Astro.caltech.edu

Palomar Observatory is among the most iconic scientific facilities in the world, and a crown jewel in the research traditions of Caltech. Conceived of nearly 100 years ago, the observatory has been in continuous scientific operation since the mid-30s, and remains productive and relevant today. Palomar is most directly the vision of George Ellery Hale (1868–1938). In a tour-de-force effort framed by the challenges of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Hale and a dedicated group of astronomers, engineers, technicians, and builders secured funding, designed the telescopes and site, and created the Observatory in much the same state as it exists today.

George Ellery Hale was the person most responsible for the building of Palomar Observatory. A graduate of MIT and a founder of Caltech, in 1928 he secured a grant of $6 million from the Rockefeller Foundation for the fabrication of a 200-inch reflecting telescope.^[1] During the 1930s, he assembled a remarkable team of engineers and designers from academia and industry. Under his direction, these people set to work on the mirror, on the mounting, and on the dome and its support facilities on Palomar Mountain. A triumph of innovation, insight, persistence, and precision the telescope was dedicated in June 1948 ten years after Hale’s death.^[2] This is the Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory, an instrument that after many decades of service continues to play a leading role in the advancement of astronomy and astrophysics.

Kashmir Hill & David McCabe:

The lawsuit against Meta is continuing. It has already had one effect for Texan consumers: They must now give Meta-owned Instagram permission to analyze their facial features to use certain face filters that can transform their appearance into, for example, a puppy or a googly-eyed monster.

The legal complaint against Google was also filed in the run-up to an election. Mr. Paxton will face a Democratic challenger, Rochelle Garza, in the general election next month.

“Google has now spent years unlawfully capturing the faces and voices of both nonconsenting users and nonusers throughout Texas — including our children and grandparents, who simply have no idea that their biometric information is being mined for profit by a global corporation,” read the complaint against Google, which was filed in district court in Midland County.

Dallas Morning News:

The superintendent job has always required political finesse but is now consumed by deeply divisive culture war fights on top of major classroom challenges, such as teacher fatigue and widespread student learning losses due to the pandemic.

Many superintendents increasingly find themselves under attack as local and national conservative groups target school board seats, and communities get riled up over book bans and how history is taught. So why would anyone want the job?

Scott Girard:

In reading, Wisconsin eighth graders saw their average score drop by five points compared to a three-point drop for the nation. Wisconsin students hadn’t had an average score this low in NAEP data going back to 1998.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Alex Tabarrok and James Lee:

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

Alex Washburne:

Drs. Valentin Bruttel, Tony VanDongen and I wrote a preprint finding evidence of a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. The online discussion of our paper ranged from uncritical support to critical consideration to every manner of insult and accusation, including ableism, scientists claiming I don’t have a PhD, and more. This letter aims to clarify who I am, what colleagues and I have done in the preprint, and what my intentions are.

Kristen Graham:

After months spent analyzing the Philadelphia School District from top to bottom, Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s transition team presented its report to the public and school board Thursday — with 91 short- and long-term recommendations on how to fix the system.

The 100-member committee — under the leadership ofCommunity College of Philadelphia President Donald “Guy” Generals and Andrea Custis, a former Verizon executive and president of the Philadelphia Urban League — studied academics, operations, and equity, among other issues.

Though the 114,000-student district has strengths — namely, a return to fiscal stability after a time when officials had to borrow to pay bills, and an end of the state’s takeover of the school system — the team also identified significant challenges.

Tops is academics: Student achievement is consistently low, and relatively flat on local, state and national assessments. Citywide, just 36% of district students meet state standards in reading and 22% in math. Moreover, the district “lacks a clear theory of action on how it expects to raise student achievement. When initiatives are launched, they rarely go to scale as they come from separate departments in the central office and simply layer on initiative after initiative.”

Arvind Narayanan:

The latest AI-related alarm: students around the world are using AI models such as GPT-3 to write essays, and getting good grades on them. 

I don’t condone cheating. But I think the availability of text generators will force changes to education which, while painful, will prove to be positive.

Consider the threat once posed by the calculator to homework that involved arithmetic. In some cases, the point of such exercises is to learn arithmetic or mathematical principles through practice. Teachers mostly shifted those exercises to the classroom, and prohibited the use of calculators in that setting.

In other cases, homework involved tedious arithmetic, but this was entirely incidental to the learning goals of the exercise (which might be about, say, gravity). After initial reluctance, teachers recognized that it was pointless to make students do these manually. Back when I was in high school, we were forced to use log tables out of the mistaken belief that there is pedagogical value in doing tedious calculations by hand. Mercifully, log tables have now joined the abacus.

Brian Krebs:

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazoncomes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

Jay Pinho is a developer who is working on a product that tracks company data, including hiring. Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor daily employee headcounts at several dozen large organizations, and last week he noticed that two of them had far fewer people claiming to work for them than they did just 24 hours previously.

Pinho’s screenshot below shows the daily count of employees as displayed on Amazon’s LinkedIn homepage. Pinho said his scraper shows that the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, a 33 percent drop:

John Hindraker:

Minnesota, as in other states, concerned parents have banded together to try to wrest control of the public schools away from teachers’ unions, in order to improve the quality of education and to stop left-wing indoctrination. Earlier this year, we started a 501(c)(4) organization called the Minnesota Parents Alliance to lead those efforts in our state. 

Today the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune both posted stories on the MPA and Minnesota’s school board races. The Pioneer Press article is long, and is titled “Social issues bring wave of conservative candidates to MN school board races.” Is educational quality now a “social issue”? 

The Pioneer Press piece is reasonably fair and includes an account of MPA’s founding:

In Minnesota last year, the Center of the American Experiment — a prominent think tank and member of the State Policy Network, which promotes conservative positions like an opposition to public-sector unions and support for voucher laws that help parents redirect tax dollars toward private school tuition — toured the state to fight against an “alarming” rewrite of the K-12 social studies standards for Minnesota schools.

“We filled rooms all across the state,” said the Center’s spokesman, Bill Walsh.

All true so far.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Will Flanders and Dylan Palmer:

How does Wisconsin stack up against other states in K-12 education? An eye-popping list from U.S. News and World Report ranked the Badger State K-12 system as the 8th best in the country.i But this rosy picture contradicts other key indicators that Wisconsin students are falling behind. So what’s going on? To get a clear look at public education in the Badger Sate requires a dive into the details.
Key Takeaways

• The academic proficiency data used by U.S. News & World Report to rank Wisconsin 8th is from the 2018-19 school year. Notably, this school year featured a transition in the governor’s mansion and was a full year before the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on Wisconsin schools.

• A sophisticated analysis of Wisconsin’s academic proficiency from 2018-19 puts Wisconsin in the middle of the pack. An Urban Institute analysis that controls for demographic factors finds Wisconsin falls out of the top ten in both math and reading on the NAEP scores.

• Academic proficiency has fallen significantly in Wisconsin since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020. Forward Exam scores fell by about 4 percentage points in reading and 5 percentage points in math.

• Chronic absenteeism in Wisconsin schools reached new heights in the most recent school year. The share of students not regularly showing up for class rose to 16% in 2020-21 school year—the highest in five years.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt:

For the past two years, families across the country have been dealing with regular shutdowns of in-person learning in their schools. While people have speculated on what the effects of losing face-to-face class time would be on academic progress, we are beginning to have the data necessary to determine the extent of these effects. Recent data from Wisconsin allows us to conduct one of the first comprehensive analyses of this question.

Using newly available data from the 2021 administration of the state’s Forward Exam, combined with data gathered on school closures at the district level from the Fall of 2020, we describe the nature and impacts of school closure. The key findings of this research include:

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in Fall 2020.
• Districts with a higher percentage of African American students were more likely to remain closed in fall 2020. Our results show that the higher the percentage of African American students in a district, the more likely that district was to remain shut down for in-person learning.
• Districts with a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students saw larger performance declines. A district with 100% low-income students would be expected to have proficiency declines of more than 6% in math and 7% in ELA relative to a school with no low-income students independent of closure status.
• More than 257,000 students in Wisconsin spent at least part of the 2020-21 school year without in-person learning. This represents approximately 30% of all students in the state.

Jeffrey Carter:

Assume that nothing nefarious was happening and the husband was a person working for a hedge fund. Well, then one of the two people in the relationship has to make a choice. Work for the hedge fund or quit while your partner takes a gig with the CFTC. 

The integrity of the US capitalistic market system is more important that this couple’s freedom to choose their career. There is no free lunch.

I had a very wealthy friend that wanted to work for a Presidential administration. They couldn’t get through the “conflicts” part of assessing their background because they had a lot of investments. The committee taking a look was afraid that person could make a decision that would unfairly advantage one of the investments, even if it wasn’t intentional. 

Yet, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.” 

Prior to the Covid information hitting the market, Washington DC people made incredible trades with incredible timing. 

Disgusting. Actually, beyond disgusting. Especially given the government response. Think there was an extra incentive to make a policy decision or public announcement one way or another with money on the line?

David Lat:

For the past year or so, I’ve been speaking all over the country about free-speech problems at American law schools. The institution that figures most prominently in my talks is Yale Law School—partly because it’s the longtime #1 law school and top producer of law professors and deans, making it a trendsetter in legal academia; partly because it’s the school I know the best, as my alma mater; and partly because it has had more high-profile controversies over free speech and cancel culture than any other school. If you look at the most popular stories in the history of Original Jurisdiction—which will celebrate its second anniversary in December, so thank you for your support—six out of the top ten posts are about Yale Law.

During the always vigorous question-and-answer sessions at my talks, I’m frequently asked: will things improve? A positive person by nature, I say yes, but this was often more wish than prediction.

Now I feel a stronger basis for optimism—and one thing giving me hope is recent news out of Yale Law. Some of this news emerged last week, when I was away on vacation, so I’ll double back to cover it. But I’ll begin with previously unreported news.

In the wake of the announcement of Judge James Ho (5th Cir.) that he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, a boycott joined so far by Judge Lisa Branch (11th Cir.) and a dozen other judges who wanted to remain nameless, Dean Heather Gerken has been quietly reaching out to prominent conservative jurists. Her message: YLS is deeply committed to free speech and intellectual diversity, it has taken concrete steps to support that commitment, and as dean, she welcomes hearing from judges about what else can be done to promote and protect academic freedom at Yale Law—including Judges Ho and Branch, the progenitors of the YLS boycott.1

The rest of the judges’ four-page letter—which I urge you to read in full, along with Judge Ho’s forthcoming article in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, Agreeing to Disagree: Restoring American by Resisting Cancel Culture—is an eloquent defense of free speech, open discourse, and civil disagreement. The last two pages respond to a statement by Dean Gerken that was posted on the YLS website last Wednesday, October 12, A Message to Our Alumni on Free Speech at Yale Law School (“Alumni Message”). So I’ll walk you through that statement now, offering reporting and opinion of my own, as well as comments from the Ho/Branch letter. (The Alumni Message was previously covered by Karen Sloan and Nate Raymond of Reuters, Brad Kutner of the National Law Journal, and Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal.)

Sai Medi:

The whole proposition was and still is so wild to me: self-organizing, distinct little molecular legos, which fit together a certain way and form sequences corresponding to another set of building blocks, proteins, which then go on to construct, well, everything. I mean literally everything. I’m talking about DNA. 

The early 2000s was like a golden age in genomics research. I was getting my undergraduate degree when the Human Genome Project had just wrapped up a few years earlier. Some of it was done in my hometown, Houston, at Baylor College of Medicine. An offshoot of that was the HapMap project, which after sequencing many individuals of different ethnicities to find distinct inheritance patterns, created the concept of ‘haplotypes,’ referring to set of gene variants that tend to occur together. With the use of haplotypes, geneticists were able to trace human ancestry and understand specific inheritance patterns.

Ian Miller:

But a new paper out from one of the world’s leading experts confirms that they were off even more than we previously realized.

John Ioannidis is one of the nation’s leading public health experts, employed at Stanford University as Professor of Medicine in Stanford Prevention Research, of Epidemiology and Population Health,” as well as “of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science.”

You’d think that those impeccable qualifications and a track record of being one of the most published and cited scientists in the modern world would insulate him from criticism, but unfortunately that’s no longer how The Science™ works.

Ioannidis first drew the ire of The Keepers of The Science™ early in the outbreak, when he cautioned that society might be making tremendous decisions based on limited data that was of poor quality.

He also took part in the infamous seroprevalence study conducted in Santa Clara County, led by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. 

That examination, which looked at antibody prevalence in the San Jose area, came to the conclusion that COVID was already significantly more widespread by March and April 2020 than most people realized.

This had wide-ranging implications, but the most important revelation was that the estimates of COVID’s mortality rate used by “scientists” and the WHO were almost certainly much too high.

Oxford:

He maintains today’s findings point toward the connection between skills and place-bound institutions as enablers – even of remote work. People with access to specialised education, vocational training and local business opportunities – in other words urban dwellers – will be more likely to have in-demand, digital skills. They will find ample opportunities in the remote labour market. People who do not have the same access to enabling institutions – in other words, people in rural regions – tend not to have the most relevant digital skills. They will have a hard time finding good remote jobs.

Allison Garfield:

Eisberner, who was elected to the council in April and brought the change in the ordinance to the full council, has been going through the city’s ordinances and codes to bring them up to date. He noticed the ordinance technically prohibits a good-natured snowball fight between family members or friends.

Daniel Leonard:

As you may have noticed, mosquitoes don’t attack everyone equally. Scientists have known that the pests are drawn to people at varying rates, but they have struggled to explain what makes certain people “mosquito magnets” while others get off bite-free.

In a new paper published on October 18 in the journal Cell, researchers suggest that certain body odors are the deciding factor. Every person has a unique scent profile made up of different chemical compounds, and the researchers found that mosquitoes were most drawn to people whose skin produces high levels of carboxylic acids. Additionally, the researchers found that peoples’ attractiveness to mosquitoes remained steady over time, regardless of changes in diet or grooming habits.

“The question of why some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others—that’s the question that everybody asks you,” says study co-author Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist and mosquito expert at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rockefeller University. “My mother, my sister, people in the street, my colleagues—everybody wants to know.” That public interest is what drove Vosshall and her colleagues to design this study, she says.

Jill Barshay:

One college admissions officer at a large public university described how test-optional admissions had spurred more disagreements in his office. A third reader on an application was often called in to break a tie when one staffer said ‘yes’ and another said ‘no.’ Without SAT and ACT scores, he explained, the job of admitting students had become more subjective and more time-consuming. “I feel like everyone who reviews applications has their own perspective or opinion,” he said.

This sobering anecdote comes from a research project led by Kelly Slay, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been conducting in-depth interviews with admissions officers in 2022 to understand how the elimination of SAT and ACT testing requirements has been playing out inside colleges and universities. According to Slay, admissions officers often described a “chaotic” and “stressful” process where they lacked clear guidance on how to select students without test scores. Admissions officers at selective colleges were also “overwhelmed” by the volume of applicants that test-optional policies had unleashed.

“One of our key findings were the tensions that were emerging around these test optional policies,” said Slay. “There’s a struggle on how to implement them.”

Slay’s work gives us a rare, unvarnished glimpse inside college admissions offices. It’s especially significant now because a college admissions case is currently before the Supreme Court that could strike down affirmative action, a practice that gives preferences to groups that have been discriminated against. As colleges experiment with alternative solutions, these interviews help shed light on why test-optional policies haven’t been helpful for increasing diversity on college campuses.

National Geographic:

Three Inca mummies found near the lofty summit of in Volcán Llullaillaco Argentina were so well preserved that they put a human face on the ancient ritual of capacocha—which ended with their sacrifice.

Now the bodies of 13-year-old Llullaillaco Maiden and her younger companions Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl have revealed that mind-altering substances played a part in their deaths and during the year-long series of ceremonial processes that prepared them for their final hours.

Under biochemical analysis, the Maiden’s hair yielded a record of what she ate and drank during the last two years of her life. This evidence seems to support historical accounts of a few selected children taking part in a year of sacred ceremonies—marked in their hair by changes in food, coca, and alcohol consumption—that would ultimately lead to their sacrifice.

In Inca religious ideology, the authors note, coca and alcohol could induce altered states associated with the sacred. But the substances likely played a more pragmatic role as well, disorienting and sedating the young victims on the high mountainside to make them more accepting of their own grim fates.

Dan Lennington and Rick Esenberg

Standing rules are important guardrails for our separation of powers. Justice Scalia was concerned that Ms. Kelly’s injuries were too diffuse and too widely shared to constitute the type of injury that might count as a case or controversy.

But problems remain. What about cases in which a governmental policy will violate the Constitution in a way that harms many people similarly? What if the president decides to suspend collection of the income tax or announce a 40 percent increase in Social Security benefits? Standard doctrine is that no one is harmed by a benefit conferred on another. But even in the topsy-turvy world of the federal government, where we indulge the fiction that “no one” really pays for the spending of a trillion dollars, taxpayers are “really” harmed by large expenditures. The fact that many suffer the same injury makes it no less concrete or particularized.

So it is with Biden’s loan forgiveness. No one is hurt by the reduction in someone else’s debt. But many of us are harmed by another trillion dollars in debt which, notwithstanding the alchemists who run our government, will have to be paid for sooner or later.

David N. Figlio Cassandra M.D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more pre-program private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Based on current fertility rates and age structures, here are the largest declines in population expected by the UN from 2022 to 2100:

🇰🇷 South Korea –53%
🇺🇦 Ukraine –49%
🇨🇳 China –46%
🇨🇺 Cuba –42%
🇵🇱 Poland –42%
🇯🇵 Japan –41%
🇬🇷 Greece –39%
🇮🇹 Italy –38%
🇹🇭 Thailand –38%

— Edouard Mathieu (@redouad) October 21, 2022

choose life.

commentary

Tyler Cowen:

Children’s self-regulation abilities are key predictors of educational success and other life outcomes such as income and health. However, self-regulation is not a school subject, and knowledge about how to generate lasting improvements in self-regulation and academic achievements with easily scalable, low-cost interventions is still limited. Here we report the results of a randomized controlled field study that integrates a short self-regulation teaching unit based on the concept of mental contrasting with implementation intentions into the school curriculum of first graders.

Rick Barrett:

A doctor and a dentist from Nekoosa, near Wisconsin Rapids, say they’ve been robbed of their opportunity to market an infant formula made from Wisconsin goat’s milk.

Nikos Linardakis, a medical doctor, says the federal Food and Drug Administration has stymied efforts that he and dentist James Esselman have made to launch their Bêne Baby Co.’s product, even as the agency has relaxed its oversight of imported formula following a severe national shortage.

The Economist:

Almost 35 years ago American drug regulators approved Prozac, the first in a series of blockbuster antidepressants known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (ssris). Prozac and its cousins were lauded by patients and doctors as miracle drugs. They lifted low moods quickly and seemed to have no drawbacks. Divorce, bereavement, problems at work—a daily pill was there to help with that, and anything else which made you sad. Many people have stayed on these drugs for life. In Western countries today between one person in seven and one in ten takes antidepressants.

The shine of ssris has worn off. A growing number of studies show that they are less effective than thought. Drug companies often publish the results of clinical trials selectively, withholding those in which the drugs turn out not to work well. When the results of all trials submitted to America’s medicines regulator between 1979 and 2016 were scrutinised by independent scientists, it turned out that antidepressants had a substantial benefit beyond a placebo effect in only 15% of patients.

Ben Keeling:

On the first day of training in the mountain forest on a recent fall day, Army Spc. Jennifer Evans struggled to properly sharpen a butcher’s knife. Two days later, she was expertly slicing roasts and steaks off a cow carcass and had learned to boil down the bones to make broth.

Spc. Evans was with a handful of military cooks being trained to butcher and prepare meat in austere conditions, skills that have the potential to make the U.S. military more nimble and combat-effective in the event of major conflict. The training, which began a few years ago as a pilot program for Green Beret cooks, recently expanded to include conventional units.

During two decades of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has largely come to rely on bulky truck convoys or air resupply to provide soldiers not only bullets and fuel, but also every morsel of food, even at remote combat outposts.

Military leaders say such lengthy supply chains may not be workable in a potential future large-scale conflict and are preparing troops to be more able to live off the land. They are rolling out lessons on how to source all sorts of food, including meat, through local means.

Emily Hanford:

I’ve chosen 10 things to recommend. I’ve read hundreds of books and articles since I started getting interested in this topic five years ago, so it was hard to narrow it down. This is by no means a comprehensive list. But it’s a start. Here goes:

Jeff Goldstein:

Lois Lerner refused to testify before lawmakers for her role in the targeted persecution of TEA Party organizations via her position as IRS Director of tax exempt non-profits, and was voted in contempt of Congress. 

Eric Holder refused a Congressional subpoena for documents related to the “Fast and Furious” operation that ran guns to Mexican cartel members, ostensibly to track the weapons, one of which was later used to kill US Border Agent Brian Terry.

Neither received any jail time. 

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith intentionally and materially altered an email included in an FBI application to renew a FISA warrant against Carter Page. He was found guilty, but spent no time in prison, receiving probation and community service hours. He has since had his law license reinstated. 

James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, John Brennan, James Clapper, and the entire Mueller Report team, among others, repeatedly perjured themselves in Congressional testimony. Brennan and Clapper now have contributor gigs at cable news channels; Strzok has filed a wrongful termination suit against the FBI. Mueller’s Report was chastised by the IG’s office for its misleading assertions and its lies by omission, with no apologies amongst the fallout. 

And no jail time for any of them. 

Today, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was given a 4-month jail sentence for Contempt of Congress. Bannon initially denied the legitimacy of the Congressional subpoena, citing executive privilege in his role as presidential advisor, but ultimately did testify. 

I no longer care what any of you think about Donald Trump. Nor do I care what you think of Bannon, who — full disclosure — invited me to New York for a preview of his Sarah Palin documentary over a decade ago. Neither man is the issue. Roger Stone isn’t the issue, either — whatever you think of him either as a person or a persona. The My Pillow guy? Not the issue.

Olivia Herken:

The La Crosse School District has the largest referendum in the state this fall, asking voters to approve nearly $195 million to consolidate its two high schools due to declining enrollment and aging facilities.

Some Oregon residents who oppose the referendum doubt it would have a big impact. Some question whether they’ve been given full and accurate information.

“Many village of Oregon residents can’t afford this referendum, especially with all other current inflationary pressures,” Joshua King said. “But they should at least have the complete picture of the tax burden about to hit them so they can make the best decision.”

King said the referendum has become a “complex and very emotionally charged topic.”

“I’m against it,” Evy Collins said. “I’m not against people having better wages. I worked all my life, most of it as a single mother after (my) husband died of cancer. I know struggles. I always had to make do with what I had, and I still do today as a retired person. Why should our property taxes continue to go up and the propaganda that it’s for ‘the kids’ make me go for it? It’s not for the kids or better education. I’m voting no.”

The November referendums are appearing on the ballot alongside some higher turnout elections, including the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.

It’s not clear, though, how higher turnouts affect referendums. In the last decade, referendums have passed at slightly higher rates in even-numbered years when bigger elections are held, compared to odd-numbered years, Brown said. But he emphasized that other factors could be at play.

Scott Girard:

The questions come at the same time districts have received an influx of one-time money through COVID-19 relief funding. District officials have stressed, however, that because the funding isn’t ongoing, it cannot responsibly be used to pay for ongoing operating expenses without creating a fiscal cliff in future years.

The state Legislature, meanwhile, pointed to that funding in denying an increase in the revenue limit in the current biennial budget.

While the Madison Metropolitan School District is not among those asking voters for funds this fall, it is in the midst of implementing the successful capital and operating referendums from 2020. Officials have repeatedly described the current budget as a difficult one, with School Board member Savion Castro suggesting the district may need to go back for another referendum in the near future to continue funding its most important initiatives.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

John P. A. Ioannidis

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

NCLA Legal:

Plaintiffs move for the following government officials to be deposed as a part of their limited preliminary injunction discovery. These are:
(1) NIAID Director and White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, (2) Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, (3) former White House Senior COVID-19 Advisory Andrew Slavitt, (4) former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, (5) FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, (6) CISA Director Jen Easterly, (7) CISA official Lauren Protentis, (8) Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, (9) CDC Chief of the Digital Media Branch Carol Crawford, and (10) Acting Coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center Daniel Kimmage.

Jeffrey Carter:

First, some background.

Here is some data from Illinois that is also repeated across the country, I looked to two sources. Illinois Policy and Wirepoints. Illinois Policy tweeted out this video you should watch. Wirepoints compiled data on Illinois education. Here is an example. Decatur is mostly Black.

New Trier’s administration is woke and so is the school board. The teachers they hire are woke too. Instead of teaching students how to think critically and objectively, they try to indoctrinate them.

Finally, many parents had enough. My friend Beth Feely led the charge and in a lot of cases, she has paid a personal price for it. Typical of intolerant left-wing people, they cut off their friendships with her and discriminated against her. But, she kept going. She keeps going. 

Beth worked on The Policy Circle in its early days. It’s an organization targeted toward women. They organized local circles and women would get academic policy papers on societal problems. They avoided issues like abortion. They did talk about things like education. Their focus was to solve these problems from a free enterprise perspective. Beth started to find her voice here and her path shows how one person can make positive conservative change locally in their lives. 

Yesterday, Mother Jones published a hit piece on Beth’s organization castigating them as racists for fighting back. Isn’t that predictable? Beth works with the Woodson Center. Hardly a racist organization! But, they think different than the mainstream race hustlers you see on television all the time.

Dam Hee Kim, Anjana Susarla, and Scott Shackelford

2022 is looking like 2020

Dam Hee Kim, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Arizona

Social media are important sources of news for most Americans in 2022, but they also could be a fertile ground for spreading misinformation. Major social media platforms announced plans for dealing with misinformation in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but experts noted that they are not very different from their 2020 plans.

One important consideration: Users are not constrained to using just one platform. One company’s intervention may backfire and promote cross-platform diffusion of misinformation. Major social media platforms may need to coordinate efforts to combat misinformation. 

Facebook/Meta: C

Facebook was largely blamed for its failure to combat misinformation during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Although engagement – likes, shares and comments – with misinformation on Facebook peaked with 160 million per month during the 2016 presidential election, the level in July 2018, 60 million per month, was still at high levels. 

More recent evidence shows that Facebook’s approach still needs work when it comes to managing accounts that spread misinformation, flagging misinformation posts and reducing the reach of those accounts and posts. In April 2020, fact-checkers notified Facebook about 59 accounts that spread misinformation about COVID-19. As of November 2021, 31 of them were still active. Also, Chinese state-run Facebook accounts have been spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine in English to their hundreds of millions of followers.

Twitter: B

While Twitter has generally not been treated as the biggest culprit of misinformation since 2016, it is unclear if its misinformation measures are sufficient. In fact, shares of misinformation on Twitter increased from about 3 million per month during the 2016 presidential election to about 5 million per month in July 2018. 

This pattern seems to have continued as over 300,000 Tweets – excluding retweets – included links that were flagged as false after fact checksbetween April 2019 and February 2021. Fewer than 3% of these tweets were presented with warning labels or pop-up boxes. Among tweets that shared the same link to misinformation, only a minority displayed these warnings, suggesting that the process of putting warnings on misinformation is not automatic, uniform or efficient. Twitter did announce that it redesigned labels to hinder further interactions and facilitate clicks for additional information.

Morten H. Christiansen, Pablo Contreras Kallens,

Unlike the carefully scripted dialogue found in most books and movies, the language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, full of false starts, interruptions and people talking over each other. From casual conversations between friends, to bickering between siblings, to formal discussions in a boardroom, authentic conversation is chaotic. It seems miraculous that anyone can learn language at all given the haphazard nature of the linguistic experience.

For this reason, many language scientists – including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics – believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience – or so the thinking goes.

This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).

Todd Williams:

The concept of tenure is a contested one, to be sure. For some, it is a mere faculty entitlement, guaranteeing employment and further insulating professors from the practical realities of life. For others, it is a vital means of protecting the academy and securing the greatest degree of academic and intellectual freedom.

Yet, regardless of the arguments for or against tenure, it is commonly assumed that schools can no longer do without it. Upon the release of the AAUP’s “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” the practice began rapidly to be incorporated into handbooks, contracts, and policy statements across the country. The arguments for tenure were clear enough: to safeguard academic freedom, promote stability, and protect teachers from those who would squelch their ideas. Soon, the notion of an indefinite appointment became the gold standard. It also became the brass ring for which young academics reached and the keep that seasoned faculty maneuvered to defend.

Tenure also created a culture of unrealistic entitlement within the academy.

Tenure also created, however, a culture of unrealistic entitlement within the academy. Where in the broader world is there a guarantee of employment for life? Furthermore, the practice places a burden on institutions by limiting their ability to respond to institutional, financial, and personnel challenges.

Granted, termination for cause, upon program closures, and during financial crises is accounted for in most tenure guidelines. Once tenure is in place, though, it is usually accompanied by such a high degree of faculty control that terminating a tenured faculty member is a daunting and arduous task, often abandoned outright or resulting in a significant financial settlement.

Tanya Lewis:

With a few notable exceptions—such as during the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War II and the HIV crisis—life expectancy in the U.S. has had gradual upward trajectory over the past century. But that progress has steeply reversed in the past two years as COVID and other tragedies have cut millions of lives short.

U.S. life expectancy fell by a total of 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021 to 76.1 years—the lowest it has been since 1996, according to provisional data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The drop was 3.1 years for male individuals and 2.3 years for female ones. Non-Hispanic Native American and Alaska Native peoples saw the biggest decline—a staggering 6.6 years. But every racial and ethnic group suffered: life expectancy decreased by 4.2 years in the Hispanic population, by four years in the non-Hispanic Black population, by 2.4 years in the non-Hispanic white population and by 2.1 years in the non-Hispanic Asian population.

Erica Komisar:

As American wives increasingly outearn their husbands, many couples experience what relationship coach Suzanne Venker calls “role-reversal stress.” This stress can be deleterious for their emotional and sexual lives, three studies published in the American Sociological Review suggest:

• Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald found that if a husband is employed full-time, the couple has a 2.5% chance of splitting up in the next year; if he isn’t, the likelihood of divorce rises to 3.3%.

• Christin Munsch of the University of Connecticut found that husbands who are economically dependent on their wives have a greater propensity to be unfaithful.

• Three sociologists from the Juan March Institute and the University of Washington found that the frequency of marital sex is lower for couples in which the husband often does traditionally feminine chores such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of kids, and higher if he does masculine ones like yard work, paying bills and car maintenance. Julie Brines told reporters that she and her co-authors were surprised at “how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency.”

It seems younger generations are taking note. A University of Texas survey in 2014 found that younger millennial men, then 18 to 25, were likelier to agree with the statement “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family” than Generation X men or older millennials had been at the same age.

These evolving attitudes may reflect differences in the households in which these young people grew up. In 1987 wives outearned men in less than 25% of households. By 2015 that share was 38%.

Fay Vincent:

When I was 17, the head of my school told me I ought to see myself as a leader. I’m reminded of that as I read about a growing trend in academia to adopt programs like Yale Law School’s new Joseph C. Tsai Leadership Program. I don’t know if leaders are born or trained, but I see value in this kind of leadership development. Budding leaders need mentors who encourage strong character.

I had one. As a junior at Hotchkiss School in 1955, I followed my headmaster down the main corridor. He showed me a plaque honoring the winners of the alumnus-of-the-year award and asked if I knew how many had been “scholarship boys.” He listed those who had come from families of limited means like mine.

Among them: John Hersey, author of the celebrated 1946 book “Hiroshima,” and Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine. He said my peers were waiting for me to lead. “You should speak up when you have something to contribute,” he said. “Mr. Vincent, I believe that someday your name will be listed here with the others. You ought to see yourself as a leader.”

He repeated that in a letter to my parents, which I found in the school files. I was dubious. I was a solid but unremarkable adolescent. My headmaster was revered by his students, so I took his counsel seriously. I gradually adopted the behaviors he suggested. At Williams College, I intentionally sought leadership positions.

I continued to accept opportunities to lead in my professional life. At 40 I was unexpectedly offered the position of CEO of Columbia Pictures, which was in a legal and business crisis. The leadership position was significant, but as a Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer I had no business experience. Some friends advised me to be cautious and remain a lawyer. Many believed I wasn’t the Hollywood type. I decided I had faith in my capacity to lead in difficult circumstances.

NEWS BITE: Columbus City Schools in Ohio hire first-ever "Chief Equity Officer" at $163,034 per year.

Starting pay for teachers is only $45,600.https://t.co/pXDTV6cr1Q

— Chalkboard Review (@ChalkboardRev) October 21, 2022

Zach Goldberg Eric Kaufmann

We began by asking our 18- to 20-year-old respondents (82.4 percent of whom reported attending public schools) whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are central to critical race theory. The chart below, which displays the distribution of responses for each concept, shows that “been taught” is the modal response for all but one of the six concepts. For the CRT-related concepts, 62 percent reported either being taught in class or hearing from an adult in school that “America is a systemically racist country,” 69 percent reported being taught or hearing that “white people have white privilege,” 57 percent reported being taught or hearing that “white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” and 67 percent reported being taught or hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” The shares giving either response with respect to gender-related concepts are slightly lower, but still a majority. Fifty-three percent report they were either taught in class or heard from an adult at school that “America is a patriarchal society,” and 51 percent report being taught or hearing that “gender is an identity choice” regardless of biological sex.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Karl Salzman:

An enormous majority of Americans with children disapprove of Joe Biden’s job as president, according to a Monmouth University poll released Thursday.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans with kids in the house disapprove of Biden’s job performance, the poll found. Only 24 percent approve of his performance, by contrast, making a whopping 45-point gap.

The poll found that 53 percent of all American disapprove of Biden, the same figure as his FiveThirtyEight polling average. But it is one of the first since the 2020 election to look into what parents think of the president. In 2020, Biden won among parents of school-age children, 52 percent to 46 percent, according to the New York Times.

Maureen Downey:

Patti Ghezzi covered education for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 until 2006. In a guest column today, Ghezzi writes about the big story she says she missed while covering Georgia schools — the phonics story.

It wasn’t until years after she left the beat that Ghezzi said she realized widespread problems with how children were being taught to read here and across the country.

Her essay is part of a series of reflections by current and former education journalists curated by The Grade, an independent project to improve schools coverage. Ghezzi is a writer and nonprofit communication professional in Atlanta and also helps high school students write their college admissions essays.

Those interested in more on teaching reading should check out a new podcast, “Sold a Story,” starting today from American Public Media.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

James Lee

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviourrecently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.

The Post is really pushing the school culture war story of late, if you haven’t noticed. Is this what everyday educators and parents care about most?
https://t.co/vbZ6eqAxWr

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) October 18, 2022

While the @SacBeeEditBoard is obsessed with school board candidates in Placer County, they have completely ignored a special interest group contributing nearly $70K in a single school board race next door. https://t.co/jkyMsFbtgO

— Jonathan Zachreson (@JZachreson) October 19, 2022

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ confidence in the media has been anemic for nearly two decades, and Gallup’s latest findings further document that distrust. The current level of public trust in the media’s full, fair and accurate reporting of the news is the second lowest on record. This new confidence reading follows Gallup’s historically low confidence in both TV news and newspapers in June and a new low in December’s annual rating of the honesty and ethics of television reporters. Newspaper reporters received similarly low ratings in the same poll.

Bruce Gilley:

I am blessed to be the father of a beautiful young woman who just began university after graduating from St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in Portland, Ore. I’ve always been surrounded by strong and faithful women—my mother, my two elder sisters, my many nieces, and of course my wife. In addition to rearing children, they have followed many vocations, some as doctors, engineers, attorneys, investors and the like. But reflecting on the state of my daughter’s high school, I’m concerned that girls today are being offered radically limited ideas of how to live meaningful lives.

Like all Catholic schools, St. Mary’s was pressured during the past decade to get woke with equity teams, affinity groups, Black Lives Matter movements, Native American land acknowledgments, transgender affirmations, climate-change hysteria and all the rest. I found myself counting the days until my daughter was out.

Like all prudent parents, I kept my peace for the most part. But after my daughter graduated, I had an opportunity to reflect on the school’s direction when I received the first alumni donor appeal. The school president defined St. Mary’s mission as preparing girls “to bridge equity gaps, explore careers in STEM, and advocate for change in every element in society.”

Every element in society? This appeal for girls to become mindless agitators without any contemplation of the need, direction and consequences of change should scare the living daylights out of any parent. Yes, your daughter can grow up to be Jane Fonda.

As a handy reference, the fundraising letter included a header with suggested future roles for your daughter. “Girls as . . .” was the repeated phrase followed by a series of suggestions: global citizen, social activist, environmental champion, political leader, scientist, entrepreneur.

Rachel Feintzeig:

Palms sweaty, heart racing, face flushed. You’re in front of a crowd at work again, and it’s terrifying.

Public speaking is our most common fear, according to psychology researchers, and things have only gotten weirder after years spent in the protective cocoon of Zoom. Facing just our monitors, and maybe an audience count ticking up in the corner, we read from our notes and became reliant on elaborate setups and crutches (filters, Post-its peeking over the screen).

Even those who’ve managed to avoid it for months—keeping meetings virtual, heading out of town this summer—are on the hook now. Many recently scored promotions, and are now returning to oratory responsibilities they didn’t have before. Fall conferences are back on, as are blowout weddings where the happy couple would like you to give a toast. And that crowd, man. They’re tough.

Adam Andrzejewski

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.

So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:

Sarah Mervosh:

It’s just after lunchtime, and Dori Montano’s fifth-grade math class is running on a firm schedule.

In one corner of the classroom, Ms. Montano huddles with a small group of students, working through a lesson about place value: Is 23.4 or 2.34 the bigger number? Nearby, other students collaborate to solve a “math mystery.” All the while, Ms. Montano watches the time.

At 1:32 p.m., she presses a buzzer, sending students shuffling: “Ladies and gentleman, switch please!”

This is what pandemic recovery looks like at Benjamin Franklin Elementary in Meriden, Conn., where students are showing promising progress in math, a subject that was hit hard during the shift to remote learning, even more so than reading.

The school’s math progress may not look like much: a small improvement amounting to a single decimal point increase from spring 2019 to the spring of this year, according to state test results.

But by pandemic standards, it was something of a minor miracle, holding steady when test scores nationally have fallen, particularly among low-income, Black and Hispanic students, the children that Franklin serves. About three in four students at the school qualify for free or reduced lunch, and a majority are Hispanic, Black or multiracial.

The groundwork was laid before the pandemic, when Franklin overhauled how math was taught.

It added as much as 30 minutes of math instruction a day. Students in second grade and above now have more than an hour, and fourth and fifth graders have a full 90 minutes, longer than is typical for many schools. Students no longer have lessons dominated by a teacher writing problems on a white board in front of the class. Instead, they spend more time wrestling with problems in small groups. And, for the first time, children who are behind receive math tutoring during the school day.

Related: math forum audio and video

Discovery math

Connected math

Singapore math

Tim shampling

Moreover, how could the ballooning administrative apparatus at universities that exists largely to oversee DEI statements be justified if they amount to nothing more than uncontentious sappiness? Indeed, if higher ed really is facing an adverse economic climate—with austerity looming even in its core pedagogical and research functions—then it is irresponsible to devote so many university resources to such a pointless enterprise.

Apologists for this burgeoning practice have been pushed toward emphasizing a level of generality and lack of clear content in DEI statements, even at the cost of making them seem pointless and wasteful. The reason is clear: as Brian Soucek, a defender of diversity statements, acknowledges,less “specific” (in other words, more substance-free) statements are less susceptible to the challenge that they constitute “thinly veiled ideological litmus tests.” The more obvious interpretation is that DEI statements have been adopted across academia with such passion and pervasiveness not because they are empty vessels, but because they do express a particular value system and political outlook. DEI statements demonstrate, and align universities with, a way of looking at the world fashionable among faculty and (especially) administrators.

Corey DeAngelis:

Mr. Pritzker at­tended Mil­ton Acad­emy, a pri­vate board­ing school, and he sent both of his chil­dren to pri­vate schools in Chicago. By sup­port­ing school choice for low-in­come stu­dents, Mr. Pritzker in­su­lates him­self against ac­cu­sa­tions of hypocrisy.

Mr. Pritzker isn’t the first De­mo­c­rat to make this switch. Last month, Penn­syl­va­nia gu­ber­na­to­r­ial nom­i­nee Josh Shapiro changed his ed­u­ca­tion plan to in­clude pri­vate school choice. But Mr. Pritzk­er’s flip is even more no­table than Mr. Shapiro’s. Illi­nois is more heav­ily De­mo­c­ra­tic than Penn­syl­va­nia and is dom­i­nated by some of the most pow­er­ful—and no­to­ri­ously ruth­less—teach­ers unions in Amer­ica.

Tatiana Siegel:

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval. (Gabe Rottman at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says, “To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a case [since January 2021].”)

In the raid’s aftermath, Meek, who frequently collaborated with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, has made himself scarce. None of his Siena Park neighbors with whom Rolling Stone spoke have seen him since, with his apartment appearing to be vacant. Siena Park management declined to confirm that their longtime tenant was gone, citing “privacy policies.” Similarly, several ABC News colleagues — who are accustomed to unraveling mysteries and cracking investigative stories — tell Rolling Stone that they have no idea what happened to Meek.

“He fell off the face of the Earth,” says one. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”

Badger Institute:

What will it take to make Wisconsin among the best places in America to live, work and do business? The Badger Institute has pulled together some of the best minds in the state and the country to offer answers. What follows is a book full of ideas and solutionsabout public policy centered on how to improve Wisconsin, offering research and recommendations from a remarkable set of scholars who bring extraordinary insight into Wisconsin’s situation. To make systemic change to problems holding back our state from greater prosperity, these options offer a fast start.

APM Reports:

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Taylor & Francis:

Girls are routinely being given more generous grades than boys with the same academic competences, a new study of tens of thousands of pupils and their teachers concludes.

This bias against boys could mean the difference between a pass and a fail in subjects such as maths. It could also have wider consequences in areas such as college admission, job choice and earnings, warn the Italian researchers.
Their study, published in British Journal of Sociology of Education, is the first to demonstrate that the problem is systemic—it is present across a variety of educational environments and irrespective of teachers’ characteristics.
Gender-related gaps in educational achievement are common worldwide. However, the nature of the gap differs with different ways of measuring achievement.

When the results of standardised tests, which have a standard scoring system, are used, girls typically outperform boys in humanities, languages and reading skills, while boys do better in maths. 

In contrast, when grades are awarded by teachers, females do better than males in all subjects.

To find out how teachers’ evaluations tend to favour females, the University of Trento researchers began by comparing the scores almost 40,000 students received in standardised tests of language and maths with the grades they achieved in their classroom exams.

Talia Richman & Trisha Powell Crain:

For Dallas schools, “it’s about the passion, not about the paper,” said Robert Abel, the district’s human capital management chief. 

Dallas’ uncertified hires — who must have a college degree — participate in training on classroom management and effective teaching practices. Abel said the district is getting positive reports on the new teachers. 

Some teacher groups worry about inconsistent expectations for teacher candidates. 

A great teacher needs sensitivity and empathy to understand how a child is motivated and what could interfere with learning, said Lee Vartanian, a dean at Athens State University. A certification helps set professional standards to ensure teachers have content expertise as well as the ability to engage students, said Vartanian, who oversees the Alabama university’s College of Education.

Uncertified teachers may have some of that knowledge, he said, but not the full range. 

“They’re just less prepared systematically,” he said, “and so chances are they’re not going to have the background and understanding where kids are developmentally and emotionally.”

___

Nick Minock:

There may be no debate before the Nov. 8 election between Democrat Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and her Republican opponent Yesli Vega.

Virginia’s 7th congressional district is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the United States.

7News requested an interview with Rep. Spanberger to learn why she pulled out of the only scheduled debate with her Republican opponent. Spanberger refused to do an interview.

Instead, a Spanberger spokesperson sent 7News a statement.

“Due to the Vega campaign’s pressure to corrupt the Prince William Committee of 100’s efforts and stall the debate into nonexistence, with just five days to go before the scheduled debate, it became increasingly clear a debate was never going to become a reality,” a Spanberger spokesperson said Monday via email. “Ever since the Republican nominee was declared, Rep. Spanberger has been crystal clear in her efforts to join a debate with her opponent to discuss the issues that matter most to Virginians. The same cannot be said for her opponent, Yesli Vega, who declined a traditional debate in Fredericksburg with a nonpartisan moderator. Additionally, Vega has pulled out of multiple nonpartisan forums, including with local chapters of the NAACP and other local committees.”

Vega said Spanberger backed out of the debate because of comments made by Democratic lawmaker Elizabeth Guzman last Thursday.

Tyler O’Neil:

Feller insisted that the school district’s legal department—rather than the board president—schedules the hearing of grievances and that she has “no input” on such decisions.

However, another board member, Danielle Weston, countered Feller’s claim, insisting that the board president has authority over its meetings. 

Police arrested Story on Sept. 17, 2021, on a misdemeanor charge of hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct. The charge dates to the previous Aug. 16, when Story raised concerns about Schools Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez, who at the time faced allegations of family violence in an application for a protective order (redacted version available here). 

According to publicly available footage of the meeting, Amy Weir, then president of the Round Rock Independent School District Board of Trustees, warned Story not to speak about “something other than D1 or D2” on the meeting’s agenda. 

Story responded: “I will show you how what I’m about to comment on is related to that.”

John O. McGinnis:

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear two cases on Oct. 31 about whether universities have illegally discriminated against Asian-Americans. In both cases, Students for Fair Admission asks the court to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case that held the pursuit of diversity satisfies the strict scrutiny required to overcome the constitutional presumption against discrimination under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

But the justices can put a stop to racial preferences without reaching the constitutional question. Universities are required to abide by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is unambiguous about preferential admission on the basis of race. The provision reads simply: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

There is no indication in its text that Title VI incorporates the Equal Protection Clause. It could have been written to track the Constitution’s language, but it wasn’t. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his partial dissent from University of California v. Bakke (1978), the legislative history also indicates a clear intent to prohibit all discrimination on the basis of race.

Nonetheless, the majority in Grutter read the statute as if it applied the Equal Protection Clause. Traditionally, courts read statutes to avoid hard constitutional questions if possible. Grutter did the opposite; it entangled Title VI unnecessarily with the Constitution. Courts also generally interpret clear statutory language to mean what it says. Grutter did the opposite here as well, replacing clear and precise language with vague and ambiguous language not in the statute.

John Ellis:

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments about the use of racial preferences in college admissions. On this score, a curious divergence in opinion has arisen in recent years. While the public has moved sharply in one direction, academia has raced in the exact opposite.

Take California. In 1996 Californians voted by a 9-point margin to approve Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment to ban the use of racial preferences in public employment and college admissions. As the state’s electorate moved to the left in the subsequent years, it was widely assumed that support for the ban had evaporated. The University of California evidently felt bound by the letter but not the spirit of the law, as the system reduced its reliance on objective test scores so that it could use “holistic” judgments, effectively making it easier to hide its use of racial preferences.

Yet in 2020 the assumption was tested. When Proposition 16 was put on the ballot—a provision to repeal the state’s prohibition of racial preferences—Californians voted it down by a 14-point margin. Even a state that voted nearly 2 to 1 for Joe Biden affirmed its opposition to racial preferences. What explained the split?

What nobody realized was that the entire country had become increasingly hostile to the use of race in such decisions. A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.

Greateridaho.org:

Idaho doesn’t have a homelessness problem; Oregon’s keeps growing. Idaho doesn’t restrict the building of new homes.

We’d save money being a part of Idaho.

Combining all taxes together, the average Idahoan paid $1722 less in taxes in 2019 than the average Oregonian. That’s averaging together every adult or child.

Northwestern Oregon has 79% of Oregon’s voters. Oregon’s governor and legislature don’t need any votes from eastern Oregon to rule Oregon. This has led to a ruling party that ignores eastern Oregon because none of our legislators are in the ruling party. That’s why Oregon passes laws that kill eastern Oregon industries and values.

PDF link:

Under our Constitution, the people’s elected representatives in Congress make public policy, not the President or other members of the executive branch on their own. President Biden’s unilateral decision to cancel one-half-trillion dollars’ worth of student-loan debt without congressional authorization usurps a power the Constitution vests solely in Congress. This debt- cancellation plan violates the Constitution’s Appropriations and Vesting Clauses, misconstrues and exceeds any statutory authority granted in the HEROES Act, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act. The Court must stop this plan before it dupes debtors and causes further harm.

NEW: Meet the retired US generals who work as high-dollar consultants for the Saudi crown prince – and how the US govt tried to keep it a secret. A 2-year Post investigation by @FOIANate and me. 1/xhttps://t.co/AL6x3XfCwp

— Craig Whitlock (@CraigMWhitlock) October 18, 2022

A major revelation buried deep within this excellent historical overview: France’s then-ambassador admits on the record that the U.S. and France orchestrated a coup against Haiti’s elected president in 2004 https://t.co/lmMADL2dXI pic.twitter.com/FI4iSmGhdk

— Keane Bhatt (@KeaneBhatt) May 21, 2022

Temple Grandin

One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, What do you want to be when you grow up? The more useful question is: What are you good at? But schools aren’t giving kids enough of a chance to find out.

As a professor of animal science, I have ample opportunity to observe how young people emerge from our education system into further study and the work world. As a visual thinker who has autism, I often think about how education fails to meet the needs of our very diverse minds. We are shunting students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum instead of nurturing the budding builders, engineers, and inventors that our country needs.

Back when I went to school in the 1960s, shop class was the highlight of my day. I can vividly recall the wooden workbenches and the coping saws, hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, and eggbeater drills hung from a pegboard in a neat row. I also loved home economics. Although I was a tomboy, I enjoyed working with my hands in all kinds of ways. The skills I learned by embroidering, sewing, and measuring ingredients, I still use today.

If you went to public school in the ’90s or after, you may not remember such programs, which began to be scrubbed out around that time. In 2001, Congress passed the education-reform bill known as No Child Left Behind. Intended to raise national academic standards through comprehensive testing, it decimated classes that didn’t lend themselves to standardized testing. “Beginning in third grade, the amount of instructional time in the arts, music, science, and history was reduced, because basically what was tested got taught, and these subjects were not equally tested,” writes Nikhil Goyal in his book Schools on Trial. A new philosophy had supplanted hands-on learning: teach to the test, otherwise known as “drill, kill, bubble fill.”

Carolyn Kuimelis

Most Americans oppose laws that regulate how professors are allowed to speak about certain topics in college classrooms. Still, nearly one-third of people — across the political spectrum — believe that professors have too much freedom to speak their minds in the classroom.

The results come from a new YouGov poll, which found that only 19 percent of U.S. adults support these laws. That number is higher among Republicans; 30 percent say the government should be able to regulate professors’ classroom speech. And 50 percent of Republicans say professors have too much freedom to express themselves in class. Older and more educated Americans are the most likely to oppose these laws, which is true among both Democrats and Republicans.

Rebecca Ballhaus, Brody Mullins, Chad Day, John West, Joe Palazzolo and James V. Grimaldi:

More than 2,600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. That amounts to more than one in five senior federal employees across 50 federal agencies reviewed by the Journal.

A top official at the Environmental Protection Agency reported purchases of oil and gas stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.

The Journal obtained and analyzed more than 31,000 financial-disclosure forms for about 12,000 senior career employees, political staff and presidential appointees. The review spans 2016 through 2021 and includes data on about 850,000 financial assets and more than 315,000 trades reported in stocks, bonds and funds by the officials, their spouses or dependent children.

Federal officials who filed public financial disclosures, 2016-21

Emiko Terazono in London, Benjamin Parkin in New Delhi and Nic Fildes in Sydney:

From little wild orchids to the sound of warblers, nothing much gets past Jake Fiennes as he surveys a strip of wild flowers that borders a field of spring barley on the 25,000-acre Holkham estate in the east of England, where he is conservation manager.

Creating such buffer zones, known as “hay meadows”, around a field reduces its acreage, but boosts its biodiversity and improves the quality of the underlying soil. A smaller field might mean less crop, but with fewer input costs and a small uptick in yields, it also means more profits, he says.

The system of land management practised by Fiennes, and a number of like-minded farmers, is about “bringing farming and nature closer” he says. His methods fall under the wider umbrella of the regenerative agriculture movement, which aims to restore natural ecosystems that have been depleted by traditional farming methods — and, ultimately, to produce food in a more sustainable way. “Food that’s produced working with nature rather than working against it,” as Fiennes puts it.

“Young people think news is made with an agenda, whether it’s business, that there’s no such thing as objectivity, or that opinions are being actively manipulated,” says @konradcollao in this webinar hosted by @ebu_hq pic.twitter.com/AWIMAFRlPI

— Reuters Institute (@risj_oxford) October 18, 2022

I spoke recently with a political money person who mentioned that 70% of state and federal office campaign $ are spent on television!!

Julie Jargon and Andrea Petersen:

For busy families, gathering together for dinner can feel like an impossibility. Children could use it now more than ever.

Robin Black-Burns’s teenage daughter has after-school activities that fall over dinnertime, making evening meals at home a thing of the past. The SUV has become their de facto dinner table.

Ms. Black-Burns’s daughter, 14-year-old Athena Burns, has dinner in the car four nights a week, eating during the hourlong drive home from robotics-club meetings. Ms. Black-Burns usually arrives at her daughter’s school 15 minutes early to eat her own dinner in the front seat while waiting for Athena.

Athena, a freshman at a private high school in Virginia, had a similarly demanding evening schedule in middle school. The mother and daughter have been eating on the go for years. Their dining table was so underused that two years ago Ms. Black-Burns donated it, converting the family dining room into a lounge.

“We wonder why so many kids have anxiety,” Ms. Black-Burns says. “Well, gee, they have a rigorous academic schedule and after-school activities and they’re eating in the car.”

ACT scores have declined around the nation, and in Wisconsin as well. Our research shows that the policies of school districts in putting the desires of unions ahead of the needs of children has contributed to this trend. 🧵

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) October 14, 2022

Matthew Sparks:

An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 per cent, as a range of software relies on carrying out the task at great scale.

Matrix multiplication – where two grids of numbers are multiplied together – is a fundamental computing task used in virtually all software to some extent, but particularly so in graphics, AI and scientific simulations. Even a small improvement in the efficiency of these algorithms could bring large performance gains, or significant energy savings.

Taxprof:

Following up on last week’s post, UC-Berkeley Law Faculty Statement In Support Of Jewish Students:  Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  A Free-Speech Scandal at Berkeley Law, by Steven Lubet (Northwestern):

The University of California’s Berkeley campus has been a hotbed of leftist politics since at least the early 1960s, so it is unsurprising that students at its prestigious law school have long embraced the cause of Palestinian rights. It was shocking, however, when the latest expression of anti-Israel sentiment veered into territory so extreme that even the law school’s progressive dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, observed that it could be seen as antisemitic. Although the students had not in any sense established “Jewish-free zones,” as some overheated commentaries called them, what they did was bad enough. Nine law-school affinity organizations, nominally representing a majority of the student body, adopted a bylaw providing that they will not “lend platforms to speakers” who “have professed or continue to hold” Zionist views.

Yes, you read that correctly. The bylaw does not simply prohibit pro-Israel presentations at the organizations’ events. It bans speakers on any topic who happen to support the existence of Israel — a category that encompasses more than 80 percent of the world’s Jews, and includes many Berkeley Law students and faculty. As Chemerinsky remarked in an email to students, “Indeed, taken literally, this would mean that I could not be invited to speak because I support the existence of Israel, though I condemn many of its policies.” For the same reason, I would also be unable to speak to the student groups about my research on 19th-century abolitionist lawyers, notwithstanding my decades of support for the anti-occupation movement within Israel. …

National Archives

NARA developed its Digital Preservation Framework to document and share recommended preservation actions based on its electronic record holdings and current capabilities. It is a comprehensive resource that includes:

• A Matrix for file format risk analysis and prioritization for action;
• Preservation Plans for 16 categories of electronic records (or “record types”), such as email, still images, and software, which identify “Significant Properties,” the properties that should, if possible, be retained in any format migration; and
• Preservation Action Plans for over 650 file formats, including proposed preservation actions and tools.

NARA won the 2020 National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Award for Digital Preservation in the Organization category, citing the team and the international impact of the Digital Preservation Framework.

A chemical hunger:

The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.

Mystery 1: The Obesity Epidemic 

The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

Back in the 1890s, the federal government had a board of surgeons examine several thousand Union Army veterans who fought in the Civil War. This was several decades after the end of the war, so by this point the veterans were all in their 40’s or older. This gives us a snapshot of what middle-aged white men looked like in the 1890s. When we look at their data, we find that they had an average BMI of about 23 (overweight is a BMI of 25 and obese is a BMI of 30 or more). Only about 3% of them were obese. In comparison, middle-aged white men in the year 2000 had an average BMI of around 28. About 24% were obese in early middle age, increasing to 41% by the time the men were in their 60s.

Claire Woodcock:

While Laffin acknowledges that a reevaluation of effective education is necessary, he says this can happen when looking at the types of prompts educators assign students, noting a difference between the regurgitation of facts and information discovery. However, he worries that products like OpenAI’s text generator will make essay writing a moot point.“We lose the journey of learning,” said Laffin. “We might know more things but we never learned how we got there. We’ve said forever that the process is the best part and we know that. The satisfaction is the best part. That might be the thing that’s nixed from all of this. And I don’t know the kind of person that creates more than anything. Beyond academics, I don’t know what a person is like if they’ve never had to struggle through learning. I don’t know the behavioral implications of that.” Meanwhile, innovate_rye eagerly awaits GPT-4, which is anticipated to be trained on 100 trillion machine learning parameters and may go beyond mere textual outputs. In other words, they aren’t planning to stop using AI to write essays anytime soon. “I still do my homework on things I need to learn to pass, I just use AI to handle the things I don’t want to do or find meaningless,” innovate_rye added. “If AI is able to do my homework right now, what will the future look like? These questions excite me.” 

Commentary.

Jonathan Weisman

In early 2019, as the Defense Department’s bureaucracy seemed to be slow-walking then-President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, Joe Kent, a CIA paramilitary officer, called his wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologic technician who was still in Syria working against the Islamic State group.

“‘Make sure you’re not the last person to die in a war that everyone’s already forgotten about,’” Kent said he told his wife. “And that’s exactly what happened,” he added bitterly.

The suicide bombing that killed Kent and three other service members days later set off a chain of events — including a somber encounter with Trump — that has propelled Kent from a storied combat career to single parenthood, from comparing notes with other anti-war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to making increasingly loud pronouncements that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are political prisoners.

In five weeks, Kent, 42, a candidate for a House seat in Washington state that was long represented by a soft-spoken moderate Republican, may well be elected to Congress. And he is far from alone.

A new breed of veterans, many with remarkable biographies and undeniable stories of heroism, are running for the House on the far right of the Republican Party, challenging old assumptions that adding veterans to Congress — men and women who fought for the country and defended the Constitution — would foster bipartisanship and cooperation. At the same time, they are embracing anti-interventionist military and foreign policies that, since the end of World War II, have been associated more with the Democratic left than the mainline GOP.

AOC, 12/2020, on Antifa activists menacing politicians in public: Activists *should* be impolite. “The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable.”

AOC, last night, to protesters confronting her for funding Biden’s proxy war: I won’t answer you! “You’re being ruude!” https://t.co/iuy4GYOLdY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 13, 2022

https://t.co/NGUQPcmrSr pic.twitter.com/iIEWFglQMY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 16, 2022

Nathan Biller:

A professor fired by New York University after students said his class was too difficult told The College Fix that students are not trying as hard, even as exams have become easier than before.

More than 80 students from Maitland Jones, Jr.’s 350-student chemistry course signed a petition claiming “that the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Jones for their poor test scores,” according to The New York Times, which did not link to the petition.

The Fix asked Jones (pictured) in an email interview whether the number of failing grades in recent years has been unusually high. He responded on October 10 that grades have tanked even as he had made the exams easier to pass.

“If you include withdrawals with the few F’s I give in the course, yes,” Jones told The College Fix.

Though “the exams have become easier (the top of the class now routinely gets 100 on the exams),” he wrote, “the grades have plummeted.”

“Class attendance (about 33% mid year) and office hours attendance (3-10 and only the top students) has also crashed,” Jones wrote. “Is there a connection? You tell me!”

Joel Kotkin:

Yet the tech elite today, as well as their Wall Street allies, no longer resemble the entrepreneurs of the past. The masters of our increasingly “woke” corporate elites are, for the most part, now second-generation bureaucrats presiding over the wealthiest, most pervasive monopolies on the plant. Controlling 90 percent of a market like search (Google), operating system software (Microsoft), dominating the cloud and on-line retail (Amazon) or 90 percent of phones (Google and Apple) does not turn executives into-risk takers but acquirers. Three tech firms now account as well for two-thirds of all on-line advertising revenues, which now represent the vast majority of all ad sales. Once paragons of entrepreneurial vigor, these firms, as Mike Lind has noted, have morphed into exemplars of “tollbooth capitalism,” which receive revenues on transactions that far exceed anything they lose in failed ventures and acquisitions.

Finance, the other pillar, has also become markedly more concentrated, with the number of banks down a full third since 2000 in the U.S. while Europe experienced a slower, but similar consolidation. The five largest banks control more than 45 percent of all assets in the U.S., up from under 30 percent twenty years ago. The five largest investment banks control roughly one third of investment funds: the top 10 control an absolute majority.

This growing concentration fosters a greater acceptance and even eagerness for state regulation. In the earlier open, entrepreneurial period, tech and even finance executives tended to a variety of views, with most leaning towards libertarianism. Historically, Silicon Valley elected middle-of-the-road Republicans—liberal on defense and culture but fiscally conservative—like Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell. Democrats certainly were present and competitive, but those too tended towards the center.

Richard Phelps:

With each public remark a scholar may add to society’s collective working memory or subtract from it. Their addition is the new research they present in a journal article or conference presentation. The subtraction, when it occurs, is typically found in the scholar’s portrayal of previous research on the topic.

Editors typically grant scholars, and especially celebrity scholars, quite a bit of latitude in how they reference the universe of other relevant research. The single new study presented in a manuscript sent to a scholarly journal for review may be rigorously critiqued even while the literature review presented at the beginning is not reviewed at all. This dynamic allows scholars to write pretty much anything they please about the universe of research—declaring themselves to be the first in the world to study the topic (and, thus, to be the world’s foremost expert), ignoring or demeaning the work of professional rivals, or referencing only the work of friends, who may return the favor in their own writings.

Preposterous, you say?

Indeed, the practice of “dismissive reviews” pervades contemporary scholarship. Look for yourself. Access a standard internet search engine, such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, and enter phrases such as: “there is no research,” “this is the first study,” “little research exists,” “there are few studies,” “paucity of research,” and the like.

Here are some search engine counts I got on Google (September 12, 2022) for certain phrases:

Glenn Reynolds

It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia — but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the “vision” of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the wealthy, the powerful and the connected.

Traditionally, the “public-domain” power was used to acquire property needed for things like roads and bridges. It’s still often defended in those terms, but the “public use” required for such takings has now been interpreted by courts to include pretty much anything the government wants to do with the property — including handing it over to someone else who just happens to be wealthier or better-connected than the original property holder. 

In this case, the government lacks even the weak excuse that the change will boost tax revenues, since — as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic Monthly pointed out — the property is being transferred from taxpaying businesses to a largely non-taxpaying enterprise. 

Part of the American Dream was the expectation that if you started a business, you might go broke but you didn’t have to worry about the government seizing your business on behalf of those with more political juice. That sort of thing was for Third World countries, corrupt kleptocracies where connections mattered more than capability. 

Not anymore. In fact, some of those formerly corrupt Third World countries have started providing stronger protection for private property, as they’ve realized that the more power you give to politicians and their cronies, the less incentive people have to try to succeed through hard work. What’s the point, if you’re at the mercy of the cronies?

We, on the other hand, seem to be moving backward. 

The fact is the powerful and connected — the Bloombergs, the Bollingers, et al — don’t really need strong legal protections. Nobody’s going to take their property anyway. (When’s the last time you heard of a rich guy’s home being condemned?) For those with juice, things seldom get as far as the courts. 

The courts are supposed to be there to protect the rest: The people without the connections, the ones who depend on the rule of law to keep the predators away. 

That protection has never been perfect, of course, but in the area of eminent domain it’s become a sick joke. The message sent is that your property belongs to you — until somebody with more clout wants it for something else, be it a “vision,” or a moneymaking scheme.

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.

Kayla Huynh:

Kim’s research particularly dives into U.S. involvement in the Korean military conflict during the Cold War. Her unique approach examines the experiences of ordinary people caught in the machinery of war, rather than narratives of government and military leaders.

She details those accounts in her award-winning book, “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold Story.” The book focuses on Japanese American soldiers whom the U.S. drafted into the conflict. Many of them served as interrogators during the Korean War after being held in U.S. internment camps just five years prior. 

Before working at UW-Madison, Kim taught at New York University. She also completed her undergraduate studies at Yale University and received her doctorate from the University of Michigan. Her next book, tentatively titled, “The World that Hunger Made,” explores how states, organizations and political economies have attempted to regulate hunger rather than solve it.

Andrew Van Dam:

You might want to look at corporal punishment of children in schools.

— Lucien Lombardo, New York

As a means of controlling classrooms or improving academic performance, corporal punishment has an uninspiring track record. Last year, a review of 69 studiespublished in the medical journal the Lancet found “physical punishment is ineffective in achieving parents’ goal of improving child behaviour and instead appears to have the opposite effect of increasing unwanted behaviours.”

The good news is that, in most of the country, fewer than 0.01 percent of public school students were paddled, slapped or otherwise physically punished in the 2017-2018 school year, the most recent for which we have data from the U.S. Education Department.

The bad news is that 10 states, mostly in the South, don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

Those 10 states accounted for a full 99 percent of incidents of corporal punishment reported to the Education Department. About 75 percent happened in just four Southern states: Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Arkansas.

Mississippi is the nation’s corporal-punishment capital, and it’s not particularly close. About 4.2 percent of students there were physically punished, more than double the rate in Arkansas, which ranked second at 1.8 percent. That adds up to more than 20,000 Mississippi students being paddled in the 2017-2018 school year — nearly a third of all American public-school students who were physically punished that year.

In the 10 paddling states, Native American and Black boys are punished at the highest rates (more than double the average), while White boys and boys with disabilities also face relatively high rates of corporal punishment. Girls are physically punished at much lower rates, with Native Americans, Blacks and girls with disabilities bearing the brunt of such punishment in those states.

Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Paul Thacker:

A potential $50 million contract allows PR firm to be “embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as part of the Division of Viral Diseases team.”

I’m still not certain what happened to Americans, who seem to have tossed aside all caution and critical thinking when it comes to medical interventions that get labeled “vaccines.” I can only remark that, to myself and many living in Europe, it comes across as rather disturbing at times—almost cultish.

If interested in further reading about the major conflicts of interest and lack of transparency surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, I won a British Journalism Award for a series of investigations published by The BMJ:

• Conflicts of interest among the UK government’s covid-19 advisers Little is known about the interests of the doctors, scientists, and academics on whose advice the UK government relies to manage the pandemic. Attempts to discover more are frequently thwarted, finds Paul D Thacker
• How independent were the US and British vaccine advisory committees? Investigation finds disclosure standards differ widely, often leaving the public in the dark
• Tracking down John Bell: how the case of the Oxford professor exposes a transparency crisis in government 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

Oxford’s John Bell is certainly an interesting figure, as he has his fingers in so many pies. Yet Oxford and the British government continue to hide his financial interests and corporate ties. Bell is also a board member of Hakluyt, a British spy firm, with a long shady past. As I wrote a couple weeks back, the Brunswick Group PR firm provides public relations for both Hakluty and British Petroleum (BP), the fossil fuel company which employed Hakluty in the early 2000s to spy on Greenpeace activists.

As long as TikTok supports the political establishment, it will evade sanction, allowing its data gathering machine to continue unimpeded.https://t.co/U3OTnu7qRa

— John Robb (@johnrobb) October 15, 2022

Loss of Bible literacy was a disaster in the sense that educated people used to be able to draw on about thousand years of a people’s history that varied from desert nomads (Exodus) to tribal confederation (Judges) to kingdom (Samuel) to subjects & rebels (Maccabees).

— Nemets (@Peter_Nimitz) October 14, 2022

Erin Doherty:

The average ACT test score for students in the class of 2022 dropped to its lowest level in more than three decades, according to data out Wednesday.

Why it matters: The decline in scores is the latest indicator of the pandemic’s detrimental effects on the nation’s students — and underscores the extent to which graduating high school students are ill-prepared for college.

• “The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. 

Driving the news: The national average composite score for graduating seniors in 2022 was 19.8 out of 36, the lowest average score since 1991 and down from 20.3 for graduating seniors in 2021.

Joaquin Nunez:

I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from,” Griffin told the Wall Street Journal.

In relation to his remarks, it is necessary to point out that, under the leadership of Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-IL), Chicago recorded 797 homicides in 2021, the highest of any U.S. city.

Mark Dittli:

When I see that we are headed into a significant growth slowdown, even a recession, and bank credit is still growing. The classic definition of a banker used to be that he lends you an umbrella but would take it away at the first sight of rain. Not this time. Banks keep lending, they even reduce their provisions for bad debt. The CFO of Commerzbank was asked about this fact in July, and she said that the government would not allow large debtors to fail. That, to me, was a transformational statement. If you are a banker who believes in private sector credit risk, you stop lending when the economy is headed into a recession. But if you are a banker who believes in government guarantees, you keep lending. This is happening today. Banks keep lending, and nominal GDP will keep growing. That’s why, in nominal terms, we won’t see an economic contraction.

Arthur Burns, who was the Fed chairman during the Seventies, explained in a speech in 1979 why he lost control of inflation. There was an elected government, he said, elected to fight a war in Vietnam, elected to reduce inequality through Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. Burns said it wasn’t his job to stop the war or the Great Society programs. These were political choices.

You get stagflation after years of badly misallocated capital, which tends to happen when the government interferes for too long in the allocation of capital. When the UK government did this in the 1950s and 60s, they allocated a lot of capital into coal mining, automobile production and the Concorde. It turned out that the UK didn’t have a future in any of those industries, so it was wasted and we ended up with high unemployment.

Board member Savion Castro said, “I think we’re going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.” (Taxpayer supported political activity)

Commentary…

Mario Koran:

But documented racism provided the kindling for Kiel’s political eruption. That story started in 2020 when Amy Wempner discovered racist Snapchat messages sent about her son Armond — one of five Black students at Kiel High School.

The family’s push for the school district to respond illustrates how a Republican strategy to mischaracterize discussions of race as political indoctrination can prevent schools from protecting students of color.

After the school district brought on a consulting firm to conduct training about racism and harassment, Kiel parents accused the firm of advancing critical race theory. That movement flipped the school board and prompted Armond to transfer to another school district.

In a federal lawsuit filed in October, the family accused the Kiel school district of violating Armond’s civil rights by failing to appropriately address racial hostility.

Notes on Wisconsin Watch $ and influence.

Olivia Herken:

We have extended ourselves beyond a balanced budget with this calculated use of fund balance to make this historical investment in our hourly staff,” board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said, “which we have heard is very important.

“I do want to recognize that our obligation in the next year’s planning and budget is to make the structural changes that we indicated would be needed to balance this investment and not create a structural deficit for future budgets,” she said. Some of those proposed structural changes include repurposing or eliminating 100 positions in the district.

“I know this discussion tonight is about the 2022-23 budget, but beyond this year I’m concerned about future budgets and the future of funding for public education in Wisconsin,” she said.

Board member Savion Castro said, “I think we’re going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.” (Taxpayer supported political activity)

Madison taxpayers have long spent more than most k-12 school districts, now more than $22,000 per student.

Scott Girard: It continued the ongoing drop since the onset of the pandemic, which has seen the district go from 26,977 students in fall 2019 to 25,244 in this year’s “third Friday count,” which is completed on the third Friday each September. This year’s drop, however, was smaller than the past two years, which saw drops of 1,032 and 470 students.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Rob Henderson:

Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age, which is perhaps one of the reasons why boomers are so easy to mock. In a recent article, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who had told her that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys.”

An article in the Wall Street Journal reports:

Aging baby boomers are … struggling with a bunch of issues … One of the most vexing issues they face is deciding what they want to be called by their grandchildren, lest it make them sound—and feel—old … Ms. Wilkofsky has decided to be called Glamma, as in glamorous grandmother, a name suggested by one of her girlfriends. Her husband, Steven, a 58-year-old doctor, said he didn’t want a typical grandfatherly name, either, because “I still feel like I am 25.” So he chose to go by “Papa Doc.”

And this is from an article on the same topic from the New York Times:

However mightily my peers may pine for grandchildren and adore them when they arrive, some don’t want to acknowledge being old enough to be dubbed Grandpop or Granny. Such names conjure up gray hair and orthopedic shoes, along with a status our society may honor in the abstract but few boomers actually welcome.

A few months after the student eruptions at Yale in 2015, I met with a professor for coffee.

David Blaska:

Why in hell (our favorite rhetorical flourish) is the Madison public school district promoting a Get Out the Vote rally? For a partisan election! No school board candidate, no school referendum is on the ballot. But Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes are!

Why is the rally, scheduled for Monday 10-24-22 at the State Capitol, called “Unity in the Community”? What unity? An election — any election — is up or down, yes or no. Somebody wins, the other guy loses — the antithesis of unity. Unity? That’s Kim Jong Un language. The kumbaya word is invoked to hide the partisan nature of this exercise. Unavoidably, the Madison Metropolitan School District gives away its game:

Andrew Gumbel:

Thiel’s spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors – Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.

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”

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

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.

“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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Leighton Woodhouse:

Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco. The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline:“S.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says she’ll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers.” The article was taped to walls on neighborhood corners regularly frequented by drug dealers. At least one of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish — all the better for the dealers in question, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.

The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that includes the Mid-Market area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is both a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities). Dorsey’s office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to promote. Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department. Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his number one priority — a goal he shares with new District Attorney Jenkins.

Scott Sumner:

[As an analogy, it’s awkward for intellectuals on the center left to watch large numbers of working class Americans moving each year from blue states to places like Texas and Florida.  Indeed, this fact explains their sudden interest in zoning reform, which is (ironically) a longstanding cause for libertarians like me.]

That’s not to say that the US might not have been better off with more welfare spending in the 19th century, just that it’s not an obvious example of the failure of  extreme libertarianism. Indeed, I’d go even further.  At the (cross sectional) level, I don’t believe world history offers any obvious examples of the failure of libertarian ideology.  Not one.  If I am wrong, which country is the failed libertarian model?

On the other hand, from a time series perspective there are some seemingly obvious examples of libertarian excess, including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the more recent Great Recession that followed the 2008 banking crisis.  While those events certainly look like failures of libertarian ideology, on closer inspection they are both examples of the failure of government monetary policy.  Nonetheless, here I believe DeLong is partly correct, as while I see these events as representing government policy failure, I accept DeLong’s view that they largely reflect government policy failures caused by ideas popular among many libertarians, such as opposition to stimulus when NGDP has fallen.  So I certainly don’t wish to suggest that our hands are clean.  Libertarians are like anyone else; they often hold incorrect and even morally objectionable views.  

[BTW, throughout the book DeLong sprinkles in a few embarrassing quotes from libertarians like George Stigler and Friedrich Hayek.  In contrast, one finds almost no examples of embarrassing quotes from intellectuals on the center-left, even though if you go back in history you can find plenty of such examples on issues ranging from race to gay rights.  Whole books have been written documenting the left’s embarrassing excuse making regarding communist regimes.]

DeLong views Herbert Hoover as an example of how laissez-faire ideology can lead to disaster. The truth is more complicated. At the time, Hoover was regarded as being much more interventionist than Coolidge. DeLong correctly lists some of Hoover’s mistakes, but only those that would be viewed as mistakes by a center-left economist. Thus Hoover favored high tariffs and opposed devaluing the dollar. But DeLong doesn’t discuss the many (ineffective) actions that Hoover took to ameliorate the Depression. Nor does he discuss Hoover’s decision to dramatically raise income taxes on the rich (from 25% to 63%), or his success in jawboning corporations to avoid the sort of deep nominal wage cuts that allowed for a fast recovery from the 1921 deflation. That’s not laissez-faire. I’m not one of those libertarians that believe these policy errors caused the Great Depression—tight money was the main problem—but these mistakes made it somewhat worse. (As did FDR’s NIRA wage shock.) I suspect that most center-left economists support higher taxes on the rich and oppose nominal wage cuts in a depression, so perhaps this explains DeLong’s oversight.

But given what we know now, the cause of the Great Depression was clearly government failure.