And That’s the Truth: Learn to Read!

by  on Sojourner Truth
 
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth

[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth– PE]

Chicago Democrat sounds alarm as 55 schools report no proficiency in math or reading: ‘Very serious’ — foxnews.com

“No proficiency” means there ain’t one kid can read or do math in the whole school. Not one.

A Illinois state senator named Willie Preston says

“I think that we have to reengage parents, have parents actively take a role inside the schools when they can be, but in addition, we need to make certain that we … spend our money in the right way as it pertains to our children’s education.”

You gotta engage parents, I don’t see why you gotta reengage em. Damn schools were closed for two years. Parents had to school their own kids. If there ain’t one kid in the whole school that can read or do math, you tellin me the parents were engaged? They ain’t never been engaged.

And the money ain’t the problem either. People always blame money for bad schools. Illinois this year sent $9.4 billion to Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. government sent another $1.8 billion. Check my math (if you didn’t go to a Chicago public school) but that’s $11.2 billion

Look at this:

These schools gettin 5 figures per student. Some get $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000. I ain’t kiddin! Some schools get $50,000 per student.

Even if you got $10,000 per student and you got 30 kids in a class, that’s $300,000. Take out the teacher’s salary and the price of some chalk and you still got a lotta money. Where in the hell is that money goin? Probly they payin 10 levels of administrators in the district office who ain’t teachin nobody.

And in case you’re gonna say that COVID lockdowns caused this problem, well for your information, the current scores are not much worse than they were in 2019.

Sen. Preston adds “A lot of these children are coming from poverty-stricken communities.”

Oh, bullshit. There’s a lot of low-income Asians in this country too but I guarantee you they can read.

The governor of Illinois will make it a national priority to teach black queer history for some goddamn reason but nobody wants to teach black kids to read.

And that’s the Truth!

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That is a Load of Educational Malarkey!

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That is a load of malarkey! I mean, the bullshit meter just totally pegged.

That is not what he thinks and anyone who knows even a little about politics knows that is not what he thinks.

What he thinks is that every kid in every zip code should attend the public schools that they’re assigned to based on where they live. And if those schools are hopeless trash fires, the kids should attend those schools anyway.

Teachers unions and the Democratic party are co-dependent. The unions, in addition to providing financial support, are the foot soldiers of the party. In exchange, no Democrat will ever — and I mean never ever — support school choice, i.e., every kid having access to every education opportunity possible.

P.S. Whoever wrote this tweet is definitely a graduate of the public schools Biden thinks every kid should attend. Shouldn’t the phrase “education opportunity” be “educational opportunity”? “Education” is a noun, not an adjective.

Now try to figure out the last sentence. How can one person have a consensus view?

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Don’t Believe Your Eyes, the Economy is Strong!

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According to LinkedIn, here are some of the companies doing layoffs so far in February:

  • Convoy
  • Tackle
  • DocuSign
  • KPMG
  • Wix
  • The RealReal
  • DigitalOcean
  • Bank of America
  • Criteo
  • Sprinklr
  • PICO
  • ServiceTitan
  • Vicarious Surgical
  • Betterment
  • Divvy Homes
  • Neiman Marcus Group
  • Udemy
  • iRobot
  • LinkedIn
  • Terminus
  • Showtime
  • HackerEarth
  • Channel Advisor
  • United Talent Agency
  • Electric
  • Collective Health
  • TripleLift
  • Rigetti Computing
  • Twilio
  • Daily Harvest
  • Dandy
  • Bark
  • Olive AI
  • News Corp
  • Yahoo
  • GitHub
  • GitLab
  • Disney
  • GoDaddy
  • JPMorgan Chase
  • Affirm
  • Medly
  • Gusto
  • Nomad Health
  • Zoom
  • Magic Eden
  • Protocol Labs
  • Bittrex
  • Chainalysis
  • Prime Trust
  • CoinTracker
  • VinFast
  • Gong
  • EBay
  • Secureworks
  • Boeing
  • Dell Technologies
  • Clari
  • Workato
  • Drift
  • Kyruus
  • Desktop Metal
  • Getir
  • Salesforce
  • Highspot
  • Getaround
  • Autodesk
  • Tilting Point
  • Mindstrong
  • Athenahealth
  • Genesys
  • Replica
  • Sendoso
  • Articulate
  • MediaMath
  • Dialpad
  • Wheel
  • Cyren
  • Okta
  • Miro
  • Pinterest
  • REI
  • FedEx
  • DraftKings
  • Rivian
  • Splunk
  • Match Group
  • Bustle Digital Group
  • Wish

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I’m Shocked — SHOCKED — to Find That My Letter Was Distorted

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Wow! It took him more than two years to figure that out?!

“All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said,” Clapper recently told the Washington Post.

“The intent of the letter was that this could be Russian disinformation — emphasis on could,” Clapper told the outlet. “It’s a very important nuance … a distinction that people are always ignoring.”

Well, he’s right. If you read the letter carefully, it does say — I’m paraphrasing here — we have no idea if the laptop is Russian disinformation, we have no evidence that it is, but it does have the classic earmarks of Russian spycraft.

Why would 50 former high-ranking intel officials get together to write and sign a letter saying, basically, we have no idea what we’re talking about? Answer: because they knew it would be distorted. They wanted it to be distorted.

Intel guys — FBI, CIA, DHS — didn’t and don’t like Donald Trump, didn’t want him re-elected because he treats them with the contempt they deserve.

Journalists are a) left-leaning, and b) not too smart, but just to be sure it gets distorted, let’s put the letter in the hands of Natasha Bertrand (then at Politico), one of the biggest liars in the profession.

Then after the election, when a suitable amount of time has passed, like maybe two years from now, we can — correctly! — say that our words were distorted.

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What the State of the Union Didn’t Say

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Biden SOTU

  • The president entered office with a 1.4% inflation rate and spiked it to 7%.
  • 30-year mortgages of 2.7% soared to 6.5% in less than two years.
  • Eggs are $7 a dozen.
  • A thin steak is $15 a pound.
  • A sheet of plywood is $95.
  • Gas averaged $2.39 a gallon when the president took office and even after draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve it is still $3.50 a gallon. In my state, California, gas has recently been over $5 a gallon.
  • The price of natural gas has tripled in less than a year.
  • In two years over 5 million foreign nationals poured into the United States—all illegally across a nonexistent border.
  • The president said that he “lowered” inflation, energy prices and interest rates after sending them to astronomical levels and then seeing them momentarily taper off a bit. Like Nero bragging about rebuilding Circus Maximus after burning it down. He omitted that these indices remain far higher than they were when he entered office.
  • Russia went into Ukraine because Vladimir Putin saw the greatest humiliation in modern military history in Afghanistan, he sees President Biden mumbling and bumbling, he doesn’t respect Joe Biden and he doesn’t fear Joe Biden.
  • The president said that he had “more jobs created in two years than any president has created in four years,” omitting that if the government forces businesses to close, it doesn’t “create” jobs when allowing them to open again.
  • Three years ago, the unemployment rate was at 3.5%. President Biden reminded us that it is now at a historic low of 3.4%. Not mentioned: 30 million people lost their jobs to COVID-19 lockdowns. Biden claims to have “created” 12 million jobs during the past two years. The missing people have dropped out of the job market.
  • There is no specific Biden economic policy that brought us an unemployment rate 0.1% lower than the previous administration. It happened on autopilot as we came out of a two-year economic shutdown.
  • Biden claimed that his administration had “cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion—the largest deficit reduction in American history,” when, in fact, those “cuts” were sunsetting pandemic emergency spending. Next year, the deficit will be back to historically high levels.

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Go Down, Moses

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I read yesterday that Moses Hall became the fifth building at UC Berkeley to lose its name( because of the allegedly racist views of its namesake, Bernard Moses, a prominent faculty member from 1875 to 1911.

All of the buildings have been unnamed since 2020.

“Disappearing” people is straight out of the Joseph Stalin playbook and I’ve never learned to see Stalin as a role model.

According to the Berkeley news article that I read, Niko Kolodny, former chair of the philosophy department, said he became aware via email that Moses’ name “had been deeply disturbing to several people of color.”

The University of California established a Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture in 1937, and Moses Hall was named in 1965. The fact that it took more than 80 years since Moses was first recognized for the university to familiarize itself with his views (via an email!) and deem them inappropriate suggests that virtually no one has been reading his writings for the past 80 years, thus the number of people (“several”) who might have been deeply disturbed would have to be quite small.

What I find deeply disturbing is that anyone with — or without, but especially with — the benefit of a so-called liberal education would be deeply disturbed to find that people living 100 years ago held views that would not be considered progressive by 2023 standards.

In fact, academics writing in any discipline 100 years ago or more would have espoused views and theories that are now considered obsolete. Why would that surprise or disturb anyone? I don’t think Berkeley should be proud of graduating students who become deeply disturbed by something so obvious.

The Moses unnaming proposal states that while Moses’ perspective might have been common among white academics at the time he expressed it, “it is at odds with the present values of the UC Berkeley community.”

So Moses was not an outlier. His perspective was common at the time he expressed it. The article doesn’t even say that his work has since been shown to be empirically false, only that “it is at odds with the present values of the UC Berkeley community.”

Can something be true and at the same time “at odds with the present values of the UC Berkeley community”? If so, which takes precedence?

And finally, given that Berkeley seems to be on a run of unnaming buildings, and that the campus sits on unceded (i.e., stolen) Indian land, I’d like to pose the following to every grinning nitwit involved in the unnaming, up to and including the Chancellor: “Do you feel morally justified in using and benefitting from the occupation of stolen Indian land, while making holier-than-thou pronouncements about people who’ve been dead for 100 years? Shouldn’t the entire campus be bulldozed and the land returned to its rightful owners?”

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A Parkland Parent on Permitless Carry

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Mr. Petty went on to make some cogent points in a subsequent interview:

“California has suffered some horrific tragedies over the last couple weeks in mass shootings and gun control advocates promise that if we just implement their preferred policies, we’ll be safer as a nation.

“California has enacted what you could only call ‘the dream’ for gun-control advocates, and it is not proving to make Californians any safer. The reason is simple.

“Criminals don’t obey gun laws.

“The only thing Gavin Newsom and the California legislature have accomplished is curtailing the rights of law-abiding Californians, and in doing so they have made no one safer.

“I think Californians should just lift their heads up and realize that what they’re doing isn’t making them any safer. You can’t perpetually be just one more gun law away from public safety and that’s, unfortunately, what the gun control advocates are peddling.”

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Shell and Apple

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How much should they make? Apple made $120 billion selling gadgets. Shell sells a product people need.

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Black Queer History in APAAS

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Pritzker Demands Black Queer History in AP African-American Studies — nationalreview.com

In case you don’t know who “Pritzker” is, which I didn’t, J.B. Pritzker is the governor of Illinois.

J.B. Pritzker

The College Board is putting together a new AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom you probably do know, recently rejected the APAAS course, said he would not allow it to be taught in Florida, because the curriculum includes topics that seem to be included for political purposes rather than their relevance to African-American studies.

Like “queer history.”

I’m not aware of any state ever previously vetoing an AP course. Pritzker sent a letter to the College Board in which he attacked what he called “Florida’s racist and homophobic laws” and pledged that Illinois would “reject any curriculum modifications designed to appease extremists like the Florida Governor and his allies.”

I don’t think until fairly recently, it would have occurred to J.B. Pritzker to demand that queer history be included in an AP curriculum.

Here’s a full list of AP courses:

  • Art and Design (formerly Studio Art): 2-D Design
  • Art and Design (formerly Studio Art): 3-D Design
  • Art and Design (formerly Studio Art): Drawing
  • Art History
  • Biology
  • Biology
  • Calculus AB
  • Calculus BC
  • Chemistry
  • Chinese Language and Culture
  • Computer Science A
  • Computer Science Principles
  • English Language and Composition
  • English Literature and Composition
  • Environmental Science
  • European History
  • French Language and Culture
  • German Language and Culture
  • Government and Politics (Comparative)
  • Government and Politics (US)
  • Human Geography
  • Italian Language and Culture
  • Japanese Language and Culture
  • Latin
  • Macroeconomics
  • Microeconomics
  • Music Theory
  • Physics 1: Algebra-Based
  • Physics 2: Algebra-Based
  • Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism
  • Physics C: Mechanics
  • Psychology
  • Spanish Language and Culture
  • Spanish Literature and Culture
  • Statistics
  • US History
  • World History: Modern

It seems like if you think queer history is an essential component in an AP course, you could demand its inclusion in all of these courses.

There are queer people in China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain. There have been queer artists, biologists, computer scientists, musicians, politicians. I could go on and on.

Why does J.B. Pritzker think that queer history is an essential component of one and only one AP course? I would like to ask him that. Or see a reporter ask him that. Reporters rarely ask interesting or provocative questions unfortunately.

I’d like to ask him where he would rank his own knowledge of Black queer history on a scale of 0 to 10. I’d like to know how is it possible that anyone in America is leading a productive life in the absence of a dedicated study of Black queer history.

Spoiler Alert: It appears that the final version of the APAAS course will be closer to the DeSantis vision than the Pritzker vision, although the linked article sounds disingenuous to me.

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Pfizer Employee Flips Out on Video

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As I write this, YouTube has taken down the video, I assume because it shows a Pfizer employee acting like an out-of-control cartoon character and damages the vaccine narrative.

The video is still up on Twitter.

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Is Diversity Training Doing More Harm Than Good?

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From the New York Times:

Diversity trainings have been around for decades, long before the country’s latest round of racial reckoning. But after George Floyd’s murder — as companies faced pressure to demonstrate a commitment to racial justice — interest in the diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) industry exploded. The American market reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020.

Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”

But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them.

I can’t remember ever having any doubt about this.

There’s a model for marginalized groups (Asians, Jews) being successful in America and the model doesn’t include a focus on other people being responsible for everything that’s wrong with your life.

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California Teacher Helps Change Students’ Gender Identity Without Parents Knowing

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California teacher helps change students’ gender identity without parents knowing — torontosun.com

The biggest problem in education is too much emphasis on academics and not enough emphasis on teachers changing students’ gender identity without parents knowing.

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Strict California Gun Laws

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Gavin Newsom swats down CBS reporter’s Second Amendment question — msn.com

That’s not really the way I saw it. Gavin Newsom is not a smart man. He’s not going to win too many forensic scrimmages against another adult.

The reason the CBS reporter was talking to Newsom about guns and the Second Amendment is that we had 3 mass shootings in 3 days in California. I’ve heard that California has the strictest gun control laws of any state in the country, whatever that means, but we still had 3 mass shootings in 3 days.

What Newsom was responding to was not even a question. He had just finished calling the Second Amendment a “suicide pact” when the reporter pointed out that many people in the U.S. support the Second Amendment.

This was Newsom’s swat-down reply:

“Yeah, I have great respect. I have no ideological opposition with someone reasonably and responsibly owning firearms and getting background checks and being trained and making sure they’re locked [up] so their kid doesn’t accidentally shoot themselves or a loved one. Absolutely not. Never suggested that. That’s what they immediately do. ‘He wants to take away your guns.’ I just want to take away weapons of war that are illegal on the streets of California and should be illegal across the United States.”

I think what he’s missing here is that two of the shootings were carried out with guns that are legal to own in California. Whether or not they were legally obtained I do not know, but I do know that only a small percentage of gun crimes are committed with legally obtained weapons.

The third shooter had a gun that is not legal to own in California. It was an old gun so he may have acquired it before it was banned or he may have bought it in another state.

But so what? The shooter is no longer alive but if he were, he’d be charged with what? — 11 counts of murder and one count of possessing an illegal firearm? That’s a deterrent?

Good luck reducing gun violence with more laws and more laws and more laws. It’s not going to work.

I saw this interview on the news. Not noted in the article cited above is that Newsom and the reporter were walking along a sidewalk, closely followed by Newsom’s bodyguards, all of whom it’s safe to assume were carrying guns.

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A Ukrainian Question

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In what conceivable way are American citizens benefited or having their lives improved or increasingly secured by escalating the U.S. role in the war in Ukraine? Or conversely, in what conceivable way would your life or the lives of most Americans be harmed by changes in the governance of various provinces in Eastern Ukraine? How would your life be affected if the citizens of the Donbas region decided, as Kosovo decided 20 years ago, that they preferred to be independent or be governed by Moscow rather than by Kyiv? Why would that matter to your life? Why is the U.S. government willing to provoke so much danger to the globe, so much risk of escalation, and a practically direct proxy war now with the world’s largest nuclear power? Over what? Over who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine.

— Glenn Greenwald

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