Home Depot Co-Founder: Socialism ‘Comes Right Out Of The Universities’

weaselzippers
Jan 26, 2019

Socialism begins at the high school level.

Via Campus Reform:

Home Depot billionaire co-founder Bernie Marcus said Friday that the growing appeal to socialism in America comes out of the universities.

Marcus, during an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, discussed the deterioration of socialist Venezuela and Cuba, comparing the situations in those countries today with the realities there decades ago, pre-socialist rule. Marcus called the economic downturns in each of those countries, Cuba, in particular, a “perfect example of socialism gone wrong.”

“They [Cuba] took a great country. They put it right down the drain in every way possible. People are starving to death. Medical is not available for them. And we have a group of people in Washington today, new representatives especially, that look at socialism as the way to go and if you don’t think that’s dangerous, I do,” Marcus said.

Marcus further addressed where he believes the growing socialist sentiment among Americans is coming from.

“It comes right out of the universities. You see students graduating today and a very high percentage…almost 50 percent of students coming out of universities today believe that socialism is the answer,” Marcus said. “That’s frightening to me because the things that made this country great, that created the wealth of this country, and I mean the wealth of every single person right down the line, the best medical care in the world, the best housing in the world, that’s why people want to come here, is because of the system, and that’s the free enterprise system.”

A recent Campus Reform analysis backs up Marcus’ views. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist from the Bronx, recently unveiled her “Green New Deal,” which contains a proposed 70 percent top tax rate among America’s highest earners- those making $10 million per year or more. As it turns out, the overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators at Ocasio-Cortez’s alma mater, Boston University, financially supported Democrats and Democrat causes from 2017-2018.

Keep reading…


Thank You Mr. Marcus and WZ.

Weekend reads: The study that never existed; turmoil at Cochrane; a plagiarist is appointed professor

retractionwatch
Scientific/Academic Ethics, again

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
 
The week at Retraction Watch featured a lot of news about Brian Wansink — six new retractions, his resignation, and findings of misconduct. There was other news, too, including a dozen new retractions of work by a scientist who once went to court to try to sue his critics. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Chad Tackett claimed his weight loss program was so good that it was part of a university-sponsored study. That the study never existed was the least shady part of the tale.” (Alex Kasprak, Snopes)
• One of the medical world’s most respected expert bodies — the Cochrane Collaboration — is in turmoil after its governing board voted to expel an outspoken member.
• “Back in 2016, he was convicted of plagiarism.” But the Comenius University in Bratislava appointed Marian Vanderka as a professor anyway. (The Slovak Spectator)
• “Scientific misconduct is more than falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism – and harder to identify. ” (Leah Lawrence, ASH Clinical News)
• “Why one scientist spends hours a week putting together a spreadsheet of documented harassment findings, names and all.” Colleen Flaherty profiles the work of Julie Libarkin. (Inside Higher Ed)
• The authors of a PNAS study of psychological targeting on Facebook add a disclosure saying they “are employed by an institute that receives funding from Facebook, as well as its competitors (e.g., television networks and Google).” They argue that “This balance of interests means that their views are not influenced by any single company or industry group.”
• Meet the “journalologists” using scientific methods to study publishing. (Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Science) Part of a package on “Research on Research.”
• The U.S. FDA will “(sometimes) impose fines on (some) institutions that fail to post clinical trial results,” writes Till Bruckner of TranspariMED.
• “Are non-monetary rewards effective in attracting peer reviewers?” asks a new study. (Monica Aniela Zaharie, Marco Seeber, Scientometrics)
• “This problem is so entrenched and the lack of response is so distressing, in the face of the rise of scientific fraud, that we resort to denial or pretending everything is fine.” (Claude Huriet, European Scientist)
• “Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, has published his doctoral thesis online in an effort to put an end to allegations of plagiarism and distance himself from the degree scandal that has dogged some of the country’s most high-profile politicians.” (Sam Jones, The Guardian)
• Bad Science: Jason Hoyt speaks to Dorothy Bishop. (PeerJ blog)
• Book ’em, Danno? “The City of Cleveland has terminated 15 police academy cadets accused of cheating and plagiarizing notes in a notebook used during the police academy.” (Ian Cross, News 5 Cleveland)
• Universities should “reboot undergraduate courses for reproducibility,” says Katherine Button. (Nature)
• “A research-funding foundation has revoked a £1-million (US$1.3-million) grant from prominent palaeontologist Nicholas Longrich, who was disciplined by his institution, the University of Bath, UK, after an investigation found he had breached its anti-harassment policy.” (Holly Else, Nature)
• “Women are inadequately represented as peer reviewers, journal editors and last authors of studies, according to an analysis of manuscript submissions to an influential biomedical journal.” Dalmeet Singh Chawla reports on a preprint highlighted previously on Weekend Reads. (Nature)
• “Better incentives could reduce the alarming number of studies that turn out to be wrong when repeated,” writes Shannon Palus. (Scientific American, sub req’d)
• “[W]ithout reliable publishing, what’s the point of a scientific career?” asks Stuart Goldie. (Chemistry World)
• Is peer review only skin-deep? “These results indicate that the majority of dermatologists are not familiar with predatory journals.” (Acta Dermato-Venereologica)
• An article titled “Why all randomized controlled trials produce biased results,” say authors of a new piece, “may create confusion to understanding of RCTs in the research community.” (Annals of Medicine)
• “Cited vs. uncited papers: What do they tell us?” Prashant Kamat, editor in chief of ACS Energy Letters, runs the numbers and critiques Impact Factor calculations.
• “My former advisor, who sexually harassed me and other women, no longer has a glacier named after him in Antarctica.” Another #MeToo moment.
• An odd one: A court settlement in which a reporter, sued by a scientist who didn’t like what was written about him, agreed to call the scientist a “genius.”
• Dear publishers: Please stop saddling authors with retractions because of your own errors. Here’s another example of a phenomenon we’ve described before.
• “AAAS will, in its sole discretion, consider revoking Fellow status in cases of proven scientific misconduct, serious breaches of professional ethics, or when the Fellow in the view of AAAS otherwise no longer merits the status of Fellow.” A new policy.
• “Although we received no written response, the plagiarized article was taken down from their website two days after the demand to retract the article was sent.” (Mark Langdorf, WestJEM)
• Economics is having a replication crisis, says Noah Smith. (Bloomberg) Background here.
• “The world is so large under the electron microscope that if you want, you can find two identical ones.” PubPeer calls this “one of the most poetic author defenses” they’ve seen in six years of running the site.
• When it comes to plagiarism, these aerospace researchers are real stars. (Journal of Guidance and Control)
• “That was embarrassing.” Researcher Detlef Weigel submits a correction to Science, after  comments on PubPeer.
• “Retracted studies are an infrequent problem, but they appear often enough to potentially influence the results of some Cochrane Reviews.” (conference abstract)
• “It is the strictest action yet by a US research-funding agency on the topic of sexual harassment.” The NSF unveils a new policy. (Alexandra Witze, Nature)
• Our Ivan Oransky talks about our database, and how it fits into a roadmap for open science.
• The German Research Foundation (DFG) has imposed a three-year ban on funding for a researcher. As is typical in such cases, they do not say who the scientist is.
• Researchers in Africa are being warned about predatory journals. One criterion: Are they aggressive advertisers? (Maina Waruru, University World News)
• “He also made it clear that the grade won’t be changed, and told students to stop trying to get their points back in the email that reads like poetry from the seventh century.” A professor in China cracks down on plagiarism. (CGTN)
• A judge “dismissed a criminal case against chemist Patrick Harran, who faced charges of violating health and safety standards after an accidental death in his laboratory nine years ago.” (Amy Maxmen, Nature)
• The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has a new acting director of the Division of Investigative Oversight: Brian Mozer.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Thank You Retractionwatch.

Weekend reads: Top researchers resign over publishing issues; organized crime meets publishing; infamous fraudster rides in on a horse

retractionwatch

Ah yes, the Ethics of Science.

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at authors who publish once every five days, a revoked PhD following a retraction, and a case of what sounds like irony. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A top cancer researcher resigns  after reports that he failed to disclose millions in payments “from health care companies in dozens of research articles.” That prompts our co-founders to ask, “Why do medical journals keep taking authors at their word?” (STAT)
• H. Gilbert Welch, a top health care policy scholar, has resigned from his faculty position at Dartmouth, after an investigation concluded that he had committed research misconduct in a paper. Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine is again refusing to retract the article, even after the Committee on Publication Ethics suggested they should consider it. (STAT)
• “Organised crime in certain countries has realised there is a lot of money to be made here.” Our Ivan Oransky talks to ABC News Australia about the black market in China and elsewhere.
• “Once Implicated in Cloning Fraud, This Scientist Now Wants to Bring Back an Extinct Ice-Age Horse.” Hwang Woo-Suk rides in on an…Ice-Age horse. (David Grossman, Popular Science)
• “So what’s with the talk of burning things to the ground?” Tom Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education visits the annual meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. He also profiles James Heathers and Nick Brown, whom we wrote about in February.
• An investigation into the work of Olivier Voinnet “uncovered manipulation of certain figures. However, the commission’s report confirms that Voinnet did not personally initiate this manipulation.” However, “since Voinnet implicitly trusted his former employees at IBMP and saw no reason to be suspicious up to the summer of 2016, some manipulated data may also have potentially crept in to the corrections that he made to the research articles. Voinnet will now rectify these immediately.” (ETH-Zurich) As of now, Voinnet has 8 retractions, 4 expressions of concern, and 24 corrections, according to our database.
• “Journals shouldn’t shrink from offering criticisms that may be considered inconvenient, say the editors of a BMJ journal in the latest round of a dispute over the quality of a Cochrane review.” (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ; sub req’d)
• “Should We Still Cite the Scholarship of Serial Harassers and Sexists?” asks Nikki Usher. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Some thoughts on the EU’s Plan S for open access: “Open access will curtail profits but not quality or freedom,” says Lenny Teytelman in Times Higher Education. “Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free,” says George Monbiot in The Guardian.
• The Netherlands has a new Code For Research Conduct.
• A new policy from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) “lays out the expectation that our awardees will make the data from their PCORI-funded research projects available to third-party requestors. Very importantly, it provides funding to our awardees for their time and effort in preparing the data to be shared.” (PCORI)
• Should the UK create a new committee to ensure that misconduct investigations are done properly? The government says it will look into the possibility.
• “In a letter sent to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins on Thursday, alcohol researcher Dr. Michael Siegel of Boston University School of Public Health called on NIH to retract and apologize for a statement on the website of NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism,” reports Sharon Begley. (STAT)
• “A University of Bristol lecturer has resigned after admitting that he fabricated his research.” (BBC)
• A new grant from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity will be used ‘to develop a data-searching tool that will boost the scale at which articles are automatically searched to detect figure reuse, thus finding cases of potential inauthenticity and inappropriate reuses much more quickly and across broader repositories of information.” (press release)
• Spanish Health Minister Carmen Montón has resigned after allegations of plagiarism in her master’s degree. (El Pais)
• “Publication pressure and scientific misconduct: why we need more open governance.” (Simon Gandevia, Spinal Cord)
• “In a bid to make it easier for university and college teachers to earn points to enhance their research score for recruitment and promotion, the University Grants Commission has decided to treat all peer-reviewed journals at par with its own list of approved journals.” (Vikas Pathak, The Hindu)
• Who are the world’s top reviewers? Find out who Publons ranked.
• “How Would You Ensure Diversity In Peer Review?” asks The Scholarly Kitchen. PLOS Blogs talks to Cassidy Sugimoto about the same issue.
• “Academic publishing is a mess and it makes culture wars dumber,” says Rob Beschizza of some recent controversial cases. (BoingBoing)
• Thou shalt not steal — nor plagiarize. A Christian counseling organization leader faces plagiarism charges. (Michael Gryboski, Christian Post)
• “Twitter Is Denying Access To Its Data To A Prominent Opioid Sales Researcher,” Dan Vergano reports. (BuzzFeed)
• “You are correct in pointing out that we mistakenly identified a significant difference … These [corrected] results suggest that education, while highly effective for engendering healthy life behaviors, had no effect on controlling the BMI of the participants (Table 3).” (The Journal of Nursing Research)
• A scientist at GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets to use at a Chinese startup. (Mark Reisch, Chemical & Engineering News)
• “Research fraud should incur suspension of the license to practice.” A new white paper in Intensive Care Medicine.
• According to prosecutors, a former Washington University employee “committed mail fraud through a variety of means, including seeking reimbursement from the university for contract work she had done for her personal benefit, charged gift cards to a fellow employee’s university account, and traveled around the world using falsified invoices.” (Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed)
• “Peer reviewers in developing nations are underrepresented,” suggests a new report. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
• A look at the overrepresentation of review articles in citations, and the effect of that phenomenon on the literature. (RubenMiranda and Esther Garcia-Carpintero; Journal of Informetrics; sub req’d)
• How often do dental journals pull papers? Sorry, couldn’t resist. (Journal of Dentistry, sub req’d)

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Thank You Retractionwatch.

Gun Activists Praise Court Ruling In Favor of Campus Carry

the college fix
Keil Huber - The University of Iowa •August 31, 2018

Anti-gun professors lose a second time in appeals court; free speech groups silent

Activists with pro-gun groups are applauding a federal appeals court’s recent dismissal of a lawsuit challenging a Texas campus carry law. The ruling dealt a blow to the three professors who sought to nullify the law on First Amendment grounds.

This is the second time the professors have lost the case in court. The suit was thrown out, and the concealed carry law upheld, by a federal district judge in July of 2017. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has upheld that decision, Inside Higher Ed reported, with the court stating that “none of the cited evidence alleges a certainty that a license-holder will illegally brandish a firearm in a classroom.”

Gun rights activists have applauded the decision.

Michael Newbern, spokesman for the campus carry group Students for Concealed Carry, provided The College Fix with a statement from Quinn Cox, the southwest regional director of the organization

“I am pleased to see this two-year-old law upheld. Once again, opponents of campus carry have failed to provide evidence that campus carry makes college campuses less safe or inhibits the free exchange of ideas,” said Cox.

“In Texas, vetted, licensed adults have been allowed to take their concealed firearms into places like movie theaters, churches, and public libraries for more than 20 years. It is silly to think that expanding this law to include the buildings of public colleges would somehow violate the U.S. Constitution,” Cox added.

Alice Tripp, a lobbyist and legislative director for the Texas State Rifle Association, also supported the decision.

“Last summer I sat through most of the federal court hearing, so I followed this closely. I heard the judge say to the plaintiffs that before they got too wrapped up in their witnesses to understand that he was going to rule against them and that they of course would appeal,” Tripp told The Fix via email.

“Nothing is ever a sure thing, but we believe that the appeals court made exactly the correct ruling,” Tripp said, stating that she regularly carries concealed handguns in the Texas state capitol.

“Nothing ‘controversial’ ever happens there and no one has raised the First Amendment issue,” she said.

Court rules that campus carry law doesn’t violate First Amendment

The concealed carry law, according to an informational page on the University of Texas’s website, has allowed for concealed carry license holders to carry concealed handguns throughout public university campuses since Aug. 1, 2016. The law “gives public universities some discretion to regulate campus carry,” but those regulations may not “generally prohibit” or “have the effect of generally prohibiting” concealed campus carry.

That same website declares that “UT staff and faculty members do not have authority to ban handguns from classrooms.”

Shortly before the law took effect, three University of Texas instructors challenged the law in court. Professors Jennifer Glass, Lisa Moore and Mia Carter claimed that allowing students to carry firearms on campus would have a “chilling effect” on classroom free speech, thus violating their speech rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“[R]obust academic debate in the classroom inevitably will be dampened to some degree by the fear that it could expose other students or themselves to gun violence,” the lawsuit stated.

The appeals court rejected that argument, noting that the plaintiffs “cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.”

Free speech groups silent on ruling

Though the lawsuit hinged on a somewhat novel interpretation of free speech rights, pro-First Amendment groups were silent on the decision.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a campus watchdog group that monitors free speech violations on campuses across the country, declined to comment on the case. The First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C. did not respond to requests for comment.

The American Civil Liberties Union declined to comment on the matter. Imelda Mejia, a spokeswoman for ACLU’s Texas branch, told The Fix via email: “Unfortunately, we aren’t involved in the case and don’t usually speak on anything at the federal level.”

Mejia directed The Fix to the ACLU’s national headquarters, where ACLU spokesman Thomas Dresslar told The Fix via email: “Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that we do not have anyone that is able to speak to you about this.”

Though the ACLU has historically been a robust defender of American free speech, it is more equivocal on the subject of gun rights. Its Second Amendment webpage states that the group has “long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right” and that the ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court rulings that have found an individual right in the Second Amendment.

“However, particular federal or state laws on licensing, registration, prohibition, or other regulation of the manufacture, shipment, sale, purchase or possession of guns may raise civil liberties questions,” the page states.

MORE: In victory for gun rights activists, district court tosses anti-campus carry lawsuit

MORE: A new women’s gun advocacy group highlights the popularity of Texas campus carry
 
Thank you Mr Huber and The College Fix.

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Management Researcher With 16 Retractions Has New Professorship

Retraction Watch
August 14, 2018 Author Alison McCook

Ulrich Lichtenthaler, a management professor who has had to retract 16 papers for data irregularities, has a new position in academia.

According to a news release from the International School of Management (ISM), a business school based in Germany, Lichtenthaler has been appointed Professor of Business Management and Entrepreneurship at the Cologne campus. Lichtenthaler is also taking over as one of the directors of the Entrepreneurship Institute at ISM, which conducts research in the field.

Lichtenthaler’s name may be familiar to readers: After journals retracted more than a dozen of his articles, he resigned from a previous post at the University of Mannheim in 2015.
We emailed Lichtenthaler to ask if he had disclosed his history to his new employers; he forwarded the email to ISM’s head of marketing and sales, who told us:

Dr. Ulrich Lichtenthaler has been appointed Professor at International School of Management (ISM), effective as of March 1st, 2018. The appointment is based on a due appointment process. This process is by standard subject to examination by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Prior discrepancies and retracted publications of Dr. Ulrich Lichtenthaler were known in advance to the appointment process.

In 2013, the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management, where he earned his PhD, withdrew Lichtenthaler’s teaching qualifications; we asked the ISM spokesperson if that affects his current position. She told us:

[ISM] is an application-focused University of Applied Sciences, putting emphasis on practice-oriented teaching. In this regard, Dr. Ulrich Lichtenthaler has specific expertise in business practice and high qualities in teaching.

She added:

ISM is a ’Fachhochschule’ (University of Applied Sciences), which is within the German educational system distinct from a ‘Universität’ (Research University). Appointment criteria for a ‘Fachhochschule’ as compared to a ‘Universität’ are primarily a PhD degree, experience in business practice and experience in teaching. A ‘Habilitation’ (Venia Legendi or Teaching License, as you referred to) is not required at a ‘Fachhochschule’.

His new appointment has caused some reactions; one commenter on a site about jobs in economics wrote:

holy s**t… wtf… fake or real?

When Joel West, a professor at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, Calif., announced the appointment on Twitter, one reader said he was “gobsmacked.”

West told us that, since he learned about Lichtenthaler’s appointment, he’s heard a “range of reactions” from people in the field:

It’s just really frustrating. Even when you have a well document case of serial academic fraud, that it’s not disqualifying for another position in academia.

Lichtenthaler’s past caused some collateral damage: In 2015, one of his frequent co-authors and head of a department at WHU — Otto Beisheim School of Management was charged with “severe scientific misconduct” for not spotting many of the issues with Lichtenthaler’s work.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.


Thank You Ms McCook and Retraction Watch.

Over 90% of America's Top Colleges Regulate Free Speech

freebeacon
Rachel Frommer
December 20, 2017 5:00 am

One-third employ severely restrictive policies

Over 90 percent of the America's top colleges maintain policies regulating campus free speech, with one third employing severely restrictive policies, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported in its annual end-of-year analysis on campus speech and harassment policies—what FIRE terms "speech codes"—found that over half of the 461 schools included in FIRE's study continue to use methods that have some "chilling effect" on expression.

One in nine campuses continue to preserve "free speech zones," or limited strips of campus to which administrators at public institutions restrict demonstrations, pamphleting, and other public expressions of views, according to the report. These zones can make up less than 1 percent of a campus, according to FIRE.

Samantha Harris, vice president of policy research at FIRE, said such policy is "blatantly unconstitutional."

The U.S. Justice Department has publicly supported students who have filed suits against their colleges zoning guidelines, and the state legislatures of Colorado, Missouri, Arizona, Virginia, Kentucky, and Utah have all approved bills this year banning zones at public universities.

Yet, there has been no tidal wave in eradicating the zones policies.

"Schools, understandably, need to maintain order, and prior restrain policies are attractive and effective," said Harris. "It's the path of least resistance."

Students should be on alert for language in student handbooks banning "offensive speech," a rule banning all spontaneous protest activity, or requirement that students receive prior approval for all club activity.

"The more broad, the more restrictive," Harris offered as a rule of thumb.

Harris urged schools to prioritize protecting speech with a content-neutral statement, like the one issued at the University of Chicago in 2012 and since adopted by 27 other schools or faculty bodies.

But, crucially, universities must then actually follow through. Even when administrators take free speech promises, they can fail to stand by that principle when the heat is on, said Harris.

She pointed to the infamous 2015 incident at Yale, where a pair of married academics who urged students not to be easily offended by Halloween costumes were ultimately forced out of the institution not by official fiat, but due to student pressure.

"You want to be making your position on free speech known before a crisis," said Harris. "Adopt the ‘Chicago Statement' as a first principle, but then put it in all of the official materials at orientation, and integrate it into other policies."

Harris said an increasing number of schools received FIRE's "green light," the group's recognition of a school without its anti-free speech policies.

Since the report was completed, another two schools have been awarded the "green" rating, bringing the total up to 37.

"There's a lot of work left to be done," said Harris. "But we don't want to make perfect the enemy of good."
This entry was posted in Culture and tagged College Campuses, First Amendment. Bookmark the permalink.

Thank You Ms Frommer and Free Beacon

Its Time To Re-Think Education - Part 1 (Indoctrination)

Never seen it handled with more insight and uncompromising Hell Fire.

This is a Must Read. Don't put it off.  

Only a system as ruthless and relentlessly totalitarian as our Edu/Indoctrination complex could scam the tax payers into paying them to invent Thought Crimes.

Via Zerohedge
Tyler Durden

Dec 12, 2017 8:40 PM

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
– Mark Twain

As a father of two young children, my thoughts have increasingly started to center around their young lives and the future world they’ll inhabit. Such considerations quickly lead to stressful questions such as, what are the best schools in the area? Which option can provide the best environment in which to thrive? If the best options aren’t public, can we afford them? Is it worth the money? All these questions and more have filled the minds of my wife and I over the past couple of years, but lately we’ve started to ask even bigger questions, such as whether the compulsory education system as it exists in the U.S. in 2017 makes any sense in the first place. I’m increasingly starting to conclude that it doesn’t.

Before I get into that, let’s take a step back. A lot of what I do here at Liberty Blitzkrieg is highlight what’s perverse and destructive about human behavior at this time, and how things can be made dramatically better in the future. If I had to summarize my worldview concisely, I’d state that human beings at the moment are living under highly centralized, hierarchical power structures which are gamed by unethical, greedy and corrupt people at the top who exploit the masses ruthlessly.

Since the worst of humanity will always work hardest and most violently to attain power (this will always be the case), the only way to achieve lasting, positive change is to systemically move to a different model for human activity. Trying to get decent people at the top of a highly centralized power structure is counterproductive and merely a short-term solution if it can even be achieved in the first place. What we need to do is tear down and reduce centralized power as much possible in the first place. If power becomes distributed far more widely across the planet, the ability for mass control and consolidation becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.

The most significant theme of the next hundred years (at least) will be a dramatic shift toward decentralized networks in nearly all aspects of human affairs. We’ve already seen its profound impact in a dramatic decentralization of information/media content creation and distribution, and we’re starting to see its impact when it comes to currency/monetary systems. Without the arrival and viral adoption of the internet on the scene, none of this would’ve been possible. More importantly, only 50% of the planet is currently online and massive social media networks have only been going for a decade or so. If we assume the internet isn’t going anywhere, we’re only in the very, very beginning stages of how it’ll ultimately shape human affairs.

As I noted in the recent post, Bitcoin, Terence McKenna and the Future of the Internet:

I remain in awe of the implications of people across the world easily talking to one another in real time and forming global networks. We’ve become so accustomed to social media at this point many of us already take for granted how extraordinary and revolutionary it really is. Nothing like this has ever happened before in human history, and it’s hard for me not to be extremely optimistic about its impact on life here on earth over a longer time horizon.

One of the most remarkable things about humans across the world talking to one another, is it becomes increasingly difficult to manipulate distinct populations into hating each other and rallying around wars that only benefit elite sociopaths in the first place.

As things stand now, people from all over the planet are examining the way the world functions and coming to the conclusion that it’s completely insane and anti-human. We live in a world where we’re told to be slaves to authority and expert judgement, despite the fact that such figures are consistently and spectacularly wrong, with their proclamations often leading to massive levels of death, destruction and economic collapse all over the world. To summarize, the world as it’s currently organized is transparently insane and cannot stand up to even the slightly degree of scrutiny. As more and more people wake up to this reality, the world will change in unimaginable ways. The earth as it stands today will be recognizable in 25 years.

Although I’ve discussed what this means when it comes to governing institutions and monetary systems on many occasions this year, one area that I’ve only begun to explore is education. As our kids creep toward the age where most children enter the school system, my wife and I have started to examine what this system looks like, and if it’s as insane as everything else about the world today. The answer seems to be, yes.

Earlier this year, I came across a 1990 speech given by famed teacher and author, John Taylor Gatto, and it completely and totally blew my mind. I highlight a few excerpts below, but cannot stress enough how important it is to read the entire thing. It’s one of the most powerful pieces of information I’ve ever shared.
Enjoy:

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching – that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard…

Here is another curiosity to think about. The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate” – that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic – because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves…

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does…
I could name a few other conditions that school reform would have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television, or both. It’s a simple matter [of] arithmetic, between schooling and television all the time the children have is eaten away. That’s what has destroyed the American family, it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children. Television and schooling, in those things the fault must lie.

What can be done? First we need a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit, day after day, year after year. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road to take that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.

Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command center made up of “experts”, a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato’s republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology – drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach…

Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer – these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of “school” open – to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn’t succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6000 in l976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can, too.

Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents – and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 – we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press – a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I’ve said my piece. Thank you.

This above excerpts are from a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990. Please read the entire thing and share it with the following link: Why Schools Don’t Educate.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss the concept of unschooling and why it’s captured my attention recently.

Thank You for bringing this to everyone's attention, Mr Durden.

Prof Calls For Black Xmas To Disrupt White Capitalism

campusreform
Nikita Vladimirov Investigative Reporter @nikvofficial on Nov 29, 2017 at 4:09 PM EDT

A California State University-Los Angeles professor is urging Americans to participate in “Black Xmas” by boycotting “white corporations” and fighting “White Capitalism.”

Arguing that "White-supremacist capitalism" is responsible for "state-sanctioned violence against Black people," the Black Xmas website urges people to patronize black businesses "rather than lining the pockets of Trump."


A California State University-Los Angeles professor is urging Americans to participate in a “Black Xmas” by divesting from “white corporations” and fighting “White Capitalism.”

In her op-ed for The Los Angeles Sentinel, Melina Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist and the chair of the school’s Department of Pan-African Studies, explains that “Black Xmas” is “an economic divestment from White corporations and an investment in building Black community through support for Black community organizations and businesses.”


"“Black Lives Matter is dreaming of and building for a #BlackXMas, where we divest from White corporations and invest in building Black community."

[RELATED: BLM protesters shut down ACLU free speech event]

“This call is fundamentally tied to Black Lives Matter’s mission to end state-sanctioned violence against Black people,” the professor continues. “We know that state-sanctioned violence is rooted in White-supremacist capitalism.”

The official website of the initiative provides additional instructions to participants, asking Americans to stop “spending with White corporations” between November 24, 2016 and January 1, 2018.

“Donald Trump embodies White capitalism,” the website states. “If you are anti-Trump, you should hold back your resources from him and the like.”

Alongside general information, the organization also touts a list of “black businesses” around the country, and urges Americans to donate to a list of “black organizations,” including Black Lives Matter.

“Black Lives Matter is dreaming of and building for a #BlackXMas, where we divest from White corporations and invest in building Black community,” Abdullah writes in her op-ed. “Rather than lining the pockets of Trump and other White-supremacist capitalists, donate to Black-led organizations that are building new, liberatory structures in our communities.”

[RELATED: Panelists look to 'decenter whiteness' in university archives]

According to The Blaze, Abdullah also recently explained her stance on “white capitalism” during an appearance on KPFK-FM radio’s “Beautiful Struggle,” where she noted a connection between race and economics.

“We say ‘white capitalism’ because it’s important that we understand that the economic system and the racial structures are connected,” she argued on the program. “We have to not only disrupt the systems of policing that literally kill our people, but we have to disrupt the white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative system that is really the root cause of these police killings.”

Neither California State University nor Professor Abdullah responded to Campus Reform’s requests for comment.

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Thank You Mr Vladimirov and Campus Reform.

Another brain fart from the tanning beds/manure pits of Academia, where theories of mental illness incubate, get Govt Funding to propagandize their faux-legitimacy as science, and do a bang up job of leading us all proudly, hand in hand with Research Funding from the worlds largest drug cartels, Forward into the Glorious World of Next Tuesday. 

 pic creds to thepeoplescube.com

Prof: Racist 'Hate Speech' Causes Cigarette Smoking

Your tax dollars paying for the cushy lifestyles of Behaviorist, Blithering Idiots.

campus reform
Nikita Vladimirov Investigative Reporter @nikvofficial Today at 8:25 AM EDT

A Northwestern University professor argued Wednesday that "hate speech" should be a form of expression that is subject to legal limitation.

Laura Beth Nielsen claims that "racist hate speech" causes negative outcomes like cigarette smoking and PTSD, and should therefore be banned just like incitement to violence.

A Northwestern University professor argued Wednesday that "hate speech" should be a form of expression that is subject to legal limitation.

In an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, sociology professor Laura Beth Nielsen contends that “members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer” when Americans are granted the freedom “to be hateful.”


"Racist hate speech has been linked to cigarette smoking...and post-traumatic stress disorder."

[RELATED: Volokh demolishes Feinstein in campus free speech hearing]

“Perhaps it’s nonsense to characterize the nature of the harm as nothing more than an emotional scratch,” Nielsen postulates. “That’s a reflection of the deep inequalities in our society, and one that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how hate speech affects its targets.”

The professor maintains that free speech is already a limited right, mentioning numerous restrictions on panhandling, protesting veteran’s funerals, advertising, inciting lawless action, and more.

“So soldiers’ families, shoppers, and workers are protected from troubling speech," she deduces. "People of color, women walking down public streets or just living in their dorm on a college campus are not."

To support her argument, Nielsen cites "empirical data" suggesting that “frequent verbal harassment can lead to various negative consequences.” According to the professor, the negative consequences of “racist hate speech” include high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Instead of characterizing racist and sexist hate speech as ‘just speech,’ courts and legislatures need to account for this research and, perhaps, allow the restriction of hate speech as do all of the other economically advanced democracies in the world,” she argues.

While Nielsen briefly considers basic objections that could be raised by “free-speech absolutists,” she reiterated her view that freedom of speech is already “far from absolute.”

[RELATED: UMich paper defends silencing speakers who 'outrage' students]

“But these free-speech absolutists must at least acknowledge two facts," she declares. "First, the right to speak already is far from absolute. Second, they are asking disadvantaged members of our society to shoulder a heavy burden with serious consequences. Because we are 'free' to be hateful, members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer."

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government may not prohibit hate speech in a case involving an all-Asian American rock band called The Slants, whose name is also a derogatory term for Asians.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing an opinion for four justices, argued that the ability of the government to restrict offensive speech “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment."

“Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful," Alito acknowledged, "but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

[RELATED: Evergreen students: 'F*** free speech' that 'validates' hate]

In an interview with Campus Reform, Nielsen said that her main criticism of the legal system is its failure to “recognize some harms even as they recognize others," adding that "those that are recognized tend to be the ones endured by those who already enjoy privilege in our society.”

Zachary Greenberg, Justice Robert H. Jackson Legal Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), agreed that freedom of speech is not "absolute," but warned that there is no clear definition of the term “hate speech.”

“You can ask a hundred people what hate speech is and you get a thousand different answers,” Greenberg told Campus Reform, later adding that “there is really no ending point” once you start punishing offensive expression.

“When you have these very vague, ambiguous terms for punishing speech, you end up suppressing and punishing a wide variety of speech, much more speech than what is intended to be punished to begin with,” he pointed out.

Greenberg also noted that certain “buffer zones” that restrict protests around funerals have been struck down by the Supreme Court, and maintained that even they are not necessarily a “permissible restriction” under the constitutional law.



Thank You Mr Vladimirov and Campus Reform,