Profile of some parents that make the daring decision to send their child to public school. I was all set to loathe them, but I ended up basically respecting them.

They were both raised in super-fundie home-schooled households. The thing that ended up providing the first crack in the foundation was when they were confronted with the dictate to use corporal punishment on their own kids. Eventually they undertake a lot of soul-searching and timidly decide to try out the local elementary school.

That's about the extent of the article, but it's a nice read. There's no exploration of the rest of the couple's beliefs, so I assume I don't want to know about their remaining worldview.

I recently had two different assessment scales come up in independent conversations:

1. The NOVA Food Classification System. This is a scale to measure how processed different foods are.

2. Various scales for assessing hoarding and clutter. In other words, if you walk in someone's house, how do you quantify how problematic the behavior is? Can the situation continue on with monitoring, or is aggressive intervention required? The Clutter Image Rating is particularly nice because it has photos ranked from 1-9 of living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms in various states of clutter. (Also in the course of this conversation, it was driven home for me how harrowing hoarding disorder is. Egad.)

Anyway: there is something so satisfying about a well-designed scale designed by professionals in order to facilitate communication in a clear and organized manner, on a topic which you've barely considered but now have a framework to operate within.

Mossy Character writes:

Did you people know about this? Amazing.

Heebie's take: This really is kinda wild:

The battlefield of the Tollense valley (German pronunciation: [tʰɔˈlɛnzə]) is a Bronze Age archaeological site in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the northern edge of the Mecklenburg Lake District. The site, discovered in 1996 and systematically excavated since 2007, extends along the valley of the small Tollense river, to the east of Weltzin village, on the municipal territories of Burow and Werder.

Thousands of bone fragments belonging to many people have been discovered along with further corroborative evidence of battle; current estimates indicate that perhaps 4,000 warriors from Central Europe fought in a battle on the site in the 13th century BC. As the population density was approximately 5 people per square kilometer (13 people per square mile), this would have been the most significant battle in Bronze Age Central Europe known so far and makes the Tollense valley currently the largest excavated and archaeologically verifiable battle site of this age in the world.[1]

From the end of the entry:

Helle Vandkilde, archeologist at Aarhus University commented "Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on [...] Very few talked about warfare."[2]

Probably a safe bet not to assume people are ever peaceful.

Minivet writes: I'm reading that it's mostly a flat budget for the next couple of years, but no big cuts for this year. Some IRS "clawback" cuts, but mostly for future plans, less of the cuts being for money already allocated. Some work requirements for a segment of 50-54-year-olds, plus a new exemption to work requirements for homeless or near-homeless people that, if implemented well, might help more numerically than the other imposition hurts.

Behind the paywall, Josh Marshall says he's surprised both at how good the deal is (while still confident the negotiations should never have taken place and not eliminating the debt ceiling is an invitation to continued hostage-taking) and at how non-restive the Republican caucus is so far. It might not get Freedom Caucus votes, but not necessarily a new leadership fight, which you would have assumed comparing their earlier maximalist demands with what's been negotiated.

One of his readers speculates there was a secret third backup beyond 14th Amendment and minting the coin: the Fed could have just bought up all the defaulted bonds at face value, making the judgment call that they're fundamentally sound and their validity will eventually be restored. If disclosed in negotiations, that could have negated Republican leverage because it could have prevented economic collapse.

Heebie's take: I assumed this was the outcome because this was McCarthy's only path to staying in power.

(I'm also a little stuck on the phrase "how non-restive the Republican Party is so far." Is non-restive the same as restless?)

I vaguely don't understand why the hens actually came home to roost on Ken Paxton. Like, the lesson from Trump seems to be you don't ever have to hold anyone accountable, and Republican voters will reward you for it. I assume he must be such a giant prick in person that enough people want to teach him a lesson, and maybe he was interfering with people's personal agendas? Distracting from the hideousness of the legislative session? (That doesn't resonate with me, but was proposed in conversation yesterday.) This attributes it to Republican in-fighting, which yeah, but somehow still leaves me curious.