NOT THE BEE: Donald Trump Agrees to Debate Against Biden Moderated by Joe Rogan.
Well, Mr. Biden?
Archive for 2020
September 14, 2020
“CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLY” SOUNDS BETTER THAN “GROUP OF SELF-APPOINTED ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKOS.” UK citizens’ assembly backs flight taxes to reduce climate emissions.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Sunday Night Football TV Ratings Drop 28% From The 2019 Opener.
Like Spinal Tap, their appeal is becoming more selective.
IT IS UNWISE TO CHALLENGE THE NARRATIVE, COMRADE: Oregon Sheriff’s Deputy Investigating Fires Pays Price for Saying Unkind Words About Antifa.
I DUNNO, 2020 HAS BEEN A BAD YEAR FOR PANGOLINS: The Tech Behind The Mind Reading Pangolin Dress Could Lead To Wireless—And Batteryless—Exoskeleton Control.
PROGRESS: F-35 Stealth Fighter Now Costs Less Than Boeing’s F-15EX. “Moreover, the aircraft’s maker, Lockheed Martin, has also done its part to bring the sustainability cost per flying hour down by some 40 percent—meaning that the F-35 costs less to fly per hour, which is notable as the hours flown each year are set to increase.”
PERHAPS WE HAVE TAKEN THE CULTURE IN AN UNFORTUNATE DIRECTION: Suicide rate keeps rising among young Americans.
ROGER KIMBALL: Wiping Phones and Erasing the Public’s Trust.
Thanks to the efforts of the indispensable Judicial Watch, we now know that the team of Robert Mueller wiped some 30 government-issued smart phones before turning them over to the Inspector General.
Mueller’s “pitbull,” the despicable Andrew Weismann, “accidentally” wiped his device twice after entering his passcode too many times. The phone used by Lisa Page, the anti-Trump FBI lawyer who had an affair with Peter Strzok, former head of the Bureau’s counterespionage section and consigliere of the vendetta against Michael Flynn, was restored to its factory settings before the IG got it. The phone of another FBI reportedly “wiped itself” before being turned in.
Amazing, isn’t it, how diligent Democrats are about covering their tracks, and how disingenuous? They remember what happened to Richard Nixon, who taped all his oval office conversations and lived to regret it when the tapes became public during the Watergate investigation.
The 33,000 emails that Hillary had wiped from her home-brew server were entirely private, she said, having to do with yoga classes and her daughter’s wedding. Then why resort to professional data wiping software? Why pretend not to know what it means to “wipe” a computer server? (“You mean with a cloth?”) Why instruct your minions to destroy your smart phones with a hammer?
As Kimball writes, “Nothing happened to Hillary because she occupies a zone of privilege even more exalted than that occupied by Speaker Pelosi.” Read the whole thing.
Flashback:
WHO? BidenWatch for September 14, 2020. “Biden loses Hispanic voters to Trump in Florida (and elsewhere), prompting Bloomberg to promise to airdrop money into the state on his behalf, how Biden has screwed up everything he’s ever tried, and proof positive Slow Joe needs a teleprompter for even the most friendly basement interviews.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Bad Teaching is Tearing America Apart: Education’s dumbing down frays the bonds of citizenship and is hardest on the poor.
If you have school-age children, the pandemic-induced move to online classes may give you an unusual window into their education. E.D. Hirsch expects you’ll be surprised by “how little whole-class instruction is going on,” how little knowledge is communicated, and how there is “no coherence” from day to day, let alone from year to year.
The current fashion is for teachers to be a “guide on the side, instead of a sage on the stage,” he says, quoting the latest pedagogical slogan, which means that teachers aren’t supposed to lecture students but to “facilitate” learning by nudging students to follow their own curiosity. Everything Mr. Hirsch knows about how children learn tells him that’s the wrong approach. “If you want equity in education, as well as excellence, you have to have whole-class instruction,” in which a teacher directly communicates information using a prescribed sequential curriculum. . . .
He cites both history and neuroscience in explaining how education went wrong. It began in the 1940s, when “schools unbolted the desks and kids were no longer facing the teacher.” Instead children were divided into small groups and instructed to complete worksheets independently with occasional input from teachers. “That was also when our verbal test scores went down and the relative ranking of our elementary schools declined on a national level.” On the International Adult Literacy Survey, Americans went from being No. 1 for children who were educated in the 1950s to fifth for those in the ’70s and 14th in the ’90s. And things have only gotten worse. Between 2002 and 2015, American schoolchildren went from a ranking of 15th to 24th in reading on the Program for International Student Assessment.
The problem runs deeper than the style of instruction, Mr. Hirsch says. It’s the concept at its root—“child-centered classrooms,” the notion that “education is partly a matter of drawing out a child’s inborn nature.” Mr. Hirsch says emphatically that a child’s mind is “a blank slate.” On this point he agrees with John Locke and disagrees with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought children need to develop according to their nature. Both philosophers make the “Cultural Literacy” list, but “Locke has to make a comeback” among educators, Mr. Hirsch says. “The culture is up for grabs, and elementary schools are the culture makers.”
Mr. Hirsch is a man of the left—he has said he is “practically a socialist.” But he bristles at the idea that kids should read only books by people who look like them or live like them.
From K-12 to higher ed, America’s education system has been not merely ineffectual, but actively destructive. It’s time for a wholesale revamping. Or replacement.
PLAY STUPID GAMES, WIN STUPID RIOTS: Cop Shoots Latino Man in Self-Defense. BLM Rioters’ Response: ‘Death to Cops.’
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Mostly Peaceful Rioters Attempt to Peacefully Burn Down Police Station.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: What’s wrong with young people in our military today?
Answer: It’s that they’re acting like young people in the military, according to the Puritan Progressives.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
Learn what it takes to get a riot thrown in your stupid honor.
Communism comes to San Francisco (and takes charge).
Communism comes to Colorado Springs (and promptly goes to jail).
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
Update: Link was broken before — sorry! All fixed now.
A SANE REACTION TO AN INSANE YEAR: Swing States See Gun Sales Boon, Activists Look to Capitalize. “A broader look at monthly sales data, as measured by FBI background checks, confirms swing state voters’ eagerness to arm themselves in 2020. The nine states at the epicenter of the presidential race between President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden each saw historic seasonally adjusted gun sales in June—larger in all cases than the record-setting sales of March—a sign of surging demand for firearms in the wake of rioting and protests that have turned violent.”
Related: Joe Biden promises to put Beto O’Rourke in charge of gun control.
Vote accordingly, first-time gun-owners.
RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY: Professor: White Christians deny climate change while west coast burns.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: ‘We Hope They Die:’ Protesters cheer a shooting ambush of sheriff’s deputies in L.A.
No one other than the shooter is responsible for the gunfire ambush Saturday of two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies as they sat in their patrol car. But the same can’t be said for the protesters who blocked the entrance to the hospital where the two are being treated, and chanted “we hope they die.” The latter is a cultural poison nurtured by the left-wing anti-police movement sweeping the country. . . .
Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti called the chants and protests at the hospital “unacceptable” and “abhorrent,” but he and other Democrats need to do more to condemn and ostracize these protesters. Democrats may fear the wrath of Black Lives Matter, but the backlash elsewhere in America will be far greater if pleasure at cop killing becomes common on the left.
Policing reform is impossible amid a war on police. Mr. Garcetti and other mayors should abandon their cuts to law-enforcement budgets and express regular solidarity for cops on the beat. Without such a signal, police will continue to retreat from enforcing the law in crime-ridden neighborhoods, and those who suffer most will be the law-abiding in the likes of Compton and Flatbush.
As usual.
