big, beautiful tax credit is coming your way next year! Contribute to a Scholarship Granting Organization to support school choice, and receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700.

The Matt Gala