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JANUARY 4,  2022

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE: 

THESE AREN'T THE TEACHERS WE KNEW – FROM NATIONAL REVIEW:   The Chicago Teachers’ Union, which represents 25,000 teachers in the city, voted Tuesday to strike against in-person schooling and conduct remote instruction until the Omicron spike subsides.  The 600-member House of Delegates, the CTU’s governing body, decided to refuse to teach in the classroom until January 18 or until the virus infection rate hits below the threshold set last year. As pledged, Chicago Public Schools will cancel classes on Wednesday but keep schools open for students. Schools had resumed in-person learning Monday following the two-week winter break.  Last year’s school closure threshold is a test positivity rate of ten percent or higher that has increased for the previous seven consecutive days, each day at least one-fifth higher than the week before, according to the Chicago Sun Times.   It's time to tell these unions who owns the schools.  The unions are run from the hard left.  That's not where the parents are.  The best idea I've heard recently about education, although it is not new, is that funding should go with the student, not with the school or district.  If a parent isn't pleased with the school, that parent can pull his or her child out and enroll the child in another school.  The funding, which is paid for by taxes, would follow that student to the new school.   We used to have something called the G.I. Bill of Rights, established right after World War II, to provide tuition payments for those who had served, giving them a new start in life.  It worked very much on the same idea I just noted.  A former service member would choose a school, gain admission, and then direct the federal government to make payment directly to that school.  It worked superbly.  It should be tried among civilians today.
   

A SMALL VICTORY – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:  Facebook did an about-face after banning the account of Heroes of Liberty, a conservative children’s book publisher whose works include biographies of Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell and Amy Coney Barrett.  Andy Stone, spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, tweeted Monday that the decision last month to disable permanently the publisher’s account was a mistake.  “This should not have happened. It was an error and the ad account’s been restored,” Mr. Stone said.  His tweet came in response to a post from Fox senior political analyst Brit Hume, who called the ban “sickening.”  Mr. Hume and others rallied to Heroes of Liberty’s defense after editor and board member Bethany Mandel said that Facebook had shut down the newly launched publishing house’s advertising account over the “disruptive content” of its ads.  The company officially launched in November but had invested “considerable resources into building our brand on Facebook” beginning in July.  “When Facebook shut down our account, we lost all the data that we carefully gathered for the last six months,” Ms. Mandel said in a Monday tweet. “We can’t communicate with the audience that we built. Our ad account is permanently disabled. The consequences to our business could be devastating.”  Some on the left say that Facebook can do whatever it wishes because it's a private company.  Maybe so, but I wonder if anyone still uses the term "public trust."  There was a time when some publishers regarded their enterprises as public trusts, as well as private firms.  They had a sense of obligation and citizenship.  Haven't seen too much of that lately.

January 4, 2022       Permalink

WONDERFUL GLENN LOURY – OVERNIGHT:  A distinguished African-American scholar who's been right all along, but never gets the credit he deserves.  From College Fix: 

Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University, defended “unabashed black patriotism” and other “unspeakable truths” in an essay for the Jan. 2022 issue of First Things.

Loury wrote the piece based on a speech he delivered at the 2021 National Conservativism Conference.

“I am a patriot who loves his country,” Loury said.

He acknowledged the persistence of racial inequity, but denied that racism alone can explain it. In order to “stay in touch with reality” and avoid misinterpreting social problems, Americans need to consider other factors. Even more, viewing racism as the only source of American problems such as police killings contributes to social division.

“The right idea here,” he argued, “is the ethic of transracial humanism propounded by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.”

“We, as citizens of this great republic, must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress the universality of our humanity and the commonality of our interests as Americans…By contrast, those who promote anti-whiteness (as Black Lives Matter activists do) will reap what they sow, in a backlash of pro-whiteness.”

Loury went on to urge his fellow black Americans to view the American dream as their birthright.  He stressed the emergence of a black American middle class and the comparative wealth of black Americans compared to other groups throughout the world. He called out wokeness as denial of the reality of black opportunity and progress:

“The very fact that the cultural barons and elites of America…have bought into woke racialism gives the lie to the notion that the American Dream doesn’t apply to blacks. It most certainly and emphatically applies. To deny this is to tell our children a lie, a lie that robs black people of agency and self-­determination.”

“Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness,” he said.

Black Americans should take pride in their country and in their Western cultural inheritance, Loury said, to which we owe crucial ideas about human rights and the rule of law. Inspired by these ideals, America accomplished the greatest transformation of the status of enslaved people in history:  “Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America.”

COMMENT:  What a terrific man.  I'm surprised he's been allowed to work in the academic world, and in an Ivy League school no less.  If black America could have more leaders like Loury, it would be further ahead.  But I fear that the woke crowd is in control for the moment, thanks to the support of a compliant and maturity-challenged press.

January 4, 2022       Permalink

JANUARY 3,  2022

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

ADAMS IN ACTION – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:   New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Monday knocked the NYPD for failing to conduct a “thorough investigation” into the alleged assault he called 911 about on his first day on the job.  Criticism from the retired NYPD captain-turned-politician comes two days after he reported three men fighting each other in Brooklyn. Police responded but left without questioning anyone.  “I think that what happened there, it is crucial that we use that interaction as a teaching moment. The officers, I believe, should have stopped, carried out a more thorough investigation, interview people at the scene. I don’t believe they did that properly,” Adams said on PIX 11, when asked if he was “happy” with the officers’ response.  “We should instruct how we want these jobs handled, and how we want them to come to a proper resolution,” he said. “And I’m going to look at that and make sure we instruct the officers on what my expectations are.”    He's also said, very strongly, that, unlike the mayor he just replaced, he will have his officers' backs.  He will support them, but he'll insist on high standards.  Hey, we may just have an effective mayor here.  Clearly, it will take a long time to evaluate him, and we won't always agree with him.  But he has a clarity that we haven't seen for some time in City Hall.   

ANOTHER EDUCATIONAL ADVANCE – FROM COLLEGE FIX:  Administrators at the University of Reading in England recently cut several lines referring to domestic violence from a classic Greek poem to avoid offending students.  The 2,000-year-old poem, Types of Women, by Semonides of Amorgos, is taught to first-year classics students at the school and makes reference to silencing women through violence.  Documents obtained by The UK Daily Mail include a statement by school administrators:  “The portion of the poem now omitted involved a brief reference to domestic violence,” read the statement. “That portion has subsequently been removed because, while the text as a whole is vitriolic, that part seemed unnecessarily unpleasant and (potentially) triggering.”  According to the school, no student had complained about the poem.  “This is beyond naive,” Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter, told the Daily Mail. “It is positively ridiculous and has no place in academia.”   Black is certainly right.  There are some signs of a growing resistance to the know-nothing wokeism that has taken over many schools.  The question is whether the resistance has come too late.  Congress has a role to play in withholding federal aid to schools that succumb to the trends of the moment, but Congress will only act if Republicans are in control.  That's our job come November.

January 3, 2022       Permalink 

BYE BYE, BLUE BOYS – OVERNIGHT:  The strong trend continues, although many "journalists" won't examine it – Americans are leaving red states in droves.  From the New York Post: 

Droves of residents fled Democrat-run states with surging crime and COVID-19 restrictions last year — with New York, New Jersey and Connecticut among the five that suffered the steepest losses, a sobering new survey shows.

New Jersey led the nation with 70 percent of the people involved in moves fleeing the Garden State, compared to just 30 percent who migrated in, according to United Van Lines’ 45th Annual National Movers Study.

Illinois — home to crime- and shooting-ridden Chicago — came in second with 67 percent of the moves recorded were of residents leaving the state, while just 27 percent were in-bound.

New York ranked third, with 63 percent of movers headed for the exits and 37 percent settling in.
Nearly 30 percent those who fled the Empire State said “family” was a primary factor in their decisions, with about 12 percent citing “cost.”

The survey also showed that the exodus largely involved the wealthy, with those making $150,000 or more comprising 45.3 percent of the total.

It’s unclear when those moves took place, but in April the state adopted a record $212 billion budget that targeted big earners with new taxes that rise as high as 10.9 percent.

Meanwhile, six of the top 10 metro areas suffering from the worst exodus were in the New York-New Jersey region.

And...

California — long a driver of population growth — was fifth-worst for movers heading for the exits, with 59 percent fleeing the state while only 41 percent of newcomers moved in.

All five states with the highest outbound rates have a few things in common: they are run by Democrats, are high-taxed and suffer from spikes in crime.

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  Very good information.  Frankly, I'm not shocked.   Democratic policies have hit rock bottom.  And the Democratic Party, increasingly elitist and racialized, seems less popular than the Covid 19 virus.   I don't know how they do it, but the Dems seem to have chosen, for their themes, some of the most disliked ideas in the record books – winners like defunding the police and teaching critical race theory in the schools.  And at times their leadership appears older than the country.

Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, wherever they are, are probably disgusted.  And none of them could get into the Democratic Party today.

January 3, 2022       Permalink