RUTHFULLY YOURS

The recent Chinese cyberattack that compromised the data of as many as 4.2 million public employees — one of the biggest thefts of federal data in U.S. history — has given new urgency to longstanding concerns over the cybersecurity of HealthCare.gov and several state exchanges. Public records obtained by National Review over the past two years, as well as reports from inspectors general and news outlets, detail myriad health-sector breaches that have already occurred.

Probing the security breach at the Office of Personnel Management, the House Oversight Committee concluded Tuesday that “state sponsored and non-state sponsored hackers are aggressive, motivated, persistent, and well-funded in their attempt to breach government and commercial systems.”

Growing revelations about the Obama administration’s tech-security shortcomings could have major implications for the millions of Americans who bought health coverage online, trusting the federal government to safeguard their personal data, including Social Security numbers and financial and health information.

I am a high school English teacher. I am not supposed to dislike Shakespeare. But I do. And not only do I dislike Shakespeare because of my own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate, but also because there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.

I do not believe that I am “cheating” my students because we do not read Shakespeare. I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition. I do not believe that not viewing “Romeo and Juliet” or any other modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play will make my students less able to go out into the world and understand language or human behavior. Mostly, I do not believe I should do something in the classroom just because it has “always been done that way.”

I am sad that so many of my colleagues teach a canon that some white people decided upon so long ago and do it without question. I am sad that we don’t believe enough in ourselves as professionals to challenge the way that it has “always been done.” I am sad that we don’t reach beyond our own often narrow beliefs about how young people become literate to incorporate new research on how teenagers learn, and a belief that our students should be excited about what they read — and that may often mean that we need to find the time to let them choose their own literature.

A veteran teacher at Luther Burbank High School, the biggest high school in Sacramento, Calif., is proposing that high-school teachers stop teaching Shakespeare because he’s just some old white guy who died a long time ago so what could he know about anything.

In a piece published in the Washington Post, Dana Dusbiber explains that we should “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely” because she “[does] not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach [her] students about the human condition.”

“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” she writes.

Just because she’s an uninspiring figure doesn’t mean she can’t win.

That calculation clearly underlay Hillary Clinton’s Roosevelt Island speech over the weekend. She hardly tried to inspire: Both the writing and the delivery were pedestrian, at best. What she did instead was outline liberal policies and celebrate the liberal coalition. The theory seems to be that those policies are sufficiently popular, and that coalition sufficiently large, that together they can bring her victory no matter how meager her political talent or how suspect her character.

The policies she listed are, in the main, destructive ones. There is little evidence that the federal government can improve children’s futures through universal preschool. A big increase in the minimum wage is likely to suppress job growth. Discrimination by employers is not the major cause of the pay gap between men and women, and thus policing that discrimination more will not do much to shrink the gap. Mandatory paid leave may worsen employment prospects for women. Further weakening immigration enforcement will inflame social tensions while cutting the wages of the working poor. Judging from the premium hikes insurers are requesting, maintaining Obamacare probably means watching its already unsatisfactory outcomes get worse.

Her campaign relaunch repudiates everything Bill Clinton did as president.

If anyone thought Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was going to mean a replay of the 1990s, we were wrong. Instead, the campaign she relaunched on Saturday is much more of a return to the 1930s. The woman who, as First Lady, reputedly communed with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt now seeks to transform herself into the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt.

Of course, at a time when Rachel Dolezal can “identify” as black, Hillary Clinton is perfectly free to see herself as the new FDR. But in doing so, she not only delivers an economic platform designed to please people who think President Obama is too right wing, she also repudiates just about everything that Bill Clinton did as president.

“If you don’t like the Pope’s message, feel free to ignore it.” Why stir up anti-Catholic sentiment? rsk

There’s a lot of fuss being made in some conservative quarters about Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical about “man-made climate change.” Let’s stipulate at the outset that “climate change” is a lot of hooey that conceptually survives not the slightest bit of rational scrutiny and that the “global warming” industry is mostly a scam to enrich a few Leftists and bring down the West economically while helping Madre Gaia not one whit. So what?

Pope Francis will call for an ethical and economic revolution to prevent catastrophic climate change and growing inequality in a letter to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics on Thursday. In an unprecedented encyclical on the subject of the environment, the pontiff is expected to argue that humanity’s exploitation of the planet’s resources has crossed the Earth’s natural boundaries, and that the world faces ruin without a revolution in hearts and minds. The much-anticipated message, which will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops, will be published online in five languages on Thursday and is expected to be the most radical statement yet from the outspoken pontiff. However, it is certain to anger sections of Republican opinion in America by endorsing the warnings of climate scientists and admonishing rich elites, say cardinals and scientists who have advised the Vatican.

Here’s my advice: ignore it. Yes, it plays into the nutty fears in some precincts that the pope is a crypto-Latin-American Marxist liberation theologist (he’s actually just another Italian, who happens to have been born in Argentina, a demographically European country) who hates capitalism and is suspiciously nice to Muslims. News flash: the pope is Catholic. Which is to say he is concerned with the spirit, not the flesh; with the betterment of all mankind, not just Catholics; that he takes Church teaching seriously and that — surprise! — the first Jesuit pope follows consciously in the footsteps of his namesake and fellow Italian, St. Francis of Assisi. The quintessential rich kid who gave it all away and lived a life of extreme simplicity among God’s creatures is, in fact, the patron saint of the environment:

If you can’t choose your race, you can’t choose your gender either.

We new media professionals surf a choppy sea of social whim. Whatever people talk about, we write about. It’s supply and demand. That said, there are certain stories which I resist chiming in on no matter how big they get, stories which I find either distasteful or ludicrous.

The story of Rachel Dolezal stands as an example. The drama surrounding her masquerade as a black woman strikes me as tabloid garbage, warranting a sidebar mention at best, and then only for laughs.

Unfortunately, my attempt to avoid the story has run up against this piece at Reason, in which editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie attempts to draw a distinction between Dolezal’s transracialism (yes, spell check, that’s a word now) and Caitlyn Jenner’s transsexualism. He writes:

I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California.

8:00 AM

I finally got around to retrieving the car seat that someone threw out in front of the vineyard near my mailbox. (Don’t try waiting dumpers out — as if it is not your responsibility to clean up California roadsides.)

An acquaintance had also emailed and reminded me that not far away there was a mound of used drip hose on the roadside. That mess proved to be quite large, maybe 1,000 feet of corroded and ripped up plastic hose. I suppose no scavenger thinks it can be recycled. I promise to haul it away this week. One must be prompt: even a small pile attracts dumpers like honey to bees. They are an ingenious and industrious lot (sort of like the cunning and work ethic of those who planted IEDs during the Iraq War). My cousin’s pile across the road has grown to Mt. Rushmore proportions. Do freelance dumpers make good money promising to take away their neighborhood’s mattresses and trash without paying the $20 or so county dumping fee? And does their success depend on fools like me, who are expected to keep roadsides tidy by cleaning up past trash to make room for future refuse?

We all know the famous Republican Jeb! (as his campaign seems eager to avoid use of his last name and believes an exclamation point will get people excited about him, I’ll indulge that wish) who is now an immediate heavyweight in the Republican primary after his long-expected announcement for president.

But don’t let the R that often makes its way in front of his name fool you. Jeb! loves lots of things that Democrats and big government progressives love.

Jeb! loves Common Core, for example. To be fair, a number of Republican heavies once advocated Common Core in its inception, only to later reject it when a groundswell of opposition arose — including Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee. The latter have all reversed course on Common Core due to largely (but not solely) conservative backlash. Jeb! on the other hand, stands alone among the Republican field in his estimation that Common Core is about upholding sensibly applied state standards, and his aides suggest that since “[s]tates had to opt in, and they can opt out.”

Barack Obama owes his position to his membership in a class that is destroying America: the intellectualoids — shallow people able to fool others into believing they possess superior intellects.

In his 2007 book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Shelby Steele did an excellent job of explaining how and why such a small man might have been on his way to making such big history. Although Mr. Steele’s final assessment of what the outcome was going to be was incorrect, he nevertheless coined two important cultural terms — Challengers and Bargainers — that were polite enough to be used in a benign sort of way when categorizing the two main types of officiating blacks that have defiled our civic square. According to the Challenger-Bargainer theory, Barack Obama was one of the most attractive, articulate, and “bookish” Bargainers that America had come across since the Civil Rights movement, ergo his successful candidacy.