Friday, November 26, 2021

colonizers

 https://mises.org/wire/inca-empire-indigenous-leviathan-state


One of the realities that nullifies persistent interpretations of the European colonization of the Americas as a cataclysm of subjugation is the existence of state exploitation in the precontact New World. As I have recently shown, many common Indians lived in banal slavery to a political class—the same servitude that every “citizen” of a state lives under, compelled to labor for the benefit of others, albeit with its own unique packaging and set of justifications. What this means is that there were also many politicians in the precontact world, with the same base lust for power that drives so many contemporary rulers.


When the agents of European states dropped anchor off the American littoral and proceeded to survey the interior, many were welcomed by various political leaders. These politicians were not naïvely offering hospitality. Indeed, the lack of women and children on these expeditions was often a conspicuous red flag to tread lightly.1 Rather chiefs often had expansionist ambitions and knew that the strangers’ military support and trade goods could turn the local geopolitical tables in their favor.


So they strategically courted the newcomers, seeking alliances.2 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of expeditions are peppered with reports of Indian leaders trying to extract political commitments from the leaders of the missions or otherwise trying to draw them into their military network.

Monday, November 22, 2021

porn in Flagler School District libraries

 https://www.theepochtimes.com/tempers-flare-at-florida-school-board-meetings-over-sexually-graphic-book-found-in-school-library_4114782.html


Another Flagler resident attempted to read excerpts from another book—also full of vulgar language—which she discovered is available to children in one of the Flagler County high school libraries. However, FCSB Chair Tucker forbade her to do so. The irony of his reasoning—because “there were children in the room” and might be watching the livestream—was not lost on many seated in the room.


Wednesday, November 10, 2021

California Democrats

 Who's in power in California?


Attorney General of California Rob Bonta Democratic

Secretary of State Shirley Weber Democratic

California Treasurer Fiona Ma Democratic

Governor of California Gavin Newsom Democratic

Lieutenant Governor of California Eleni Kounalakis Democratic


The state senate is 31 Democrats, 9 Republicans.

The California State Assembly is 

  Democratic (59)

  Republican (19)

  Independent (1).


Senators are 

Dianne Feinstein (D)

Alex Padilla (D)


California House of Representatives

42 Democrats

11 Republicans


Monday, October 18, 2021

Philadelphia SEPTA train rape

Incidents like these lead to...

Jonathan Pentland

https://lawandcrime.com/crime/four-months-after-viral-video-u-s-army-sergeant-convicted-of-assault-for-shoving-black-man-in-neighborhood-confrontation/

Amy Cooper

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/amy-cooper-dog-central-park.html

Barbeque Becky

https://www.newsweek.com/lake-merritt-bbq-barbecue-video-oakland-racist-charcoal-east-bay-black-family-919355

Travis McMichael

Gregory McMichael

William "Roddie" Bryan

-- Incidents like this:

https://nypost.com/2021/10/16/passengers-did-nothing-during-rape-on-philadelphia-train-cops/

A homeless man raped a woman this week on a commuter train in suburban Philadelphia in full view of other passengers –who cops said didn’t lift a finger to help, or even dial 911, reports said.

The attack at around 10 p.m. Wednesday was captured on surveillance video that showed other people in the train car, according to Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt of the Upper Darby Police Department.

“Were they watching? I don’t know. Again, we’re still going through the video but there was a lot of people, in my opinion, that should’ve intervened. Somebody should’ve done something.,” Bernhardt said, Philadelphia’s CBS-3 reported.

“It speaks to where we are in society; I mean, who would allow something like that to take place? So it’s troubling.”


Friday, September 3, 2021

Safe, Legal and Rare no more

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/us/politics/abortion-laws-2020-democrats.html

The most striking change, beyond individual policies, is how unapologetic candidates’ tone on abortion rights has become.

Advocates have traditionally said they support the right to choose abortion, not abortion itself, and Democrats have said it should be “safe, legal and rare.” Public debate has commonly centered on procedures after 20 weeks’ gestation, which account for less than 1.5 percent of abortions. The discussion has often been on opponents’ terms.

Now, almost every candidate says the next president should actively reframe the debate. Their language focuses on health care, bodily autonomy and, at times, even the idea of abortion as a positive force enabling women to control their lives and increase their economic security.

“Abortion is health care, and health care is a human right,” Elizabeth Warren wrote in her survey response. In the last debate, she argued that abortion rights were “also economic rights.”

Only Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Sestak and Marianne Williamson now say abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” — a phrase, popularized by President Bill Clinton and repeated by Hillary Clinton, that reflected a search for common ground with people not fully supportive of abortion rights.

The rest of the 2020 candidates sidestepped or rejected the “rare” part. Bernie Sanders, for instance, wrote, “Abortion should be safe, legal and accessible to every person who chooses it.”

Why did we fail in Afghanistan?

 We didn't do this in Japan:


https://spectatorworld.com/topic/did-gender-studies-lose-afghanistan/


So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.


A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. 


Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.


The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.


...

Police facilities included childcare facilities for working mothers, as though Afghanistan’s medieval culture had the same needs as 1980s Minneapolis. The army set a goal of 10 percent female participation, which might make sense in a Marvel movie, but didn’t to devout Muslims. Even as America built an Afghan army that ended up collapsing in days, and a police force whose members frequently became highwaymen, it always made sure to execute its gender goals.


But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the ‘nation-building’ that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.


vax the teens?

 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/03/uk-rules-out-covid-vaccinations-for-children


The UK government’s vaccines watchdog has decided there is not enough evidence to recommend the rollout of Covid vaccines to all 12- to 15-year-olds, but has held open the possibility of ministers seeking other advice to go ahead nonetheless.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said that while the health gains from vaccinating the entire age group was seen as greater than the risks, “the margin of benefit is considered too small to support universal vaccination of healthy 12 to 15-year-olds at this time”.

One issue with expanding jabs more widely is the very small risk of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, in children who receive the vaccine. While this is extremely rare, and children tend to recover quickly, there was uncertainty about any longer term effects, with further research needed.

Thursday, September 2, 2021

PRO-LIFE FEMINIST

https://bothlivesmatter.org/stories/bexs-story-i-am-a-pro-life-feminist

Abortion is a tool of male oppression. These words are not my own but I do subscribe to them when abortion is used not to save women’s lives but to control them. These words were penned by our feminist foremothers, Susan B. Antony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who put it quite eloquently when they said, when women have been treated for so long as property, it is degrading that they should treat their own children as chattels. 

First wave feminists were adamantly opposed to abortion, it was perceived as the ultimate exploitation of women. The very roots of the feminist movement are indeed pro-life. Abortion enables men who disrespect women to continue their objectification, to see them as play things that they can use and discard at their leisure without any accountability on the man’s part. There are women worldwide owed billions in unpaid child support as fatherhood is becoming more and more disconnected. Women pay the price when men are not taught, or do not face up to, their responsibilities.

To accept the pro-choice stance and feminism as a truism is a dangerous myth. Traditionally feminism has lent its voice to the oppressed and marginalised in society, obviously including but not confined to women, and rejects the use of force to control or destroy another human being. Feminism appeals for peace and speaks out against violence, yet abortion is a violent act. In order to terminate a pregnancy a heartbeat must be stopped, bones must be broken and organs must be ruptured. These uncomfortable and hard truths are contradictory to the feminist philosophy. 

Given that for so long women were dehumanised, seen as inferior and oppressed it seems bizarre that women should dehumanise the unborn. The oppressed should never become the oppressor. Our stance on abortion continues to be used as a litmus test for one’s leftist-feminist credentials. The pro-choice movement, which focuses on ‘my body, my life, my choice’ seems to have more in common with the Libertarian ultra-right-wing ideology of individualism, autonomy and free choice than it does with feminism which grew from a ideology which emphasises the protection of the weak, solidarity and community.

Sunday, August 29, 2021

California burning

 https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen

Thursday, August 26, 2021

Clown World

 When you live in Clown World.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/why-the-media-is-worse-for-biden-than-trump.html


Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones.


But wait, you’re thinking. Didn’t the media hound Donald Trump for four straight years at least as hard as it’s hounded Biden over the last week?


Well, sort of. The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms. Republicans communicate to their base through a media that functionally operates as part of their party, while Democrats communicate to their base through a media that still exerts substantial independence. If you want to understand the strange difficulty that Joe Biden’s sane, competent administration has in yielding measurably higher approval than Trump’s insane, incompetent presidency, the asymmetrical relationship between the two parties and their respective media environments is the most important place to start.


On Biden’s best days, the conservative media was still giving him hell. In recent days, CNN and MSNBC looked a lot like Fox News, all hyping chaos in Afghanistan 24/7. That is the kind of comprehensive media hostility Trump never had to worry about.


And the flip side of the very different media environment facing Democrats is that it at least forces them to try to meet some minimal standard of competence and honesty. Their politicians sometimes lie, as politicians do, but if caught in a lie, it’s untenable for them to simply repeat the lie over and over.


The standard that mainstream news media applies to Democrats leaves plenty to complain about. (And I do.) But if we have learned anything from the previous four years, it’s that being held to a flawed standard ultimately works out better than not being held to any standard at all.

COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces

 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

vax approval

 https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download

On August 23, 2021, FDA approved the biologics license application (BLA) submitted by BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH for COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Afghanistan Never Existed

 https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/one-thing-we-never-understood-about-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/


Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.


American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.


1,200 Americans died during Obama's Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.


Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.


No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.


The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.


We came to defeat the Jihadists behind September 11 and we stayed behind to reform Afghanistan. But what were we reforming it from? We couldn’t name the problem.


And when you can’t name a problem, you never come up with a solution.


Having failed to fix Afghanistan, the process is now underway to bring as many Afghans as possible to America. The old plan to bring 100,000 “interpreters” and their family members has been vastly expanded to make any Afghan who did any work for American organizations, from aid groups to the media, eligible to come to America. By the time they’re done, we may end up with a million Afghan refugees in America. Some of them will become Islamic terrorists.


The final act of fighting terrorism is bringing the terrorists to America to create more terror.


Friday, August 6, 2021

The truth about recycling

 https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled


Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.


None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.


"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."


Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.


But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.


"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."


But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.


Sunday, July 25, 2021

Moira Greyland Peat writes about men and women

I’ve watched a lot of videos about Hollywood’s two latest flops.  They have failed to listen to the fans, and they’re losing a lot, as in a LOT, of money.

Both “Masters Of The Universe: Revelation” and “Black Widow” have been based around the ubiquitous “Strong Female Character”, while sidelining, cucking, and frankly, simply killing off all the male characters.

Why do “Strong Female Characters” fail to resonate with women?  Primarily because there is a real disconnect between the Hollywood interpretation of female strength and actual female virtues.  

In Hollywood, a “Strong Female Character” is physically strong above all, and usually stronger than any man she interacts with.    Since actual people look for heroes with character traits they can aspire to, this fails at the outset.  

I have never in my life met a woman whose primary ambition was to be physically stronger than a man.  Why?  Well, to begin with, it is impossible.  We don’t have the bone structure to make it possible, and even if it was, that is simply not how we are bent.  Do we generally want to solve our problems by punching people?  No.  We want to outthink our opponents, if at all possible, and avoid physical combat.

Men have a particular set of characteristics that make them very well-suited to physical combat.  They feel relieved after DOING things, while women tend more to feel relieved after TALKING.  These differences are well known, studied, and explored in every way, and have always been known.  Any woman who would rather punch people than to talk her head off would be no woman at all.

That is one reason the “trans” we encounter fail to read as actual women.  Trans who get upset typically launch physical threats, which is a completely unfeminine response.  If we are actually frightened, we are likely to ask a male for help, not only because men enjoy protecting women, but because men are very good at doing so.

Where men run women down for too much talking, women run men down for too much doing: too many physical responses.  And yet both are needed.  It is not a case of “some girls talk, some girls act.”  It is universal and predictable.

As a result, any theatrical thing where a woman is made to behave emotionally or physically as though she is a man, will simply fail to resonate with women.  We identify with the parts of a female character that remind us of ourselves, but the more she acts like a man, the less she will remind us of ourselves.

Also, we know that Hollywood has quotas.  Oh yes, Netflix in particular insists that a percentage, a large one, of everyone involved must be “diverse.”  If this meant that X percent would be Catholic and Y percent would be Protestant, that might lead to interesting stories.  

Insisting that a large percentage of writers and other creatives be gay does not create interesting stories.  Why?  Because the actual percentage of gay human beings is tiny, only 1. 6% in total, including gays and lesbians.  Add to this that the actual genesis of gay conduct has to be denied in the hope of getting more people involved, and we are saddled with a population that nearly nobody can identify with. 

Why do we not identify with this enormous population of mostly gay humans?  Partly because they are lying about themselves, and partly because they are lying about us.  

My own experience as a child of gays gave me the chance not only to be intimately familiar with the ways that my gay parents wanted to be seen, but also with what they actually were.  Where both of them were indisputably brilliant and talented, and even fine writers, what they really wanted to be seen as was suitable, attractive romantic partners, and that was the real heartbreak.  

My father (brace yourself, because this is vile) wanted the children he molested to DESIRE HIM.  Of course this was impossible, because he was a fifty-year-old man with a long gray beard and a huge belly, and the children were universally fooled by his masquerade as a father-figure.  Children need fathers, and if their own fathers are absent or inadequate, they will often try to absorb fathering, even from dangerous people.

My father looked like a safe adult male, who lavished the boys he desired with attention and gifts, and the real price was not instantly apparent.  What my father inevitably discovered was that it was the attention and the gifts the children wanted, and not his repulsive physical attention.

Forgive me for that disgusting illustration.

At the center of the whole business, though, was a man who wanted to be appreciated for something he was not, and could never be.  I remember how infuriated he would get when the boys he was trying to seduce would vastly prefer my company.  I was a young teen girl, which is naturally much more appealing to a teen boy than an old man.

So there you have it.  In order for my father to have what he wanted, the boys he targeted had to pretend to be something they were not, and could never be, that is, they had to pretend to want what he wanted, and he had to pretend to be the father they actually wanted.  Both were lying to get what they wanted.  The center of that transaction ended up being an uneasy exchange of gifts, food and money for sexual favors—until my report ended my father’s reign of error and dumped him in prison where he belonged.

Bear with me a little longer while I paint the rest of the picture.

My mother’s situation was similar, in that she tended to seduce childlike women who needed mothering and had broken relationships with their own mothers.  Since bringing sex into a parental relationship is a deep, deep betrayal, these relationships could only continue on a false basis, again where “parenting” and gifts of food and money and attention were exchanged for sexual favors.  

In the case of my mother and stepmother, the latter simply ended the sex by getting a lock on her door.  She was able to deceive my mother into endless hope to the point that my mother would not leave her, though. One presumes that my stepmother was confident enough that she was earning her keep in other ways to excuse her physical absence from the “relationship.”  

My stepmother was a good secretary and accountant, and created a lot of professional value for my mother, who was no kind of marketer.

Still, in both cases, the relationships were the same.  The “adult” in the relationship wanted sex and attention, and the children wanted parenting, and this is a recipe for disaster.  Since my stepmother was technically an adult, she was able to think her way out of giving my mother what she wanted, and to maintain the relationship on her own terms, even though it meant it was fundamentally a parasitic relationship by two very unequal partners.  

So what on earth does this have to do with the endless gay tropes in Hollywood?  

It points out that gay “relationships” are often simply attempts to repair broken parental relationships, and as a result, many end when the younger party grows up.  Also, it is a fact that the two members of such a relationship often want completely opposite things, and the situation ends up being a pack of lies, in order to simply survive.  That is the reality.

What does Hollywood offer?

Unfeminine women who live to fight, and don’t need no man, who end up desiring each other.  In effect, the relationships end up being between women who only pretend to be masculine, and women who pretend to desire them for a time.  Two unfeminine women is not something one generally sees in the gay community, because the dynamic of the butch lesbian and the femme, or the “parent” and the “child” are much more common.  Opposites attract, after all, even if it is opposites in pathology.  

Since overwhelmingly, women are straight and do not want to fight, making all the Hollywood gals into violent lesbians is simply silly.  We can identify with a blue-skinned seven foot tall alien woman, provided she has other traits we identify with.  A blue-skinned seven foot tall alien woman who hates men and has girlfriends?  That is a bridge too far.  

We like men.  Presenting men as inadequate does not change our view.  Even if we know a few inadequate males, we generally internally dismiss them as being large children, and what is on our radar will be males we deem to be worthy.  

Moreover, we have immutable biological responses to men.  Even among lesbians, this is still true.  My lesbian mother was married to my father until he was incarcerated, and only divorced him when forced to.  I am the youngest of her three children, and the daughter of her second husband.  

Even after she got mixed up with my stepmother, the two of them had numerous entanglements with a variety of men.

This is much more common than one might think.

If this was even the slightest bit mutable, why do so many trans insist on pretending to be far more “feminine” than the vast majority of women?  

Simple.  They know what men like, even if they can only ape it poorly, with the rare exceptions on magazine covers still being a source of horror and disgust to the vast majority of men.  

Men like women.  Women like men.  We are not the same.  All the efforts made by Hollywood to negate or diminish our differences have simply resulted in characters that we cannot identify with.

If Hollywood wanted to get the fans back, they would do well to find out what women actually want and like.  Even if they insisted on women doing some physical fighting, it would be far better to have us doing what we would actually do, in escaping, using weapons, and even using our wits, rather than simply pretending we can out-punch someone literally twice our size and strength. 

At best, the very strongest woman alive can be as strong as a very strong fourteen year old boy.  That’s it.  We don’t ever get stronger than that.  This means that even a man of comparatively average strength would be able to beat any woman, simply via leverage, without even considering brute strength.  It is fantasy and nonsense to claim otherwise, and it means we can’t identify with that sort of thing.  

When I was in high school and college, I was very strong, and I was a fencer.  I could beat every woman I ever fought, because I had reach, via long arms, and unusual upper body strength.  But fencing is a game of speed and reflexes, and where I could beat every woman, I could only reliably beat men of a similar size to me.  If we had been fighting with broadswords, I would have lost, and lost, and lost, had I been so unwise as to fight men.  A foil weighs nearly nothing, so I was fast.  If I had been using a heavy weapon, physics would have defeated me… and any woman with half a brain would know this.

When I was growing up, I used to fight with my nearest brother Mark, and I will never forget when he abruptly became stronger than I was.  I was 12 and he was 13.

I was such a tomboy I thought I could still beat him, even though he had grown taller than I was.  I was wrong.  One day, after I had acted like a total bitch to him, he punched me in the face, knocking me into a door, breaking my nose, and leaving me in a crumpled heap.  I have no illusions: the situation was 100% my fault.

He was, like any reasonable man would be, aghast at what he had done, even though I had provoked him.  But I learned my lesson, and never got into a physical fight with him again.  Even though I became an avid weightlifter, and danced and fenced competitively, I never risked his wrath again.  Even though he was un-athletic, even squishy, he was way too big and too strong for me.

We cannot outfight men.

What we can do is think our way out of combat.  We have all encountered this.  We all know, instinctively, that men can do things we cannot do, and we would be foolish to try.

Why does Hollywood not know what absolutely every woman ever born knows?  

The question of virtue is even more important.  For a man to defend his family is a matter of virtue, but women do not defend our families in the same way.  We can talk and reason and challenge and stand up in the ways we can, and we will certainly risk harm to ourselves to protect our children, but we are not called to physically fight, because if we lose, and we die, our children will have nobody to feed them.

Why are our actual strengths and virtues overlooked, as though the male virtue of protective combat is the only one that matters?

What girl has ever grown up wanting to fight someone to protect our families?  None of us, I think.  But where boys will even turn sticks into swords for play-fights very young, we girls will turn more or less anything into a doll so we can play at being mommies.  I was an unusual girl, because having been raised by gays, I was supposed to “not be like that.”  I never owned a doll until I was an adult, though I did eventually have toy horses.  

Having been made to suppress my femininity in an attempt to please my parents, I have been all over the tomboy thing.  As an adult, I am very glad I was able to be a wife and mother, even though I was shamed for wanting this for as long as I could remember.

Hollywood seems to want to propagandize women in the same way I was propagandized.  We are not supposed to want marriage and children, even though we do.  We are supposed to “out-man” all the men, and doing so is a “win” for us.  We are supposed to demand that men act like women, and refuse to go along with biology.

Furthermore, we are supposed to fight with men, instead of loving them.

But in the final analysis, who is this all for?  We grow out of wanting to please our parents, and then what remains is biology.  We want families, because we are built to want families, and because they are pretty darned cool.  Having had a musical career and a family, the family mattered more, as in a LOT more.  

The bill of goods we are being sold is to delay marriage and family so we can become “Self-Actualized” and yet in retrospect, we can be many things AND have families as well.

Hollywood would do well to bring back feminine women and masculine men, instead of the androgynous neither they seem determined to push on us.  The vast majority of us want normal things, and to twist us away from the things we actually want simply will not maintain our attention.

I might have seen “Black Widow” if ScarJo had not blathered on about feminism, or if it had had a real love interest.  I might have watched “Masters of the Universe” if the women had had beautiful costumes and actual love matches.  

It should go without saying that these imaginary “Strong Female Characters” occasionally ape male failings, such as alcoholic excess, sexual predation and fighting for no reason.  What they cannot do is ape the behaviors of mature men, because those require self-sacrifice, introspection, and deep thought.  Anyone immature enough to pretend a deception as deep as aping another sex will not be engaging in introspection.

Without the centuries-old love story of men and women, there is simply no story.  I watch movies and read books for their stories about people.  If the people are no longer recognizable as people, there is no point.  If a seven foot tall blue skinned alien is more recognizable as a woman than an actual woman, Hollywood has missed the mark.  Heck, if Groot seems more like a man than Prince Adam from He-Man, they’ve completely lost the plot.

And for a movie to have lost the plot is as bad as for salt to lose its saltiness.

—Moira Greyland Peat

Sunday, July 11, 2021

Facing Reality

 https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/charles-murrays-forthcoming-book-facing-reality-two-truths-about-race-in-america/


The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have 1) different violent crime rates and 2) different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.


What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.


We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.


Sunday, May 2, 2021

AG William Barr

https://billmoyers.com/story/the-long-read-barr-battles-the-rule-of-law/

When the story of the Trump era is written, history will pose a single defining question to every American lawyer: In the fight to preserve the rule of law, which side were you on?

America has seen which side William Barr is on. As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, the attorney general represents the “People of the United States.” Early in his tenure, Barr jettisoned that role.

Operating as Trump’s personal advocate, Barr has abused the power of his office to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation. Although troublesome, Barr’s actions are best viewed as a case study in his modus operandi. What Barr has done to that investigation and its key players, he can do to anything and anyone. That makes Barr’s methods ominous for the rule of law itself.

Hiring Barr was no accident. Early in 2017, before special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, Trump feared that he was losing control of the Trump-Russia investigation. He was furious at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ (JD, Alabama, 73) for recusing himself from the ongoing probe. Referring to his former personal attorney, notorious fixer, and top aide to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) during the investigations of communist activity in the 1950s, Trump lamented, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

A year later, he got his answer. Barr sent Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (JD, Harvard, ’89) an unsolicited 19-page memo challenging the premise of Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation and urging that the special counsel should not even be permitted to question Trump. In William Barr, Trump had finally found his Roy Cohn.

First came the lies and deceptions. According to The Washington Post, as of July 9, 2020, Trump had made more than 20,000 “false or misleading claims” since assuming office. Like Trump, Barr understands the rhetorical and psychological concepts of primacy and repetition. Whoever speaks first and most frequently on an important topic has the upper hand in controlling the resulting narrative, regardless of its veracity.

From his first days in office, Barr has reinforced Trump’s false assertions that the Trump-Russia investigation never should have happened. In the maelstrom that followed, truth became a casualty. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/william-barr-trumps-sword-and-shield

Barr showed no sign of tempering Trump’s instincts. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told me, “I think he was nominated for his ability to protect Trump. His belief in executive power was his primary qualification.” In high-profile cases, Barr has repeatedly aided Trump politically. When Barr issued his summary of the Mueller report, he quoted part of a sentence saying that no conclusive proof of collusion had been found, but left out the rest, which suggested that Russia and the Trump campaign had worked at arm’s length toward similar goals.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155221/dereliction-william-barr

Barr, by comparison, seems to have no such scruples about carrying out Trump’s whims. He hasn’t really deviated from Sessions’s overall policy agenda since taking over DOJ. In some aspects of immigration and criminal-justice matters, he’s even gone further than Sessions ever did. But his greatest achievement so far is doing what his predecessor spent almost two years resisting: transforming the Justice Department from a semi-independent actor into an instrument of Trump’s political interests.

Trump never masked his views on how his attorneys general should act. He believes that the Justice Department should protect him and his friends from legal troubles while inflicting them on his enemies. Multiple White House aides told Mueller that Trump would describe Robert F. Kennedy and Eric Holder as attorneys general who shielded their presidents from political harm, and how he needed to find one like them. To Trump, the attorney general is just another lawyer who should be aggressively advancing his personal interests—another Roy Cohn, or Michael Cohen, or Rudy Giuliani.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/william-barrs-secret-memo-attorney-general-department-justice-mueller.html

So the fact that the president who believes the attorney general should be his Roy Cohn appointed a candidate who had submitted a long defense of Trump to the president’s lawyers turns out not to have been a massive coincidence.

https://www.justsecurity.org/71230/bill-barr-no-lap-dog-just-defending-his-idea-of-the-top-dog/

Barr sent an unsolicited memo to President Trump on June 8, 2018, seemingly in an audition to become Attorney General, making the argument that the aspects of the Mueller investigation were legally insupportable, particularly because the president per se cannot commit obstruction of law, unless he commits an actual crime such as witness tampering.  According to Barr’s memo, the president’s “discretionary prosecutorial power is unreviewable.” As Marty Lederman explained in his review of the memo, this was no simple version of the unitary executive theory.  As Lederman, who is not one to exaggerate, wrote, the 2018 memo advanced “a version of Barr’s notorious 1989 OLC memorandum, boosted by the proverbial ‘steroids.’… so shockingly categorical and so extreme.”

Barr is a fellow traveler in his belief of an all-powerful president with deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former D.C. Circuit judge and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who infamously fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal’s “Saturday night massacre” when none of his Justice Department’s superiors would do so – because Bork believed it was President Nixon’s right to do so. Under President George W. Bush, DOJ lawyers relied on the same theory to advance controversial positions allowing torture and warrantless wiretapping of Americans on U.S. soil.  While those are policy positions that DOJ lawyers regarded as allowed by the unitary executive theory, proponents argue that the ability to control all executive branch personnel, as well as prosecutorial decision-making, is compelled by the theory.  This position undergirds opposition to the just-cause removal proposals for agency inspectors general and to the similar provision applicable to the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau recently invalidated by the Supreme Court.


Saturday, April 24, 2021

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

 By Frank Champagne:


“CRITICAL RACE THEORY is specifically designed to destroy the soul, strip away self-awareness and dignity and replace it with guilt that cannot be erased.

Christians are taught from childhood that we are “born in sin.” But they are also taught that they can find “redemption” by accepting Jesus.

There is a way to be absolved of the “sin.”

But CRT teaches that there is no redemption from the “sin” of being born white.

It is lifelong guilt without atonement, with no redemption, no matter how good a person you are.

You are a “sinner” by dint of birth. It is nothing more than a moral trap from which there is no escape. It’s is, in fact the most racist and bigoted ideology imaginable!

The truest and most simple test of racism is, does it work in all directions with all people? In other words, if you switch the race in question, is it still racist? If you teach that all whites are “sinners” what if you switched that statement to all blacks, or all Asians, or all any other race? CRT is designed to attack the character and worthiness of just one race, white people. If it preached the same message about any other race it would be immediately seen and rightly condemned as racist.

So why are so many people accepting this hateful dogma? Why is this brand of racism deemed acceptable? Why are teachers allowed to indoctrinate our children? Why is it not stamped out, uprooted and despised like all other such doctrines?

Almost everyone despises the doctrines of the KKK and Naziism, we have eliminated from our culture all the old disparaging names for various races. Why is this brand of hatred accepted?

Critical Race Theory is a smoldering fire of bigotry that is being spread throughout America from corporate HR departments to kindergartens.

It is clearly no less evil and pernicious as all the other preceding doctrines we eventually confronted and drove from the mainstream to the shunned shadows where they can no longer spread.

It’s time to turn the fire hoses of love, respect and fellowship on this fire and douse it now, before it harms generations of Americans by perpetually picking at the old, almost healed wounds of racial divisions and reigniting centuries-old fires that were all but extinguished.”

children with knives

 Nyaira Givens

https://www.wlwt.com/article/family-devastated-after-13-year-old-stabbed-by-former-friend-during-fight-dies/36180426
https://local12.com/news/local/13-year-old-girl-stabbed-to-death-in-winton-hills-cincinnati-nyaira-givens-page

LAKE CHARLES, La

https://www.wavy.com/news/national/video-of-teen-girls-deadly-stabbing-in-walmart-was-livestreamed-on-social-media-sheriff-says/
https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/4-teen-girls-charged-walmart-stabbing-death-15-year-old-girl-streamed-facebook-live/QTAQM5N3LVC6ZCOEKWM3DC4PM4/

Andrew Lafleur

https://www.cpso.com/2020/09/08/cpso-investigating-homicide-in-moss-bluff/

Anthony Bennett

https://www.cpso.com/2020/07/28/two-juveniles-arrested-for-homicide/




Sunday, April 18, 2021

Brearley Parents

 

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/you-have-to-read-this-letter


April 13, 2021 


Dear Fellow Brearley Parents, 


Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child's education is irreparable. 


It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley's antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed. 


I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died. 


Friday, April 9, 2021

Deinstitutionalization

 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html

Monday, April 5, 2021

All Asian parents should understand what liberals want to do to your children

 https://sfpsmom.com/why-we-cant-talk-about-honors-programs-without-talking-about-race/


Why We Can’t Talk About Honors Programs without Talking About Race

Recently, some parents and educators have initiated a campaign to reinstate honors math and English classes in our middle schools for families who “choose to have such programs.” They are calling on parents to come down to the SFUSD Board of Education office this Tuesday, February 24 to demand reinstatement of a two-track option for parents: honors and regular classes.

I have been listening to arguments on all sides of the issue and hear the very real concerns that many parents and teachers express about our district not adequately serving the needs of GATE students. Many parents complain their children are “bored to tears” (actuall parent quote) and sit day after day in classes where they are asked to tutor or translate for their lower-performing peers. In reading comments on my blog, on the PPS-SF listserve, and in emails with concerned parents, I see a consistent themes. Parents express a confusion about the district’s decision-making policies, anger about not feeling included in decisions to remove of honors classes from schools, and frustration about feeling like their concerns are dismissed.

I applaud their involvement in our schools, and appreciate their advocacy in regard to quality instruction and high expectations for SFUSD students. It is time to make serious changes in the way we meet the needs of high performing students, and parents have waited long enough to feel like active partners in this discussion. I wholeheartedly agree there is a need to revamp our current system and demand accountability for teaching all students… including students who perform well beyond grade level expectations.

That said, the issues these parents raise, does not necessitate moving back in time to a two-track system. Proponents may believe that honors classes will provide more academic challenge for their children… but at what cost?

Proponents Present a False Choice

Tracking has always been a problem in our schools as it divides students into HAVEs and HAVE-NOTs. Proponents of tracking state that elimination of the middle school honors classes has created a “lack of choice” for families:

Before SFUSD acted last year to eliminate honors classes in middle school, we had choice. About half of the middle schools had honors classes, and half did not. Parents could choose which program they felt was right for their kids. If parents were worried that the availability of honors classes in a school was a negative for their child, they could avoid such a school. If parents thought a school with honors classes was right for their kid, they could choose such a school.

So basically what they are stating is that reinstating honors classes will give families more options in educating their kids. That sounds good right?

Well, actually… no.

Here, proponents present a false choice. If participating in honors classes were truly a “choice” – wouldn’t ALL families choose it for their children? Saying parents might choose to avoid schools with honors is ridiculous. It is more likely they would complain about their children being tracked out of honors into classes with fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and more high-needs kids.

In reality, students who get tracked into these types of classes, tend to be from poor or immigrant families unaware of other options. They often lack the ability to advocate for advancement due to language or social status. These students are often denied participation in honors programs based on being ill prepared due to poverty, language, or poor instruction in previous classes

“High-performing” students who participate in honors classes, may or may not receive access to more challenging curriculum as compared to similar students in heterogeneous classrooms. (There is research to support positive AND negative outcomes in this regard.) Conversely, research on the impact of tracking on lower-performing students is much more definitive – low-performing students suffer many negative effects.

Let’s Talk About Structural Racism

Proponents contend grouping students by math ability is “fair” and there is no systematic discrimination in track placement. So how do they explain the over-representation of Black, Latino and low income students in lower-performing tracks of a two-track system?

This, they say, “stems from low grades and test scores.”

This argument may sound good on paper, but it is fundamentally flawed. The very fact that black and Latino students are overrepresented in lower-performing classes is direct evidence that a system of structural racism is in place.

Before I go further on this topic, let’s take a step back and define what we are talking about…

According to a paper for the Race and Public Policy Conference titled: Chronic Disparity: Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequalities – Poverty Outcomes (2004) by Keith Lawrence of the Aspen Institute on Community Change, and Terry Keleher, of Applied Research Center at UC Berkeley, structural racism is defined as the following:

Structural Racism in the U.S. is the normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics – historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal – that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. It is a system of hierarchy and inequity, primarily characterized by white supremacy – the preferential treatment, privilege and power for white people at the expense of Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Arab and other racially oppressed people.

The paper goes on to state that some of the key indicators of structural racism are inequalities in “power, access, opportunities, treatment”, including policy impacts and outcomes, that are “intentional or not.” Structural racism is difficult to identify in institutions because it “involves the reinforcing effects of multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present, continually producing new, and re-producing old forms of racism.”

How is Structural Racism Evident in Our Schools?

School segregation is one example of structural racism. My grandparents were not able to attend high school because they were not allowed to attend their all-white neighborhood schools. They, like other blacks at the time, were presented with the false “choice” of all black schools that were often too far away to attend. For example, my grandmother on my father’s side would have had to travel seven miles in order to attend the all-black high school in central St. Louis, MO.

Even when blacks did make the extra effort to attend segregated schools, the education they received was inferior to that of their white peers. My father was lucky enough to be one of the only “negroes” to attend John Dewey Elementary in Evanston, IL. He received an excellent education there. On the contrary, his cousin Charles, who was at the same grade level, attended an all black school in St. Louis. My father told me that he sometimes went to school with his cousins when he would visit them. When he did, he recalled feeling embarrassed for being singled out by teachers for being the “smartest kid in class.”

My father was a bright young man. But he was definitely no brighter than all his cousins and their peers. On these visits, he realized how lucky he was that his parents had not only moved north from Missouri to Illinois, they had moved just across the dividing line between Evanston, IL’s poorer quality black school and the higher quality (white) school.

These examples show how the “choice” argument totally fails. My grandparents were given a “choice” to attend a black high school, that was extremely difficult to get to each day. My father had the “choice” to attend a superior elementary school, only because his parents knew and were able to move across a district dividing line. It’s not a choice for all families if all families don’t have the means to make the choice, let alone know the choice exists.

The More Things Change the More they Stay the Same…

After the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 schools were ordered to desegregate. But anyone who has ever worked in public schools knows segregation and discrimination didn’t end that day. In an article by the New Republic, author Arit John explains why schools may be more ethnically diverse than they were sixty years ago, but differential treatment is still alive and kicking.

Even Well-Integrated Schools Treat Black Students DifferentlySixty years after Brown v. Board from the New Republic

America’s classrooms may not be separate, but they’re still not equal

By 

A 2012 study from the American Sociological Association found, “Substantial scholarly evidence indicates that teachersespecially white teachersevaluate black students’ behavior and academic potential more negatively than those of white students.” The study analyzed the results from the Education Longitudinal Study, a national survey of 15,362 high school sophomores, as well as their parents and teachers. Again, the evidence showed a bias among white teachers that favored white students.Racial diversity, teachers and students

Ironically, it was Brown that led to massive decline in the number of African American teachers. Segregated counties often operated two school districtsone for blacks and one for whites. When the school districts integrated thousands of African American teachers were fired or laid off. Today’s teacher force reflects that decline in diversity. A new report from the Center for American Progress found that 80 percent of public school teachers are white, while nearly 50 percent of students are minorities.Read more here.

So, What’s Happening in SFUSD?

In San Francisco, our schools are even more ethnically diverse. The teacher pool may be as well, though I’m quite confident it does not reflect the ethnic makeup of the population it serves. (SFUSD recently launched a concerted effort to increase hiring of African-American teachers, so hopefully this will continue to improve.)

Follow along with me on this…

  • IF systemic racism is defined as “preferential treatment, privilege and power for white people” and…
  • IF the key indicators for systemic racism are the evidence of inequalities in “power, access, opportunities, treatment” … intentional or NOT,
  • THEN we should be able to identify systemic racism in our district, by identifying areas of racial inequality.

Let’s take a look at our own data on district participation in GATE by race to see how we are doing…

SFUSD GATE Percent Participation by Race

Create infographics

 

Clicking on the circle graph representing SFUSD demographics above you can see that Asians are the largest ethnic group of students in our district at 44% of the population. If you click on the GATE graph, you see they represent 66% of the GATE population. While Black students make up 9% of the general population, yet only 4% of the GATE population.

How do these numbers square up? Why are Asians and whites overrepressented in GATE programs while black and Latino (and Samoan) students are woefully under-represented? Should we chalk this all up to poverty? Parent education levels? Cultural predispositions? I don’t think so…

Going back to proponents arguments that honors classes are not discriminatory, we see their argument is not only flawed, it expresses racial bias.

  • IF any student can participate in the program if they so wish, and…
  • IF selection of students is based solely on grades and test scores, and…
  • IF black and Latino students are underrepresented in higher performing classes, and…
  • IF structural racism is NOT the cause…
  • THEN IT ONLY FOLLOWS that the lack of representation of blacks and Latinos in higher performing classes must be due to the students themselves.

Another Round of the Blame Game

The argument presented above is a very difficult one to listen to. It denies the very real impacts of structural racism in our system and then tells students and families (either implicitly, or overtly) that if they are not able to successfully navigate a flawed system, it is their own fault.

Let’s see what Mychal Denzel Smith of the Nation has to say about this:

Americans Insist on Being Delusional About Racism

Mychal Denzel Smith on July 3, 2014 – 1:54 PM ET

The headline to this ThinkProgress story reads “A Black College Student Has The Same Chances Of Getting A Job As A White High School Dropout.” At the same time, this Pew Research Center study shows that 63 percent of Americans believe “Blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for own condition.”

How do these two things square with each other?

They don’t. But that doesn’t actually matter. Americans aren’t swayed by facts or statistics but by narratives. The narrative we have internalized with regards to racism is one of unimpeached progress. We’ve gone from slavery to Jim Crow to civil rights to a black president without a hitch.

Meanwhile, the thing that black parents across the country have told their children for generations about having to work twice as hard to get the same things that are handed to white people, remains true. Yet 63 percent of Americans choose to believe black people are unambitious, or lazy or incompetent. Racism, the kind that limited opportunities for black Americans, is a thing of the past, we would like to believe.

Read more here.

Whether they are aware of it or not, the message Iproponents of a two-track system are sending (folks who have in many cases, benefitted from systems of structural racism in the past) is “Our kids deserve better! Other people’s kids are not my concern (and are in many cases part of the problem). If getting a quality education for my child means other people’s children don’t get served, or are actually held back .. Then so be it, it’s not my concern.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

I don’t have all the answers, but I do know tracking in honors is NOT the solution. Parents of all backgrounds feel angry and frustrated when they express concern for their children and their pleas go unanswered, or worse yet are dismissed. GATE parents know their children deserve more from our education system and are demanding the district’s attention to meet the very real needs of their kids.

And let’s be fair, the district could do a better job to involve and inform families in the ways it plans to support GATE students. Unfortunately, in the absence of that communication some parents have grown tired of waiting and are now connecting the dots, sometimes incorrectly.

What we need is more services and structures to support students who excel. These new services can’t come at the cost of our most underserved children and families. These new services should not rebuild structures that deny children access to upward mobility because of their race, language or ethnic background, or their families prior success in a notoriously biased education system of our parents and grandparents day.

Here are a few of my recommendations about what we SHOULD DO to make our education system better for ALL students (not just those who come from families that already have assets, not just those whose parents know how to navigate the system.)

What we SHOULD do:

  1. Redesign GATE – The new program should align with gifted research, brain-based learning and the new standards, curriculum, and assessments. This redesign should answer questions like: Which students are identified to receive services? How are services best delivered? etc.
  2. Increase systemic supports for teachers in meeting the growing demand to educate diverse student learners – This can be achieved in various ways, including (but not limited to): class size reduction, team teaching, curriculum, technology, training and site-based coaching.
  3. Support parents in advocating for the needs of their children – Engagement is a critical factor of successful instruction–if students are “bored” it is our job as educators and community members to come together to find new ways to challenge and support them.
  4. Explicitly incorporate GATE into the district’s student support framework – Ultimately, I believe GATE student support should be explicitly incorporated into the Response to Intervention (RTI) educational model that the district is using to provide specific supports to focal groups of students with specific learning needs.

What we SHOULD NOT do:

  1. Re-create a two-track system – It’s high time we stopped separating students into “smart” vs. “lazy” and figured out how to support all students. In my experience in schools (roughly 20 years!) any two track system is a formula for a segregated and unequal education system. Students are placed in a track early on in their academic career (sometimes as early as the fourth grade!) and can never gain access to college and career-going courses and opportunities. Research shows that even the label of “underperforming” hinders students performance leads to lower achievement over time.
  2. Reinforce the “us” vs. “them” mentality when dialoguing about solutions for our schools. – Education will always be a hot topic. Parents and teachers are passionate about our children and schools. It is inevitable that there will be differing viewpoints about how to best serve our kids. That said, name-calling and disrespectful language and behavior toward teachers, district staff, students or families only widens the gaps between us and prevents us for working together for the best of all our kids. Calling teachers “incompetent” or parents “entitled” or students “lazy” (and I have heard both of these words uttered) does nothing to solve the problem of educating all our students. Where do we agree? Where can we find common ground? How can we listen better to one another’s very real concerns? How can we help each other help our kids?

The Last Word…

We need to TALK ABOUT RACE. OK, this is a hard one, but if looking at the history of bussing has taught me anything, I’ve learned that you can’t just administrate change and think that’s going to do the trick. The predicament we find ourselves in now is a great illustration that if we don’t investigate our assumptions and own internalized bias (we ALL have it people!) we will continue to recreate systems of social inequity in new ways.

Teachers, parents and students need to talk more about race and the impact of bias in our society. Those of us who have benefited from racially biased systems of the past (or just “got lucky” like my parents) need to be especially aware of how our actions impact others. We cannot right all the wrongs of society, but we had better not unwittingly contribute to keeping systems of structural racism in place.

Our district has recently adopted an Ethnic Studies curriculum, we need to ensure it is robust and well supported in its implementation. Additionally, we need highly skilled leadership to ensure this conversation is going on at every level in the district and among families, educators and community partners. We need to have these conversations in our churches, homes and in our schools. We have a new generation counting on us to do right by them and we are well positioned to make changes we have not been able to make in years. Let’s make it happen!