When Did American School Officials Become So Anti-American?

The (lack of ) reasoning behind this decision makes you wonder if these people could find their butts with both hands and a mirror in a well-lit room:

Students at a Washington state high school wanted to mark the 20th year since the Sept. 11 attacks by wearing red, white and blue at a patriotic-themed game but were refused because the event could "unintentionally cause offense to some who see it differently," according to a report.

Jason Rantz, a host on KTTH 770/94.5FM, reported that the event was canceled by an unnamed staffer at Eastlake High School in Sammamish "at the last minute." A student told the show that he was informed that the "red, white and blue was going to be seen as racially insensitive and may affect people in a way that we will not understand and for that reason that we were to change our theme."

It's not like people of all races weren't killed that day.

So Much Is Unexplained Here

Why are these health care workers so reluctant to get a vaccine?

Why would a hospital rather fire them now than have them unvaccinated, which is exactly how they've been the last 18 months and more?

Something's not right.

A hospital in upstate New York will put baby deliveries on hold after too many workers in its maternity unit resigned over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to local reports.

Lewis County General Hospital will be forced to temporarily stop all baby deliveries after Sept. 24 due to the staff's refusal to get vaccinated, WWNY-TV reported.

So far, six employees in the hospital’s maternity ward have chosen to resign instead of getting the vaccine, while another seven are undecided, Lewis County Health System Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cayer said during a news conference on Friday, according to the station.

"If we can pause the service and now focus on recruiting nurses who are vaccinated, we will be able to reengage in delivering babies here in Lewis County," Cayer said.

Since the vaccine was mandated for health care workers on Aug. 23, Cayer said that 30 workers have resigned, 20 of whom held clinical roles like nurses, therapists and technicians, the Watertown Daily Times reported.

While 464 of the hospital’s workers have been vaccinated, 165 others have yet to receive the vaccine, Cayer said.

"It just is a crazy time," Cayer told the paper, emphasizing that the hospital will not be shutting down services. "It’s not just LCHS-centric. Rural hospitals everywhere are really trying to figure out how we’re going to make it work."

Hypocrisy

 Consistency has never been a strong suit of the left.

Jelly

I went to a friend's today to see her new RV.  She and her wife sold an SUV and their old RV to buy an almost-new 31-footer.  It's a motor home, not a trailer, but it's sort of a toy hauler, as the back 6' or so is a "garage" that is the perfect size to carry their Honda scooters.  The ramp for the garage doesn't open out the back, though, but out the right side, making it convenient in shorter-length camp spots.  Oh, and pretty much the entire left side is a slideout.

I'm a little jealous.

I have dubbed this vehicle the Taj Mahal.  Let the camping begin!

The Highlander Club

Years ago, when I arrived at my current school, there was a student club called the Highlander Club. I don't know what else that club did, but each Friday its members wore kilts to school. The teacher with me in this picture was a club member when he was a student there (just a few years before my arrival). He's drafted a half-dozen or so teachers to wear kilts on Fridays in order to help drum up student support for reinstituting the club.

Yes, I'm wearing a woodland camouflage utility kilt and a West Point t-shirt :-)

Army Football Team Today, 9/11/21

Army never trailed, and even though Western Kentucky scored a touchdown with 22 seconds remaining in the game, Army pulled out the win 38-35.

How Does Booze Relate To The 'Rona?

Australia has turned totalitarian so fast I can hardly believe it:

Residents in apartment blocks locked-down by NSW Health are having their alcohol deliveries policed as part of a policy to limit the number of drinks being consumed each day.

NSW Health has imposed rules limiting people in “NSW Health controlled buildings” to a certain amount of alcohol each day in a bid to “ensure the safety of health staff and residents”...

Residents are allowed to receive a ration of one of the following: six beers or pre-mixed drinks, one bottle of wine, or one 375ml bottle of spirits.

Excess alcohol is being confiscated until lockdown rules are lifted...

However it is unclear what powers NSW Health has to limit the delivery of alcohol to people isolating in their own homes; public health orders do not mention alcohol limits...

A spokeswoman for the Sydney Local Health District said when NSW Health took control of apartment buildings for the purposes of limiting the spread of coronavirus, the buildings became subject to alcohol consumption restrictions.

What's next, mandatory calisthenics?  You might be thinking that I shouldn't be giving them any ideas, but they already got the ideas from Orwell.

The True Purpose of Masks

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, nails it on masks:

Masks, as Twitter wags have noted, are by now the equivalent of MAGA hats for Blue America. As washed-up child activist David Hogg put it last year, “I feel the need to continue wearing my mask outside, even though I’m fully vaccinated, because the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative.” 

Such statements capture an unfortunate fact about our society: We’re so politically tribalized that even our response to the pandemic says more about politics than about anything else. That’s especially true when it comes to masking...

The problem is that despite all the calls to “follow the science,” the science on masks doesn’t actually demonstrate that they are magic talismans against contracting or spreading COVID. In the right circumstances, they are modestly useful. Medical personnel who wear N-95 masks, gloves and goggles while tending to patients very seldom get infected (in fact, when they catch COVID, it’s usually at home, not at work). 

On the other hand, the average person walking around Walgreens wearing a “face covering” made of cloth is mostly engaging in Hygiene Theater. Some “face coverings” even make things worse: The ever-popular fleece neck gaiter appears to do so, by breaking up exhaled droplets into smaller ones that stay in the air longer...

A recent study conducted by a US Army medical team and published in the Southern Medical Journal looked closely at mask mandates in Bexar County, Texas, home of San Antonio, and found that the mandates didn’t help. Its conclusion: “There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.” 

Nonetheless, mask mandates are a common response to COVID spikes (as are lockdowns, which the World Health Organization recommends against). They provide a sense that politicians are doing something, and they have become a tribal identifier for people on the left.

Wearing a mask lets you publicly proclaim that you take COVID seriously and, by its very visibility, lets leftists show their strength in many cities and neighborhoods, while identifying opponents for shaming and exclusion. (Hogg also commented about “very liberal area[s] where 99 percent of the people you see are wearing masks” — you don’t want to stand out as a Republican there!)

The very visibility of masking makes shaming easy, and I think many people are into masks as much for the shaming opportunities, or the fear of being shamed, as for any concrete benefit.

The headline of that article proclaims, "Masks are here to stay as long as libs need to shame their political enemies".  The only so-called science involved is political science.

What Could Possibly Have Prompted The US Dept of Education To Misrepresent Racial Statistics Regarding Misbehavior In Schools?

I'm sure it was an entirely innocent mistake (said in deadpan voice indicating sarcasm):

A recent lawsuit illustrates yet again that the Biden administration makes false claims without evidence.

On June 4, the Biden administration issued a notice calling for new federal policies about school discipline, in light of the fact that “students of color” are disciplined more often than “their White peers.” It cited a controversial report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights “finding that: Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.”

But as a Washington Post news reporter noted in 2019, the Commission never showed that “finding” was true. The Commission’s chairwoman, who is now President Biden’s nominee to head the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, “pointed to a few spots” in the Commission’s report to “claim that there are no underlying differences in student behavior. But those citations did not offer such evidence. One set of data referenced in the report showed the opposite,” noted The Post’s Laura Meckler.

Moreover, studies and surveys show that black students do have higher rates of misbehavior in school. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows blacks are much more likely than whites to get into fights at school — 11.4% of blacks did so, compared to 5.2% percent of whites, according to the Education Department’s NCES Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2016...

On August 30, the Education Department finally produced some of the requested emails. The emails show that the Education Department should have known better than to claim that students of color don’t commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

Lefties like to insult FoxNews by calling it Faux News.  Does it work the same way with Faux-chi?

The Intercept obtained over 900 pages about EcoHealth Alliance’s U.S.-funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China .

The documents detail two unpublished proposals funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and updates to EcoHealth Alliance’s research.

You will see why the left and Fauci owe Sen. Rand Paul a ton of apologies...

The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) September 7, 2021

The Zoom Variant

Is there a medical justification for this, or just a political one?

A New Jersey student has said he is barred from taking classes at Rutgers University because he has not been vaccinated — even though he is only studying virtually from home.

Logan Hollar, 22, told NJ.com that he largely ignored the school’s COVID mandate “because all my classes were remote” from his Sandyston home, some 70 miles from Rutgers’ campus in New Brunswick.

But he was locked out of his Rutgers email and related accounts when he went to pay his tuition at the end of last month — and was told that he needed to be vaccinated even though he has no plans to attend in person.

Hollar has now been forced to miss classes that started Sept. 1 — and has been warned it could be weeks before a decision is reached on his application for an exemption to the vaccine mandate, he said.

Now reread what I posted just a few minutes ago.

Healthcare Communism

A friend sent me a quote or paraphrase from an article in the current issue of The Economist:  "Liberals tend to defer to progressives and progressives tend to defer to totalitarians."  Seems true to me.  Then I read this, and the quote above seemed even more true:

And, to be clear, when I assert we live under healthcare communism, I don’t mean communism the way ye olde Karl Marx dreamed it up. I mean something even worse, more insidious—total state control of our lives, who wins and loses, who profits and who fails, who becomes a billionaire and who a pauper, even who survives… in other words communism as practiced in today’s People’s Republic of China and, increasingly, the United States.

Update, 9/8/21: As if on cue:

"Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they're going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed," the host continued. "That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.'" 

Scratch a leftie, and a totalitarian bleeds.  And we know how totalitarians like people to die. 

Update #2, 9/9/21:  The internet is forever:

Jimmy Kimmel 2017: "No family should be denied medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they can't afford it."

Jimmy Kimmel 2021: “Vaxxed person having a heart attack? Yes, come right on in. We’ll take care of you. Unvaxxed guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.”

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) September 9, 2021

This Work Week Hasn't Started Off Well

I enjoyed having yesterday off work.  It went downhill after that.

It started when I got to work today and somehow had two entirely different roll sheets for 3rd period.  It didn't take long to figure out what happened--what was supposed to happen next Monday actually happened today, but with errors.

We need another statistics class, and since I'm the only one who teaches statistics, I had to have another such class.  The only way to do that was to move one of my non-statistics classes to another teacher and use that period to give me a new stats class.  The new stats class was created, all right, but it was assigned to me along with the my other class during the same period.  Nobody had moved my other class to their new teacher.

You might think, that's no biggie, someone just needs to push a button in the computer and it's done.  Well, kinda.  But the teacher getting those students doesn't really exist yet.  After a succession of substitute teachers we finally got a long-term substitute a few days ago, and he is to get my class--but he isn't in our computer system yet.  He doesn't have a district-issued laptop, he doesn't even have a district email address yet.

And, because of all this changing, I no longer have a T.A. (teacher's assistant).  Some teachers have several, I need only one--and now that TA is gone.  Can I get another one over 3 weeks into the school year?  Unlikely.

This is the rockiest start I've seen to school in my 25 years of doing this.

Tomorrow we get out of school early but tomorrow afternoon I have an IEP meeting.  Via Zoom.  From home.  I don't enjoy IEP's, and after the last year and a half I despise doing anything by Zoom.  Tomorrow night we have to Zoom from home for Back To School Night--where I'll get to face parents of students I haven't even seen yet, and explain to them how I plan to get their kids caught up after missing the first 3 weeks of the course.

And we have a staff meeting--probably via Zoom--after school on Thursday.  Perhaps Friday will be OK.

Are Bodies Stacking Up Like Cord Wood at Cornell?

Can't blame it on the anti-vaxxers.  Must be people not wearing masks, right?

Cornell University has aggressively pushed its students to get vaccinated, announcing a vaccine mandate for the 2021-22 academic year in April and frequently denying religious and medical exemptions.

As a result, 95 percent of the campus population, both students and faculty, is vaccinated.

Despite this, Cornell University has more than five times the amount of confirmed positive cases during its first week of this academic year than it did during its first week of the 2020-21 academic year, according to the Cornell COVID dashboard.

It's not a pandemic anymore.  It's endemic.  Best learn to live with it. 

And that's exactly what's happening at Cornell.  They're living.  It's time to end the government overreach and mandates and oppression.  At this point I wonder if we don't have rights anymore, but permissions from politicians.

Update, 9/9/21:  Stanford, too:

While the private California university said the “risk of COVID-19 transmission is very low in masked settings among vaccinated individuals” it has not stopped it from a prohibition on any parties larger than a few people. The school said 95 percent of its students have submitted proof of vaccination.

“Indoor student parties will be prohibited until October 8, the end of the third week of the fall quarter for most students,” Associate Vice Provost Russell Furr said in an email to students. This new prohibition will “help limit the potential for virus transmission in this period when we are returning on-site.”

CriticalRace.org

From the web site:

A free resource for parents and students concerned about the negative impact Critical Race Training has on education. Search our database of close to 400 colleges and universities to learn more about Critical Race Training on campuses nationwide. We've expanded our database immensely (and far beyond higher education) since it was made public and are adding and updating the site daily. Check back often for the latest information.

It's not just for higher ed anymore:

The main focus of CriticalRace.org is Critical Race Theory and its applications in higher education, as this is where the ideology was first developed and where many individuals are trained. Our database does not yet cover primary or secondary schools.

We recognize that Critical Race Training in primary and secondary education is a growing issue and one that’s significantly more difficult to track.

We’ve included some resources concerning Critical Race Training in primary school....

Spying On Students Is Much Easier Than Teaching Them

Schools should do less of this and more of teaching:

Texas schools are rapidly scaling up the use of technology that monitors email, web history and social media posts of potentially millions of students, often without their knowledge or consent, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found.

Legal and privacy experts have long raised concerns about this technology and questioned its effectiveness in detecting potential threats. Despite those worries, Texas’ schools have spent millions of tax dollars on these services since 2015.

The proliferation of student surveillance has been fueled by nationwide fears about school shootings, suicides and cyberbullying. Among school districts, no state has more contracts with digital surveillance companies than Texas, according to GovSpend, a company that tracks government spending.

What students do away from school on their own time is the concern of parents, not the school.

If Anyone Would Know About the Effects of Over-parenting, It Would Be People At Stanford

Research led by Stanford education professor Jelena Obradović finds that too much parental involvement when children are focused on an activity can undermine behavioral development:

Research has shown that engaged parenting helps children build cognitive and emotional skills.

Too much parental direction, however, can sometimes be counterproductive, according to a new study led by Jelena Obradović, an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, published March 11 in the Journal of Family Psychology.

In the study, the researchers observed parents’ behavior when kindergarten-age children were actively engaged in playing, cleaning up toys, learning a new game and discussing a problem. The children of parents who more often stepped in to provide instructions, corrections or suggestions or to ask questions – despite the children being appropriately on task – displayed more difficulty regulating their behavior and emotions at other times. These children also performed worse on tasks that measured delayed gratification and other executive functions, skills associated with impulse control and the ability to shift between competing demands for their attention.

'Rona in Kona

Is the data in this graph false, or not?

If it's accurate, it sure doesn't speak well for all the 'rona mitigation efforts governments around the world have tried.

Facial Recognition Software

For most of us, 1984 was supposed to be a warning rather than a how-to manual:

The government of South Australia, one of the country's six states, has implemented a new policy requiring Australians to use an app with facial recognition software and geolocation to prove that they are abiding by a 14-day quarantine for travel within the country. ..

The app uses geolocation and facial recognition software to track those in quarantine. The app will contact people at random, asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes.

"We don't tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes," Marshall said.

If the resident cannot verify his or her location or identity when requested, the South Australia Health Department will notify the police, who will then conduct an in-person check on the person in quarantine. Marshall said the government will not be storing any of the information provided to the app.

Those people are bat-crap insane.

Health Care in the Time of the 'Rona

I know what let's do.. let's fire them and then cry about being short-staffed and unable to care for all the 'rona patients!

Ohio nurses are pushing back against hospitals requiring them to take the coronavirus vaccine, and a recent survey shows that about 30% of nurses at one Cincinnati medical center would quit before taking the vaccine.

One hundred thirty-six out of 456 nurses who responded to a union survey at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center said they would quit their job instead of following a mandate to get vaccinated, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

How can this story possibly be true?

Conservative author and commentator Candace Owens was denied medical care in the form of a coronavirus test by a Colorado laboratory because of her political beliefs, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson reported Thursday.

Owens was sent a letter by Aspen Laboratories' co-founder Suzanna Lee informing her that her "booking" was being cancelled and that she would be "denied service" because of both her aversion to governmental face mask mandates and her analysis of the effectiveness of vaccination shots.

"We cannot support anyone who has pro-actively worked to make this pandemic worse by spreading misinformation, politicizing, and discouraging the wearing of masks and actively dissuading people from receiving life-saving vaccinations," Lee wrote in the letter obtained by "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

I'm sure it's in the name of science.

Friday Is Kilt Day

One of the younger teachers at my school is also a graduate of said school, and back in his day (not too long before I got there) the school had a Highlander Club.  I remember that club's existence the first few years of my tenure at school, and all I remember of it was that its members wore kilts to school each day.

This teacher is resurrecting the Highlander Club and drafted a few of us teachers to help get the ball rolling.  Accordingly, I ordered a kilt last Saturday and it arrived Tuesday--in plenty of time for those few of us to wear our kilts to school today (Friday)!  

What that teacher doesn't know is that today (I'm typing this post on Wednesday and scheduling it for Friday) I put an additional plan into motion.  I asked one of our woman teachers to send an email asking her fellow woman teachers to wear skirts on Friday for even more support :-)  

This could be fun, I hope it turns out great.

Update, 9/4/21:  Three guys wore kilts (more are on order), and several of our women teachers wore plaid, skirts, etc.  I had one student very adamant that he was going to join the Highlander Club.  It was a fun day for launching the club.

Why Credibility Is So Important

So many of our formerly-trusted institutions have lost their credibility in recent years, and we see the results all around us.  In addition to government, the fields of science in general and medicine in particular have taken pretty strong hits:

Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.

Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.

Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.

Atlas has refused to be silenced. He has a lot to say about how the scientific field and Americans’ trust in it have been tremendously harmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Science has been not just a victim,” he told me, “but actively participated in the self-destruction of its credibility.”

This part struck home with me:

“Science is not supposed to be about intimidating, countering interpretation of data, or abusing, or censoring data,” Atlas said. “Science is not supposed to have a view. Science is only about data and the scientific process. There is never supposed to be ‘an accepted view’ of science.”

Yeah, what he said.  Read the whole thing.

Teachers In The News

It's been a banner week for teachers and it's not even Friday yet!  Let's count down our entries, yes?

At #4, and new one here at RotLC, are the Colorado teachers who pledge to teach critical race theory in their classrooms, even if it's banned.

A project in the name of the late, self-proclaimed socialist college professor Howard Zinn has gathered thousands of signatures of teachers nationwide, including about 100 from Colorado, pledging to teach the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their classrooms despite any bans by any state government or a local school district.

CRT is a school of thought that believes racism is institutionalized and embedded in America’s history, and that history should be viewed primarily through the lens of racial oppression.

Remember, they want to indoctrinate not their own children, but other people's children.

#3, a Virginia teacher who has been vindicated:

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled in favor of an elementary school teacher who was suspended for criticizing the district's proposed transgender policies.

The commonwealth's highest court on Monday rejected Loudoun County Public Schools' appeal to suspend Tanner Cross, a physical education teacher who was placed on administrative leave in May for criticizing the district's proposed policies for transgender students. Cross won a temporary injunction in the state's 12th circuit court in June and subsequently was allowed to return to the classroom...

The updated policies, which the school board approved on Aug. 11, also require teachers to call students by selected names and pronouns that align with their "gender identity." Cross spoke out against that provision in a May 25 school board meeting, days before he was suspended.

"I love all of my students, but I would never lie to them regardless of the consequences," Cross said. "I'm a teacher, but I serve God first and I will not affirm a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it's against my religion, it's lying to a child, it's abuse to a child, and it's sinning against our God."

District officials claimed Cross's statement had a "disruptive impact" on the school community.

Coming in at #2, making her second appearance here on RotLC, the Southern California teacher who had students pledge allegiance to the rainbow flag instead of the US flag has been removed from the classroom:

A California teacher who went viral after bragging in a TikTok video that she had taken down the American flag in her classroom because it made her feel "uncomfortable" and suggested that her students should say the Pledge of Allegiance to a rainbow flag has been removed from her classroom.

"She has been removed from the classroom and placed on administrative leave, as our investigation continues," Newport Mesa Schools spokesperson Annette Franco confirmed to Fox News Wednesday.

And our #1 teacher story of the week, also making a 2nd appearance here at RotLC this week, how could it not be the commie in the Sacramento classroom?  Watch the (hidden camera?) recording of the pinko, and hear him in his own words, here.  Watch James O'Keefe of Project Veritas celebrate the commie's exposure and imminent firing.  Watch the pinko's more subdued, less arrogant boohoo video here.  And here's the latest:

The Natomas Unified School District has put a teacher with Inderkum High School on paid leave and says it is taking steps to fire the teacher for actions the district described as “inappropriate” and “irresponsible.”

In a more than two-page statement, superintendent Chris Evans said an investigation into an undercover video recently produced by conservative activist group Project Veritas led them to question the teacher’s methods inside the classroom.

Let's give it up for our teachers!