EDUCATION Comments turned off

Miguel Cardona, Miseducation Secretary National history test scores plummet, and he attacks Republicans.

Posted By on May 6th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/miguel-cardona-naep-scores-national-assessment-of-educational-progress-civics-history-schools-ron-desantis-acc73985?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The federal Department of Education’s mission is supposed to be . . . what exactly? Apparently Education Secretary Miguel Cardona thinks it’s something other than improving educational results. New national test results this week showed eighth-grade U.S. history scores at an all-time low, and Mr. Cardona’s response was to attack the GOP.

The data released is from 2022 tests on U.S. history and civics under the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the “nation’s report card.” The average eighth-grade history score is down five points from 2018 and nine points from 2014. It’s the lowest on record, going back to 1994. Scores dropped the most among the lower performers. Only 13% of students were deemed NAEP proficient. The civics results are similarly depressing.

This is a damning record for the educational establishment, on top of last year’s news that NAEP math scores for eighth-graders in 2022 fell to a 20-year low. For all the money the U.S. keeps pumping into education, surely somebody in authority ought to be embarrassed by these pitiful outcomes, working to reverse them, and explaining to the citizenry what is being done. Maybe that person is supposed to be the U.S. Education Secretary?

Mr. Cardona’s statement on the poor NAEP showing begins by saying that it “further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading.” This might be a workable start if Mr. Cardona went on to acknowledge that Zoom classes were a generational error and that the teachers unions that lobbied to keep schools closed should accept some responsibility.

Instead Mr. Cardona turns to a partisan diversion. “Now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” he says. “We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Transgender Follies—More Madness from the Left The transgender craze, like the word itself, is new, dangerous to the persons involved, and hasn’t a shred of evidence to support it. Joan Swirsky

Posted By on May 6th, 2023

https://cnav.news/2023/05/05/editorial/guest/transgender-follies-madness-left/

Growing up in the 1950s, I remember distinctly that all of my high school classmates were obsessed with figuring out who they really were, males or females. Every conversation, the special clubs we formed to talk about this issue, the heated arguments we had with our parents who didn’t “get” that the children they thought were boys or girls were not at all what those dinosaurs imagined sex and gender to be, and the total lack of understanding we got from the powers-that-be, including teachers, counselors, coaches, doctors. It was truly a horrible time to be a girl or boy.

Tomboys

All that my girlfriends talked about, starting about the age of 11 or 12, was having their budding (or in some cases, formidable) breasts cut off, and the hormones coursing through their systems somehow, magically, eliminated altogether. The same with the boys. “How can we cover up our Adam Apples,” they lamented. “How can we hide our penises and put barrettes in our hair and be the girls we were really meant to be?”

After high school, I married and became a young mother at 18. And my son told me that when he was in high school in the 1970s, the same thing took place, although more intensely. “All we talked about,” he told me, was “who was a real boy and who was a real girl, and how the tomboys could become real boys and the guys who liked cooking could become real girls.”

“But at least things had progressed,” he said, “and there were teachers and guidance counselors willing to encourage the girls who were tomboys and the boys who liked cooking to stick to the genders “they were born to be and not to allow parents to interfere.”

Reality check

Please re-read every word of the above four paragraphs and know that NOT ONE WORD of them is true! In the 1950s—and for centuries before and decades after—girls knew they were girls; boys knew they were boys and that was that.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Envoy John Kerry’s Jet-Set Spending Is Getting Plenty of Cloud Cover By James Varney

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/05/03/slipstream_climate_envoy_john_kerrys_jet-set_spending_is_getting_plenty_of_cloud_cover_897101.html

John Kerry leads an international jet-set life that might exhaust a runway model. If President Biden’s special envoy for climate was not in Washington or relaxing at his mansion near Nantucket Harbor, he could be found in Brazil, Panama, the Bahamas, or Germany. And that’s just in February and March. 

The boss and his climate czar: Kerry is indefatigable in attending conferences and meetings in far-flung posts and glittering capitals. But details are scant.

While Kerry trumpets his meetings and appearances around the world, the State Department wraps the rest of his efforts in a cloak of secrecy usually reserved for CIA black box operations. It has refused to specify lists of people he is meeting with and who is advising him as he circles the globe. His office has stonewalled requests for budget and staffing information from legislators and government watchdog groups. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed last year by RealClearInvestigations for a breakdown on how the climate envoy’s roughly $16.5 million 2022 budget was spent, the State Department said it could not comply with the request until April 2025, months after both the 2024 election and the expiration of President Biden’s current term. 

The secrecy surrounding Kerry’s work is reaching a boiling point with the threat of a congressional subpoena. 

Frustrated that Kerry’s office ignored two previous requests for detailed information about its budget when his party was in the minority, Republican Rep. James Comer, who now heads the House Oversight Committee, sent what he labeled a final courtesy letter on April 25 and added that a subpoena would accompany the next request if Kerry’s “powerful, unchecked position” continued to hide the information. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New Ugly Americans How odd that those on the Left who in the past decried “American imperialism” are now proving the greatest imperialists of all. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/03/the-new-ugly-americans/

The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors. 

But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down. 

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped. 

We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists’ marts. 

Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy.

A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.

And gender studies programs—to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies—were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.

Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea. 

Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.

The woke Left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.

American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on the transgendered, LGBTQ acceptance, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgendered ambassadors. 

The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.

Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

East Palestine derailment update By Bruce Thompson

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/east_palestine_derailment_update.html

We are now three months past the derailment of the Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine Ohio. What have we learned? On Feb. 6, 2023, Michael Graham of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) informed the public that the derailment was caused by a broken axle on one of the freight cars. He noted that the train had a crew of three, and that the crew was able to disconnect the two locomotives and move away to a safe distance. There was no information about the potential imminent explosion of one vinyl chloride tank car, just the comment, “Once the fire is out, the railcars will be moved for further damage assessment.” Later that day, there was a “vent and burn” operation in conformance with the Federal Railway Administration handbook covering such situations. The towering column of smoke and flame caused quite a ruckus. And as is usually the case, no one wants to take ownership of the decision to proceed in conformance with federal regulations. Where was Pete “#SecretaryPete” Buttigieg?

Clearly, there are two issues to address, the first would be to reduce the number of broken axles in the whole fleet of rolling stock on America’s railroads. Then we can look at the vent and burn strategy. This was not the first rail accident where a broken axle on a freight car carrying non-hazardous material caused the derailment of tank cars carrying hazardous fuel oil with a resultant fire and significant pollution. The NTSB even has videos and a completed report of the prior accident in Caselton, North Dakota. Two BNSF freight trains (BNSF is owned by Democrat mega-donor Warren Buffett) were passing going in opposite directions when an axle on a grain car broke and the car derailed. It fell onto the parallel track and the unit train with a string of tank cars containing fuel oil collided with the wreckage, derailed, and caught fire.

The NTSB re-creation video shows an interval of 93 seconds from the time the axle broke to when the crew of the crude oil train reported they were on fire.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

When are Democrat voters going to wake up and hold their representatives accountable? By Tim Jones

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/when_are_democrat_voters_going_to_wake_up_and_hold_their_representatives_accountable.html

It really is bizarre that there are so many people in this country that continue to vote for Democrats every election cycle — at all three levels of government: federal, state and local — when economic and social problems continue to get worse almost by the day. 

During Biden’s administration, inflation, crime and out-of-control illegal immigration have been the most notable. It’s a reminder of be Einstein’s famous aphorism “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing everything over and over again and expecting different results”. This describes the Democrat electorate in nutshell, except for all of the institutional elites to whom these chronic problems don’t apply. They just sit back and virtue-signal their wokeness while living comfortably and securely in their gated communities

The facts and metrics that are demonstrably true seem to be ignored every election day. Biden’s administration has actually made life worse for everyone, including every single person within the Democrat voter base regardless of race, sex and ethnicity.

Of course, those in the upper classes, so many of whom vote for Democrats out of a seriously misguided noblesse oblige, are never seriously affected by bad Democrat policies they support. It was Bill Gates who convinced Joe Manchin, senator of West Virginia to cast the deciding the for the Inflationary Reduction Act that’s now projected to add an additional $1 trillion in more new spending under Biden.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

South Korea Knows The Korean War Isn’t Over Is the U.S.-South Korea alliance secure? by Austin Bay

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/south-korea-knows-the-korean-war-isnt-over/

A lesson in so-called forever war is deep background for this week’s celebration of the seven-decade-long U.S.-South Korea bilateral alliance.As U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meet in Washington their nations have cause to celebrate. Ranking economies by GDP, the U.S. (population 330 million) is No. 1 and South Korea (52 million) is No. 12 (possibly 10).

But behind the photo-ops aides are discussing North Korea’s nuclear threats and communist China’s regional and global threats.

Difficult fact: The Korean War remains unfinished business. When media claim Afghanistan was America’s longest war, they ignore the frozen war on the Korean peninsula and the American troops still there, pulling guard duty.

The July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice Agreement established a ceasefire. Seventy years later there is no peace treaty.

Around 2.6 million human beings died during the war’s most intense combat (June 1950-July 1953). One million South Korean civilians died (estimated). North Korea lost a million soldiers and civilians. The U.S. military lost 37,000 killed in action.

In November 1950, the Chinese Communist Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) invaded North Korea and attacked American units. By July 1953 the PLA had suffered an estimated 600,000 dead.

So, here’s a fact relevant to 2023 and the Biden-Yoon meeting: At its height the Korean War was a war between the U.S. and communist China.

The PLA withdrew after the armistice. The U.S., however, didn’t cut and run. The war didn’t end. North Korea, backed by communist China and Russia, waged “gray zone war” — terror, firefights and infiltration in 1990s Pyongyang added threats of nuclear war.

We’ve a relic Cold War stand-off. Behind North Korea is an imperialist and expansionist communist China. The U.S. still stands with South Korea.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The War on Merit Comes to Science Welcome to the corruption of the hard sciences by identity politics. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-merit-comes-to-science/

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a column by two scientists, Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov, detailing their travails in trying to get scientific journals to publish their “commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit.” They were met with rejection, one editor calling the essay “downright hurtful,” and another one writing that “the concept of merit . . . has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.” It finally was published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which champions “free inquiry,” a fast-disappearing virtue in our age of “woke” intolerance.

The politicization of academic disciplines in the humanities or history or the “human sciences” is bad enough, but its dangers are nothing compared to the corruption of the hard sciences by illiberal identity politics. The roots of this dangerous ideology lie in the notion of “equity,” a fancy word for the equality of results. Both “equity” and ideological distortions of science have a long history of destructive outcomes.

The notion of absolute equality or radical egalitarianism was born 2500 years ago with democracy and its extension of political rights to non-elites. As Aristotle defined radical egalitarianism, “it arises from the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” As such it is inherently tyrannical, for given the unequal distribution of talent, brains, opportunity, industry, and sheer luck, only by unjustly reducing the equality of some can absolute equality exist for all.

And as James Madison said in his discussion of “faction,” the clashing “political interests and parties” that can threaten our freedom result from “unequal faculties of acquiring property”––just as we see today with “equity” and “disparate impacts” and the redistribution of wealth in order to mitigate what one faction deems are unfair distinctions based on a spurious “merit” that makes some wealthier and more privileged than others. “Equality of outcome” thus exacerbated this inherently contentious and divisive dynamic.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Biden Ed Sec Says Low Civics Scores Show Students Need Critical Race Theory “It may be best to have students learning from home” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-ed-sec-says-low-civics-scores-show-students-need-critical-race-theory/

You have to give the promo lefties credit for staying on message. No cult member has ever been as determined to ignore everything factual, moral or legal in pursuit of the agenda. They start fires and then show up to pour more gasoline on them while warning that cuts to the arson department will undermine our best defense against fires.

After lefties, doing the bidding of teachers’ unions, closed the schools, the educational system ceased to function leading to catastrophic drops in test scores. None of the lockdowners has been willing to claim their share of the credit and Biden’s Secretary of Education manages to suggest that poor civics scores is proof that we need to teach kids more critical race theory.

Knowledge of civics among the nation’s eighth-graders fell for the first time since the federal government began testing children under the current framework in 1998, according to new results that come amid a broader concern about pandemic-era learning loss.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, known as the Nation’s Report Card, also show a 5-point decline in average scores in history.

Biden’s Secretary of Education, who kept trying to close schools, has some thoughts on the matter.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, noting the abysmal math and reading NAEP scores released last fall.

“It tells us that now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” the secretary said.

We spent insane amounts of money on a school system that did not function because the primary beneficiary of all that ed spend, bureaucrats, teachers’ unions and assorted administrators, decided to close the schools. If we want to increase spending on schools, let’s claw some of that money back from their salaries and budgets.

And no matter how much we spend, it’s not going to get any better because education isn’t a money game. It’s a parent game. All the stats clearly show it. If the parents don’t care, then a student has to be really dedicated to overcome that hurdle. And how many kids are?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trans Massacre Manifesto Still a Mystery The Nashville shooting, and the callous official response, portend a year of living dangerously. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/murder-manifesto-still-a-mystery/

“The investigation has advanced to the point that writings from the Covenant shooter are now being reviewed for public release and that process is underway and will take a little time.”

That was a spokesman for the Metro Nashville Police Department speaking to the New York Post last Thursday. That day marked one month since Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, 9, at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

Nashville police “could not give a firm date when the writings would be released.” Shortly after the murders, Nashville city councilman Robert Swope told reporters “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when.” In the meantime, the FBI is reportedly “processing” the material.

“It’s really not even a manifesto,” according to Nashville city council member Courtney Johnson.  “It’s diaries of a mentally ill person.” The councilwoman, a real-estate agent, did not explain how she was qualified to diagnose Audrey Hale, who carefully planned the attack for months.  “What I was told is, her manifesto was a blueprint on total destruction, and it was so, so detailed at the level of what she had planned.”

According to Johnston, “that document in the wrong person’s hands would be astronomically dangerous.” So it was the “document” that was dangerous, and Johnston didn’t understand “these claims that law enforcement is hiding something.” That should be a simple matter.