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August 2024

Should Schools Ban Phones? Jacqueline Nesi evaluates the evidence related to phone-free schools

https://www.afterbabel.com/ Jonathan Haidt

“Schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences.”  

— U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy

“Cell phone use in schools has gotten out of control. It’s gotten to the point that students don’t talk face to face, but instead text one another when they’re sitting right next to each other! …research tells us what we already know: excessive cell phone use impacts students’ mental health and academic performance. It’s time to update our policy [to ban cell phones] and make it a district-wide responsibility.”  

— Jackie Goldberg, Los Angeles Unified School District Board President

“It’s 2024 – and all families rely on cell phones to stay connected and communicate now more than ever…parents want to be able to have clear and open channels of communication with their own children. Banning cell phones outright in school or treating them like contraband instead of using effective classroom management is entirely unreasonable and not grounded in the reality we will live in.” 

— Keri Rodrigues, President of the National Parents Union 

It’s back-to-school season, and you know what that means! We’re talking about school cell phone bans.

Should schools ban phones outright? Are there other options? Is there any research on this? 

This is a big topic, so I cover it in two parts. In this post, I discuss the research on phone bans. In the second post, I talk about specific policies, and how schools can implement them.

So, please, grab a seat, put away your cell phone (in your backpack, out of sight, for the duration of this period), and let’s get to it! 

Wait, what’s going on?

This Week Today | Current Events from Israel Rabbi Ben Packer

https://mailchi.mp/dd9d88d97a17/israel-current-events***

Gaza
There were serious developments in Gaza this week. First of all, 6 dead bodies of Israeli hostages were retrieved by the army from a tunnel. It was already known that 5 of the 6 had been killed. It was suspected that the 6th was killed, but hadn’t been confirmed. All 6 had been kidnapped alive from communities adjacent to Gaza on Oct. 7th. It is unclear as to how they all were killed, but there are suggestions that at least some of them were killed by IDF attacks near the tunnel where they were being held. There are some on the left who are blaming Prime Minister Netanyahu for this, but that just shows how crazy and bitter these people are. 

In a bit of a surprise move, Israeli forces pushed through a section of the Gaza Strip (Kissufim) all the way to the beach this week. This is the third corridor that crosses the entire Strip that has been created by the IDF since the beginning of the current conflict. It’s unclear what exactly precipitated the move, but is likely connected to a recent uptick in rocket fire. In the areas of the other two corridors (Netzarim in the middle of the Strip and Philadelphia in the south bordering Egypt), the IDF continued this week to eliminate terrorists and destroy tunnels. It was announced this week that over 150 tunnels in the Rafiach area have been destroyed so far. Two reserve soldiers were tragically killed this week in the Netzarim corridor by a roadside bomb. Another soldier was also killed while engaging terrorists. 

The hostage negotiations appear to be deadlocked. Hamas refuses to agree to a deal in which Israeli forces remain in Gaza. So far, Prime Minister Netanyahu has refused any scenario where troops are pulled out of certain areas, like the Netzarim and Philadelphia corridors.

The DNC, Lies and Videotape Democrat fakery and media silence. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dnc-lies-and-videotape/

This summer marks 20 years since an Illinois state senator calling himself Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. This year’s DNC confirms that the more accurate designation is DSM – the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood now spreading reality dysphoria across America.

The Illinois senator told the nation his father was a Kenyan goatherd who went to school in a tin-roof shack. He rode that story into the US senate and in 2008 ran for president, promising a fundamental transformation of the United States of America. In the 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, David Garrow confirmed what others had already revealed, that the vaunted Dreams from My Father was a novel, not an autobiography or memoir, and the author a “composite character,” one of the numerous fakes on the political scene.

Under DSM, a politician can make false claims with little if any challenge from the establishment media. For example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren built a career on the false claim that she was a Cherokee Indian. The honorable course would be to resign but the Massachusetts Democrat went on to run for president.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal claimed he served in Vietnam, a claim that was exposed as false by the New York Times. That prompted no resignation from the Connecticut Democrat, who in 2017 demanded that Trump attorney general pick Jeff Sessions return an award from the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Consider also Delaware Democrat Joe Biden.

Even hagiographical hooey like Mark Bowden’s 2010 “The Salesman” outed Biden as a poor student and semi-literate plagiarist. Biden did better as a serial prevaricator, falsely claiming that his first wife was killed by a drunk driver, that his son Beau was killed in Iraq, that he acted as a liaison for Golda Meir during the Six Day War, and so on. Such fakery made Biden a natural choice for the composite character.

As vice president, Biden “got China” and the “Big Guy” ran the business operations through son Hunter, dealings now coming to light in more detail. Biden also had leverage with Ukraine, using his power to get a prosecutor fired. In classic corrupt style, the Delaware Democrat used the power of his office to enrich himself and his family.

A Deep Dive into a Harris Word-Salad Why her handlers are keeping her sequestered from the media and voters. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-deep-dive-into-a-harris-word-salad/

Recently Larry Elder provided us with a sample of Kamala Harris’s thinking on various issues. A deep dive into one will demonstrate why her handlers are keeping her sequestered from the media and voters.

Here’s one from the year of her stillborn 2020 presidential primary, when she didn’t get a single vote, and from which she had to ignominiously withdraw:

“So, there’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, ‘oh everyone should get the same amount.’ The problem with that, not everybody’s starting out from the same place. So, if we’re all getting the same amount, but you started out back there and I started out over here, we could get the same amount, but you’re still going to be that far back behind me. It’s about giving people the resources and the support they need, so that everyone can be on equal footing, and then compete on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

The first problem is Harris’s typical simplistic and redundant writing style. Phrases like “same place,” “back there,” “equal footing,” “equitable treatment” are vague. We assume she’s talking about socio-economic status and education, which leftists and progressives claim are products of the unjust political and economic order and “systemic” oppression. Since these are the keys to success, “resources and support,” i.e. transfers of money, or subsidized goods and services, must be provided to peoples so “we all end up in the same place” ––in other words, equality of result rather than opportunity, the fly in this word salad.

This sentiment is important, since it lies behind numerous dysfunctional leftist policies, and has been obvious in Democrats’ policy proposals since FDR, and took a quantum leap during Barack Obama’s presidency. Today, they have moved even farther left during the Biden-Harris administration, which along with Harris’s vice-president candidate Tim Walz, promise to leave centrism and common sense completely behind, damaging even further our economy and national character in the pursuit of correcting what is called “income inequality.”

Don’t Forget What Harris And Biden Have Done To The Country

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/22/dont-forget-what-harris-and-biden-have-done-to-the-country/

When Americans listen to Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech tonight, they need to tune out the thrill-up-the-leg praise from the media and the audience’s stream of verbal bouquets and ask themselves one question: Are they better off today than they were four years ago. For all but a few, the answer would be resounding “no.”

In the only debate between President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign, just days before the election, Reagan asked what the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government called “one of the most important campaign questions of all time:

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” 

Voters said no, and sent Reagan to the White House with 489 electoral votes and sent Carter home with 49.

Forty-four years later, the question is still relevant, and still yields the same response, because:

The unemployment rate was 4.3% in July 2024 – the fourth straight month it has increased – compared to 3.5% in February 2020 when politicians and unelected public health officials began choking the economy with pandemic lockdowns. Even though that comparison is bad enough, it’s somewhat misleading, because there are 5 million fewer Americans in the labor force than there were just before the lockdowns. Adjusting for that, the real unemployment rate, which has never been below 4% while the Biden-Harris regime has been in office, would be 5.2% today.

Pogrom at Kibbutz Be’eri: Jews Under Fire by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20885/pogrom-at-kibbutz-beeri

“As word came that murderous hordes were approaching, the Jews attempted to flee. Those who could not, barricaded themselves indoors and prayed for a miracle.”

This moving narrative describes not the shocking events of October 7, 2023, at Kibbutz Be’eri and other communities in Israel, but the massacre of eastern European Jews nearly 400 years earlier by Cossacks during the 1648 Khmelnitsky pogroms, in what is now Ukraine.

Although Jewish settlements in the greater Kievan Rus region, Ukraine and Crimea included, can be traced to the 8th -10th centuries, a record of pogroms took some time to emerge. Not limited to the Rus region, pogroms were widespread in middle ages Europe as a whole. In the Rhineland area, the First Crusade of 1096 led to mass slaughter of Jews who had settled there, and the same later in Palestine when the Crusaders arrived. In England, the York pogrom of 1190 resulted in the expulsion of Jews from the land for nearly 400 years.

The long and woeful history of eastern European pogroms: the massacre of innocent, peace-loving Jews in their small villages, their shtetls, commenced about a thousand years ago and continues today. Out of these pogroms came the words of Rabbeinu Gershom, who in the 10th century wrote in his work, Zechor Brit Avraham (Recall the Covenant of Abraham):

“Wounds, bruises, and fresh blows
are inflicted on the daughter of Israel
She is pained and embittered in a foreign land
hunted like a bird from Mt. Moriah.”

The year 1391 witnessed the infamous Spanish pogrom in which Sephardic Jewish communities were destroyed, and those who refused to convert to Catholicism were murdered. By 1492, the date of final expulsion, there were few, if any, openly practising Jews left in Spain.

Nearly 400 years later, in 1881, a continuous four-year pogrom occurred in southern Russia, when thousands of shtetls with their Jewish occupants were eliminated. With numerous pogroms in between, some 40 years thereafter, between the years of 1918 and 1920, major pogroms were instigated throughout Ukraine, in which more than 250,000 Jews were murdered. The mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine and Russia to America can be traced to those events.

Only one day after Israel’s declaration of Independence in 1948, “murderous hordes,” like the Cossacks of before, once again sought to purge Jews in the region through an existential attack by five Arab armies. This time was different, however: the Jews had weapons and successfully fought back against the intended massacre.

In 2021 at the city of Lod, Israel, an intended pogrom of “violence and terror” by contemporary “murderous hordes” was attempted, but fortunately with limited success. In a repeat of history, and despite relocation to their ancestral homeland of Israel, Jews were forced once again to “barricade themselves in their homes in fear of the rampaging mobs while others chose to flee the city until calm was restored.” Still, this was not yet the Be’eri pogrom of 2023.

Biden’s Both-Sidesism Collides with Reality P. David Hornik

No, Mr. President, suicide bombers and the Israeli army are not the same.

“We’ll keep working to bring hostages home and end the war in Gaza and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” President Biden said Monday night at the Democratic National Convention. He went on to say that “Those folks down the street”—the anti-Israel protesters—“have a point: a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”

On Sunday night in Tel Aviv, a suicide bomber accidentally blew himself up as he was about to enter a synagogue. The Tel Aviv police chief said that if the bomb had not gone off accidentally, “it would have caused vast damage and multiple casualties.”

The would-be bomber was a Palestinian from the West Bank, and Hamas—Israel’s main adversary in the Gaza fighting—claimed credit for his would-be attack and vowed to carry out more.

If the bomber had succeeded to enter the synagogue, his act would not have been the same as Israel’s antiterror warfare in Gaza, which, like all antiterror warfare in populated areas, sometimes exacts civilian casualties—though “No urban fight in history has resulted in such a low ratio” of civilians to combatants killed.

But the Biden administration has for a while been embracing moral equivalency regarding the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza, and now characterizes it as a war that simply has to end so that peace can prevail. “Peace” means a return of the Israeli hostages neatly balanced by a complete, or near complete, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

Liberals Should Start Taking Anti-Israel Activists at Their Word

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2024/08/liberals-should-start-taking-anti-israel-activists-at-their-word/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_

Behind the willingness on the mainstream left to indulge the anti-Israel radicals, argues Jonathan Chait, is a tendency to romanticize them while ignoring their actual ideas. Chait, a staunchly liberal journalist who makes some unsympathetic and highly dubious claims about Israel, sees this tendency in some of his own colleagues, who tend to ascribe “the most sympathetic possible motives” to the protesters while avoiding any examination of their “actual beliefs.” Take, for instance, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that interrupted Kamala Harris’s speech in Detroit:

SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.”

Would progressives have taken a cooler view of the demonstrators had they possessed a clearer view of their objectives? Some might. But others would not. Progressives tend to take a romantic view of left-wing protest. Protesters occupy a special category of political actor, freed of any responsibility or agency and judged only as a counterweight against the worst excesses of whatever they oppose. They represent an idealistic impulse and revulsion at the status quo, and since the status quo is unjust, their behavior, by definition, cannot be. All that matters is that their actions are directionally correct.

To the extent progressives feel any discomfort with the goals or methods of protesters, they tend to rationalize them by invoking noble protests from past eras.

But the leaders of these specific protests, as Chait documents, have made their actual beliefs quite explicit, and one “common thread” is an “unbounded eagerness to shed Israeli blood.”

Read more at New York Magazine

This Genteel Country Is Now the Rape Capital of Europe Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/08/20/this-genteel-country-is-now-the-rape-capital-of-europe-n4931793

An explosion of violent crime in the United Kingdom has made England and Wales into what one economist calls “the rape capital of Europe by a sizeable margin.”

The figures are “pretty grim,” according to UK economist and podcast host Philip Pilkington. “Looks like Britain is becoming a pretty unsafe place.”

(The UK publishes separate crime statistics for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.)

The rate of increase is staggering, too. Reported rapes are up 63% in just five years.

In the city of Bournemouth, where anti-immigration protestors were rounded up by authorities two days ago, rapes increased from 98 in 2010 to 342 last year — three and a half times as many as before.

Meanwhile, His Majesty’s Labour government responded by preparing to empty the jails of 5,000 criminals, some of them violent, to make room for the people protesting against Britain’s immigration-fueled crime wave.

The ghosts of 1968 still haunt the Democrats The Israel-Hamas War threatens to disrupt Kamala Harris’s coronation – and her path to the White House. Kevin Yuill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/21/the-ghosts-of-1968-still-haunt-the-democrats/

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week is already invoking memories of another, infamous DNC in the windy city. In 1968, between 9,000 and 10,000 people – mainly students – gathered in parks and outside the convention centre to protest against the Vietnam War. The resulting violence and mayhem was broadcast around the world.

This week, thousands of demonstrators protesting against Israel’s war on Hamas arrived in Chicago. The aim of the Coalition to March on the DNC, which is made up of more than 200 organisations, is to pressure the Democrats to abandon their support for Israel. On Monday, the coalition held a demonstration of about 3,000 people and hopes to up those numbers on Thursday, when vice-president Kamala Harris is due to speak and officially accept the presidential nomination. The coalition’s website brands the current president ‘Genocide Joe Biden’ and warns: ‘Democratic party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands.’

Some of today’s protesters hope to explicitly invoke the 1968 protests. ‘This is the Vietnam War of our era’, said Hatem Abudayyah, a spokesman for the coalition. ‘The attacks on our movement, our students and our organisations are similar to the attacks on the movement that was trying to stop 1968… I absolutely see those parallels.’

There are indeed some notable parallels between 1968 and now. Just like the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the recent, unsuccessful attempt on Donald Trump’s life threatened to change the course of history. Similarly, the 1968 DNC protests followed a wave of student unrest across American campuses over an overseas conflict. Just as Biden is stepping aside for Harris, then president Lyndon B Johnson made way for his heir apparent, then vice-president Hubert Humphrey, to take the nomination.

The Democrats would rather not see these parallels, given that the eventual outcome of the 1968 election was victory for Republican Richard Nixon. There is certainly an air of desperation in the many media attempts to dismiss the comparisons. Elderly protest veterans have been wheeled out to say, essentially, that 2024 will be nothing like 1968.