What’s interesting in the news today?
After a couple of days off, I have a bunch, so I’ll try to be brief. As always, clicking the text will take you to the entire article.
1. Not shocking. It’s one of the reasons Planned Parenthood pushes both to young girls. It guarantees return business either way.
From CNSNews “A new report released by the Family Research Council (FRC) on the demographics of abortion in the United States reveals that when and if a woman undergoes the procedure once or more is tied directly to chastity, monogamy and the use of contraceptives.”
“It also shows that 34 to 38 percent of women who became sexually active as young girls (12 or younger, 13, or 14) have had an abortion, while six percent of women who had intercourse for the first time at age 20 or later have had an abortion. “There’s a huge relationship between the earlier one starts being sexually active and the more likely things are going to go wrong, including undergoing an abortion,” said Patrick Fagan, director of FRC’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute and co-author of the report with Scott Talkington, research director for the National Association of Scholars and Senior Research Fellow at George Mason University School of Public Policy.
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2. Cuomo says pro-lifers aren’t welcome in his state. They can’t have conservatives challenging the abortion extremists, now can they?
From HotAir “Forty-eight percent of Americans and all priests and nuns are no longer welcome in the Empire State, according to its governor. Delivering a monologue on Republicans with all the hyperbole of an MSNBC anchor and none of the charm, Cuomo offered this:
You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.
… You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.“
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3. I have a feeling the Gov. would welcome this though, because he obviously agrees with the ideology.
From TheDailyCaller “Hillsdale professor Terrence Moore, author of “Story Killers: A Common Sense Case Against Common Core,” exposed some of the more distressing aspects of the controversial Common Core education
standards program, saying that all teachers must tell young students that all right-wing groups are fascist.
Moore highlights how it is not just the reading lists and course materials — which have already attracted a large amount of criticism — that need to be examined by parents. It’s also the teaching notes and standard curriculum; the notes and standards come as part of a comprehensive package. Moore noted through his research that a distinctly political slant is introduced, one which dictates not only what children are taught, but also how they should be taught.”
““In the margin of the teachers edition, the teacher is instructed to explain the term ‘fascist’ to the students and to point out that the term ‘fascist’ is now applied to all right-wing extremist groups.”
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4. In other school news…..
It looks like Atlanta wasn’t the only city with a major teacher cheating scandal.
From FoxNews “Just days after three Philadelphia school principals were fired for alleged cheating, news comes that the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office is conducting a criminal investigation into widespread cheating involving more than 100 educators around the city.
The Philadelphia Inquirer cites sources with knowledge of the criminal inquiry in reporting the attorney general’s involvement, as well as a grand jury to probe a growing scandal that has already ensnared 138 teachers and principals from schools all over the city.”
Union reps blame the high stakes test.
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5. In other union news…..
From TheFreeBeacon “Two of the most powerful unions in the country have voiced objections to a bill that would provide better background checks for teachers, Campbell Brown writes in a Thursday Wall Street Journal column.
After the Government Accountability Office found “hundreds of potential cases of registered sex offenders working in schools” across the United States in 2010, the House passed a bill that would streamline the vetting process and close inconsistencies across state lines.
The bill is a common sense measure, according to Campbell, yet powerful teachers unions are opposed to the new standards.”
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6. Who’s up for some judicial stupidity?
From Boston.com “A federal appeals court in Boston today upheld a judge’s ruling that a transsexual inmate convicted of murder is entitled to a taxpayer-funded sex change operation as treatment for her severe gender identity disorder.
In a ruling that was a first of its kind, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said courts must not shy away from enforcing the rights of all people, including prisoners. “And receiving medically necessary treatment is one of those rights, even if that treatment strikes some as odd or unorthodox,” the court said.”
Odd, unorthodox, and stupid. They forgot to mention stupid. 🙄
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7. The new intolerance.
From TheNewStatesman “The new intolerance: will we regret pushing Christians out of public life? In this provocative challenge to the left, the former New Statesman deputy editor Cristina Odone argues that liberalism has become the new orthodoxy – and there is no room for religious believers to dissent.”
“Only 50 years ago, liberals supported “alternative culture”; they manned the barricades in protest against the establishment position on war, race and feminism. Today, liberals abhor any alternative to their credo. No one should offer an opinion that runs against the grain on issues that liberals consider “set in stone”, such as sexuality or the sanctity of life.
Intolerance is no longer the prerogative of overt racists and other bigots – it is state-sanctioned. It is no longer the case that the authorities are impartial on matters of belief, and will intervene to protect the interests and heritage of the weak. When it comes to crushing the rights of those who dissent from the new orthodoxy, politicians and bureaucrats alike are in the forefront of the attacks, not the defence.”
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8. Makes sense to me.
From TheTelegraph “Older people do not decline mentally with age, it just takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their brains, scientists believe.
Much like a computer struggles as the hard drive gets full up, so to do humans take longer to access information, it has been suggested. “
“The human brain works slower in old age,” said Dr. Michael Ramscar, “but only because we have stored more information over time
“The brains of older people do not get weak. On the contrary, they simply know more.”
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Wandering Views 
8. I’ve thought that for a long time. I think. Wait a minute, I’m not sure, I can’t remember.
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#8 is so logical. I find it hard to go between worlds. Being home for a few weeks was great, but seeing so many people from a different world and having an entirely different way to do things took a lot of brain power. Especially remembering names.
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It isn’t because I know more. It’s because the synapses in my brain don’t connect as quickly. There’s a woman at the Y named Carol. I hadn’t seen her for some time, and yesterday I must have taken a full minute to recall her name. When I confessed that, she understood.
As for “Knowing more”, I have forgotten lots of some things I know.
e.g. I hven”t tried it, but I doubt that I could solve a simple calculus problem now.
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Common Core scares the bejeebers out of me. The more I read the scareder I become.
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I don’t know nothing about a “common core”, so I may be stepping out of line here.
But I remember seeing, many decades ago, a movie called “Hitler’s Children”. They used education to create a nation that was entirely devoted to the beloved Fuhrer.
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3. How do they define “right wing Extremist group”? From past experience that could mean anything from Timothy McVeigh to my church.
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How do they define “right wing Extremist group”?
Anyone to the right of the far left. You, me, and “these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay.”
But in reality, the real extremists are Cuomo and his ilk that support abortion at anytime, up to and including partial birth abortion. Even in NY many of his views are the minority. And this shows it.
“The findings conclude that an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers support sensible restrictions on abortions, with eighty percent (80%) opposing unlimited abortion through the ninth month of pregnancy and seventy-five percent (75%) opposing changes in current law so that someone other than a doctor can perform an abortion.”
Cuomo, like most liberals, is projecting his own flaws unto others.
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Right wing extremist groups are those who believe that babies shouldn’t be killed, that the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms, that marriage is a sacred contract between a man and a woman, and that narcotics shouldn’t be legal.
Among other weird things. Like Presidents shouldn’t rule be executive decree. A voter should prove that he is who he says he is, etc.
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There’s such a thing as a “simple” calculus problem?
Cuomo’s remarks were just boneheaded.
Then again, closely related to the spirit from which they came, #7 is pretty much spot on. 😦
I’m afraid with so many social issues now being taught from one perspective only, Christians will continue to abandon the public/government school system in droves.
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It is a difficult decision in what to do about educating one’s children, today. I know many still in the system, though, who do not share the values reported above. That includes teachers. The actual teaching will still vary somewhat. I have seen many of these education things come through. Most are now dust. I also know many children taught this stuff who rejected it, because parents and others taught them differently. Think: Daniel in a foreign land. It should remind us to keep up the fight and the prayer for those children and parents.
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Donna,@11:26
A math professor once said, “A math problem is either trivial or impossible.”
He was mostly correct, you can either do it, or you can’t.
For students, the difficulty is in recalling what approach you should take, and remembering the formulas.
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1. Some of their results are correlation not causation. And some are just Duh! I didn’t need a survey to show that. And its not surprising hat the poor have fewer abortions — thats pretty much always been the case. Some might argue, its why they continue to be poor.
2. Cuomo is engaging in a little electoral style rhetoric here; preaching to the choir. All politicians do it; “My America does not include …. (insert group you don’t like). It builds a feeling of solidarity within your core voting bloc but its fairly inane and even childish.
3. Your link is little more than an advertisement for a video they are promotingn quoting an excerpt from a supposed expert. I would really like to see links to the relevant portions of the common core curriculum. As a teacher, I’ve frequently met people who tell me what the curriculum says when I know it does no such thing. So I’m suspending my judgment.
4. Testing generally has no purpose if done only to rate the school or to hit some random target. In Ontario we have grade 3,6,9, and 10 tests. Grade 3s try their best despite the fact the test results are of no consequence to them. Grade 6s don’t bother to try — they know it doesn’t matter to them so they see the one week test period as free time — no homework. Only in grade 9 and 10 do kids care since they have to past the standard test to graduate. As such the grade six scores are quite meaningless but of course the press and the ministry of education don’t see it that way.
A few years back, the press was in an uproar about a cheating scandal with ministry and police investigation. No charges were ever laid as the “cheating” amount to improper opening of test booklets, wrong remedial help for IEP students and just general careless in storing tests at the school level.
5. When criminal checks were first demanded by the school boards and ministry here, my union was against but not because they wanted to protect molestors but they wanted to discuss what type of criminal checks (it can be a general check or offences against children and major crimes only — this way your employer doesn’t know about your college age drug charge), who would pay for it, and make sure it was part of the collective agreement.
6. In the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, one of the characters is a transgendered inmate who was arrested for fraud as he attempted to acquire money to pay for his treatment. Once in jail he got it for free — irony at its finest. By imprisoning people, the state becomes responsible for their well being which leads to the curious situation — for many of America’s poor, committing a crime may be the best way of receiving medical care. That or join the Armed Forces.
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7. I read the column and although I consider myself a classical liberal in the matter of free speech (free speech ends at shouting fire in a crowded theatre), and am generally sympathetic to groups who are marginalized from the public square, I lost some sympathy due to the meandering nature of the article. In a balanced manner, she describes intolerance throughout the world but then this
This was no bad thing when, for millennia, traditional hierarchies were respected for ensuring that the few at the top protected, organised, and even ensured the livelihood of, the many at the bottom. A whitewash of ancient and medieval history which she then follows up with a reference to Hitler and PolPot as how modern secularism differs from the better “authoritarians” of the past. I was tempted to invoke Godwin’s law and stop reading. But I preserved, wondering why the historical overreach when she was discussing the marginalization of religious thought in the public sphere.
There’s a case to be made but she doesn’t make it. For one thing, she doesn’t establish the nature of the marginalization — is the religious viewpoint discriminated against or is it simply not endorsed yet tolerated? The criticism of her viewpoint is simple; tolerance doesn’t mean you retain your dominate position tolerance simply means you can express your beliefs just don’t expect endorsement. When two public spaces declined to host her event; is it marginalization or is a non-endorsement? Her column doesn’t answer this.
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