Displaying posts published in

December 2021

Former Harvard President Says ‘Antiracist’ Math Curricula Poses a National Security Threat By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/07/former-harvard-president-says-antiracist-math-curricula-poses-a-national-security-threat/

On Monday, economist and former President of Harvard University Larry Summers shared a letter declaring that the rising trend of “antiracist” mathematical education in America is a threat to the American economy and national security, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Summers, who also served as Secretary of the Treasury in the final years of the Clinton presidency, cosigned the letter with 600 other academics, all condemning this new form of education in K-12 schools. The letter says that efforts to force racial awareness into math have sacrificed the value of a strong education in mathematics in order “to reduce achievement gaps.”

Summers described mathematical education as “an economic and national security imperative,” contrasting the current approach in the United States to the one currently taken by China, where “math standards are not subject to continued erosion by social justice warriors who can’t themselves define exponential growth or solve quadratic equations.”

The bizarre push to make math about race has been funded by billionaire leftists such as Bill Gates, who used the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” a nationwide nonprofit initiative asking teachers and schools across the country to consider the possibility that math “is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.” Among other things, this and other similar efforts have tried to declare that some of the foundational tenets of math in education, such as students showing their work and how they arrived at the correct answer, are racist.

The coalition behind the letter signed by Summers and 600 others, “K12MathMatters,” says that this politicization of math only reduces “access to skills needed for social mobility.”

“While the U.S. K-12 system has much to improve,” the letter reads in part, “the current trends will instead take us further back. Reducing access to advanced mathematics and elevating trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills would cause lasting damage to STEM education in the country.”

How to help J6 defendants By Sharon Caldwell

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/how_to_help_j6_defendants.html

My husband, Thomas Caldwell (“Tom”), quite surprisingly to me, is now known as a ‘January 6er or J6er’ criminal defendant.  This term is applied to people who went to Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021 to hear President Trump speak, to march to the U.S. Capitol, and to peacefully protest there.  That is what more than 500,000 January 6th attendees did that day — including me.  Unfortunately, many were arrested for simply exercising their First Amendment rights.  My husband is one of those.  He never entered the U.S. Capitol, did not commit any violence against anyone or anything, and did not plan or participate in any kind of attack on the Capitol.  Yet, he was wrongly scooped up and thrown in jail for 53 days.  Most of his jail time was spent in solitary confinement.

At the time of his arrest, Tom was 66 years old.  He is a retired Navy officer and a disabled veteran who lives with chronic pain, debilitating spinal conditions, and other ailments, mostly due to his selfless service to our country.  He has no criminal history and has been an upstanding citizen for half a century.  He is a gentle, fun-loving soul.

Tom is innocent of all the charges the DoJ and FBI have thrown at him.  Lies about him have been spread worldwide through the media.

In my husband’s case, he was arrested on January 19th, 2021 after virtually no investigation.  Under political pressure, an extreme rush to judgement ensued.  As a result, many statements and assumptions were made about Tom which are false. The DoJ has backed off on many false accusations, but charges against Tom remain.  My expectation is that they will all be dropped some day (as they should be), or he will be fully acquitted.  Learn more about my husband’s case and help us with our legal battle.

Justice Sotomayor ‘paraded her scientific ignorance’ in questioning during oral arguments on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/justice_sotomayor_paraded_her_scientific_ignorance_in_questioning_during_oral_arguments_on_emdobbs_v_jackson_womens_healthem.html

Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, raised eyebrows and cast doubt on her fitness for her elevated office during oral arguments over the pending Mississippi abortion case, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health.

Constitutional scholars were taken aback by her injection of politics:

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception – that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Sotomayor asked. “I don’t see how it is possible.”

And her casual rejection of the Constitution as the arbiter of Supreme Court decision-making:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor even said at one point that the Supreme Court comes up with decisions all the time that aren’t directly grounded in the Constitution. This is a line of argument that, if taken seriously, would justify the Supreme Court swinging free of all restraint and rewriting the nation’s laws on the fly.

But for sheer wrong-headedness, you can’t top the “misinformation” (to use a term the progs currently favor when trying to censor) that she spouted on fetal development.

Writing in Newsweek, Dr. Grazie Poso Christie, exposes her ignorant declarations:

…right after Mississippi’s solicitor general Scott Stewart argued it was no longer appropriate to use fetal viability (the gestational age at which a prematurely-born infant can survive in an intensive care unit) as the point after which states can protect an unborn child from elective abortion. He said this was due—in part—to 30 years of medical advances. In a piqued, incredulous tone, Sotomayor demanded to know just “What are the advancements in medicine?” As Stewart began to list them, mentioning new knowledge of fetal pain, the Justice abruptly cut him off.

Our brief and others document the medical and scientific advances Mr. Stewart was referring to, in language easily accessible to lay people and rigorously sourced in the latest scientific journals and currently accepted medical practices. It’s there for anyone with eyes—or the will—to see.

Sotomayor vigorously rejected Stewart’s reference to advances in our understanding of fetal pain. She claimed that only an eccentric “small fringe” believes fetal pain exists “before 24, 25 weeks.” She could not have been more wrong. A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that a fully developed cortex is not necessary for the transmission of pain sensations, which may be present as early as 12 weeks.

In fact, physicians routinely protect their youngest patients—fetal and premature—from pain. A baby born at 21 or 22 weeks receives anesthesia routinely during any intervention. Anything less would be considered barbaric. (snip)

Dealing with the School Staff Shortage By Keri D. Ingraham

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/dealing_with_the_school_staff_shortage.html

K-12 public schools throughout the U.S. are facing staff shortages so severe that school days are being canceled. Seattle, Boulder, and Portland, Oregon are just a few examples of districts without adequate staff to maintain daily operations following Veteran’s Day. Claiming exhaustion, hundreds of teachers in these cities opted to take the day off in order to have a four-day weekend. Denver Public Schools’ situation is even more dire. The district moved to remote learning for three days in mid-November, canceled school on November 19 as a mental health day, and took a full week off for Thanksgiving.

The school staff shortages and well-being crisis of both teachers and students can be traced to the left-wing priorities and policies of the teacher unions and politicians who run these cities. Most egregious was the shuttering of schools closed for more than one calendar year, which kept teachers pinned behind screens and distanced from their students. It not only took the passion out of teaching for many teachers, but it also overwhelmed many educators whose limited technical skills were insufficient for the remote learning environment.

Fearmongering by teacher unions and Democrat political leaders also caused many employees distress regarding returning to school and triggered some to quit. Despite the harm they personally experienced and witnessed in their students, many teachers supported keeping schools closed due to an exaggerated fear of COVID and loyalty to their union and political leaders. Furthermore, despite seeing their students slip behind academically (especially those of minority ethnic groups and low-income families), they played puppet to political narratives that often clashed with the data and even common sense. The unwarranted duration of public-school closures during the 2020-2021 school year — which occurred even while private schools operated fully — was detrimental to students, despite the public rhetoric of Democrat leaders and teacher unions about how much they cared.

The Middle East Studies Association’s Shameful Betrayal of Academic Freedom An obsessive hatred of the Jewish state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/mesas-shameful-betrayal-academic-freedom-richard-l-cravatts/

Unsurprisingly for an organization whose membership has been perennially hostile to Israel, members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) voted at their recent annual meeting to advance a resolution endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli academics to a full membership vote in 2022.

The sententious language of the MESA boycott resolution, which ironically purports to protect academic freedom, asserts that there is evidence of “successive Israeli governments’ systematic violations of the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli direct or indirect control” and that these so-called “systemic violations include restricting freedom of movement for Palestinians; isolating, undermining, or otherwise attacking Palestinian educational institutions; harassing Palestinian professors, teachers, and students . . ; and maintaining inequality in educational resources between Palestinians and Israelis.”

But MESA’s notion that Israeli universities are “imbricated in these systematic violations” is flawed in at least two respects. It, first, exonerates academics in any country other than Israel for any misdeeds committed by their own governments, for which, by the same standard that the boycotters apply to Israel, they as concerned citizens and scholars should have to answer. The notion that Israeli academics should, or could, be held responsible for the actions of their own government was at best hypocritical, and at worst yet another example of how, where Israel is concerned, the standards applied in measuring its actions are impossibly high.

Secondly, making Israeli academics complicit in the actions of their government ignores the reality that, as is the case on European, Canadian, and American campuses, many Israeli professors veer to the Left politically and many, incredibly, share the same virulent anti-Israel, anti-Zionism sentiments so proudly touted by the boycott supporters.

In fact, MESA President Dina Rizk Khoury ludicrously claimed that the boycott would not only help Palestinian scholars whose rights are allegedly denied by Israel but would also help insulate anti-Israel Israeli academics, too, academics she contends face imaginary “attacks” from their peers within Israel. “Today’s vote clears a path for our full membership to collectively determine how we can do our part to support the academic freedom and education rights of Palestinian scholars and students,” Khoury proclaimed, “not to mention Israeli scholars facing attacks from their own government for criticizing its policies.”

How Obama Sabotaged the American Military Obama fundamentally transformed the military the way that he did the country. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/how-obama-sabotaged-american-military-daniel-greenfield/

By the time Barack Obama left office, every branch of the military was smaller than it had been on September 11. But the change in size concealed the true impact of America’s most left-wing president in undermining our national security and weakening us in the face of our enemies.

 “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” Obama famously boasted. He used the pen to unleash a blizzard of executive orders and memorandums. Some led to outraged protests, but some of his most devastating penned assaults on our nation’s military flew under the radar.

One of those took place during the end of his last year in office. His memorandum, “Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce”, created the woke military of the Biden administration by putting identity politics, diversity quotas, and political indoctrination at the heart of the military’s mission.

Obama had always resented the military. Even former General McChrystal, an Obama loyalist fired for describing his boss a little too aptly in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter, described him as “uncomfortable and intimidated” by generals. But Obama’s parting shot at the military cut the generals down to size by transforming them into community organizers.

His order redefined diversity as the military’s “greatest asset” and reinvented national security as a system for maximizing employment diversity by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and every identity politics metric, but not the military metrics that truly mattered, readiness, competence, and a willingness to wage war in defense of the homeland.

Along with transforming the military into another quota-based federal employment agency in which skills and capability mattered much less than being a disabled transgender Eskimo, the order also demanded that national security agencies should make “implicit or unconscious bias” training mandatory for “senior leadership and management positions”. Divisions that didn’t earn sufficiently high IQ (Inclusion Quotient) scores would also be hit with bias training.

Temple Emanu-El Silences a Pro-Israel and Amplifies an Anti-Israel Voice by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18009/dershowitz-temple-emanu-el

[T]his is exactly how McCarthyism worked back in the 1950s. The institutions that banned people accused of being communists did not necessarily believe the accusations or think that they justified the ban, but they feared being tainted even by false accusations. So, they went along with the ban, just to be safe.

When I was first falsely accused of having had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, his island and other specified locations, I stated categorically that I have documentary records that conclusively prove I could not have been in those locations during the relevant time periods. I produced cell-phone records, American Express charges, travel documents, recorded TV appearances, teaching schedules, calendars, court appearances and other documents that persuaded Giuffre’s own lawyers that it was “not possible” for her account to be true, and that—in her lawyer’s own words—she was “wrong … simply wrong” in accusing me.

We later found several “smoking gun” emails that proved she never met me or even heard of me. She had to be told by a journalist friend that I was a famous lawyer and that my name “was a good name for your [book] pitch,” even though there was “no proof” I had done anything wrong. Giuffre then followed the journalist’s advice and included my name in her book manuscript, but as a person she had seen, but never met, and certainly never had any relations with.

She told her best friend that she didn’t want to accuse me but “felt pressure” from her lawyers to do so. She also told her best friend’s husband that she never had sex with me. I have recordings confirming this.

We learned that at the same time Giuffre publicly accused me, her lawyers privately accused Wexner of nearly identical sexual misconduct and demanded a meeting to resolve her “claims” against him. Both Wexner’s wife and lawyer told me it was a “shakedown” (the word is recorded on a tape). It seems obvious that I was being used as a stalking horse to send the unmistakable message to Wexner that if he didn’t want to happen to him what happened to me—namely, a very public accusation—there are ways of resolving the matter.

When employment records proved she was 17, which is above the age of consent in New York and other states, she admitted she had been “mistaken.” She also admitted that she was “mistaken” when she said she had dinner with Al and Tipper Gore on Epstein’s island.

[H]er own lawyer has said on TV that based on his 11-year investigation, he does not believe that “any high-profile people” had sex with Giuffre. All of these high-profile people have categorically denied her accusations.

If her own lawyers don’t believe her sworn accusation—and they have said they do not—how can others credit them? That is probably why the U.S. Attorney’s office that indicted Epstein and Maxwell deliberately omitted Giuffre as a witness.

Nobody who has seen the evidence believes Giuffre, yet Temple Emanu-El nonetheless canceled me.

I offered to speak on how to combat these dangers [anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish attitudes in universities and among the hard left], but [t]he synagogue preferred to hear from Peter Beinart, who advocates the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and who supports boycotts against Israelis. At the same time that I was canceled, Beinart received a substantial speaker’s fee from the synagogue to make his case against Israel.

Silence is not the option in the face of unjustified McCarthyite censorship by a synagogue that claims to be a house of study, open-mindedness and Jewish values of dialogue and dissent. So, I will not quietly accept temple Emanu-El’s hypocrisy and cowardice. Nor should you.

Germany’s Multicultural Suicide by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17971/germany-multicultural-suicide

“I will continue to take a critical stance against those… who use the liberal structure and tolerance of the constitution to impose totalitarian views of the state and who undermine the rules of the rule of law, using anti-Western indoctrination…. I will not adapt my vision of freedom of expression to… ‘Everyone has the right to freely express their opinion in a way that is not contrary to Sharia law'”. — Ralph Giordano, FAZ.net.

Once a dam breaks, there is only a competition to see who gives way faster.

The city is also changing the name of its squares…. The new name of a square in Aachen is “Moscheeplatz” (“Mosque Place”), a name desired by the Mayor Marcel Philipp, in agreement with the Turkish [Department of Religious Affairs] …

Then there is the question of demographics: 70% of Raunheim’s population are migrants. “Here we have more Muslims than Christians”. — Mayor Thomas Jühe, Social Democrats, Die Welt, November 16, 2021.

Despite this, they say that the “Great Replacement” and the Islamization of Europe are just conspiracy theories. Have we really understood what the Europe of tomorrow will be like?

“Western hegemony is over,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently. “It lasted centuries, but it is over”.

At the same time, the mosques of Cologne, the fourth-largest city in Germany, obtained permission to broadcast the call to prayer every Friday over minaret loudspeakers.

Congressional Report Details ‘Inhumane’ Conditions of January 6 Inmates

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/07/congressional-report-details-inhumane-conditions-of-january-6-inmates/

A new report published by U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) office details “atrocious,” “cramped,” and “inhumane” conditions at the Washington, D.C., jail where January 6 defendants are being held ahead of trial. The congressional delegation had been turned away by jail officials in July and again initially in November, before they were given access.

The report, “Unusually Cruel,” was released by Greene’s office on Tuesday. It recounts a three-and-a-half-hour tour on November 4 of two Washington, D.C. jails by Greene along with Rep. Louie Gohmert and members of their staff. The purpose of the visit, according to the report, was to inspect the conditions of jails, “specifically the treatment of inmates held in the [Central Treatment Facility] in relation to the events of January 6, 2001.”

According to Greene’s office, “cells in the January 6 wing of the CTF were extremely small, composed of a single toilet, sink, and a small bed cot. The walls of the rooms had residue of human feces, bodily fluids, blood, dirt, and mold. The community showers were recently scrubbed of black mold—some of which remained. The interior walls of the common area were also freshly painted.”

“According to the inmates,” the report continues, “the U.S. Marshals had recently visited the area just days before, which caused a flurry of activity by guards to clean up the January 6 area while the U.S. Marshals were inspecting another area.”

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in October held D.C. Department of Corrections Director Quincy Booth and warden Wanda Patten in contempt and ordered the Justice Department to investigate the CTF for possible civil rights violations after jail officials failed to provide treatment for a January 6 defendant in need of surgery. A November 2 report by the U.S. Marshals Service concluded the CTF failed to meet “minimum standards of confinement” and determined 400 inmates should be transferred to a different facility in Pennsylvania.

Read the entire report below.

A “Mini-Ice Age” Could Hit Earth By 2030, Scientists Warn

https://www.sciencenatures.com/2021/12/a-mini-ice-age-could-hit-earth-by-2030.html

Amid rising concerns over the effects of global warming, a group of scientists has claimed that the Earth could in a little over a decade be hit by a “mini ice age” that would freeze major rivers. The startling prediction is based on a mathematical model of the Sun’s magnetic energy which also suggests that Earth’s temperature will start dropping in 2021.

The plummeting temperature will then lead to something called the “Maunder minimum”, which is referred to a previous mini ice age that occurred between 1646 and 1715, turning London’s Thames into a frozen river, scientists claimed. The latest research, led by maths professor Valentina Zharkova at Northumbria University, is built on a previous research that predicts the movements of two magnetic waves produced by the Sun. It also foretells rapidly decreasing magnetic waves for three solar cycles that will begin in 2021, and last for as many as 33 years.

According to the model, the two magnetic waves will become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26 between 2030 and 2040, the waves will become out of sync, causing reduction in solar activity by as much as 60 percent.

 “In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other — peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,” Zharkova reportedly said in 2015 while conducting a previous research on the phenomenon. “Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’.”