The "big lie" of university admissions --- and it's hurting the life chances of black and brown students.
Here's John McWhorter, on Substack:
No more SAT at the University of California? Classic racist antiracism, and it's not going to end well.https://t.co/S5AxQRCV7f
— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) July 25, 2021
It's a grassroots revolt.
At Legal Insurrection:
On Twitter, Bill Melugin below, who's been at the border for a few days, recording first handout the scale of the crisis. (Scroll down his feed for lots of videos.)
At LAT, "Why Border Patrol is doing more to rescue and identify missing migrants":
That’s a wrap on this border trip. Back to L.A. for a bit to recharge, then right back to TX again next weekend for trip #7 during this border crisis. This heat here is no joke 🥵
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) July 25, 2021
FALFURRIAS, Texas — A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent scrutinized video of a dying migrant on her cellphone, trying to match the background to the ranch she was searching for his body last month. “Can I see the picture real quick, the background?” another agent asked. Agent Nancy Balogh held out her phone. In the two minutes of video, 25-year-old Yoel Nieto Valladares lay on the sandy ground, shirtless and sweating, jeans cinched with a rectangular metal belt buckle. Nieto was barely able to sip from a Coke as another man fanned him with a black cap. The dying man’s hands twitched, a tattoo of his father and younger brother’s initials visible on his arm. His eyes rolled. “How do you feel, guy? Hey, how do you feel?” the man filming asked, panning to show a dozen others dressed all in black, the color favored by smugglers working at night.Nieto shushed him, smiling. “This is bad, he’s delirious,” said the man filming. The dying man groaned. Moments later, in a second minute-long video, Nieto’s black polo shirt was on and his arms lay atop it, limp. His eyes were open, staring. A smuggler had sent the videos to Nieto’s family with GPS coordinates. “I really hope we find him,” Balogh said. Several years ago, the U.S. Border Patrol launched a Missing Migrant Program in Arizona — though the agency’s primary mission remained apprehending migrants — that has since expanded border-wide. Their relationship with migrant advocates had grown strained. In recent years, the Border Patrol had even helped prosecute some who left water and other supplies for migrants in the desert. But the agency’s approach has now evolved amid an increase in migration and deaths. Brooks County — about 75 miles north of the Rio Grande Valley — has become the Border Patrol’s laboratory, a place to test approaches they’re already extending across the border. A three-person missing-migrant team trained in forensics is working with an intelligence officer to help identify migrant remains. The agency also added equipment and technology to help locate stranded migrants faster. It installed more than 1,400 rescue signs across the region labeled with GPS coordinates. Agents obtained GPS coordinates for more than 22,000 landmarks that can be referenced during a migrant’s 911 call — from power poles to windmills, pipelines and cattle guards. And they positioned 30 mobile, solar-powered rescue beacons in remote areas with little to no cellphone reception. The beacons are equipped with cameras that have already led to the rescue of a migrant. By summer’s end, the beacons will alert agents’ cellphones directly. By year’s end, they plan to have 170 beacons nationwide, which can be used to rescue migrants and investigate, Supervisory Agent Brandon Copp said. Despite the summer heat, which usually decreases migration, the number of migrants arriving at the border last month — 188,829 — was the largest in years. The busiest area for crossings was south Texas, where agents earlier this month stopped 736 migrants in three groups near the Rio Grande. As of last month, they had helped recover more than 324 migrant remains and conducted 9,201 rescues nationwide, 81% more than all of last year. “If we get facial recognition of a guide, we can tie them to that migrant’s death,” Copp said. Like many of Texas’s 254 counties, Brooks — population 7,100 — doesn’t have a medical examiner. Death investigations are handled by justices of the peace unless the county pays an outside expert. Local funeral homes historically cut corners burying migrant dead. Researchers investigating unmarked migrant graves at a local cemetery in recent years found multiple migrant bodies buried together, some in plastic bags and milk crates. They had to exhume and catalog DNA in international databases to help identify them. Now the sheriff’s office is working with the Border Patrol to more quickly identify and release migrant remains without sending them for autopsies or DNA testing, which can be expensive and time-consuming. The sheriff just got a secondhand refrigerated trailer on loan from the state funeral home association, used for COVID dead during the pandemic. Deputies and Border Patrol agents now store unidentified bodies there as they investigate. Because of changes in county ordinances, some of the Border Patrol agents in south Texas, El Paso and Tucson have trained to photograph dead migrants’ fingerprints to help consulates identify them. They also learned to recover fingerprints from bodies that have decayed or been submerged in water...
Still more.
Honestly, she doesn't look a day over thirty.
She certainly celebrates in style, in any case. On Twitter (scroll through her feed for more).
See, "Inside J.Lo’s 52nd Birthday French Yacht Celebration."
Also, Bella Thorne and Abella Danger.
And at the Hostages, "Big Boob Friday: NSFW."
This links to the paperback book, of which I own a copy.
It's bit expensive, though (to say the least), so perhaps click on the hard-copy version, which is selling for as low as $3.51.
At Amazon, Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson.
I used to post Judge Jeanine's opening monologues quite often.
She's a real treasure (and doesn't take any crap).
At Fox News:
This is a total scam.
As if Frisco couldn’t drive out residents any faster. *Eye-roll.*
At Fox Business, "San Francisco considering congestion tax on high-earning drivers: The San Francisco County Transportation Authority is studying the prospect of congestion fees."
Following-up, "Trump Endorsements Reshape Republican Party (VIDEO)."
This woman fears Trump will rally his base and primary her for 2022, and she's not stupid, putting her finger to the wind.
At the New York Times, "Nancy Mace Called Herself a ‘New Voice’ for the G.O.P. Then She Pivoted":
MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — Representative Nancy Mace had just delivered the kind of red-meat remarks that would ordinarily thrill the Republican voters in attendance here on a recent sweltering evening, casually comparing liberal Democrats to terrorists — the “Hamas squad,” she called them — and railing against their “socialist” spending plans. But asked to give an assessment of her congresswoman, Mara Brockbank, a former leader of the Charleston County Republican Party who previously endorsed Ms. Mace, was less than enthusiastic. “I didn’t like that she back-stabbed Trump,” Ms. Brockbank said. “We have to realize that she got in because of Trump. Even if you do have something against your leaders, keep them to yourself.” Ms. Brockbank was referring to Ms. Mace’s first weeks in office immediately after the Jan. 6 riot, as the stench of tear gas lingered in the halls of the Capitol and some top Republicans were quietly weighing a break with President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Mace, a freshman congresswoman, placed herself at the forefront of a group of Republicans denouncing Mr. Trump’s lies of a stolen election that had fueled the assault and appeared to be establishing herself as a compelling new voice urging her party to change its ways. But these days, as Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they have no intention of turning against Mr. Trump, Ms. Mace has quietly backpedaled into the party’s fold. Having once given more than a dozen interviews in a single day to condemn Mr. Trump’s corrosive influence on the party, Ms. Mace now studiously avoids the subject, rarely if ever mentioning his name and saying it is time for Republicans to “stop fighting with each other in public.” After setting herself apart from her party during her first week in office by opposing its effort to overturn President Biden’s victory, Ms. Mace has swung back into line. She joined the vast majority of Republicans in voting to oust Representative Liz Cheney from leadership for denouncing Mr. Trump and his election lies. She also voted against forming an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot. And rather than continuing to challenge party orthodoxy, Ms. Mace has leaned in to the most combative Republican talking points, castigating Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top health official who is a favorite boogeyman of the right, accusing Democrats of forcing critical race theory on children, and publicly feuding with progressives. Her pivot helps explain why the Republican Party’s embrace of Mr. Trump and his brand of politics is more absolute than ever. It is not only the small but vocal group of hard-right loyalists of the former president who are driving the alliance, but also the scores of rank-and-file Republicans — even those who may disagree with him, as Ms. Mace has — who have decided it is too perilous to openly challenge him. “She’s a little bit like a new sailor; she tried to get her sea legs, but she’s also looking out over the horizon, and what she saw was a storm coming in from the right,” said Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in South Carolina. “So she immediately started paddling in another direction. The problem is, is that everything you say and do, there’s a record of it.” Ms. Mace declined through a spokeswoman to be made available for an interview, but said in a statement that “you can be conservative and you can be a Republican and be pissed off and vocal about what happened on Jan. 6.” (Ms. Mace’s most recent statements regarding the Capitol attack have been explanations of why she opposed commissions to investigate it.) “You can agree with Donald Trump’s policies and be pissed off about what happened on Jan. 6,” Ms. Mace said. “You can think Pelosi is putting on a sideshow with the Jan. 6 commission and still be pissed off about Jan. 6. These things are not mutually exclusive.” Ms. Mace is facing a particularly difficult political dynamic in her swing district centered in Charleston, which she won narrowly last year when she defeated Joe Cunningham, a Democrat. Her immediate problem is regaining the trust of the rock-ribbed conservatives who make up her base. It is all the more pressing because political observers expect Republicans to try to redraw Ms. Mace’s district to become more conservative, and possible primary challengers still have a year to decide whether to throw their hats in the ring. Her predicament bubbled below the surface on a recent evening here at a pork-themed “End Washington Waste” reception overlooking the Charleston Harbor and the docked Yorktown, a decommissioned Navy aircraft carrier. Voters signed the hocks of a paper pig urging Democrats to cut extraneous spending from the infrastructure bill and exchanged printed-out “Biden bucks” for cocktails, as some reflected on Ms. Mace’s balancing act...
Still more.
Remember Michael Wolff had an essay up at the New York Times the other day, "Why I’m Sure Trump Will Run for President in 2024."
At the video, Trump's rally in Phoenix yesterday.
He'll be traveling the country holding "Stop the Steal" rallies like this right up to next year's midterm elections.
More, at the Los Angeles Times, "Mar-a-Lago primary: Trump wields power with endorsements, but some in GOP fear midterm damage":
WASHINGTON — Former President Trump, again upending American political norms, is moving to remake Congress and the Republican Party in his own image. Since leaving the White House, he has issued a spate of endorsements of House and Senate candidates for next year’s crucial midterm election, including an array of political outsiders, conspiracy theorists and others who — like Trump himself — break the traditional mold. While most former presidents have steered clear of politics, Trump is intervening in Republican primaries like an old-style ward boss: rewarding allies, punishing enemies and trying to use his vast popularity among Republican voters to keep himself and his agenda at the center of the GOP. Targeting one of his most prominent Republican critics, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Trump plans to meet this week at his New Jersey golf club with Wyoming Republicans who are running against her. His goal: to endorse one, clear the field of others and set up a head-to-head contest. But Trump’s heavy hand in GOP primaries carries risks for his party. Some Republicans fear that some of his endorsements — those based not on electability but on candidates’ loyalty to him and his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen — could make it harder for the party to win in swing states. “If we as Republicans continue to relitigate a past lost election, we will not position ourselves to win in the midterms,” said John Watson, former Georgia Republican Party chairman. “We have the issues on our side if we will just get out of our own way.” A former NFL star Trump is promoting for a potential Senate run in Georgia — Herschel Walker — is beloved in the state where he started his career as a Heisman Trophy winner. But he is an untested political novice, and it’s been decades since he lived in Georgia. In North Carolina, Trump is backing Rep. Ted Budd to replace the state’s retiring Republican senator. Budd, a gun store owner, is an ardent defender of the former president but has trailed in early polling and fundraising. In Arizona, many Republicans believe Gov. Doug Ducey would be the best candidate against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. But Ducey, who has been pummeled by Trump for not doing more to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, has said he won’t run. Trump derided him on Ducey’s own turf Saturday, recalling in a Phoenix speech his reaction to Ducey’s possible candidacy. Trump said he was asked, “Sir, would you like him to run for the Senate?” and replied, “He’s not getting my endorsement, I can tell you.” Trump allies argue that the party would face far graver political problems if he were not so engaged. Many see him as essential to motivating GOP voters in 2022’s high-stakes election, especially since turnout usually drops in midterms. “This is largely going to be a turnout-based election. If the candidate is Trumpy, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” said a person familiar with the former president’s thinking. “The wishy-washy vanilla candidate is going to be problematic in a race that is really all about energy and turnout and excitement.” The aggressive endorsement strategy also is a gamble for Trump himself: If his candidates lose, he may end up looking like a paper tiger...
More.
Sen. John Barrasso: "The Democrats seem to be determined to bankrupt America. This spending spree is a reckless tax and spending spree. It really does seem to be Bernie's [Sanders] effort to socialism. It's his manifesto." pic.twitter.com/Om9TEtKdvv
— The Hill (@thehill) July 25, 2021
At AMN, "Video: Fauci says CDC may ask vaccinated Americans to wear masks again."
The new variant is out of control:
Dr. Anthony Fauci says US is "going in the wrong direction" as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, particularly among unvaccinated Americans. https://t.co/BtMUrX2WfD #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/QxPOQ3d2J3
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) July 25, 2021
Here comes the New York Time to argue that the Delta virus, or the Alpha or Omega, or whatever, is gonna put us all back in lockdown. I'll still be teaching online this fall semester, and in total it'll be about 20 months online if indeed my college goes back on campus with in-person in Spring 2022.
See, "The Delta Variant Is the Symptom of a Bigger Threat: Vaccine Refusal":
Public health experts have fruitlessly warned for months that the virus — any version of it — would resurge if the country did not vaccinate enough of the population quickly enough. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, predicted in January that Florida might have a rough summer. Now one in five new infections nationwide is in Florida. True, the speed and ferocity with which the Delta variant is tearing through Asia, Europe, Africa and now North America has taken many experts by surprise. It now accounts for about 83 percent of the infections in the United States. But Delta is by no means the wickedest variant out there. Gamma and Lambda are waiting in the wings, and who knows what frightful versions are already flourishing undetected in the far corners of the world, perhaps even here in America. Every infected person, anywhere in the world, offers the coronavirus another opportunity to morph into a new variant. The more infections there are globally, the more likely new variants will arise. The United States will be vulnerable to every one of them until it can immunize millions of people who now refuse to get the vaccine, are still persuadable but hesitant, or have not yet gained access. The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again.
From Spencer Lindquist, at the Federalist, "Critical race theory has just recently become one of the primary targets for the right, and for good reason. But CRT's presence in K-12 education isn't new":
One step backward. They asked another question. One step forward. The PA system buzzed back to life. Another question, another step forward. Then another, and another. It had been decided. It was 2015 during my freshman year of high school. I had just been exposed to critical race theory for the first time. We were in the midst of a privilege walk, a racial shaming exercise that uses selective questioning to substantiate claims of privilege and oppression. Now, six years later, critical race theory has just recently become a target for the right, with various different states outlawing it and parent groups forming to oppose it. This cancerous ideology has had a presence in our K-12 public schools for much longer than many realize, however. I know because my high school attempted to indoctrinate me with it and, when I fought back, to reeducate me. Taxpayers Paying for Indoctrination I went to high school at a mid-sized government school in the heart of the Silicon Valley. The student body was highly diverse, with large Asian and Hispanic populations and a white plurality. The Public School Review noted my school was in the top 20 percent of the most multiracial schools in California, a state that’s already far more multi-ethnic than most of the rest of the country. My first encounter with critical race theory was in my freshman year, when we skipped our P.E. class to engage in a racial struggle session, hosted by a teacher and a special cadre of students who had been handpicked and placed in her equity advisory class. I began to catch on when the presenters played a video titled “What kind of Asian are you?” The clip features a buffoonish caricature of an insensitive white man, the video’s antagonist, who becomes the subject of scorn after he commits several “microaggressions” as he attempts to relate with the video’s heroine, an Asian woman. She then humiliates him and trots off. I was beginning to wonder if our conversation was really about advancing “equity,” or if it was about scapegoating those who pose an obstacle to progressivism’s long march. They didn’t leave me wondering for long. Shortly after the video, we were taken into the school courtyard, where chalk lines had been meticulously drawn on the pavement, where we were then told to stand on the center line. We then started our privilege walk. The presenters asked us a series of questions, telling us to step forward or backward depending on our answers to inquiries like “Have you ever felt like you’ve been racially profiled?” or “Did your parents graduate from college?” By the time it was over, whites were in the front, then Asians, Hispanics, and finally African Americans. The verdict was in. But while trivial questions like “Can you easily find Band-Aids that match your skin tone?” were used to substantiate sweeping claims of privilege and oppression, more pertinent inquiries that would’ve jammed the narrative were excluded. We were never asked, for example, to take a step back if we’d be systematically discriminated against when we applied for college. Nor were we asked if we had ever felt that the media had ever weaponized our ancestry against us to brand us as oppressors, or if violence against us had been ignored because of our race, either in America or abroad. Similar exercises held today likely don’t ask questions that account for recent developments, like multi-million-dollar organizations branding phrases like “It’s Okay To Be White” as hate slogans, critical race theory teaching white children to hate themselves, or the adoption of the language of genocide by academics who dub whiteness a “parasitic condition” without a “permanent cure,” or fantasize about committing acts of racial violence against white people. The selective questioning was intended to create a certain outcome, a prime example of a conclusion in search of evidence...
At LAT:
More than 4,000 personnel are working to contain the stubborn Dixie fire, Carhart said Friday, including firefighters from Arizona, New Mexico and even Florida https://t.co/EwwHZVfs8f pic.twitter.com/fILXd1NA3i
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 24, 2021
The kid's plugging away in summer school with the hopes of beating the zombifcation of learning.
At NYT, "In Mrs. McQueen’s Summer Classroom, an 8-Year-Old Races to Catch Up":
GREENSBORO, N.C. — In second grade, Zion Graham bounded to school. He loved math. His favorite book was about a slow turtle who took all day to get dressed. Then came the pandemic, and months of joyless remote learning. Zion lost confidence in reading. His performance in third grade plummeted. Zion, now 8, is spending his summer racing to catch up, back at Hunter Elementary School in Greensboro, N.C. When Zion and his schoolmates arrive by 7:45 a.m. each morning, they face a challenge — and a deadline. How much can they learn before fourth grade starts, to avoid falling even further behind? Around the country, children are attending summer school like never before, as the United States pushes billions of dollars into education to help children recover from the pandemic. The Biden administration has identified summer learning as one key strategy, allocating at least $1.2 billion in federal stimulus money for it. From San Diego to New York City to Miami, hundreds of thousands of children are attending programs this year, some for the first time. In Guilford County, N.C., the school district that includes Greensboro, summer school enrollment has skyrocketed to 12,000, from 1,200 two years ago. Yet summer school, by its very nature, is short, and the pandemic’s impact on students is expected to stretch months, even years. “You have kids who have the potential to catch up relatively easy — I mean, before Christmas,” said Tonette McQueen, Zion’s summer teacher. “Then you have some kids who will experience some growth, but will be behind for years to come.” Though the pandemic hurt almost all students, creating learning gaps for some, and deepening existing gaps for others, research suggests that the students who suffered the most are like those in Mrs. McQueen’s classroom — students of color, low-income students, English language learners and other historically marginalized groups. Hunter Elementary is almost 90 percent Hispanic and Black, and nearly all students qualify for free or reduced lunch. “It has definitely widened the gap for poor kids and kids of color,” said Tomeka Davis, a sociologist at Georgia State University who studies education, with an emphasis on race and class...
Still more.
