Tyler Cowen:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.

– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.

Lu Pan:

This is a note on, the Turing Award laureate, Ted Codd’s revolutionary paper — A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. In this post, I will review the paper and add my comments with a perspective from modern distributed databases. 

Tight coupling

How users used to interact with databases were tightly coupled with implementation details — e.g. how bits are managed and represented on physical hardware. Users might expect to get replies in certain order because data is sorted in a specific order on disk (Ordering Dependence) without explicitly expressing reply ordering requirements. Indices on data were exposed directly to users, which makes changing them (especially removing them) in the future difficult (Indexing Dependence). Data were organized in tree structures (like folders) — e.g. employees are nested under companies, and children nested under employees. The structure has to be exposed to users, who follow this path for data access. This means changes can’t be made to the tree structures (Access Path Dependence).

Abstraction

Many problems in computer science are solved by introducing another level of indirection or abstraction. What if instead of leaking data store order, indices, or how we structure the data storage, we introduce a language that just describes the data itself. It would be completely declarative, decoupling how users would reason about the data and how it’s actually organized on disk. In Ted Codd’s own words,

1. Ok, let’s talk about a different strategy for Biden and Dems, going all the way back to inauguration. Instead of seeing the election as a mandate to expand the safety with weird badly designed programs, what would a good agenda have been? Deal with Covid. What does that mean?

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 20, 2021

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Molly Beck:

Low-performing schools in Wisconsin would be forced to close under a plan to overhaul K-12 education put forward by Kevin Nicholson, a Republican who is expected to announce this week he is running for governor.  

Nicholson, who was defeated in a Republican U.S. Senate primary in 2018 by former state Sen. Leah Vukmir of Brookfield, is proposing massive changes to the state’s education landscape but did not answer questions about how he would accomplish his goals if elected. 

In a GOP primary, Nicholson would face Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch who has broad support among elected Republican officials — including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester. 

Vos said in an event Wednesday hosted by Wispolitics.com that Nicholson should not run. 

“I think if he runs, it hurts our chances to defeat Gov. Evers. But I can’t control that. If he runs, he runs,” Vos told the Madison-based Capital Times.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Vinay Prasad:

Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough have massively backfired, with both men gaining prominence and publicity from the attempts to shut down their speech. More generally, I strongly disagree with efforts to censor scientists, even if they are incorrect, and no matter the implications of their words, as I believe the harms of censorship far exceed any short-term gains.

“The 21st Century Salonniere:

If our leaders communicated clearly and transparently throughout the pandemic, if they left politics aside, if they explained why their opinions and guidance have changed so often and provided the data to back it up, a guy like Malone couldn’t get much of an audience.

As for the media, they do little more than parrot the leaders. If the messages from leaders are garbled, constantly changing, and unclear, our media outlets are usually going to repeat those messages, not clarify them.

So our leaders have failed America. The media has failed America. But where are the scientists? Why aren’t the workhorses of this pandemic, the people who are quietly behind the scenes doing the best they can, people who are subject-matter experts and who don’t have an agenda, presenting clear information to the public and explaining the ways in which Robert Malone is full of shit?

I think the answer is twofold. First, the scientists have their hands full, fighting the pandemic and “doing science” in a very rapidly changing information landscape, and they are consumed with talking among themselves, not communicating with the public. It’s really not Joe Q. Scientist’s role (or forte) to communicate science information to the public.

But second, if I had to guess, to the community of honest, good-faith experts who are trying hard to fight this global disaster, Malone sounds so much not like a credible scientist that to them he’s self-evidently full of shit.

In other words, I think scientists don’t see a need to discuss it, just as you or I might not see a need to discuss whether a Magic 8 Ball can really tell the future or not.

So the arrogant mainstream sees Malone getting in the way of their messaging, and they ignore him. The actual scientists think the problem is obvious, and they impatiently wave it away. Neither group sees a need to offer explanations.

But there are a lot of people who are “smart, but not scientists.” They don’t necessarily have the background to evaluate Malone’s claims, or the time to read medical journal articles to keep up on the latest science, just as I don’t have the background to evaluate what an electrician says about my solar panels, or the time to read electricians’ textbooks to check up on what he says.

Scott Girard:

Registration can be completed online through the district’s Volunteer Tracker program, which allows volunteers to select the schools where they’d like to volunteer and identify what roles they can volunteer for.

In an interview last week, Jenkins suggested that the district needs individuals and local businesses to step up to help keep school buildings open, as “every able-bodied” central office staff member was already out helping at schools last week.

“We have a lot of businesses here,” he said. “If they subbed one day a month, that would take us through the rest of the year with enough staffing to fill these vacancies. And we’re at a critical spot like across the rest of the country right now.”

The district is also advertising paid positions on its volunteering page, seeking more staff to fill a variety of positions:

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Nate Raymond:

Prosecutors have recommended that the U.S. Justice Department drop charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor accused of concealing his ties to China when seeking federal grant money, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.

Federal prosecutors in Boston decided to seek dismissal of the case against Chinese-born mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist Gang Chen.

Boston prosecutors recommended the case’s dismissal in recent weeks based on new information, the person said, adding the Justice Department has not made a final decision.
MIT President Rafael Reif has defended https://president.mit.edu/speeches-writing/letter-community-re-sustech-relationship-and-professor-chen its $25 million collaboration SUSTech as furthering MIT’s research mission.

Leslie Eastman:

On February 2, Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert and the director of Wellcome, sent around notes, including to Fauci and Collins, summarizing what some of the scientists had said on the call.

Farzan, a Scripps professor who studied the spike protein on the 2003 SARS virus, “is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explain that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely),” Farrar’s note reads, referring to a spike protein feature that aids interaction with furin, a common enzyme in human lung cells. Farzan didn’t think the site was the product of “directed engineering,” but found that the changes would be “highly compatible with the idea of continued passage of the virus in tissue culture.”

It is important to note that the furin site substantially enhances transmission to humans. It is difficult to explain how this strand of viral DNA is substantially altered in one, small area with four amino acids and 12 nucleotides with the remainder of the sequence remaining intact.

Why were the voices of those suggesting a lab leak origin silenced? For the sake of “international harmony” and to protect Chinese science.

Susan Snyder:

[S]ome academics who ardently despise Wax’s comments say they would rather she retains the right to say them than allow her to be fired. Removing her could open the door to censorship for professors who espouse views opposed by conservatives, such as critical race theory.

“How in the same breath do you oppose those measures but also say you should fire Amy Wax,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education, who has ardently defended free speech. “I don’t think we can have it both ways.”

Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said Wax’s most recent comments about Asian Americans came on a radio show and a written post she made after the show and are not within her primary area of academic expertise or connected to campus.

“Because of that, it is very difficult for an institution to take action or sanction a faculty member, tenured or not, for that speech,” he said. “Penn has walked right up to the line of what they are allowed to do here. They can condemn her, but they can’t punish her.”

AP Dillon:

On Jan. 15, the Wake County Democrats issued a Tweet in support of certain Wake County School board members, notably leaving out member Karen Carter.

The tweet includes an image apparently depicting school board attendees (parents) as conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, anti-vax, and Jan. 6 protesters.

Francis Fukuyama:

BEGINNING A FEW DECADES AGO, WORLD POLITICS STARTED TO EXPERIENCE A DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION. From the early 1970s to the first decade of this century, the number of electoral democracies increased from about 35 to more than 110. Over the same period, the world’s output of goods and services quadrupled, and growth extended to virtually every region of the world. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty plummeted, dropping from 42 percent of the global population in 1993 to 18 percent in 2008.

But not everyone benefited from these changes. In many countries, and particularly in developed democracies, economic inequality increased dramatically, as the benefits of growth flowed primarily to the wealthy and well-educated. The increasing volume of goods, money, and people moving from one place to another brought disruptive changes. In developing countries, villagers who previously had no electricity suddenly found themselves living in large cities, watching TV, and connecting to the Internet on their mobile phones. Huge new middle classes arose in China and India—but the work they did replaced the work that had been done by older middle classes in the developed world. Manufacturing moved steadily from the United States and Europe to East Asia and other regions with low labor costs. At the same time, men were being displaced by women in a labor market increasingly dominated by service industries, and low-skilled workers found themselves replaced by smart machines.

Ultimately, these changes slowed the movement toward an increasingly open and liberal world order, which began to falter and soon reversed. The final blows were the global financial crisis of 2007–8 and the euro crisis that began in 2009. In both cases, policies crafted by elites produced huge recessions, high unemployment, and falling incomes for millions of ordinary workers. Since the United States and the EU were the leading exemplars of liberal democracy, these crises damaged the reputation of that system as a whole.

Andrew:

In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” 

Fifty-two years later, we’re still waiting.

That’s pretty funny! It’s not a shocker that Minsky was optimistic about the development of AI—I’m optimistic about all my research projects too—but I had no idea he’d been so rashly optimistic as that.

It wasn’t so extreme as James Watson’s claim in 1998that cancer was going to be cured in two years . . . or was it? I mean, from the perspective of 1998, maybe a cancer miracle cure might have been possible. Just turn off the right set of switches in the cells, and . . . bingo! It could be, right?

But to think in 1970 that they were about to have a machine with human intelligence in just a few years . . . I mean, really, how could they have possibly thought that?? I hope that Minsky at least went back and revisited this prediction and considered what he got wrong.

Anyway, back to Smith’s article:

Ilya Somin:

Georgetown philosophy Prof. Jason Brennan, himself the author of an important book on the morality of resistance to government power, has a useful summary of King’s views on these issues. As Brennan points out, King believed that disobedience to unjust laws is often entirely justified, even when the laws in question were enacted by democratic governments:

Many people assume that we almost always have a duty to obey the law, even unjust laws. King argued that unjust laws are no laws at all. Or, more precisely, he argued that if a law is unjust, there is no obligation to obey it and no right to enforce it.

He argued there could be all sorts of reasons why a law lacks legitimacy and authority. King denied that something evil could be rendered permissible if a democracy voted for it. He thought we had genuine rights and these rights are not created by government fiat or social agreement.

He also thought laws could lack legitimacy and authority because they were passed by an unfair procedure. For instance, many countries in Southern states were even majority Black, but only the white minority could vote.

I think King was right about this, and that, for many unjust laws, we have no obligation to obey. I outlined some of the reasons why in this 2014 piece about why most undocumented immigrants have no moral obligation to obey laws denying them the right to move to another country (see also follow-up post here). The same reasoning applies to many other unjust laws, at least those that inflict great harm on their victims.

Brennan is also right to note that, on King’s view, justified disobedience to unjust laws may not always require accepting punishment. He favored such acceptance, in some cases, for largely tactical reasons.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Kim Feller-Janus:

Several years ago I became disenchanted by my profession. I was not happy with the results of my work as a Reading Interventionist in a large school district. Yes, the students assigned to me made progress and the principals, teachers, and parents were pleased with my work, but I wasn’t. Year after year I worked with my students to reach “grade level reading” by years’ end and most of the time we met that goal. However, these same students were back to see me the following year because what they had learned the year before didn’t seem to stick and they were falling behind once again. This was hard to accept. I felt that I could do better, but I didn’t know how. And, this is why I decided that it was time to make a change.

Upon leaving the school environment I opened my own business, Auburn Reading Center, LLC. This gave me the opportunity to continue to work with struggling readers and time to learn more about effective reading instruction. This is when I discovered the book, Uncovering the Logic of English by Denise Eide. I devoured it within hours and then I wanted to scream, “Why didn’t anyone teach this to me in college?!” 

This began my journey to learn more about our English language and the connection it has with the decades-old brain research. This research shows brain activity when a good reader is reading as well as the brain activity when a poor reader is reading. There is evidence proving that our brains are not wired to read and that we need to be taught. Effective reading instruction that is explicit, systematic, multisensory, and structured is the “silver bullet” for most people. This explained to me why the students I taught within the school system were making minimal overall progress and never actually becoming proficient readers. In fact, in some cases what I was doing may have been more harmful than helpful. This broke my heart and pushed me even more to learn a better way to teach.

My next thought was to learn more about the author of this amazing book and find a way to connect with her in hopes that she could lead me into the right direction for coursework or training. This is when I discovered that Denise Eide had also written a comprehensive language arts curriculum that is based on brain research. I also learned that her office was located in Rochester, Minnesota which is just a little over 3 hours away from where I lived. I was determined to make that 6-hour round trip to meet this brilliant woman. Fortunately for me, Denise graciously agreed to meet me for lunch near her office to talk about her book and curriculum. We also talked about my frustrations with what seemed to be a norm in most schools – which is the belief that there will always be about 20% of children who will never be good readers. This is something that I never want to accept.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jonathan Chait:

Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time. In recent days, Angie Schmitt and Rebecca Bodenheimer have both written essays recounting the disorienting and lonely experience they had watching their friends and putative political allies denounce them for supporting a return to in-person learning. Bodenheimer’s account is especially vivid:

“Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labeledadvocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy,” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda.”

The fevered climate of opinion ruled out cost-benefit thinking and instead framed the question as a simple moral binary, with the well-being of public schoolchildren somehow excluded from the calculus. Social scientists like Emily Oster who spoke out about the evidence on schools and COVID became hate targets on the left, an intimidating spectacle for other social scientists who might have thought about speaking up.

The failed experiment finally came to an end in the fall of 2021. (A handful of districts have shut down during the Omicron wave, but this is mainly a temporary response to staff shortages rather than another effort to stop community spread.) The Chicago Teachers Union, one of the more radical unions, did stage a strike, but it was met with firm opposition from Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and ended quickly.

But the source of the sentiment has not disappeared. The Democratic Party’s left-wing vanguard is continuing to flay critics of school closings as neoliberal ghouls carrying out the bidding of the billionaire class. Bernie Sanders aide Elizabeth Pancotti claims that “the loudest and most ardent supporters of keeping schools oepn [sic] (& those who dismiss legit concerns about teacher/child health risks) are largely those with remote work options/resources for alternative child care arrangements,” as if only some selfish motive could explain the desire of an American liberal to maintain public education. A story in Vice praises a student walkout in New York as a national model.

The ideas that produced the catastrophic school-closing era may have suffered a setback, but its strongest advocates hardly feel chastened. Whether educational achievement can or should be measured at all remains a very live debate within the left.

Most progressives aren’t insisting on refighting the school closing wars. They just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong.

One of the grievances that critics of the Iraq War nursed after the debacle became clear was the failure of the political Establishment to draw any lessons broader than “don’t invade Iraq without an occupation plan.” Their anger was not unfounded. The catastrophe happened in part because the structure of the debate allowed too many uninformed hawkish voices and ignored too many informed dovish ones. (As a chastened Iraq War supporter myself, I’ve grown far more cautious about wading into foreign-policy debates for which I lack adequate understanding.)

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Reuters:

China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to avoid the economic risks from a rapidly aging population, but the high cost of urban living has deterred couples from having more children.

The 2021 rate of 7.52 births per 1,000 people was the lowest since 1949, when the National Statistics Bureau began collating the data, adding further pressure on officials to encourage more births.

The natural growth rate of China’s population, which excludes migration, was only 0.034% for 2021, the lowest since 1960, according to the data.

“The demographic challenge is well known but the speed of population aging is clearly faster than expected,” said Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset management.

“This suggests China’s total population may have reached its peak in 2021. It also indicates China’s potential growth is likely slowing faster than expected,” Zhang said.

Choose life.

LibreTexts:

The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.

Kyle Stokes:

But in affluent or gentrifying areas of the Los Angeles Unified School District, parent fundraising organizations — like parent-teacher associations and school booster clubs — often cover such costs.

Since 2016, parents across L.A. Unified have reliably raised at least $30 million each year through non-profit organizations that support academics at their schools. That’s according to a database KPCC/LAist built out of more than 1,700 records these groups filed with the federal Internal Revenue Service and with state officials.

We’re publishing that database now so that you can search for your school and compare your fundraising totals to others in your neighborhood or across the district.

Giulio Meotti:

“If Europe does not regain control, Islamized mini-states could soon appear”. The prediction comes from the Russian political scientist Sergei Markov. In an interviewpublished by Lenta.ru, Markov notes that European institutions are adapting to the Islamic way of life, values ​​and traditions (the recent campaigns of the Council of Europe in favor of the Muslim veil is an example), and adds:

“Fully Islamized Islamic enclaves, mini-states and neighborhoods in large European cities will begin to appear. Yes, they will always be a minority. But they are more united and threaten violence. And the state will have to obey their instructions”.

Europe should pay attention to what Markov says. It is not even a warning. It is already here. In 2021, 35,000 migrants landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa — five times the number of inhabitants on the island (6,500), according to InfoMigrants. Imagine if the same demographic process took place in a city — and then more cities.

The most complete picture of Europe’s so-called “no-go zones” was created by the Migration Research Institute of Budapest, linked to the prestigious Mattias Corvinus College, which reported that in Europe there are more than 900 areas of this type.

Many of the migrants already live on the generosity of European welfare, even as the police, social workers and ambulances do not enter these areas or must be protected when they do. Gangs and organized crime dominate the street, high birth rates guarantee demographic expansion and Islamic sharia law is de facto respected by the inhabitants; butchers are only halal, “mixed” hairdressers disappear, Islamic bookshops proliferate, Jews leave, churches are often converted to mosques and women are pressured to comply with sharia law.

“We in the West are used to seeing women everywhere around us,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her new book, Prey, before describing that in certain parts of Brussels, London, Paris and Stockholm, “you suddenly notice that only men are visible,” as women “erase themselves” from public spaces.

Peter Cordi:

In 2020, the federal government gave American colleges and universities approximately $14 billion in relief through the CARES Act. As part of the $2.2 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, the CARES Act allocation mandated that approximately half its funds be used for emergency student aid. 

Now, nearly two years after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act in March 2020, numerous institutions that received aid are delaying in-person learning due to the Omicron variant.  

By Jan. 7, seven out of 10 University of California campuses announced “revisions to their winter quarter or winter semester plans.” Winter sessions precede the spring semester, which traditionally starts in mid-to-late January.

Rachel Pannet:

Authorities in Germany are under fire for tracking down witnesses to a potential crime by using data from a mobile phone app that was intended to help identify close contacts of people infected with the coronavirus.

Police in the city of Mainz, near Frankfurt, successfully petitioned local health authorities to release data from an app called Luca when a man fell to his death after leaving a restaurant in November. They said they were seeking witnesses who had dined at the restaurant around the same time and reportedly found 21 people from the app data.

The apparent misuse of the data has been criticized by privacy advocates, who fear that such sensitive information will be used for non-pandemic-control purposes. The incident is also likely to provide fodder for vaccine doubters, some of whom have taken on a broader anti-government stance, and those who believe coronavirus-related conspiracy theories.

Luca is subject to Germany’s strict data-protection regulations and, by law, information from the app cannot be accessed by non-health authorities and used in criminal prosecutions. The app stores the user’s personal details and uses QR codes to record how long they’ve spent at a location. The information is encrypted to obscure any personal information, according to Culture4life, the company that developed the app, and can only be decrypted by health authorities if someone at a venue is infected.

Moshe Vardi:

But the general ignorance of computing history goes deeper. The early programmers were women because until the development of electronic computers, computing used to be a human job; computers were humans who computed. Computing required precision and patience, and most pre-ENIAC human computers were female. Specifically, women played a key role in code breaking, which has had an intimate connection with computing. Three recent books describe this key role played by women in cryptology. Women Codebreakers at Bletchley Park, by Kerry Howard,^bdeciphers the legacy of British women code-breakers in World War II. Code Girls, by Liza Mundy, tells the story of over 11,000 women, who comprised more than 70% of all U.S. code breakers during that war. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies, by Jason Fagone, chronicles the life of Elizabeth Smith Friedman, who played a leading role in U.S. cryptanalysis for 40 years.

Another recent book, Brotopia, by Emily Chang, describes how “Silicon Valley disrupts everything but the Boys’ Club.” “From its earliest days,” Chang writes, “the industry has self-selected for men: first, antisocial nerds, then, decades later, self-confident and risk-taking bros.” As a prelude, I suggest reading the Vanity Fair disputed excerpt,^c featuring Chang’s reporting about “exclusive, drug-fueled, sex-laced parties” where women are preyed upon. But the controversial sex parties are a small part of Silicon Valley’s problems. The main story of the book is of a culture is that highly hostile to women.

A.T. Wynn and S.J. Correll, two Stanford sociologists, reach the same conclusion in their recent paper in Social Studies of Science, titled “Puncturing the pipeline: Do technology companies alienate women in recruiting sessions?”^d Using original observational data from recruiting sessions hosted by technology companies, they found that company representatives often engage in behaviors known to create a chilly environment for women. They concluded that representatives “may puncture the recruiting pipeline, lessening the interest of women at the point of recruitment into technology careers.”

One may think these problems are specific to Silicon Valley, but the recent #MeToo movement made it clear that academic environments can also be hostile to women. I urge you to read ‘What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You,’^e where Kathryn McKinley provides “a personal account of sexism, harassment, and racism that I and some anonymous members of the computer-architecture community have experienced.”

Illeana Najarro:

When working with students of color, particularly Black students, teachers lower down the rigor of assignments, ask fewer open-ended questions, and assign worksheets instead of group assignments, according to a new study out of New York University. Researchers point to racial biases about the academic abilities of students of color as a major factor.

“It’s not this overt ‘I have more Black students, I’m going to be racist,’ but I think it’s that when they go into a classroom that has more Black students it’s instinctual that the teachers actually kind of lower their standards. They use less-rigorous instruction,” said Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, an NYU associate professor and sociologist and lead author of the study.

Research in the past has focused on how Black and Latino students are more likely than white peers to have teachers with one year or less of experience in the classroom, which can correlate with lower educational outcomes. But Cherng and his co-authors found that racial bias came into play in classroom instruction regardless of the teacher’s credentials or racial background.

Tristan Justice:

Except the agency wasn’t dedicated to protecting MLK. In fact, the peaceful pioneer of 20th-century civil rights was targeted by the law enforcement agency as a domestic enemy. The FBI once told King in a letter to kill himself.

King, the FBI wrote in a memo highlighted by a new documentary out last fall, was “the most dangerous Negro in America,” and warranted the “use [of] every resource at our disposal to destroy him” after King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

Two months later, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps of MLK’s Atlanta residence and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) offices under the pretense of investigating ties to communism. In what’s become typical of agency probes, however, the bureau went on to expand its surveillance operation by tapping hotel rooms King visited. Collecting blackmail information on King’s extramarital affairs, the goal was to ruin his reputation and stifle the movement. 

As King’s rise continued to bring change to a segregated country, criticism of the FBI came with it. The SCLC president condemned the law enforcement agency for its apathy toward civil rights abuses, angering the bureau’s leaders who were eager to bring him down.

After then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called King the “most notorious liar in the country,” during a 1964 press conference over King’s criticism, the agency sent a letter to King with tape recordings of the civil rights leader’s promiscuity in a D.C. hotel. The letter said that with a 34-day deadline “before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation,” King ought to kill himself to save from embarrassment.

I recently saw a sign prominently posted in a Madison restaurant that said: “Wear a Mask, it’s the law”.

This is a teaching moment.

The current Dane County Madison Public Health mask requirement is a mandate, not (yet) a law. The status of said mask requirement is the subject of law fare and activism.

Some background:

a. President Obama’s use of executive orders vs legislation, satirized by SNL:

b. Rule making

Wisconsin’s long term, disastrous K-12 reading results:

I’ve become quite familiar with this issue via our reading advocacy over the years. Legislation to address Wisconsin’s dramatic K-12 reading decline (our students now trail Mississippi, a state that spends less and has fewer teachers per student) was passed in 2011/2012, following Massachusett’s best in the US K-12 teacher content knowledge requirements.

Fast forward a few years: DPI Superintendent and now Governor Evers begins to waive that requirement. In fact, he did so more than 6000 times (teacher mulligans).

Alexander Shur:

“This case is not about what restrictions are appropriate during the ongoing COVID pandemic, which is admittedly serious,” the lawsuit states. “It is about who decides and how.”

c. Dane County Madison Public Health (vs Milwaukee and elsewhere):

“In particular, WILL argued the new restrictions were not voted on by the Dane County Board.”

Milwaukee’s common council is debating a mandate (which, as far as I can tell, is the way things are to be done, via state statutes other than a very short term emergency) (update: passed).

But, their administrators have not imposed a mandate outside of an elected official vote.

My own view? If the non elected administrators are correct, why not vote on it (City Council and the County Board, among others).

All that being said, this is a wonderful opportunity to share a bit with student customers and encourage them to consider these issues. Should we have mandates? Should elected officials have to vote on things that reduce our rights? How have the different approaches worked historically?

This is an excellent book, that covers much of the same ground: The Great Influenza.

Joe Mathews:

If California is ever going to achieve true equity, the state must require parents to give away their children.

Today’s Californians often hold up equity — the goal of a just society completely free from bias — as our greatest value. Gov. Gavin Newsom makes decisions through “an equity lens.” Institutions from dance ensembles to tech companies have publicly pledged themselves to equity.

But their promises are no match for the power of parents.

Fathers and mothers with greater wealth and education are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled, and democracy has been corrupted. More Californians are abandoning the dream; a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found declining belief in the notion that you can get ahead through hard work.

My solution — making raising your own children illegal — is simple, and while we wait for the legislation to pass, we can act now: the rich and poor should trade kids, and homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.

Now, I recognize that some naysayers will dismiss such a policy as ghastly, even totalitarian. But my proposal is quite modest, a fusion of traditional philosophy and today’s most common political obsessions.

In his “Republic,” Plato adopted Socrates’ sage advice — that children “be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parents” — in order to defeat nepotism, and create citizens loyal not to their sons but to society.

Today, a policy of universal orphanhood aligns with powerful social trends that point to less interest in family. Californians are slower to marry, and are having fewer children — our birth rate is at an all-time low.

My proposal also should be politically unifying, fitting hand-in-glove with the most cherished policies of progressives and Trumpians alike.

Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron is always worth reading and contemplating:

And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Brecht Savelkoul:

Are we living through a new Cultural Revolution? As someone who has spent more than half an afternoon considering Chinese history, I have some very nuanced and complicated views on this question… Just kidding, of course we aren’t. I feel like I’m insulting my own intelligence spelling this out. If you are the kind of person who feels Maoist China is a reasonable comparison to our current situation, I recommend you press the X-button on top of this browser tab, because I’m not going to waste another word on this nonsense.

Good, now that those morons have left us, let’s look for a better comparison. Because merely debunking bad historical analogies never seems to work. They just keep coming back until they’re replaced by a stronger one. Yet until recently I struggled to find a good analogy to describe the “woke” movement. As happens so often in these cases though, I stumbled upon something when I wasn’t particularly looking for it.

People read newspapers and magazines and sat in stunned silence. They were overcome with unspeakable horror. How were we supposed to live with this? Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well. “We don’t know our own nation. We don’t understand what the majority of people think about; we see them, we interact with them every day, but what’s on their minds? What do they want? We have no idea. But we will courageously take it upon ourselves to educate them. Soon, we will learn the whole truth and be horrified,” my friend would say in my kitchen, where we often sat talking.

That was Svetlana Alexievich on the intellectual atmosphere during the latter years of the Soviet Union. More specifically, she’s referring to Mikhael Gorbachev’s decision to throw open the archives. For the first time in Soviet history it became possible to see the founders in an unflattering light. Until then all the focus had been on the idealism of Lenin and his revolutionary comrades. The evidence from the archives though gave an uncomfortable insight into the ruthlessness with which they had pursued their grip on power. Otto von Bismarck supposedly called this the “sausage factory” of politics and recommended people with weak stomachs to look away. But the sudden media frenzy in 1980s Russia made it impossible to look away, and the history of the early Soviet Union came out of a very bloody factory indeed. According to Alexievich, the resulting disillusionment played a big part in the collapse of Soviet civilization.

Scott Girard:

“This time, I’m going to the business community, to the churches and saying, ‘Hey, let’s start anticipating together, scenario planning, so if something happens, we can be a model for how you do it,’” he said. “Keep it rolling and keep safety first and then the rest of the stuff.”

That “rest of the stuff” includes a continued focus on the social-emotional health and well-being of students, who Jenkins said lost some of their relationship-building time and conflict-resolution skills while they were isolated in virtual learning. That contributed to the safety issues that cropped up this fall, he said.

“Starting off this school year, in my estimation, we saw an increase in choices students were making of how they engage or could not engage properly resolving conflicts,” he said. “In certain cases, that led to some violent situations amongst a few trying to process it, and we’re trying to help them process it.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Julie Jargon:

The expectation is that they should be able to log in, see what needs to be done and do it,” Ms. Dasko said. “These are kids, and they don’t have the maturity to look at this big system and figure out how to break it down.”

The reliance on tech has led some parents to buy their kids phones sooner than they would have liked. The difficulty of taking photos of schoolwork on the Chromebook is one reason Ms. Dasko, a graphic designer in northeastern Washington, recently bought her daughter a phone.

“Teachers cite the same challenges—it’s not just parents and students,” said Heather Dowd, a former teacher turned instructional coaching consultant and co-author of “Classroom Management in the Digital Age.”

She said she expects digital classrooms to become more streamlined and easier to use. Until then, many parents complain that tech problems are getting in the way of learning and wonder: What’s so bad about paper and pencil, anyway?

Michelle McNally’s eighth-grader has been struggling to keep track of each teacher’s method for showing that work has been done. Some of his teachers require screenshots of physical work; others check students’ computers to see that work has been completed.

“Is the goal to learn the system, or is the goal to learn the content?” said Ms. McNally, a digital-marketing executive in Indianapolis.

Chuck Ross:

Two dozen Republican senators are calling on Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to explain his role in soliciting a letter from the National School Boards Association that compared school parents to domestic terrorists.

An email released this week showed that an association official told a colleague that Cardona asked the group to write the Sept. 29 letter that urged President Joe Biden to use the FBI to investigate threats made against school board members. The letter was the catalyst for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to form a federal task force to track school board threats across the country.

Republicans and parent groups have bristled at the federal task force, saying that it will have a chilling effect on parents protesting at local school board meetings. Parents across the country have pushed back against school districts’ coronavirus policies as well as the teaching of left-wing curricula, such as those that include critical race theory.

A group of senators, led by Tim Scott (R., S.C.), on Thursday asked Cardona what role he played in crafting the letter.

“While we knew early on that White House staff were complicit in the creation of this letter, it is only recently that information has surfaced implicating you and your office in this shameful episode,” the senators wrote.

Barry Adams:

Almost all of the lessons at the Kickapoo Valley Forest School are held outdoors, even on days when the temperature plunges well below freezing. The nature-based curriculum is central for the 4K and kindergarten students and their teachers, who have had lunch outside all but four days since the first day of school in early September.

But this school, in its first year and based at the nearly 9,000-acre Kickapoo Valley Reserve just up the road from Organic Valley, is doing more than helping grow the minds and physical stamina of rambunctious and curious 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Max Edén:

History never quite repeats itself. But if we don’t learn from it, then it can quickly rhyme in hideous couplets. First, tragedy. Then, farce. Last year’s coronavirus school closures were an unspeakable tragedy for schoolchildren. After the first viral panic, these closures were not driven by the prevalence or danger of the disease, but rather the power and political self-interestof teachers unions.

This dynamic was once again on display this month after teachers with the Chicago Teachers Union unilaterally refused to show up for in-person instruction on the pretext of concerns about the omicron variant. Chicago Public Schools was forced to cancel five days of class. School could only reopen after officials gave major concessions to the union.

The lesson from this tragicomic farce is that we must call a spade a spade. America does not really have “teachers unions” in the traditional sense — that is, democratically representative entities promoting the collective will of schoolteachers. Instead, these “unions” are structurally, operationally, and essentially cartels. These K-12 cartels were in the business of taking students hostage for ransom well before COVID-19. Yet the past two years of naked self-interest and hypocrisy from those who claim to be the guardians of our nation’s children have been laid bare for all to see. And it must not be forgotten.

The reason it had been difficult to learn before is because the K-12 cartel aims for a monopoly on moral language. During the first round of school closures, for example, the Chicago Teachers Union tweeted : “The push to re-open schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” (Hey, what isn’t these days?) In service of protecting its own power and influence, the K-12 cartel has adopted the leftist obsession with framing everything in American life through an “equity lens.” “Equity” is a remanufactured Trojan horse word intended to smuggle the ideology of critical race theory and other such cultural radicalism into schools. A “lens” refracts light so that you see objects differently. When you can only see the world through an “equity lens,” which blends every object into a grand conspiracy of so-called “racism,” “sexism,” and “misogyny,” what you see is what you’ll get.

Lauren:

While sitting in the Panama City airport, waiting for my flight to Rio, one of Copa Airline’s Panamanian employees came on the intercom to announce that the flight to “Rrrrio de Haneiro” would be boarding soon. The long rolled R caused several of the Brazilians around me to turn to each other and chuckle. Later, while waiting to take off, the Brazilian flight crew announced that the trip to “Hiu gee Zhaneiru” would take about 7 hours.

Nothing could better highlight the stark differences in pronunciation between Portuguese and Spanish, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the sound of R. A flight like this might be one of the first situations in which many tourists encounter the beautiful, enigmatic Portuguese R.

As with many languages, R in Portuguese can take on a kaleidoscope of different sounds depending on its placement within a word and the dialect of the speaker. It’s pretty much impossible to give any hard and fast rules that apply across all dialects. But I’m going to try here to give you a sense of the huge variation that exists.

(If you are not as fascinated by rhotics as I am, or are looking at this article and thinking “tl;dr”, you may prefer the short version of this article)

Rhotics

Ok, let’s just consider for a moment how weird and cool R is. Linguists have a special name for all the R sounds of the world: rhotics, which are a rather elusive category because there is no definitive phonological way to define what is and isn’t a rhotic — there’s not a single trait that all rhotic sounds have in common, except for some kind of association with the letter R in one or more languages. A sound represented by the letter R in one language could be represented by a completely different letter in another language, or it could be missing from that other language altogether.

R sounds are fascinating to me not just because they are so diverse, but because they are one of the strongest markers of regional dialect, native vs non-native accent, and social class within any single language (consider a posh Queen’s English “yahd” vs. a nasal midwestern American “yard” vs. a rolling Scottish “yarrrd”).

The Community:

In case you haven’t heard, Stanford mandated that students must get boosted by Jan. 31 — or else. 

When Paul Offit — director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, decades-long enemy of the anti-vax movement and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine — tells his own twenty-something son not to get boosted, you might start to ask some questions about the wisdom of Stanford’s latest mandate. 

It is becoming clear: Mandating boosters is an affront against the medical and bodily autonomy of Stanford students. That is why I started a petition to Stanford leadership to rescind the booster mandate. I will lay out my case here, but I encourage everyone to read the petition itself and draw their own conclusions. If you agree that getting boosted should be a personal decision, let Stanford know.

To start with, our campus is already extremely well-protected against COVID-19. We are over 95% fully vaccinated. Our student body is overwhelmingly young. The latest CDC estimate is that 18–49 years old, fully vaccinated people are hospitalized from COVID-19 at the rate of 8 in 1,000,000. If you’re under 30, that’s 4 in 1,000,000. The pre-pandemic rate of hospitalization from the flu was 100 times that, but Stanford (rightly) didn’t mandate flu vaccines back then.

Audrey Williams June:

New data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center provides a somber final tally of college enrollment during the fall of 2021: It dropped 2.7 percent from a year earlier, a decline of 476,100 students. 

Undergraduate enrollment, which was down at every type of institution, slipped by 3.1 percent — or 465,318 students — from the fall of 2020. The total decline among undergraduates since the fall of 2019 — just before the pandemic hit — was more than a million students, the center said.

Matt Taibbi:

The terrific humorist, journalist, and novelist talks about the downfall of journalism, bureaucratic absurdity, and class cruelty in a blistering indictment of an America turned upside down

I know there’s frustration that Callin is still exclusive to iPhone, but in an effort to share some of yesterday’s wide-ranging talk about the state of the media, vaccine madness, the new urban snobbery, and the lost art of talking, I’m reproducing a partial transcript here. The first question came from a caller named Nick:

Nick: Where the hell is this thing coming from?

Walter Kirn: I had a psychiatrist once and when I came in with some dysfunction or problem, he said, “What happened right before that?” So I would say, “What happened right before?” What happened right before this was social media. It has created a sort of hyper-consensus engine, because these ridiculous takes that you’re talking about all just exaggerate a basic take.

It’s basically an arms race that’s going on now, in which people attempt to agree more intensely than they agreed before. I do credit social media, at least that’s the place where we see these takes. We don’t tend to hear them by CB radio or over the phone necessarily, but there’s something about this third particle accelerator of opinion that we call Twitter which seems to inflate the craziness.

Now, as to whether the liberals have changed? Yes, they’ve changed! They used to be gentle, interesting, controversial, humorous people. Now they’re strident ideologues who love every institution which they professed to detest and suspect in the old days…

Matt Taibbi: And have no sense of humor.

Walter Kirn: Yes, and that sense of humor and weirdness is something that they call out, rather than try to cultivate, unless it’s the weirdness that’s already been pre-approved — at which point they compete to inhabit it more completely than anyone else.

Nick: Matt, I mean your show and your writing, and Chapo Traphouse, was a big political awakening for me…

Walter Kirn: Look, Matt’s a dissident in this community. He may be disappeared before this Callin is over. The mainstream folks who are driving this are on the hunt right now for a sense of humor. If they find any in the landscape, they will launch an arrow. I mean, I have very funny friends who were last night on Twitter, who aren’t this morning.

Taibbi: What novelist would do the best job of capturing the current craziness?

Walter Kirn: It’s been a progression. About a year ago, it would’ve been someone like Kafka, who talks about these open-ended crimes and the insoluble cosmic mystery that the individual gets caught up in and never has an explanation for. But to cut to the chase now, it’s somebody like Joseph Heller, because we’re now in an absurd carousel of bad routines.

And that’s what Catch-22 is. I just re-watched the 1970 Mike Nichols version last night to prepare for this. Just a few outtakes: you’ve got these guys living on a bomber base in the Mediterranean and they’re dying one by one, their planes are getting shot down and they want to get out of it. But the Colonel in charge keeps raising the number of missions you have to fly in order to retire from the bombing. And that reminds me of the vaccines. You’ll need six! No, you’ll need seven!

The great conceit of the whole novel is that the base is slowly turning into a capitalist hell. Milo Minderbinder, the ambitious impresario, is selling the parachutes in Egypt for cotton. The bomber pilots wake up in the middle of runs and find out their parachutes are gone. It’s because this syndicate, which has developed out of their base, has sold them. In the end, Minderbinder does a deal with the Germans: they will buy up the excess cotton, which he spent all his money on and has gone broke on, if he will agree to bomb the base himself so the Germans don’t have to.

I look at COVID a little bit like that. We will agree to destroy our society for you, China… Our greatest product at the moment, this vaccine, our most expensive and profitable export, is the result of our suffering. And it isn’t seeming to cure it either, frankly, from my perspective, since every single person I know who’s gotten the booster in LA is now asking me for recommendations on zinc and other vitamins to take. There’s the famous saying, that the capitalist will sell the revolutionary the rope he will use to hang himself. Well, that’s kind of the situation I see us in. It’s as though there’s only one corporation in charge right now, and that is one Pharma/gov/tech conglomerate. Maybe it’s called BlackRock, or Vanguard.

Matt Taibbi:

The terrific humorist, journalist, and novelist talks about the downfall of journalism, bureaucratic absurdity, and class cruelty in a blistering indictment of an America turned upside down

I know there’s frustration that Callin is still exclusive to iPhone, but in an effort to share some of yesterday’s wide-ranging talk about the state of the media, vaccine madness, the new urban snobbery, and the lost art of talking, I’m reproducing a partial transcript here. The first question came from a caller named Nick:

Nick: Where the hell is this thing coming from?

Walter Kirn: I had a psychiatrist once and when I came in with some dysfunction or problem, he said, “What happened right before that?” So I would say, “What happened right before?” What happened right before this was social media. It has created a sort of hyper-consensus engine, because these ridiculous takes that you’re talking about all just exaggerate a basic take.

It’s basically an arms race that’s going on now, in which people attempt to agree more intensely than they agreed before. I do credit social media, at least that’s the place where we see these takes. We don’t tend to hear them by CB radio or over the phone necessarily, but there’s something about this third particle accelerator of opinion that we call Twitter which seems to inflate the craziness.

Now, as to whether the liberals have changed? Yes, they’ve changed! They used to be gentle, interesting, controversial, humorous people. Now they’re strident ideologues who love every institution which they professed to detest and suspect in the old days…

Matt Taibbi: And have no sense of humor.

Walter Kirn: Yes, and that sense of humor and weirdness is something that they call out, rather than try to cultivate, unless it’s the weirdness that’s already been pre-approved — at which point they compete to inhabit it more completely than anyone else.

Nick: Matt, I mean your show and your writing, and Chapo Traphouse, was a big political awakening for me…

Walter Kirn: Look, Matt’s a dissident in this community. He may be disappeared before this Callin is over. The mainstream folks who are driving this are on the hunt right now for a sense of humor. If they find any in the landscape, they will launch an arrow. I mean, I have very funny friends who were last night on Twitter, who aren’t this morning.

Taibbi: What novelist would do the best job of capturing the current craziness?

Walter Kirn: It’s been a progression. About a year ago, it would’ve been someone like Kafka, who talks about these open-ended crimes and the insoluble cosmic mystery that the individual gets caught up in and never has an explanation for. But to cut to the chase now, it’s somebody like Joseph Heller, because we’re now in an absurd carousel of bad routines.

And that’s what Catch-22 is. I just re-watched the 1970 Mike Nichols version last night to prepare for this. Just a few outtakes: you’ve got these guys living on a bomber base in the Mediterranean and they’re dying one by one, their planes are getting shot down and they want to get out of it. But the Colonel in charge keeps raising the number of missions you have to fly in order to retire from the bombing. And that reminds me of the vaccines. You’ll need six! No, you’ll need seven!

The great conceit of the whole novel is that the base is slowly turning into a capitalist hell. Milo Minderbinder, the ambitious impresario, is selling the parachutes in Egypt for cotton. The bomber pilots wake up in the middle of runs and find out their parachutes are gone. It’s because this syndicate, which has developed out of their base, has sold them. In the end, Minderbinder does a deal with the Germans: they will buy up the excess cotton, which he spent all his money on and has gone broke on, if he will agree to bomb the base himself so the Germans don’t have to.

I look at COVID a little bit like that. We will agree to destroy our society for you, China… Our greatest product at the moment, this vaccine, our most expensive and profitable export, is the result of our suffering. And it isn’t seeming to cure it either, frankly, from my perspective, since every single person I know who’s gotten the booster in LA is now asking me for recommendations on zinc and other vitamins to take. There’s the famous saying, that the capitalist will sell the revolutionary the rope he will use to hang himself. Well, that’s kind of the situation I see us in. It’s as though there’s only one corporation in charge right now, and that is one Pharma/gov/tech conglomerate. Maybe it’s called BlackRock, or Vanguard.

Jesse Kauffman:

The greatest casualty of the pandemic era is, without question, America’s public education system. Shuttering public schools in the first panicked days of March 2020 was perhaps understandable. However, many schools—such as those my children attend in Ann Arbor, Michigan—failed to open the following year. Schools closed in defiance of any reasonable accounting of the massive harms and non-existent benefits. 

Worse, parents (including  my wife and me) who advocated to get their kids’ schools open were subject to abuse and harassment on social media, where we were called “teacher killers” and racists. This abuse was tacitly encouraged by teachers’ unions, which adopted similar rhetoric (“The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny”announced the official Twitter account of the Chicago Teachers’ Union in December 2020) as well as elected school boards, who struggled to hide the obvious contempt they had for parents. 

This came as a terrible shock to many who had children in these schools, but especially to lifelong Democrats living in progressive towns and cities. They felt themselves abandoned by institutions they had long trusted and supported without reservation. That trust is gone and unlikely ever to return.    

Our medical and scientific institutions have also undermined their credibility over the past two years. Few authority figures were once as trusted as physicians. But our collective view of them will never be the same.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jill Tucker:

On Friday, Marin County health officials, noting that 1 in 20 to 25 county residents is currently infected with COVID-19, announced a similar recommendation. They advised schools to no longer send any notification of exposure, but rather advise parents to simply keep an eye out for symptoms.

The North Bay county also went a step further than Palo Alto, saying students and staff exposed in a classroom setting do not need to test, leaving testing as a recommendation only after exposure in high-risk activities like close-contact sports or child care settings.

The assumption of the recommendations is “we’re all exposed to COVID,” said county schools Superintendent Mary Jane Burke, and that schools are still a safe place to be. “It begins to take us into the endemic vs. the pandemic. I think it’s the right thing.”

At the same time, the inability to track individual cases has left districts and counties unable to count in-school transmissions. Under previous strains, few cases of in-school transmission occurred, reinforcing that in-person instruction presented a relatively low risk of catching the virus.

Currently, Bay Area counties can’t say whether there are more cases coming from exposure inside classrooms than before or whether students and staff are getting the coronavirus in the community.

KAREN ANN CULLOTTA:

After enduring the hardships of Chicago Public Schools’ teachers strike in 2019, a delayed reopening of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic and a seemingly endless stretch of remote learning, Pilsen resident Christina Castro decided last fall to transfer her three children to Catholic schools.

“The public school system was already so unpredictable, and once we were in a pandemic, it definitely wasn’t heading in a positive direction,” said Castro, 36.

She enrolled her two youngest children at St. Ann School, just a two-block walk from their home, and transferred her eldest daughter, a junior, to De La Salle Institute, a private Catholic high school on the city’s South Side.

“We received financial aid — my older daughter earned a merit scholarship — and all three of my kids are thriving in their new environment,” Castro said.

David Blacker:

I’ve been a full-time professor at University of Delaware since 1998 and I’ve seen a thing or two. We have now reached a crisis point for students and it is necessary to speak out. Following Gov. Carney’s panicky mask mandate, UD has directed everyone to wear N95 or surgical masks indoors. This includes students and also professors even while they are teaching. In my opinion, this policy is misguided and, worse, it will drastically erode an already deteriorating situation for UD students. They can step across Main Street into a crowded and maskless bar, but when they go back on campus supposedly to learn, they still have to cover up and isolate.

During the pandemic, UD has pursued a somewhat middle path vis-à-vis other universities. It has not been as draconian as some. But our campus has seen its share of COVID-19 safety theatrics, including pointless measures such as the hand sanitizing stations still dotting the hallways. More significantly, there has also been a trigger-happiness to lock down and put everything online. Currently, things are mostly face-to-face again, but it is hit or miss. Students often get the worst of both worlds. On a whim, faculty are allowed to move classes online on the vague subjective basis of merely feeling unsafe and I know of specific instances where some have canceled classes solely to minimize their interactions with students. As a result, students sometimes do not know from day to day where or what their classes will be.

Matt Ridley:

That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science

Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime….

Kyle Morris:

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said Twitter made a “mistake” in 2020 when it suppressed a New York Post bombshell that was highly critical of President Biden’s son Hunter.

Khanna’s remarks came during an interview with Joe Lonsdale on the American Optimist podcast about his new book, “Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.”

“I am not for having either the government, or you know, tech companies ultimately being the arbiter of truth,” Khanna told Lonsdale. “I’m for making sure that we don’t have speech that incites violence, but I’m very wary of censorship.”

Documents:

Plaintiffs, Sia Henry, Michael Maerlander, Brandon Piyevsky, Kara Saffrin, and Brittany
Tatiana Weaver, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, bring this class action
under Section 1 of the Sherman Act against Brown University (“Brown”), California Institute of
Technology (“CalTech”), University of Chicago (“Chicago”), The Trustees of Columbia
University in the City of New York (“Columbia”), Cornell University (“Cornell’), Trustees of
Dartmouth College (“Dartmouth”), Duke University (“Duke”), Emory University (“Emory”),
Georgetown University (“Georgetown”), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT),
Northwestern University (“Northwestern”), University of Notre Dame du Lac (“Notre Dame”),
The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”), William Marsh Rice University (“Rice”),
Vanderbilt University (“Vanderbilt”), and Yale University (“Yale”) (collectively, “Defendants”)

Defendants are private, national universities that have long been in the top 25 of the U.S. News & World Report rankings for such schools. These elite institutions occupy a place of privilege and importance in American society. And yet these same Defendants, by their own admission, have participated in a price-fixing cartel that is designed to reduce or eliminate financial aid as a locus of competition, and that in fact has artificially inflated the net price of attendance for students receiving financial aid. Defendants participate in the cartel claiming the protection of Section 568 of the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 (the “568 Exemption”). This exemption from the antitrust laws, which otherwise prohibit conspiracies among competitors, applies to two or more institutions of higher education at which “all students admitted are admitted on a need-blind basis.” Section 568 defines “on a need-blind basis” to mean “without regard to the financial circumstances of the student involved or the student’s family.” 15 U.S.C. § 1 Note.

Ivy League Subsidies and tax breaks:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).

Ashley Yiu:

“I’m glad they’re taking it seriously, but I’m not sure how realistic it is to expect that students don’t drink water in libraries.” Charlie Friedlander, FCLC ’22

Fordham also updated its policies for eating and drinking in spaces on campus. Eating or drinking will be prohibited at athletic events until further notice. Food and drink are not allowed in classrooms and instructional spaces such as libraries or laboratories. Throughout the month of January, eating and drinking will also not be permitted at any events or meetings. Additionally, the university canceled all indoor events scheduled for January where food or beverages were to be served.

In regard to attendance at sporting events and other outdoor activities, he feels that if social distancing is permissible, then spectators should be allowed. 

Friedlander acknowledged the administration’s mitigation efforts while also considering the effectiveness of certain protocols, such as prohibiting students from drinking water indoors.

Sarah Churchwell:

We all know that language is mutable, that it must either evolve or wither away: there’s no language so pure as a dead one. Babylonian is untroubled by the intrusion of new slang, as it is untroubled by speakers. The word “slang” is itself illustrative: it was first recorded in 1756, I learn from the OED, which offers a wonderfully sniffy definition: “The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character.” Language thus signals not education, but character: not what you know, but who you are. And who you are, linguistically speaking, is all about class, innit.

It took an American to start purging the French out of English. After the revolution (not “war of independence”, thank you) the fledgling US sought to establish its independence culturally as well as politically. Moreover, the Enlightenment project of America’s founders meant emphasizing literacy education; and pronunciation had already altered over the previous two centuries. In 1828 Noah Webster produced the first American dictionary, seeking to establish America’s cultural distinctiveness. The much-maligned (in Britain) suffix “-ize” is not a modern outrage derived from US business speak, but dates back to Webster, who returned it to words derived from Greek verbs ending in “-izein”. He also took the French out of words ending in “-re”, and the “u” out of the suffix “-our”, another French spelling. In other words, when the British mock “American” spellings, they are usually defending the French. That’s what you call historical irony.

Amanda:

This website is for anyone who is interested in learning or reviewing introductory general, organic and biological chemistry topics. This includes high school and college chemistry students, as well as independent learners. The subject matter covers topics from any high school chemistry course, any introductory general chemistry course, and any introductory general, organic and biological chemistry course (also known as allied health chemistry).

BREAKING – we reached a settlement with the State of CA, and they will be PERMANENTLY REMOVING the Aztec chants from the Ethnic Studies Model Cirriculum and paying $100,000 towards our attorneys’ fees. My statement is in the thread below:

— Paul M. Jonna (@PaulJonna) January 15, 2022

Scott Calvert & Douglas Belkin:

Teachers calling in sick from Covid-19 are prompting superintendents across the country to close schools and move classes online, forcing parents to scramble for child care and reorder work schedules.

Nationally, more than 4,500 schools will be closed at least one day this week due to the pandemic, the highest number this academic year, according to Burbio Inc., a Pelham, N.Y., data company that tracks K-12 school closures.

On Wednesday, Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest district, canceled classes after the teachers union said the classrooms presented unsafe conditions. City leaders called the vote by the Chicago Teachers Union an illegal job action and said teachers who didn’t report to work wouldn’t receive pay.

Districts in other cities such as Atlanta and Milwaukee moved over the weekend to shift classes online as the highly contagious Omicron variant has driven a surge in cases.

Laura Meckler:

Email correspondence from the time suggested that the NSBA might have been acting at request of the White House, according to documents released through open records requests filed by a conservative group called Parents Defending Education. Slaven and the White House said that isn’t true.

In one email, an NSBA board member wrote that Slaven had said the letter had been requested by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for use by the White House. In another, Slaven wrote that the letter included “additional information on some of the specific threats,” as requested by the White House. Cardona’s spokeswoman said he did not solicit the letter.

Five days after the NSBA letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded. He directed the FBI to work with U.S. attorneys across the country to convene meetings within 30 days with federal, state and local leaders to discuss strategies for addressing threats to school personnel.

Slaven circulated a copy of the letter to the NSBA board on the evening of Sept. 29, after sending it to the White House. He told members it would be distributed to the press the next day.

Derek Lowe:

This latest paper goes a long way towards nailing that down. The authors are looking at a huge and unique data set: blood draws from recruits to the US military. There are about 62 million serum samples from periodic HIV testing over the years, and in looking at the 1995-2013 data set the authors identified 955 cases of MS that developed in 10 million service members after they joined. 801 of them had enough serum samples for the study (at least three – the first one on joining, one taken as close to possible to the time of diagnosis, and at least one in between), and the team identified 1566 matched controls for them. 35 of the 801 were EBV-negative at the first sample, and 107 of the 1566 controls. All but one of those 35 became EBV-positive over time, and in fact only one person of the whole 801 was EBV-negative in the last sample before diagnosis (about a year before). Median time for development of MS after going EBV positive was about five years, and the median for MS development after the first sample was about ten years.

The study used cytomegalovirus as a control, since it’s spread in much the same way as Epstein-Barr and thus can account for environmental and behavioral effects. But there was no real correlation at all with MS and CMV, except a slightly lower rate of MS in those who were both CMV and EBV positive, which fits with previous work suggesting that the immune response to CMV attenuates the effects of Epstein-Barr. The paper also took a random 30 MS patients and 30 controls and did a comprehensive search (via antibody responses) for infection in samples both before and after MS diagnosis by basically all known human pathogenic viruses (about 200 species). The only thing that came up out of the baseline was Epstein-Barr.

Chris Rickert:

Two Madison La Follette High School students arrested after fight

Two Madison La Follette High School students are facing charges after beating a 15-year-old classmate so badly Thursday afternoon that he will likely need surgery, police said.

Police said the victim told them a group of students was making fun of him before the fight inside the school at 702 Pflaum Road on the city’s Southeast Side, and that school surveillance video of the incident shows the victim and another teen preparing to fight one another and several teens punching or attempting to punch the victim.

Parents defending education:

New documents released in a federal lawsuit filed by parents alleging anti-Asian discrimination case against the school board in Fairfax County, Va., reveal that board members knew that the new admissions policies to America’s No. 1 high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, were “racist,” “anti asian” and “political.”

The case, Coalition for TJ vs. Fairfax County School Board et al, is Case Number: 1:21-cv-00296-CMH-JFA in U.S. federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Judge Claude Hilton will hear the case in federal court in Alexandria on Tuesday, January 18, at 10 a.m.

The Coalition for TJ is represented by Pacific Legal Foundation.

The new documents chronicle the behind-the-scenes manipulations and motivations that disturbed even school board members for their rushed and hurried process.

Eric Ting

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who accused white progressives of projecting beliefs onto African American residents after the fallout from the death of George Floyd in 2020, is criticizing them once again.

During an appearance on the New York Times’ “Sway” podcast with Kara Swisher, Breed was asked about her emergency declaration in the Tenderloin and some of the backlash she received from District Attorney Chesa Boudin and others, who argued that an increased police presence would not improve conditions.

Breed said that her own “experiences of growing up in poverty and growing up in war zones similar to the Tenderloin” informed her decision-making process and took a shot at critics she perceives to be overly ideological.

“I think a lot of people, like some members of the Board [of Supervisors], like Boudin, did not grow up in poverty in San Francisco,” she said. “They did not grow up in these kinds of conditions. They have a theory as to what they believe based on their ideology. But they’re also white. They are not Black people who’ve had these unfortunately traumatizing experiences in communities where there’s not trust with the police, but also there’s a desire to be safe, right? And I’ve worked many of my years of growing up in this community to really turn that around because of the violence. “

The unnamed members of the board she’s referring to are likely Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen. The former voted against Breed’s Tenderloin emergency declaration, while the latter threatened to undo the emergency ordinance if the San Francisco Police Department’s budget increases. Later in the interview, Breed specifically mentions District 5, which is Preston’s district.

On the topic of Boudin, Breed said she and the district attorney “have different perspectives on things,” and would not say how she plans to vote in the upcoming June recall election.

Nicola Woolcock:

Forcing pupils to wear masks in the classroom is dystopian and critics should not be smeared as Trumpian Covid-deniers, the children’s author Julia Donaldson has said.

The creator of The Gruffalo said that she feared that the use of face coverings in schools was becoming normalised and was concerned that children’s education should not be “sacrificed” to protect the NHS.

Donaldson, 73, has written about 200 books, many of which have been adapted for television and stage. The Gruffalo has sold more than 13 million copies and been translated into more than 100 languages.

Julia Donaldson has written about 200 books, including The Gruffalo, which has sold 13 million copies

Derek Thompson:

Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change—but in practice, many Americans are basically dead set against the clean-energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar-power projects. We say that housing is a human right—but our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or megaprojects. Politicians say that they want better health care—but they tolerate a catastrophically slow-footed FDA‪ that withholds promising tools, and a federal policy that deliberately limits the supply of physicians.

In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with a policy agenda that is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.

This is the abundance agenda.

Matt Ridley:

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Emily Everson Layden:

Rutgers researchers have unearthed the earliest definitive evidence of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) in ancient Iraq, challenging our understanding of humanity’s earliest agricultural practices. Their findings appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Overall, the presence of millet in ancient Iraq during this earlier time period challenges the accepted narrative of agricultural development in the region as well as our models for how ancient societies provisioned themselves,” said Elise Laugier, an environmental archaeologist and National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Broomcorn millet is an “amazingly robust, quick-growing and versatile summer crop” that was first domesticated in East Asia, Laugier added. The researchers analyzed microscopic plant remains (phytoliths) from Khani Masi, a mid-late second millennium BCE (c. 1500–1100 BCE) site in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Jason Riley:

Economic inequality continues to be one of the most hotly debated topics in America, but there has been relatively little discussion of the fact that black-white gaps in joblessness, income, poverty, and other measures were shrinking prior to the pandemic.

Why was it happening, and why did this phenomenon go unacknowledged by so much of the media?

In The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley—acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration. To acknowledge as much is not to endorse the 45th president but rather to champion policies that achieve a clear moral objective shared by most Americans.

Matthew Wilson:

Are you a freshly-minted Ph.D. holder interested in becoming a tenure-track computer science professor at UNC-Chapel Hill? First, you’ll have to submit a “diversity statement” describing your “commitment to diversity.”

Candidates seeking to be an assistant professor at Boston University’s business school should includereferences to the “diversity contributions” they would bring in their cover letter, taking care to demonstrate that they fall in line with the college’s “institutional commitment” to maintaining an “inclusive, equitable, and diverse” campus. Anyone applying for open tenure-track positions in George Mason University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department will be “expected” to “embrace” and “advance” the school’s “strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” And those interested in teaching human anatomy at East Carolina University should present “statements” describing their “experience with” and “commitment” to “equity and diversity in teaching, research, and service.”

Along with the standard parts of an application for a job in academia―a curriculum vitae, transcripts, personal statements, references, and research experience―more and more universities, both in North Carolina and across the country, are evaluating whether candidates conform with institutional commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. 

According to a recent study by the American Enterprise Institute, approximately one in five university-sponsored faculty job postings require potential employees to submit statements in support of DEI initiatives as a part of their applications, while nearly seventy percent mention the words “diversity” or “diverse.” In one instance at the University of California, Berkeley, the think tank’s report noted (citing Andrew Gillen), 679 of 893―or more than three-quarters―of qualified applicants for a faculty position in the life sciences were eliminated from “serious consideration” after their “contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion” failed to meet the “high standard” set by the university.

Cuesta College:

The following strategy, SQ4R, is built around the idea that what you do before and after you read is as important as the reading itself. Learning is an active process which requires concentration and energy. Understanding and using the following strategies will increase your comprehension and your retention of the information.

SQ4R = Survey – Question – Read – Recite – Record – Review

Survey

Look over a chapter for a few minutes before studying it in depth.

Read the title and introductory paragraph(s). Fix the name of the chapter in your mind. Often the introduction to the chapter supplies background for recognizing the purpose of the chapter. It may also state specifically the method of development the author intends to follow.

Read headings, subheadings, and italicized words. Go through the chapter heading by heading; these will form a topical outline.

Read the summary at the end of the chapter. Reread it to see which ideas the author restates for special emphasis or what general conclusions he or she comes to. If there is no summary, read the last sentence or two before each new heading.

Before reading:

104 Page PDF:

The Early Literacy and Beyond Task Force was established in December 2020, charged with analyzing promising approaches to literacy education and making recommendations to Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) and the teacher education programs at the University of Wisconsin -Madison School of Education (UW-SoE) to improve literacy outcomes and reduce gaps in MMSD student’s opportunities and outcomes. The Task Force members met between February and June 2021 to address the charges listed below.

1. Review and become familiar with the best evidence about the most effective ways to teach literacy in pre-kindergarten through Grade 12, and how to best develop future teachers who can better teach literacy in schools.

2. Identify how literacy, especially early literacy, is taught across MMSD, and analyze achievement data for MMSD students with respect to literacy.

3. Examine how literacy, especially early literacy, is taught to teacher education students at UW- SoE and analyze what these future teachers are learning about literacy.

4. Recommend steps that strengthen literacy instruction in the Madison schools and UW-Madison teacher education programs.

The Task Force included 14 members, seven each from MMSD and UW-Madison who were experts in literacy and equity – the central foci of the effort. The project was managed by Dr. Jen Schoepke who holds positions in both organizations. Task Force members worked collaboratively as a whole group focused on the fourth charge listed above and in three subcommittees focused on the first three charges. To facilitate cross-fertilization and leverage our collective knowledge, each subcommittee included representatives from MMSD and UW-Madison.

Task Force members kept children and equity at the center of our work and our recognition that behind every data point was a child and a family with aspirations for success. The Task Force focused on the demand for social justice and the ways that reading can empower young people with the opportunity to create a more just future.2 Several things were abundantly clear through Task Force dialogue: (1) student’s opportunities and outcomes need to be more equitable; (2) all of our children need improved literacy outcomes, and (3) it is our collective responsibility to put systems, processes, and pedagogy in place that allows the excellence within our children to shine.

Building on a long-standing culture of collaboration across MMSD and UW-SoE, this report was developed through a true partnership, with an explicit focus on literacy instruction as an equity strategy. Task Force members agree that we need urgent change grounded in reflective, evidence-based practice. This report is meant to spur such transformation in MMSD and UW-SoE so we can realize the moral imperative to get all of our children to read successfully and at high levels. The Task Force submits this report to MMSD and UW-SoE leadership for their consideration, knowing that its recommendations are just the beginning of the work that needs to be done. This task force report represents the collective work of the Task Force members, not perspectives or viewpoints of any one individual.

Madison’s literacy task force report background, notes and links.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

mp3 audio (about 3 hours – not the entire session):

Machine generated transcript.

School and District Report Cards and the recent changes made to those Report Cards

Invited speakers include:

School Choice Wisconsin Action (Jim Bender)

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (Thomas McCarthy)

Stride, Inc.

Siena Catholic Schools

Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (Prepared testimony)

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The Economist:

Over the past two years America’s children have missed more time in the classroom than those in most of the rich world. School closures that began there in early 2020 dragged on until the summer of 2021. During that time the districts that stayed closed longest forced all or some of their children to learn remotely for twice as long as schools in Ireland, three times longer than schools in Spain and four times longer than in France.

In recent weeks American schools have started closing once again, as the Omicron variant of covid-19 has brought a fresh wave of infections. About 5,000, equivalent to roughly 5% of schools, were shut for part or all of the first week in January. Sometimes that was because staff had been forced into isolation, but other closures were pre-emptive. In Chi cago teachers refused to turn up between January 5th and 11th. Some staff in California urged healthy colleagues to call in sick. America’s shrill debates about schooling continue to set it apart. The new term met with much less fuss in England—even though the country had a higher national infection rate than America and has vaccinated fewer young children.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Mike Antonucci:

The Chicago Teachers Union decided last week to cease in-person schooling until a variety of conditions were met. In response, Chicago Public Schools refused to allow teachers to log in for remote instruction and demanded they return to the classroom. After days of negotiations, the two sides reached a tentative agreement. In-person classes resumed Jan. 12.

In the interim, familiar debates reappeared. The union claimed the surge in infections and inadequate COVID testing made the schools unsafe. The district and the mayor said the danger to children was still very low, and that measures taken made the schools safer than other indoor spaces.

“We’d rather be in our classes teaching, we’d rather have the schools open. What we are saying though is that right now we’re in the middle of a major surge, it is breaking all the records and hospitals are full,” said union President Jesse Sharkey on Jan. 5.

The Economist:

Given the way the fight had been proceeding, it ended in a whimper. On January 10th a stand-off between Chicago’s teachers’ union and its mayor, Lori Lightfoot, escalated to personal insults. Jesse Sharkey, the union’s president, called Ms Lightfoot “relentlessly stupid”. She responded by calling him a “privileged, clouted white guy”. Hours later, the teachers agreed to go back to work, bringing to an end a nearly weeklong strike over covid-19 safety fears. The city stuck to its terms, but agreed to increase testing and supply more kn95 masks.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Shared via brownstone:

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Dean Mosiman:

Under the draft resolution, the Truth and Reconciliation Implementation Workgroup would meet at least bimonthly; design and facilitate the implementation of a truth and reconciliation process; host a community forum or forums to allow opportunities for BIPOC residents to voice their grievances around past injustices in the city; facilitate a community forum or forums with expert presenters on reconciliation and healing; and draft a report to submit to the EOC and then the City Council detailing policy recommendations that the city could implement to address past wrongs.

“If approved, it will be important for policymakers to consider how to create the capacity to carry out the work,” Davis said.

Paul Thacker:

It sometimes feels like researchers are striving to give people reasons to doubt science in the age of COVID. In the most recent example, the DisInformation Chronicle discovered that, in one of the most widely read science journal articles of 2020, researchers wrote that it was a “conspiracy theory” to claim that the COVID-19 pandemic could have started from a lab accident in China. However, they violated publishing ethics by not disclosing that the article had been secretly edited by two scientists whose lab research involves genetically engineering coronaviruses.

The commentary titled, “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2“ appeared in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections, which is published by Taylor and Francis. The authors also appear to have bypassed the normal process of peer review, according to emails made public by U.S. Right to Know.

Doug P:

Just coincidentally, the Associated Press has issued new guidance to their reporters covering Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations:

Joshua Trevino:

David Ramos:

Tip #1: Quit bad books

Life is too short to read a bad book. — James Joyce

Nothing stops a reading habit in its tracks like a bad book. 

A book can be bad for a few reasons. Sometimes they’re poorly written, or not well-organized. Other times, the book just doesn’t interest you. 

Thinking a book is bad doesn’t mean you’re judgemental or a bad reader. There are, quite literally, dozens of great books I can’t stand reading. I’ve easily quit more than a hundred books over the last few years for exactly the reasons listed above because moving on means I get a new opportunity to find something I love.

If you’re a few pages or chapters in and realize it isn’t for you, it’s okay to put the book down and find what’s next.

Pieter Streicher:

Professor Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team even produced a study, late in December, that managed to conclude there was ‘no evidence’ that Omicron was milder than Delta — based on the same theory that the differences in outcome could be entirely down to immunity rather than intrinsic to the virus. Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the UK’s medical and scientific leaders, were persuaded and lobbied the Government for additional restrictions before Christmas based on the same apparent uncertainty.

And yet, once again, it turns out that the obvious was true after all.

Now that the cases have peaked in London (since 23^rdDecember in fact) and the hospital variables are in decline, it is possible to compare peak levels between London and Gauteng province in South Africa, where the Omicron wave began. There are very real differences between the two cities: Gauteng has relatively high prior infection levels and low vaccination rates, while London has lower prior infection rates and high vaccination rates. Gauteng has a younger population compared to London. Despite all this, the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) dropped 5-7-fold in both areas between Delta and Omicron.

Brad Polumbo:

As the Tax Foundation’s Jared Walczak explains, the tax hikes take three forms. There’s an income surcharge (on top of the already-high state income taxes) that applies starting at $149,509 in earnings. There’s also a payroll tax add-on, with the top rate applying to employees earning $49,990 or more. Then, there’s a 2.3% business tax hike on gross receipts above the first $2 million a business takes in.

Caitlin Owens:

State of play: Months of convoluted guidance hit a breaking point over the winter holiday, when the CDC became a viral internet meme amongst frustrated Americans who could no longer take the agency’s guidance seriously.

The CDC’s new guidance on how long COVID patients should remain in isolation was mocked by thousands of internet meme-makers. The CDC responded by saying the changing guidelines are motivated by “fast-moving science.”
“It’s never good to be the butt of jokes,” former CDC director Tom Frieden said in an interview.

“We Failed”

One of the largest newspapers in Denmark is apologizing for its journalistic failure during COVID-19 by only publishing official government messages without questioning them. Via @Niemandsknecht https://t.co/0DfZAOXduT

— Jan Nieuwenhuijs (@JanGold_) January 11, 2022

Lindsey Burke and Corey DeAngelis:

Imagine being a second grader in a major city right now. If you entered kindergarten during the 2019-20 school year, COVID-19 first closed your school in March, potentially offering “remote learning.”

As you prepared to enter first grade the following fall, you were one of more than half of students nationwide for whom the school doors were still shut, again having access to remote instruction only.

Incredibly, as you entered second grade, the 2021-22 school year, the district superintendent bows down to the powerful teachers union and shifts back to “virtual learning.”

Another teachers group, National Educators United, is now pushing for a nationwide closure of schools for at least “two weeks.” Yeah, like that worked out so well last time.

In reality, you’ve hardly been in what could pass for “school” since COVID-19 began. Even the days you had access to in-person instruction, learning to read was made harder through masks, your short lunches were spent socially distanced from your friends, and you couldn’t play on the playground equipment during recess.

This scenario has been playing out for millions of children across the country since March 2020. And now, as students return from winter break, school districts across America—including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Newark, New Jersey—have regressed to remote learning once more, foreclosing access to in-person instruction for nearly 200,000 students.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Joy Pullman:

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Calvert:

Public-school attendance across the U.S. has dropped to unusually low levels, complicating efforts to keep schools open, as districts also contend with major staff shortages.

Many students in kindergarten through 12th grade are out sick because of Covid-19 or are being kept home by anxious parents, as the Omicron variant surges, officials say. Remote learning often isn’t being offered anymore for students who are home. Empty desks create a quandary for teachers, who must decide whether to push ahead with lesson plans knowing a large number of their students will need to catch up.

New York City, the nation’s largest school district, saw its overall attendance rate fall below 70% when classes resumed after the winter holidays, far beneath the district’s pre-pandemic average of over 91% students at school each day. Many students missed class because of fears of contracting the virus or because they or a family member had tested positive, teachers said.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Andrew Rotherham:

If education reform were a religion, then professing to just “follow the evidence” and “listen to communities” would anchor the liturgy. Charter schools, however, are a curious case that tests the faith. Urban charters have proven to be an effective reform, at scale, and parents in many communities are clearly demanding them. Raise that in a lot of education spaces, though — including among many of the well-heeled who consider themselves reformers or allies — and you’ll be branded a heretic, or at least quietly not invited back to church. That’s why it was so refreshing to see former New York City mayor, media mogul and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg announce a $750 million effort to create more high-quality charter school seats in communities around the country. 

That $750 million that Bloomberg’s foundation plans to spend over five years may seem like a pittance against the backdrop of a system that annually spends 1,000 times that amount, and especially as almost $200 billion in federal COVID aid is working its way through the system. Yet one lesson of decades of education reform is that relatively small amounts of money, well targeted, can leverage more change than larger but diffuse slugs of funding. Bloomberg’s $750 million isn’t small in any real sense — it’s a lot of money, and the kind of commitment that can tangibly change lives — but let’s hope this ends up being a down payment on a longer-term commitment.

Helen Lewis:

I got my COVID-19 booster shot last week, on the first day I was eligible. My shot was delayed because I caught COVID in early December, an experience that was low-key grim: two days of shotgun sneezing, no taste or smell for a week, and a constant fatigue that didn’t abate until the holidays. I was very glad to face the coronavirus with two Pfizer doses already in my arm, and even more grateful that my parents and 91 percent of Britons in their age group are triple-jabbed.

Immunity builds to a peak in the fortnight after vaccination, and so next week I will be about the most protected a human can realistically expect to be against COVID. That reflection has inevitably led to another one: I want my life back. Thank you, coronavirus. Next. 

Avoiding the virus is no longer an option; Omicron has seen to that. Almost everyone is likely to catch the variant eventually. Over Christmas, one in 10 of my fellow Londoners—one in 10!—had COVID. Thanks to Britain’s solid vaccination rates, particularly among vulnerable groups, this tsunami of infections has so far led to a daily death toll less than a fifth the size of the one we had last winter. In the United States, the picture looks bleaker, with overwhelmed hospitals and 1,500 deaths a day. Because the vaccinated can still spread the disease, Americans should probably lie low for a few more weeks, until this wave subsides. Personally, I don’t need an immediate license to party like it’s February 2020, but I want some indication from lawmakers and medical experts that restrictions won’t last forever. For any country without the discipline, collectivism, and surveillance technology of China, the zero-COVID dream is over. Two years is long enough to put our lives on hold.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ruth Wisse:

On January 1, 1993, I arrived at Harvard to take up a newly endowed professorship in Yiddish literature. It seemed preposterous: me at Harvard, Yiddish at Harvard. The university had never figured in my aspirations. My impressions of the university had been formed mostly from what I knew of its program in Jewish studies, which was jokingly referred to as ‘the Yeshiva on the Charles’ because of its emphasis on Talmudic and medieval sources. Its almost exclusively male Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations felt obliged to appoint a female.

My gender played an even more prominent part in the deliberations of the Department of Comparative Literature where I was to hold a joint appointment. By 1993, no self-styled academic conservative like me — who taught literature old style, reading along the grain rather than against it, with appreciation for its texture and its historical, cultural and linguistic contexts — could have won the vote of some of the literature department’s trendsetters had I not been a woman. In yet another irony, these progressive members of the committee did not know that I had opposed affirmative action for women at my then-job at McGill University. In short, I was appointed on the basis of a policy I deplored. Still, I accepted the position and the following year I was made the Center’s director. Having been assured that my chair would be accompanied by a lectureship in Yiddish language, I set up language instruction, undergraduate courses, and a track for graduate students supported by generous stipends.

Rebecca Bodenheimer:

I probably should have inferred that becoming a school-reopening advocate would not go over well in my progressive Oakland community, but I didn’t anticipate the social repercussions, or the political identity crisis it would trigger for me. My own experience, as a self-described progressive in ultra-lefty Oakland, is just one example of how people across the political spectrum have become frustrated with Democrats’ position on school reopenings.

Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labelled advocates’ calls for schools reopening “white supremacy” called us “Karens,” and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s transphobic agenda. 

There was no recognition of the fact that we were advocating for our kids, who were floundering in remote learning, or that public schools across the country (in red states) opened in fall 2020 without major outbreaks, as did private schools just miles from our home. Only since last fall, when schools reopened successfully despite the more contagious Delta variant circulating, have Democratic pundits and leaders been talking about school closures as having caused far more harm than benefit. 

Some progressive parents now admit they were too afraid of the blowback from their communities to speak up. And they were right to be wary. We paid a price.

Libby Emmons:

The article addresses using fear as a means to control people, in the right doses: “A meta-analysis found that targeting fears can be useful in some situations, but not others: appealing to fear leads people to change their behaviour if they feel capable of dealing with the threat, but leads to defensive reactions when they feel helpless to act. The results suggest that strong fear appeals produce the greatest behaviour change only when people feel a sense of efficacy, whereas strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest levels of defensive responses.”

Van Bavel deals with how to deal with “optimism bias” in a population, as well as risk perception, emotional responses, and how the “global pandemic may also create opportunities to reduce religious and ethnic prejudice.”

He wrote that “People’s behaviour is influenced by social norms,” but that “Changing behaviours by correcting such misperceptions can be achieved by public messages reinforcing positive (for example, health-promoting) norms.”

Harriet Alexander:

In 2015, molecular oncologist Jennifer Byrne was surprised to discover during a scan of the academic literature that five papers had been written about a gene she had originally identified, but did not find particularly interesting.

“Looking at these papers, I thought they were really similar, they had some mistakes in them and they had some stuff that didn’t make sense at all,” she said. As she dug deeper, it dawned on her that the papers might have been produced by a third-party working for profit.

Joe Barrett:

Chicago Public Schools canceled classes Wednesday after the teachers union voted late Tuesday to stop providing in-person instruction, citing the latest spike in Covid-19 that has sent cases to record levels in the city.

City leaders called the vote by the Chicago Teachers Union an illegal job action and said teachers who didn’t report to work wouldn’t receive pay. The administration promised to provide parents with a plan later Wednesday for how it would resume operations in the face of the walkout.

School administrators and the union in the nation’s third largest school system have clashed repeatedly over Covid protocols throughout the pandemic. Classes were online for much of the 2020-2021 school year and began returning to in-person last February amid strong objections of the union.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a media briefing Tuesday that the shift to online learning last year had been very difficult on working families and hurt many students.

“Achievement gaps are real and they are affecting kids of color at an exponential rate,” she said.

Scott Girard:

MMSD spokesman Tim LeMonds told the Cap Times in an email Tuesday the district’s attendance rate Monday was 80.6%. That’s below the average of more than 90% throughout the 2020-21 school year, according to attendance data received through an open records request.

Other area school districts, which all returned from winter break as scheduled in the first week of January, reported slightly higher attendance rates during the first week of 2022.

In the Verona Area School District, attendance ranged from 85.37% to 89.58%, according to data provided by superintendent Tremayne Clardy.

Waunakee Community School District’s attendance rate was between 87.86% and 89.81% throughout last week, district communications and engagement specialist Anne Blackburn wrote in an email.

Similarly, the Oregon School District saw attendance rates from 82.2% to 87.5% last week, according to an email from district communications director Erika Mundinger.

The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District saw attendance rates stay between 88.5% and 90.2% the week of Jan. 3, director of information and public relations Shannon Valladolid wrote in an email.

Perhaps related: a physician recently mentioned to me that we are living through a phenomena of the worried well.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Rob Crilly:

President Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona apparently solicited the controversial letter from the National School Boards Association that said threats made by protesting parents should be taken as seriously as domestic terrorism, according to emails released on Tuesday.

The NSBA, in an internal memo sent on October 12, revealed that they had held discussions with White House officials before sending the much-criticized letter to President Joe Biden.

Attorney General Merrick Garland later said the letter, setting out worries about threats, was the starting point for plans for a task force to protect members of school boards.

Now, emails obtained by Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, suggest that Cardona himself was part of the process that led to its production.

In an exchange on Oct. 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett wrote that the group’s interim chief executive Chip Slaven ‘told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.’

‘Should this allegation be true, it would reveal that this administration’s pretextual war on parents came from the highest levels,’ PDE President Nicole Neily told Fox News Digital, which was first to report on the emails.

Shannon Whitworth:

I work at a high school where the majority of the students are from inner-city Milwaukee. They are confronted almost daily with some form of dysfunction, depravity, or violence.

One day, some of my students challenged me as to why they should put a lot of effort into their studies when, from their perspective, the outlook for their futures looked bleak. I reminded them that God doesn’t want them to live in poverty or hopelessness. Rather, as stated in Proverbs 13, He wants them to live lives of prosperity, generosity and leave a legacy, which is possible if we follow His plan. I was able to share aspects of my faith with my students because the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) has enabled their parents to send them to Milwaukee Lutheran High School on a voucher.

BREAKING: Nebraska Senator Justin Wayne (D) again calls out his colleagues for sending their kids to private school while opposing school choice for others. pic.twitter.com/WiXAmcBRN8

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 11, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Matthew Foldi:

The governor of Tennessee says the University of Memphis is canceling a program that offered financial incentives to professors for infusing “social justice” into their courses.

Gov. Bill Lee (R., Tenn.) contacted the public university immediately after learning about the new program, first reported on by the Washington Free Beacon, which offered faculty $3,000 to redesign their curricula to align with the university’s “diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice” commitments. The governor said the program will not be carried out.

“The University of Memphis informed my office that the initiative will not move forward,” Lee told the Free Beacon. “We welcome robust debate on college campuses, but taxpayer dollars should never be used to fuel a divisive, radical agenda.”

“Ending this program was the right decision, and I thank the university for hearing our concerns,” Lee said.

Melissa Korn:

Sixteen major U.S. universities, including Yale University, Georgetown University and Northwestern University, are being sued for alleged antitrust violations because of the way they work together to determine financial-aid awards for students.

According to a lawsuit filed in Illinois federal court late Sunday by law firms representing five former students who attended some of the schools, the universities engaged in price fixing and unfairly limited aid by using a shared methodology to calculate applicants’ financial need. Schools are allowed under federal law to collaborate on their formulas, but only if they don’t consider applicants’ financial need in admissions decisions. The suit alleges these schools do weigh candidates’ ability to pay in certain circumstances, and therefore shouldn’t be eligible for the antitrust exemption.

Thomas Fazi and Toby Green:

All of which has meant that, until the Observer’s interview with Mark Woolhouse, there has been painfully little critical analysis from the mainstream Left as to whether the raft of restrictive Covid measures we have seen over the past two years have indeed served the collective good — or saved lives for that matter. By definition, for something to be considered in the collective interest of a society, it has to be in the interest of at least a significant majority of its members. However, it’s hard to see how lockdowns (and other subsequent measures) meet this criterion.

Their psychological, social and economic impact mighthave been justified from a collective-interest and life-saving standpoint if Covid represented an equal threat to all citizens. Yet soon into the pandemic, it became clear that Covid-19 was almost exclusively a threat to the elderly (60+): in the last quarter of 2020, the mean age of those dying both with and of Covid-19 in the UK was 82.4, while by early 2020 the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) — the risk of actually dying if you catch Covid — in people under 60 was already known to be exceptionally low: 0.5 per cent or less. A paper written late in 2020 for the WHO by professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists, then estimated that the IFR for those under 70 was even lower: 0.05%. As Woolhouse points out in his interview “people over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15”.

Moreover, given the impacts on other aspects of medical care, the preservation (or prolonging) of life of the elderly was certainly being achieved at the expense of the life expectancies of younger sectors of the population — to say nothing of the catastrophic impacts in the Global South. This has indeed been confirmed by evidence which shows that excess deaths in younger age groups rose sharply in 2021, with very little of this attributable to Covid mortality.

If anything, Covid restrictions should have been framed in terms of solidarity: as measures which implied the overwhelming majority of the collective, which risked little or nothing from Covid, paying a price, and a heavy one at that, in order to protect, in theory at least, a minority (in Western countries people aged 60 or older represent on average around 25% of the population). Acknowledging this from the start would have avoided much loss of trust in public institutions down the road, and would have allowed for a rational discussion around important questions of intergenerational equity, proportionality and the balancing of rights and interests.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Selena Zito:

Some days, people would pull an ornament from their jacket pocket and add it while on their daily stride. On other days, one might see a parent pushing a stroller or with a child on their little bicycle stop and look at the delightful little ornaments.

Without fail, each child would look at it with the same awe you might see from a child who lives in New York City and visits Rockefeller Center to take in that giant spectacle of a tree.

It was a sad little tree, but it had a lot of love and community around it. And that made it special because the community created it and cared for it.

Then one day, shortly before Christmas, the tree was stripped bare, the joy it gave gone. Within days, a sign went up that read, “Whoever took our Christmas tree ornaments…put them back.”

Weeks later, the sign is still stubbornly there — despite the wind and rain that have pounded the area. It is a reminder that some people demand accountability even for something as seemingly inconsequential as the decorations on a small tree.

You might wonder why people would go out of their way to strip this tree of ornaments that had no monetary value other than to do it because they could get away with it. They glean some sense of perverse power. Well, then certainly the thought has crossed your mind in two years or so why we have collectively been allowing people to go out of their way to destroy things in our culture for no other reason other than that they get away with it.

And they glean some sense of perverse power.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

C Bradley Thompson:

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I’VE BEEN TELLING YOU NOW SINCE DAY #1 OF DUMB & DUMBER. Banning CRT is NOT the solution. You’re going to get it no matter what, which is why you must #JustWalkAway. “Getting critical race theory out of public schools is harder than passing a law.”

Banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory and its tenets in public schools may not be as easy as passing a law. Idaho was the first of nine states to pass an anti-CRT law, and so far this new school year, some parents don’t see any change.

“In any way that they can get it in there, they get it in there, by using words like equity, teaching about white supremacy,” said Kristen Young, a parent in the Nampa School District who formed a local chapter of Power to Parents.

WHAT EVERY SIX-YEAR-OLD NEEDS TO KNOW IN ORDER TO BE PROPERLY EDUCATED: “The New Sex Education.” Why don’t we just drop ALL sex talk in schools.

The NEW-NEW MATH DOESN’T ADD UP. (H/T Glenn Reynolds via Lynn Miclea.)

Wiseye video stream:

DPI recently made changes to the state report card that no longer provide an accurate picture of the performance of Wisconsin’s schools. The Assembly Committee on Education will hold an informational hearing, Wednesday at 10:30 am, on Wisconsin’s state report card to determine why the changes were made and how the report card can be improved going forward.

Will Hearing Statement.

Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Wisconsin’s Report Card “Fails to Meet Expectations”

Madison, Milwaukee school performance overrated by Wisconsin DPI

State Senator Kathy Bernier and State Representative Joel Kitchens:

Literacy in Wisconsin is in crisis: 64% of Wisconsin 4th graders can’t read at grade level, with 34% failing to read at even the basic level. As co-chair of Governor Walker’s Read to Lead Task Force, you know that high quality universal literacy screening is the undisputed cornerstone of evidence-based reading instruction. Unfortunately, your veto of Senate Bill 454, The Roadmap to Reading Success, delays the inevitable adoption of desperately needed science-based standards for how we screen and identify struggling readers to get them the help they need.

For too long we have relied on the now disproven pet theories and guesswork of the education establishment and it has left a full two-thirds of our 4th graders struggling to read. How many more children need to pass through Wisconsin’s failing reading system while state specialists hold endless meetings to puzzle over this crisis?

When you vetoed the Roadmap to Reading Success, you said more money is needed. Governor Evers, under the budget you signed into law in July, the state already reimburses schools for 100% of the costs of literacy screeners. Sadly, what you vetoed are the science-based high standards that would ensure we use screeners that actually get the job done with accurate, actionable data.

Our recent budget invests $15.3 billion into K-12 education, or nearly 40% of all state spending. On top of this, Wisconsin schools are receiving an unprecedented $2.7 billion in federal COVID funds and you recently committed an additional $110 million in no-strings-attached federal ARPA funds. Governor Evers, if more funds are needed to take this inevitable and critical first step toward solving our reading crisis, you have sole control over nearly $1 billion in additional federal COVID dollars. That’s why today, we’re introducing an amendment to Assembly Bill 446, calling on you to release any portion of these funds you see fit and sign this bill into law. When a full one-third of fourth graders can’t read at the basic level, we simply cannot wait.

As red and blue states across the country are adopting the reforms in this bill and seeing stunning improvement in reading achievement, Wisconsin’s children are being left behind. If you need further convincing that the Roadmap to Reading Success is the foundational change we need to begin addressing our literacy crisis, some of the most significant research driving literacy reforms across the country is happening right here at UW-Madison’s Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Dr. Seidenberg, one of the world’s foremost researchers on neuroscientific understanding of how children learn to read, spearheads groundbreaking research. We urge you talk with Dr. Seidenberg and learn firsthand why he supports the Roadmap to Reading Success.

The time to act is now. As more and more Wisconsin parents, teachers and local school leaders are waking up to this reading crisis and taking the challenge head-on, they are crying out for desperately needed statewide leadership. The Roadmap to Reading Success isn’t speculative, wishful thinking about what might work. It is the best of evidence-based screening practices. It’s not a question of if, but when Wisconsin will adopt these science-based reforms. Governor Evers, if you don’t sign this bill into law, someone else will. So, for the sake of our kids, do your homework on this quickly and sign this bill into law.

State Senator Kathy Bernier

State Representative Joel Kitchens

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Angie Schmitt:

I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face.

Things got worse for us in December 2020, when my whole family contracted COVID-19. The coronavirus was no big deal for my 3- and 5-year-olds, but I was left with lingering long-COVID symptoms, which made the daily remote-schooling nightmare even more grueling. I say this not to hold myself up for pity. I understand that other people had a far worse 2020. I’m just trying to explain why my worldview has shifted and why I’m not the same person I was.

By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Here’s a startling graph illustrating a point that people are beginning to talk about, but not visualizing well. And showing that concepts from 6 weeks ago aren’t applying. Changes in ratio of new cases PER 100K of fully vax to unvax. pic.twitter.com/y88xVMVPp5

— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 8, 2022

Delta Airlines:

After a comprehensive review of our pilot hiring requirements, Delta has decided to make a four-year college degree “preferred” rather than “required” for first officer candidates, effective immediately.

While we feel as strongly as ever about the importance of education, there are highly qualified candidates – people who we would want to welcome to our Delta family – who have gained more than the equivalent of a college education through years of life and leadership experience. Making the four-year degree requirement preferred removes unintentional barriers to our Delta flight decks.

Liyun Qi:

When China put in place its one-child policy four decades ago, policy makers said they would simply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy.

“In 30 years, the current problem of especially dreadful population growth may be alleviated and then [we can] adopt different population policies,” the Communist Party said in a 1980 open letter to members and young people.

With the number of births declining year after year, China is now racing in the opposite direction, closing abortion clinics and expanding services to help couples conceive. But a legacy of the one-child policy, scrapped in 2016, is a dwindling number of women of childbearing age as well as a generation of only children who are less eager to marry and start a family.

In addition, infertility appears to be a bigger problem in China than in many other countries. According to a survey by Peking University researchers, it affects about 18% of couples of reproductive age, compared with a global average of around 15%.

A thread 🧵 about Hong Kong in 15 tweets. In Nov ‘19, during the height of protests in HK, I mailed a copy of Animal Farm to Claudia Mo, then a member at HK’s top lawmaking body, LegCo. It was an anonymous gift. From ‘a Hongkonger’ was how I inscribed the book. 1/15 pic.twitter.com/oG2Cp87bUX

— Bleak House Books (@bleakhousebooks) January 10, 2022