THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE

🧵 Thread:

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023

There isn't any ambiguity. The paper was a political project designed to put an end to the debate. There was not only the "not plausible" line but this one too ("clearly show…not a laboratory construct"), which was eagerly tweeted out by the editor of Nature Medicine. https://t.co/S20X0LoKUX pic.twitter.com/AtYDr9qtP4

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 27, 2023

Aaron Sibarium:

It was 2018, two years before the tidal wave of diversity initiatives unleashed by George Floyd’s death, and Starbucks needed a public relations win. The coffee giant was under fire after an employee at one of its stores mistakenly called the police on two black men, prompting the company to announce a “multiphase effort” to become “more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.”

Part of that effort was a series of “civil rights assessments” conducted by Covington & Burling, one of the top white shoe law firms in Washington, D.C., under the leadership of former attorney general Eric Holder, a senior counsel at the firm.

Holder—who has charged as much as $2,295 an hour for such work—issued a final report in 2021 that outlined the steps Starbucks had taken to promote “equity.” They included tying executive pay to diversity targets, setting spending goals for “diverse suppliers,” and launching a mentorship program for “BIPOC” employees, which Holder pressed the company to expand. Each initiative, he wrote, demonstrated the coffee maker’s “commitment to civil rights and equal treatment.”

But one year later, Starbucks was fending off a civil rights lawsuit over precisely the programs Holder had blessed. The lawsuit, which is still ongoing and was filed last August by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative nonprofit that is also a Starbucks shareholder, argued that the programs violate non-discrimination laws as well as the company’s fiduciary duties. Such claims may have come as a surprise to Starbucks executives: At no point did Holder’s report address the legality of the policies at issue.

When a law firm’s “civil rights” advice gets its client sued for race discrimination, one might expect the firm to dispense less of that advice, or at least to warn other clients about the risk of taking it. But Covington, which represents some of the largest companies in the world, did neither.

IRG’s Center for Investigative Oversight

What It Is: A new report by IRG has discovered that the United Nations Foundation, the multi-billion dollar UN partner chaired by media tycoon Ty Turner, is funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Evers Administration to fund jobs created by executive order aimed at combating climate change.

Why Does It Matter: These documents, obtained by IRG’s CIO, show that Governor Evers is using approximately $300,000 of UNF funds to staff the Office of Sustainability & Clean Energy (OSCE), a governmental entity he created solely by executive order, which in turn has worked to implement far-left climate priorities such as a “carbon-free” Wisconsin by 2050. DOA staff failed to disclose the relationship with the UNF when directly questioned by the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance in March about how the OSCE positions were funded.

The Legislature has repeatedly denied Governor Evers’ requests for money to fund his climate change and “environmental justice” initiatives. Governor Evers’ decision to sidestep the legislative process and instead rely on the UNF raises fundamental questions about the legality and propriety of his administration’s activities, including whether DOA misled the Joint Committee on Finance and how much control the UNF has over DOA’s work.

Related: Small Learning Communities funded by the Gates Foundation.

William Stroock

It was such an odd thing. We pissed off a PhD on Twitter yesterday basically for being insufficiently anti-Russian. ‘Why do they always have Uke flags in their bio?’ we asked. Let’s call this PhD Frank. Frank really let us have it, being a PhD and all. Failing to be impressed with Frank’s academic credentials, we remarked that we too could throw some letters after our last name, and aren’t you impressed with yourself? Then a fellow PhD came to Frank’s defense, and then another. 

We could turn this into a 2003 and Me Post because 20 years ago we’d finished our MA (AMU, online for those of you who like to whip out your degree and slap it on the server tray)*. A few people urged us to continue studying. We mulled it over and realized during the 3-5 years it’d take to get a doctorate we could write several novels and dozens of magazine articles. No thanks. Our life in the late 90s turned on a few bad decisions. Saying no to a PhD was our first great decision of the 21st century. We’ve published more in a decade than these fucking people will their entire lives.

Anyway. we learned during our professorial days, eight years ended now, that there’s a certain type in the profession that must needs sign their emails: PhD, tenure track. Frank is that type.

We checked, and Frank has written a single book with 18 ratings. One of his white knight defenders, let’s call her Francine, has written two books with 36 and 17 ratings. You have to put in the work, Francine told us. 

Have you ever been in a situation where you were a split second away from punching someone in the mouth? Oh….how we thought about doing so, metaphorically, on Twitter, by dropping our Amazon page in Frank and Francine’s mentions.

Kappan:

Based on an extensive research review, the National Reading Panel (NRP) report was an inflection point in the history of reading research and education policy. It found that instruction in five related areas — phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — benefits early readers.

And, in the minds of many, including its authors, it should have ended the debate about whole-language and basic-skills reading instruction.

Instead, the opposite happened: The fighting over reading instruction intensified, and methods that were failing kids became entrenched.

For that result, there are many contributing factors, some of which have been featured in APM Reports’ new podcast series, Sold a Story, which I helped research.

An inadequate media response may well be one of the reasons the NRP report didn’t have the influence it should have.

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Politics and the taxpayer funded DPI.

Wisconsin DPI Reading Curriculum Evaluation list

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Matt Ridley and Alina Chin:

The controversy over the origins of Covid-19 refuses to die, despite efforts early in the pandemic to kill it. It was natural to doubt it was a coincidence that an outbreak caused by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats began in Wuhan, China, the only city where risky experiments were being done on diverse and novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats. The Chinese Communist Party did its utmost to dismiss such suspicions, but so did a group of influential Western scientists.

Arthur Thomas:

Gus Ramirez was at Cardinal Stritch University for a ceremony for All-In Milwaukee students when he had an idea.

“When I was on campus, I realized it was just a beautiful campus and could be an opportunity for us,” said Ramirez, co-chair of the Ramirez Family Foundation that bought the campus for $24 million.

The opportunity is to create a second school to serve children in Milwaukee. Ramirez founded St. Augustine Preparatory Academy on the city’s South Side, which opened in fall 2017. He’s talked in the past about opening a second school on the north side of the city.

The 43.5-acre Cardinal Stritch campus isn’t actually on Milwaukee’s north side – it sits on the border of Glendale and Fox Point – but it does come with already built assets. Ramirez estimated the existing assets he plans to use for a school would cost $150 million to $200 million if it were to be similar in size to Aug Prep.

Mark Judge:

Earlier this year, veteran Post reporter Bob Woodward, who of course became famous for his Watergate coverage, blasted the media and the young reporters at his own paper for their falling for “Russiagate,” the hoax that President Donald Trump was working with the Russians. Woodward called the Steele dossier, the basis for that story, garbage, and told the Columbia Journalism Review that the media had to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” Woodward then said this: “To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone.”

At the Post the problem is not as much a lack of curiosity as much as the desire to push a certain narrative. This is where my personal experience with the paper comes in.

On September 16, 2018, Washington Post writer Emma Brown reported that Christine Blasey Ford, a psychologist in California, accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Kavanaugh had been nominated for the Supreme Court and was about to be voted out of committee. Ford claimed that he had sexually assaulted her in high school in 1982.

Ford also claimed that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place and that I witnessed everything before jumping in and breaking it up. As I wrote in my book, The Devil’s Triangle, the entire thing was a set-up. The Devil’s Triangle is written by me, someone whose family has been Washingtonians for more than 100 years, whose grandfather played for the Washington Nationals, whose father worked at National Geographic, a DC institution. I was at the center of one of the most amazing political battles in the last half-century. The Washington Post never reviewed my book or ever mentioned it.

That’s not a lack of curiosity. That’s the kind of willful ignorance that loses a paper $500 million. Ask yourself this: in identical circumstances say, thirty years ago, with Bob Woodward more actively involved, would the Post have reviewed The Devil’s Triangle?

Related: Obama staffer Ben Rhodes on reporters: “they literally know nothing”.

And:

It's long been clear that the scientists who first told Fauci they strongly believed COVID came from a lab leak – only to sign his letter *days later* calling anyone who believed that stupid and deranged — deliberately lied to and manipulated the public. It's a massive scandal: https://t.co/owFrdJAnNF

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 27, 2023

The libs are now calling for my imprisonment for publishing an op-ed in the New York Times. https://t.co/ThQvOFUcP0

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 27, 2023

EXPLICIT: Osseo parent reads from an explicit book available in Osseo district libraries and is stopped by the school board chair, saying that last time something like that was read, the “language was offensive to some.” pic.twitter.com/W3Cr7E2kOZ

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) July 26, 2023

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Julia Steinberg:

“California is America, only sooner” was an optimistic phrase once used to describe my home state. The Golden State promised a spirit of freedom, innovation, and experimentation that would spread across the nation. And at the heart of the state’s flourishing was a four-letter word: math.

Math made California prosper.

It’s most obvious in top universities like Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, and UCLA. Those schools funneled great minds into California STEM enterprises like Silicon Valley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aeronautical engineering. Both the Central Valley and Hollywood—America’s main providers of food and fodder, respectively—rely upon engineering to mechanize production and optimize output. 

All of this has made California’s GDP $3.6 trillion—making it the fifth largest economy in the world as of last year.

But now “California is America, only sooner” is a warning, and not just because of the exodus of people and jobs and the decay of our major cities, but because of the state’s abandonment of math—which is to say its abandonment of excellence and, in a way, reality itself. 

Perhaps you’ve read the headlines about kooky San Francisco discarding algebra in the name of anti-racism. Now imagine that worldview adopted by the entire state.

Becky Vevea:

That day would mark the largest mass closure of public schools in the nation’s history, as Henson and 49 other Chicago schools shut their doors for good. Some 17,000 students and 1,500 staff would scatter to schools across the city. Many others would leave the district altogether. 

The promise made at the time by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel was that the students would go to better schools, and the district would save money by offloading expensive-to-maintain aging buildings.  

“I know this is incredibly difficult, but I firmly believe the most important thing we can do as a city is provide the next generation with a brighter future,” he said in a statement after the school board voted on the closures. “I am confident that … our children will succeed.”

Tyler Cowen:

One of the Democratic Party frustrations with conservatives during the ACA debates was witnessing them tolerate or even support Romney’s Massachusetts plan, but oppose Obamacare.  That I can understand.  One of the conservative frustrations with ACA was the fear that it would just be the first step in a never-ending, upward-ratcheting series of efforts to spend ever more on health insurance coverage, which has positive but only marginal implications for health itself.  After all, where exactly do the moral arguments for spending more on health insurance coverage stop?

Is there a politically feasible version of the Finkelstein and Einav plan that can spend less or the same?  Is there a politically feasible version of the plan period?  How much trust will there be in the promise that if I give up my private health insurance coverage, it will be replaced by something better?  How much trust should there be?

But again, the authors here have a very different perspective on the sector and how to do health care policy.

Rebecca Leppert and Katherine Schaefer:

Here are eight facts about Americans with disabilities, based on government data and recent Pew Research Center surveys.

Older Americans are significantly more likely than younger adults to have a disability.Some 46% of Americans ages 75 and older and 24% of those ages 65 to 74 report having a disability, according to estimates from the Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey (ACS). This compares with 12% of adults ages 35 to 64 and 8% of adults under 35.

Vinay Prasad:

“Yes! we found an example of fraud”

“OMG, the culture in his laboratory was so horrible.”

“Yay, science is self-correcting!”

Some of these things were said recently, when the Stanford University president resigned to spend more time doing research (which, ironically, was the problem).

Yet, these same people routinely use false studies to push for conclusions they like. In fact, the majority of scientists conduct research that is false, not useful or not helpful. Only a tiny fraction of scientists stick to true and useful. 

While fraud is the worst conduct— using false studies to support your views is hardly better. The Figure illustrates the spectrum of bad science from Fraud to Truth. Let me give some examples of people using bad science to further their agenda, and argue for strategies to solve the problem.

The Reith

In his sixth and final lecture entitled ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’, Professor Oppenheimer explains how the “House of Science” helps us to understand the underlying profundities of the earth and our lives. He draws parallels between the construction of human society and the atom: each man is dependent on the next, and through the power of the collective, Man’s power grows with the shared knowledge of individuals

Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman:

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

Commentary.

Paul Bedard:

The just-published 52nd Ratings of Congress from CPAC’s Center for Legislative Accountability found 14 House members and just three senators — Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Mike Braun (R-IN) — with 100% ratings on the issues the group cares about. In 1971, there were 61 perfect House Republicans and 11 100% senators, including conservative giants Barry Goldwater of Arizona, New York’s James L. Buckley, and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond.

The CPAC report found Democrats much more moderate decades ago. In 1971, there were 23 senators with zero ratings on the CPAC report card of conservative issues. Today there are 38, more than half the Democratic Caucus. In the House, there were 39 perfect liberal voters in 1971 compared to 76 today. Plus, there are dozens of House liberals with a 3% rating.

CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp said the analytics show that many Republicans come to Washington and face-plant into the swamp’s deep end over time.

Great Books Homeschool:

Tyler Cowen:

The only summary I have seen is from Karlstack, noting that he is siding against the doxxers and has defended EJMR in the past.  Most of the people who care already know the details, so I won’t repeat them.  I will however add a few observations:

1. I don’t read EJMR, so however bad it is, or however useful it sometimes may be, is a closed book to me.  It is not the next marginal thing I might read if I had more time.  And I have never posted there.  So my comments should not be taken as reflecting any deep knowledge of the site itself.  I would rather listen to Wings songs, if that is what it came down to.

2. The soon to be published paper supposedly reveals IP addresses of many EJMR posters.  This seems wrong to me, noting that many posters (presumably) are making entirely innocent observations, or if not innocent remarks nonetheless remarks that should not be doxxed.  They may wish to criticize a colleague or superior, or express a repugnant political opinion.  Or whatever.

2b. What about posters from Turkey, China, Russia and elsewhere, who have expressed political opinions? Isn’t this point enough on its own to settle the matter?

Samantha Neely and C. A. Bridges

Political advisor William B. Allen, who helped approve Florida’s African American history curriculum, called out Vice President Kamala Harris for her comments on the new course material during a brief interview with ABC News.

The Florida Board of Education signed off on a new K-12 curriculum for social studies in the state last week, sending a storm of controversy in its wake. Opponents of the new coursework, including Harris, have spoken out against several items in the new African American History section.

Supporters, like Allen, have maintained that the outcries are meritless and many have not read the actual changes. Here’s what Allen had to say about the discussion:

Faye Brown:

The House of Lords could be replaced by bots with “higher productivity, deeper knowledge and lower running costs”, a peer warned as the debate continues over the risks of artificial intelligence (AI).

Lord Londesborough said AI will soon be advanced enough to deliver his speeches in his voice by analysing and processing the comments he has made on parliament’s live TV feed.

He asked the upper chamber if the prospect of being replaced by “peer bots” is either an “exciting” or an “alarming” one, before raising concerns about the impact AI could have on millions of workers in the UK.

Ah, but who decides what data drives the bots? Tammy Baldwin, Mark Warner and a few other taxpayer supported Senators recently introduced the “Restrict Act”, implementing further censorship.

Censorship Accountability Act was introduced by Freedom Caucus member Rep. Dan Bishop

Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, Young-Wan Kwon

For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room-temperature superconductor (Tc≥400 K, 127∘C) working at ambient pressure with a modified lead-apatite (LK-99) structure. The superconductivity of LK-99 is proved with the Critical temperature (Tc), Zero-resistivity, Critical current (Ic), Critical magnetic field (Hc), and the Meissner effect. The superconductivity of LK-99 originates from minute structural distortion by a slight volume shrinkage (0.48 %), not by external factors such as temperature and pressure. The shrinkage is caused by Cu2+ substitution of Pb2+(2) ions in the insulating network of Pb(2)-phosphate and it generates the stress. It concurrently transfers to Pb(1) of the cylindrical column resulting in distortion of the cylindrical column interface, which creates superconducting quantum wells (SQWs) in the interface. The heat capacity results indicated that the new model is suitable for explaining the superconductivity of LK-99. The unique structure of LK-99 that allows the minute distorted structure to be maintained in the interfaces is the most important factor that LK-99 maintains and exhibits superconductivity at room temperatures and ambient pressure.

James Warrington:

The owner of the Daily Mail is gearing up for a legal battle with Google over claims the tech giant used hundreds of thousands of online news stories to train its ChatGPT rival without permission.

Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), the publishing group controlled by Lord Rothermere, is understood to have sought legal advice as it considers potential action.

DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division, allegedly harvested a vast cache of around 1 million news articles from the Daily Mail and CNN websites to help develop its chatbot, Bard.

It is claimed that the tech giant targeted them because both use bullet points to summarise key points before the main text of a story. Google allegedly used the articles to test Bard’s capabilities by removing words from the bullet points and asking the AI to fill in the gaps based on the rest of the story.

However, it allegedly used the articles from the Daily Mail and CNN websites without either copyright holder’s knowledge or permission. Around three-quarters of the articles used in the dataset are believed to have come from the Mail, while the remainder were taken from CNN’s website.

Joshua Nelson:

A Wisconsin school district is being sued after a teacher allegedly announced change of pronouns and gender transition without parental consent.

In June, Eau Claire Area School District [ECASD] students were allegedly “required” to report to a classroom where they found their orchestra teacher Jacob Puccio, a school counselor, and the ECASD Diversity, Equity and Inclusion director Dang Yang.

Students were allegedly told that Puccio would be undergoing a gender transition from male to female from a “scripted statement” that was read to several classrooms of elementary and high school music students throughout ECASD.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) alleges that the statement was crafted by ECASD to “ensure that students received information in a particular way.” Furthermore, WILL claims that parents are still not aware of what was read to students and want to know the details.

WILL:

“It’s ridiculous for a school district to refuse to produce a statement that was read out loud to dozens of minor students in several district classrooms. What was told to these kids should be readily accessible to parents.”

Freddie deBoer

There are two indelible images of Ocasio-Cortez, neither of them flattering, that bookend her evolution. The first is the photo of her weeping outside of an immigration camp in Texas in 2018, before she had won election to Congress. Dressed all in white, she wails in protest of “kids in cages,” the phrase employed by activists to denounce Trump-era immigration policy. The protest itself wasn’t offensive; our treatment of migrants at the border is indeed indefensible. The trouble lies in what didn’t happen next. When Biden took office in 2020, American immigration policy did not meaningfully change. This is often chalked up to Covid-era restrictions, but those restrictions are long gone and Democrats have not made significant changes to Trump’s border policy. There are, literally, still kids in cages — so why isn’t Ocasio-Cortez at the border again, protesting her country’s president?

The second image of AOC is at the 2021 Met Gala — a who’s who of celebrity and wealth, a celebration of precisely the elitism that the left is meant to oppose. So it was a bit depressing, but not at all surprising, to see this champion of the working class at an event in which celebrities wandered around unmasked while their many servants dutifully wore masks to prevent the spread of Covid. Politicians, even lefty politicians, go to fancy events and hobnob with the ruling class; it’s a fact of life. But Ocasio-Cortez tried to have it both ways: she wore white again, this time a dress emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich” in bright red. And this made her opportunity to rub shoulders with the 1% a matter of direct hypocrisy. It’s one thing to go to the party; it’s another to blare out a message that you disapprove of the party while you’re there.

If there is a key to AOC’s political persona, it lies between these two poles. The former betrays the fundamental moral corruption of partisanship: it compels people to care about political issues precisely to the degree that those issues are convenient for the party. Losing interest in our immoral immigration system after Biden’s election is exactly the sort of thing that AOC’s rabid fans once said she would never do. The latter not only sees AOC transported from outside the gates to inside the most elite of venues, it also showcases AOC’s increasingly half-hearted attempts to cover up her genuine predilections with the most superficial of symbolic acts.

Take, for example, the chronic mistreatment of workers in our railway system that contributed to the derailment and subsequent air crisis in East Palestine, Ohio. Ocasio-Cortez publicly castigated the railway companies and demanded better conditions for workers — then voted to forbid them from striking. It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of her overall political orientation, speaking up like a militant supporter of workers in the press then immediately betraying them with her vote. She would go on to claim that this was really a matter of supporting what the workers wanted, but Railroad Workers United quickly clarified that this defense was an act of remarkable dishonesty. Labor is the heart of the left and strikes are the sword of labor; to vote to forbid workers from striking, for a supposed socialist, amounts to an unforgivable betrayal of basic values.

Dave Karpf:

He also provides a corollary: “if you don’t make recommendations, you won’t know what to be disappointed by.” 

Let me offer a second corollary: “if you retrofit your predictions to insist they were right after all, you’ll never learn a single damn thing.” 

I mention this because, as you might imagine, I run into a lot of incorrect predictions as I read through the WIRED archive. 90s WIRED was chock full of a very particular style of futurism — one that has, uh, not aged especially well. 

In keeping with Davies’ Law, this presents a lovely opportunity. I’m rereading the entire magazine back catalog to understand how emerging technologies looked back then, take stock of where people thought the world was headed, and then draw some lessons from the resulting surprises.

The thing that sets me back on my heels, though, is that a lot of those old WIRED techno-optimists are still out there making predictions today. And, to hear them tell it, they were right all along.

Rebecca Beitsch:

It’s not the first time a lawmaker has been improperly searched via FISA 702, with Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) saying in March that his name was searched using the tool.

Mariana Lenharo

Researchers whose first language is not English can spend around twice as long reading an English-language scientific journal article as native speakers. For a PhD student working on their thesis, that can mean spending up to 19 additional working days per year just reading papers.

These statistics, published today in PLoS Biology¹, might not be shocking, researchers say, but it’s important to measure the effects of language barriers on the careers of academics who are not fluent in English. It “is the first step for the scientific community to make more effort to tackle this problem”, says Tatsuya Amano, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and a co-author of the study.

Amano and his colleagues polled 908 environmental scientists from 8 countries, each of whom had authored at least one peer-reviewed paper in English. Some of the participants were from countries where a moderate proportion of people are proficient in English (Bolivia, Spain and Ukraine), whereas others were from countries where proficiency in English is uncommon (Bangladesh, Japan and Nepal). Their answers were compared with those from people in countries where English is the official language (Nigeria and the United Kingdom).

Emily Files:

Parents of children with dyslexia have been ringing an alarm bell in Wisconsin.

They say school districts often fail to teach children to read. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one in three Wisconsin fourth graders is a proficient reader.

After years of debate in the Capitol, Gov. Evers and Republican lawmakers agreed on a bill that makes sweeping literacy reforms. Evers signedthe so-called “Right to Read Act” last week.

Tobi Raji and Theodoric Meyer

Prelogar cited only the dearth of women and not of Black and Hispanic lawyers arguing before the court, but her message in a case dealing with race-conscious admissions programs was clear.

“When there is that kind of gross disparity in representation, it can matter and it’s common sense,” she told the justices.

Her argument didn’t sway the court’s conservative majority, which ruled last month that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs were unconstitutional.

It did garner the attention of the court’s three liberal justices, who cited Prelogar’s remarks in a dissent, warning that “inequality in the pipeline to this institution, too, will deepen.”

But a similar lack of diversity to the one Prelogar pointed out in her argument has persisted for years in the solicitor general’s office, which is part of the Justice Department and represents the federal government before the Supreme Court.

Over the past dozen terms, nearly three-quarters of Supreme Court arguments made by lawyers in the office have been delivered by men, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

The information on which we based our reporting on Nigel Farage and his bank accounts came from a trusted and senior source. However the information turned out to be incomplete and inaccurate. Therefore I would like to apologise to Mr Farage.

— Simon Jack (@BBCSimonJack) July 24, 2023

Jill Barshay:

When you think of a college student, you might imagine a young adult leaving home, moving into a dorm, navigating a campus and maybe attending a fraternity party. That’s an outdated image. We’ve written a lot about how older adults with jobs and children are a giant group on campus. But a more surprising species is spreading through the college registrar’s rolls: teenagers living at home, taking yellow buses to high school and maybe scrambling home before curfew.

The number of high schoolers taking college classes has been surging for more than two decades. In what is called dual enrollment, students simultaneously earn high school and college credits from a single class. These advanced college-level courses are no longer just for gifted students who have exhausted the high school course catalog. Now they’re a tool to encourage more Americans to enroll in college by giving them an early taste of post-secondary education and a head start with a few credits. 

Dual enrollment students were estimated to number more than 1.4 million in the fall of 2022, and account for almost one out of five community college students. That’s according to estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Some scholars believe the total number could be much higher, perhaps 2 million students, when spring 2023 course taking is included. Dual enrollees appear to far outnumber the 1.1 million high school graduates in the class of 2022 who took at least one Advanced Placement exam.

“It’s meteoric,” said Brian An, a sociologist at the University of Iowa. “When I first started working in dual enrollment research in the mid 2000s, it was nowhere near these numbers. If you had told me 10 years ago that 20 percent of all community college students would be dual enrollment, I would have said that’s crazy talk.”

That we have a record of their internal communications, and that they're extremely explicit that they think a lab leak is plausible if not likely, and also extremely explicit that they're going to say the opposite in the paper for political reasons, and also lie to reporters. https://t.co/2X7qm39ZuP

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 23, 2023

Antonio Regaldo:

Forget about He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who created gene-edited babies. Instead, when you think about gene editing you should think of Victoria Gray, the African-American woman who says she’s been cured of her sickle-cell disease symptoms. 

This week in London, scientists are gathering for the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing. It’s gene editing’s big event, where researchers get to awe the audience with their new ability to modify DNA—and ethicists get to worry about what it all means.

Paul Caron summarizes:

I received an email from a person who worked as a state board of law examiners. With permission, I reproduce the email, stripping any reference to the person’s state. …

In my view, the UBE, and the *** Supreme Court through its adoption, dropped the standard of “minimal competence” to an alarming level.  I could not, in good conscience, continue to serve and resigned.  The NextGen Bar Exam represents the complete abandonment of competence as a standard.  I sincerely hope that the *** Supreme Court does not adopt it.  Unfortunately, they will probably blindly defer to the “experts” at the NCBE.

Even since *** adopted the UBE, I have been hoping that it would not prove to be the disaster for professional competence that I feared it would. And while the jury is still out on that point, the NCBE now wants to do away with any testing of the applicants’ abilities to apply the facts to the law. Any state that adopts the NextGen bar exam will have abandoned its professional obligation to ensure that new lawyers are minimally competent.

The Economist:

The cost of many private colleges in America has reached $80,000 a year. The median household income in America in 2021 was $71,000 a year. This shows that college is unaffordable. Or does it?

The consensus view is that America has a college-affordability crisis and things are getting worse. According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, “college costs are out of control”. Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont, and other progressives have pushed for free college and loan-forgiveness for years. The White House attempted a costly bail-out of student borrowers which the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional. Both sides are telling a similar, but mostly inaccurate, tale. Most undergraduate degrees in America are actually affordable, and in many cases going to college is getting cheaper.

Erin Geary:

If only the mayor listened to Bhatti and Betancourt and created the City Bank of Chicago, Ross could get a loan to pay her taxes perhaps with no interest because that would be the moral thing to do. Otherwise, the County Assessor will place a lien on her home and eventually force her to sell.

Forgive the cynicism, but there is something deeply immoral at play in Chicago. For all the Obama-esque savior-in-chief qualities Johnson is projecting, everything the mayor does is calculated. For example: Slipping into an apron to demonstrate support for labor’s push for a fair minimum wage is a great photo op, but who stands to gain if tipped workers earn the same hourly wage as untipped workers? The city via taxes. Then there is the Pontius Pilate move of inviting Chicagoans to roundtable discussions where they can give their two cents on what they feel is most vital to the city’s budget.

Joanne Jacobs:

“Students’ expectations are even more off-base when it comes to mid-career earnings,” she writes. “The average mid-career salary is $98,647, but zoomers anticipate making $204,560 a decade after graduation.”

Young people don’t lack self-esteem: 70 percent say they’re harder working than classmates, and 64 percent think they’re smarter. 

They also see a degree — but not experience — as critical to getting a good job, writes Dunaway-Seale. 

Seventy-two percent think majoring in a high-demand field will guarantee them a job immediately after graduation; 61 percent think the degree alone will impress employers, so there’s no need to build a resume.

Guzdial:

After we got the go-ahead to start developing PCAS (see an update on PCAS here), I had meetings with a wide range of liberal arts and sciences faculty. I’d ask faculty how they used computing in their work and what they wanted their students to know about computing. Some faculty had suggested that I talk to history professor, LaKisha Michelle Simmons. I met with her in January 2023, and she changed how I thought about what we were doing in PCAS.

I told her that I’d heard that she built websites to explain history research to the general public, and she stopped me. “No, no —- my students build websites. I don’t built websites.” I asked her what she would like her students to know about the Internet. “I could teach them about how the Internet works with packets and IP addresses. I could explain about servers and domain names.”

She said no. She was less interested in how the Internet worked. She had three specific things she wanted me to teach students

John Carter:

At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty. Some degree of indoctrination was always a factor, of course, but until recently the idea was to take the smartest recruits you could find, and then make them loyal. That was the purpose of the Rhodes scholarships, for instance. It was widely understood that while you needed your leadership cadre to be team players, it was absolutely crucial that they also be good at what they do. In practice, that meant sacrificing a certain degree of unity of purpose, because smart, ruthless people also tend to be independent-minded and outspoken. Still, whatever amount of friction that was caused by the ruling class sometimes operating at cross-purposes with itself was more than compensated for by the competitive advantages of a truly meritorious elite.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.

a ruling class exhibiting near perfect unity of rigidly disciplined ideological purpose, able to move in synch with one another like a school of hungry piranhas, but composed of unimpressive cretins who are individually incapable of doing whatever task is assigned to them.

Aatish Bhatia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz:

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.

The study — by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality — quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

The analysis is based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. It focuses on the eight Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago. It adds an extraordinary new data set: the detailed, anonymized internal admissions assessments of at least three of the 12 colleges, covering half a million applicants. (The researchers did not name the colleges that shared data or specify how many did because they promised them anonymity.)

The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.

Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.https://t.co/r4rNYBnrfK pic.twitter.com/S8w8HQ0yz9

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 24, 2023

Evidence for the fig leaf interpretation of affirmative action: https://t.co/3T8goyvUDy

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 24, 2023

Suzanne Smalley:

A bill requiring social media companies, encrypted communications providers and other online services to report drug activity on their platforms to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) advanced to the Senate floor Thursday, alarming privacy advocates who say the legislation turns the companies into de facto drug enforcement agents and exposes many of them to liability for providing end-to-end encryption.

The bipartisan Cooper Davis Act — named for a Kansas teenager who died after unknowingly taking a fentanyl-laced pill he bought on Snapchat — requires social media companies and other web communication providers to give the DEA users’ names and other information when the companies have “actual knowledge” that illicit drugs are being distributed on their platforms.

Many privacy advocates caution that, if passed in its current form, the bill could be a death blow to end-to-end encryption services because it includes particularly controversial language holding companies accountable for conduct they don’t report if they “deliberately blind” themselves to the violations.

Officials from the DEA have spent several months honing the bill with key senators, Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) said Thursday.

Providers of encrypted services would face a difficult choice should the bill pass, said Greg Nojeim, Senior Counsel & Director of Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Privacy advocates counter that determining what constitutes child sexual abuse imagery on platforms is much easier than patrolling speech, particularly in various languages and with street slang, to sniff out drug sales.

School board matters have not “become intense battlegrounds.” They have always been them. That is not bad. It is democracy. The MSM’s pearl-clutching over this reality is too often selective and unfortunate. https://t.co/XwgzhRniNH

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 23, 2023

Paul Abel

I was busy conducting experiments, writing papers, and trying to finish my dissertation. But when I was asked to serve on a faculty job search committee, I felt I couldn’t say no. I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn how I might eventually secure a faculty position of my own. However, as I read through reams of impressive applications, reality struck: It would take a lot of time and many sacrifices to build a CV that would be competitive in a faculty job search—and I could still end up empty-handed. For the first time, I began to question the academic career path I was on.

Until then, I hadn’t had any reason to doubt it. I was passionate about science, research, and teaching. I already had a respectable handful of publications, awards, and grants. I certainly knew I couldn’t immediately jump to a faculty position—I’d need to do a postdoc or two first—but I was confident I was on the right path to securing one.

Tatsuya Amano:

These days it’s necessary to have at least a basic level of English proficiency in most research contexts. But at the same time, our collective emphasis on English places a significant burden on scientists who speak a different first language.

In research published today in PLOS Biology, my colleagues and I reveal the enormity of the language barrier faced by scientists who are non-native English speakers.

English has become essential in academic life

Scientists need to know English to extract knowledge from others’ work, publish their findings, attend international conferences, and collaborate with their peers from around the world. 

There’s no doubt this poses a significant challenge for non-native English speakers, who make up more than 90% of the global population. 

Yet there is a shocking lack of insight into how much extra effort non-native English speakers must invest in order to survive and thrive in their fields. 

Making these hurdles visible is the first step towards achieving fair participation for scientists whose first language isn’t English.

Julie Burchill

Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust was set up by James Maxwell to commemorate his wife, who died from cervical cancer at the age of 40 in 1999. It is the only UK charity that deals solely with this killer disease. How sad that such a bequest has been polluted by the politics of gender woo-woo. The word ‘bonus hole’ sounds more like something out of a gonzo-porn flick than the kind of thing you’d hear from an organisation offering succour to scared women. Lord forbid that the majority of women living in the real world should ever be given more respect than the tiny minority of body dysmorphics who might be ‘hurt or distressed’ by that nasty v-word.

Wall Street Journal:

Schools were given $190 billion in federal money for Covid safety measures and to help students catch up, and many have poured funds into tutoring or other programs. Then why are test scores still lagging? A new report suggests that pandemic learning loss is being exacerbated by teaching loss.

Curious about what's ACTUALLY in that "report" on "teaching loss" the @WSJ featured?

Here are five things to know:

⭐️ the entire "report comes" from 30 anonymous "leader and high-level administrator" interviews from 5—yes, only F-I-V-E—school districts

[1/7] pic.twitter.com/DSVc6iEomF

— Marcus Luther (@MarcusLuther6) July 24, 2023

Wall Street Journal

Crit­ics of Flor­ida Gov. Ron De­San­tis ar­gue he has gone too far in try­ing to root out “wok­e­ness” from pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, but look to Cal­i­for­nia to see where aca­d­e­mic group­think is go­ing if left unchecked. A le­gal com­plaint filed this month by a his­tory pro­fes­sor in Ba­kersfield says that his com­mu­nity col­lege’s per­for­mance and ten­ure re­views are be­ing used to force fac­ulty to adopt woke pro­gres­sive val­ues in their class­rooms.

Day­mon John­son has been at Ba­kersfield Col­lege since 1993. As he tells it, three months ago Cal­i­for­nia Com­mu­nity Col­leges, which serves 1.8 mil­lion stu­dents at 116 cam­puses, amended its reg­u­la­tions so em­ploy­ees must es­pouse its tenets of di­ver­sity, eq­uity, in­clu­sion and ac­ces­si­bil­ity (DEIA). “Fac­ulty mem­bers shall em­ploy teach­ing, learn­ing, and pro­fes­sional prac­tices that re­flect DEIA and anti-racist prin­ci­ples,” the reg­u­la­tions say. Schools must “place sig­nif­i­cant em­pha­sis on DEIA com­pe­ten­cies in em­ployee eval­u­a­tion and ten­ure re­view.”

California Community Colleges (@CalCommColleges) is "embedding DEI competencies and criteria into evaluation and tenure review processes."

Faculty must "implement a pedagogy and/or curriculum that promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens."

Ideology, thru and thru!🧵 pic.twitter.com/RjadpuCJ7F

— Jake 🇺🇸 (@omni_american) July 23, 2023

Jeffrey Tucker:

It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room.

It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.

It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as H.L. Mencken might have said, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.

It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: It reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.

The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.”

Reporting on the spectacle, The New York Timessaid these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?

Attacks on Free Speech Aren’t New

Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.

The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1920) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the U.S. that the communists, anarchists and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the U.S. government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.

Frederick Hess:

In education policy circles, there’s a lot of enthusiasmregarding the promise of AI-enabled tutoring. After all, a huge stumbling block for tutoring has been the limited number of affordable, reliable, and skilled tutors. That’s why ubiquitous AI could be such a game-changer.

But there’s reason to fear that the excitement of AI-enabled tutoring will distract us from some of the other, less fantastical possibilities offered by web-enabled mentoring. Look, I want to be clear. I am, and have long been, a believer in the promise of computer-assisted tutoring—especially when an AI tutor knows a student’s vocabulary or can inhabit fictional characters.

I post this clip often but it is so important when it comes to exposing climate change propaganda.

This was over 30 years ago. Every single word that Rush says is correct. pic.twitter.com/eNrfIeh1in

— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 22, 2023

Matthew Contenitti:

Conservatives have placed freedom at the heart of their political program since the 1930s. They have resisted the encroaching control of centralized bureaucracies by appealing to the dignity of human life, the limited government of the Constitution, and the space that market economics provides for individual choice and competition.

This consensus held despite criticism from libertarians and traditionalists. It held because the principles and institutions of the American Founding anchored conservatives in a national history and culture that, among other things, have long been individualistic and suspicious of authority. It held because conservatives of all stripes perceived a common danger in unconstrained government and, perhaps most important, in the Soviet Union and global communism.

The consensus unraveled in the 1990s. Victory defeated American conservatism. The collapse of the Soviet Empire, disintegration of the Soviet Union, and China’s turn toward state capitalism removed, or obscured, the communist threat. Congress lowered marginal tax rates and exempted more Americans from income taxes. Lawmakers imposed time limits and work requirements on welfare, and caseloads fell. Cities adopted broken-windows policing and removed violent criminals from the streets, and crime declined. For a moment in 2001, and again from 2003 to 2007, Republicans enjoyed full control of the federal government for the first time in 50 years.

Jim Hinch:

Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.

Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.

For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.

Henry Mack:

In May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a series of higher-education bills, among them Senate Bill 266. As Florida’s system chancellor over public colleges, I helped design the provisions of that bill, which amended general-education requirements for students at all Florida colleges and universities. General education had become larded with “diversity” education; SB 266 stipulates that it should aim instead at universal knowledge and an understanding of our democracy. In short, the law clarified the legislative and executive expectation for what every undergraduate student attending our public colleges and universities should know, or at least be exposed to, in general-education coursework.

Naturally, the reform drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Journalists and academics argued that it would drive talent away from Florida and compromise the state’s competitiveness. Faculty claimed that the legislation infringes on academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and shared governance. The American Association of University Professors has been particularly vocal about its displeasure with the direction of Florida’s higher-education aims. Still others speculated that the change would result in the loss of accreditation statusfor the Sunshine State’s universities, or in hostile environments for minority and low-income students.

None of this is true. Since the bill’s passage, Florida education leaders have in fact been flooded with inquiries from teachers wanting to move to the state. These interested instructors also believe that public colleges and universities should ground their general education coursework in the history of Western Civilization and the Great Books tradition—aims that SB 266 now makes explicit. This approach is not new, nor should it be controversial.

Dan Lennington

The battle lines are drawn. After the United States Supreme Court declared affirmative action in college admissions illegal last month, politicians and university presidents vowed to make the decision a dead letter. Taking them at their word, “diversity” — that is, favoring applicants based on race — will be preserved by any means necessary.

President Biden pledged that his administration would find a “new path” that “protects diversity.” Harvard’s president Lawrence Bacow promisedto marshal the “talent and expertise of our Harvard community” to figure out a way to “preserve” an admission system that results in racial diversity. And the Association of American Universities declared that America’s top 71 research institutions will continue to pursue “diversity throughout the academic enterprise.”

In other words, our universities have ironically recalled George Wallace, essentially declaring, “Racialism now, racialism tomorrow, racialism forever.” But to succeed, they must find a way to subvert the law. Absent direct defiance (and schools may try to hide a fair amount of that), the answer is finding a racial proxy — something that isn’t race but approximates the same result.

Brett Beasley:

“Benjamin Franklin saw that the Colonies’ financial independence was necessary for their political independence. Most of the silver and gold coins brought to the British American colonies were rapidly drained away to pay for manufactured goods imported from abroad, leaving the Colonies without sufficient monetary supply to expand their economy,” Manukyan said.

However, one major problem stood in the way of efforts to print paper money: counterfeiting. When Franklin opened his printing house in 1728, paper money was a relatively new concept. Unlike gold and silver, paper money’s lack of intrinsic value meant it was constantly at risk of depreciating. There were no standardized bills in the Colonial period, leaving an opportunity for counterfeiters to pass off fake bills as real ones. In response, Franklin worked to embed a suite of security features that made his bills distinctive.

Anatoly Liberman:

In 1894, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen brought out a book titled Progress in Language. Whether anything in language can legitimately be labeled as progress is a moot point, but no one doubts that language indeed has history. The larger the speaking community and the more mobile the population, the faster the change. Problems arise when we go beyond such trivialities. Language does not remain stable even in our lifetime, and different people react differently to this phenomenon. Assuming that we notice the changes, do we accept, or do we resist them? I will skip phonetic problems, because it is the vocabulary and usage that deserve our attention here. 

This post owes its existence to Valerie Fridland’s book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English (Viking, 2023). The book deals with some processes in Modern (American) English, and the author is very much on the side of “progress in language.” If I am not mistaken, her main point is that as long as some widespread phenomenon can be explained, it should be accepted. This approach does not convince me. For instance, I have read numerous interviews with celebrities in sports and music, and almost every noun in them is accompanied by a single epithet, namely, f—ing. I can easily explain why people speak so: the word is nowadays on everybody’s lips from the age of three, and many Americans don’t know any other equally expressive qualifying word. This argument does not make me look “for the good in [their] bad English.” 

Some chapters in the book are less exciting than others: among them, the triumph of the word dude. Dude is a respectable relative of the aforementioned epithet: instead of using many nouns, people have limited their vocabulary to a single one: this is practical and convenient, because with overchoice comes much sorrow: the more knowledge, the more grief.

NEW: Equable Institute report shows Illinois' pension crisis is the worst in the nation. Public pension funds ended FY2023 with an estimated $210 BILLION in unfunded pension liabilities. 🧵

— Bryce Hill (@BryceTHill) July 19, 2023

Andrew Lowenthal and Matt Taibbi:

Yesterday witnessed another bizarre display of cartoon authoritarianism on the part of the Democratic Party, as members beat up one of their own presidential candidates, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in a hearing of the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Bezos is reportedly taking a direct interest in the Post , which will reportedly lose $100 million this year due to failing subscriptions. One suggestion…https://t.co/HTofUbjhes

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 22, 2023

Related: RFK Jr. is — by far — the most approved-of political figure in the United States right now.

Josh Blackman:

Last week, I wrote about the apparent efforts to make the NextGen Bar Exam far simpler that the current exam. I received an email from a person who worked as a state board of law examiners. With permission, I reproduce the email, stripping any reference to the person’s state.

I was an Assistant to the *** Board of Law Examiners when the *** Supreme Court decided to adopt the UBE [Uniform Bar Exam]. The sales pitch for the UBE from the NCBE, as presented to the group of assistant bar examiners I was among, was threefold.  First, it won’t be any worse that the current bar exam.  Second, it will be better for the applicants because they will have more flexibility in deciding to which state they should move.  Third, everybody else is doing it.  None of those explanations supports such a dramatic change in public policy as the adoption of the UBE and the abandonment of a state-specific essay test.  For my part, I asked two questions:  If the UBE is not an affirmative improvement over the status quo, why should we change?  Why should the *** Supreme Court elevate the applicants’ interests in residential flexibility over ensuring that ***’s new lawyers have demonstrated some level of competence in *** law?  I did not receive satisfactory answers to either question.  The Board and the other assistants seemed inclined to blindly defer to the so-called expertise of the NCBE and generally unwilling to consider the consequences of the policy change.

Nate Silver:

But I’m going to make an exception here, because we have a scandal where the facts are relatively simple and clear — but which was nevertheless extremely consequential.

Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular1, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.

We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There’s also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level). 

The messages show that the authors were highly uncertain about COVID’s origins — and if anything, they leaned more toward a lab leak than a spillover from an animal source. But none of that was expressed in the “Proximal Origin” paper, which instead said that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Granted, there is a little bit of ass-covering — “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another,” they also wrote in the paper. But the message — natural origin good, lab leak bad — was received clearly enough by mainstream news outlets. “No, the new coronavirus wasn’t created in a lab, scientists say”, reported the CBC in covering the paper. “COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin” was the headline at Science Daily.

In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message. This went beyond mere motivated reasoning. There was an enormous gap between what the authors believed privately and what they stated publicly, including in the “Proximal Origin” paper — again, see the above links for more detail.

Alisa Rosenbaum:

The old idiom, “if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck,” directly applies to the Latin School of Chicago for what increasingly appears to be a hostile, bullying environment for both students and parents alike.

Both Chicago Contrarian and many other media outlets have covered the story of the $100 million lawsuit filed against the Latin School by Rosellene and Robert Bronstein for its role in the suicide of 15-year-old Nate Bronstein, a former student there.

Recently, Latin stands accused of failing to deliver school records (as highlighted in a recent Chicago Tribune article) to the parents of Nate, who took his own life in early 2022 due to repeated bullying and cyberbullying at the hands of students at school-sanctioned events. Nevertheless, Latin’s latest blunder shows how far this school has fallen in its treatment of students.

In the latest Latin offense, a pair of graduating twins were allowed to walk but not receive their diplomas nor transcripts for college matriculation due to a dispute between the school and the twins’ mother, Katie O’Dea.

Ms. O’Dea had left her role as the school’s director of communications after 16 years in November 2022 (according to her LinkedIn profile), holding a valid enrollment contract for her children to finish the academic year after paying the agreed upon discounted sum. Yet her children were still denied their diplomas and transcripts.

O’Dea filed a lawsuit on June 27 along with her husband, Daniel McKee, and their children, Molly and Hugh McKee.

Te-Ping Chen and Lauren Weber:

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer. 

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

The number of CDO searches is down 75% in the past year, says Jason Hanold, chief executive of Hanold Associates Executive Search, which works with Fortune 100 companies to recruit HR and DEI executives, among other roles. Demand is the lowest he has seen in his 30 years of recruiting.

At the same time, he says, more executives are feeling skittish about taking on diversity roles.

Dan Wang:

I think the reason they haven’t given everyone access to AI chatbots is straightforward: regulators in Beijing would rather not let them run in the wild. Chinese tech companies may be hobbled by lack of access to the most advanced chips; and they’re probably hurt by the lack of training data, since most of the trainable texts are in English rather than Chinese. But Chinese companies rarely hesitate to release substandard products into the market in order to claim early-mover advantages, so a greater force must be holding them back.

Taxpayer funded Central Intelligence Agency:

Test your cryptography skills by cracking the code of Kryptos, a sculpture at CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Be warned though, many have tried and few have succeeded. To date, only three of the four messages have been revealed. Can you solve the last one? Download the code here to test your skills.

Jennifer Calfas:

The Mid­dle­town, Conn., in­sti­tu­tion joins sev­eral other uni­ver­si­ties for­go­ing the decades-old prac­tice of giv­ing the chil­dren of alumni pref­er­en­tial treat­ment in the ad­mis­sions process, which dis­pro­por­tion­ately ben­e­fits stu­dents who are wealthy and white. The Supreme Court’s de­ci­sion strik­ing down the use of af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion in col­lege de­ci­sions in June elim­i­nated a tool many uni­ver­si­ties used to di­ver­sify their cam­puses, thrust­ing legacy pref­er­ence into the spot­light.

Wes­leyan Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Michael S. Roth said in a state­ment Wednes­day that legacy sta­tus “has played a neg­li­gi­ble role in our ad­mis­sions process for many years.” But the lib­eral-arts col­lege, which had a 15.7% ac­cep­tance rate for the class of 2027, found it nec­es­sary to for­mally end the prac­tice fol­low­ing the high court’s de­ci­sion, he said.

Yes, this paragraph appeared in @nytimes. Which appears to have completely, totally lost its way and forgotten the business it is in. pic.twitter.com/UTRxiprvEe

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 21, 2023

Matt Taibbi:

When Public and Racket obtained hundreds of pages of communications between the scientists who published perhaps the most influential Nature Medicine paper about the origins of Covid-19, one of the first things we noticed was the scientists’ fixation with hits and Internet traffic. If Heathers had been written for the Instagram age, the script would have read a lot like the Slack chats between Drs. Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and Eddie Holmes.

This is the NY Post reporter who used authentic docs to report on Joe Biden's role in Hunter's business deals in Ukraine and China before the 2020 vote.

CIA and @NatashaBertrand smeared her with lies that it was "Russian disinformation," then Big Tech censored her reporting. https://t.co/cmUIcGjUxc

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 20, 2023

Charles Cooke:

Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, a former president of the Association of American Law Schools, and the author of many of the books that America’s law students use while in college, has joined forces with a political-science professor from San Francisco State University to write an open letter to President Biden urging him to begin openly ignoring the Supreme Court:

We urge President Biden to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations.

I contended recently that the Left has no comprehensible judicial philosophy. This is a good example of that problem. There is no principle on display here, and there is no use pretending otherwise. By “mistaken interpretations,” Tushnet means decisions that he personally dislikes. By “fundamental commitment,” he means political outcomes that he personally desires. By “MAGA justices,” he means members of the Supreme Court whom he personally wishes had not been nominated and confirmed. He provides no rubrics, frameworks, standards, canons, doctrines, or objective arguments of any sort in the course of his proposition. Why not? Because he doesn’t have any.

As Tushnet goes on to confirm:

BREAKING: Stanford Law School has parted ways with Tirien Steinbach, the DEI administrator who accosted a sitting federal judge. Story forthcoming. pic.twitter.com/JHMBTIPuLC

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) July 20, 2023

Gail Heriot:

My friends call me a pessimist. But if you’re concerned that this piece is going to be a downer, in which I list all the ways universities will circumvent the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions ruling, relax. I’m very pleased with the Court’s decision.

Opponents of race-preferential admissions haven’t won the war, and things could still go awry. But we’ve gained some important legal weaponry, and we stand a decent chance of adding to the arsenal. (Forgive all the military metaphors: I’ve been “in the trenches” on this issue for almost three decades.)

Provided that “win” is defined realistically, the fight seems a lot more winnable now than it did before SFFA v. Harvard. Yes, colleges and universities will try to get around the ruling. But 100 percent compliance isn’t necessary for positive things to flow from the Court’s decision.

Here are some predictions for the coming year or so.

Some schools will experiment with doing away with standardized tests, but those that hope to be viewed as academically rigorous will quickly decide that they don’t like the results and will reverse course. MIT has already done so (after abandoning the SAT during the Covid-19 lockdowns). Some schools will experiment with preferences based on social class. They will find that there are a lot more low-income Asian Americans and whites than they realized (and that most of their African American and Latino applicants are not low-income). That may dampen their enthusiasm. But if they try to get around the problem by defining social class in a way that privileges one racial group over another, they will risk being a target in the next wave of lawsuits (which is surely coming).

Elisabeth Bik:

One evening in January 2014, I sat at my computer at home, sifting through scientific papers. Being a microbiologist, this wasn’t unusual, although I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did that night.

These particular papers were write-ups of medical research, with many including photographs of biological samples, like tissue. One picture caught my eye. Was there something familiar about it? Curious, I quickly scrolled back through other papers by the same authors, checking their images against each other.

There it was. A section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments.

What’s more, the authors seemed to be deliberately covering their tracks. Although the photos were of the same sample, one appeared to have been flipped back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.

Louis Bonham:

At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education.

Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply obey laws that forbid practices they consider moral imperatives is naïve.

Expecting state employees to simply obey anti-affirmative-action laws is naïve.

Take California’s ban on affirmative action. For decades, it has been illegal for California institutions to give racial preference in admissions, hiring, or contracting. Despite this clear, politically popular law, have California state universities ended their use of racial preferences? Anyone familiar with the UC System will tell you they have not.

Instead, state employees violate the law and continue such practices. UC Berkeley’s law-school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, typifies this prevailing attitude. In a recently surfaced video from earlier this year, this head of a public law school admits he and his school violate California law, via a process he calls “unstated affirmative action”:

Christopher Rufo:

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists desired not only to remake the world of politics and economics, but to reshape human nature according to the dictates of left-wing ideology. “And so,” he continued, “I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.”

This concept—the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit—would drive the communist regimes for the middle part of the twentieth century. The Soviets had their artists. The Chinese had their propagandists. The Third World armies had their pedagogists. All were committed to the creation of the New Man.

The Marxists in the West, such as Paulo Freire, held the same philosophy. Freire and his disciples believed that the critical pedagogies could reengineer the human soul and inspire a revolution from the bottom up. But in contradiction to their counterparts in the East, the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed in the West was not social class, but racial identity. 

“Although [Freire]’s early work was understandably rooted in an almost exclusive concern with class, many of us realized that it had theoretical shortcomings in dealing with the central issues shaping the multicultural debate,” explained Freire’s closest American collaborator, Henry Giroux. “Many of us began to expand the notion of social justice to include a discourse about racial justice. That is, justice could not be taken up solely in terms of the ownership of the means of production, or strictly around questions of labor or the division of wealth. These were very important issues, but they excluded fundamental questions about racism, colonialism, and the workings of the racial state.”

A federally funded, university and progressive media project to limit “information disorder’s scope and impact.” Is it me or does that sound just astoundingly misguided? https://t.co/j2Duq2vlEY

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 20, 2023

The vision of the university as a place to interact with those from differing viewpoints has never been weaker. I appreciated liberal professors in college bc it taught me how to debate & argue in a civil manner. But it appears many on left & right now want an echo chamber. https://t.co/kXrTmQ9T9r

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) July 20, 2023

While the @nytimes was blindly and unquestioningly following the lead of the Proximal Origin authors re #COVID19 origins, those scientists were scheming to manipulate NYT coverage. It’s time for the NYT to review its disastrous coverage of the pandemic origins issue. pic.twitter.com/MJbToUrvXk

— Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) July 19, 2023

Shankar Institute:

raction due to the joint efforts of educators, parents, and state leaders. This movement for better reading instruction has helped to fuel a wave of legislation to address widespread and persistent reading deficits of American students. While reading difficulties cut across socioeconomic lines, they disproportionately affect students living in poverty as well as those from black, brown, and indigenous communities.

Reading Reform Across America documents how state legislatures nationwide have responded to these challenges. Specifically, the report examines reading-related legislation enacted between 2019 and 2022. We analyzed a total of 223 bills enacted in 45 states and the District of Columbia, examining over 40 features, such as teacher preparation, professional development, and curriculum, to name a few.

Our objective is to provide a robust and granular description of states’ efforts to enhance reading instruction, with the following goals:

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Rep Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) just said one of the most disturbing and insane things a member of Congress has ever said:

“The DOJ, FBI, and IRS keep this democracy in check [and] provide the checks and the balances."
pic.twitter.com/gTBHLvSmaV

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 19, 2023

The fact that @FrancescaHongWI is a state lawmaker seems relevant here, but not mentioned. Sponsorships, news media, politics all a bit of a melange. https://t.co/5TxQuqzVtX

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 19, 2023

To make a point about “far right” GOP opposition to federal law enforcement, ⁦@AP⁩ goes all the way back to Reconstruction, without mentioning the resistance then was Democratic. https://t.co/lJ9e8LOhkB

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) July 20, 2023

William Jacobson:

CriticalRace.org, a project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, has unique and unparalleled interactive maps and databases demonstrating how Critical Race Theory and its progeny, such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Ibram Kendi’s misnamed “anti-racism,” have deeply penetrated every corner of academia. The racialization of education is all but complete

🚨BREAKING: ELKHORN, WI GENDER SUPPORT POLICY UPDATED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS WITHOUT PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE OR INPUT…IN 2021!
👉🏽Parents only realized this after they discovered a 10 yr old biological boy was using the girl’s bathroom.@Moms4Liberty@DefendingEd pic.twitter.com/x6fAgcaj8i

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) July 18, 2023

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson promised to raise $800 million in new revenue without hiking property taxes.
His allies support a Chicago income tax–3.5% on all household income above $100,000. #NeverEnough #Taxes #Chicago #Illinois #Mondayhttps://t.co/sJAQugvZAD

— Beverly A. Pekala (@PekalaLaw) July 17, 2023

Eugene Volokh:

From Judge Clifton Corker’s opinion today in Ultima Servs. Corp. v. U.S. Dep’t of Agric. (E.D. Tenn.):

This case concerns whether, under the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, Defendants the United States’ Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) and the Small Business Administration (“SBA”) may use a “rebuttable presumption” of social disadvantage for certain minority groups to qualify them for inclusion in a federal program that awards government contracts on a preferred basis to businesses owned by individuals in those minority groups.

The court generally answers this “no”; here’s an excerpt, though if you’re interested in the details you should read the whole opinion:

“The liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause contains within it the prohibition against denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.” United States v. Windsor (2013); see also Bolling v. Sharpe (1954); Ctr. for Bio-Ethical Reform v. Napolitano, 648 F.3d 365, 379 (6th Cir. 2011) (“The Fifth Amendment, of course, does not itself contain a guarantee of equal protection, but instead incorporates, as against the federal government, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”). Courts, therefore, “evaluate equal protection claims against the federal government under the Fifth Amendment just as [they] would evaluate equal protection claims against state and local governments under the Fourteenth Amendment.” …

To satisfy the compelling-interest prong [of the strict scrutiny applicable to race classifications], the government must both identify a compelling interest and provide evidentiary support concerning the need for the proposed remedial action. The Supreme Court has held that the government has a compelling interest in “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc.Additionally, the government must present goals that are “sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.”

To say that teachers weren’t involved in discussions as we worked through the process is untrue.
I also personally met with @WSRAliteracy. At that meeting, a light was shined on why we are in this reading crisis. https://t.co/w6tZfArOUx

— John Jagler (@JohnJagler) July 19, 2023

I am pleased to announce the Right to Read Act has been signed into law. @RepKitchens and I authored AB 321 to curb Wisconsin’s ongoing literacy crisis by investing $50 million in early literacy development and banning reading curriculum that has hindered students for decades. pic.twitter.com/mBGSR0Gya1

— Duey Stroebel (@SenStroebel) July 19, 2023

Mitchell Schmidt:

Wisconsin falls for MS miracle scam

And children and teachers suffer the consequences

https://t.co/0ELJUm0KL9

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) July 19, 2023

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Meta’s new AI provides a good example of early AI alignment.

If you can insert your values into this process, you will be able to control the future. These language models will be a foundational part of technological development going forward. https://t.co/sjXA7lPBzJ

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 19, 2023

Tom Knighton

When I was in middle school here in Georgia, they did something kind of smart. They broke us all into classes based on our grades. All the “A” students were in one group, “B” students in another, and so on.

The result was that those who excelled could excel and those who needed special help weren’t holding anyone else back.

Apparently, someone thought that was horribly unfair and the schools stopped doing it, which is a big problem.

You see, while the term “equity” wasn’t really a thing when this happened, it was the same mentality. If everyone couldn’t succeed academically, it seems, no one should.

It sounds stupid, but it’s the crab bucket mentality. The crabs pull down all the other crabs lest someone else escape.

Frankly, I could deal with it if I knew that was the end of it, but the practice continues to go on. Take this example from Massachusetts:

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Matt Taibbi calls the covid origins cover up “perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality”

Never forget pic.twitter.com/XRO4ygKckv

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 19, 2023

Noah Smith:

“The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.” — John Dewey

A couple of weeks ago, Armand Domalewski wrote a guest post for Noahpinion about how the new California Math Framework threatened to dumb down math education in the state — for example, by forbidding kids from taking algebra before high school:

Well, I’m going to write another post about this subject, because the direction in which math education is trending in America under “progressive” guidance just frustrates me so deeply. 

A few days after Armand’s post, the new California Math Framework was adopted. Some of the worst provisions had been thankfully watered down, but the basic strategy of trying to delay the teaching of subjects like algebra remained. It’s a sign that the so-called “progressive” approach to math education championed by people like Stanford’s Jo Boaler has not yet engendered a critical mass of pushback. 

And meanwhile, the idea that teaching kids less math will create “equity” has spread far beyond the Golden State. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.

It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.

The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.

Related: Madison’s various one size fits all schemes:

Connected Math

Discovery math:

Not, Singapore math, however.

Linda Jacobson & Asher Lehrer-Small:

But a 10-month examination by The 74 shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have barely tapped monies advocates say are critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic. 

With just over a year left to allocate the funds, the question isn’t only if districts will hit the September 2024 deadline, but whether the unprecedented windfall will leave students better off. 

Districts have not made it easy to answer those questions. Despite the unprecedented expense, Congress said little about districts’ responsibility to keep the public informed.

“Are districts with the biggest declines in student achievement spending their money the way you hope they would?” asked Matthew Steinberg, an education professor at George Mason University. “We just don’t know.”

A recent government report said gaps in spending data “make it difficult for the oversight community, decision-makers, and American taxpayers to fully understand where the money went and how it was used.”

Wall Street Journal:

More than 100,000 students attend Ohio’s charter schools, which are especially important for the state’s inner-city students. Out of 26 cities measured, Cleveland students posted the biggest drop in National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores last year compared to 2019. Cleveland also has its own school voucher program, and one common-sense measure from the Legislature was to allow students to take the vouchers to any private school—not only schools within the district.

Ohio has expanded its school choice offerings from cities to suburbs over the years. Good for Gov. DeWine and the Legislature for making private schools available to more families, and let’s hope they have their eye on education savings accounts next.

Adam Townsend:

The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “the FTC would take exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”

A private litigant who engaged in such conduct might well be facing charges of witness tampering. As the Plaintiff in this civil enforcement action, the FTC should not receive preferential treatment. There simply is no way to square the striking record of bias recounted above, along with other evidence described in this motion, with any semblance of the impartiality, due process, or equitable conduct that the law requires from administrative agencies like the FTC when they act pursuant to court-authorized and -supervised consent orders. 

This Court should intervene to stop the FTC’s ongoing improper conduct.

The alarming recent developments in this case occur against the backdrop of a consent order between the FTC and Twitter (now X Corp) entered more than a decade ago to resolve allegations that Twitter had not adequately safeguarded user information.

The Pentagon re-authorization bill provides a study to understand the “impacts of decreased testosterone levels on readiness” of special forces. pic.twitter.com/4gTP2R509A

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 18, 2023

Paul Cassell:

It is well known that there were significant spikes in homicides in 2020, particularly in major urban areas. In an article I published in 2021, I attributed these spikes to what I dubbed the “Minneapolis Effect”–specifically reductions in proactive policing as police pulled back in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I blogged about my article here.

A few days ago, an important new statistical study found corroboration for my hypothesis in New York City. Professor Dae-Young Kim’s article “Did De-Policing Contribute to the 2020 Homicide Spikes?” answers the question posed in the title in the affirmative.

Professor Kim’s article examines NYC homicide data from 2017 through 2020. It divides homicides into six different categories: gun, non-gun, domestic, non-domestic, gang, and non-gang. It assesses the connection between homicide rates in those categories and a significant reduction  in NYPD police stops of pedestrians. In NYC, stops fell from 13,453 in 2019 to 8,375 in 2020–a 30% decrease in proactive policing.

Professor Kim’s article found that the reduction in stops led to an increase in three homicide categories:

data wars — controlling access to your data https://t.co/Wbzp42Pcud

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 14, 2023

MATT TAIBBI, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Chats showing Proximal Origins authors saying things like “The truth will never come out (if lab escape is the truth)” were published first by independent researcher Francisco Del Asis of the independent investigatory group DRASTIC, after which the story was picked up by Ryan Grim of The Intercept. From there, health officials did their best to ignore the material — “Many of them remained silent with this revelation,” is how De Asis puts it — almost as if they were waiting for another shoe to drop. 

That other shoe is dropping. Public and Racket last week obtained a full complement of the “Proximal Origins” communications examined by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, revealing a story far worse than previously believed. While today’s Public story details the unprecedented scientific cover-up, the letters and chats examined here at Racket show how health officials and scientists constructed perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality. Because House investigators uncovered such a wealth of material, some of the Proximal Origin communications — which shed light on other Covid-related controversies — will be addressed in a second part of this series later this week. For now, however, the degree to which these communications blow up years of news stories stands out.

Maya Bodnick

Two weeks ago, I asked eight Harvard professors and teaching assistants to grade essays written by ChatGPT-4 in response to a prompt assigned in their class.2 Here are the summarized prompts with links to the essays:

• Microeconomics and Macroeconomics(Professors Jason Furman and David Laibson): Explain an economic concept creatively (300-500 for Micro and 800-1000 words for Macro).
• Latin American Politics (Professor Steven Levitsky): What has caused the many presidential crises in Latin America in recent decades (5-7 pages)?
• The American Presidency (Professor Roger Porter): Pick a modern president and identify his three greatest successes and three greatest failures (6-8 pages).
• Conflict Resolution (Professor Daniel Shapiro): Describe a conflict in your life and give recommendations for how to negotiate it (7-9 pages).
• Intermediate Spanish (Preceptor Adriana Gutierrez): Write a letter to activist Rigoberta Menchú (550-600 words).
• Freshman Seminar on Proust (Professor Virginie Greene): Close-read a passage from “In Search of Lost Time” (3-4 pages).
• Freshman Expository Writing (instructor chose to remain anonymous): Close-read a passage from “Middlemarch” (4-5 pages).

I told these instructors that each essay might have been written by me or the AI in order to minimize response bias, although in fact they were all written by ChatGPT-4. I submitted exactly what ChatGPT-4 wrote, except that I sequenced multiple responses in order to meet the word count (ChatGPT-4 only writes about 750 words at a time). Finally, I told the professors and TAs to grade these essays normally, except to ignore citations, which I didn’t include.

Bobby Jindal:

The elevation of victimhood over achievement has led many to misrepresent their racial and gender identities in pursuit of advantages in professional and academic positions. Students at selective colleges are identifying as non-heterosexual at rates several times higher than historic or national averages, though University of London political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in sexual behavior tied to those identities. I’ve heard of parents at elite private high schools using genetic testing services hoping to identify any ethnic heritage that would boost their children’s college applications and of young professionals falsely identifying as bisexual for a career boost.

Racial and gender quotas result in liberals’ willful hypocrisy and convoluted rationalizations when they are confronted with the reality that aptitudes, interests and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among their superficial and shifting politicized racial categories. Liberals have translated their calls for increased diversity into demands that colleges admit and employers hire black and Hispanic applicants in proportion to their group’s share of the U.S. population.

1. Twitter Files: Who Are the People Claiming RFK Jr. is “Disinformation”?

Let's look at what I found inside Twitter's internal documents. pic.twitter.com/fnzgPu7giQ

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) July 18, 2023

Martin Gurri:

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

At the same time, the speech police protected from criticism members in good standing of the establishment, with a special fondness for Anthony Fauci. It did that for Joe Biden, too, before and after his election to the presidency. There’s no need to repeat here the sordid details of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, but given that the predicate for censorship has been the defense of truth, the bare facts of the story should be noted: the FBI lied to Twitter, and Twitter passed the lie on to the public. If it was a disinformation operation, it succeeded completely.

As Taibbi and Shellenberger observed, these maneuvers were unprecedented in the lifetimes of those assembled at the hearing. Even Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy encountered strong opposition from elements of the political and media establishment. The new censorship seemed to rely on universal elite conformity. No debates had been held, no enabling laws passed. The federal government’s standing legal authority had been used to silence, in secret, the online opinions of an untold number of Americans. Whatever the Republicans’ motivation, one would think this to be a worthy subject of conversation for the House.