Fallout From the Pandemic: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading

If last November's elections are any guide, next to gas prices inflation, K-12 education will be the most volatile electoral issue facing congressional Democrats in this years midterms.

At the New York,Times, "It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading":

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“We’re in new territory,” Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic’s toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are “pretty dramatic,” she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

The literacy crisis did not start with the pandemic. In 2019, results on national and international exams showed stagnant or declining American performance in reading, and widening gaps between high and low performers. The causes are multifaceted, but many experts point to a shortage of educators trained in phonics and phonemic awareness — the foundational skills of linking the sounds of spoken English to the letters that appear on the page. The pandemic has compounded those issues. Children spent months out of the classroom, where they were supposed to learn the basics of reading — the ABCs, what sound a “b” or “ch” makes. Many first and second graders returned to classrooms needing to review parts of the kindergarten curriculum. But nearly half of public schools have teaching vacancies, especially in special education and the elementary grades, according to a federal survey conducted in December and January.

Even students with well-trained teachers have had far fewer hands-on hours with them than before the pandemic, which has been defined by closures, uneven access to online instruction, quarantine periods and — even on the best days — virus-related interruptions to regular classroom routines. Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading skills they need to learn the rest of the curriculum, from math word problems to civics lessons. Billions of federal stimulus dollars are flowing to districts for tutoring and other supports, but their effect may be limited if schools cannot find quality staff members to hire...

 

Make America Florida

From Stephen Green, at Instapundit, "Florida Will Be First State to Recommend Against COVID-19 Vax for Healthy Kids."

The Atlantic: Schools' Masking Policy Has Imposed a Serious, Possibly Permanent, Developmental Delay on Many Students

At AoSHQ, "The Atlantic published an article admitting the obvious: The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from."

Xi Jinping's Power Grab

From Jude Blanchette, at Foreign Affairs, "Xi’s Gamble: The Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster":

Xi Jinping is a man on a mission. After coming to power in late 2012, he moved rapidly to consolidate his political authority, purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of rampant corruption, sideline his enemies, tame China’s once highflying technology and financial conglomerates, crush internal dissent, and forcefully assert China’s influence on the international stage. In the name of protecting China’s “core interests,” Xi has picked fights with many of his neighbors and antagonized countries farther away—especially the United States. Whereas his immediate predecessors believed China must continue to bide its time by overseeing rapid economic growth and the steady expansion of China’s influence through tactical integration into the existing global order, Xi is impatient with the status quo, possesses a high tolerance for risk, and seems to feel a pronounced sense of urgency in challenging the international order.

Why is he in such a rush? Most observers have settled on one of two diametrically opposite hypotheses. The first holds that Xi is driving a wide range of policy initiatives aimed at nothing less than the remaking of the global order on terms favorable to the CCP. The other view asserts that he is the anxious overseer of a creaky and outdated Leninist political system that is struggling to keep its grip on power. Both narratives contain elements of truth, but neither satisfactorily explains the source of Xi’s sense of urgency.

A more accurate explanation is that Xi’s calculations are determined not by his aspirations or fears but by his timeline. Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.

By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries. Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing, and Xi has now placed China on a risky trajectory, one that threatens the achievements his predecessors secured in the post-Mao era. His belief that the CCP must guide the economy and that Beijing should rein in the private sector will constrain the country’s future economic growth. His demand that party cadres adhere to ideological orthodoxy and demonstrate personal loyalty to him will undermine the governance system’s flexibility and competency. His emphasis on an expansive definition of national security will steer the country in a more inward and paranoid direction. His unleashing of “Wolf Warrior” nationalism will produce a more aggressive and isolated China. Finally, Xi’s increasingly singular position within China’s political system will forestall policy alternatives and course corrections, a problem made worse by his removal of term limits and the prospect of his indefinite rule.

Xi believes he can mold China’s future as did the emperors of the country’s storied past. He mistakes this hubris for confidence—and no one dares tell him otherwise. An environment in which an all-powerful leader with a single-minded focus cannot hear uncomfortable truths is a recipe for disaster, as China’s modern history has demonstrated all too well...

Keep reading.

PHOTO CREDIT: "Xi giving a speech at the U.S. Department of State in 2012, with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then Vice-President Joe Biden in the background. Seated in the front row is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger." (Wikipedia.)

Police Clear Ottawa Truckers at Gunpoint (VIDEO)

Canada's a police state.

I can't ever recall --- in my 45 years as a political scientist --- such an unjust authoritarian crackdown in a Western democratic country. French truckers shut down the entire country nearly every year or two. It's just a thing. I mean, Black Lives Matter is a protected group in American politics (thanks to coastal/beltway elites in cahoots with the Democrat media complex), but it's still something that riots continued throughout 2020 --- at least from the moment of George Floyd murder, practically up until today --- without a nationwide crackdown, fucking martial law! Regardless of ideology, most American cities won't allow citizens to burn it all to the ground. (But then there's always Portland. *Eye-roll.*)

It's the working class that's a threat to global elites, and their only response is to call fed-up workers racists, Nazis, and the "fringe minority." And freezing all assets of lawfully protesting Canadians (soon coming to America) is Beijing-level totalitarianism. Canada is a pariah state. Expect a mass voters' revolt now, especially in the rest of the country --- outside dirtbag Ottawa --- among the manly agricultural, rustic burgs across the plains, as citizens everywhere refuse to surrender their God-given rights, regardless of what civil liberties Canada's worthless "Charter" allegedly protects. 

What a damned disgrace. A woman was purportedly trampled to death under hoof, as Trudeau's mounted assassins charged overwhelmingly protesters. 

The New York Times is bad enough, but I've already checked the bloodthirsty Canadian newspapers, and I just can't. 

So, at NYT, "Ottawa Protesters Cleared From Parliament Encampment":

OTTAWA — The center of a sprawling protest in the Canadian capital was cleared of demonstrators for the first time in three weeks on Saturday, following an aggressive push by armed police officers to drive out the protesters.

Starting about 10 a.m. police advanced on trucks that had been parked on Wellington Street, the thoroughfare in front of the Parliament building, drawing guns on some vehicles, and arresting protesters inside and nearby the trucks.

The operation was an escalation by the authorities to finally end the protests, which began with a convoy of truckers rallying against vaccine mandates, and later inspired demonstrations around the world.

Officers, some brandishing batons, others holding rifles, pushed to regain the area in front of Parliament, expanding an operation that began on Friday to remove demonstrators and parked trucks that have blocked the city’s downtown core.

In the heart of the encampment, the police pushed people back with batons and irritant spray. They advanced methodically truck by truck as demonstrators shouted, “Shame on you!” At points, officers trained guns on individual trucks, or pointed them at the vehicles’ windows. They banged on doors, opening them up in an attempt to check for or dislodge any occupants who were still inside.

A recording played in French and English, as the police advanced. “You must leave,” it said. “Anyone found in the zone will be arrested.”

The police operation appeared to be a final salvo in the government’s belated effort to break up the occupation. In recent weeks, the demonstrations have attracted a variety of protesters airing grievances about pandemic restrictions, claims of government overreach and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s stewardship of the country.

By midmorning, police had cleared the demonstrators from what had been the occupation’s core, Wellington Street, in front of the house of Parliament, and set up barricades. Most of the trucks entrenched there for the past three weeks drove off when the advance began; a few abandoned vehicles remained...

Keep reading. 

The Truth About the Ottawa Truckers' Convoy

As the cliche goes, if you read one thing about the Ottawa freedom convoy, make it this. 

From N.S. Lyons, at the Upheaval, "Reality Honks Back:About those truckers…":

To simplify [his thesis], let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today.

Much has rightly been made of the “working class” and their alienation from “the elite.” But this phrasing comes mixed up with associations about material wealth and economic class that aren’t necessarily helpful. Many (though not all) of those who support “populist” politics in opposition to the elite tend to frequently be either fairly solidly middle-class skilled tradesmen, relatively successful small businessmen, or land-holders (e.g. farmers, ranchers, real estate entrepreneurs) who are often actually relatively well-off. It is the character of their work that seems to shape the common identity and values of each side of the class divide more than income.

So too does this difference appear to widen – and perhaps even help explain the root of – the huge and growing gender divide in politics, given the fairly well-established preference (on average) by men to work with “things” (more concrete) and women to work with “people” (more abstract).

Meanwhile, this class divide also maps closely onto another much-discussed political wedge: the geographic split between cities, where most of the Virtuals are concentrated, and the outlying exurbs and rural hinterlands, where the Physicals remain predominant. I would suggest the nature of these two classes plays a significant role in shaping the local cultures of these places. And as anyone following events in the United States, U.K., Australia, or Europe over the last few years (such as Brexit, or the Yellow Vest protests in France) could tell you by now, partisan differences between urban metropolitan cores and provinces seem to have become one of the defining features of politics across the Western democratic world.

Below is a map of the eastern half of the United States showing at very high detail the geographic distribution of votes cast in the 2016 presidential election. The urban-rural divide between political parties couldn’t be more stark.

Differences in the Canadian electoral system mean I can’t show you a similar map for Canada, but you can be assured that the urban-rural divide there is just as significant.

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.

In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.

The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.

When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking breaks (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world.

It turns out that not only do the Physicals still exist, and are (for now) still able to drive themselves into the heart of the cities, they actually still have power – a lot of power. In the middle of a supply chain crisis, those truckers represent the total reliance of the ruling elite on the very people they find alien and abhorrent. To many of the Virtuals, this is existentially frightening.

The reaction of the Virtual ruling class – represented by the absolutely archetypal modern progressive male, Justin Trudeau – to this challenge has been extremely telling, and rather predictable...

RTWT. 

 

How Chinese Grand Strategy Exploits U.S. Power

 From Mark Pottinger, at Foreign Affairs, "Beijing’s American Hustle":

Although many Americans were slow to realize it, Beijing’s enmity for Washington began long before U.S. President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and even prior to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012. Ever since taking power in 1949, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has cast the United States as an antagonist. But three decades ago, at the end of the Cold War, Chinese leaders elevated the United States from just one among many antagonists to their country’s primary external adversary—and began quietly revising Chinese grand strategy, embarking on a quest for regional and then global dominance.

The United States and other free societies have belatedly woken up to this contest, and a rare spirit of bipartisanship has emerged on Capitol Hill. But even this new consensus has failed to adequately appreciate one of the most threatening elements of Chinese strategy: the way it exploits vital aspects of American and other free societies and weaponizes them in the service of Chinese ambitions. Important U.S. institutions, especially in finance and technology, cling to self-destructive habits acquired through decades of “engagement,” an approach to China that led Washington to prioritize economic cooperation and trade above all else.

If U.S. policymakers and legislators find the will, however, there is a way to pull Wall Street and Silicon Valley back onside, convert the United States’ vulnerabilities into strengths, and mitigate the harmful effects of Beijing’s political warfare. That must begin with bolder steps to stem the flow of U.S. capital into China’s so-called military-civil fusion enterprises and to frustrate Beijing’s aspiration for leadership in, and even monopoly control of, high-tech industries—starting with semiconductor manufacturing. The United States must also do more to expose and confront Beijing’s information warfare, which spews disinformation and sows division by exploiting U.S. social media platforms—platforms that are themselves banned inside China’s own borders. And Washington should return the favor by making it easier for the Chinese people to access authentic news from outside China’s so-called Great Firewall.

Some have argued that because the CCP’s ideology holds little appeal abroad, it poses an insignificant threat to U.S. interests. Yet that ideology hardly appeals to the Chinese people, either, and that hasn’t prevented the party from dominating a nation of 1.4 billion people. The problem is not the allure of Leninist totalitarianism but the fact that Leninist totalitarianism—as practiced by the well-resourced and determined rulers of Beijing—has tremendous coercive power. Accordingly, U.S. leaders should not ignore the ideological dimension of this contest; they should emphasize it. American values—liberty, independence, faith, tolerance, human dignity, and democracy—are not just what the United States fights for: they are also among the most potent weapons in the country’s arsenal, because they contrast so starkly with the CCP’s hollow vision of one-party rule at home and Chinese domination abroad. Washington should embrace those strengths and forcefully remind American institutions that although placating China might help their balance sheets in the short term, their long-term survival depends on the free markets and legal rights that only U.S. leadership can secure.

THE ART OF POLITICAL WARFARE

The West’s sluggishness in realizing that it has been on the receiving end of China’s elaborate, multidecade hostile strategy has a lot to do with the hubris that followed the United States’ triumph in the Cold War. U.S. policymakers assumed that the CCP would find it nearly impossible to resist the tide of liberalization set off by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. According to this line of thought, by helping enrich China, the United States would loosen the party’s grip on its economy, people, and politics, setting the conditions for a gradual convergence with the pluralistic West.

That was, to put it mildly, a miscalculation, and it stemmed in part from the methods the CCP employs to prosecute its grand strategy. With enviable discipline, Beijing has long camouflaged its intention to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal order. Beijing co-opted Western technologies that Americans assumed would help democratize China and instead used them to surveil and control its people and to target a growing swath of the world’s population outside China’s borders. The party now systematically cultivates Western corporations and investors that, in turn, pay deference to Chinese policies and even lobby their home capitals in ways that align with the CCP’s objectives.

Beijing’s methods are all manifestations of “political warfare,” the term that the U.S. diplomat George Kennan, the chief architect of the Cold War strategy of containment, used in a 1948 memo to describe “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” Kennan credited the Soviet Union with “the most refined and effective” conduct of political warfare. Were he alive today, Kennan would marvel at the ways Beijing has improved on the Kremlin’s playbook.

Kennan’s memo was meant to disabuse U.S. national security officials of “a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war.” He was hopeful that Americans could shed this handicap and learn to fight in the political realm to forestall a potentially catastrophic military conflict with the Soviets. To a great extent, Washington did exactly that, marshaling partners on every continent to contain Soviet influence.

Today, free and open societies are once again coming to terms with the reality of political warfare. This time, however, the campaign is directed by a different kind of communist country—one that possesses not just military power but also economic power derived from its quasi-marketized version of capitalism and systematic theft of technology. Although there are holdouts—financiers, entertainers, and former officials who benefited from engagement, for example—polls show that the general public in the United States, European countries, and several Asian countries is finally attuned to the malevolent nature of the Chinese regime and its global ambitions. This should come as no surprise, given the way the CCP has conducted itself in recent years: covering up the initial outbreak of COVID-19, attacking Indian troops on the Chinese-Indian border, choking off trade with Australia, crushing the rule of law in Hong Kong, and intensifying a campaign of genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China.

HIDE AND BIDE NO MORE

Those aggressive moves represent merely a new phase of a decades-old strategy. In writing his recent book The Long Game, the U.S. scholar Rush Doshi pored over Chinese leaders’ speeches, policy documents, and memoirs to document how Beijing came to set its sights on dismantling American influence around the globe. According to Doshi, who now serves on the National Security Council staff as a China director, three events badly rattled CCP leaders: the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square; the lopsided, U.S.-led victory over the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces in early 1991; and the collapse of the Soviet Union that same year. “The Tiananmen Square protests reminded Beijing of the American ideological threat; the swift Gulf War victory reminded it of the American military threat; and loss of the shared Soviet adversary reminded it of the American geopolitical threat,” writes Doshi. “In short order, the United States quickly replaced the Soviet Union as China’s primary security concern, that in turn led to a new grand strategy, and a thirty-year struggle to displace American power was born.”

China’s new grand strategy aimed first to dilute U.S. influence in Asia, then to displace American power more overtly from the region, and ultimately to dominate a global order more suited to Beijing’s governance model. That model isn’t merely authoritarian; it’s “neo-totalitarian,” according to Cai Xia, who served for 15 years as a professor in the highest temple of Chinese communist ideology: the Central Party School in Beijing...

Keep reading.

 

Prime Minister Justine Trudeau Hurls Nazi Slurs at Melissa Lantsman, Jewish-Canadian Member of Parliament (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Lantsman on Twitter, "I think the Prime Minister should think long and hard about his own history before singling out a Jewish Member of Parliament and falsely accusing me of standing with a Swastika. What a disgraceful statement unbecoming of anyone in public office - he owes me an apology."

And at the New York Post, "Justin Trudeau sparks outrage after accusing Jewish conservatives of supporting swastikas."

She appeared on Laura Ingraham's show last night:

Justin Trudeau: A liberal Despot

This is from Megan Murphy, the righteous Canadian anti-trans feminist who was kicked off Twitter a couple of years back for violating Jack's politically incorrect diktats. She's in Mexico now, it turns out, in exile and flying under the radar. I miss her voice --- a voice of sanity in a world of madness.

At Spiked, "The Canadian PM has invoked emergency powers to crush the truckers’ peaceful protest":

The Emergencies Act has never been used before in Canadian history. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked only once during peacetime – by Justin’s father, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in the 1970s. The War Measures Act was used to give sweeping powers of arrest and internment to the police in response to a Quebecois separatist group, Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which, in 1970, kidnapped and murdered the deputy premier of Quebec, Pierre Laporte. At the time the powers were invoked, 23 members of the FLQ were already in prison, including four who had been convicted of murder. This was an actual terrorist group, responsible for illegal activities, including bombings, kidnapping and murder – not tens of thousands of happy Canadians, peacefully protesting by playing street hockey, singing the national anthem, dancing, barbequeing and setting up bouncy castles for kids, as we see in Ottawa today.

The Emergencies Act defines a national emergency as an ‘urgent and critical situation’ that ‘seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it’. The Act cannot be applied to lawful advocacy, protest or dissent.

Tellingly, even when the War Measures Act was invoked by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, in response to a group causing actual violence and perpetrating illegal acts, this was widely criticised as an infringement on civil liberties. During what was called the October Crisis, the military was deployed in Quebec and about 400 people were arrested under the measure.

Invoking the Emergency Act now, in response to peaceful Canadians engaging in legal protest, is a stretch of epic and frightening proportions. Yet many progressive Canadians seem relieved at Trudeau’s decision and thankful he is finally ‘taking action’ against the nuisance of having to confront diversity of opinion in their country, after having spent the past two years in a virtual bubble, away from people who hold different views and perspectives to themselves.

The response to the convoy and its supporters has, from the get go, been both inspiring and appalling. Across Canada people have expressed a long forgotten sense of pride in their country. So many – myself included – had lost faith that Canadians would ever push back against the Liberal government’s ongoing abuse of power against its citizens. At the same time, progressives and the mainstream media have engaged in an abhorrent and endless deluge of hateful and defamatory attacks on their neighbours. Claims that protesters are white nationalist, violent terrorists continue to dominate the narrative, without evidence, fuelled by a prime minister intent on pitting Canadians against one another and on ignoring our charter rights.

Ironically, considering the claims of those who insist the Freedom Convoy is a dangerous movement, it is the protesters and their supporters who have faced the most vicious attacks. For instance, GiveSendGo – the crowdfunding platform convoy organisers began using to fundraise in support of the truckers for things like food, lodging and fuel – was hacked this week after it refused to comply with an order from the Superior Court of Justice in Ontario to prevent disbursement of funds. Tammy Giuliani, the owner of a gelato café in Ottawa, was forced to close this week after a list of donors to the convoy’s fundraising campaign was leaked via the hack and those opposing the protests began threatening Giuliani, her staff and the shop. Major banks have frozen accounts collecting funds for the truckers, and the Canadian government has threatened to freeze the bank accounts and suspend the vehicle insurance of truckers who continue to participate in the protests.

Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergency Act is nothing less than an attack on democracy...

RTWT. 

As Ottawa Tries to Stop the Flow of Money to Protesters, Questions Remain on Who Will Be Targeted – and Whether the Tactics Will Work (VIDEO)

Totalitarians.

At Blazing Cat Fur:

Ottawa’s new emergency law enlists a huge range of financial players in a bid to cut off funds to protesters tied to the trucker blockades, but questions remain about who will be targeted and whether it will even work.

A new order and regulations under the Emergencies Act, which the federal government invoked on Monday, requires a long list of entities — this includes banks, insurance companies, credit unions, trust and loan companies, payment processors and online fundraising platforms — to continuously determine whether they should freeze accounts and halt services for individuals or companies tied to illegal assemblies and blockades that have gripped the country for weeks...

Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year

At Amazon, Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.

The World's Proletarian Working-Class Has Awoken! (And Progressive-Socialist Elites Won't Stand For It.)

Following up, "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Invokes Canada's 'Emergencies Act' to Shut Down Truckers' Protest (VIDEO)."

The radical left in power is crushing dissent? Burying the working-class, the alleged dialectical-historic force now driving the world's workers toward the proletarian utopia? 

You don't say? 

Here's Batya:

The workers of the world are literally uniting. And yet these truckers have not been embraced by the left. Instead they have been tagged as fascists and racists by progressive pundits, activists, and politicians—those who tweeted “Stay Home! Slow the Spread!” while truckers delivered their Amazon Prime packages.

This spectacle—of workers fulfilling Marx’s fantasy, only to be smeared by the very people who claim to prioritize the working class—captures in stark relief the split emerging between the working class and the left that used to represent them...

Well, everything's upside down, so what the fuck? The populist-nationalists are gaining the upper hand, and idiot left-progressives are basically propelling the "far right" that they so much hate straight into power. 

Idiots. Bloody idiots, the lot of them.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Invokes Canada's 'Emergencies Act' to Shut Down Truckers' Protest (VIDEO)

This is tantamount to declaring martial law, over peaceful truckers protesting pandemic tyranny. Seriously. 

And Canada's supposed to be the West's model democracy, a nirvana of progressive tolerance and a social safety-net paradise.

Well, no. It's a dystopian nightmare with a disgusting black-face hypocrite tin-pot leader bringing back communist repression in real time. 

The New York Times nails it here, "Trudeau Declares Rare Public Emergency to Quell Protests":

The invocation of the Emergencies Act confers enormous, if temporary, power on the federal government.

It allows the authorities to move aggressively to restore public order, including banning public assembly and restricting travel to and from specific areas. But Mr. Trudeau and members of his cabinet offered repeated assurance that the act would not be used to suspend “fundamental rights.”

It has been half a century since emergency powers were last invoked in Canada. Mr. Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, imposed them during a terrorism crisis in Quebec. Monday was the first time that the 1988 Emergencies Act has been used.

The response by the police and all levels of government to the crisis, which included an almost weeklong blockade of an economically critical border crossing with the United States, has been widely criticized as inadequate. Mr. Trudeau, some critics contend, should have intervened earlier and perhaps even deployed troops to break up the protest.

On Monday, Mr. Trudeau said he would not use his authority under the declaration, which will last for 30 days, to bring in the military, reiterating his previous position against intervention by the armed forces...

Thirty days? Pfft. 

No one believes that. This is a state crackdown on popular dissent. The truckers' right to protest is substantiated by the majority in public opinion, though other surveys cast light on a different majority of Canadians, some hateful fire-breathing fascists looking to crush the truck convoy by military force. Trudeau claims he won't bring out the military, but who needs that when you've got your own gestapo arresting people in their own homes for not wearing a mask.

More, updates at the Ottawa Citizen, "Truck convoy: Trudeau invokes Emergencies Act; Judge approves city's injunction; 'Several' trucks moved off residential streets." 

And at the Wall Street Journal, "Canada’s Trudeau Invokes Emergency Powers to Address Trucker Protests":

OTTAWA—In a highly unusual move, the Canadian government on Monday invoked a series of emergency powers that include limits on public gatherings in a bid to end disruptive demonstrations in the capital city and along the Canada-U.S. border.

The measures, announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, represent one of the most striking responses by a Western government against protests by those opposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates and social restrictions in response to the pandemic, and immediately drew fire from some Canadian leaders and civil-liberties groups.

The government also said Monday the country was extending laws targeting money laundering to capture transactions, including cryptocurrencies, on crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe.

“It is now clear that there are serious challenges to law-enforcement’s ability to effectively enforce the law,” Mr. Trudeau said at a news conference. “We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue.”

Mr. Trudeau’s move to invoke emergency powers comes after police on Sunday reopened access to the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit with the city of Windsor, Ontario. Up until late Sunday night, demonstrators had blocked incoming U.S. vehicles from entering Canada for roughly a week.

Officials said these extraordinary measures were necessary because of the damage done to the economy with the blocking of U.S.-Canada trade. Further, “we’ve seen intimidation, harassment and expressions of hate,” said Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Marco Mendicino, adding scenes in Ottawa have at times represented lawlessness. “That is one of the reasons why we’ve had to take [this] very careful and deliberate step.”

The prime minister’s decision to invoke the special powers faced sharp criticism Monday from both rights groups and some provincial leaders.

Quebec Premier François Legault said he can understand the sentiment that “enough is enough” in Ottawa but believes the planned measures aren’t needed in his province and could be damaging.

“We really need not to put oil on the fire,” Mr. Legault said.

An earlier and much more restrictive version of the legislation, called the War Measures Act, was invoked three times in Canadian history. Its most controversial use was in 1970, when Mr. Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, used the act when he was prime minister to squelch a militant separatist group in Quebec, known as the FLQ.

The government said its invocation of the act doesn’t undermine Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which came into force in 1982 and protects rights considered essential to preserving a free and democratic society. However, there is a debate about whether the government is overstepping in applying the act to those participating in protests and blockades.

Leah West, a national-security expert at Carleton University in Ottawa, said it is unclear that the current protests—in the capital, Ottawa, and at two border crossings in western Canada—meet the legal threshold of a national emergency. Invoking the Emergencies Act if that threshold isn’t met, she said, “sets a precedent that unpopular dissent against the government is enough for the government to take these extraordinary powers into its own hands.”

Prof. West said Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects civil liberties, but protection isn’t absolute. She said that means rights can be limited and still comply with the Charter.

The measures come into effect immediately but Mr. Trudeau must present his reasoning for using the act to parliament and hold a vote within seven days. The leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, said he would support the move, thereby giving the incumbent Liberals enough votes to ensure passage.

Mr. Trudeau said the military wasn’t being deployed against the protesters, and the government wasn’t suspending rights guaranteed under the country’s constitution. He added the measures, which local police forces would enforce, are meant to target specific regions in the country where protests are judged to pose a threat. Mr. Trudeau described the demonstration in Ottawa, now in its 18th day, as “an illegal occupation.”

City of Ottawa officials say the local police force doesn’t have the necessary resources to quell the demonstration, and have asked the federal government for an additional 1,800 officers.

Despite the government’s hard line, protesters believe their message is resonating.

“Any government that’s ever taken freedoms away from people never gives them back,” said Tyler Chiliak, a farmer from western Canada who has been in Ottawa since the Covid-19 protests began.

When he isn’t out commiserating with fellow protesters, he is keeping warm inside his cargo trailer, where he cooks food, keeps bottled water and sleeps.

“It may take a while before we accomplish our goals so to speak. But whether they like it or not things are happening because we are here,” Mr. Chiliak said.

Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland also said the country was extending laws targeting money laundering. All crowdfunding platforms and the payment-service provider they use must register with Canada’s financial-intelligence agency, and report what they deem as large, suspicious donations. The recent protests had success in raising money on GoFundMe...

At the video up top, check out this masked Canadian Karen, at 1:57 minutes, who's ashamed of the truckers' exercise of freedom and natural rights: "I just feel I'm living in another country, like I'm in the states ...," one of the most embarrassing things she's ever seen. 

She's embarrassed. At her fellow countrymen. For standing up against the despotism of the Canadian state.

Oh this world. I can't...

College Students Forgot How to Talk to Each Other

The Democrat Party pandemic lockdown policies have set back, if not destroyed, a generation of young people, and not just school children. 

I know this first hand from my oldest, 26, who moved to San Francisco to start at S.F. State in February 2020. He came back home after one semester in The City, depressed and disappointed at how isolated and inferior was his college experience compared his time at Santiago Canyon College in Orange Park Acres. 

I also know this from teaching college students online for two years. I'm on my fifth semester in a transition to "remote emergency instruction" that was expected to brief and temporary. Even this semester, where my college has gone back to full in-person on-campus classes, more than 50 percent of those enrolled are taking their courses online. Indeed, the enrollment was so low in some of the campus-based classes that over two dozen were cancelled in my department alone. 

You're not getting the full college experience --- and excellence in education --- with online classes. It's good for some very motivated students who thrive in the intense atmosphere of digital learning space, but in my experience, it's not for most. I'm expecting to hear soon about my class schedule for fall, where I've requested to teach all on campus. We'll see how that goes. It feels weird to even be possibly going back. I feel like I need to retrain myself, to get myself fit for teaching in person. Seriously. My lectures are quite stentorian, and I need to be in good cardio-vascular condition. I don't feel like that right now, as I haven't been physically training during the pandemic lockdown. 

This summer I'll be changing my daily routine if all works out and I'm set to resume going to work everyday,  like I used to for 20 years.

In any case, at the Wall Street Journal, "College Students Have to Learn How to Make Small Talk Again":

When students at San Jose State University returned to campus last fall after more than a year of remote learning, lecturer Damon Moon thought they would be chatty and excited to see one another. Instead, he noticed something concerning: They weren’t talking at all.

Before class, students were looking at their phones or laptops. Even in the campus cafeteria, Mr. Moon saw that most students were eating alone, sandwich in one hand, phone in the other.

“They lost the skill to have small talk,” said Mr. Moon, who teaches international business classes. To get a close-up look at this phenomenon, I spoke to Mr. Moon and his students at the university.

“When I was in elementary school or middle school, if I wanted to talk to someone new, I would go up to them and try to strike up a conversation,” said Kian Kashefi, a 19-year-old business accounting major. Now, he said, “it feels weird to talk to anybody new without first connecting on social media.”

In a prolonged pandemic that has shifted more interactions online, college students are finding it harder to strike up conversations and make friends. In the past, socializing wasn’t just a perk but also a big incentive for students choosing campus life.

College instructors worry that if they don’t do something to facilitate conversation in class, their students will be unprepared to enter the workforce. To overcome screen-reinforced social awkwardness, some even lean on smartphones and web browsers to encourage students to interact.

Researchers from three universities surveyed nearly 33,000 college students around the U.S. and found two-thirds were struggling with loneliness in the fall of 2020. More than a year later, many students, including those at San Jose State, had returned to remote instruction after winter break because of the Omicron Covid-19 surge.

Joel Figueroa, a 20-year-old business major, said that since the pandemic began he has become more nervous about talking to people. “I was much more confident in my abilities before,” he said.

While technology has enabled him to remain in touch with friends, it has undermined his in-person interactions, he said. “My connections with friends offline would definitely be deeper if we were not so attached to our devices,” he said.

Even older students I talked to, who didn’t grow up with as much technology or spend formative years in a pandemic, are finding it hard to make connections.

“I didn’t form relationships with any students when I went back to campus last fall,” said Megan Dela Rosa, a 43-year-old business major. “Everyone had their masks on and you didn’t know anyone’s comfort level.” She added, “I just went to class, got my work done and left.”

Anna Touneh transferred to San Jose State from a community college last fall. Since school began this year online, the 32-year-old said talking to students has only become more awkward.

In one class recently, small groups of students went to Zoom breakout rooms to work on an assignment. Ms. Touneh said in her group, no one had their cameras on and no one spoke. “It took me six minutes to say something,” she said. “I finally gathered the courage, but it was very meek. I said, ‘Hey, guys, so what are we supposed to be doing?’”

Runhua Yang, a 43-year-old business major, said she’s normally extroverted but the pandemic has made it more difficult to express herself. Masks have made it harder for teachers to hear her, she said, causing her to speak up less often. “If a professor doesn’t encourage participation, I stay quiet,” she said.

Parents and psychologists were already concerned that phone usage was negatively affecting social-skill development among young people, even before the pandemic, according to Danielle Ramo, chief clinical officer at BeMe Health, a mobile platform for teen mental health. In a previous job, she helped develop an app called Nod to help college students improve their social lives by challenging them to do things like smile at five new people or keep their dorm-room doors open in the evening...

 

Ezra Levant Explains the Media's Mischaracterization of the Freedom Convoy

He's really good. 

At Pajamas, "Rebel News Co-Founder DEMOLISHES Canadian Media's Lies About the Freedom Convoy."

Previously: "Forthcoming Investigation of Freedom Convoy's Seized GoFundMe Donations (VIDEO)."

Forthcoming Investigation of Freedom Convoy's Seized GoFundMe Donations (VIDEO)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's so fucked up over this he's become a bloody parrot: "This must stop! This must stop! This must stop! ..."

And video, from Monday: "NOW - Canada's PM Trudeau: "Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens' daily lives. It has to stop."

Where'd the money go?

GoFundMe is now GoFuckMe. They royally screwed up announcing the operation was confiscating $10 million in donations to the trucker's convoy --- $10 million! --- and now here comes the inspectors.

At CBNC, "DeSantis, state AGs pledge to investigate GoFundMe removing page for Canadian vaccine mandate protest."

Now watch, at Maria Bartiromo's, on Fox: 

Majority of Americans Says It's Time to Live With the Virus

Well, one would think.

The only thing that's changed is the polls, now scaring the living shit out of our authoritarian "knowledge working" pajama-clad overlords who haven't manned the front lines of our entire freakin' economy for the last two years. Dolts. All of them. 

We're talking some big majorities too.

At NYT, "Americans Are Frustrated With the Pandemic. These Polls Show How Much":

A wave of polls taken as the Omicron variant crested across much of the United States shows new signs that the public’s resolve to combat the coronavirus pandemic is waning.

The surveys depict an increasingly frustrated and pessimistic nation that is as worried by the specter of an endless pandemic as it is fearful of the disease. While a majority of voters remain concerned about the coronavirus, the balance of recent polling suggests that the desire to return to normalcy has approached or even overtaken alarm about the virus itself.

A recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that 46 percent of respondents thought Americans should “learn to live with” the pandemic “and get back to normal,” while just 43 percent thought “we need to do more to vaccinate, wear masks and test.”

A Republican firm, Echelon Insights, had similar findings, reporting that 55 percent of voters thought Covid-19 should be “treated as an endemic disease that will never fully go away,” like the flu, while 38 percent said it should be “treated as a public health emergency.”

The results are especially striking at a time when coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and even deaths are near record highs. Indeed, the same polls showed that the public’s concern about the virus increased during the Omicron wave. But in a telling indication of the public’s attitudes toward the pandemic, greater worry about the virus has not translated to greater support for measures to stop its spread.

Instead, fears of the virus apparently have been outweighed by mounting frustration with the inconveniences of a pandemic that has stretched into its second year. Three-quarters of adults described themselves as tired or frustrated with the pandemic in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Fully 70 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives” in a recent poll by Monmouth University. That survey found that support for vaccine mandates has dropped to just 43 percent from 53 percent in September, while support for masking and social distancing guidelines dropped to 52 percent from 63 percent over the same period.

The findings come at a possible turning point in the pandemic, as several Democratic governors announced intentions to ease some mask mandates over the next month. The growing frustration with pandemic restrictions may help explain some of those early announcements — even as cases reach record levels.

The polls create a delicate challenge for the Biden administration, which never regained its political standing since the rise of the Delta variant dashed last summer’s hopes of a return to normalcy. The growing unease with the pandemic seems to have added to the president’s political woes, and may help explain why the public disapproves of Mr. Biden’s handling of the coronavirus for the first time...

Newsom's lifting California's indoor mask mandate next week, along with now-quivering Democrat governor's around the country trying to innoculate themselves as voters' wrath this November.

Now Leftists Want Masks Off Our Children

The political winds have changes, showing --- once again --- just how craven is the progressive left.

See Michelle Goldberg, at the New York Times, "Let Kids Take Their Masks Off After the Omicron Surge":

Perfect example of medical professionals NOW admitting their "professional" advice since the beginning of the lockdown was bull. 💉😷💉 #BacktoSchool https://t.co/ceCPy4IiVc

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) January 30, 2022

Elissa Perkins, the director of infectious disease management in the emergency department of the Boston Medical Center, told me she spent most of 2020 “imploring everybody I could in every forum that I could to mask.” In the beginning, she said, this was to flatten the curve, and later to protect the vulnerable. But masking, she said, “was intended to be a short-term intervention,” and she believes we haven’t talked enough about the drawbacks of mandating it for kids long-term.

“If we accept that we don’t want masks to be required in our schools forever, we have to decide when is the right time to remove them,” she said. “And that’s a conversation that we’re not really having.”

At least, people in deep blue areas weren’t having it until recently. But as the Omicron wave begins to ebb, that conversation — sometimes tentatively and sometimes acrimoniously — has begun. This week Perkins co-wrote a Washington Post essay calling for schools to make masking optional. The Atlantic published an article titled, “The Case Against Masks at School.”

“Coming off the Omicron surge, I think there’s going to be a tipping point with more and more people questioning does this need to continue in schools,” said Erin Bromage, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Bromage worked with the governor of Rhode Island to reopen schools there, and later helped schools in southern Massachusetts reopen. He believes in the importance of Covid mitigations, but his views on school masking have evolved in recent months. There comes a point, he said, “at which the reduction in risk that comes from the mask is balanced or begins to be outweighed by the detrimental side of things that come with masking.”

The debate about masks in schools can quickly turn vicious because it pits legitimate interests against one another. Many people who are immunocompromised, or live with those who are, understandably fear that getting rid of mandates will make them more vulnerable. But keeping kids in masks month after month also inflicts harm, even if it’s not always easy to measure.

“I think it would be naïve to not acknowledge that there are downsides of masks,” said Perkins. “I know some of that data is harder to come by because those outcomes are not as discrete as Covid or not-Covid. But from speaking with pediatricians, from speaking with learning specialists, and also from speaking with parents of younger children especially, there are significant issues related to language acquisition, pronunciation, things like that. And there are very clear social and emotional side effects in the older kids.”

That’s why I believe that mandatory school masking should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels. I fully accept that, in future surges, masks might have to go back on, but that’s all the more reason to get them off as soon as possible, to give students some reprieve.

Otherwise, I fear that, at least in very liberal areas, a combination of extreme risk aversion and inertia means that school masking will persist indefinitely. The chief executive of the Prince George’s County public schools in Maryland recently downplayed the idea of a future without masks, saying: “The only off-ramp I want is the one where Covid no longer exists. I don’t think that that off-ramp will exist.” I hope this attitude isn’t widespread, but if it is, it will be incumbent for progressive parents desperate for an off-ramp to push back.

There’s some question about how well masks in school really work; many studies are confounded, since communities with school mask mandates tend to adopt other Covid mitigation measures as well. Much of The Atlantic’s “The Case Against Masks at School” is devoted to reviewing studies either conducted or cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it concludes that the “overall takeaway from these studies — that schools with mask mandates have lower Covid-19 transmission rates than schools without mask mandates — is not justified by the data that have been gathered.”

The fact that experts can poke holes in some studies of masking does not mean that masks don’t make a difference...

Keep reading. 

Pressure on Parents to Vaccinate Kids Intensifies

Look, this pandemic is over, as Bari Weiss so accurately stated last week, to the enraged consternation of the left's foaming, raging partisans. 

At the New York Times, "As Covid Shots for Kids Stall, Appeals Are Aimed at Wary Parents":

Getting more young school-age children vaccinated is crucial for ending the pandemic, public health officials say, and many are focusing on that group.

For weeks, the school principal had been imploring Kemika Cosey: Would she please allow her children, 7 and 11, to get Covid shots?

Ms. Cosey remained firm. A hard no.

But Mr. Kip — Brigham Kiplinger, the principal of Garrison Elementary School in Washington, D.C. — swatted away the “no’s.”

Ever since the federal government authorized the coronavirus vaccine for children 5 through 11 nearly three months ago, Mr. Kip has been calling the school’s parents, texting, nagging, cajoling daily. Acting as a vaccine advocate — a job usually handled by medical professionals and public health officials — has become central to his role as an educator. “The vaccine is the most important thing happening this year to keep kids in school,” Mr. Kiplinger said.

Largely through Mr. Kiplinger’s skill as a parent-vax whisperer, Garrison Elementary has turned into a public health anomaly: Eighty percent of the 250 Garrison Wildcats in grades kindergarten through fifth grade now have at least one shot, he said.

But as the Omicron variant has stormed through America’s classrooms, sending students home and, in some cases, to the hospital, the rate of vaccination overall for America’s 28 million children in the 5-to-11 age group remains even lower than health experts had feared. According to a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation based on federal data, only 18.8 percent are now fully vaccinated and only 28.1 percent have received one dose.

The disparity of rates among states is stark. In Vermont, the share of children who are fully vaccinated is 52 percent; in Mississippi, it is 6 percent.

“It’s going to be a long slog at this point to get the kids vaccinated,” said Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at Kaiser who specializes in global health policy. She says it will take unwavering persistence like that of Mr. Kiplinger, whom she knows firsthand because her child attends his school. “It’s hard, hard work to reach parents.”

After the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was authorized for younger children in late October, the out-of-the-gate surge in demand lasted a scant few weeks. It peaked just before Thanksgiving, then dropped precipitously and has since stalled. It now hovers at 50,000 to 75,000 new doses a day.

“I was surprised at how quickly the interest in the vaccine for kids petered out,” Dr. Kates said. “Even parents who had been vaccinated themselves were more cautious about getting their kids vaccinated.”

Public health officials say that persuading parents to get their younger children vaccinated is crucial not only to sustaining in-person education but also to containing the pandemic overall. With adult vaccination hitting a ceiling — 74 percent of Americans who are 18 and older are now fully vaccinated, and most of those who aren’t seem increasingly immovable — unvaccinated elementary school children remain a large, turbulent source of spread. Traveling to and from school on buses, traversing school hallways, bathrooms, classrooms and gyms, they can unknowingly act as viral vectors countless times a day.

Parents give numerous reasons for their hesitation. And with their innate protective wariness on behalf of their children, they are susceptible to rampant misinformation. For many working parents, the obstacle is logistical rather than philosophical, as they struggle to find time to get their children to the clinic, doctor’s office or drugstore for a vaccine.

In some communities where adult opposition to vaccines is strong, local health departments and schools do not promote the shots for children vigorously for fear of backlash. Pharmacies may not even bother to stock the child-size doses.

Despite the proliferation of Covid-crowded hospitals, sick children and the highly contagious aspect of Omicron, many parents, still swayed by last year’s surges that were generally not as rough on children as adults, do not believe the virus is dangerous enough to warrant risking their child’s health on a novel vaccine.

Health communication experts additionally blame that view on the early muddled messaging around Omicron, which was initially described as “mild” but also as a variant that could pierce a vaccine’s protection.

Many parents interpreted those messages to mean that the shots served little purpose. In fact, the vaccines have been shown to strongly protect against severe illness and death, although they are not as effective in preventing infections with Omicron as with other variants. And caseloads of children in whom Covid has been diagnosed only keep rising, as a report last week from the American Academy of Pediatrics underscores. Dr. Moira Szilagyi, the academy’s president, pressed for greater rates of vaccination, saying, “After nearly two years of this pandemic, we know that this disease has not always been mild in children, and we’ve seen some kids suffer severe illness, both in the short term and in the long term.”

Recognizing the urgency, proponents of Covid shots are redoubling their efforts to convince parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics has put together talking points for pediatricians and parents. Kaiser has its own parent-friendly vaccine-information site. Patsy Stinchfield, a nurse-practitioner who is the incoming president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, keeps up an exhaustive speaking schedule, answering Covid vaccine questions from parents, teenagers, pediatricians and radio talk show hosts.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has just posted a free, online training course to help give pro-vaccine parents language and ways to approach their resistant friends. It provides vaccine facts, resources and techniques to engage them. One tip is to share personal stories about Covid, to ground the purpose of the vaccine in real-world experience. Another is to normalize Covid vaccination by proudly telling friends and family when children get Covid shots.

Rupali Limaye, an associate scientist at Bloomberg who studies vaccine messaging and developed the course, said that giving parents tools to persuade others about Covid shots could improve uptake rates, particularly now that some hesitant parents are rejecting the advice of pediatricians. Peer “vaccine ambassadors,” as she calls them, have more time and exert less of a power dynamic than harried doctors. “This is a supersensitive topic for a lot of people,” Dr. Limaye added...

Keep reading.

 

I'm a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren't Alright.

 From Stacy Lance, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "My students were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves":

I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students’ development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently.

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home.

One of my favorite projects that I assign each year is to my 10th grade students, who do in-depth research on any culture of their choosing. It culminates in a day of presentations. I encourage them to bring in music, props, food—whatever they need to immerse their classmates in their specific culture. A lot of my students give presentations on their own heritage. A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was one of the best days that I can remember. She was proud to share her story—she had struggled with homesickness—and her classmates got a lesson in empathy. Now, my students simply prepare a slideshow and email it to me individually.

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren’t even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that’s forbidden. Younger children are expected to follow the “mask off, voices off” rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other’s houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical.

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

Around this time of year, we start planning for the prom, which is held in June. Usually, my students would already be chatting constantly about who’s asking who, what they’re planning on wearing, and how excited they are. This year, they’ve barely discussed it at all. When they do, they tell me that they don’t want to get their hopes up, since they’re assuming it will get cancelled like it has for the past couple of years.

It’s the same deal with universities. My students say, “If university is going to be just like this then what’s the point?” I have my own children, a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son, who have spent almost a third of their lives in lockdown. They’ve become so used to cancellations that they don’t even feel disappointed anymore...

Keep reading.