Andrew McCarthy:

On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum in which he wailed about the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” Clearing his throat with an empty nod to the inconvenient fact that the Constitution protects “spirited debate,” Garland incorrectly — indeed, outrageously for someone of his experience as a Justice Department official and federal appellate judge — claimed that free-speech principles yield not only to “threats of violence” but also to “efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views” (at least, evidently, individuals not named Sinema or Manchin).

Garland knows this is dangerous nonsense. I personally know that he knows it. He was a high-ranking official in the Clinton Justice Department, which gave me a very hard time — though it ultimately relented — when I proposed charging a notorious terrorist with soliciting acts of violence and seditious conspiracy.

We had elaborate evidence, much of it in the form of recorded statements, showing that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman believed himself to be in a forcible war against the United States, that his followers had carried out and plotted terrorist attacks, and that he had personally called for both bombings of American military installations and the murder of Egypt’s then-president.

Yet, with the Clinton administration under pressure from left-wing and Islamist groups aligned with the Democratic Party, I was darkly cautioned about the inviolable carapace of free expression and the imperative to avoid “chilling” speech by conflating criminal incitement with constitutionally protected rhetoric that expressed hatred for America — even rhetoric that bitterly attacked American officials and insisted that our governing system should be supplanted.

Garland well knows, as he and Clinton officials stressed to me nearly 30 years ago, that in the incitement context, the First Amendment protects speech unless it unambiguously calls for the use of force that the speaker clearly intends, under circumstances in which the likelihood of violence is real and imminent. Even actual “threats of violence” are not actionable unless they meet this high threshold.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

You can smell the fear in this act – further confirmation those in power really, really fear the power of “we the people” standing together, united. This is not the action of a govt secure in it’a position. Like everything evil, tyranny comes from weakness – not strength. https://t.co/VnpUsdI6lB

— Lara Logan (@laralogan) October 5, 2021

Rod Dreher:

Violence — real or threatened — in school board meetings is unacceptable. But here’s the thing: why federalize this? Why isn’t local law enforcement capable of handling these cases? Why involve the Justice Department? One wonders if the Left is not trying to deploy the same strategy the FBI used against the KKK during the Civil Rights era against parents today who dissent from CRT and/or gender ideology taught to their kids, and vaccine policies. How many parents will be willing to show up at all at school board meetings to object if they fear that in so doing, they will become ensnared with the FBI?

Perhaps this is the point.

Ilan Kogan:

Oddly, the proposed legislation reads like a list of the most widely condemned policy ideas globally. Elsewhere, these ideas have been vigorously protested by human rights organizations and struck down as unconstitutional. No doubt, the federal government’s proposed legislation presents a serious threat to human rights in Canada.

The government’s intentions are noble. The purpose of the legislation is to reduce five types of harmful content online: child sexual exploitation content, terrorist content, content that incites violence, hate speech, and non-consensual sharing of intimate images.

Even though this content is already largely illegal, further reducing its proliferation is a worthy goal. Governments around the world, and particularly in Europe, have introduced legislation to combat these harms. The problem is not the government’s intention. The problem is the government’s solution.

Serious privacy issues

The legislation is simple. First, online platforms would be required to proactively monitor all user speech and evaluate its potential for harm. Online communication service providers would need to take “all reasonable measures,” including the use of automated systems, to identify harmful content and restrict its visibility.

Second, any individual would be able to flag content as harmful. The social media platform would then have 24 hours from initial flagging to evaluate whether the content was in fact harmful. Failure to remove harmful content within this period would trigger a stiff penalty: up to three per cent of the service provider’s gross global revenue or $10 million, whichever is higher. For Facebook, that would be a penalty of $2.6 billion per post.

Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Ryan Mac:

Facebook has been in an uproar over the past few weeks, which the meetings were held to quell. The tumult began after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles last month that showed Facebook knew about the harms of its services, including teenage girls saying that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. The articles were based on a trove of Facebook documents, which were leaked by an unidentified whistle-blower.

The revelations immediately set off a wave of criticism from regulators and lawmakers, many of whom moved swiftly to call the company to account. As scrutiny mounted, Facebook delayed the Instagram service for children. On Thursday, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, was questioned for more than two hours by lawmakers about the mental and emotional toll its services could take on kids.

Inside Facebook, top executives have been engulfed by the crisis, with the fallout spreading through parts of the company and disrupting its “Youth Group,” which oversees research and development for children’s products like Messenger Kids, according to interviews with a dozen current and former employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

To navigate the controversy, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have approved decisions on how to respond but have deliberately kept out of the public eye, said two people with knowledge of the meetings. The company has leaned on its “Strategic Response” teams, which include communications and public relations employees.

Wall Street Journal:

Large college endowments have notched their biggest investment gains in decades, thanks to portfolios boosted by huge venture-capital returns and soaring stock markets.

The University of Minnesota’s endowment gained 49.2% for the year ending June 30, while Brown University’s endowment notched a return of more than 50%, said people familiar with their returns, which aren’t yet public.

Meanwhile, Duke University over the weekend said its endowment had gained 55.9%. Washington University in St. Louis last week reported a 65% return, the school’s biggest gain ever, swelling the size of its managed endowment pool to $15.3 billion. The University of Virginia’s endowment reported a 49% gain. Universities’ returns may include portions of endowments, plus other long-term investments.

Will Flanders:

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently attempted to make the case for masking in schools by citing a number of different studies that purported to show their positive effects in a series of tweets. However, his use of one study out of Wisconsin shows either a willful misrepresentation of the data, or an ineptitude in interpreting research that should be concerning to families impacted by U.S. Department of Education policy.

The study in question looked at transmission rates of COVID-19 in rural Wood County, Wisconsin. They follow 17 schools in the county, all of which required masking, and provide a description of the transmission rates that were found. Cardona claimed that the study found a “37% lower incidence of COVID than the surrounding community,” and claimed that this was scientific evidence that masking of students was effective. But this study makes no such claim. The 37% number found in the study is merely a comparison of COVID transmission in the school with transmission in the surrounding community—there was no control group. A control group is vital to a comprehensive study because it allows the scientists to exclude outside factors.  There are plenty of other explanations for why transmission was lower in the school.  The preponderance of the evidence suggests that kids are less likely to transmit COVID-19 than adults. But whatever the truth, the study cited is not evidence one way or the other.

The misrepresentation on the part of Cardona was so great that the author of the study in question took to Twitter to correct the record:

“Secretary Cardona, I was the senior author of this study. Our study is not able to give any information about the role masks played in the observed low in-school transmission rates. We had no control group so don’t know if the rate would have been different without masks.”

The tweet remains up as of this writing, despite attempts by the author of the study and many others to correct the record, and the Secretary has not explained the reasoning behind his misrepresentation. There are problems with the other studies he cites as well. None of the other studies cited has a control group. Even worse, as pointed out by American Federation for Children Director of Research, Corey DeAngelis, the fourth study cited is purely a simulation—meaning that it is guaranteed to find an effect of masking if an assumption that it works is included in the model.

Abigail Shrier:

For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers — has defined the boundaries of the new orthodoxy surrounding transgender medical care: What’s true, what’s false, which questions can and cannot be asked.

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic. They said that any worries about a social contagion among teen girls was nonsense. And they never said anything about the distinct possibility that blocking puberty, coupled with cross-sex hormones, could inhibit a normal sex life.

Their allies in the media and Hollywood reported stories and created content that reaffirmed this orthodoxy. Anyone who dared disagree or depart from any of its core tenets, including young women who publicly detransitioned, were inevitably smeared as hateful and accused of harming children.

But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.

Ulrike Malmendier:

Personal experiences of economic outcomes, from global financial crises to individual-level job losses, can shape individual beliefs, risk attitudes, and choices for years to come. A growing literature on experience effects shows that individuals act as if past outcomes that they experienced were overly likely to occur again, even if they are fully informed about the actual likelihood. This reaction to past experiences is long-lasting though it decays over time as individuals accumulate new experiences. Modern brain science helps understand these processes. Evidence on neuroplasticity reveals that personal experiences and learning alter the strength of neural connections and fine-tune the brain structure to those past experiences (“use-dependent brain”). I show that experience effects help understand belief formation and decision-making in a wide area of economic applications, including inflation, home purchases, mortgage choices, and consumption expenditures. I argue that experience-based learning is broadly applicable to economic decision-making and discuss topics for future research in education, health, race, and gender economics.

John Vahlenkamp:

The Camera is retracting an article that appeared in its Sept. 11 edition, headlined “Reflections on finding peace.” The newspaper has concluded the article substantially misrepresented the stories of its primary subjects — Mark Pfundstein, John Maynard and Danna Hirsch.

The Camera has determined that multiple statements attributed to these sources, including purported direct quotations, were fabricated.

Those were:

Four direct quotations attributed to Mark Pfundstein: (1) that he suspended a phone call with colleagues on Sept. 11, 2001; (2) that he monitored White House orders during the crisis; and (3) that he escaped from the Pentagon and (4) personally witnessed rescues there. Pfundstein has refuted those quotations. The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before the attack on the Pentagon, Pfundstein — who was working at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in Suitland, Md. — participated in a video teleconference with colleagues working in the Pentagon, some of whom he learned later that evening were killed in that attack. No one on his call the morning of 9/11 was at the World Trade Center.

A statement attributed to Pfundstein regarding phone calls he made immediately after planes struck the World Trade Center tower; and an inaccurate statement, wrongly attributed to Pfundstein, regarding President George W. Bush’s address to the nation that morning. Further, the story attributes to Pfundstein numerous references to exact times, which he says he did not bring up in interviews with the reporter.
Pfundstein’s current vocation. He lobbies Colorado’s congressional delegation for a less militarized foreign policy. He does not speak at universities.

The inspiration of the United States of America was that there isn’t “a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right” https://t.co/YVRt4Vrrwd

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) October 3, 2021

“A lot of times parents think that the eating disorder has taken over every inch of their mind. There’s always a bit of humanity left inside,” says Steve’s daughter Lily. Hear Lily and @StevenDLevitt have a candid conversation about her recovery: https://t.co/8qXVKpyFYF

— People I (Mostly) Admire (@MostlyAdmiring) September 30, 2021

“Most educated workforce in the world”

Are we (Wisconsin/Madison) in the game? I have my doubts.

Mulligans distract us.

Two recent scenes at LHR, London Heathrow airport. 80 million people transited the airport in 2018.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Addison Smith:

Another student pointed out that, “Some of the things [Biden] would be paying for does sound nice to have, but I mean… it’s hurting somebody. I mean, you might be giving all those things, but somebody’s paying for it”.

When one student suggested the bill should be passed, Smith told her that, if the debt were divided up among U.S. citizens, each citizen would owe more than $86,000. After hearing how debt falls on the taxpayer, she quickly changed her mind about the bill.

“Everything’s going to start rising in prices and stuff… you did change my mind”, she said.

Scott Girard:

A vote by Sun Prairie Area School District residents Monday could reshape the district’s future school board.

SPASD community members submitted a petition to change the board’s apportionment, which governs the eligibility of people to run for the board. Currently, the entire seven-member board is “at-large,” meaning candidates can live anywhere in the district and be eligible to run.

With SPASD adding a second high school next fall, however, some residents wanted to change that to ensure better geographic representatio

David Blaska:

Wisconsin law is clear. If violence breaks out in school, you call the police and you call them first thing.

Madison’s public schools violated state statue when it did not call in the police after an East high school sophomore was pummeled by two assailants as he sat at his desk. We’re not the only ones to notice. Retired UW Law School prof Ann of Althouse asked, “Why don’t schools call the police when crimes are committed in school?”

We answered her question at our blogge headlined “School discipline plan omits police, rewards analysis paralysis:” Madison WI schools have declared War on Police.

Again we post the flow chart of the school district’s critical response plan. A starving mouse would go dizzy in this bureaucratic maze. See if you can find where it says Call the Police. In fact, the first step reads: “Central Office Notified.”

Gangs and School Violence forum

Michael Benjamin:

We ask that question of any parent whose child attends a city Department of Education school and more broadly of families (especially urban ones) all across the nation. And not just elementary-school children, but even middle- and high-schoolers.

Because all too many public schools not only fail to teach basic skills; they promote students with decent grades without ever alerting families to how bad things really are. If there was a silver lining to the sick farce of remote learning this last year and a half, it was that it forced many parents to get more involved in their children’s education. And lots and lots of them woke up to the horrible truth.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Dominick Cummings:

Just as bureaucracies resist changes to their current direction as if governed by Newton’s First Law, so they are governed by Newton’s Third Law: the moreforce you exert to simplify and remove ludicrous proecess, the more demented the bureaucratic resistance becomes.

How demented?

In March 2020 I had meetings in the Cabinet room to strip insane processes out of the way. What did I discover one day? That PPE equipment would not arrive in the NHS for months because we had ordered it to be SHIPPED. Why? Because ‘the rules’ said that FLYING it was ‘not value for money’ and we always follow ‘the rules’ even when they kill people. So I told them to call the airlines and commandeer their planes (all grounded) and fly them to Asia and collect the PPE and fly back. And they asked for a letter from the PM’s office indemnifying them in the event of legal challenges and/or disciplinary action. And now much of Westminster is fighting NOT to remove the insane rules but to ensure that the insanity revealed by covid is NOT used as an excuse to remove them. And they have had much success, and got the High Court to agree that avoiding killing people is not a good enough reason to move quickly. And the lesson has been duly learned — even in a crisis killing tens of thousands, make sure you prioritise the insane rules if you want to keep your job.

Stephen LePore:

Students at a Minnesota school will no longer be seeing an ‘F’ on test papers – no matter how badly they do – and they could be allowed to retake tests.

Sunrise Park Middle School in White Bear Lake released a YouTube video this week detailing its new grading system which it says, in part, helps fight systemic racism.

The scale goes from an A (any score above 92.5 percent) to an I (50 percent to 59.49 percent) but below that, a letter grade will not be used, including an F.

Associate Principal Norman Bell expanded, saying that students are encouraged to retake/revise tests, quizzes, papers, projects and have a 10-day window to do so after the date the grade is posted.

Grades also will not be increased or decreased over behaviors, attitude, tardiness, and whether the assignment was turned in late or on time.

‘There’s other ways that we can communicate those things to parents,’ said Principal Christina Pierre, who emphasized that not every kid gets things right the first time.

Rachel Sharp:

The Supreme Court has denied a challenge from New York City public school teachers to block Mayor Bill de Blasio’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate from going into effect today.

US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor ruled in favor of the city Friday – allowing the mandate to go ahead and paving the way for up to 14,800 unvaccinated school employees to be out of work come Monday.

A group of four teachers had sent an emergency petition to Sotomayor Thursday asking her to halt the mandate.

They argued the mandate not only places an ‘unconstitutional burden’ on the city’s 148,000 school workers, but also ‘threatens the education of thousands of children.’

The petition claimed teachers’ rights are being violated because they do not have the option to undergo regular COVID-19 testing instead of getting the shot.

Teachers across all public schools in the Big Apple were given up until 5pm Friday to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk losing their jobs.

Glenn Reynolds:

The pandemic has been a disaster for public education. Closed schools and self-serving teachers unions have undermined parents’ faith in the system. The result has been a massive move to private schools and to homeschooling. More than 11 percent of American households are homeschooling their kids. The numbers among black and Hispanic households are now even higher than this average.

There are a lot of reasons for this — I wrote a book on the trend, “The New School,” almost a decade ago. But COVID has accelerated things dramatically.

Homeschooling is safer from infection and, Moreland she important, from the ever-changing whimsof the educational bureaucracy. Rather than put up with the increasingly intrusive and authoritarian behavior of educrats, parents are taking control. Thanks

They’re also finding out that their kids are learning more and faster. (My own daughter wasn’t homeschooled, but after concluding that her public high school was wasting a huge chunk of her day, as she switched to an online program and graduaras early, starting college at 16.)

Now a federal court in my hometown has provided another reason: You’re not only under the thumbs of intrusive educrats; you’re also subject to whatever diktats activists can persuade a federal court to issue. In the case of Knox County, Tenn., schools, that consists of an order to mask all children, despite orders from Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, and the Knox County Board of Education to the contrary.

The court’s order is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some parents whose kids have medical conditions that might make them particularly at-risk if they contract COVID sued, demanding the school board order all students to wear masks as a way of accommodating their kids’ disabilities. The school board argued that the ADA requires only a “reasonable accommodation” for disabilities, and that it was prepared to provide that by offering online classes or classes apart from the general student body.

Dominic Cummings:

In Washington as in London, the golden rule of Government is — the government does not control the government and anybody who tries to change this is seen as the enemy by the bureaucracies that actually control ~99% of the government. Politicians talk as if the government controls the government and fundraise as if it does. The media reports as if it does. It does not.

Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, covid, the Afghanistan debacle — all are impossible to understand unless you understand this rule.
Almost no ‘conservatives’ in the UK understand this rule, why ‘reform’ is so extremely hard, and what to do about it. There is almost no public discussion in conventional UK media about how power actually works in the British state and this seems to be roughly the same in the US. For example, even after >100k avoidable deaths the entire UK political media provides no analysis of the crucial bureuacratic engine, ‘the Covid Taskforce’, which actually controls covid policy (who controls it, how does it work). Instead covid policy is portrayed as the product of ‘Cabinet discussions/rows’ — but Cabinet is actually almost totally irrelevant, and usually not even consulted. Even the greatest researchers and extremely able people who have built multi-billion dollar companies often talk as if the President/PM controls the bureaucracies and can instruct them to do X or Y, and they do X or Y, just as they routinely discuss politics as if a) there must be a hidden plan that renders the visible chaos more rational and b) politicians are ‘at least’ rational about electoral/communication strategy (they usually aren’t).

America needs a government that controls the government, as it did under FDR and Lincoln, and shatters the party structure which is a plague. You don’t control the government unless you can shut down parts of the ‘permanent’ bureaucracy and you can’t legally do this in the current regime without grabbing control of a party. It’s hard to imagine sane politics over the next 50 years without somehow closing (or at very least ‘changing beyond recognition’) the GOP, Democrats, Tories, Labour.

The college fix:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” — George Orwell, 1984

Rory Linnane:

In a troubling sign of the pandemic’s impact on students’ plans for higher education, a report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum shows less than half the state’s public high school seniors last year filled out federal paperwork for college financial aid. 

Compared to the pre-pandemic class of 2019, 13% fewer Wisconsin seniors in the class of 2021 filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, according to data compiled by the Forum. The FAFSA is a key predictor of whether a high school senior will go on to college.

In Milwaukee, where great gains in completion numbers had been seen, the drop from 2019 to 2021 was 26%, setting Milwaukee Public Schools and city charter schools back to where they were before 2017. 

“These declines carry ominous implications since the FAFSA is a crucial first step for many students toward securing the financial aid necessary to attend college,” the Forum noted in its report. 

Thecompletion numbers for the city and state fell by greater margins than the nationwide numbers, which, including private schools, fell by 8%, the Forum found. 

Some of the drop could be due to an overall decline in the number of students in the graduating classes at public high schools. But completion rates, which take into account student population, also dropped.

Wisconsin Senate:

Senate Ed Committee will have a hearing on SB454 The Roadmap to Reading Success Wednesday, Oct 6 at 10:30AM. It will be the only bill on the agenda. Catch it on Wisconsin Eye (or in person).

Related: A Capitol Conversation (2011!) and the Foundations of Reading.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Joanna Chiu:

Dan, whose name I’ve changed to protect his identity, hails from one of China’s picturesque and relatively laidback southwestern provinces. He studied English diligently and was elated when a top Canadian university accepted his application to study law.

About a month before the start of the September 2017 session, when Dan was still in China, the university issued his student credentials, and with them he received access to a virtual private network (VPN). The tool allowed him — for the first time in his life — to scale the “Great Firewall of China” and access an uncensored internet.

Curious, the 21-year-old thought he might check out some overseas social media sites, connect with future classmates, and read world news; that way, he wouldn’t seem so out of touch once he arrived. He would be joining a cohort of Chinese international students in Canada totalling around 140,000 that year.

He decided to take a few basic precautions, since he hadn’t left China yet. He signed up for Twitter using a fake name and fake location, and even set his gender to female.

To his amazement, the platform was already full of Chinese-language users. A whole network of bloggers, artists, independent journalists and scholars were engaging in a level of dialogue on Chinese politics he had never seen.

Once Dan arrived in Canada and began adjusting to a new city and a new university, he continued to browse Twitter in his dorm room. He was too nervous to actually join in any conversations. He retweeted only three posts: the news that Nobel laureate and Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo had died, a short satirical video about President Xi Jinping, and a chart on levels of Chinese government corruption.

Rory Linnane:

MPS, like districts across the country, is receiving three rounds of stimulus funds under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, known as ESSER. MPS gets more than many districts because amounts are based largely on how many students in the district come from low-income families.

MPS already allocated its first two rounds of funding. The third, $504 million, funded by the American Rescue Plan, comes with requirements to consult with underserved families before making spending decisions.

Madison is scheduled to receive more than $70M in redistributed federal taxpayer and borrowed funds.

Jennifer Schluesser:

The historian Beverly Gage, who has run the Grand Strategy course since 2017, says the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts to influence the curriculum.

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy is one of Yale University’s most celebrated and prestigious programs. Over the course of a year, it allows a select group of about two dozen students to immerse themselves in classic texts of history and statecraft, while also rubbing shoulders with guest instructors drawn from the worlds of government, politics, military affairs and the media.

But now, a program created to train future leaders how to steer through the turbulent waters of history is facing a crisis of its own.

Beverly Gage, a historian of 20th-century politics who has led the program since 2017, has resigned, saying the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts by its donors to influence its curriculum and faculty hiring.

The donors, both prominent and deep-pocketed, are Nicholas F. Brady, a former U.S. Treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Charles B. Johnson, a mutual fund billionaire and leading Republican donor who in 2013 made a $250 million donation to Yale — the largest gift in its history.

Days after the 2020 presidential election, Professor Gage said, an opinion article in The New York Times by another instructor in the program calling Donald J. Trump a demagogue who threatened the Constitution prompted complaints from Mr. Brady.

Dave Sebastian:

YouTube said it would remove content that falsely alleges approved vaccines are dangerous and cause severe health effects, expanding the video platform’s efforts to curb Covid-19 misinformation to other vaccines.

Examples of content that would be taken down include false claims that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility or that they don’t reduce transmission or contraction of diseases, theAlphabet Inc. GOOG -0.93% division said Wednesday.

The policies cover general statements about vaccines—not only those for Covid-19—and about specific routine immunizations such as those for measles and hepatitis B. YouTube said it has removed more than 130,000 videos for violating its Covid-19 vaccine policies since last year.

“We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general,” YouTube said. “We’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with Covid-19 to other vaccines.”

Alec Johnson:

Scarlett Johnson, Kris Kittell, Charles Lorenz and Cheryle Rebholz will be on the ballot, along with incumbent Mequon-Thiensville School Board members Wendy Francour, Erik Hollander, Akram Khan and Chris Schultz. It’s unclear if anyone else besides the incumbents and the candidates supported by the recall organizers will run.

“Our community has told us loud and clear that they are ready for a change,” Schroeder said in the news release. “This positive campaign will reassure our community that their voices have been heard, and that much needed change is just around the corner.”

In June, Schroeder said the recall grew out of concerns over the district’s COVID-19 mitigation plan, critical race theory and a decline in academic performance. She also said at the time that board members were not responsive to parents about their concerns, and that the board had abdicated its decision-making authority to Mequon-Thiensville School District Superintendent Matthew Joynt, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason for doing so

David Blaska:

The influential Ann of Althouse, retired UW Law school professor and bloggueresse, asks “Why don’t schools call the police when crimes are committed in school?”

The short answer is that Madison WI schools a year ago enlisted in the War on Police.With the connivance of Madison’s woke city government, the school board evicted school resource police officers. Let Ann tell it:

There’s an interview with Tim LeMonds, MMSD Director of Communications. If I understand him correctly …  the school’s policy is not to call the police unless a weapon is involved or police are needed to stop the fight. The message I hear is that there’s a plan never to call the police if attacks are quick and done with bare hands. The video shows a defenseless child getting pummeled at his desk. As LeMonds put it:

“When the attack took place, the teacher reached out for assistance and by the time staff were able to respond the incident was over.” 

Althouse asks: “How is that a reason not to call the police?!” 

The Werkes answers: Student discipline has been sucked into a bureaucratic black hole. Woe to the educator who does call police! We reproduce the critical response incident flowchart. It is contained within the school district’s 111-page MMSD safety plan. One Hundred and Eleven pages! At the very least, one hopes that each and every one of 4,985 school district employees (including the hot lunch ladies) are given a laminated copy like the kind the football coaches carry on the sidelines. Sort of a Chinese restaurant menu.

UPDATE: A reader points out, correctly, that MMSD policies & actions are in clear violation of Wisconsin State Statute 48.981, which mandates the reporting of any assault on a child under the age of 18 to a law enforcement agency or county social services.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum.

Jessica Holmberg and Will Flanders:

Teachers are fundamental in supporting and molding the minds of America’s future workforce. Unfortunately, the teaching workforce is experiencing crisis-level shortages. Research estimates that the national gap between supply and demand for teachers will grow to more than 100,000 by 2024. While there are many factors contributing to enrollment declines, one major factor that states could use to alleviate the problem is tackling overly burdensome licensing requirements.

For some time, there has been declining enrollment in educator preparation programs and a high level of new teacher turnover in Wisconsin and the U.S. as a whole. In Wisconsin alone, educator preparation enrollment decreased nearly 30% since 2008, according to a recent analysis.

One of the major problems in getting teachers into the classroom are complex licensing requirements. Every state requires some form of teaching license for teaching in the public-school system. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released a report that reviewed the many steps a teaching candidate is required to take before licensure. To begin, all teacher candidates must complete an educator preparation program that traditionally takes four years, but may be less depending on whether the candidate holds a bachelor’s degree or not. During preparation, candidates may be required to maintain minimum grade point averages and pass numerous content-related courses and assessments, among other requirements. In 2018 only 45.3% of candidates in Wisconsin passed the Praxis II Mathematics licensure assessment, even after multiple attempts.

Riley Vetterkind:

Teaching public school students and training employees about concepts such as systemic racism and implicit bias would be banned under legislation Republicans passed in the state Assembly Tuesday.

GOP lawmakers also approved a bill, 61-37, that would create a statewide civics curriculum that all Wisconsin public and private schools would have to follow. The measure would require all public school students to take at least a half credit in civics education in order to graduate.

Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, D-Milwaukee, joined Republicans in favor of the civics bill.

The first measure, which would prohibit teaching concepts under the rubric of “critical race theory,” began circulating in the state Legislature this summer amid a nationwide push by conservatives to police how teachers talk about race in the classroom. The theory asserts that racism is ingrained in the nation’s social structures and policies.

The bill, which passed the Assembly on a 60-38 party-line vote, is all but certain to be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a former state schools superintendent. The bill has yet to be approved by the Senate.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Luke Rosiak:

Soon after The Daily Wire published an investigation that was unflattering to Democratic politician Terry McAuliffe and the Fairfax County Public Schools, FCPS filed legal action against the story’s source: the mother of a special-ed parent who relayed records that the school system provided to her under public records laws.

It also sued another mother of a special-needs student who runs a blog that published portions of the records. The documents are billing records showing how FCPS paid Hunton Andrews Kurth, a law firm that hired now-Virginia gubernatorial candidate McAuliffe as a top advisor, to do much of what parents say is the school system’s dirty work, including seeking to dismiss a class action lawsuit filed by special-ed parents who allege that their children were systematically physically abused by educators.

The school system said it “mistakenly” released the records, and claimed they contained information that could violate federal law. Ironically, one of the services Hunton provided to FCPS is reviewing FOIAs, and these materials were largely Hunton’s own billing records.

The unusual legal maneuver, highlighting questions about whether schools exist to serve parents or the other way around, came hours before McAuliffe – whose campaign has received nearly $1 million from teachers unions – said in a debate that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” It also came in the same district that cut off a mother during public comment when she raised questions about improper books.

Wall Street Journal

The U.S. median income for a family of four is about $90,000. Those families would pay 2% of income annually ($1,800) for child care. Taxpayers would pay the rest, roughly $21,000 for two kids in day care, according to estimates by Rachel Greszler of the Heritage Foundation. In wealthy states like Massachusetts, where child-care prices are higher, a family of four earning $200,000 a year could receive $23,000. Even at $367,000 in income, that Bay State family could get $10,000 in subsidies (as long as they self-certify they have less than $1 million in assets).

• Democrats also want paid family leave—about two-thirds of average wages for up to 12 weeks a year for any family care. It would apply to both full- and part-time employees, and in the case of newborns both parents would be entitled to leave. This means a married couple with a newborn—each earning $200,000 (Mr. Biden’s definition of a “rich” household)—could each collect more than $1,000 in weekly benefits, resulting in $24,000 of paid leave in one year. A couple making $100,000 each would be eligible for roughly the same amount.

Here’s what you need to know about new entitlements

• Democrats are also expanding ObamaCare. This spring’s Covid bill eliminated the income cap (400% of the poverty level) on who qualifies for subsidies. Brian Blase of the Galen Institute has calculated this windfallfor higher-income earners. It’s especially large for older Americans or those living in parts of the country where the benchmark premium (used to calculate benefits) is higher than the national average. 

A family of five with a 60-year-old head of household in Prescott, Ariz., for instance, could earn $350,000 a year and still qualify for an ObamaCare subsidy of $21,309. Even at $500,000 of income, that family would still get $8,559 in federal healthcare dollars.

• The bill includes a huge, new $12,500 electric vehicle tax credit. Since EVs cost between $10,000 and $15,000 more than similar gas-powered vehicles, this money will mostly flow to well-off coastal dwellers, especially in California. A couple can make $800,000 a year and still qualify for some of the credit.

• The biggest subsidy of all may be the return of the state and local tax deduction. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has promised her Members “meaningful” relief above the current $10,000 cap. Only some 15% of taxpayers itemize their deductions, and most of those who would benefit from a higher cap are the affluent—again mostly in richer coastal states.

“WILL issued a letter to the Kenosha County health department reminding the local agency that a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, James v. Heinrich, prevents local health officers from closing schools for in-person learning.”https://t.co/NDAzmy1y8b pic.twitter.com/XQrUF8skto

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) September 30, 2021

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst:

There is a strong and politically bipartisan push to increase access to government-funded pre-K. This is based on a premise that free and available pre-K is the surest way to provide the opportunity for all children to succeed in school and life, and that it has predictable and cost-effective positive impacts on children’s academic success.

The evidence to support this predicate is weak. There is only one randomized trial of a scaled-up state pre-K program with follow-up into elementary school. Rather than providing an academic boost to its participants as expected by pre-K advocates, achievement favored the control group by 2nd and 3rd grade. It is, however, only one study of one state program at one point in time. Do the findings generalize? The present study provides new correlational analyses that are relevant to the possible impact of state pre-K on later academic achievement. Findings include:

no association between states’ federally reported scores on the fourth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in various years and differences among states in levels of enrollment in their state’s pre-K program five years earlier than each of those years (when the fourth-graders taking NAEP would have been preschoolers);
positive associations (small and typically not statistically significant) between NAEP scores and earlier pre-K enrollment, when the previous analysis is conducted using NAEP scores that are statistically adjusted to account for differences between the states in the demographic characteristics of students taking NAEP; and
no association between differences among states in their gains in state pre-K enrollment and their gains in adjusted NAEP scores.
Under the most favorable scenario for state pre-K that can be constructed from these data, increasing pre-K enrollment by 10 percent would raise a state’s adjusted NAEP scores by a little less than one point five years later and have no influence on the unadjusted NAEP scores.

Lucas Robinson:

The principal of O’Keeffe Middle School said a video of a fight between two students on a bus is “disturbing” and urged the community to stop sharing the video online. 

The fight that broke out on a bus Wednesday afternoonleft one student with injuries, Principal Tony Dugas said in an email to families. The injured student was evaluated by a local health care provider, and the school is working to determine how to discipline the students involved, Dugas said.

Related: Gangs & School Violence Forum.

David Blaska:

Now WMTV-15 is showing student-captured smart phone video of fights, including a one-sided assault at Madison East high school.

The latter shows a Madison East sophomore attacked by two other students who ran into his classroom as he sat in the front row. It appears they were not fellow classmates but entered the classroom to pummel him.

The mother told TV-15: “The teachers are hands off and I’m pretty sure they are told to be hands off.” The mother has pulled her son out of school. She filed a police report, not the school district.

The incidents are not isolated, as East high Principal Sean Leavy admits in a message to parents:

Since the start of in-person learning this school year, our administrative team and deans of students have responded to multiple alterations during lunch hour that have taken place on and off school grounds, with some of these altercations becoming physical.

In a second WMTV-15 report, spokesman Tim LeMonds (he has a tough job) did his best to defend the school district’s police-free safety plan: “The big difference is SROs … Our buildings are safe … will things happen? We hope not but yes, there will be incidents.”

Murtaza Hussain:

CHAPEL HILL, NC – APRIL 21: An aerial view of the
This August, Israeli consular officials in the southeast U.S. arranged meetings with a dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to discuss a graduate student teaching a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to two UNC professors with knowledge of the meetings, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, the Israeli official accused the Ph.D. student of antisemitism and said she was unfit to teach the course.

The intervention by an Israeli government official, Consul General to the Southeastern United States Anat Sultan-Dadon, followed a pressure campaign by right-wing pro-Israel websites and an advocacy group to remove the graduate student, Kylie Broderick, from teaching the history department course called “The Conflict over Israel/Palestine.” The websites and pro-Israel advocacy group pointed to postings Broderick had made on Twitter that criticized Israel and Zionism and, without evidence, cited the postings as evidence of antisemitism.

Peter Q. Blair & Kent Smetters:

While college enrollment has more-than doubled since 1970, elite colleges have barely increased supply, instead reducing admit rates. We show that straightforward reasons cannot explain this behavior. We propose a model where colleges compete on prestige, measured using relative selectivity or relative admit rates. A key comparative static of the model is that higher demand decreases [increases] the admit rate when the weight on prestige is above [below] a critical value, consistent with experience in elite [non-elite] colleges. A calibrated version of the model closely replicates the pattern in the data of declining admit rates at elite colleges while counter-factual simulations without prestige fail. Prestige competition is inefficient. Allowing elite colleges to collude on admissions strategy internalizes the non-pecuniary prestige externality and is Pareto improving.

Jay Greene and Drew Harwell:

At first, Ryan Lackey thought the email was a scam. It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personalaccounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos.

Even weirder, the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret. Six months later, Lackey, a computer security consultant in Puerto Rico, still has no idea what Facebook turned over to an FBI investigation that he believes may have started as early as 2019.

“My online life, at least half of it touches Facebook in some way,” said Lackey, 42.

Every year, Facebook, Google and other technology companies receive hundreds of thousands of orders from law enforcement agencies seeking data people stash online: private messages, photos, search histories, calendar items — a potentially rich trove for criminal investigators. Often, those requests are accompanied by secrecy orders, also known as nondisclosure or gag orders, that require the tech companies to keep their customers in the dark, potentially for years.

Robin Hood in reverse right here. Acceptance rate at UW-Madison is now *60%*. Glad all those students could get into the school of their choice, but let’s not pretend we are part of a university system in any substantive sense. (1/2)https://t.co/dPLR9qZPp4

— Matt Jewell (@Prof_Jewell) September 29, 2021

Will Flanders:

The Assembly and Senate passed a common-sense reform to make data on school-level spending available to the public in a user-friendly, online portal. Assembly Bill 387/Senate Bill 373 received bi-partisan support in the Assembly, along with the endorsement of the Department of Public Instruction (DPI)— the state agency tasked with developing and presenting the information. But Democrats in the Senate saw fit to oppose the measure, voting almost unanimously against it (Senator Pfaff voted in favor). The reason? Democrats in the Senate saw an opportunity to attack their favorite target: private schools in the state’s school choice programs.  

Senator Chris Larson, with other Democratic members of the Senate, introduced an amendment to subject the state’s private schools that receive more than 80% of their revenue from parental choice programs to the same financial accountability standards advanced by the bill for public schools. This was designed to put legislators in support of transparency on the defensive, and deflect from the very important issue that was under debate.  

What the Democrats failed to realize is that private schools in the choice program already have the most direct accountability possible: the parents of students that choose to attend their schools. Peer-reviewed research by myself and Corey DeAngelis shows that schools in the choice program are responsive to market forces. The schools that provide an effective learning environment see enrollment growth, while those that are less effective shrink, or have left the market entirely.  

Moreover, choice schools are subject to an annual financial audit from DPI that can lead to a school’s removal from the program if taxpayer money is found to be misused. The schools are also required to show that they have sufficient funding on hand to cover all of the state aid that they receive. The same cannot always be said for traditional public schools, which often are rewarded with funding increases despite a record of inefficiency with taxpayer money.

In defense of liberty:

Under the legislation, prospective parents will no longer have to guess and gamble about whether a nearby school is informally slipping into the classroom content such as the New York Times 1619 Project, or assigning literature like Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, which tells students, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”  Instead, as noted by Rep. Behnke, this new Academic Transparency legislation “allows families to make informed decisions about their children’s education experience.” Indeed, for the first time, parents will have the ability to identify and distinguish between schools pushing radical politics versus those affirming core academic principles before they’re forced to choose where to send their children. 

Opponents of the legislation found almost no objection too outlandish to level against the new measure, including declaring during the final votes that “this bill censures history” and that its sponsors “are taking away local control of school boards,” despite the fact the bill allows school boards and teachers to continue selecting whatever curriculum materials they wish. The real problem, it seems, is that now they will have to disclose them.

As Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute observed of Academic Transparency even before Wisconsin’s latest votes, “This proposal is starting to catch fire across the country. It has been introduced in Texas and Illinois, and passed in the Arizona State Senate and the North Carolina State House…[and] earlier this month, Wyoming became the latest state to take up this proposal.”

Now, with the passage of SB463, Wisconsin lawmakers have officially set the bar high for other states looking to empower parents and contain the outbreak of politically radical, racially divisive content flooding our K-12 school system.

Martin O’Leary:

One of the most common simple techniques for generating text is a Markov chain. The algorithm takes an input text or texts, divides it into tokens (usually letters or words), and generates new text based on the statistics of short sequences of those tokens. If you’re interested in the technical details, Allison Parrish has a good tutorial on implementing Markov chains in Python.

This technique has been around for a very long time, but it’s slightly unclear when it was first developed. The following is a slightly sketchy work-in-progress timeline of what I’ve been able to work out.

My goal here is to work out when was the first person to:

• implement Markov chains on a computer
• with probabilities derived from a source text
• to generate new text
• for creative purposes

In the State Senate and Assembly today, SB 463/AB 488 (authored by @SenStroebel and Rep. Behnke) was debated. The bill would require school boards to make teaching materials, like lesson plans and classroom syllabi, available online to the public.

— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) September 28, 2021

Curiously, colleges routinely post course syllabi.

Tajma Hall:

The mother says she doesn’t understand how a fight can happen in a classroom. Video of that fight and others showing highlights of several recent fights at Madison schools are circulating among students.

The videos also raise questions about district policy, and student safety, now that school resource officers are no longer in Madison schools. The mom says to her knowledge, the students responsible have not been punished at this time. Since the fight, the mother has pulled her son out of school indefinitely in fear of his safety. She says she filed a police report and is disappointed the district did not take the matter more seriously.

NBC15 reached out to district officials who say they stand by how the incident was handled. A spokesperson for the district said the attack is unacceptable and says it wasn’t stopped because it happened so quickly.

“When the attack took place, the teacher reached out for assistance and by the time staff were able to respond the incident was over,” said Tim LeMonds, MMSD Director of Communications.

How can a public radio managing director be trusted to represent a diverse public if she is this biased against charter school supporters?

Short answer: she can’t.https://t.co/e9t5T24Fjs

— Citizen Stewart (@citizenstewart) September 28, 2021

Matt Walsh:

The Loudoun County school board in VA has imposed a radical trans policy allowing males access to girl’s restrooms and teams. Teachers are required to use preferred pronouns. To protest this madness, I’ll be leading a rally outside the school board meeting on September 28. Join us! The time for sitting on the sidelines is over. Schools that harm children must be confronted. We must speak up against this indoctrination loudly and in person. I have a large platform and intend to use it to help mobilize these efforts. The child abusers will hear from us.

James V. Grimaldi, Coulter Jones and Joe Palazzolo:

More than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010. The jurists were appointed by nearly every president from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump.

About two-thirds of federal district judges disclosed holdings of individual stocks, and nearly one of every five who did heard at least one case involving those stocks.

Alerted to the violations by the Journal, 56 of the judges have directed court clerks to notify parties in 329 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves. That means new judges might be assigned, potentially upending rulings.

When judges participated in such cases, about two-thirds of their rulings on motions that were contested came down in favor of their or their family’s financial interests.

Jeff Horwitz:

“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

Despite attempts to rein it in, XCheck grew to include at least 5.8 million users in 2020, documents show. In its struggle to accurately moderate a torrent of content and avoid negative attention, Facebook created invisible elite tiers within the social network.

In describing the system, Facebook has misled the public and its own Oversight Board, a body that Facebook created to ensure the accountability of the company’s enforcement systems.

Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman:

First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system. Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.

Antonio García Martínez:

Christopher Rufo is a political activist who has been leading a very prominent media war against ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT), a concept I won’t even dare to define but which Pull Request readers have surely seen in various guises all over their feeds.
This post is for paying subscribers

id

Rachel Lin and William Hetherington:

The academic records of 7,854 high-school students have been lost due to a hard-drive failure, the Ministry of Education said yesterday.

The records were being stored at National Chi Nan University, which was commissioned by the ministry’s K-12 Education Administration to host a computer server of student portfolios that universities could access to evaluate their applications.

Under a program introduced in 2019 for high-school students starting that year, students are to create portfolios to be used for university applications, which include their grades, extracurricular activities and other information related to their character and achievements.

Ruth Wisse:

I had been delighted when Dean Jeremy Knowles asked me during our first interview whether I would be prepared to teach in Harvard’s version of ‘the Core’, a liberal arts curriculum from which undergraduates were obliged to select 10 courses over their four years. I planned a ‘great Jewish books’ course featuring writers from Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Primo Levi and Saul Bellow, thus including major international works to represent the multilingual quality of modern Jewish literature and to track the experience of Jews in the 20th century.

At the start of one semester, I noticed a girl wearing a hooded sweatshirt so low over her forehead one could scarcely see she was African American. She told me she was stymied by the first assigned text: Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (the source of Fiddler on the Roof) in a translation generously sprinkled with transliterated Hebrew quotations. I assured her that almost everyone in the class would need to resort to the glossary provided at the back of the book, and then tried to show her that the game might prove worthwhile if she could just relax and enjoy it. From then on, she came to see me almost weekly and was soon doing most of the talking.

Thanking me for the course at the end of the semester, my student surprised me by singling out Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet, a demanding indictment of the counterculture and permissiveness of the 1960s. It was not a young person’s book, but it had had its effect. ‘When I arrived here,’ the student said, ‘I was the you-go girl! I was going to change everything. I was going to change the world. Well, this book showed me that I could also change it for the worse.’ She articulated better than I had done what a course on modern Jewish fiction could hope to transmit.

I had the opposite experience with a Muslim student from Pakistan who refused to deal with Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s Hebrew novella, In the Heart of the Seas, because he deemed it racist. A student could only find this ‘racist’ if he was raised to disbelieve in the Bible’s formation of the Jewish people and the natural right of the Jews to their homeland. The Arab and Soviet coalition had rammed through the villainous resolution equating Zionism with racism at the United Nations; this highly intelligent young man took that equation as much on faith as Agnon’s travelers believed in their return to Zion.

The student had until then been doing very well. It being too late to withdraw from the course, he demanded to complete it without having to deal with this book. This was technically possible since assignments and exams left him enough to choose from without it. I discussed it with a teaching assistant, and we decided to accede to his request. We had by then experienced enough of Harvard’s swelling bureaucracy to know what it would cost in time and energy if we were to refuse his petition.

Peter Doshi and Aditi Bhargava:

Increasingly, vaccination is no longer a matter of choice. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of workplaces and schools are instituting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, with more expected following formal FDA licensure of the vaccines. But mandating people and their children who have consciously chosen not to get vaccinated — a group that tends to be younger, less educated, Republican, non-white and uninsured — is a recipe for creating new and deeper fractures within our society, the kind of fractures we may profoundly regret in hindsight.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: This is a new form of institutionalized segregation. Yes, some unvaccinated adults may swallow this bitter pill and comply as a way of doing their part in making America safer. But many will see it — along with requirements that the unvaccinated wear masks or undergo regular COVID testing — as a thinly veiled attempt at public shaming. After all, if the goal is to maximize the interruption of spread, then surely all people should be masked irrespective of vaccination status.

Forced compliance will come with future consequences. The ensuing anger, resentment and loss of trust forms a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Are we ready to add this mandate to the list of issues helping erode the fabric of our society?

Meanwhile, New York City teacher litigation.

Alan Borsuk:

It started out in Fall 1991 with 337 students in seven schools. Religious schools weren’t allowed to participate then and only one of those seven schools (Bruce Guadalupe) still exists. The program grew slowly until 1998, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the first high court in the nation to rule that using public money to support students attending religious kindergarten through twelfth grades schools was constitutional.

Voucher use grew strongly after that. By last fall, about 28,000 children, around a quarter of all Milwaukee children receiving publicly funded education, were going to about 115 private schools. That in itself is a big key to understanding the dramatic change overall in the local school landscape, due to vouchers.

Just to be clear, no one has ever been required or assigned to use a voucher to go to a private school. That wouldn’t be legal. Thousands of parents want their kids to attend private and, most cases, religious schools, and vouchers make that possible. Why do parents make such choices?

There are as many answers as there are students, but the best list I can offer includes the belief that, compared to many public schools, environments are safer, discipline is stricter, classes are often smaller, and the Bible is part of the program.

Denise-Marie Ordway:

People who trust science are more likely to be duped into believing and disseminating pseudoscience, finds a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Pseudoscience is false information that references science broadly or scientific terms, research or phenomena. Across four experiments, researchers asked U.S. adults to read news articles written for the study that intentionally made false claims about two topics: a fictional virus created as a bioweapon or the health effects of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

The experiments reveal that study participants who indicated they had higher levels of trust in science were most likely to believe the fake account if it contained scientific references. Those individuals also were more likely to agree that stories spotlighting pseudoscience should be shared with others.

On the other hand, people who demonstrated a stronger understanding of scientific methods were less likely to believe what they read and say it should be shared, regardless of whether the information was attributed to science.

The researchers note their findings conflict with ongoing campaigns to promote trust in science as a way to fight misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing and COVID-19 vaccines. Trust in science alone is insufficient, says the lead author of the paper, Thomas C. O’Brien, a social psychologist who studies conflict resolution and trust in institutions, most recently at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Bruce Vielmetti

Amyiah Cohoon, then a sophomore, took a spring break trip to Florida with the Westfield Area High School band in 2020. The students returned to Wisconsin on March 15, earlier than planned, because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Cohoon posted on Instagram that she thought she had been infected, had been to hospitals, and though she tested negative, her doctors thought she probably had had it earlier. In a final post, she is wearing an oxygen mask and says she’s beaten COVID, and urges others to stay safe.

On March 27, Marquette County Sheriff’s Sgt. Cameron Klump came to the Cohoon home and said Sheriff Joseph Konrath had ordered the posts be taken down, as he didn’t believe there were any confirmed cases of COVID in the county.

Earlier that day, the school district administrator had notified parents there was “no truth” to rumors a student had contracted COVID-19 during the band trip. He called Cohoon’s posts, “a foolish means to get attention and the source of the rumor has been addressed.”

Sharon Lerner, Maia Hibbett

A grant proposal written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.

Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.

:

Where does that leave the program, heralded initially as a way to close the district’s graduation rate gap between white and Black students and ensure all students were career- or college-ready when they graduated? It’s uncertain.

From June through early September, the Cap Times made multiple requests for interviews with central office officials about the past and future of the Pathways program. Those requests repeatedly went unfulfilled. An update on the program is likely to come at a future School Board meeting.

Pathways is meant to provide a window into potential career paths in a specific sector through community experiences, job and internship opportunities, early college credit and a curriculum that includes small, thematic focuses through all of a student’s core subjects.

Among the challenges it has faced is being implemented without full buy-in, creating scheduling challenges and skepticism from some staff.

“We’re not going to do stupid stuff,” [Ed] Hughes said. “If this doesn’t work, we’re not going to follow it. We’re not going to turn West into a vocational high school, it’s just not going to happen.”

West did not turn into a vocational high school. But it also didn’t continue enrolling students in Pathways after a bumpy introduction saw lower enrollment numbers than the other schools.

Representative Robin Vos:

“Funding for K-12 education in Wisconsin is at historic levels, and this year our schools received a massive amount of one-time federal dollars. The Democrats’ singular focus to push more money into schools isn’t a winning strategy for our kids. We need to look at improving how they are being taught and why so many students are struggling with the basics – reading, writing, and arithmetic.

“We’ve seen the consequences the pandemic has played on our kids’ education, we should be focusing on doing assessments so teachers can have a better understanding of where students need to get caught up.

“Throwing even more money at the problem will not fix it. Evaluating curriculum, academic testing, and allowing parents to be a part of the conversation are real solutions Legislative Republicans will continue to fight for in the classroom.”

Mr Vos’s comments were written in response to Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Jill Underly’s recent remarks.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Daniel Engber and Adam Federman:

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.

The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

The document seems almost tailor-made to buttress one specific theory of a laboratory origin: that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t simply brought into a lab by scientists and then released by accident, but rather pieced together in a deliberate fashion. In fact, the work described in the proposal fits so well into that narrative of a “gain-of-function experiment gone wrong” that some wondered if it might be too good to be true. Central figures in the coronavirus-origins debate were involved: Among Daszak’s listed partners on the grant were Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an American virologist known for doing coronavirus gain-of-function studies in his lab, and Shi Zhengli, the renowned virus hunter from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Shi Zhengli has not responded to a request for comment. A UNC spokesperson responded on behalf of Baric, noting that “the grant applicant and DARPA are best positioned to explain the proposal.”)

There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018. The proposal that circulated online includes an ambitious scheme to inoculate wild bats against coronaviruses, carried out in concert with the National Wildlife Health Center, a research lab in Wisconsin. A spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, which oversees the center, acknowledged this connection and affirmed the identifying number and co-investigators, noting that the agency’s involvement in the project ended with DARPA’s rejection of the grant proposal. “This is the proposal that was not funded,” USGS Acting Public Affairs Chief Rachel Pawlitz said after reviewing the PDF. She could not, however, vouch for the document in its entirety.

The Economist:

That vikings crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.

But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals that an Italian monk referred to the continent in a book he wrote in the early 14th century. Setting aside the scholarly reserve that otherwise characterises his monograph, Mr Chiesa describes the mention of Markland (Latinised to Marckalada) as “astonishing”.

Bill Muehlenberg:

Never forget September 23, 2021. On this day a world record was broken. Metropolitan Melbourne has now been in lockdown for a total of 235 days – eight whole months! And along with this broken record we have broken the state, the nation, people, economies, livelihoods, small businesses, the rule of law, basic human rights, and most civil liberties.

And sadly, I have had to live through it all – along with over 5 million other enslaved people. Consider how the records have tumbled:
-Folks in the Czech Republic had spent 201 days in lockdown.
-Citizens of London had spent 207 days in total being locked down.
-The poor sods in Buenos Aires were locked down for 234 days.

But while they are now all free, or at least far more free than some of us, we who have had the extreme misfortune of living in the Melbourne metropolitan region have just marked this mind-numbing and soul-destroying milestone. No other jurisdiction on the planet has been under such hardcore and interminable lockdown.

Michael Cusumano:

At the center of debate regarding regulation of social media and the Internet is Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996. This law grants immunity to online platforms from civil liabilities based on third-party content.22 It has fueled the growth of digital businesses since the mid-1990s and remains invaluable to the operations of social media platforms.6 However, Section 230 also makes it difficult to hold these companies accountable for misinformation or disinformation they pass on as digital intermediaries. Contrary to some interpretations, Section 230 has never prevented platforms from restricting content they deemed harmful and in violation of their terms of service. For example, several months before suspending the accounts of former President Donald Trump, Twitter and Facebook started to tag some of his posts as untrue or unreliable and Google YouTube began to edit some of his videos. Nevertheless, online platforms have been reluctant to edit too much content, and most posts continue to spread without curation. The problem with false and dangerous content also seems not to have subsided with the presidential election: Social media is now the major source of anti-vaccine diatribes and other misleading health information.21

Ed Francis:

Good morning, my name is Ed Francis, the owner, and editor of armored archives. We are a small but growing channel covering the development of Armoured vehicles over the last century.

Until recently I have had no problems with Google Drive which I used to back up all of my data, which has been gathered from archives over the last 7 years or so, this is primarily documents ranging from engineering to mechanical reports 1916-2020. One of these files I suspect has been picked up by the bots which had a wide selection of vehicles from the Middle East. That is its been flagged up in a False Positive by Google’s online bots.

This file was a collection of vehicles and at some point, was to be used to make a video showing the adaption and changes to vehicles used in these conflicts and how the requirements for urban fighting and asymmetrical warfare have shifted the design parameters of vehicles. These files contained no graphic images, no promotion of terrorism, no glorification or recruitment or anything else of the sort. There is the possibility that ISIS and so on painted slogans or daubed their letters on vehicles as this is common practice in that conflict.

There has been no picking of sides, ideological posts, or discussion thereof, and the file contains aspects from all sides in those conflicts and is focused on the vehicles in question, dates they were recorded, locations, and categories. The rest of the google file is similar in supporting context with files from cold war developments, WW2 developments, and of course our videos and research, which has taken over 7 years to collect from British archives.

Many taxpayer supported K=12 school districts use Google services (YouTube), including Madison.

WAOW:

As classrooms opening up across the country, they notice a shortage. Not in schools supplies, but teachers.

After years of school, student teaching and prepping for the Praxis exam, many teachers across the country still come to the same conclusion: teaching is not for them.

Research shows on average teachers have been leaving the field after five years. The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty (WILL) says this is a side effect of the job and teachers are tired of all the red tape surrounding the job.

“Teachers often don’t feel supported in terms of discipline and things like that but often there is this continual process of licensure that teachers have to go through as well,” said Will Flanders, a researcher at WILL.

NEW: U.S. District Court Judge Brett Ludwig issued a decision declaring a Marquette County Sheriff’s threat to arrest a teenage girl over a social media post in March 2020, violated the teen’s First Amendment rights.

WILL sued in April 2020

Details –> https://t.co/kU4Tsyqak8 pic.twitter.com/S3GGIIXUBv

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) September 24, 2021

Jacques van Helden, Colin D Butler, Guillaume Achaz, Bruno Canard, Didier Casane, Jean-Michel Claverie:

On July 5, 2021, a Correspondence was published in The Lancet called “Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans”.¹ The letter recapitulates the arguments of an earlier letter (published in February, 2020) by the same authors,² which claimed overwhelming support for the hypothesis that the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic originated in wildlife. The authors associated any alternative view with conspiracy theories by stating: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”. The statement has imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate, including among science journalists.³ The 2021 letter did not repeat the proposition that scientists open to alternative hypotheses were conspiracy theorists, but did state: “We believe the strongest clue from new, credible, and peer-reviewed evidence in the scientific literature is that the virus evolved in nature, while suggestions of a laboratory leak source of the pandemic remain without scientifically validated evidence that directly supports it in peer-reviewed scientific journals”. In fact, this argument could literally be reversed. As will be shown below, there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible.There is so far no scientifically validated evidence that directly supports a natural origin. Among the references cited in the two letters by Calisher and colleagues,^{1, 2} all but one simply show that SARS-CoV-2 is phylogenetically related to other betacoronaviruses. The fact that the causative agent of COVID-19 descends from a natural virus is widely accepted, but this does not explain how it came to infect humans. The question of the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2—ie, the final virus and host before passage to humans—was expressly addressed in only one highly cited opinion piece, which supports the natural origin hypothesis,⁴ but suffers from a logical fallacy:⁵ it opposes two hypotheses—laboratory engineering versus zoonosis—wrongly implying that there are no other possible scenarios. The article then provides arguments against the laboratory engineering hypothesis, which are not conclusive for the following reasons. First, it assumes that the optimisation of the receptor binding domain for human ACE2 requires prior knowledge of the adaptive mutations, whereas selection in cell culture or animal models would lead to the same effect. Second, the absence of traces of reverse-engineering systems does not preclude genome editing, which is performed with so-called seamless techniques.^{6, 7} Finally, the absence of a previously known backbone is not a proof, since researchers can work for several years on viruses before publishing their full genome (this was the case for RaTG13, the closest known virus, which was collected in 2013 and published in 2020).⁸ Based on these indirect and questionable arguments, the authors conclude in favour of a natural proximal origin. In the last part of the article, they briefly evoke selection during passage (ie, experiments aiming to test the capacity of a virus to infect cell cultures or model animals) and acknowledge the documented cases of laboratory escapes of SARS-CoV, but they dismiss this scenario, based on the argument that the strong similarity between receptor binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 and pangolins provides a more parsimonious explanation of the specific mutations. However, the pangolin hypothesis has since been abandoned,^{9, 10, 11, 12} so the whole reasoning should be re-evaluated.

Rory Linnane:

Though the position is technically nonpartisan, Underly’s campaign was heavily funded by the Democratic Party in a race that saw unprecedented spending. Her campaign spent seven times that of her opponent, former Brown Deer Schools Superintendent Deborah Kerr.

The only action Underly announced Thursday was the creation of a literacy task force to research and advise educators on effective strategies for teaching reading, an issue that has been contentious enough to be called the “reading wars.”

Curiously, Underly campaigned on eliminating Wisconsin’s one teacher content knowledge requirement: elementary reading (Foundations of Reading).

This, amidst our long term 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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

J. Nathan Matias, Kevin Munger, […]Charles Ebersole

The pursuit of audience attention online has led organizations to conduct thousands of behavioral experiments each year in media, politics, activism, and digital technology. One pioneer of A/B tests was Upworthy.com, a U.S. media publisher that conducted a randomized trial for every article they published. Each experiment tested variations in a headline and image “package,” recording how many randomly-assigned viewers selected each variation. While none of these tests were designed to answer scientific questions, scientists can advance knowledge by meta-analyzing and data-mining the tens of thousands of experiments Upworthy conducted. This archive records the stimuli and outcome for every A/B test fielded by Upworthy between January 24, 2013 and April 30, 2015. In total, the archive includes 32,487 experiments, 150,817 experiment arms, and 538,272,878 participant assignments. The open access dataset is organized to support exploratory and confirmatory research, as well as meta-scientific research on ways that scientists make use of the archive.

Amanda Morris:

About the size of a grain of sand, the new flying microchip (or “microflier”) does not have a motor or engine. Instead, it catches flight on the wind — much like a maple tree’s propeller seed — and spins like a helicopter through the air toward the ground.

By studying maple trees and other types of wind-dispersed seeds, the engineers optimized the microflier’s aerodynamics to ensure that it — when dropped at a high elevation — falls at a slow velocity in a controlled manner. This behavior stabilizes its flight, ensures dispersal over a broad area and increases the amount of time it interacts with the air, making it ideal for monitoring air pollution and airborne disease.

As the smallest-ever human-made flying structures, these microfliers also can be packed with ultra-miniaturized technology, including sensors, power sources, antennas for wireless communication and embedded memory to store data.

Eric Gardner:

This era of social media is bringing about a new genre of libel litigation — one where an individual says something, then is corrected, and then goes to court with bruised reputation. The latest complaint comes from John Stossel, the veteran TV journalist who on Wednesday sued Facebook in California federal court over what was affixed to his post about 2020 California forest fires and their cause.

“This case presents a simple question: do Facebook and its vendors defame a user who posts factually accurate content, when they publicly announce that the content failed a ‘fact-check’ and is ‘partly false,’ and by attributing to the user a false claim that he never made?” Stossel’s complaint asks. “The answer, of course, is yes.”

The Economist:

It seemed like a blustery overpromise when President Joe Biden pledged in July to oversee “the largest ever one-year decrease in child poverty in the history of the United States”. By the end of the year, however, he will probably turn out to have been correct. Recent modelling by scholars at Columbia University estimates that in July child poverty was 41% lower than normal.

America has long tolerated an anomalously high rate of poverty among children relative to other advanced countries—depending on how it is measured, somewhere between one in six or one in five children counted as poor. The reason why is not mysterious. The safety-net has always been thinnest for the country’s youngest: America spends a modest 0.6% of gdp on child and family benefits compared with the oecd average of 2.1%. What would happen if this were to change? The rush of cash Congress made available to cushion the economic fallout of covid-19 provided an experiment.

J. W. Hammond,Sara E. Brownell,Nita A. Kedharnath,Susan J. Cheng,W. Carson Byrd

The acronym “JEDI” has become a popular term for branding academic committees and labeling STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) initiatives focused on social justice issues. Used in this context, JEDI stands for “justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.” In recent years, this acronym has been employed by a growing number of prominent institutions and organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. At first glance, JEDI may simply appear to be an elegant way to explicitly build “justice” into the more common formula of “DEI” (an abbreviation for “diversity, equity and inclusion”), productively shifting our ethical focus in the process. JEDI has these important affordances but also inherits another notable set of meanings: It shares a name with the superheroic protagonists of the science fiction Star Wars franchise, the “Jedi.” Within the narrative world of Star Wars, to be a member of the Jedi is seemingly to be a paragon of goodness, a principled guardian of order and protector of the innocent. This set of pop cultural associations is one that some JEDI initiatives and advocates explicitly allude to.

Whether intentionally or not, the labels we choose for our justice-oriented initiatives open them up to a broader universe of associations, branding them with meaning—and, in the case of JEDI, binding them to consumer brands. Through its connections to Star Wars, the name JEDI can inadvertently associate our justice work with stories and stereotypes that are a galaxy far, far away from the values of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. The question we must ask is whether the conversations started by these connections are the ones that we want to have.

As we will argue, our justice-oriented projects should approach connections to the Jedi and Star Wars with great caution, and perhaps even avoid the acronym JEDI entirely. Below, we outline five reasons why.

Matt Taibbi:

A long list of press figures — from Stelter’s own CNN colleague and shameless intelligence community spokesclown Natasha Bertrand, to reporters from The New Yorker, Time, MSNBC, Fortune, the Financial Times, and especially Slate and The Atlantic — were witting or unwitting pawns in a scheme to sell the public on a transparently moronic hoax, i.e. that Donald Trump’s campaign was communicating mysterious digital treason to Russia’s Alfa Bank via a secret computer server.

The story sounded absurd from the start, and was instantly challenged by experts. Even outlets normally hostile to Donald Trump like the New York Times and the Washington Post correctly steered clear of it initially. However, plenty of other reporters fell for it and kept falling for it, including Stelter’s own CNN. We’ve known this story was false since at least December 9th, 2019, when Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz told us that “the FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but had concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links”: 

Horowitz’s conclusion was particularly embarrassing for CNN, which cited “sources close to the investigation” in March of 2017 — well after the FBI had already decided there was nothing there, according to Horowitz — to report the “FBI investigation continues” into the “‘odd’ computer link.” Moreover, when the original main source for the Alfa story, a “computer expert” who went by the name “Tea Leaves,” refused CNN’s requests for an interview for that piece, the network explained in apparent seriousness that “fear has now silenced several of the computer scientists who first analyzed the data,” as if a combo squad of Russian spies and Trump goons might put bullets in their heads. We find out from this indictment that those sources were terrified, all right, only not of Russians or Trump, but of being found out. In fact, the “academics” who were the sources for Franklin Foer’s original October 31, 2016 Slate article, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”, were so concerned a nonsense allegation of secret Trump-Russia communication wouldn’t pass a public smell test that one of them proposed faking the story to make them “appear to communicate,” literally using the word “faking” in an email.They ended up not going that far, but the “research” they did produce was so weak that one of them complained that they couldn’t “technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny,” even ifreporters and others lived down to their expectations and proved “not smart enough to refute our ‘best case’ scenario.” The researcher’s email went on, in a line that summed up much of the Russiagate phenomenon:The only thing that drives us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump]… Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?The intrepid reporting heroes who bought this manure-sack from these people were the ones to whom Rachel Maddow said, with a straight face, “We are blessed to have journalists as talented as you… writing about this.”

Alan Cole:

Kitschelt and Rehm would not be surprised by the anti-tax language deployed by the SALT Democrats. They argue that high-income voters⁠—even the high-education kind that vote for Democrats⁠—are generally skeptical of taxation and redistribution.

So the SALT coalition’s rhetoric makes sense: they are representing their voters in the language that most appeals to them. Gottheimer is the new representative from New Jersey’s 5th, and that’s what somebody from New Jersey’s 5th sounds like on taxes. Gottheimer’s Republican predecessor, Scott Garrett, also liked teeing off on the opposing party’s tax increases. Nobody has necessarily changed their views: it is just that the borders of Blue America have been redrawn slightly.

But given a thin majority in the House (there are only eight more Democrats than Republicans) appeasing the SALT coalition and its constituents is a significant issue for Biden. And it could substantially change what Democratic policy looks like. From Cornerstone Macro’s Don Schneider, here is how the current Ways and Means proposal looks, with and without SALT restoration.

The SALT coalition’s request would have a dramatic direct impact on high-income taxpayers. People making between $100,000 and $200,000 (the average income in Bergen County lies in this range) would get a slightly larger tax cut than they do under the Biden proposal without SALT restoration. Furthermore, people earning between $200,000 and $500,000 (about the 95th to the 98th percentile of the U.S. income distribution) would receive a net tax cut. People in the $500k to $1 million range would see most of their net tax increase under the baseline Ways and Means proposal evaporate.

Finally, taxpayers earning more than $1 million would benefit a great deal from full SALT restoration⁠. But the Democratic commitment to taxing the super-wealthy is strong enough, and built enough into the Ways and Means proposal, that even a bill with full SALT restoration would still hike their taxes.

MacIver News:

For most teachers in the Lodi School District last year, the path to their annual raise took them through a professional development program focused on “equity.”

Every year, Lodi teachers are required to meet Performance/Professional Practice Goals (PPG), which includes professional development training. Last year, they had two options for that training: equity or technology.

Even though they did not have to take the equity track, most of them picked it anyway. Out of 112 staff members, 86 choose equity, 22 picked technology, and 4 didn’t pick either. (None of the 4 who did not participate at all were put on an improvement plan, as required by the district’s PPG policy.)

This is the first example identified by the MacIver Institute of a school district making Critical Race Theory part of the calculation for employee compensation. “Equity” is a common euphemism for Critical Race Theory (CRT). Any doubt of that association was dispelled as soon as the district picked the required reading material.

The equity track was built around the book “So You Want to Talk About Race.” The book was written in 2018 by Ijeoma Oluo.

Oluo says she belongs to a “broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left.’” Her book is typical Marxist fare. Many of the concepts found in “So you want to talk about race,” were used by activists in 2020 to justify the race riots across the country.

In her State of Education Address, State Superintendent Jill Underly commented on the divestment of schools in WI. But schools don’t have a funding crisis. With COVID aid coming into WI, schools received a record amount of funding in the 21-23 budget. https://t.co/h3IP4iCwYq pic.twitter.com/zHwFCpNTgu

— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) September 23, 2021

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Phew. Now that I have a school-aged child of my own I’m seeing just how fraught it is to advocate for your kid when also trying to maintain a cooperative relationship. Makes me rethink how I’ve thought about that issue when reporting.

— Nichole Dobo (@nicholedobo) September 22, 2021

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Andrius Sytas:

Lithuania’s Defense Ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities.

Flagship phones sold in Europe by China’s smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp (1810.HK) have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement”, Lithuania’s state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday.

The capability in Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the “European Union region”, but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Defence Ministry’s National Cyber Security Centre said in the report.

“Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible,” Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters in introducing the report.

Xiaomi did not respond to a Reuters query for comment.

Relations between Lithuania and China have soured recently. China demanded last month that Lithuania withdraw its ambassador in Beijing and said it would recall its envoy to Vilnius after Taiwan announced that its mission in Lithuania would be called the Taiwanese Representative Office. read more

POLITICO reporter @SchreckReports has a new book *confirming* the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop about Joe Biden’s business deals in China & Ukraine are genuine.

People complaining about pre-election censorship by Google in Russia cheered Big Tech’s censoring this reporting. pic.twitter.com/T7r8G6MSDW

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 21, 2021

Izabella Kamiunska:

For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.

Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.

Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.” 

At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.

Assembly Committee on Government Accountability and Oversight begins hearing on Public School Spending Transparency legislation.

Watch live –> https://t.co/IZgoSF4SvS

Bill — https://t.co/KfApISGORV

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) September 15, 2021

Erica Pandey:

Charter schools picked off hundreds of thousands of public school students across the U.S. during the pandemic, according to a new analysis from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Why it matters: The pandemic has weakened America’s public education system, as Zoom classes, teacher fatigue and student disengagement take their toll. And that hobbled system is shedding students to charter schools, private schools and homeschooling.

• Those dynamics are exacerbating inequities in American education, as it’s typically wealthier and white students who make the switch.

By the numbers: Charter school enrollment increased by 7.1% in the U.S. between the 2019-20 school year and the 2020-21 school year, per the analysis. That’s a jump of about 240,000 students.

• During the same period, non-charte

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Bonnie Snyder

At the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE), our longstanding concerns about the deteriorating free speech culture in higher education led to the suspicion that many of these pernicious problems originate before students ever set foot on campus. This spurred us to expand our organizational aims to include high school outreach, in order to teach younger students the value and importance of their — and their peers’ — precious First Amendment rights.

From coast to coast, we’re seeing documented cases of heavy-handed thought reform efforts in K-12 education that substantiate our long held concerns. A situation that has been festering for decades at a level of low-grade chronicity reached acute levels this past school year, as demonstrated by levels of school board engagement and vituperation that we haven’t seen before in our lifetimes.

Paying attention to the K-12 landscape uncovers problematic patterns ranging from activist educators rebelling against traditional ethical restraints to a willingness to denigrate anyone — including children — who dares to verbalize doubt, disagreement, or even lack of sufficiently enthusiastic proactive agreement. Some assertive teachers are hanging uncomfortably presumptive “We Believe” posters in their classrooms while some schools — mainly private — have adopted highly prescriptive collective belief statements or commitments with insufficient discussion or buy-in from the school community.

It certainly doesn’t help that the training new teachers receive is so precipitously one-sided, as we discussed in a recent podcast episode with English professor Lyell Asher, writer of an important article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the steepening tilt of American Education Schools.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Molly Worthen:

Why should universities guarantee jobs to a bunch of elitists who study esoteric subjects and brainwash students with left-wing politics? This critique of tenure in higher education is as old as tenure itself, and it’s gaining ground. In recent years, governing boards and legislators in several states have attempted to ban tenure or curtail its power — sometimes succeeding, as in Wisconsin. In the American labor market, where employers have unusually wide latitude to hire and fire at will, it’s not hard for politicians to channel popular resentment toward a small class of workers with relatively strong protections.

That class is getting even smaller. The proportion of American faculty members on the tenure track has been falling since the 1970s, and today just a third of college professors have tenure or are on track to receive it. Every year more and more teachers join the ranks of contingent faculty, surviving contract to contract with little hope that these debates will ever apply to them.

Over the years, tenure’s defenders have offered up noble pleas for the system. It does not grant a teacher a job for life but simply protection from arbitrary firing and retribution; it safeguards academic freedom; it decreases turnover and creates a more stable learning environment for students; it’s more cost-effective than critics suggest, especially when compared with how much universities spend on new administrative positions and lavish student facilities.

All these arguments are basically right. But they will never persuade tenure skeptics outside the university. That’s because the fight over tenure is not really about tenure. It’s a proxy for a larger debate about the meaning of academic freedom and the priorities of higher education. These are intractable battles in the culture wars, but universities are not helpless to confront them — as long as they grapple with the real problems in the tenure system and academic culture.

David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University, began to notice these problems when he was in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He told me he “saw two classes of faculty: one class that was essentially untouchable, no matter productivity or behavior — and this was 50 years ago, so their behavior was not up to modern standards — and another class that was walking on eggshells.” When he arrived at Columbia as a junior professor in the late 1970s, he said, his colleagues told him to focus on research and “minimize my effort in teaching, because it would be detrimental to my future.” Tenure review at Columbia — and at many other universities — continues to focus heavily on a candidate’s scholarly publications.

Paul Mirengoff:

Earlier this year, Gov. Kristi Noem signed a pledge to bar “action civics” (mandatory political protests for course credit) and critical race theory (attacks on “whiteness,” “Eurocentrism,” etc.) from South Dakota schools. For doing so, she drew praise from conservatives, including Stanley Kurtz, a leader in the fight against action civics.

Stanley warned, however, that Noem had her work cut out for her in order to make good on the pledge. “Even in a deep-dyed red state such as South Dakota, the threats that Noem has just pledged to battle have made shocking progress,” he stated. We discussed Noem’s pledge and Stanley’s warning here.

Has Noem done the hard work required to fulfill her pledge? Stanley finds that she has not. He writes:

Paul Hill:

Our priorities for public education have shifted—away from academic learning and toward therapy and custody. The latter objectives were always present, but today’s movement away from “solid” subjects is a big change. In the late nineteenth century, Americans invested in K–12 education for everyone and made attendance compulsory because of the need for a literate, numerate, and informed workforce and electorate. It’s fair to ask whether public education is really about those things any more.

In previous crises, educators didn’t set aside traditional academic instruction. After the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, when kids returned to school after a year or more of trauma, school leaders thought they needed good teaching above all else, both to preserve their futures and help them regain a sense of purpose.

Adult issues (fear of noncompliance with federal regulations, reluctance to impose scheduling and effort requirements on teachers, union opposition to school reopening even when local infection rates were low) came to the fore after schools shut down in March 2020. Now schools are reopening but teachers in some places are being told that nobody will fuss about how much kids learn this year.

Many parents seem okay with this, settling for schools that keep kids unpressured and content. Other families, not buying this, have shifted to private schools where academic goals are still clear, or are directing their own kids’ schooling. But a lot of parents, educators, and ordinary citizens seem to be going along.

Additional notes and Commentary.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

Future:

One thing’s for sure — with this COVID crisis, we’re at an inflection point between old and new technology — whether it’s in how we make vaccines, or how we apply the fields of synthetic biology and genetic epidemiology in public health response. So now’s the time to look both backward, and forward, to really change things…

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and commentary from Scott Girard: 

“While Heinrich allowed schools to use their premises for child care and youth recreational activities, the government barred students from attending Mass, receiving Holy Communion at weekly Masses with their classmates and teachers, receiving the sacrament of Confession at school, participating in communal prayer with their peers, and going on retreats and service missions throughout the area.”

Additional commentary:

“Reasonable” should mean that the public health authorities followed their own internal guidelines for evaluating regulations. These include posting the scientific evidence leading to the regulation, receiving community input, and studying the effectiveness and sustainability of the regulation. In the case of Covid and the schools all this was ignored in Dane County. There was no evidence of transmission in children of school age at the start, the community’s wish to have the schools open was ignored and, over time, it was seen that surrounding counties kept their schools open without increasing Covid transmission – and this last point was completely ignored by Dane County. But the Supreme Court didn’t address the issue of irresponsible public health officials. Perhaps it cannot as Owen pointed out. Perhaps dereliction of duty must be addressed by criminal courts. Instead the Supreme Court answered a different question which might be put as follows: suppose a majority of children in a given community refused the regular vaccines – or refuse the covid vaccine – can the public health authorities close the school? The answer was no. This is significant because racism has been defined as a public health issue. Suppose a majority of parents refused to allow their children to attend a CRT seminar defined as immunization against racism and required for admittance to school. Could the public health authorities close that school. No. In the past certain religious tests have been required before attendance at universities was allowed and non-conforming universites have been closed. If racism is a public health issue the Test Acts may return as public health tests and if that happened we may be sure Dane County would adopt Test Regulations closing non-conforming public schools if it could. Then this Court decision, barring such Test Regulations, would seem far-sighted.

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Terence Eden:

So, there’s no way to switch off notifications from private lists. You have to switch them off for everything.

In this case, the harm was minimal. I’ll have to find something else as a surprise gift. But imagine if I had a “private” wishlist for something embarrassing or upsetting? I don’t remember ever switching on the option for my Alexa to announce to my entire household that there is a price-drop on my weird fetish.

I’ve written before about anti-social app design. The tech bros working on apps often don’t consider that people have families. And that they live with people that they want to keep secrets from.

According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics – only 28% of households contain a single occupant. The majority of people live with other people.

This is an absolutely amazing speech justifying why, as the Mayor of SF, she was completely justified in violating the city’s indoor mask mandate that applies to ordinary citizens. Top notch: https://t.co/HzcVEeYYVy

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 20, 2021

CBS4 Boston:

The Massachusetts Teachers Association is speaking out against MCAS, saying the state’s standardized test “has allowed white supremacy to flourish in public schools.” The teachers union is endorsing a bill that would eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement in the state.

The bill scheduled for a committee hearing Monday on Beacon Hill would offer “multiple pathways” for students to demonstrate educational competency, outside of standardized testing.

MTA President Merrie Najimy said the MCAS has been “alienating students who have diverse backgrounds and differentiated learning styles.”

“The implementation of the MCAS and other standardized tests has had the exact opposite effect of what was supposed to occur when the system was introduced more than 20 years ago,” Najimy said in a statement. “Public schools in predominantly Black and brown communities have been taken over by state bureaucrats who have been using standardized testing as a tool not to improve opportunities for students but instead as one to pry public education from the hands of the families and educators who know best what their students need.”

The MTA shared a Twitter video earlier in the week saying, “It’s time to cancel MCAS.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Glenn Greenwald:

A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was indicted on Wednesday with one felony count of lying to the FBI about a fraudulent Russiagate story he helped propagate. Michael Sussman was charged with the crime by Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Trump Attorney General William Barr to investigate possible crimes committed as part of the Russiagate investigation and whose work is now overseen and approved by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

Sussman’s indictment, approved by Garland, is the second allegation of criminal impropriety regarding Russiagate’s origins. In January, Durham secured a guilty plea from an FBI agent, Kevin Clinesmith, for lying to the FISA court and submitting an altered email in order to spy on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The law firm where Sussman is a partner, Perkins Coie, is a major player in Democratic Party politics. One of its partners at the time of the alleged crime, Marc Elias, has become a liberal social media star after having served as General Counsel to the Clinton 2016 campaign. Elias abruptly announcedthat he was leaving the firm three weeks ago, and thus far no charges have been filed against him.

The lie that Sussman allegedly told the FBI occurred in the context of his mid-2016 attempt to spread a completely fictitious story: that there was a “secret server” discovered by unnamed internet experts that allowed the Trump organization to communicate with Russia-based Alfa Bank. In the context of the 2016 election, in which the Clinton campaign had elevated Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin to center stage, this secret communication channel was peddled by Sussman — both to the FBI and to Clinton-friendly journalists — as smoking-gun proof of nefarious activities between Trump and the Russians. Less than two months prior to the 2016 election, Sussman secured a meeting at the FBI’s headquarters with the Bureau’s top lawyer, James Baker, and provided him data which he claimed proved this communication channel.

Robby Soave:

Yet another politician was caught violating her own mask mandate. This time it’s San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who partied maskless at a jazz club on Wednesday despite the city’s requirements.

Breed was spotted at the Black Cat nightclub by Mariecar Mendoza, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was an exciting evening: According to Mendoza, “Oakland’s Raphael Saadiq and D’Wayne Wiggins—two of the three original members of the chart-topping group Tony! Toni! Toné!—did an impromptu late-night performance of ‘Let’s Get Down,’ the hit single from the East Bay trio’s platinum-selling fourth studio album, 1996’s ‘House of Music.'” Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, was also in attendance.

Ann Althouse:

I would add the 22 and the 21 together, which would put Memorial High School in first place. But really, I think 750 comments on what to name that high school is insufficient to justify ousting James Madison from a place of honor in the city of Madison. I am afraid this will begin an unstoppable momentum that will end up depriving us of the traditional name of our city.

Where will this end? With a state capital named Vel Phillipsville? If we must go that way, may I suggest the more sprightly Phillipvelphia?

Garrick Stride:

I am an emergency physician and father of three young children. Last month, public health authorities suddenly imposed a two-week at-home quarantine order on two dozen kids from my son’s preschool class due to a COVID-19 exposure. Like all parents of those kids, I lost over $800 in unreimbursed preschool tuition and was forced to rearrange my work schedule. Ironically, these children were probably exposed to more people in those two weeks from attending different day-care and social events than if they had simply remained in their classroom cohort, but, unfortunately, public health orders don’t seem to account for actual human behavior.

Health authorities have two justifications for imposing these kinds of afflictions on the public. Originally, the goal was “to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.” In other words, to prevent suffering and death from lack of access to health care, we discouraged people from going to hospitals, shut down medical clinics to in-person visits, and suspended all non-emergency procedures. The implementation was clearly illogical, but at least the goal was rational.

Now that the vast majority of the country has natural or vaccine-mediated immunity to COVID-19 and our health care systems have improved surge capacity, our hospitals are no longer at risk of being truly overwhelmed. Busy? Sure. Systemically overwhelmed and unable to compensate? No chance.

Airguard:

With AirGuard you get the anti-tracking protection you deserve! The app periodically scans your surroundings for potential tracking devices, like AirTags or other Find My devices. If a devices follows you, you will get a notification in less than an hour!