Ian Underwood, Author at Granite Grok

Tucker Carlson - Twitter news update screen grab

Praising with Faint Damnation?

May 6, 2023 Ian Underwood

We’ve all heard the phrase damning with faint praise, which is the use of insincere or half-hearted praise to indicate that someone doesn’t deserve praise at all. The idea is, if you’re supposed to be praising someone, to do such a lousy job that you leave the listener asking: Is that the best you can … Read more

Brittney_Griner_3 Lorie Shaull Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Why Not Trans-age Athletes?

May 2, 2023 Ian Underwood

The other day, professional basketball player Brittney Griner said: ‘I think it’s a crime honestly to separate someone for any reason.’ She was speaking in favor of allowing transgender competition in sports — for example, allowing a male who identifies as a female to compete against females.

Will the Secret Service Use ‘Smart Guns’?

April 17, 2023 Ian Underwood

Biofire has just announced its new ‘smart gun.’ It’s approximately the size of a toaster, but I’m sure that can be reduced over time. It has to be stored in a ‘smart dock’, which has to be plugged in. So, not really designed to be carried away from home.

The Basic Idea Behind a Constitution

April 11, 2023 Ian Underwood

When you have kids, you start looking around for all the harmful things they might do by accident, like stick a finger in a socket, drink cleaning fluids from under the sink, climb out a second-story window, fall down some stairs, or drown in a toilet, and so on.

Breaking John Marshall’s Spell?

April 11, 2023 Ian Underwood

We have at least one US Representative (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York) and one US Senator (Ron Wyden of Oregon) openly calling on the Biden administration to simply ‘ignore’ a recent ruling from a federal court.

Orwell v. Trump

March 29, 2023 Ian Underwood

If you’re not yet familiar with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942, you should check it out because the Court may get a chance to revisit its logic in that case.

Dillon’s School

March 26, 2023 Ian Underwood

Browsing though SB 272, the so-called Parents’ Bill of Rights, I came across this little gem: The right to exempt a public-school student from participating in required statewide assessments in English, language arts, mathematics, and/or science, as set forth in RSA 193-C:6. Sorry, but no. First, note that RSA 193-H:2 requires that schools shall ensure … Read more

Tenth Amendment Sanctuary States

March 25, 2023 Ian Underwood

These don’t exist yet, but they need to. And New Hampshire should lead the way by becoming the first. The idea isn’t new. New Hampshire is one of several ‘Second Amendment Sanctuary’ states as of June 2022. As of that date, the state is prohibited

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Call Them What They Are: Welfare Schools

March 24, 2023 Ian Underwood

Anyone who knows me has heard me quote Confucius: The first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names. What we call things determines how we think about them and how we act toward them. This is why it’s time for us to stop using the term public school and replace it with … Read more

What Kind of Parent?

March 20, 2023 Ian Underwood

There’s a question that should be asked more often, which gets at the moral foundations of treating education as an entitlement. Suppose you own several properties in a town. You have two kids, who are being schooled at the expense of the town, which costs the town more than $500,000 over the course of two … Read more

Questions That Didn’t Get Asked at Meet the Candidates Day in Croydon

March 13, 2023 Ian Underwood

At Meet the Candidates Day in Croydon, one resident kept asking each candidate: Yes, or No, do you support the Free State movement? Do you support public education? Do you support the United States Constitution?

Your Conception Permit, Please

February 17, 2023 Ian Underwood

It distresses me to hear conservative media figures like Tucker Carlson and Howie Carr jumping on the ‘we need to enforce the gun control laws we already have’ bandwagon.

Quote of the Day: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)

February 3, 2023 Ian Underwood

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms should be the name of a chain of convenience stores in Florida, not a federal agency.

Croydon Superintendent: $1 Million per Student Not Enough to Teach Kids to Read

February 2, 2023February 1, 2023 Ian Underwood

In an earlier piece on charter schools, I suggested that we need to start asking school districts: How much is enough?

That is, if we want to get 100% of our educable students to proficiency in reading and math, how much would it cost?

The Bureau of Arbitrariness, Tyranny, and Fear

January 26, 2023 Ian Underwood

In one of his eponymous lectures, Richard Feynman told a story about a lady who was pulled over for speeding. Told that she was going 60 miles per hour, she replied that she’d only been driving for seven minutes.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Student Achievement

January 18, 2023 Ian Underwood

I was just at a meeting of the Croydon school board, and several times, when the question of how the students are doing came up, there was a rush — one might say a stampede — to offer excuses as to why it’s simply not possible to say in any objective way whether students are … Read more

The New McCarthyism

January 7, 2023 Ian Underwood

As we watch the GOP squabble over whether it wants yet another Speaker of the House from California, it’s worth taking a moment to remember Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist Party candidate for president (from 1928 through 1948).

Reading education sunset Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Using Outrage to Protect Incompetence

December 28, 2022 Ian Underwood

I recently had lunch with a group of people who are concerned about the problems that we’re having with public schools, and who wanted to discuss ways to do something about those problems.

Put Schools on an Elimination Diet

December 19, 2022 Ian Underwood

There is something called an ‘elimination diet,’ which people use to find out what foods their bodies have trouble processing. You start by cutting out everything but one food — typically beef, because you can stay healthy indefinitely eating just beef. It’s boring but sustainable.

Guns Image by WorldSpectrum from Pixabay

Sauce for the Gun

December 11, 2022 Ian Underwood

I recently watched a YouTube video that promised to show Ben Shapiro ‘destroying’ Piers Morgan in a discussion about gun control. But a few minutes into it, I realized that Shapiro had already conceded the larger argument in order to score a few technical points. In particular, he said his answer to gun violence was … Read more