This is a solid idea

And a second post at the end

Apologies for no post yesterday. I had to take my wife to a doctor’s appointment, and then run a couple of errands because she wasn’t up for either without me, so that threw everything in a tailspin. So, to make up for it, we’ve got a free piece to start off, followed by another that has a paywall. Everyone gets something.

I tend to spend most of my time agreeing with Republicans and disagreeing with Democrats. That’s because most of the Democratic ideas I run across are stupid, and the Republican ones aren’t.

Or, at times, it’s because there are too many stupid ideas flowing and I have to pick the worst ones, which happen to be from Democrats.

I don’t agree with everything the GOP says and does, though. They do a lot of things I think are moronic, and have supported some bad ideas, and still do.

They just aren’t as bad as the other guys.

So, imagine my surprise when I came across this proposal.

Perez is a House Democrat representing the Washington 3rd District, and while a Washington state Democrat representing what amounts to the suburbs of Portland is one I’d expect to be peddling nonsense as her stock and trade, that’s not what we’re seeing here.

First, on the surface, this is just good for kids who now don’t have to just throw themselves into academics in order to be competitive for college admissions. While I’m down on college for most students, the truth is that some want to go, and there’s no reason they should have to step away from shop classes to do so.

Second, some of these classes teach skills that can be translated into work immediately after high school, which means it becomes a lot more viable for someone to get a job and work their way through school, minimizing how much they have to take out in loans.

They might even find a pathway through life that they might have missed if they’d been forced to skip out on shop classes so they could get into college.

Schools will also have a bit more justification in keeping shop programs since, frankly, I think a lot of students will sign up for those classes just to get a mental break from trig and history.

Now, I don’t know the nitty-gritty of this measure, but the surface-level stuff is something that I can’t honestly find a real downside to.

Sure, someone who wants to be a doctor opting to take auto shop instead of physiology might not be the best move in that particular instance, but I doubt there’s going to be really that many people making that kind of decision.

If nothing else, a shop class or two might give people an appreciation of craftsmanship and blue-collar labor. The idea that many college-educated people have about these trades is that these are people too stupid to get into a university, that smart people don’t start working on cars for a living. They don’t build furniture or weld two pieces of metal together as a means of paying their bills. These are jobs for simpletons.

Except, they’re not. They’re incredibly complex tasks that, while not requiring a university degree, aren’t for morons.

If some of these people took those classes, though, even if they never used them again, it might start to sink in that people are different, have different desires out of life, different interests and predispositions, and not be the least bit dumber than anyone else.

Once we see the text of the bill itself, we can probably find plenty of problems with this measure, because frankly, politicians could screw up a free ice cream party. Still, the broad strokes are a great idea that I’d love to see implemented.

Let’s be the America that China thinks we are

I’m not a fan of the Chinese government. Any longtime reader has already picked up on that one.

However, sometimes, they’re unintentionally awesome.

Normally, by being unintentionally hilarious with their meme game sucking so bad, but this time, in the wake of yoinking Venezuelan socialist strongman Nicholas Maduro, they did something different.

They made us look dope as hell.