EDUCATION Comments turned off

The School Shutdowns and Lost Literacy New evidence that children have fallen far behind in reading.

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-school-shutdowns-and-lost-literacy-covid-pandemic-amplify-education-reading-11645653340?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Governments made many mistakes in the pandemic, and shutting down schools was arguably the worst. We’re now discovering the damage as studies calculate the learning loss.

Amplify, the curriculum and assessment provider, examined its test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with the literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).”

Before the pandemic, 55% of kindergartners were on track in reading skills. That fell to 37% in 2020–2021 and 47% this school year. The year before the pandemic, only 29% of kindergartners were deemed “far behind” in early literacy skills. That rose to 47% and 37% the first and second year of the pandemic.

Amplify sees some progress this year in reading as the classrooms have reopened. But the troubles persist for this year’s second graders, whose schooling has been dominated by shutdowns and disruptions. Among this Covid cohort, Amplify finds that “the number of students at greatest risk of not learning to read is slightly higher than it was a year ago.” Some 35% of second graders are in literacy crisis this year, up from 26% before the shutdowns.

Like other recent studies, Amplify reports that minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss. During the last normal school year, only 34% of black and 29% of Hispanic second graders needed intensive intervention to help catch up. This school year 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders have fallen this far behind on literacy, compared to 26% of white peers.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Kerry’s Ukraine Emissions He frets that Russian brutality will distract from climate change.

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerrys-ukraine-emissions-climate-russia-vladimir-putin-11645736997?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned in an interview this week about “massive emissions consequences” from a Russian war against Ukraine, which he also said would be a distraction from work on climate change. Nevertheless, he added, “I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.”

What’s overheated here is Mr. Kerry’s brain. His comments came before Vladimir Putin began Thursday’s massive assault on Ukraine. But the BBC says the interview was taped this week, and the alarms about Mr. Putin’s impending attack have been ringing loudly. Mr. Kerry was running Foggy Bottom in 2014 when Mr. Putin invaded Crimea. How has he failed to internalize that Mr. Putin is a bad actor motivated by power and Russian revanchism?

Mr. Kerry told the BBC that he hopes Mr. Putin realizes Northern Russia is thawing, “and his infrastructure is at risk, and the people of Russia are at risk.” We’ll wait until you stop laughing. Mr. Putin deserves to be made a pariah. Western leaders like Mr. Kerry shouldn’t be wondering whether a polite tea in Moscow might induce him to slightly lower next year’s oil production when he can enrich the Kremlin by selling it for $100 a barrel.

Mr. Kerry’s defenders—assuming they exist—might say he’s merely fulfilling his role as President Biden’s climate envoy. And Mr. Kerry did express to the BBC his concerns about “the people of Ukraine,” as well as the principle of using force to alter boundaries.

But Mr. Kerry’s comments aren’t a gaffe. They reveal the Biden Administration’s obsession with climate, and with punishing fossil-fuel production, which has made the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail. The climate lobby has made Mr. Putin more powerful. Every time Mr. Kerry visits Moscow, the boys in the Kremlin must think it’s Christmas.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden, not Putin, to blame for higher gas prices

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/595706-biden-not-putin-to-blame-for-higher-gas-prices

President Biden wants you to know that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will drive up oil prices. He warns that it may soon cost more to fill up your tank.

He’s right, but don’t be deceived; that’s been the plan all along. Not, certainly, to foster war in Europe, but to push a hasty and ill-considered switch to renewable fuels, no matter the cost to consumers. Sadly, that has also been the program in Europe, which is now dealing with the ugly consequences of bowing to climate activists. The world still needs oil, and much of it is in the wrong hands.

Russia has Europe over a barrel. Americans must understand that this is no accident. It’s the result of European climate policies just like those that Democrats want to force on Americans, substituting unreliable and costly renewable energy for oil and gas. It is the continent’s adoption of a Green New Deal-like agenda – banning fracking, subsidizing wind and solar, etc. – that has made Europe dependent on a hostile nation to power their economies.

If we continue down a similar path, we could find ourselves back in the 1970s, overly reliant for oil on Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia and other hostile nations. In 1973, OPEC cut off oil exports to the U.S.; oil prices quadrupled, plunging the U.S. into recession.

Here’s the reality: We will still be burning oil and gas to heat our homes and generate our electricity for years to come. We can either produce those fuels at home or, like Europe, import them from abroad.

Since Biden became president, he has clearly chosen the latter path; this is a grave mistake. In thrall to well-heeled and noisy climate activists, Biden has set about junking one of America’s greatest geopolitical advantages – abundant, cheap energy – in a reckless quest to drive down carbon emissions.

A quest, by the way, that even the president admitted was pointless. Last April, Biden acknowledged that 85 percent of emissions come from outside the U.S. and confessed, “That’s why I kept my commitment to rejoin the Paris accord, because [even] if we do everything perfectly, it’s not going to matter.” He was correct. Whatever we do will be overwhelmed by increased emissions from China and India.

Even as Russian tanks lined up on the Ukraine border, Biden’s administration froze U.S. drilling on federal lands and slapped on rules making it even more difficult to build natural gas pipelines. What can they be thinking?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Frisco Frolics A remarkably dysfunctional year for the San Francisco Unified school board. Larry Sand

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/frisco-frolics-larry-sand/

It started in January 2021, when the school board in San Francisco decided to rename 44 public schools, claiming their namesakes were “unworthy of the honor.” The names of such American icons as Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, et al. were to be placed on the chopping block.

February was no less contentious – and at the same time provided some comic relief – when the art department of the school district bizarrely announced that acronyms such as VAPA (visual and performing arts) are “a symptom of white supremacy.” The month also saw the school board decide that top-rated Lowell High School should no longer admit students based on their academic performance. Instead, the school was to use a lottery to admit them. This, of course, was very discriminatory toward Asian American students who made up 50.6 percent of its student body at the time. And if February wasn’t already absurd, the city government of San Francisco sued its own school board to reopen schools. After 327 days the city fathers and mothers decided that enough was enough. But in reality, kids, especially minorities, were not terribly well educated in Fog City before the shut down – just 19 percent of blacks passed a recent state test in reading – so perhaps the school board figured eliminating in-person learning couldn’t do that much more damage.

Then, in March, it was revealed that school board member Allison Collins had made some rather nasty comments on Twitter about Asian Americans in 2016, and left the posts intact five years hence. She accused them of many things, including the use of “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” The school board was pretty much forced to do something, but they didn’t fire her or take away any of her six-figure salary; they merely removed her as vice president, and stripped her of committee assignments. March went out like a lion when Collins filed a lawsuit against the district and five fellow board members, asking for $87 million in damages for violating her free speech rights. Among other things, her lawsuit alleged that the demotion caused her a significant loss of reputation, severe mental and emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and – I am not making this up – “spiritual injury to her soul.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Putin Sizes Up Biden, Invades Ukraine Weakness invites aggression. Robert Spencer

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/putin-sizes-biden-invades-ukraine-robert-spencer/

Russian troops are advancing briskly into Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has brushed off Old Joe Biden’s sanctions and made it abundantly clear that he is not afraid of Biden, as Democrat operatives and their propaganda arm, the establishment media, have long insisted.

This is what happens when America has a feeble president, an obvious figurehead, and our military is compromised by Leftist ideologues. Clearly Putin is taking advantage of Biden’s obvious weakness and the decimation of our Armed Forces by wokeness and Covid hysteria. He knows that there is little likelihood that Biden will touch off World War III by committing American troops to the defense of Ukraine. Putin also likely considers that even if the American military does end up confronting Russian forces, that the U.S. military’s concentration on pushing Critical Race Theory and other Leftist agendas on the troops, as well as the culling that took place due to vaccine mandates, have left our military in such a weakened, distracted, and confused state that it will not pose any significant threat anyway.

Meanwhile, Putin emphasized in his remarks announcing the beginning of the operation against Ukraine that “in December 2021 we once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything was in vain. The US position did not change. They did not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this important issue for us, continuing to pursue their own goals and disregarding our interests.”

If this is an accurate summation of what happened, and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t, then the fecklessness of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is as much to blame for this conflict as Putin is. The questions must be asked: was it really necessary to begin maneuvering to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, and to ignore all Russian entreaties that may have led to the formulation of an agreement that was mutually acceptable to both parties? Were State Department officials too preoccupied with implementing the woke agenda to bother to negotiate with Putin over NATO?

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

THE COURAGEOUS DOCTORS WHO FOUGHT THE COVID FARCE: ARMANDO SIMON

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/25/these-are-the-courageous-doctors-who-fought-the-covid-farce-and-paid-the-price/

“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”  – Martin Luther King

Doesn’t it strike anyone as being in the least bit odd that those health care workers (physicians, nurses, researchers) who have gone against the current – as voiced by the politicians, the network news and the CDC – regarding the morbidity of COVID and/or the treatment against the virus, have been subjected to a torrent of insults, to censorship, and even loss of jobs and/or certification – simply for doing what health care workers have done throughout the centuries, that is, giving their professional opinions? Meantime, on seeing the internet mob go after their colleagues, other health care professionals have cowardly chosen to remain quiet and let the grotesque COVID farce play out.

Since when is punishment the reaction to a doctor giving a medical opinion?

Along the same lines, has no one noticed that both the analysis, the prognosis, and the treatment regarding the virus has been a total fiasco?

One cannot also help but be angry over the intense attacks at doctors and nurses who are carrying out their professional duty by disagreeing with the official dogma. What a contrast from the start of the epidemic in early 2020 when they were justly called heroes, when the lockdown citizens of Paris, Rome, Barcelona and elsewhere for weeks would go out at night on their balconies and applaud, and shout praise and songs of gratitude and admiration for their doctors and nurses in hospitals, many of whom were dying doing their duty!

Unless I am mistaken, I believe that this is the first time in history that so many doctors and nurses have been threatened, persecuted, censored and tormented for doing their job, or for rendering a professional judgment.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

JOE BIDEN: PUTIN’S GREEN PATSY

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/25/joe-biden-putins-green-patsy/

President Joe Biden has finally come forward with sanctions against Russia and Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. Don’t expect much. Thanks to Biden’s economically destructive climate-change policies, Putin holds a decisive advantage in this conflict.

“This aggression cannot go unanswered,” Biden said, speaking Thursday as he unveiled what he called “devastating” financial punishments. “If it did, the consequences for America would be much worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.”

During his campaigns and while in office, Biden has often posed as a tough guy against the Russians – even as his family pocketed millions from Russian and pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, corruption virtually ignored by the American big media.

“Putin knows, if I am president of the United States,” Biden said in a 2019 fundraising video, “his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.” 

So far, mission not accomplished.

Then there’s this:

“Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be president. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee,” Biden tweeted on Feb. 21, 2020. “If you’re wondering why – it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him.”

Well, he’s now going “toe-to-toe” with Putin for real, and it doesn’t look so good. His sanctions, which may pinch Russia a bit but don’t go nearly far enough to reverse Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, sound tough. Among them are restrictions on Russian financial institutions, bans on technology exports, and financial restrictions on some members of Putin’s government. But not Putin himself.

“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences,” Biden said Thursday, outlining his actions, which, he predicted, would “impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time.”

In fact, Biden pulled his punches, leaving Russia’s economy still standing.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Seeing Putin Plain If the invasion of Ukraine has taught us anything, it’s that Russia’s leader operates from a very different worldview from our own. Damir Marusic

Posted By on February 24th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-putins-ukraine-gambit

Is Russian president Vladimir Putin mad? While it’s natural for people waking up to a war having broken out on the European continent to ask themselves this question, it is the wrong question to ask.

It’s wrong because it leads to strategic mirroring. In the run-up to today’s outbreak of hostilities, the Biden administration admirably focused much of its energies on keeping allies on the same page. It aggressively shared detailed information about plans behind the scenes across European capitals, and by earlier this week had managed to cobble together a united front against Putin’s increasingly threatening posture.

But in seeking to deter Putin, the Biden team made several mistakes. It kept waving the threat of sanctions, sure that the thought of economic pain would make the Russian leader flinch. After all, to a modern, liberal-minded leader, the looming threat of material privations feels like a heavy cost to bear. Putin himself punctured that fantasy in his speech on Monday, saying that he fully anticipated heavy sanctions to be applied no matter what. The whole tone of his speech, dripping with hateful grievance, indicated that material privation was a small sacrifice to right what he insists are historical wrongs. Now that sanctions are set to roll out, we will see if Putin misjudged how much stress the Russian state can bear. As a means of deterrence, however, sanctions failed miserably.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Expelled from a Progressive Think Tank—for the Crime of Denouncing Antifa Violence Craig McCann

Posted By on February 24th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/02/22/expelled-from-a-progressive-think-tank-for-the-crime-of-denouncing-antifa-violence/

On February 2nd, I wrote an opinion piece entitled “Beware the Anti-Fascists, for they have become what they oppose,” on behalf of the UK-based Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR)—a research centre for which I served, until recently, as a policy and practitioner fellow. That article began as follows:

I am increasingly concerned at the rate at which the so-called “CVE field” [countering violent extremism] is being infiltrated by activists describing themselves as “Anti-Fascists” who advocate for committing criminal offences in furtherance of their opposition to the radical right. This has exploded since the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for which a large number of criminal investigations are still ongoing. As someone who has spent more than a decade delivering and studying state responses to counter the radical right, as well as other forms of terrorism, I feel compelled to challenge the implied narrative that the only way to oppose the radical right is by emulating their tactics.

One might think that this wouldn’t be a controversial opinion. Yet it was met with an avalanche of abuse and hit pieces emanating (and apparently coordinated by) Antifa-linked social-media accounts in the United States. Despite the fact that I had written numerous articles for CARR over the last four years (17, according to the website), it was suddenly (and ludicrously) claimed that my former career as a police officer meant that my supposed “bias against antifascists” had always been lying in plain sight.

CARR, as per its website, is dedicated to “the study and countering of radical right extremism and intersecting phenomena (e.g., populism, gender, antisemitism, and Islamophobia) that aims to support a variety of mainstream groups, from government agencies to grass-roots charities, through podcasts, commentary, research reports, presentations, media interviews and commissioned work.” As a former senior counter-terrorism officer who’s served in the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Counter Terrorism Command (SO15), as well as the author of a book on state responses to right-wing extremism (based on my PhD research), I was invited to become affiliated with the group in mid-2018.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Breaking the Moscow/Beijing axis should be our top priority: Paul Petrick

Posted By on February 24th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/24/the-breaking-the-moscow-beijing-axis-should-be-our-top-priority/

What a difference a half-century makes.

In February 1972, the People’s Republic of China hosted a history-making American delegation headed by President Richard M. Nixon, the Middle Kingdom’s most important Western visitor since Marco Polo.  In February 2022, no Western heads of state were in Beijing as the city played host to the Winter Olympics.

Those hoping the U.S.-led diplomatic boycott would cause red faces in Red China were disappointed when chief ChiCom Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin held their 38th meeting, just prior to the opening ceremonies.  From their conference emerged a 5,000-word joint declaration pledging cooperation on military and economic matters around the world and beyond (plans for a Sino-Russian moon base were announced last year).

Preventing such a combination, which Xi has described as something that “exceeds an alliance,” has been an objective of foreign policy strategists since the beginning of the last century. The failure to achieve that objective is nothing short of calamitous according to fin de siècle historian Henry Adams.

Having relieved Spain of the remnants of her empire via the Spanish-American War, America emerged as a new world power at the dawn of the 20th Century. At that time, Henry Adams emerged as a peak geopolitical prognosticator.  The scion of presidents and diplomats, Adams was famously perplexed by the modern world, but nonetheless possessed an unparalleled foresight into the future of foreign affairs.  He correctly predicted the decline of the British Empire, world war, the Bolshevik Revolution, NATO, and the atomic bomb.

But Adams’ most chilling insight came as his friend and neighbor Secretary of State John Hay was desperately trying to prevent Russian colonization of China through his “Open Door” policy of guaranteeing world powers equal access to Chinese markets.  Adams warned, “if Russia organizes China as an economical power, the little drama of history will end in the overthrow of our clumsy [W]estern civilization.”