Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet recently drew attention for declaring that homeschooling should be banned.
Now she's elaborating on the reasons for her stance, arguing children have a right to be taught ideas their parents reject, reports Campus Reform.
"Children have a right to be exposed to views and values other than those of their parents, and there is no way to guarantee that if 24/7 those kids are at home," said Bartholet.
Homeschoolers routinely outperform public school students in standardized tests and have no lack of extracurricular activities. Their parents cite the left-leaning indoctrination in public schools in subjects such as history, science, social studies and sex education as reasons to homeschool.
But Bartholet proposes imposing requirements to make it all but impossible for parents to homeschool.
"I think they need to demonstrate why even if they haven’t had much of an education themselves, they’re going to be capable of providing their kids an adequate education," she said.
Her plan would require not only that parents demonstrate ability but also present a "legitimate" reason for homeschooling.
And they would be required to provide an education "comparable in scope" to public schools, she said.
She also insists that they commit to teaching a "broad range of subjects" comparable to public schools, and "state commissioners of education" should set minimum requirements.
Parents, she said, should "commit to" teaching the curriculum of public schools.
"I think that you know, roughly speaking, the public school curriculum ought to be something that homeschooling parents are willing to commit to, and demonstrate that they are able to teach," she said. "So ‘presumptive ban’ simply means shifting the burden of justification to parents."
Further, she thinks children must be exposed "to the public schools' environments," through taking courses.
The fundamental problem she sees is that parents have an absolute right to withdraw their children from public schools.
Columnist Laura Hollis recently noted that Bartholet's opposition to homeschool is "a smorgasbord of selective outrage and red herrings. She points to isolated instances of neglect by homeschooling parents (mentioning exactly one example) but conveniently ignores shocking evidence of widespread sexual abuse and physical violence in America's public schools (1.1 million serious incidents, according to a 2016 report originally published under then-President Barack Obama's administration).
"Bartholet also ignores the reams of evidence demonstrating that homeschooled children do better academically, socially and professionally than their public-schooled peers," Hollis explained.
She described Bartholet's advocacy as "part of a larger effort to silence conservatives and marginalize their impact in this country."
"The larger point is this: Disagreement will not be tolerated, and persuasion will not be permitted. Hardcore leftists will not be satisfied until those on the right – or anyone who pokes holes in the prevailing narrative, for that matter – are silenced, personally and politically," she wrote.
The post Anti-homeschool professor reveals warped, real agenda appeared first on WND.
In a continuation piece of Public Service Announcements for America's rioting class (parts one, two, and three here), this evening we are focusing on how protesters should avoid posting on social media past curfew hours because police in some cities are monitoring feeds and will issue curfew citations.
Milwaukee CBS 58 provided at least one example of this, after protester Demetrius Griffin received a rather odd citation in the mail last week.
Griffin said he was shocked when he opened up his mailbox and found a $691 citation from the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) detailing how he violated curfew. He spent the last five days marching and attending demonstrations and posted a series of images and videos on social media about what was happening on the ground, some of the postings suggested he violated Milwaukee's 9 pm curfew.
According to the citation, MPD's "Virtual Investigation Unit" was secretly monitoring Griffin and issued him an instant-citation with him not evening knowing until he opened up his mailbox days later.
"Something's not right about it, so that's what I feel," Griffin said, referring to the citation, and how it was issued.
He went on to say the citation is a "scare tactic, they're [MPD] trying to intimidate me."
Milwaukee attorney Nicole Muller said she's never seen a citation like this before but said others at the same rally received similar ones.
"We've received several inquiries from people who have not only received municipal ordinance violation tickets but also referrals and some criminal charges," Muller said.
The citation does have Griffin's driver's license information and a signature by an officer, lending credibility that the citation is real, and suggests how 'Big Brother' is watching protesters' every move. He said his First Amendment right was violated and trust in government is declining.
"They're using stuff like this to make us shut up about our First Amendments because we are just out peacefully protesting," said Griffin.
Muller said any protester who received virtual curfew citations "should not pay the fine, but it is important people don't ignore the citation, and instead take it to court."
"If you're raising constitutional issues in litigating these citations, they need to be raised before your proceedings really start," added Muller.
Muller has another piece of advice for America's rioting class: "Before you go out and protest, get a name and number of an attorney and write it on your arm."
Among the constant deluge of police brutality footage flooding the internet as America’s armed goon patrol responds to the Black Lives Matter protests across the nation, there is one video which stands out above all the others in illustrating just how pervasively violent police culture is. Curiously enough, this video itself contains no police brutality.
The video clip in question shows the outside of the Buffalo City Courthouse, where members of the police and fire unions awaited the two officers who hospitalized a 75 year-old peace activist named Martin Gugino by shoving him to the ground. When the two officers exited the courthouse, released on their own recognizance, and were met with applause from the crowd.
“Two police officers were charged with felony assault during a protest in Buffalo, and they were applauded by their colleagues as they left the courthouse,” MSNBC reports as its footage shows a large gathering clapping and whistling enthusiastically.
— @Acyn
This, right here, is a sign of a culture that cannot be redeemed. A police culture which makes no secret of the fact that cops as a collective will consistently support the most self-evidently unjustifiable acts of brutality committed by their own.
This video emerges after 57 Buffalo police resigned from their department’s Emergency Response Team (just the team, not from the department itself) in protest of the suspension of the two officers who’d been recorded assaulting an old man without the slightest provocation. It emerges after the Buffalo Police Department was caught lying that Gugino had “tripped and fell” before footage surfaced showing Gugino being shoved hard and smashing his skull on the pavement. This police department could not possibly have made it more clear to the public that they unconditionally support one another in their viciousness and savagery.
This is far more damning than any of the many, many video clips circulating that demonstrate irrefutably how police and their apologists have already lost the debate on this matter. It makes a lie of the widespread narrative that this is just a minor problem caused by a few bad apples while the “vast majority” (to quote the 44th president) are good people who uphold their duty to protect and serve the community.
Clearly that is not the case. Clearly. The reality is that most police stand by other police, even when they are undeniably in the wrong. That is not what good people do. That is not what people who have any intention whatsoever of ever doing anything about police brutality do. That is what people who intend to perpetuate a violent and increasingly militarized police force forever do.
This isn’t working. Police culture cannot be saved, and has no interest in being saved. In the eyes of the armed goon patrol, it’s the people complaining about police brutality who are the problem. That’s why the response to them has been consistent and copious amounts of police brutality.
This is not a matter of passing a few more pieces of legislation. This is not a matter of giving police more workshops and seminars. This is not a matter of needing more police to take a knee during protests or march with them in solidarity. This is a matter of an entire police force, from sea to shining sea, which insists on the gratuitous use of violence and will defend any cop who uses it.
The problem, as we’ve discussed previously, is that those in power have no intention of ever departing with the violent goon patrol which gives them the ability to brutalize the public if they get out of line. Many of them are providing lip service to solidarity and listening and understanding right now, but make no mistake: the mainstream rank-and-file public awakening to the reality that they live in a militarized authoritarian police state was not in the script, and they are getting very nervous about its implications.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, to say the least.
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President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks Thursday, May 21, 2020, at the Ford Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)
Americans now have what a team of constitutional experts is calling a new Bill of Rights.
It comes in an executive order from President Trump that imposes 10 principles of "fairness in administrative enforcement and adjudication" for processes that agencies and bureaucrats use to administer the laws of the land.
They are dubbed by the Pacific Legal Foundation the "Regulatory Bill of Rights."
"If properly implemented, the 10 principles in the Regulatory Bill of Rights will go a long way toward ensuring the due process protections that Americans rightly expect and should always receive from federal agencies," said Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for the Separation of Powers at Pacific Legal Foundation.
"The president’s order is an impressive statement of ideals that should guide agencies to revise decades of unfair regulatory procedures and practices that violate core constitutional rights."
The organization for decades has defended Americans who have been targeted by those administrative rules and practices.
The PLF notes the order requires "all agencies to revise their enforcement procedures and practices to conform to these principles."
"While we are excited that the administration took our recommendations seriously, it now falls on the individual agencies and the OMB to change their current practices to conform to the principles the president has reaffirmed," Gaziano said. "PLF will continue to fight until the aspirational goals of the Regulatory Bill of Rights become a reality."
The organization has released a report outlining some of the battles it has waged against the more egregious cases.
"To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, governments exist to protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, government regulators – who control vast swaths of American life – often lose sight of this basic truth," PLF says.
"Federal bureaucracies are designed and driven to pursue their narrow missions, be it regulating education, economic activity, or the environment. Even if well-intentioned, agencies' myopic focus on their own regulations, policies, and objectives, as well as the documented tendency of bureaucracies to expand their own power and personnel, leads them to give short shrift to the fundamental value of individual liberty – as many Pacific Legal Foundation clients can attest."
The group cites lack of fair notice, unfair rules of evidence, unreasonable and coercive penalty threats, delaying and denying access to courts, and evading accountability.
It profiled the lawsuit Mike and Chantell Sackett brought against the EPA for declaring a residential lot in a subdivision near Priest Lake, Idaho, where they planned to build a home a "federal protected wetlands."
The agency's threats included hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Months later, the EPA claimed the lot was "navigable water" and gave the Sacketts no opportunity to challenge the designation.
It took fighting in the courts – including the U.S. Supreme Court – until 2020 before the EPA finally withdrew its orders and removed the crushing fines.
That case was littered with due process deficits, unreasonable fine threats and even the attempt by regulators to deny the Sacketts access to the court system. PLF said.
"The erosion of the Constitution's separation of powers in favor of the regulatory state may be the greatest threat to our liberty today," the legal group said. "Rather than our elected representatives in Congress writing the laws that bind us, seemingly unlimited power to write and enforce regulations has been delegated to and is wielded by obscure and unaccountable bureaucrats.
"Rather than courts serving as the neutral protector of our rights when these bureaucracies question or challenge our behavior, the judiciary places a heavy thumb on the scales of justice in favor of the overreaching agencies," the report said.
The post Trump gives Americans new 'Bill of Rights' appeared first on WND.
A data analytics firm behind an influential - and now retracted Lancet study which concluded that Hydroxychloroquine is dangerous, has one employee and is headquartered in a residential house just west of Chicago. Yet its bogus data prompted the World Health Organization, the UK and France to halt clinical trial programs involving the controversial drug used to treat COVID-19.
The data firm, Surgisphere, was founded by 41-year-old Sapan Desai, an MBA who also holds a medical degree and a Ph.D. who is named on both The Lancet study and another now-retracted article in the New England Journal of Medicine. He has refused to explain how his tiny data analytics firm was able to procure their dodgy data after questions were raised over troubling inconsistencies - despite a letter to The Lancet from over 200 scientists demanding greater transparency regarding the hospitals where medical data came from, according to Bloomberg.
"There is an almighty rush to understand this new disease -- everybody is trying to get data quickly," said said Nicholas Day, a professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford’s branch in Bangkok. "All the journals are desperate to publish because there is a thirst to know about this disease. Therefore mistakes are made, stuff is rushed through."
Desai claims his 12-year-old company uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the process of data analytics - "which is the only way a task like this is even possible," he told Bloomberg.
"It is important to understand the nature of this database," he added. "We are not responsible for the source data, thus the labor intensive task required for exporting the data from an EHR (electronic health record), converting it into the format required by our data dictionary, and fully de-identifying the data is done by the healthcare partner. Surgisphere does not reconcile languages or coding systems."
Meanwhile, a Sofia, Bulgaria-based computer scientist who performed freelance programming for Surgisphere two years ago says he has "no clue about their access to medical data."
Key questions over Desai's data include;
According to Desai, the official figures "could have been under-reported early on during the pandemic, thus leading to the appearance that we are over-reporting numbers when in actuality we are capturing the true total number of Covid-19 infections at the hospital level, which is the true source for this data."
Still, the Surgisphere studies were highly unusual in that they claimed to quickly assemble data from hundreds of anonymous hospitals, using numerous electronic medical records systems, under different privacy laws across many countries on multiple continents. And even more strangely, for studies that claimed a massive feat of data integration in record-setting time, they had no biostatisticians listed as authors that might have helped pull all this data together.
More typically, when medical scientists do such studies they rely on clearly named and reputable government databases in one country or state that researchers are able to access.
Surgisphere said its information comes from “a registry, with data obtained from electronic health records” of a “very specific group of hospitalized patients with Covid-19.” The company “directly integrates with the EHRs of our hospital customers,” and “has permission to include these hospitals’ EHR data in its query-able registry/database of real-world, real-time patient encounters.” -Bloomberg
Yet, the company won't provide the names of companies or institutions which have provided data.
Desai also claims on his website that he has worked with Scotland's National Health Service 'to find data-driven solutions to high rates of post-surgical complications and infections,' when no such relationship exists.
"At no point have Surgisphere had any access to NHS Scotland data," they told Bloomberg in an email.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of it all is that the WHO and two entire countries halted trials of a potentially life-saving drug following the results of a single study that they failed to independently verify.
A business professor is predicting that as many as half of the country's universities and colleges may be gone within the next five to 10 years.
"They are soon going to become the walking dead," said New York University professor Scott Galloway in a PBS interview, the Daily Wire reported.
He said one-quarter to one-half of the universities and colleges could go out of business because of the impact of the coronavirus shutdown and the fact that foreign students who pay full tuition are the "cash cow."
They, he said, simply "might decide not to show up."
"What department stores were to retail, tier-two higher tuition universities are about to become to education and that is they are soon going to become the walking dead," he said.
He said the holding of classes via Zoom has been a revelation to many.
"Students I think across America along with their families listening in on these Zoom classes are all beginning to wonder what kind of value, or lack thereof, they’re getting for their tuition dollars.
"There’s generally a recognition or disappointment across America, and I would argue that it’s not that they’re disappointed in the Zoom classes, it’s more the recognition that Zoom has uncovered how disappointing college education is. I think there’s a lot of households saying, 'This is what we’re paying for?'"
He said the top tier schools will survive.
"The elite, truly high-end universities are gonna be fine; the head of Harvard admissions has stated publicly that he could double the size of his freshman class and not sacrifice any quality. So it’s a great time to be on the waiting list of a top-tier university ‘cause you’re probably gonna get a call," he said.
"There are 4,500 universities in the U.S., you could see a thousand to two thousand go out of business in the next five to ten years," he said.
The post 'Soon to be the walking dead': Half of universities predicted to vanish appeared first on WND.
(Charisma) Total membership in the Southern Baptist Convention fell almost 2% to 14,525,579 from 2018 to 2019, according to the Annual Church Profile compiled by LifeWay Christian Resources in cooperation with Baptist state conventions. The decline of 287,655 members is the largest single-year drop in more than 100 years. (Read More…)
The post Southern Baptists Experience Historic Drop In Membership appeared first on The Most Important News.
