Prof. Jeffrey Sachs says he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US lab biotechnology”

Current Affairs:

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal theLancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19,  originated through dangerous virus research gone awry.

Prof. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation of the origins of COVID-19 and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths. If that hypothesis is true, the implications would be earth-shaking, because it might mean that esteemed members of the scientific community bore responsibility for a global calamity. In this interview, Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place. He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent.

Does Education Matter? Tests from Extensions of Compulsory Schooling in England and Wales 1919-22, 1947, and 1972

Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins:

Schooling and social outcomes correlate strongly. But are these connections causal? Previous papers for England using compulsory schooling to identify causal effects have produced conflicting results. Some found significant effects of schooling on adult longevity and on earnings, others found no effects. Here we measure the consequence of extending compulsory schooling in England to ages 14, 15 and 16 in the years 1919-22, 1947 and 1972. From administrative data these increases in compulsory schooling added 0.43, 0.60 and 0.43 years of education to the affected cohorts. We estimate the effects of these increases in schooling for each cohort on measures of adult longevity, on dwelling values in 1999 (an index of lifetime incomes), and on the the social characteristics of the places where the affected cohorts died. Since we have access to all the vital registration records, and a nearly complete sample of the 1999 electoral register, we find with high precision that all the schooling extensions failed to increase adult longevity (as had been found previously for the 1947 and 1972 extensions), dwelling values, or the social status of the communities people die in. Compulsory schooling ages 14-16 had no effect, at the cohort level, on social outcomes in England.

College Essay Prompts Get Absurd. ‘So Where Is Waldo, Really?

Isabelle Sarraf:

The University of Maryland, College Park, has asked students to detail their favorite thing about…last Tuesday. That’s a tough one if your Google Calendar shows a lot of white space. One college-admissions consulting blog advises, “If you laid in bed all day Tuesday, but went for a beautiful hike on Wednesday, write about the hike.” The school says it continues to ask that question, but changes the day each year.

Chapman University asks applicants to name one dish they would cook for the school’s admission team. Princeton University, meanwhile, has asked “What song represents the soundtrack of your life at this moment?”

To get into Pomona College, last year’s seniors had to answer, in 50 words or less, “Marvel or DC? Pepsi or Coke? Instagram or TikTok? What’s your favorite ‘this or that’ and which side do you choose?”

Positive feedback: the science of criticism that actually works

Esther Bintlff:

Years ago, after I received some negative feedback at work, my husband Laurence told me something that stuck with me: when we receive criticism, we go through three stages. The first, he said, with apologies for the language, is, “Fuck you.” The second is “I suck.” And the third is “Let’s make it better.”

I recognised immediately that this is true, and that I was stuck at stage two. It’s my go-to in times of trouble, an almost comfortable place where I am protected from further disapproval because no matter how bad someone is about to tell me I am, I already know it. Depending on your personality, you may be more likely to stay at stage one, confident in your excellence and cursing the idiocy of your critics. The problem, Laurence continued, is being unable to move on to stage three, the only productive stage.

Recently, I asked my husband if he could remember who had come up with the three-stage feedback model. He said it was Bradley Whitford, the Emmy-award winning actor who played the charismatic Josh Lyman in The West Wing and, among other roles, the scary dad in the 2017 horror movie Get Out. “What? I would definitely have remembered that. There is no way that would have slipped my mind,” I insisted, especially because I had a mini-crush on the Lyman character for four of The West Wing’s seven series.

In 20 seconds flat, I had my laptop open and was putting one of my few superpowers, googling, to use. There it was. Whitford has aired this theory in public at least twice. Once during a 2012 talk at his alma mater, Wesleyan University, and again when he was interviewed on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2018.

…..

One of Scott’s fundamental beliefs is that there is nothing kind in keeping quiet about a colleague’s weaknesses. She calls this “ruinous empathy”. Scott is a two-word-catchphrase-generating machine. While aiming to achieve “radical candour”, you need to avoid “manipulative insincerity” and “obnoxious aggression”. The key in giving feedback, she writes in her book, is to “care personally” while “challenging directly”.

This holds true even when we are merely anticipating feedback. In a 1995 study by academics from the University of California, Riverside, children were split into two groups to solve maths problems. One was informed the aim was to “help you learn new things”. The other was told: “How you do . . . helps us know how smart you are in math and what kind of grade you might get.” The first group solved more problems.

Civics: “A tool that, if indeed effectively publicized, would chill public expression even of constitutionally protected speech”

Eugene Volokh:

press release Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney in charge of the federal prosecutor’s office in Massachusetts, Rachael S. Rollins announced the rollout of an “End Hate Now” telephone hotline (emphasis added):

The “End Hate Now” hotline [1-83-END-H8-NOW] is dedicated for reporting hate-based incidents or potential criminal activity. Massachusetts residents and visitors are encouraged to call the hotline to report concerning or troubling incidents of hate, potential hate crimes, or concerns regarding individuals believed to be espousing the hate-filled views or actions we learn of far too often in the wake of mass shootings and/or acts of hate-based violent extremism. Callers are encouraged to leave their contact information but may remain anonymous….

Hate crimes are illegal acts committed based on a victim’s perceived or actual race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability. Beliefs are not hate crimes. Distasteful ideologies, advocacy of political or social positions, use of discriminatory rhetoric, or the general philosophic embrace of biased or hate-filled beliefs are not crimes. Under federal law, investigations may not be based solely on an individual’s beliefs or their protected First Amendment activity.

A ‘Dubious Expediency’: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students

Gail Heriot:

Mounting empirical research shows that race-preferential admissions policies are doing more harm than good. Instead of increasing the numbers of African Americans entering high-status careers, these policies reduce those numbers relative to what we would have had if colleges and universities had followed race-neutral policies. We have fewer African-American scientists, physicians, and engineers and likely fewer lawyers and college professors. If, as the evidence indicates, the effects of race-preferential admissions policies are exactly the opposite of what was originally intended, it is difficult to understand why anyone would wish to support them.

Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers

Kat Rosenfield:

At first, Gullaba was asked to add an Asian character—east Asian, specifically, perhaps a Pacific Islander. Then it was suggested that Titus’ wingman, the biggest secondary character, should also be assigned an Asian identity. And there was one more bizarre twist: Another agency employee, who we’ll call Sally, was brought in at the eleventh hour to read the book and provide additional feedback.

“My agent was like, ‘I don’t want to do this, it makes me very uncomfortable,'” Gullaba says. “But then he says it.”

Sally, the agent explained, was black.

Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don’t share the same traits—or “lived experience,” to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.

The sensitivity reader’s possible areas of expertise are as varied as human existence itself. One representative consultancy boasts a list of experts in the usual racial, ethnic, and religious categories, but also in such areas as “agoraphobia,” “Midwestern,” “physical disability, arms & legs,” and (perhaps most puzzlingly) “gamer geek.” Another one lists individual readers with intersectional qualifications: Depending on the content of your novel, you might hire a white lesbian with generalized anxiety disorder or a bisexual, genderfluid, light-skinned brown Mexican with a self-diagnosis of autism. Every medical condition, every trauma, every form of oppression: Sensitivity readers will cover it all.

“that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise”

Heather MacDonald:

The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

Thus forewarned, the reader plunges into a thicket of social-justice maxims: physicians must “confront inequities and dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression, as well as embed racial justice and advance equity within and across all aspects of health systems.” The country needs to pivot “from euphemisms to explicit conversations about power, racism, gender and class oppression, forms of discrimination and exclusion.” (The reader may puzzle over how much more “explicit” current “conversations” about racism can be.) We need to discard “America’s stronghold of false notions of hierarchy of value based on gender, skin color, religion, ability and country of origin, as well as other forms of privilege.”

A key solution to this alleged oppression is identity-based preferences throughout the medical profession. The AMA strategic plan calls for the “just representation of Black, Indigenous and Latinx people in medical school admissions as well as . . . leadership ranks.” The lack of “just representation,” according to the AMA, is due to deliberate “exclusion,” which will end only when we have “prioritize[d] and integrate[d] the voices and ideas of people and communities experiencing great injustice and historically excluded, exploited, and deprived of needed resources such as people of color, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+, and those in rural and urban communities alike.”

Parental Authority Gets a Boost From Dobbs

Michael Toth:

In the ensuing decades, the high court reiterated the fundamental status of parental rights. In May v. Anderson (1953), the justices noted that a mother’s right to the “care, custody, management and companionship of her minor children” is an interest “far more precious” than any property right. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), they concluded that parental rights are firmly rooted in the “history and culture of Western civilization” and “established beyond debate.” And in Troxel v. Granville, decided in 2000, the Supreme Court invalidated a Washington law that empowered the state’s courts to disregard the views of custodial parents as to whether “third parties”—in this case grandparents—should have visitation rights to minor children. In an opinion for a four-justice plurality, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor emphasized that parental rights were “the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests,” dating back to Meyer and Pierce.

Even before Dobbs, federal judges were citing this line of cases in upholding recent parental-rights claims. In May, Judge Holly Teeter enjoined a Kansas school policy prohibiting teachers from revealing a transgender student’s “preferred first name and pronouns” when communicating with parents. Although the plaintiff in Ricard v. USD 475 was a teacher, Judge Teeter went out of her way to chastise the school’s intrusion on parental rights. Quoting Pierce and Troxell, she questioned why a school would even claim an “interest in withholding or concealing from the parents of minor children, information fundamental to a child’s identity, personhood, and mental and emotional well-being.”

Former Students Sue Columbia, Say They Were Misled By Misreporting Of Data That Inflated Its U.S. News Ranking

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf:

Columbia University faces twin lawsuits from two former students alleging the Ivy League institution broke a New York consumer protection law — and its contract with them — by submitting potentially false data to bolster its placement on U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges rankings.

One student, who remained anonymous in court filings, sued Tuesday, while the other, Ravi Campbell, filed a lawsuit in mid-July. Both argue students paid “a premium for tuition and other fees” but were deprived of the education Columbia claimed to offer when it submitted information for rankings about factors like student-to-faculty ratios and class sizes. They described Columbia’s alleged misreporting as false, immoral and unethical.

The anxious generation — what’s bothering Britain’s schoolchildren?

Lucy Kellaway:

In less than two weeks, 250,000 18-year-olds in England will turn up at school for one last time to collect a piece of paper on which three letters of the alphabet will be printed. These grades will sum up their academic achievement so far, will affect the rest of their education — and possibly the rest of their lives. Twenty-five of them will be students of mine. 

I don’t know how they’ll feel on the day, but I am full of doubt. Since last September I have done my best to teach them monopolistic competition, the Laffer curve and the rest of A-level economics. But have I given them the support they need in any broader sense? 

Across the country, these teenagers are probably the most fragile, inadequately prepared and unhappy group of Year 13 students ever to collect A-level results.

Prison Abolitionism and the Academy’s Decline

John McGinnis:

Defund the Police has become a political slogan of the left in cities across the country. But that mantra is a little timid compared to a new slogan that is taking hold among law professors: Abolish Prisons. This program is now regularly and seriously pressed in the academy’s most important law reviews. It is the subject of earnest discussion at conferences and faculty workshops across the nation. There is now a cottage industry of tenured professors who write about its nuances and more no doubt will soon secure tenure for doing so.

Its prominence and the arguments deployed its favor show the willingness of the legal academy and the intellectual class in general to tolerate foolish arguments so long as they conform to current fashions on the left. Rather than build a framework for incremental reform based on empirical evidence, such legal academics are now paid to engage in utopian—even nihilistic–rhetoric. It might be thought that these kinds of ideas—from abolishing prisons to defunding the police to eliminating standardized tests—mark a return to the radicalism of the 1960s.

But then the radicalism came from students against the establishment. Here the radicalism comes from the educational establishment itself. The better historical analogy is to nineteenth-century Russia. There the intelligentsia contained substantial radical elements, offering not to reform but to destroy the institutions of its society. Fyodor Dostoevsky memorably captured their perfervid meanderings in his great novel, The Possessed.

It is important to understand what prison abolitionism is not about to appreciate the significance of this becoming a serious topic in the law school world. Prison abolition does not argue for making prisons more humane. It does not suggest that they should become more effectively rehabilitative, returning people to a productive place in society. It does not argue for decreasing the prison population by further reducing the number of people imprisoned for non-violent crimes or for releasing prisoners as they age out of the likelihood of committing further crimes. These kind of incremental reforms may well be plausible schemes for social improvement, but they are anathema to many prison abolitionists. Such reforms represent the kind of cost-benefit analysis within the framework of the status quo that is wholly opposed to the spirit of destroying institutions.

Civics: Lobbying and legislation

Julia Rock:

The world’s largest private equity firm hired Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) son-in-law as a lobbyist at the same time Schumer announced a deal that guts Democrats’ long-promised plan to close a tax loophole enriching private equity moguls.

The hire spotlights the network of Schumer’s family and former staff with ties to the major companies with legislative business now before the upper chamber run by Schumer.

Indeed, Schumer’s relatives and former staffers are now lobbying for the Blackstone Group, Amazon, Intel, and Google, among other corporate giants — all of which have been lobbying on pending Senate legislation.

This session of Congress has, so far, been favorable to these companies. An antitrust bill designed to crack down on major tech companies still has not received its promised vote on the Senate floor — thanks to Schumer — and Intel stands to be the primary beneficiary of a subsidy package aimed at semiconductor companies that passed Congress in July.

Abolish the PhD

Device random:

Problem is, “graduate students” are not students. They are workers.

The bulk of the graduate “school” is research work. Graduate “students”, in fact, are the main workhorses of modern research. It gives pause that a large percentage of modern science is actually generated by the hands and brains of young unexperienced or semi-experienced “students” (see here for example). A quintessential requirement for successfully completing graduate “school” is to have published at least a peer-reviewed paper as a main author. (By the way, this means that the most important intellectual endeavour of humankind is literally in the hands of inexperienced, underpaid, unrecognized trainees.)

Mind you: this is not part-time work, or even standard 9-to-5. It is hard, continuous work, with weekends and nights spent in the lab or writing research papers (see e.g. here). Journals advise graduate students to work most weekends and long hours, because that’s how you succeed. (After all, having a shitty job is a privilege! The abovelinked article tells it with a straight face: “Those who stick with a career in science do so because, despite the relatively poor pay, long hours and lack of security, it is all we want to do.”)

Granted, in some jurisdictions, most notably United States, graduate “students” also follow university courses, especially in the first couple of years. All of them are also studying somehow, sure thing: they read papers and books that allow them to do their job. So does a tenured professor. The job of research involves studying, but this does not make them full-time students. It makes them workers that need to learn things, as most qualified workers do.

A large new study offers clues about how lower-income children can rise up the economic ladder.

David Leonhardt:

The study tries to quantify the effect in several ways. One of the sharpest, I think, compares two otherwise similar children in lower-income households — one who grows up in a community where social contacts mostly come from the lower half of the socioeconomic distribution, and another who grows up in a community where social contacts mostly come from the upper half.

The average difference between the two, in terms of their expected adult outcomes, is significant, the authors report. It’s the same as the gap between a child who grows up in a family that makes $27,000 a year and one who grows up in a family that makes $47,000.

The study is based on a dizzying amount of data, including the Facebook friendships of 72 million people. (You can explore the findings through these charts and maps from The Upshot.)

Robert Putnam — a political scientist who has long studied social interactions, including in his book “Bowling Alone” — said the study was important partly because it hinted at ways to increase upward mobility. “It provides a number of avenues or clues by which we might begin to move this country in a better direction,” he said.

Civics: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum cryptography: Announcing my second lawsuit against the U.S. government. #nsa #nist #des #dsa #dualec #sigintenablingproject #nistpqc #foia

Cr,yp.to

NSA’s policy decision to sabotage public cryptographic standards. In 1968, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) “went to NSA for help”, in the words of an internal NSA history book. Work by journalists over several years forced NSA to release the relevant portions of the book in 2013, and before that smaller portions in 2008 and 2009.

NBS was an agency inside the U.S. Department of Commerce, another part of the U.S. government. Later NBS was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The reason NBS went to NSA is that NBS had decided to develop a U.S. government encryption standard.

According to the same history book, this triggered an internal debate within NSA, culminating in NSA deciding to manipulate public standards to make sure they were “weak enough” for NSA to break them:

Narrowing the encryption problem to a single, influential algorithm might drive out competitors, and that would reduce the field that NSA had to be concerned about. Could a public encryption standard be made secure enough to protect against everything but a massive brute force attack, but weak enough to still permit an attack of some nature using very sophisticated (and expensive) techniques?

NSA then worked with NBS and IBM’s Walter Tuchman on the design of what later became the Data Encryption Standard (DES):

NSA gave Tuchman a clearance and brought him in to work jointly with the Agency on his Lucifer modification … The relationship between NSA and NBS was very close. NSA scientists working the problem crossed back and forth between the two agencies, and NSA unquestionably exercised an influential role in the algorithm.

Back in the 1970s, Tuchman and NSA told a completely different story to the public. For example, regarding accusations that IBM and NSA had “conspired”, Tuchman told an interviewer “We developed the DES algorithm entirely within IBM using IBMers. The NSA did not dictate a single wire!”

Fit to Print? UNC’s Settlement with Nikole Hannah-Jones is Bad News

Phillip Magness:

One last thing. UNC did the right thing in offering her the job without tenure. There are many professors who are not academically qualified but who nonetheless qualify for a teaching professorship on the strength of a career of solid, interesting work. These faculty, commonly called professors of practice, raise no eyebrows whatsoever. Given her work history, such an offer would have been exactly the right kind for UNC to make to Hannah-Jones. If at some point down the line her demonstrated research output and classroom experience warranted a merit-based promotion, she could have been given the opportunity to go through the same tenure-review process as any other faculty member. Instead, she demanded the privilege of sidestepping the normal rules and procedures of academic promotion by threatening to unleash a lawsuit and a Twitter mob against the university.

And as galling as it is to see Nikole Hannah-Jones try to weasel her way into an unearned tenured professorship, there is one thing that is even more galling: She hasn’t published a single piece of journalism in the New York Times, her other full-time employer, in over two years. Maybe the Times is on to her. They claim to publish all the news that’s fit to print, after all.

Civics: Domestic Political Surveillance: How Deep Is DoD Involvement?

Patrick Eddington:

Federal players involved in the surveillance included Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the DEA. But one particular US government department’s involvement sparked even greater concern: the Department of Defense.

It’s been just less than two years ago that an United States Air Force Inspector General (USAF IG) report on the use of National Guard RC-26B surveillance aircraft against protesters was made public. The propellor driven, twin engine aircraft has been in US military service for many years as an intelligence collection platform, which is precisely the role in which it was used to track Americans engaged in marches and rallies after Floyd’s murder. The USAF IG’s June 2020 report on the RC-26B incidents was contradictory in terms of exactly how much potentially personally identifying data on protesters might have been collected and shared with federal, state, or local law enforcement.

The USAF IG report claimed (pp. 1–2) that “The sensors on the RC-26B can only collect infrared and electro‑optical imagery, and this imagery was not capable of identifying distinguishing personal features of individuals.” Yet deeper in the report (p. 21), the investigators conceded that “Although it is difficult in an urban environment, it appears it would be possible to connect activities to an individual. One witness described developing a ‘pattern of life’ which is a term‐​of‐​art in intelligence practice for following a person or object to discern patterns that allow forecasts of movements of that person or object…That requires some amount of discernibility among objects. For instance, a flight could observe suspicious activity, follow the person, and law enforcement on the ground could be vectored by a control center or by a law enforcement officer on‐​board to the individual….It is important to emphasize here, though, that there is no evidence that such a risk manifested in any of these RC-26B flights.”

Yet a National Guard Bureau white paper on RC-26B capabilities notes that “RC-26B records evidence‐​quality full motion video, and high resolution still frame imagery for use by the law enforcement community, host nations, and other government agencies.” And as the USAF IG report itself noted (p. 50), a plan to use a Phoenix‐​based RC-26B to collect full motion video on protesters to “deter planned/​unplanned demonstrations, protests or looting” did not go as planned because of software compatibility issues between the RC-26B and the Phoenix Multi‐​Agency Coordination Center (MACC). The USAF IG report described the Arizona National Guard operations plan’s counterprotest language as “in‐​artfully worded,” it conceded that “Deterring protests and demonstrations, assuming they are lawful, is not consistent with constitutional rights.” In fact, planning a military operation to disrupt First Amendment protected protests was, in fact, a violation of the rights of Phoenix protesters — contrary to the USAF IG’s assertions at the time.

There are good reasons to question the thoroughness of the USAF IG’s investigation and conclusions in this case, as the Defense Department and its components have a history of spying on domestic protesters.

Three ways L.A. schools are trying to get ahead of chronic absenteeism

Rebecca Katz:

Faced with a crisis of chronically absent students last academic year, Los Angeles County education officials have spent the summer training workers to connect with families so children return to class next month.    

Teachers and social workers have been learning to spot mental health issues; and help parents find resources such as daycare so older siblings can return to school.  

Last year, the number of chronically absent students in the LA Unified School District was stunningly high. 

More than half of all L.A. Unified students — over 200,000 kids — were chronically absent last year. Chronically absent students miss more than 9% of the school year.

In the spring, L.A. Unified superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged to personally follow 30 chronically absent students. Last month at a conference in Orlando, Florida, Carvalho said 10 of the 30 students were at home with no parents. “No adult was caring for them,” he said. 

Chronically absent students have had to stay home with their siblings, get jobs, or simply cannot find transportation to school. Now, Carvalho estimated that tens of thousands of students are not enrolled for school at all this year.

Carvalho told the Los Angeles Times that the chronic absenteeism rates were “exceedingly high.”

Civics: curious legacy media practices

Erik Hoel:

Their refusal to link or cite or provide any outside reference anywhere that might take you off their website means you never know where any fact they give you comes from—and without its origins, you can’t assess its veracity. Like:

Says who? Is this study 5 years old? 10? This year? No one can ever know, because where this is coming from is completely opaque.

How to Use an iPad as a Secure Calling and Messaging Device

Yawnbox:

Do this all before setting up your AppleID, and before connecting to any network of any kind. Again: DO NOT connect to any network – Bluetooth or Wi-Fi unless steps 1-5 are complete.

Note: if you are adapting this guide using an iPhone or iPad with cellular, remove the SIM card before powering on the device. Ideally this would be a brand new device having never been connected to a network.

Princeton professor Kevin Kruse accused of plagiarism in Cornell dissertation, ‘surprised’ by lack of citation

Amy Ciceu and Annie Rupertus:

Kruse holds a reputation as a renowned left-leaning professor and “history’s attack dog,” as he was once termed by The Chronicle of Higher Education, with a long track record of taking to platforms like Twitter to correct common misinterpretations of American history by conservative and other political commentators. As a scholar of 20th-century American history, Kruse has written books on religious nationalism, urban and suburban history, and the Civil Rights Movement. He has served as a professor at the University since 2000, most recently teaching a lecture on U.S. history from 1920 to 1974 as well as a seminar on the political history of civil rights.

Several conservative critics, including Princeton University student Abigail Anthony ’23, have argued that the University’s seeming inaction on Kruse’s alleged plagiarism stands in stark contrast to what some have criticized as the unjust termination of former classics professor Joshua Katz this past May. 

During the spring of 2022, the University dismissed Katz following an internal finding that Katz “misrepresented facts” during a 2018 investigation into a relationship he had with a student, discouraged the alumna from participating in said investigation, and tried to prevent her from seeking mental health care when she was a student, according to the University. His defenders have claimed the dismissal was retribution for a controversial column Katz wrote for Quillette in July 2020 in which he opposed a faculty letter on racial equity and labeled a now-inactive student group, the Black Justice League, a “small local terrorist organization.”

Civics: “a moralist who appealed to man’s worst impulse: envy”

C Bradley Thompson:

The political goal of communism is to annihilate freedom in all realms of life—economic, social, and intellectual. By philosophic design, Marxism in power must always use force to achieve its ends. Anygovernment that expropriates and redistributes private property, any government that seeks to control an entire economy, any government that violates the rights of its citizens on a daily basis, anygovernment that seeks to reconstitute human nature will and must use force as a matter of course. Thus, the theory of socialism necessitates the use of coercive force in practice.

The fact of the matter is that the Marxist ideal necessarily leads to censorship, secret police, reeducation camps, Gulags, and genocide in practice. Its violent and bloody history is evident for all to see. Marxian socialism begins and ends with violence and destruction.

Economically, Marxism seeks to destroy private property, the price system, the division of labor, the system of profit-and-loss, wage labor, competition, and material wealth. Politically, it seeks to destroy the rule of law, constitutionalism, separation of powers, and civil rights. Morally, it seeks to destroy individual rights, egoism, and all “bourgeois” virtues. Epistemologically, it seeks to destroy independent thought and free choice. Metaphysically, it seeks to change human nature itself. This is why the communist 1 percent (the true 1 percent) must use the terror apparatus of the State to force the 99 percent (the true 99 percent) to become something they are not and do not want to be. And if that does not work, the secular philosophy of brotherly love simply liquidates as much of the 99 percent as is necessary.

In the end, all decent people must see that Marxism is evil—absolutely evil. It is the wellspring of communist mass murder. 

The Marxist regimes responsible for genocide are not aberrations from “true Marxism” but are in fact its fulfillment and living embodiment. They represent what Marxism is and must be. Violence and terror are necessary instruments of the communist ideal. History demonstrates—and I hope this series of video essays have proved philosophically—that Marxism is a philosophy of mass murder, which is precisely what it has done wherever it has held power.

Marxism necessarily leads to Stalinism, to Maoism, to Pol-Potism to Kim Il Sungism, to Castroism, to dictatorship, to the police state, to terror, to show trials, to the gulag, to genocide, and finally to the grave. In other words, the problem with Marxism is . . . Marxism.

‘Vibrant-Campus-Community Coordinator’

Brianna Hatch

Calling all prospective student-affairs leaders: This small college is looking to hire someone who can restore “a vibrant student life” to its rural campus, post-pandemic.

All you need is (preferably) a master’s degree and an “energetic, dedicated, progressive, and student centered” attitude, and you could be the new vibrant-campus community-coordinator at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, at a salary of $39,000 per year. The college was founded in 1954 as part of the University of Virginia, to

Litigation on Race & Admissions

Jim Shelton:

Yale has joined a legal effort to uphold the longstanding ability of colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity as elements in a holistic review of applicants in the college admissions process.

In an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on Aug. 1, Yale added its voice in two cases involving, respectively, Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The court is expected to hear arguments in the cases, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. University of North Carolina et al, this fall.

Through those lawsuits, a group called Students for Fair Admissions seeks to eliminate consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions. The universities’ amicus filing opposes the suits.

Yale joined more than a dozen other universities in filing the brief, including Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and the University of Chicago.

“Today Yale joined peer institutions in stating emphatically that student diversity is essential to the missions of American universities and promotes educational excellence for all students,” President Peter Salovey said. “Our amicus curiae brief makes clear that the way we consider race and ethnicity as part of individualized applicant review is crucial to achieving a richly diverse academic environment that enhances students’ educational experiences and maximizes their future success. Yale stands firm in supporting universities’ established right to compose incoming classes that are diverse along many dimensions and in its commitment to enrolling students from all walks of life.”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Household debt tops $16 trillion for the first time,

Jeff Cox:

Household debt climbed past $16 trillion in the second quarter for the first time, as soaring inflation pushed up housing and auto balances, the New York Federal Reserve reported Tuesday.

The collective American IOU totaled $16.15 trillion through the end of June, good for a $312 billion — or 2% — increase from the previous quarter. Debt gains were widespread but particularly focused on mortgages and vehicle purchases.

“Americans are borrowing more, but a big part of the increased borrowing is attributable to higher prices,” the New York Fed said in a blog post accompanying the release.

Mortgage balances rose 1.9% for the quarter, or $207 billion, to about $11.4 trillion, even though the pace of originations moved lower. That annual increase marked a 9.1% gain from a year ago as home prices exploded during the pandemic era.

Credit card balances surged $46 billion in the three-month period and 13% over the past year, which Fed researchers said was the largest gain in more than 20 years. Non-housing credit balances increased 2.4% from the first quarter, the biggest gain since 2016.

The Dismantlers

Christopher Rufo:

According to the district, the gender binary has created an unjust society that distributes “heterosexual and cisgender privilege,” the sexual analog to the concept of “white privilege.” In the presentation, administrators explain that “a heterosexual/cisgender person automatically receives” this privilege, which “benefits members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups” and “results in institutional power” for straight men and women. Furthermore, the district claims, this sexual privilege is connected to a broader range of privileges and oppressions via the theory of intersectionality. “Racism, classism, heterosexism, etc. do not exist independently,” the presentation reads. “Multiple forms of discrimination interrelate creating a system of oppression.”

What is the solution? To dismantle “heteronormativity” and break the “gender binary.” Following the principles of queer theory, San Diego Unified has created a program of gender-identity instruction with the explicit goal of undermining the traditional conception of sex and promoting a new set of boutique sexual identities, such as “transgender,” “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” “asexual,” and “two-spirit,” that promise to disrupt the oppressive system of heteronormativity. A series of curriculum documents encourage students to study the basic tenets of queer theory and then examine photographs of gender-nonconforming role models, including a woman with a beard, a boy in a dress, a teenage girl with a “genderqueer” identity, a boy wearing a tiara, and an infant with a “gender neutral baby name.” In another document published by San Diego Unified, administrators celebrate “nonbinary identities,” arguing that there must be a “linguistic revolution to move beyond gender binaries,” including the adoption of the term “Latinx,” which “makes room for people who are trans, queer, agender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid.”

This ideology has already shifted the district’s sexual-education program. In a training produced jointly by San Diego Unified and Planned Parenthood, administrators walk teachers through the constellation of new identities and advise them to eliminate traditional language from their vocabulary. Men are to be called “people with a penis” and women are to be called “people with a vulva,” because, according to the district, some women can have penises and some men can have vulvas. Additionally, the district points out that teachers can assist in a child’s gender transition without notifying parents and that, under California law, minors of any age can consent to pregnancy testing, birth control, and abortion. Finally, the training program includes sample questions on sexuality that teachers might address in the classroom, including: “Is it okay to masturbate?”; “How do gay people have sex?”; “What is porn?”; and “What does semen taste like?” In a related presentation, the district also advises teachers on leading discussions on “how to use a condom” and how to engage in “safer oral sex” and “safer anal sex.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Kindergarteners learn that “person with a penis” may be a boy, but not necessarily, and a“person with a vulva,” may be a girl. Or not. The “gender spectrum” is “infinite,” like the number of stars in the sky.

By first and second grade, students that it is “not true” that there are “only two genders, girls and boys.” A lesson called “Our Names, Genders, and Pronouns” teaches six- to eight-year-olds they can be “boys,” “girls,” “cisgender,” “transgender,” or “nonbinary,” and experiment with pronouns such as “they/them” and “ze/zir.”

Three ways L.A. schools are trying to get ahead of chronic absenteeism

Rebecca Katz:

Faced with a crisis of chronically absent students last academic year, Los Angeles County education officials have spent the summer training workers to connect with families so children return to class next month.    

Teachers and social workers have been learning to spot mental health issues; and help parents find resources such as daycare so older siblings can return to school.  

Last year, the number of chronically absent students in the LA Unified School District was stunningly high. 

More than half of all L.A. Unified students — over 200,000 kids — were chronically absent last year. Chronically absent students miss more than 9% of the school year.

In the spring, L.A. Unified superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged to personally follow 30 chronically absent students. Last month at a conference in Orlando, Florida, Carvalho said 10 of the 30 students were at home with no parents. “No adult was caring for them,” he said. 

Chronically absent students have had to stay home with their siblings, get jobs, or simply cannot find transportation to school. Now, Carvalho estimated that tens of thousands of students are not enrolled for school at all this year.

Tracking down John Bell: how the case of the Oxford professor exposes a transparency crisis in government

Paul Thacker:

As testing and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine are hailed as UK pandemic successes, why won’t Oxford University or the government disclose the “long list” of financial interests of a high profile researcher at the centre of both? Paul D Thacker investigates

Since the covid-19 outbreak began early last year, John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, has held high profile roles in the UK government’s epidemic response while also working with AstraZeneca on the vaccine.

But both Oxford and the government have refused to disclose Bell’s financial interests after The BMJ filed freedom of information (FOI) requests. More alarmingly, it appears that the government is referring media enquiries about Bell through the Cabinet Office and is scrutinising a reporter for The BMJ as it has other reporters it finds troublesome.1The BMJ has been unable to gain either direct contact with Bell or contact through his employer, Oxford University, despite multiple attempts.

The Daily Mail reported on Bell’s financial ties in September 2020, noting that he had £773 000 (€893 000; $1.1m) worth of shares in the pharmaceutical company Roche.2 The newspaper published the story after Roche sold the government £13.5m of antibody tests, which Public Health England later found to be unreliable. Bell had headed the National Covid Testing Scientific Advisory Panel and chaired the government’s test approvals group, but he told the Mail that he had no role in the purchase and that he had disclosed to the government “a long list of my interests.” The government and Oxford University’s failure to be open about Bell’s financial ties make it impossible for the public to know what, if any, interests the professor has when influencing key decisions about which of the many covid-19 tests the UK should purchase.

“Parental Secrecy Policy”

Libertycenter:

This was the experience of our client’s daughter, who in just the sixth grade was recruited by teachers to join an “Equality Club” where she was told she may be transgender and bisexual—two terms that were foreign to her. Teachers encouraged Jessica Konen’s daughter to change her name to a boy’s name as an expression of her new identity and specifically instructed her not to tell her mother about her new identity because her mother couldn’t be “trusted.”

Then, they gave her articles—and required her to read them—on how to hide her transgenderism from her mother. Still without Jessica’s knowledge, teachers and administrators created a “Gender Support Plan” instructing faculty to refer to her daughter by a new name, male pronouns, and to let her use the unisex teachers’ restroom.

Parents absolutely have a right to know what is being taught in their kids’ school, especially with respect to sensitive issues like gender and sexuality. The Supreme Court has consistently held that parents have the right to direct the upbringing and education of their children. But parents are denied that right when activist teachers think they know better and intentionally hide information from moms and dads.

Taxpayer funded Cencorship: NIH edition

Paul Thacker:

After Tobias took the agency to court over the redactions, the NIH sent him a second production this April of the exact same 24 pages, with the exact same passages redacted. However this time, the NIH cited different legal claims for these same redactions—exemptions 4 and 5. In their letter to Tobias, the NIH explained:

Exemption 4 protects from disclosure trade secrets and commercial or financial information that is privileged and confidential. Exemption 5 permits the withholding of internal government records which are pre-decisional and contain staff advice, opinion, and recommendations.

Returning to the land: Mississippi edition

Érica Hensley and Teresa Ervin-Springs:

The farm had been in Kevin’s family for four generations; it’s a place he visited as a child, but he hadn’t exactly picked up the skills to be a farmer.

In June of 2016, as Kevin’s mother’s health failed, she transferred the property deed to him, as no other family members wanted anything to do with it. On a trip to the property soon after, Kevin and Teresa saw why. Everything on the grounds needed fixing: the grass was nearly 4-feet tall; there were two year’s worth of leaves piled up; and the house was in disrepair. The couple looked around and saw overgrown trees and broken windows. That night, the bugs were so loud Teresa called them “terrifying.”

“We were happier leaving than coming,” Kevin said. Though she never said why, Kevin’s mother still entrusted him with the deed despite no experience, or interest, in farming.

For the first six months, the couple toiled over what to do with the property. They considered selling it, but the land, and obligation to care for it, kept tugging at them.

They decided to make one more trip back, once the shock wore off, and something about the land—and more importantly, in them—shifted. Touring the tract with a forrester who taught them about native flora and fauna, the Springses witnessed what they couldn’t see the first time.

To prepare for life as farmers, they spent long hours on YouTube, read books, and attended food safety and farming conferences—in addition to countless field days and workshops focused on sustainable farming practices. They planned to take on this unknown territory one 100 x 100 foot plot at a time.

Taxpayer funded k-12 school funding changes in California

Lasherica Thornton:

If approved, Black students would get the funding starting the 2023-24 school year for being the lowest performing in English and math. Black students would continue to benefit from the funding until they reach the threshold of the highest performing student group. But if during that time, another student group slips to the bottom, that student group would also be eligible for the new funding. But that’s unlikely, Fortune said, as the achievement gap for Black students is likely to take years to correct. “Black students have been the lowest performing subgroup in this accountability system and in the previous accountability system,” Fortune said. “It takes a lot of effort to inch up.” With 67% of Black students not on reading level, that percentage would have to increase by at least 7.6% to close the achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students; by 32.2% to close the gap between Black and white students; and by 43.95% to meet the scores of Asian-American students, the highest-performing group. For math, the percentages are even higher.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/education-lab/article263953476.html#storylink=cpy

The unseen side of depopulation in Lithuania

Irma Janauskaitė & Jovita Gaižauskaitė:

Every year, the Lithuanian state sells hundreds of properties whose owners have passed away without any heirs. These include prime real estate in central Vilnius as well as low-value homes in the provinces. Part of the reason is Lithuania’s deteriorating demographic situation, says a researcher.

Miroslavas, an employee of the state property management fund Turto Bankas, shows around an apartment in one of Vilnius’ residential neighbourhoods. Its owner has recently passed away and, in the absence of a will and close relatives, it has been taken over by the state,

“The apartment is already being appraised,” he says.

The Lithuanian state thus “inherits” about 400 apartments, houses, garages, warehouses, garden sheds and other pieces of real estate every year. In one-third of the cases, the properties are co-owned with other people.

Mindaugas Sinkevičius, the head of Turto Bankas, says that such properties are usually located in the countryside, although occasionally he comes across some prime real estate.

Denied tenure at Harvard, fighting on

Sarah Brown:

Two and a half years ago, many professors wonderedjust how broken the tenure system must be if Lorgia García Peña wasn’t considered worthy.

García Peña, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child, was the only Black Latina scholar on the tenure track in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2019 her department committee unanimously recommended her for tenure, and the college-level appointments and promotions committee endorsed that decision. But once her case reached the administration, she was denied.

A firehose of sensitive data from your vehicle is flowing to a group of companies you’ve probably never heard of

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng

The Markup has identified 37 companies that are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data in an environment with few regulations governing its sale or use.

While many of these companies stress they are using aggregated or anonymized data, the unique nature of location and movement data increases the potential for violations of user privacy.

“but the rate drops to 60 percent among Black children in this age range”

Perry Stein:

D.C. students who are 12 and older must be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this upcoming academic year.

The youth vaccine mandate in D.C. is among the strictest in the nation, according to health experts, and is being enacted in a city with wide disparities in vaccination rates between its White and Black children. Overall, about 85 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 15 have been vaccinated against the virus, but the rate drops to 60 percent among Black children in this age range.

Federalized student loans: billions in lost revenue due to flaws in budget estimates.

Meghan Brink:

Since 1997, changes to the federal student loan program, including programs that set certain borrowers on a path toward forgiveness, new repayment methods and the pause on student loan payments that was enacted at the start of the pandemic, have driven a 33 percent increase in the cost of the student loan program, totaling $102 billion.

By far, the largest change that contributed to this increase was the pause on federal student loan payments and programmatic changes enacted throughout the pandemic and other pandemic-related loan forgiveness programs, the report shows. In total, these changes drove an increase of over $107 billion between the years 2020 and 2021.

Other changes included the Taxpayer-Teacher Protection Act of 2004, which increased the amount of loan forgiveness that certain teachers could be eligible for, resulting in a $48 million increase; the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, which re-established models for income-driven repayment (IDR) and PSLF, resulting in a $4 billion increase; and the Revised Pay as You Earn plan, a form of IDR, resulting in a $9.9 billion increase. In total, these changes have accounted for a 6 percent increase, totaling $20 billion.

Dallas school safety plans

Talia Richmond:

The district is continually training employees on how to respond to threats.

DISD employees and members of the Dallas Police Department and Dallas Fire-Rescue recently went through active-shooter training at Thomas A. Edison Middle Learning Center in West Dallas. The training, which was conducted mostly by Dallas police SWAT officers, included classroom, physical and tactical instruction.

“We will continue to do that,” Dallas ISD Chief of Police John Lawton said.

Elizalde said the district is also stepping up training for hall monitors.

She added that various departments are also going over communication strategies. The district is aware, she said, that if there’s confusion about who takes command, and when, “we lose precious time.”

Staff must also emphasize to teenage students that it’s important not to prop open doors for friends or visitors.

There is no substitute, Elizalde said, for teaching people to share information about potential problems.

Taxpayer Subsidized Universities are out of touch…

Nick Burns:

It’s that the campus setup makes it easy for them to forget that reasonable people often don’t share their outlook.

Student bodies and faculties have grown more diverse in recent decades, but that shouldn’t fool us into thinking elite universities have become microcosms of society: The highly educated are far more liberal than average Americans. The divide isn’t just political: Whatever their socioeconomic backgrounds, students and professors have daily routines that are very different from those of lawyers, shopkeepers or manual laborers — and that shapes their worldviews.

Life at a university with a dominant central campus can also narrow students’ views on the world, especially at colleges where most undergraduates live on campus. Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean.

It also takes away the chance to encounter people with different roles in society, from retail workers to landlords — interactions that would remind them they won’t be students forever and open questions about the social relevance of the ideas they encounter in the university.

Community outreach programs can help broaden students’ outlook, but the better approach would be to configure the physical footprint of universities in a way that makes interactions with surrounding communities natural.

By and large, urban state universities like Rutgers University’s Newark campus have done a much better job integrating with their environments than elite private universities — with the possible exception of N.Y.U. But colleges in smaller cities, towns and suburbs could also do more to integrate their physical presences more seamlessly with the surrounding environment. Both university and community have a lot to gain.

Some have already started breaking down the boundaries between town and gown out of financial necessity. After reopening in 2011 after three years of closure, Antioch College, a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio (population 3,972 in 2020), built new residential buildings on disused parts of its campus, offering residents access to college events and the library.

Yet, taxpayers subsidize the Ivy League:

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

The billion-dollar industry helping students at major Australian universities cheat online assessments

Mario Christodoulou

And in the post-COVID era of online assessments, he has some powerful new allies — billion-dollar companies which have been accused of being industrialised cheating factories.

They market themselves as study aids, but they profit enormously from helping students cheat, and they boomed during the pandemic with the shift to online learning.

In a single month in 2020, cheating websites received around 7.3 million clicks from Australian students, an increase of 50 per cent on 2019 figures, according to Australia’s academic integrity regulator.

Since then those monthly hits have fallen back but still remain above pre-pandemic levels at 5.9 million hits.

And one of the biggest players is a company called Chegg.

Impact of College-Level Indoctrination on K-12 Education

Will Flanders & Dylan Palmer :

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a much greater focus by parents and concerned citizens on what is being taught in schools around the country. For the first time, many parents were exposed to what was being taught to their children, and they didn’t like what they found. Horror stories abound, from students being taught that conservatives are “ignorant and poor” at a high school in Sparta, Wisconsin,1 to school districts around the country using the 1619 Project as a means of teaching American history.2

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s previous work on this topic3 has shown that these are not isolated incidents. Instead, this sort of politically divisive rhetoric in K-12 schools is quite pervasive, from the biggest cities, to the smallest towns. While we can document that these problems are occurring in schools, the question remains: how did we reach this situation?

In this policy brief, we will begin to answer this question by showing that Wisconsin’s teachers don’t always push a liberal agenda purely of their own volition. Instead, we will show that the controversial material spilling into schools today is the result of an indoctrination process that begins when teachers are enrolled in universities around the state. We use the word “indoctrination,” here, and throughout this brief, not solely because future teachers are presented with politically charged materials during their college educations, but because these materials are presented from only one political perspective, and in a manner that preempts and forecloses healthy debate and conversation about these contested political issues.

For this report, we collected syllabi from courses for education majors at all of the University of Wisconsin’s four-year public colleges. In 2020, the University of Wisconsin System graduated approximately 2,000 students majoring in various education programs.4

While we cannot gather data from private universities in the state via open records requests, we can safely say that the schools from which we have gathered data represents courses taken by roughly 80% of all education graduates in the state for recent years.*

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

L.A. Unified estimates tens of thousands of students are missing from back-to-school rosters

Howard Blume:

Two weeks before school starts, Los Angeles Unified Supt. Alberto M. Carvalho estimates that between 10,000 and 20,000 students are not enrolled or stopped attending last year, with the problem most pronounced in the youngest grades.

As school officials work to identify and enroll the children, the district also is scrambling to fill about 900 classroom teaching positions and to find more than 200 bus drivers. Carvalho said Friday he is optimistic that most of the vacancies will be filled by the Aug. 15 start of school.

The superintendent’s estimate of missing students is based on outreach efforts by district staff to families and on assessments from outside groups.

Civics: Litigation over Google Censorship Policies

Glenn Greenwald:

Attempts to find Rumble videos through Google searches are purposely thwarted by burying Rumble’s videos and instead redirecting the user to YouTube, the lawsuit alleges. Google’s “chokehold on search is impenetrable, and that chokehold allows it to continue unfairly and unlawfully to self-preference YouTube over its rivals, including Rumble, and to monopolize the online video platform market.” I often am unable to find my own videos using Google’s search engines even when I recall the title of the video more or less perfectly, and have frequently heard the same complaint from viewers.

Outdated CDC guidance may lead to a fourth year of disrupted schooling in some districts

Anthony La Mesa:

The agency still recommends close contact testing and quarantines.

With many children having experienced catastrophic learning loss during the pandemic, it is essential that the upcoming school year be as smooth as possible, but some districts will continue to apply CDC close contact testing and quarantine guidance that could lead to healthy children missing weeks of classroom instruction. One of those districts is metro Atlanta’s City Schools of Decatur.

It’s mind-boggling that Yale law students can’t be left to their own devices writing on an email list.

Aaron Siburium:

In the days before email, students and faculty would post their views on a bulletin board, nicknamed the “Wall,” in the law school’s main hallway. That system, which Yale Law School is bringing back, “provided a healthy reminder that human beings are on the receiving end of the messages people send,” Gerken said. “Indeed, sometimes students would run into the very people with whom they were debating and speak face-to-face.”

Big Hospitals Provide Skimpy Charity Care—Despite Billions in Tax Breaks

Anna Wilde Mathews, Tom McGinty and Melanie Evans:

Nonprofit hospitals get billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for providing support to their communities. A Wall Street Journal analysis shows they are often not particularly generous.

These charitable organizations, which comprise the majority of hospitals in the U.S., wrote off in aggregate 2.3% of their patient revenue on financial aid for patients’ medical bills. Their for-profit competitors, a category including publicly traded giants such as HCA Healthcare Inc., wrote off 3.4%, the Journal found in an analysis of the most-recent annual reports hospitals file with the federal government.

Monkeypox Is About to Become the Next Public Health Failure

Scott Gottlieb:

The failures that got us here fit a now familiar pattern.

Early on, similar to the early days of Covid, testing access for monkeypox was limited, despite ample evidence that monkeypox was spreading in the United States. The Strategic National Stockpile was meant as a hedge against viral contingencies, but when the coronavirus struck, it lacked adequate supplies of testing equipment, ventilators and masks. With monkeypox, the government hadn’t stockpiled enough of the only vaccine, Jynneos, that was indicated for prevention of the disease and considered safe for use. The United States had on hand fewer than 2,400 doses in mid-May, mostly as a hedge against the risk of smallpox, which was the vaccine’s other indication.

UNC Chapel Hill Student Gov’t Cuts Off Funding & Contracting to Anyone Who “Advocates” for Limits on Abortion

Eugene Volokh:

The student government president’s executive orderprovides, among other things,

That it shall be prohibited for the Undergraduate Student Government Executive Branch to contract or expend funds to any individual, business, or organization which actively advocates to further limit by law access to reproductive healthcare, including, though not limited to, contraception and induced abortions.

This seems to me a clear violation of the First Amendment:

  1. Under Board of Regents v. Southworth (2000), public university student government are generally subject to the same First Amendment limits imposed on public entities more generally.
  2. When it comes to generally available student group funding, Southworth and Rosenberger v. Rector (1995) make clear that the government can’t discriminate based on the student group’s viewpoint.
  3. And when it comes to contracting, Board of Comm’rs v. Umbehr (1996) holds that the government generally can’t discriminate based on contractors’ ideological expression, either.

Of course the same would be true of a public university’s cutting off generally available student funding or contracting to “individual[s], business[es], or organization[s]” that express pro-abortion-rights views or pro-Israel views or anti-Israel views or what have you. The Free Speech Clause generally doesn’t stop government actors from conditioning funding on groups’ nonspeech conduct, such as on the groups not refusing to do business with Israel or not excluding military recruiters (Rumsfeld v. FAIR (2006)) or providing funding for abortions or contraception for their employees. But the government may not condition funding on groups’ refraining from expressing anti-Israel, anti-military, or anti-abortion views.

Information intolerance at the taxpayer funded CDC

Joseph Simonson:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coordinated with social media companies and Google to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a trove of internal communicationsobtained by America First Legal and shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon.

Over the course of at least six months, starting in December 2020, CDC officials regularly communicated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over “vaccine misinformation.” At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as “example posts.”

In one email to a CDC staffer, a Twitter employee said he is “looking forward to setting up regular chats” with the agency. Other emails show the scheduling of meetings with the CDC over how to best police alleged misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Although many of the posts flagged by the CDC contained false information about the COVID-19 vaccines, the efforts to police misinformation also resulted in mistaken acts of censorship. An April 2021 email from a CDC staffer to Facebook states that the “algorithms that Facebook and other social media networks are apparently using to screen out posting by sources of vaccine misinformation are also apparently screening out valid public health messaging, including [Wyoming] Health communications.”