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November 2024

The Dismal State of Literacy When Unions Are at the Helm By Hannah Schmid

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2024/11/18/the_dismal_state_of_literacy_when_unions_are_at_the_helm_1072964.html

In a first-ever election on Nov. 5 for control of the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education, candidates backed and funded by the Chicago Teachers Union were largely rejected at the polls. Out of 10 races, only four CTU-backed candidates won, and one of those was uncontested. 

It was a sign Chicago has had enough of failing schools and voters were placing blame. During CTU’s militant reign over CPS, proficiency ratings for 3-8th graders have plummeted and less than 23% of 11th graders can read at grade level. Meanwhile, the CTU has spent over six months lobbying for a $50 billion contract that rather than advancing classroom instruction makes demands over things such as climate justice, green schools, and affordable housing. 

CTU candidates’ rejection is just one example of a seismic shift in the way constituents are viewing public education across the country. A national literacy epidemic means only 1 in 3 students are meeting proficiency standards in reading. People are seeing the results of union-led public education – and they’re not pleased.

The path forward for families is to stop allowing union-led public education to put power first and students last. Educators must lean into proven methods to help students succeed. 

Literacy is one of the most important skills because it’s the foundation of every milestone that follows: from reading and comprehending course material in every other subject to understanding and following instructions in employment. When children aren’t reading proficiently by the end of third grade, they are far less likely to graduate high school and are four times more likely to drop out.  

Louis Galarowicz Favoring “Diverse Faculty” New York’s public university system has adopted a program to hire minority professors.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/favoring-diverse-faculty

The Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) banned the use of race in admissions in higher education. In the State University of New York system, however, race-conscious methods are alive and well in another domain: faculty hiring.

After the ruling, Chancellor John B. King, Jr. and the SUNY Board of Trustees declared that the Court had “attempted to pull our nation backwards in the journey toward equity and civil rights.” Blacks and Latinos “are still underrepresented across institutions of higher education as students, faculty members, and administrators,” they said, so “better paths and bridges” would be needed to dismantle “roadblocks and barriers.”

In the SUNY system, these “paths and bridges” take the form of three diversity awards and scholarships: Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth (PRODiG+); the Empire State Diversity Honors Scholarship; and the Graduate Diversity Fellowship. The first is a recruiting program designed to induce “over 400 postdoctoral fellows to enter tenure-track faculty positions at State-operated campuses”; the latter two are DEI-focused scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students, respectively.

SUNY’s PRODiG+ program is explicitly designed to “increas[e] the number and share of excellent diverse faculty committed to advancing the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” In practice, “diverse faculty” apparently refers to racial minorities and women. SUNY Cortland’s PRODiG proposal, for example, stated clearly that it intends to “hir[e] a percentage of URM [underrepresented] faculty that equals or surpasses the diversity of our student population.” Cortland’s 2022 program overview clarified further that “underrepresented” groups included “women in STEM disciplines [WSTEM], Hispanic/Latinx, African Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.”

We’re all Doomed. Yawn Michael Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/were-all-doomed-yawn/

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but only in My Fair Lady. On October 29 and 30, 2024,  it fell elsewhere with tragic consequences: the loss of over two hundred lives and widespread damage in the Valencia region. Almost as surprising as the downpour’s intensity was the rush by agencies in this space to conclude it was caused by the bogeyman apparently driving most natural disasters today: “climate change”.

An alternative explanation is that the weather gods were up to their old tricks. After all, a so-called extreme weather event (EWE) happens somewhere in the world every day. So the probability was high they might conjure up one just a week before COP29, as indeed they did last year.  Storm Bettina made landfall in Eastern Europe on November 28, 2023, just days before COP28, the annual UN climate conference. It too was attributed promptly to nasty anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 Conference of the Parties is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22, 2024. After 28 years of talks, the event is being promoted, optimistically, as a Climate Action Summit. How many people does it take to change the climate of a whole planet to suit everybody everywhere and forever? At least 40,000, judging by the number of delegates this year. Good luck with that exercise of breathtaking hubris, the bureaucratic equivalent of collective hara kiri, at least for the developed world.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres had a familiar message: immediate steps must be taken to cut [carbon dioxide] emissions, “safeguard people from climate chaos”, and “tear down the walls to climate finance”, especially given what he described as this year’s “masterclass in climate destruction”. It was déjà vu all over again.

COP29 is yet another attempt by the developing world to monetize the climate and raise “trillions of dollars to protect lives and livelihoods from the worsening impacts of climate change.” Yet most countries were silent on the irony of China’s chutzpah: the world’s largest coal consumer, biggest solar panel manufacturer and now space explorer, still claiming developing country status and putting its hand out for billions of dollars of free money.

There is, of course, no suggestion here that the agency rush to judgement mentioned above might have been due to activist researchers so dazzled by confirmation bias – and now underwritten by fabulous funding from both governments and private entities – they could not resist making confident claims about climate causation, such as detecting the “fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events”; or that the MSM is happy to provide them with a media megaphone without further scrutiny, or to question the veracity of their claims.

The Next War: Attacks on U.S. Digital Infrastructure? by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21133/the-next-war-attacks-on-us-digital-infrastructure

It’s an old saying repeated by military strategists who consistently warn, “Don’t prepare to fight the last war…”

Their inference is that, while there are lessons to be learned from studying the last conflict, the next one may well be profoundly different than what you previously endured, catching a nation totally unprepared.

For America, the “next one” may already be upon us. It is not the scenario we anticipated, namely enemy aircraft coming over the pole to attack with nuclear weapons, or a catastrophic exchange of ICBMs. Even the lessons gained from the current Russian war on Ukraine may not be fully applicable to America’s defense of the homeland.

Consider the current assault as revealed in media reports. Chinese hackers sought to target the mobile phones of then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and intercepted data meant for our law enforcement agencies.

A sworn enemy, Iran, is also looking to wage their war against “The Great Satan” by seeking to hit our nation’s most vulnerable targets: our digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, today’s Pentagon is wrestling with multibillion dollar projects that are not going well. The Army has been stymied in developing a new attack helicopter, at a cost to the taxpayer that is staggering.

The Air Force is still profoundly unhappy with its next generation tanker aircraft built by Boeing, and rightfully so.

The Navy lost an aircraft carrier to an accidental fire.

Hillary Clinton’s Uranium Giveaway to Russia Is About to Bite Us on the… You Know Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/11/19/hillary-clinton-uranium-giveaway-to-russia-n4934428

The good news is that nuclear power — safe, clean, affordable, and carbon-free — has been coming back in a big way here in the USA in recent months. The weird news is that it’s generally left-leaning tech firms and AI’s ravenous need for electricity leading the charge (SWIDT?) to build new nuclear power plants or spin shuttered ones back up.

The bad news is that the voters of this country were twice reckless enough to put people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton in charge — and now Russia is putting the kibosh on the uranium exports we need for nuclear power.

Bloomberg reported this week that “Russia is temporarily limiting exports of enriched uranium to the U.S., creating potential supply risks to utilities operating American reactors that generate almost a fifth of the nation’s electricity.

“Utilities tend to make purchases well in advance,” the report continued, “so any impact is unlikely to be immediate.” However, “To break the dependence on Russia and other state-owned enterprises, coordinated western responses are required,” Veronica Baker, spokeswoman for Canadian uranium mining company Cameco, said in a statement.

The only US-based commercial enrichment facility is located in New Mexico and is owned by Urenco Ltd, a British, Dutch, and German consortium. (Also: “Urenco,” really? Did nobody who speaks English bother to sound that out before they slapped the name on the company letterhead?) The Biden administration did what it always does and threw money at the problem with “a multibillion-dollar effort to restart the nation’s domestic uranium enrichment capabilities,” according to a Just the News staff report, but Urenco expects only a 15% increase by 2027.

Will RFK Jr. Make America Healthy Again? Vinay Prasad

https://www.thefp.com/p/rfk-jr-health-human-services-flouride-vaccines-covid-trump-europe
The media describes the new HHS chief as a conspiracy theorist. But how many of his ideas are actually used in Europe? More than you’d think.

The media describes the new HHS chief as a conspiracy theorist. But how many of his ideas are actually used in Europe

A number of American commenters have been hand-wringing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be the secretary of Health and Human Services, which would put him in charge of such critical agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

“He supports people being able to purchase raw milk, don’t you know!” 

“He wants to discourage municipal water plants from adding fluoride!” 

“He says MMR vaccines cause autism!”

After Donald Trump nominated RFK Jr. for the post, Time magazine called him “a vaccine skeptic who spreads medical disinformation and conspiracy theories,” and quoted Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law as saying of his nomination, “I can’t think of a darker day for public health and science.”

But I think we need to draw distinctions. 

After looking at the whole range of RFK Jr.’s positions, I’ve come to the view that while some are extreme, others are genuinely worthy of debate—and still others are correct. And there is a way to sift the good from the bad and the debatable. When you hear one of RFK Jr.’s ideas, ask yourself a simple question: Do other nations do what he thinks the U.S. should do? If the answer is yes, then the HHS nominee’s idea is not necessarily apocalyptic, and we should be able to discuss it openly. 

Let’s take a look at some of his most controversial opinions:

Subject: Challenges facing the second Trump Administration in the Middle East Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/3YI9jrD

*The November 2024 Trump victory constitutes a potential game-changing development, regionally and globally.

*President Trump will be preoccupied with US domestic challenges.

*However, in order to end/minimize wars and terrorism, he will have to cut the head of the venomous octopus, which mandates regime-change in Tehran.

*A regime-change in Iran would induce Saudi Arabia, Oman and additional Moslem countries to join the Abraham Accords.

*The Trump Administration would be conducive for a major enhancement of the mutually beneficial US-Israel cooperation.

*Israel should not be alarmed by a possible hostile step, by the Biden Administration, as was done by President Obama.

Fake News in the 21st Century: The egregious, unethical sin of omission – Diane Bederman-

https://dianebederman.com/fake-news-in-the-21st-century-the-egregious-unethical-sin-of-omission/

“The omission is the most powerful form of lie, and it is the duty of the historian to ensure that those lies do not creep into the history books.” —George Orwell,author of ‘1984’

We have heard a great deal about Fake News over the decades. But we have not discussed the fake news that is the result of the egregious unethical omission of facts.

I am old enough to remember Donald Rumsfeld when he wrote about the known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Many laughed. I didn’t. I realized that he could be talking about the failure of MSM – the failure to report ALL the facts:The unknown unknowns. Sadly, once Fake News is shared online, it is there forever. Far too few people fact check. They just blindly believe.

I am also old enough to remember journalists like Walter Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley. Days before cable news.

We have witnessed the most egregious sins of omission these past few years as the left-leaning legacy media tried desperately to prevent Donald Trump from being elected a second time, while having tried to destroy his first Presidency.

Always the same modus operandi – share half a quote – blow it up on social media and MSM. Take those half quotes and synthesize a false conclusion. Trump is hitler. Trump is a fascist.  Trump is a danger to America. Put all of this on social media where it lives forever.

Liz Peek: RFK Jr. wants to disrupt our powerful health care complex and it is terrified

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rfk-jr-wants-disrupt-our-powerful-health-care-complex-terrified

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is right– the U.S. is flunking health care. 

Our country spends nearly twice as much on medical care per person than other wealthy countries but our outcomes – measured by life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes and heart attack mortality — are far worse. This is an industry that begs to be disrupted. 

Whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President-elect Trump has nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is the man for the job remains to be seen. Give him this: he has been fearless in calling out the obvious failures of the status quo. 

The health care “establishment” is outraged by RFK Jr. ‘s nomination, but they only have themselves to blame. Gallup reports that merely 31% of the country thinks of our health care industry positively, while 51% have a negative view. Imagine: our medical establishment has lower approval ratings than Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Why would that be? First, disenchantment with our medical officials soared during COVID. Anthony Fauci and others in charge had no idea what they were doing but nonetheless made up rules on the fly that required toddlers to wear masks, closed schools, shut down businesses and — later on — mandated vaccines and lied about their efficacy. And yet, for all the Draconian measures, the U.S. lost more people per capita to the pandemic than most other prosperous nations.   

Second, people are not stupid; they know they spend too much for health care, that it’s too complicated and that the government’s ever-expanding intrusion into the field has made it inefficient. According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the U.S. spends about $1,000 per person solely on administrative costs related to medical services, “almost five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than [the country] spends on long-term health care.” That, folks, is the tail wagging the dog. 

WHO ELSE BUT TRUMP? SYDNEY WILLIAMS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The paradox in Senator Schumer’s statement – a statement unchallenged by Ms. Maddow – is that he admitted to (and would have agreed with) Ms. Truss’s words written five years later – that unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats exert unacceptable power over our nation’s most powerful people, let alone the rest of us. Neither he nor Ms. Maddow acknowledged the irony embedded in their exchang

As I wrote on November 6, I felt relief, not joy, with the election’s verdict. But as my wife and I spent six days driving around Pennsylvania and Virginia visiting grandchildren, I thought of the election and its consequences. And I concluded that the growing power of the state and its threat to individual freedom has become so powerful that a traditional Republican candidate might not be willing to confront such an oppressive force – that it would take an individual unafraid to incur the wrath of the administrative state.

There is no question that a government that looks after 335 million people needs a professional bureaucracy. The President and the Executive Branch appoint roughly 4,000 individuals, a tiny fraction of the two million federal civilian employees. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits partisan political activity among civilian employees in the executive branch of the Federal and District of Columbia Governments, even as it excludes those Presidential appointees whose jobs depend on Senate confirmation. Nevertheless, violations of the Hatch Act have become rampant in recent years, especially in intelligence agencies and within the Justice Department, as “lawfare” was waged against Mr. Trump and some of his backers.